Your Most Valuable Skill

Manipulation of human beings. Otherwise known as social skills. From the basic aspects of making eye-contact and don't examine every tangent and metaphor improvements that any geek could use, to properly reading what people want from you.

If using your own intelligence to it's maximum effectiveness is the best skill you can have, using other people's intelligence to your own ends has to be second.

Flat out refusing to do things. You'd be amazed what you can get away with not doing.

I'm going to go with "rationality" if it counts as a skill and we are talking about deviation from the mean, not absolute value, where things like object permanence probably take precedence.

Breaking down rationality and focusing on my particular areas of strength, I'd go with the ability to notice confusion, clarify questions, and entertain a hypothesis to the point of serious investigation without becoming highly attached to it, and the sort of extreme materialism that dissolves Enlightenment era superstitions like a unified self and does so not as theoretical knowledge but as an everyday element of experienced life.

Non-attachment of all sorts really is quite useful though, from the ability to drop hypotheses to the ability to reject a long-term hobby (such as reading fiction) or interpersonal pattern (say arguing) as no longer educational or enjoyable enough to justify serious continued attention and then actually give it up or reduce participation (indulgence accepts naive assumptions about habits being fun) to a rewarding level.

Not necessarily a skill per se but...

Being able to say 'I was wrong' and proceeding to change my behavior in light of it.

Rationality is sort of the ur-procedure, but after a certain point - the point where you're no longer buying into supernaturalist superstition, begging for a Darwin Award, or falling for cheap scams

...or failing to put water bottles on your roof, or failing to sign up for cryonics...

its marginal practical value diminishes.

If your cost of obtaining further rationality is very high, so that it's going at a slow rate, then I suppose that's possible. But I think we have different views on the extent to which "people are crazy, the world is mad" holds ubiquitously true of ordinary human existence and offers low-hanging fruits.

I'm going to nominate the skill-set involved in participating productively in online discussion forums. :-) This involves:

• using proper etiquette
• avoiding or tamping down flame wars
• keeping track of people's identities so you can avoid crackpots and pay extra attention to those who consistently have high signal/noise ratios
• effective communication (writing clearly and concisely, reading comprehension, resolving confusions and misunderstandings)
• having a proper amount of confidence in one's ideas so as to not generate needless disagreements and unproductive arguments

I could also mention the skill-set for building a successful online community, but obviously far fewer people need that. (This seems like a good opportunity to say that I really admire the job that Eliezer has done building this one.)

Computer programming. Aside from the market value, it helps me analyze and plan day-to-day tasks. If there are several things I need to do, and they are tangled (one necessitates another, say), I start thinking like I would when programming, breaking the whole mess down into manageable pieces and then stringing them back together into a plan of action.

I expect that other people may have this as a separate skill not related to programming at all.

It always astounds me how a bit of skill with Excel and a programming language have given me such a huge boost in every job I've worked. I'm an engineer, so the questions I typically encounter at work involve something amenable to empirical analysis. However, I suspect the ability to do even some semi-automation of routine tasks is probably a skill anyone could use.

English! The world speaks English.

Considering that we aren't designed to be consistently happy, I have a Buddhist perspective that the best way to be happy is to want less, rather than achieve more. It might be called "letting go". This applies to things who's only or primary function is to make you happy, as opposed to making others happy or allowing you to survive to experience more happiness. E.g. rather than fall into the cycle of getting and being dissatisfied with larger and larger houses, to learn to be completely content with the house you already have. Said another way, it's a self-modification of one's emotions and utility function. One is then free to give up certain things to achieve greater utility elsewhere, altruistically or selfishly, not to mention enjoying both new and old houses quite a bit more.

The ability to do this to a significant degree is one of my most valued skills. In particular, coming to be extremely content with being single provided immense utility, both inside and outside of relationships (comparing my relationships to others). It also really helped me to find relationships. Note: as I've experienced this, it does NOT require that you cease the pursuit of something, just that you become very content with failing to achieve it. Being in a nice relationship might be preferable, but doesn't have to stop the lack of one from being a great time.

Achieving this skill to the extent I did took a long time, including a lot of struggling and complication. For those interested, particularly useful were music (able to add beauty to all manner of things with the right perspective) and general practice with enjoying subpar outcomes.

Focusing on existential risk I get to enjoy this less than I used to. By so affecting mine and others' ability to achieve future utility, the avoidance of such a disaster is far more valuable than being content with failure. Shucks.

Aside from computer programming and related technical skills, if I had to name a small set of general life skills that I have found the most useful, I think it would be the ability to say:

"I don't know."

"I don't know how long it will take me to do that." (a special case, but a very important one)

"That's none of my business."

I have found these are indeed skills, but I'm not sure off the top of my head how to articulate methods for picking them up.

I think my most valuable skill is my ability to build models of problems and systems. Not necessarily great and complete models, but at least something that encapsulates a bit of what seems to be going on and produces output that can be compared with the system. A few iterations of modelling/comparison/correction and I have usually at least learned something useful. It works both for napkin calculations or software simulations. It is a great tool for understanding many systems or checking intuitions.

