This is going to sound mean, but I don't mean to be mean. I am genuinely curios:
Could you describe "hard to talk to" as not having very high social skills? I would say that a lot of average folk could be described as hard to talk to, but super smooth people are never hard to talk to.
So I mean to restrict my question to well above average social skills.
And this leads me to my next question. Could it be that social skills require more brain power than traditionally intellectual pursuits?
We know from AI work that things which come naturally to humans are some of the most computationally intensive and most difficult to replicate.
Whereas things like math and playing chess are much easier to implement in software.
Doing math in your head can feel much more difficult than just having a conversation with someone. But what if having a conversation feels easier only because a huge amount of brain power is genetically devoted to vision, language processing, face recognition, and reading other humans' emotions?
(This is what's going to get me grayed out)
What if socially awkward geeks are truly lacking brain power compared to socially super smooth but not particularly intellectual people?
And does pg's experience prove that social smoothness provides higher fitness even in the high-tech startup environment?
Are then technically brilliant but socially awkward people truly less fit in almost all areas of life?
Do socially awkward people only out-compete socially smooth people strictly in situations where interaction among humans is truly minimal?
> Are then technically brilliant but socially awkward people truly less fit in almost all areas of life?
I would say no, they are not, if they recognize their lack of fitness and choose to do something about it.
I think it's true that a lot of technically brilliant people are socially awkward. It makes sense why they are that way, though. In order to become technically brilliant, they had to log many hours in front of a computer screen to practice and get good. Those hours spent programming didn't go into sports, theater, public debate, or whatever other activity might have built up their social skills.
The clincher for a lot of these technically brilliant people, from what I've observed, is that they start to feel superior to others because they are so smart/talented. They then begin to feel like the whole "smooth thing" is a waste of time, because we should just be able to compute our relationships with each other. (That may sound like I'm being sarcastic, but that is not my intention).
It's kind of the old story about "book smart but not street wise". There is a lot of value in learning how to make others feel comfortable around you, or to being able to work smoothly through challenging situations.
I'm thinking of the kind of situation where everyone in the room is tense and somebody is able to defuse the feeling. Being able to do that requires emotional intelligence, which is something many engineers don't always have in abundance.
Acquiring those abilities begins with seeing their value. If somebody who is socially awkward thinks it might be worthwhile to become less awkward, they can definitely do it. (I am speaking from personal experience here!)
I think you misunderstand. He's not talking about social awkwardness, but rather a mindset that prevents the open and honest evaluation of ideas that fall outside of a predetermined set.
When you try advance ideas through discussion with someone with that mindset, communication breaks down because they are unable to wrap their minds around something they for one reason or another do not want to hear. Talk critically with an entrepreneur who is obsessed with a horrible idea (they're rather easy to find at meetups and whatnot), and you'll see what I mean. There is a palpable disconnect in the conversation if you try to get them outside of what they "know".
> Do socially awkward people only out-compete socially smooth people strictly in situations where interaction among humans is truly minimal?
As someone who's been socially awkward in the past (yet good with math, a typical nerd type I guess) but who eventually taught himself to be social to the extent that I can arguably surpass most of my former friends at this game (yet who is nowhere near Paris Hilton yet), here is my hard-won perspective:
1. Being truly social requires two things: (a) social experience, (2) a sophisticated theory of mind, a brain "faculty" that is incredibly resource-intensive, possibly more so than the faculty which performs abstract reasoning. In evolutionary biology, there is an influential theory which claims that it was theory of mind (which is being able to figure out what others think) that developed due to the pressure of living in groups and not tool-making that was the original cause of humans becoming sentient. This is why I don't believe for a second those who say that women are less smart than men (most women were simply taught to be dependent on others from the early age).
2. Our education system especially tends to value social skills less than hard problem-solving skills and therefore convinces us at early age that being social requires less brain power than doing math (because "brainy" is always "good"). This is because of two things (1) people with high social skills are somewhat more likely to steal money from you or cheat or use you in some other way without you ever knowing it, (2) most people except the autistic minority are capable of powerful theory-of-mind type thinking given enough social exposure, while only a select minority (whether because of education or biology) is capable of high-level abstract reasoning.
3. At one point in my life I felt I could be very social if I wanted (and I indeed could), yet I still avoided social interactions because being social felt incredibly draining to me (all those neurons firing consume glucose...) and I did not learn yet to derive pleasure from being social.
4. People who are very good at being social (past a certain threshold) derive a lot of pleasure from it, to the extent that they forgo most non-social intellectual pursuits which they perceive as less rewarding. This is actually a dangerous trap to fall into (similar to a drug addiction) if your main area of work requires quiet contemplation.
5. People who are truly brilliant (I'm not there yet) learn to balance the amount of interaction with others (and pick those they interact with carefully) because they understand that social withdrawal can give them a serious advantage, since most of the society (perhaps except tiger-educated Asian kids) falls squarely into the social-driven category.
Could you describe "hard to talk to" as not having very high social skills? I would say that a lot of average folk could be described as hard to talk to, but super smooth people are never hard to talk to.
So I mean to restrict my question to well above average social skills.
And this leads me to my next question. Could it be that social skills require more brain power than traditionally intellectual pursuits?
We know from AI work that things which come naturally to humans are some of the most computationally intensive and most difficult to replicate.
Whereas things like math and playing chess are much easier to implement in software.
Doing math in your head can feel much more difficult than just having a conversation with someone. But what if having a conversation feels easier only because a huge amount of brain power is genetically devoted to vision, language processing, face recognition, and reading other humans' emotions?
(This is what's going to get me grayed out) What if socially awkward geeks are truly lacking brain power compared to socially super smooth but not particularly intellectual people?
And does pg's experience prove that social smoothness provides higher fitness even in the high-tech startup environment?
Are then technically brilliant but socially awkward people truly less fit in almost all areas of life?
Do socially awkward people only out-compete socially smooth people strictly in situations where interaction among humans is truly minimal?