I think there may be a tendency for the here-present audience to overanalyze and underpractice.

I think the following information is important for understanding this problem matter:

(1) Anyone attracted to this site will likely be a highly intelligent individual.

(2) IQ is more closely bundled around 100 for girls than it is for guys.

Implication: This here audience is mostly male.

(3) People with IQ differences of more than 2 standard deviations don't get along that great (aren't peers).

(4) Socialization with peers at a young age is crucial to social development.

(5) Primary schools bundle together people of all IQs indiscriminately.

Implication: Most of us in this here audience have been stunted in our social development by lacking peers early on, when it's important.

Implication: Because extreme IQs are much rarer in girls than in guys, we have to either compete for a few highly intelligent, intellectually stimulating females who may share our lack in social skills, OR settle for merely above average IQ females who may lack some intellectual sparkle, but may be easier to find and better socially developed.

(6) You don't learn to dance by watching videos of people dancing, and you don't develop social skills by reasoning about them. You need to practice.

Implication: People like us, who need to develop our social networks and social skills at a later age, will necessarily make fools of ourselves in the process. This mustn't stop us. We are belatedly developing skills that we should have picked up as kids, and practice is the only way to do it.

Of course, in any domain, whether, music, dance, attracting mates, or practicing medicine or law, those who have valuable skills may wish to prevent others from acquiring or using such skills in order to preserve a monopoly and one convenient way to do so is to declare the process of acquiring such skills to be immoral or illegal.

I also have a practical advise to those who try to improve their social skills especially in the dating space.

Learn some real partner dance!

By "partner dance" I mean something that requires real partnering skills like salsa, swing or tango, (rather than hip-hop or techno, etc. that have no real partner dancing scene and culture).

Although I don't do it for pick-up or dating reasons (I am married with children), I have been dancing salsa for a few years and I recognized a lot of positive effects:

• Great workout (much more fun than anything else I tried)
• Learned to behave much more relaxed and self-confident in the company of women.
• Improved body-awareness, posture, gracefulness, etc.
• Taught me how to make bodily contact in a gentle and enjoyable way and without being intrusive or offensive and feel completely natural about it.
• Made me more aware of dressing and hygiene.
• A form of social meditation: living in the presence, enjoying the moment by concentrating not on oneself but on someone else and the music.

But first of all: It is an awful lot of fun. Imagine that you to go to work or to a conference in a city you've never been before and at the end of the day you can be almost sure that you will find a place where there are several people of the opposite sex wait to chat with you a bit, spend a few minutes in your arms without any significant risks or hurt feelings. This was my experience at every single place I visited: I counted that within the last two years I danced in 4 different countries 15 different cities and over 30 different venues.

I am neither really young, nor good looking. It's also fair to say that I am extremely introverted, geeky and clumsy. Still, I managed to have more fun than I've ever expected. For example two months ago I went to a salsa event and was sitting around a bit between two songs when a beautiful woman came up to me and asked me to dance. I never say no, but maybe I should have, because she was so much above my level: it was almost embarrassing... Later in the night I told my wife that I danced with that amazing woman. She looked at her and told me: "Good for you, you just danced with Liz Lira" (Turned out my wife went to her workshop, during the day) Indeed: I looked her up in the net and recognized: 5X salsa world champion..., but what a nice person!

I've always found "Just be yourself" to be particularly unhelpful advice.

"Just be Brad Pitt" is better advice, but still not helpful.

Taskifaction doesn't destroy romance any more than it destroys music or dance.

This one sentence alone is worth my upvote for its sheer truth. (Although

Sucking at stuff is not sublime.

is a close second.)

Socialization is a social/cultural problem in a larger sense. The fact that nowadays most people learn their social skills in High School is bound to be problematic. Since we no longer have much of a ritualized, entrenched system for socializing our youth, they largely learn their social skills from other teenagers - the blind, gullible, hormonally confused and deeply irrational leading the blind etc. They go on to carry the resulting status games, irrational behaviour -- and scars -- into the rest of their lives and the whole of society. This explains much of our (barely) post adolescent culture and politics.

IMO, the views that rational analysis and manipulation in social context (esp. with regard to mating) is immoral or dehumanizing is based on observations that a lot of people who consciously employ such techniques often have the wrong objective function.

Consider this analogue situation: If you raise children, you definitely do a lot of rational thinking about their needs, long term interests and try help them to develop, be safe, etc. This requires a lot of objective considerations, prioritizing, even conscious manipulations on several different levels. Nobody would say that this is wrong, dehumanizing or out of place. The reason that this is intuitively accepted is that you probably do this for the right reason: in the long term interest of your children. If you have the right objective function, it is not just fine, it is required.

I think that other social interactions should not be different in this respect. You should consciously employ techniques, objectively analyze and manipulate situations, but your objective function should include the interests of your peers as well. They will sense if you genuinely care about them: Even if you manipulate them, they will be still thankful later if it happened in their long term interests.

You don't become a "manipulative bastard" just because you are manipulative, but if you are also a bastard.

That sums things up for me. To paraphrase Katie Lucas, every piece of interpersonal skills advice I've come across has, at its kernel, a very small section labelled "do magic here" -- or at least it often seems like magic to those who need that kind of advice in the first place.

As a member of that lower caste, I'm always interested in the possibility of systematizing social/dating skills. I'm currently looking into books, videos, etc. intended for autistic and Asperger people. I am neither (as far as I know), but it seems like they're the most likely to receive clear, algorithmic (so to speak) advice, because there's a recognized medical need for it. Probably it's easier for society to sympathize with them than with your run-of-the-mill geek with poor social skills, even if there are similar solutions to both of their problems. (I don't mean to belittle the problems faced by actual autistics, who absolutely do deserve that sympathy, but I also think that there should be no shame in applying the same solutions (if they work) to similar types of problems when they are faced by non-autistics.)

I'm trying a few such books right now. I might be back with some recommendations if any of them help.

Online dating sites appear to offer a counterexample to the assertion that "society resists better attempts to taskify social interaction (especially dating and mating)".

From the shallow signaling angle, discussing problems as tokens of ability probably takes precedence over discussing tasks. In that case, one doesn't explain how to solve a problem, but is simply (implicitly) telling that one doesn't have the problem (or is able to solve it).

For most skills, some people attain a level of art which surpasses describable taskification. If you asked a professional athlete how he throws the ball, or how he runs, he might mention a few tricks, but he's not going to be able to communicate it to you; in his mind, he just does it. I coach a top university speech and debate-type team (Mock Trial); I find it easy to describe how to do basic things, but nearly impossible to describe how to do sophisticated things; it has to be demonstrated and the students have to understand it themselves, and many of them fail to do so.

To some degree, socializing works on the same level. If you're thinking your way through each step, it's going to be perceptible and you will seem awkward. To seem natural, you need to simply do. That, I think, is the meaning of statements like, "just be yourself" - if you're consciously executing some series of actions that are not natural to you, you will always be thinking and never just doing.

Of course, the challenge lies in getting to that level of comfort. I'd think your best bet is exposure, ideally via both popular media and just getting out of the house. It admittedly might help to start off with some taskified strategy, since even if it is awkward, it may be less awkward. But I think the overall attitude opposed to taskifying social interaction is the fact that social interaction, at the "artisan" level, is not describably taskifiable.

You know, I like this article, but I just have to say: "taskification" is an ugly, ugly word.