Others have mentioned the skill of "letting go". I have trained myself the speciality of letting go of negative emotions, which has produced a very sunny (nearly pathologically positive) mood. Recognizing that most negative emotions like despair, sadness or anger don't solve the problem that caused them is very helpful. A positive, can-do mindset is a pretty useful asset. However, there are tricky trade-offs to be made between lowered ability to dwell on negatives plus optimism bias and the hedonic enjoyment of a good mood.

My most valuable skill I can think of is in the context of being a software developer. I've learned to be pretty good at extracting requirements from customers. I often say this is one of the more important skills a software developer can learn. It's important at all levels of the profession, and is really a gateway skill to performing at a high level.

The reason it's important and hard to learn is that most of the time, customers don't know what they want, or they have an idea in their head, but they're wrong about what will satisfy. Extreme Programming (XP) teaches one approach that lets you get by with less of this skill, and that's to build something simple that approaches what they say they want, and then keep adding stuff until they're happy with it. But if the customer is really confused (which happens more often than you might think) then you'll have started in the wrong direction, and the customer won't get less confused about what they want.

So it helps to know how to talk to the customer and find out what the real problem is, rather than just what they think the solution might be. It's also valuable to have good intuitions about features they're likely to want that they haven't asked for yet, so you can build in the hooks for those. But if you make too many guesses, you'll waste time building general support where it's not needed. So you have to calibrate your guesses as well.

we enter adulthood with an arsenal of heuristics that are mostly good enough.

Humans are rational enough in the same way that we are strong enough.

Of the ones mentioned so far my highest ranking would be learning to learn, saying no, and my first love, programming. Here's one not mentioned so far:

Consulting, the skill of influencing others at their request. (See e.g. Jerry Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting.) This has elements of teaching, but is worth more on the market. It relies on broad experience rather than specialized knowledge. It calls for your clients seeing you as a trusted advisor, relying on you not for deep expertise in their own domain but for an outside perspective, at least a little less tainted by internal biases than they are.

A consultant is often simply someone who is "less wrong" than their client, but to deploy this effectively requires a number of sub-skills: empathy, negotiation, listening, flexibility, networking...

Initially I picked up this skill because I was fed up with wasting my programming skills in the service of employers who seemed to systematically mismanage their own projects. (In retrospect that's not such a good reason to change careers, but that's how I saw things back then.) I went freelance and focused on helping businesses which wanted to improve their project management and development strategies.

Because I want to be right, I love to be wrong. Or more correctly, to realize why I'm wrong. I'm not sure how it came about, my best guess is it has something to do with humor, but every time I realize I'm wrong, I get happy. It gives me a stupid grin across my face and makes me snicker. It also happens when I realize why someone else is wrong. (as in becoming aware of what mistake they have made, or what information they are missing - not just that they are mistaken!)

Sure, most people want to be right, but they hate to be wrong. They get ashamed, frustrated, blame themselves, and try to avoid it. The problem, I believe, is that they have bundled "being wrong" together with realizing that they're wrong. To avoid these feelings, they unconsciously try to avoid giving up on their beliefs for as long as they can get away with it.

If you want to be right then you should love realizing that you're wrong, because every time you do, you'll get more right.

In short, I guess you would call this skill "being able to update". Just wanted to give my theory of how it works for me, and why so many are bad at it. The reason behind why most people have this faulty behavior is most likely the pursuit of status. Groups don't reward ability to update, in fact they punish it. You lose prestige, they'll call you a flip-flopper, instead of praising your ability to discard false knowledge. Which explains a lot about the state of the world and it's leaders, really!

Here's something big that I don't think anyone's mentioned yet. Rationality isn't the only meta-skill; you are born with the incredible ability to learn new skills, and as with most other traits, skill-learning aptitude varies between people. But more importantly, a lot of people don't realise that the skill-learning mechanism can be honed; the brain circuitry responsible for picking up new tricks grows and develops in response to use.

There are reams of anecdotal documentation, and probably some properly conducted tests as well, that bear out the local form of this phenomenon (after you've learned three second languages the fourth is easier; if you can play badminton and volleyball, then all other things being equal, you'll probably pick up tennis better than another absolute beginner). I suspect, without much justification, that this also happens globally: having exercised your skill acquisition centres in learning to play volleyball, learning to speak Russian is going to be a tiny bit easier than it otherwise would have been.

So, apart from being extremely good at pure maths (to the extent that it ought to provide me with a prestigious career), that's my most useful skill: l'm pretty quick at picking up new ones.

Like Michael Vassar, I think there should be more sex. Ergo, getting sex partners in the mood, getting them off, getting them to get me off, and (barring the previous things working) taking care of things myself.

Maybe this isn't my most valuable skill, but lately I've been much better at setting to a routine and sticking to it in the absence of external enforcement: "Do your readings for class over the weekend. Go into the lab to work on research several days per week. Go to the regular seminars. Keep up on RSS feeds and extra readings in the evenings." Naturally there are virtues to flexibility as well, but just floating through my day as an optimized routine and avoiding the problems associated with time-inconsistent preferences has really helped my productivity in the past few months.

