This may sound like I am joking but I think that engineering types tend to be literalists and could benefit from books with a more direct approach, like “How to be less of a jerk to everyone around you and why that matters” or maybe “It’s not everyone else, you’re the dick”.
I should add that I am thinking primarily about people who are inadvertently abrasive, as a result of clumsy interactions.
I think I could die happy if the following aphorism were attributed to me:
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be properly explained by apathy.
We treat other very smart people as stupid when we just haven’t given them any reason at all to make them give a fuck about our pet peeves, or daily pain. Everybody has days when they are just trying to make it to 5:00. Sell me on your idea. Scolding is a weapon of last resort, and some people reach for it very early.
> Scolding is a weapon of last resort, and some people reach for it very early.
This single fact is responsible for so much polarization and conflict in the world. It also makes one's point less convincing, and makes people less likely to choose your side.
A lot of the times, especially online, the "scolding" is done not as an attempt to bring the other person over or make them see your side; rather, it's become a social signal to one's own in-group to say "see how committed I am to our side", and gain some cachet in the group that way. Even if it muddies the water for everyone and makes the world a little bit worse in the process.
I know a lot more people that aren't bothered to even to try to learn something new, than stupid people. It takes serious effort to change your mind if you are already 'convinced'. Some people ground their convincement by repeating the same thing over and over again. It becomes part of their identity, making the effort of seeing things from a different angle almost impossible.
I spent most of my career at a company with some of the top engineers and optical scientists in the world. I'm pretty used to being the dumbest guy in the room, and I'm smarter than the average bear.
Problem-solving/designing IQ is great, but it ain't the be-all/end-all. A lot of folks with two-digit IQs are my heroes.
I guess you need to practice what this suggests rather than just sharing it with someone, though. If you send someone a link of 'How to work with "stupid" people' they might think you're calling them stupid instead of trying to improve communication.
Something I’ve come to realize is that there’s a sort of irony in thinking people are stupid. It typically means you value a specific form of intelligence, and are too biased to recognize other forms when they occur in other people.
My friend’s mom hates computers and software, but is incredibly technically competent when it comes to weaving and looms. She has fixed so many old machines, learned to do such cool stuff with them, does amazing work with dying and processing, and so on. She would strike your average tech bro as pretty clueless and out to lunch (she’s a little whacky and eccentric) but she’s so technically inclined in a different way it’s absurd.
Obviously some people are intellectually disabled and can’t do things like this, but stupid seems like a derogatory term in that context. And even then, I sincerely doubt you couldn’t find useful insight and intelligence there too.
I’d say that thinking other people are stupid is simply failing to recognize or appreciate the value other people bring.
Having said that, I’m pretty stupid so I could be wrong
> Something I’ve come to realize is that there’s a sort of irony in thinking people are stupid. It typically means you value a specific form of intelligence, and are too biased to recognize other forms when they occur in other people.
There's a great book by Todd Rose titled The End of Average; great read.
Premise is exactly that for centuries, we've measured "intelligence" in such a narrow scope focused on the foundations of industry (reading, writing, arithmetic) often at the expense of other forms of intelligence like spatial (e.g. sculptors, artists), emotional, and even dextile (I think I just made up a word?).
I have more recently been thinking about what intelligence means in this era when AI is advancing so quickly in processing information in volumes far surpassing humans ever could. I think that in the future, we'll see a realignment on intelligence.
When I first read “How to win friends …”, the advice in the book made sense, but I couldn’t take advantage of almost any of it, except maybe for written communication
My social anxiety was so high, I couldn’t even get to the basic situations that are the base for all of Dale Carnegie’s book
However, another book (and mainly the exercises in that book), that helped me a lot, was The Charisma Myth, by Olivia Fox-Cabane
It has some excellent material on how to reduce social anxiety and be able to have better interactions
Highly recommend it. And if you are curious, but don’t want to commit to a whole book, just find the intro somewhere online and follow the 3 tips in there
For any "self help" book, people split into three groups and they take it as 1. Gospel, 2. Nonsense, 3. Somewhere in the middle.
I think you have to be in the third group for the books to be useful. You have to be able to pick out the truths and the nonsense. But also I think the nonsense is sometimes helpful to point out the truths.
Me and you could read the same book, find it useful but what we took from it was quite different because what we needed was quite different. Even though we fundamentally had the same problem.
I've heard good things about "The Other Significant Others" by NPR's Rhaina Cohen (with the disclosure that the author is the partner of a friend of mine)
I want to highlight this blog article which in my opinion gives more actionable advice than all of the books listed (I read 6/8 of those) on the topic of having good social life
tldr; taking social initiative is like a cheat code.
The easiest way to make friends is to start organizing. I started applying this approach to my social life and I created two new friends groups from scratch.
