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Comment by doctorpangloss

8 hours ago

do you think communication skills and people skills are the same thing?

i like academics, don't misunderstand me.

11 comments

doctorpangloss

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nfw2  7 hours ago

> do you think communication skills and people skills are the same thing?

yes, or at least largely overlapping circles

  • thaumasiotes  6 hours ago

    They might co-occur, but they aren't the same thing. It's easy to communicate something in a way that (a) the recipient understands clearly; and (b) the recipient refuses to acknowledge despite understanding it. And in the other direction, you can persuade people to do things without them ever understanding what you want or why the things should be done.

    • nfw2  5 hours ago

      Persuasion based on pathos or ethos instead of logic is also communication

  • doctorpangloss  6 hours ago

    okay... here's another way of thinking about it: claude, gemini and chatgpt are very good at communicating. but, would you marry claude? would you want claude to be your boss? would you want claude to be your coworker? a lot of people are choosing claude to be their intern, which is something.

    what i am saying is, having people skills are the answers "yes" to all those questions. you can cynically call getting a job nepotism, or you can call it, well people like to work with their friends at the cost of measures of competency. and maybe, the core competency is being pleasant to work with or work for.

    another place people struggle with this is executive compensation. if i told every DoD employee they could get a 10x better boss for only $20/y, every single one would, which is $58m in executive compensation. but the DoD CAN'T do that, and its leadership is TERRIBLE, so... do you see?

    • jmalicki  6 hours ago

      > would you want claude to be your boss? would you want claude to be your coworker?

      I've had worse. Mostly much better, but I've had worse.