Bit of a shower thought: Outside of limited circumstances, like interviews or therapy, nobody is really expected to give you honest feedback on how you come across.
This sucks. I’ve been told I come across as unfriendly once, but I have no idea if I was just nervous and tired at the time. I still cherish that one moment almost 10 years ago when someone told me I was funny in some corporate team building bs.
Now, I could ask friends and family, but I believe they would probably not tell me the full, honest truth. After all, they (hopefully) like me and I would probably avoid being too harsh to everyone but very close people in private.
At the same time, I know plenty of people who really should get some feedback, who probably believe they are funny while everyone is bored and annoyed and hopes they talk a little less and the like.
So, are there socially accepted ways to get feedback on how you come across?
I realize that people are strange, relationships are hard, P!=NP and anime is not real. Still, it would be nice to have.
You sure you’re not neurodivergent? This is a very neurodivergent train of thought ngl.
Dawg every time I try to get honest feedback, people just butter me up and downplay my bad behaviors instead of just telling me. He’s a real one not neurodivergent.
One needs to talk with mature confidants, not just people who don’t know oneself well. They’ll be far likelier to tell you what’s up.
How does one know if another is mature enough to give truthful and honest feedback? Furthermore, how does one discern if said feedback is actually truthful and honest?
Feels like a simple problem, but the underlying social logistics is quite intricate.
Oh, come on, surely you know the answers to these. Nonetheless, I’ll humor you:
See how they provide feedback to/about other people. How accurate are they? Have they been proven wrong? What is their track record? If it’s consistently good, then that’s kind of a really strong voucher, no?
Same as above; did you agree with their assessments of others based on the info you yourself have of those subjects? Can you verify that everything, or at least most of what, they said is correct? If they’re consistently exhibiting honesty, then why is there any reason to doubt it with you?
You neutrally build a case proving or disproving their maturity and trustworthiness. It’s almost scientific!
I understand, one can manufacture a playbook to analyze an individual, just like the one you provided for my two questions.
Still, the problem remains, as it is with most human interactions, there’s no objective answer, it all varies based on human nature and the environment involved.
Indeed It is an indication, but it does not guarantee an absolute answer like: Helium is heavier than Hydrogen; a fact that can’t be disputed.
True, you can do that, but if one is asking for another’s opinion, it is hard to evaluate it yourself, there’s bias all around us, more so when we are not aware of it.
I understand your approach, and maybe I’m being a bit pedantic, but I can’t see how this isn’t a really complex problem, with no exact solution.
Well, it is a mind game, ultimately. We can never know what someone else is really thinking, at least with our current tech (which is why first strike is always so powerful), so it boils down to probabilities determined by track record. I guess this is why the Internet has made for such an interesting cultural time, because it’s allowed never-before-seen anonymity and the brutal honesty that comes with it. All I can say is that you have to learn to be content with probabilities and statistics, because trying to fit almost any aspect of human culture and perspectives into a nice, clean periodic table will leave you with more exceptions than rules!
Or you could consult an LLM, I guess…
I agree
Social anxiety is not neurodivergent. It’s more unusual to NOT think about how you are perceived. Asking the internet because you don’t trust people to be honest with you, though…
Me being whatever I am does not change the validity of the question. Many presumably neurotypical people could really do with some honest mirror of how they come across. Yet the presumably on-average-neurotypical peers don’t say anything out of politeness or other reasons.
And I ask here for the same reason I don’t ask IRL friends: we are all anonymous strangers here, nobody knows me enough to not tell me my idea is stupid, and I don’t know anyone enough to be offended by being told it is stupid.
What about the possibility that nobody here thinks your idea is stupid? I certainly don’t. I think feedback is extremely important and that this is a great question (which can only be solved by first having close, mature friends, and asking them).
Sorry, you misunderstand me, I think: I meant I am posting here, exactly because nobody here knows me well enough to really care about my feelings. So, if what I say is stupid, a random anonymous stranger is more likely to tell me than a friend. Bit of a meta question thing, I know.
For the actual question, it’s kind of the same: an irl friend is at least a bit biased towards not trying to hurt my feelings. I know I do at least, if a friend asked me how he came across, I’d be inclined to be at least a bit diplomatic. Which is why I am looking for other ideas.
Ohhhhh. See, I was making a specific distinction between in-person strangers versus online strangers. In person is a lot trickier to get rude over, so I had meant that those such people will try to be polite and downplay stuff (on average, anyway; I know there are Karens). Contrast that with people online and, because we feel safe via the guise of anonymity, we’ll brutally say whatever the @#$% we want, hahaha!
However, I still think a mature friend in person is best. The friend you asked is not mature if they’re not giving an accurate portrayal of the situation (that they should already have had info on/the experience of).
Why asking the internet part is bad? With anonymity it’s oddly one of the safest places. Rather good risk to reward ratio.
If identifying details are avoided, it can’t really come back to haunt me in the real world, which does matter a little more and if someone starts to stalk me then i can block them or just purge the user and make a new one.
At the same time it’s completely possible to get some feedback. Kinda like gauging how people would react and refining the trail of taught before releasing it to real world.
Over the years, this sort of testing out has been rather useful in clearing my own garbled up mind. Maybe kinda like interactive journaling. If the trail of taught or thinking patterns get too negative, it generally gets pointed out and i can reassess those.
Yes it is