[doctorpangloss]

I don't know if it's so much that talented people are being locked out, as much as it is that communities everywhere, not just industry, are requiring a level of people skills that academic people lack but nonetheless thrive without.

[wholinator2]

Academics do have a reputation that way, but only the 100% safe, tenured ones. The majority of academics are required to have a strong level of communication just to get their grants accepted. Imagine if, on top of working your normal job at maximum efficiency, you then had to make a presentation to the government every year about why you and everyone that depends upon you deserves to eat, while the government you make the presentation to becomes increasingly antagonistic and detached.

There's quite a lot of people skills involved in surviving as an academic in today's environment. Imagine if you had to teach calculus to 150 random, uninterested teenagers (barely adults) every 12 weeks. There's some serious people skills involved in doing a good job at that (most people do actually try to teach well, I've known multiple people this year refused tenure based on rate-my-teacher ratings).

It's a different set of skills for sure, but being an academic isn't as socially challenged as the zeitgeist appears to believe.

[doctorpangloss]

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

i like academics, don't misunderstand me.

[nfw2]

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

yes, or at least largely overlapping circles

[thaumasiotes]

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]

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

[doctorpangloss]

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]

> 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.

[LoganDark]

> claude, gemini and chatgpt are very good at communicating

There is no communication there. No concepts for them to communicate. It is just math.

[nfw2]

Regardless of the implementation, claude causes concepts to enter my brain, so it is at least one-way communication. Human brains have mundane implementations as well: chemical signals firing across neural synapses. No magic special sauce, at least not that we can detect

[awesome_dude]

Academic's, FTR, have to have a huge amount of people skills. Their job isn't just to discover, it's to share.

You cannot share (effectively) if you cannot communicate in a way that others can understand.

Further the entire ecosystem that academics rely on to get what they need to do for their research (grants, and other funding, resources, and so on) necessitate them to convince people who control those, who do not necessarily understand the purpose of the work