1. Me and my brother started organizing lasertag matches. Basically anyone is invited. We even post open invitation to all our friends. Right now we have 20 people in our group chat and we do lasertags + beers once a month.
2. I created a group of friends from highschool - like a reunion shit but once every month. When I reached out to people everyone was hyped. I had only one of these meetings atm but everyone was happy and said they want more. We will be having a second one soon.
If I needed more friends that's what I would be focusing on. Organizing a cyclic get together of people. It's like a cheat code for having a lot of friends.
Right now I am a bit of time constrained but I look forward to organizing something different in the future.
Yeah, when I was younger, I had a kickball mailing list running on my mail server early 2000s. It only had kickball traffic, anytime someone wanted to play a game they would post, their phone number and time and location of a game and people would just show up.
Would organize larger games with more notice. Anyone who watched us for more than 15 seconds would be forced to play. If they had fun, we made them sign up.
Tech does seem to be where I've met the most obliviously abrasive, socially inept people that would absolutely not gain a grain of insight from any book on this subject matter - purposefully.
I suspect that it would have remained higher, if it had simply been a discussion about what was learned from the books, as opposed to a list (basically, the first section of the post, with more text).
I think folks on HN would want to talk/argue about it.
Intentionally making friends is a concept unfamiliar to me. I have a small collection of good friends, all made long in the past and deliberately maintained. Friendships are forged in shared experience and more easily when young - that's just my personal experience I know its different for others. And they cannot be primarily virtual or they wilt. I feel like if there was any sense of an intentional attempt to make friends I would push back and away. Of course your experience is different because friendships come in many forms.
Your experience is the "standard" story about friendships portrayed in the media, and it's great when it works out that way, I'm glad it did for you.
It's hard to know how standard that actually is though, how much of the population gets to experience it that way. A lot of people grow up in situations where they feel ostracized or just don't find anyone they connect to in their peer groups, and so don't get to forge friendships at that stage.
And then there's many that go through a traumatic experience or big upheaval in their life in a way that makes it practically impossible to maintain the connections they did forge. It's true that sometimes it's those traumatic experiences or difficulties that deepen the friendship, but there's also many cases where those are so big and impactful that they alter one's identity and relationships (including friendships) forever.
It's quite mature of you to be open to the fact that the experience is different for others, that's not often the case when one gets the "default" good experience of something. Many others who get that experience tend to dismiss conscious attempts to make or maintain friendships (like in the post) as not genuine, but friendship is also a skill that some people pick up unconsciously, and others need conscious attempts to learn and practice.
I deliberately stayed in my home town to keep my friendships - in many ways I would have been far better off leaving - I have often speculated about living somewhere else for a better financial and career life but fewer friendships.
It's nice but not all friendships can be maintained or forged. I was a military family so I moved around a lot. And this was pre-social media, so I lost all my elementary school friends when I moved. So, no "childhood friends" to lean on".
And it happens naturally as well when you go to college and likely graduate. Lot of my middle/high school connections spread out doing the same as me, finding their next step in their career. I'd be surprised if most people knew more than 1-2 people at their first job. So you gotta either work hard on old relationships from afar or find new ones.
It's especially important if you are trying to find a mate. I'm not sure I heard of many deep romantic relationships that were started virtually with no physical contact for months.
>perience and more easily when young - that's just my personal experience I know its different for others. And they cannot be primarily virtual or they wilt.
There's that too. We're social creatures and a screen can't satisfy everyone. Men in particular are also just horrible at updates. I don't know how you can communicate for 20 minutes with someone you haven't talked to in a year and casually mention "oh yea, I'm married now and am expecting a kid in 3 months". Really shows how isolated you can feel with someone you thought you knew inside out.
>I feel like if there was any sense of an intentional attempt to make friends I would push back and away. Of course your experience is different because friendships come in many forms.
Well that's the difficult part of modern friend forming. It's a two way street and we're in days where even your second place might be virtual. There's no school or parents to make people mesh together. You need not only to create events but the recipient needs energy to participate. You can do everything right but some people will simply not want to meet you halfway.
> And they cannot be primarily virtual or they wilt.
See that's the problem with childhood friends, people move. Eventually it's impossible to keep in touch beyond online with more than one or two, sometimes not even that. Yearly meetups don't really do anything except make you realize that you have less and less in common each time until one day nobody feels like organizing anything anymore.
the intention in making friends comes from intentionally participating in activities where you can make friends. not in intentionally approaching any particular person to become their friend.
i traveled and moved around a lot, and just participating in tech meetups allowed me to make friends wherever i went without even trying.
I should add that I am thinking primarily about people who are inadvertently abrasive, as a result of clumsy interactions.