How to learn soft skills

I'd nominate C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters as a soft skills book, that gives your System 1 a lot of vivid, specific ways human thinking goes wrong to chew on and find ways out of.

One of my favorite examples is this passage which made a big impression on my System 1 about things that do bore me but I nonetheless get sucked into. (Context note: Screwtape Letters is written as a series of letters from a senior devil to a junior tempter about how to lead human lives astray)

You will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say...'I now see that I spent most my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.'

For me, thinking of this passage (and the horror of coming to say "I now see that I have spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked") helps me feel very motivated to snap out of boring, sterile activities. It makes the consequences clearer, and, it gives the action of closing the site/app/etc a sense of thrilling defiance.

Oh, I like this post! Thank you for writing it!

> Do consider adding your favorite books, or book-reading strategies, in the comments!

Here are some book-reading strategies I've found useful:

• When I feel angry, offended, frustrated, or some other emotion that seems to want me to stop reading or to not let the words get all the way in, I ask myself what I want from the book/author that I'm not getting. For example, while reading Nonviolent Communication, I felt something like angry whenever there was a sentence I didn't totally agree with (which was most of the sentences). Turns out I wanted a trusted adviser, someone who would guide me in my studies so I didn't have to create all of the structure for my education myself. While that desire was active and pointed at whatever I was reading, obviously false statements were quite painful. When I recognized that this was going on and that I would not find such an adviser in Marshall Rosenberg, I was able to receive whatever he had to say in a much more opportunistic, "let's see what I *can* do with this information" sort of way.
• In addition to trying on the perspective of the author, I also like to try on the perspective of the ideal reader: I pretend that even though I semi-randomly selected this book off of a shelf, it was secretly written to me in particular. The author knows all about me and and is actually extremely wise, and these are precisely the things I need to hear to solve my most pressing problems. While occupying that perspective, I ask myself what it is I need to hear from this book, and what's true about me such that I need to hear it.
• Whenever something sounds trite or vapid and yet is emphasized by the author, or by large swaths of society in general, I try re-reading it with the assumption that *I'm* the one who's been trite and vapid up to this point, and now I have an opportunity to learn what is life-changingly important in this phrase/paragraph/book.
• I try to be brash and selfish when I read. I try to have as many valuable insights as possible without any concern for whether the author meant anything along those lines. Sometimes this feels rude, and I find myself being pulled into a dull, studious, subservient sort of mental space. It's those times when I remind myself to be brash and selfish. (I also use this reminder when I encounter a vapid thing and need find what's life-changingly important about it.)
• I highlight things and write in my books. Rather than highlighting things that seem "important" (or that could conceivably appear on a test), I mainly highlight things I have emotional responses to. Sometimes I use several colors of highligher to track several kinds of emotions (especially confusion, desire/curiosity, and satisfaction/insight). What I write in the margins is an attempt to give voice to the emotion. I think that most of what this does is keep the book in constant dialogue with System 1.

Now I don't have to write the LW article on this that I've been meaning to write for years. Thanks! ;-) (I might still write it, but now I don't have to.)

I'm not sure that "read a book" is the best meta-strategy for acquiring soft skills. Sign up for a course might be a much better medium. Especially for people who do have money.

Soft skills are hard. I'm extremely good at learning soft skills. I try as hard as I can to teach one whenever someone desires one, but they're damn near impossible to teach. I've thus far only been successful at teaching someone how to do something related, in a way that their mind can grasp and run with, so that a few years later they will have developed the soft skill "on their own" (At which point, they will be doing exactly as I said exactly how I told them to, and they will tell me about this cool new thing they figured out how to do, and question why I didn't ever tell them to do it that way).

So rather than teach how to learn soft skills, I'm going to describe a few of the most useful soft skills I have.

• Maximize information input in a way that maximizes timeless usability. It works like this: prioritize observations in opposite order. The observation with the highest priority is the observation that is most distant from the desired observation while still being distantly related. The observation with the lowest priority is the observation that was first intended. For example: when performing a scientific experiment, the lowest-priority observation is the result of the experiment. Literally everything you could possibly observe related to the experiment is of higher priority than the direct result of the experiment. The reason for this is that distant observations have a tendency to be more useful for the future than direct observations.
• Minimize friction to maximize usability at detail. When welding, move the welding rod and heating device at the exact rate that keeps the rod molten, and the welding pieces not-molten. When using a common carbon fiber dremel cutting blade on metal, move the blade through the metal at the exact rate that just barely melts the metal in the direction of the cut. When hammering a nail, make the nail move at a consistent rate that is fast enough to slide past the wood, but slow enough to not split the wood (this is like air resistance at sub-sonic vs super-sonic speeds). When talking to people (assuming you want to maximize usability of the other person's mind), make statements and ask questions at a rate that doesn't overload the person's mind. When drawing a picture with a pencil, move the pencil across the medium at a rate that glides across the medium without catching on the medium.
• Inference jump to maximize efficiency of skill gain. When developing a theory from a conceptual base, assume a related postulate to be true so that you can obtain more data from experiments. The postulate is most likely not true, but that's not important. Experimenting under the assumption that a postulate is true is very useful in determining why said postulate is not true. Believe nothing. Treat all beliefs and assumed truths as inference jumps, because doing so maximizes their use. In order to make inference jumps with highest usability, all previously beliefs should be considered irrelevant. Failing that, consider the possibility that what you know to be wrong, or believe to be wrong, is in fact true, and use that as an inference jump.

