Blog post about the comic...
Quote:Quote:
http://tynan.com/xkcd
In the next frame of the comic, the “good guy” stick figure says to, “talk to them like a fucking human being.” It’s tough to know exactly what that means, so let me attack it from a different angle. A really effective opener, which I think was invented by Discovery at Venusian Arts, is to walk up to a girl and say something along the lines of, “I’ve noticed a lot of guys hitting on you. How are they doing on a scale from one to five?” After a response, you follow up with, “Let me guess… what’s your name? Where do you live? What do you do for work?”
This opener gets huge reactions. Why? Because all of the guys talking like “fucking human being(s)” are boring and so obviously failing to attract the girls, that the girls think it’s hilarious. Why not try to be better than normal?
But even if you disagree and think that normal is a good place to be, what about people who CAN’T talk like a normal human being? What happens to people who didn’t happen to develop normal social skills? Why is it so evil and manipulative for them to try to learn them? Things like bantering (a.k.a. negging), good storytelling, good body language and eye contact, are things “normal” people do well. They’re also, not coincidentally, what we teach students. You can’t just tell them to talk like a “fucking human being”, you have to show them what that means.