this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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Knowledgeable and smart are not the same thing. These two are very knowledgeable about the systems they worked on and database manipulation, believe it or not these are not hard skills to learn. But they were incredibly dumb regardless given every single action they took at every point in their lives.
Fun fact. In psychology assessment this are being called hard skills: very technical abilities for doing specialized tasks; and soft skills: social and emotional abilities to navigate social contexts, manage conflict and self regulate emotions.
Hard skills are easier to teach, while soft skills are very hard.
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Hard skills are either easy to teach or virtually impossible. It depends on the person. That isn't to say most people are incapable of learning: its that most people are fundamentally incurious or unmotivated, and teaching an incurious person is fucking impossible unless money is on the line for them.
Most people have very little difficulty getting very good at soft skills very early on in life. If you haven't learned them, you are in a minority. These two are likely in a minority psychological/neurological profile.
Well, curiosity, openness to new experiences, motivation to both learn and meet new people, tolerance to frustration and failure. Or at least be amicable enough to successfully navigate a learning setting, they are part of soft skills. In my professional experience, these are far from universal traits. Lack of soft skills is definitely not a minority, but it is also a gradient.
Humans literally evolved highly social minds entirely to rapidly develop soft skills.
You think most people lack soft skills because you placed additional effort into developing them and likely had the head start most average human beings get. Its rare that people start at zero, but some very much do.
I did.
Here's an interesting example you just gave me. I don't think that and never said as much. As I said, my impression, while anecdotal, was developed doing psychological evaluations professionally. Our understanding is that soft skills are not a given, there are actually several dimensions and degrees of different soft skills involved. Some people might be very good conversationalist, but completely emotionally inflexible at work at the same time, for example. Certainly, different social advantages derive into different opportunities to develop different soft skills. This complexity is exactly why I said that soft skills are hard to teach and learn. Also, why some people on the field are calling to rename them something else. The soft adjective is perhaps inaccurate.
Now to the example. It's extremely frowned upon in a conversation to affirm what others think, when they haven't explicitly expressed so themselves. Specially when the other person is still a complete stranger. It could be interpreted as hostility or an attempt to misrepresent other people's positions in order to attack them.
There are certain positions I would probably be very good at from a technical perspective that I avoid because I know my myself. I could never work for the CIA or FBI for example. I don't want to know their secrets because they could have me weigh a duty to execute my job and protect my family against my duty to humanity. I don't know which principle I would betray, if grappling with it didn't kill me first. Some might think that's an easy choice but the personal cost is extreme — look at Snowden.
No, keep me far away from that shit. Let me grapple with intellectual problems all day long, but moral quandaries paralyze me.
Interesting, such a strong insight is actually part of soft skills. You know yourself, what you don't want to do and stick up to it for your own moral preservation.