MeloJag wrote:
Good for you, I hope you get all the way there! Im a little curious. What have you been doing to build those social cognitive functions?
Lotta blogging, writing, fighting on forums. I've been developing rhetorical verbal social skills. I've also been working on models of social behavior and gathering data from my interactions to inform those models.
I did have scripts and rules for modeling social behavior previously, but my models have become more complicated in recent years. My new models are much more complex.
Now I'm doing some work out in the real world, and it looks like the behavior models (while they are purely abstract intellectual constructs) are really working to shed light on people's behavior when I interact with them. I.e. I now get something close to social insights when I interact with people.
So I guess my answer is that I've been engaging in immersive, intense amounts of verbal interactions on forums and using that (along with reading social psychology and neuroscience) to systemize social postures and rhetorical behavior. Now my models and data from intense forum exposure is helping me understand real world interactions more.