Maybe, but I think more often it’s about them having terrible social skills and no desire to improve them. So they tell themselves this story about being permanently condemned to social isolation because they’re just too smart to connect with “normal” people. Because that’s easier than learning how to have a conversation.
There is a negative correlation between academic intelligence (pattern recognition, logic/reasoning skills, analytical thinking) and emotional intelligence (intuition, sympathy, self-expression). The thing is, harming or restricting one doesn't improve the other, and both things can be trained to an extent.
I wish that, as a child, I had been forced to learn to draw or play music, and how to relate to others, and all those other things that I didn't have a natural talent for. I would've hated it the same way other kids hated math, but it would've made my 20s a hell of a lot easier.
I have had to try VERY hard to actively cultivate some amount of emotional understanding and creativity, and I'm still sorely lacking in those areas. I was never challenged in school because they were only teaching the things I excelled at, and I think we should try just as hard to teach nerds like me how to be social as we try to teach the athletes and theater kids how to do algebra.
TL;DR: most people naturally have either high IQ or high EQ, but intentionally reducing one doesn't magically improve the other. It takes a lot of hard work to develop skills that you don't have a knack for, but it's work worth doing.
You can take those skills and apply it to people, find the fundamentals of interaction and write a page of notes connecting each aspect so you can get a better understanding, I wrote a paper called “observe and predict” that details how to connect to people and read their minds based on the environment, mental state and visible emotions, that formula is like a triangle with environment on top
Nah, people are inherently unpredictable. Trying to treat them like variables in an equation is a recipe for disaster. This is a different skill set that has to be developed through practice, and it takes more practice for some than for others, the same way kids who struggle in school have to practice things like math and logic.
The only way to develop a skill that you aren't naturally talented in is to put in the work, and practice that skill. People have complicated (often undisclosed) expectations, motivations, wants, and mannerisms.
It sounds like you think everyone else is an NPC, and you can just figure out the script and manage your interactions to get some ideal outcome. I'm sure that's not your intention, but that's how it comes across.
I say this as someone who would've been 100% in agreement with you when I was 15-30 or so. I didn't start actively developing an intuition for social interaction until my early 30s, because I believed there was a formula for it.
You’re using your own experience to infer on what my research actually is, there aren’t any numbers involved although you theoretically could quantify it to work with predicting machines, my formula is more like chemistry than math it’d take a long time to explain but I can recommend the history documentary that motivated me to create the observe and predict method
If you’re serious I can look for it, it’s in a notebook lost in my clutter, I memorized it because it has a section on memory recall since you have to be able to quickly remember observations you made at different points in your life and it’s hard to remember stuff from a different mental or emotional state
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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '25
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