> a lot of the points felt more like learning how to charm, manipulate, and game social interactions.

A lot of stuff "normal" people do is charm, manipulate, and game social interactions. Except because they are not conscious about it, we give them a pass. One of the characteristics of autistic-spectrum individuals is that they must make a conscious effort to achieve goals that are achieved unconsciously by most of us. If we prevent such individuals from learning all that rarely-written-down stuff consciously because it seems "distasteful" to us, then we are disadvantaging such individuals socially.

> The post felt like a rollercoaster between using tricks to charm and manipulate, and periods of genuinely trying to learn how to be friends with people.

That’s all the same thing. What is being friends with people other than essentially manipulating them into liking you by being likable and a good friend?

What’s important is why you’re doing it.

If the limit of someone's behavior winds up making everyone happier-off, I don't understand why I ought to care. In that sense, calling it "manipulative" seems either inappropriate or not very useful.

At least with something like adultery, there's a pretty obvious ill consequence of someone finding out what's going on behind the scenes. But if I looked behind the curtains of someone like OP and found out that the reason they're so charming is because they thought about people a bunch: I couldn't be burdened to care.

Through all their gyrations there is still something inherently contrived and performative to their interpersonal relationships that are far afield from normal, but pass well enough to permit connection. This line really resonated with me:

> I was going around dangling the possibility of emotional connection indiscriminately, ignoring the fact that it’s entirely reasonable to interpret this as flirtation.

I am still struggling to understand the way in which many people naturally form casual connections with others. In this example, a casual connection might be a hookup or a makeout session without it turning into a relationship. In another case from their article, it may be exchanging some personal stories at a house party without it turning into a four hour ordeal, or following up and developing a close, meaningful friendship. I perceive a lot of confusion here - and in my own life - about personal wants and needs being met, meeting someone else’s needs, where one’s personal boundaries lie, and how we effectively communicate them - or not.

In consent-forward spaces you get a lot of neurodivergent people using explicit verbal negotiation and agreement on everything, but this is a consent style that very much may not land well for people outside of one of those subcultures. Therapy and other trauma-informed modalities carry similar problems. It’s fine and great to develop subculture norms for the people participating in them, but it may not help them navigate the rest of the world. And yet, I’m not sure what else can be done. My social development mirrors the author’s, and I’m still unsatisfied with my results, even though I have more meaningful connections now than I used to, so this is not all without merit. It may just be the best that some people can do.

The numbers represent progressive stages of growth away from socially abnormal behavior. Numbers 1 and 2 represent the author's abnormal behavior. Numbers 5-6 are their later stages, where they've achieved competency in social normally behavior.

The book is called “how to win friends and influence people”, after all.

> I don't want to disparage the author as this is a personal journey piece and I appreciate them sharing it. However this did leave me slightly uneasy, almost calling back to earlier days of the internet when advice about "social skills" often meant reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them (referred to as "dancing to the music" in this post).

I see why you'd think this, but I disagree. In my opinion it's two sides of the same coin, and the key moral question is whether you use those skills in a moral way. I've seen both well-meaning and charismatic people and not so well-meaning charismatic people, and at the end of the day I believe that charisma is a powerful tool, but it's not fundamentally good or bad.

Social interactions have always felt like a game whose rules I don't intuitively understand, and I've always envied people like my wife who handle it much more naturally and fluidly. The same way that I'm comfortable and capable in analytical settings, they navigate social settings with just as much finesse. I've personally spent a big chunk of my adult life trying to learn to navigate social interactions more comfortably and more intuitively, so I can see some parallels with what the author writes about. (For the record, I'm neurotypical, just awkward.)

For most people I don't think it's about charming, manipulating, or gaming social interactions, I think it's about wanting to make connections and friends because that leads to being happier.

you are doing it all time. you just not aware.

the person was so bad in thing, and had to build relevant part of the brain manually. that part you got automagically.

there is no difference except awarness. over time he will loose awarness too.

I think this means you didn’t read the piece, as it addresses this concern of yours in perhaps the simplest way possible: it’s about why each prior modality has issues.

He seems like an odd duck.

It is manipulation, you are doing things that impact how others view you in an effort to get them to do/feel/think something. Human interaction is various forms of manipulation.

Many people hear music and can put together some moves without thinking about it, others have to deconstruct, learn, and rebuild... it's still dancing either way.