Many of the most useful skills are ubiquitous. For example, everyone here can speak, read, and write English. Most of us can drive a car, and I don't know of anyone here who can't walk.

In terms of skills that not everyone has, I was unusually good at schoolwork. To break it down into some of its most significant parts:

1) I was good at translating problems stated in English into mathematical expressions. 1a) I was good at identifying the information needed to do #1, and finding that information in textbooks.

(I actually know how I learned to do #1. I had an educational computer program that I used before I learned algebra that taught me how to do this. It would give a word problem of the kind used in an algebra class, and act out, step by step, the process of creating the equations used to solve the problem.)

2) I could do math very well; I could learn the rules for "shuffling symbols around" quickly and apply them to solve equations. I could also derive results on the fly that I didn't quite remember from class when taking a test.

3) I was good at answering questions on tests. I don't know why, exactly, apart from my math skills and overall good memory for the kinds of things that get asked on tests, but I was good at it.

Another, somewhat related skill: I am an unusually good writer, at least when compared to my high school classmates. (I'm not necessarily better than the average blogger, but the average person doesn't blog.) I think it came from spending an awful lot of time reading books, but I have no idea how to teach writing.

I also have the "useless" but fun skills of being good at video games and at Magic: The Gathering.

Obsessive persistence until the right answer is found.

Self awareness. The ability to monitor myself in both real time and off line and update, nudging myself towards the development I most need at the time. Takes a while to learn that one.

Aside from learning as a way to acquire useful skills, there are certain things I learn in order to change the way I think. Echoing similar comments, programming seems to have altered my perspective as a kid and continues to do so. One example is learning Lisp. It's become popular to learn lisp not because it is practically useful in day-to-day coding (though it can be), but because it changes the way you think about how to program.

Similarly, studying abstract algebra might be a waste of my time (though I'll understand Lie groups and hence theoretical physics better), but the way it warps (in a good way) my mind cannot be attained by any other (present) means.

This might not be original, but my most valuable skill then seems to be learning how to learn, which includes honing my intuition of what is important to learn.

I'd say my most valuable skill derives from the fact that I had very unusual parents with whom I also moved a lot, so that they had a strong influence on me. Consequently, the environment of my childhood was pretty unique, giving me neural patterns that deviate significantly from those of many other people.

This means I sometimes behave in ways that seem "dumb", but in other instances act in ways that seem unusually intelligent.

I excel in areas where unique neural patterns are rewarded: This includes (naturally) the stock market, some types of programming, and some types of non-fiction writing. It also means that I tend to have more success using lateral approaches to solve problems, since my atypical neurology makes it more likely that I will conceive of lateral approaches that have not yet been tried by others.

The biggest downside to this (I'm speculating here) is that success when using lateral problem solving correlates less directly with overall effort. Hence, there is less of a psychological reward for exerting a large effort. I suspect this makes lateral thinkers, like myself, trend towards having a lower discipline, compared to others who have managed comparable achievements.

Inspired by Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiment, I'm going to go with delayed gratification. I think the most important skill (or perhaps meta-skill, as this particular skill allows one to develop skills) is the ability to delay gratification and discipline yourself to work on something for a prolonged period of time. Without hard work and discipline, you can't achieve much in life. I also want to link to an interview with Carol Dweck, since she is probably the psychologist who has influenced me the most in this regard.

sifting information from noise / getting to the heart of a problem: skimming through a lot of material, getting rid of the unnecessary crap, and picking out the things that are really crucial.

i think i've always tended toward that mode of thinking, but the first time i remember consciously focusing on it was in a philosophy course that required turning in three essays per week addressing specific ethical questions in under 300 words.

the caveat on this one is not to overdo it. i really value my ultra-sensitive BS meter, and it pretty much earns me my daily bread, but i have to be very careful about type II errors.

Quickly break a problem into tractible pieces.

I learned this mostly from watching the most effective people around me -- my bos when I worked for a web design firm, a few particular fellow students during my PhD, and so on.

As far as rationality is concerned, it's achieving the place of what I call "rational ignorance". An awareness of the limits of your rationality and how you overestimate how rational you are:

http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/the-ego-dilemma/

Hi, I'm new.

This is probably more of a talent than a skill, but I think I'm abnormally good at producing analogies on the fly. It's really useful for trying to get a concept across to a person.

I think my hard-won skill for performing very fast online research is highly useful, though I suppose my ability to get along with people, and forge positive relationships with valued others is more generally valued.

I wish Nesov, or someone else, would write a bit about "thinking in math". Is this a skill that is distinct from simply being good at math? Can it be learned through instruction or improved with practice? Are there exercises that we can do?

Learning from the mistakes of others.

If I could write the curriculum for middle school, I'd make sure it included typing, 2 foreign languages, drawing, 1 musical instrument (rock band or orchestra), and social dancing.

Pretty much anything you learned in school other than math would be better replaced by another foreign language.