Having gone back and read the original article (now on the other end of my plane flight), I see that it's focused on the whole Asperger's/neurotypical dichotomy. I know plenty of people with Asperger's, but I also think there's a tendency in geek circles to assume that poor social skills = Asperger's = biologically incapable of thinking like an NT. You can get very similar patterns simply through a lack of relevant experiences, as I did. I came into grade school having learned a couple of poor social rubrics, and as a result never got any really useful peer socialization till college. Once I started hanging out with people who hadn't seen me, at age 6, interpret mild teasing as verbal abuse, I was able to catch up on some of the skills. But being 18 years behind still means having to memorize some rules explicitly. This makes me relatively awkward sometimes, but I also have some advantages over someone who's learned the rules entirely implicitly. I can sometimes explain the rules relatively clearly to someone who has to do everything by rote. And I'm more comfortable with people who aren't working with a rule set I'm used to--for example, I can deliberately try and figure out whether someone is getting in my social space to assert dominance, or whether they're doing it because their conversational distance is a foot shorter than mine, and adjust accordingly.
It helps me to realize that many apparently socially skilled people feel nervous in social situations--they just compensate well. Humans have two major survival strategies--we make tools, and we cooperate socially. That makes social interaction a high-stakes endeavor for everyone, and the most extroverted marketing guy is more aware of those stakes, and has fewer resources put into alternative strategies. The other useful thing for me is to bear in mind is that most "mundanes" are geeks about something, whether it's accounting or Elvis or football. Even if their expertise bores me to tears, I'm reassured that they're familiar with that mindset.
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Date: 2010-05-19 06:20 am (UTC)It helps me to realize that many apparently socially skilled people feel nervous in social situations--they just compensate well. Humans have two major survival strategies--we make tools, and we cooperate socially. That makes social interaction a high-stakes endeavor for everyone, and the most extroverted marketing guy is more aware of those stakes, and has fewer resources put into alternative strategies. The other useful thing for me is to bear in mind is that most "mundanes" are geeks about something, whether it's accounting or Elvis or football. Even if their expertise bores me to tears, I'm reassured that they're familiar with that mindset.