I personally think the conceptual base of Less Wrong is contrary to efficient soft skill development. However, I think the conceptual base of Less Wrong is a potentially good platform to use to begin soft skill development. The most efficient way I can think to do so is to learn to use the conceptual base of Less Wrong, then make the inference jump that everything you've learned from Less Wrong is uselessly inefficient. This is the pattern I see everywhere people strictly adhere to a conceptual base. It's almost always a good platform to expand further from, provided the expansion stops using the platform as soon as possible.

Some of the books also contain statements that, as far as you can tell, are outright nonsense. One suggests that the only reason you or Fred have any problems is that you weren’t praised enough as children. You try on that perspective as well, but it feels yucky and nothing new clicks into place, and so you move along to the next part.

I don't think the problem with that statement is that it's outright nonsense. The problem is rather that it isn't actionable and doesn't tell you something you can do about the situation.

Very nice post. A few recommendations of books that I found useful to read in this way:

• Never Eat Alone (Keith Ferrazzi)
• Pitch Anything (Oren Klaff)
• The Charisma Myth (Olivia Fox Cabane)
• The Flinch (Julien Smith)
• The Trusted Advisor (David H Maister)

ETA formatting

First of all,I'm french so please forgive my languages mistakes Hi, thanks a lot for this article, I'd never heard about the inner simulator's notion before, now I've a word to put on it :), in a second part, do you think these skills are still semi conscious once they're learned?don't they pass on a conscious level, in my opinion once a skills or more generally a knowledge is learned, it pass from a semi conscious level to another which is more conscious if not totally. take the example of the maths problem, once the solving method is known (for a particular problem) you have to use this method in a conscious way. However it's not unconscious either, even if you spend a half life to study, this knowledge will not come out automatically, you have to found it in your memories which is a conscious mechanism. thanks for reading and sorry if it's a bit confused, in my native language it's easier :)

ChapelierdeCheshire.

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

Will try.

But I will admit I'm not sure positively people will react if they see it on my bookshelf..

I wish it came with an explanation what _exactly_ Impatience and Hybris virtues entail (given that both are generally described as non-virtues but I do seem to have the feeling that they can be good; same works for Laziness, but here I believe I have better understanding already).

I find that a fiction book that speaks to you is also a really great way of jump-starting experiments in your Inner Simulator. I usually find such books by browsing a book store and picking out (not necessarily objectively that good) stuff that speaks to me rather than working from a crowd-sourced list.

Here is an interesting flowcharts related to depression. Not sure how to interpret them, but I suppose flowcharting mental health triggers and actions could be very useful.

I'm glad you're talking about this because I spent a good deal of Highschool (age about 15-18) working on how I related with people and social situations and now I do it with aplomb, grace, and ease. Very good!

Your inner simulator is probably more accurate than your explicit models in domains where you have a rich experience base, such as social phenomena, and day-to-day physical phenomena.

Not true. At least not likely. If it were so, then most people would pick up soft skills in a rather automatic fashion without the need for too much conscious effort (actually, any conscious effort, since if the inner simulator is more accurate, your intuitions should lead you on the correct/correct-ish path. Ceterus Paribus, this should hold true for the majority of people (i would expect around more than 90%)

Also, I have a more general comment. A large part of the strategy advocatde here seems (to me) to be divided into rough categories: Keep trying stuff and keep reading stuff. You seem to indicate that learning hard facts should be discarded when you find them to be wrong, whereas learning soft skills involves some amount of reading "wrong ideas/facts/information". I get the feeling that you're keeping a double standard here. In the sense, that the timeline for learning a hard fact seems to be almost instantaneous while soft skills seem to be a little more long term (at least that's the sense I got from reading it, as if it was implied). To further illustrate this point, consider the following thought experiment:

1. You read in a book that gravity doesn't work on cell phones. You drop your phone and find it falls. You've learnt that gravity does in fact work.

2. You read that flattering people doesn't help. You avoid flattering people and then suddenly notice that your competitors who flattered their bosses/colleagues/friends have advanced their careers/social position.

See, what I'm getting at?