Social intelligence, education, & the workplace

It can make sense to teach social skills to people who lack them, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to fast-track people for having competitive skills at zero-sum contests. Putting people into gifted programs or admitting them into more-elite colleges because they have high social skills guarantees that people with higher intelligence (and better ideas) will have a much harder time getting their views heard. Give me a workplace full of stuttering nerds with pocket protectors, not conniving manipulators.

I agree with that.

Better to promote creating value over successfully accumulating value.

The Vikings may have been very successful at marauding and successfully collecting value, but even the Vikings, and perhaps especially the Vikings, would want others to get better at producing value for them to pillage.

A predator can be quite successful, but I'd rather support the creators, and even predators have an interest in that.

Bad economics. You should invest where the marginal utility of each dollar is highest, which is especially unlikely for the children of the wealthy, who will usually already have great amounts on investment made in their future, such that the marginal utility of the next dollar is extremely low.

In the context of state educational initiatives, the investment per student in a gifted+talented program will be the same for every student. So "marginal utility" would be the same as "improved outcome". This means you would like to predict success with or without intervention, and choose kids with the largest difference.

Regardless, the real question here is why you would ever choose "career success" as your metric for a publicly-funded educational program. The assumptions that you can make all kids more successful at the same time, and that this will be good for society, are both dubious.

However, you're assuming that education is viewed as an investment. This isn't necessarily the case. I haven't got the article here, but IIRC McClelland said something to the effect that it would be more fair to single out high-IQ students as kids not to spend money on.

Worth looking into, but my sense is it has no protective role. Social intelligence is not a conscious thing. The "manipulators" usually don't know that they're manipulating. Being able to manipulate other people doesn't seem to protect them from being manipulated in the same ways.

That makes sense, but what's unknown (afaik) is to what extent high social intelligence has (may have) positive effects not just for the individual, but also for whole organizations, society.

Well, smart people with limited social skills seem to get into a lot of acrimonious but unproductive disagreements which could be smoothed over with a little more empathy and diplomacy.

Yes, I agree entirely. I wanted to raise the question. Educational testers are using career outcomes as a metric for gauging their tests, and that really requires more thought about what the purpose of the tests are.

I'm not sure if you mean viable in terms of getting funded, or actually improving the social intelligence of the children enrolled in them.

They do exist if the lack of social intelligence is considered a diagnosis. I had lessons once or twice a week from a speech therapist as a child, partly for difficulty pronouncing letters, and partly for social skills, for that reason. During elementary school, some of this was with the school's speech therapist. I think I also remember a few "how to make friends" lessons with a school guidance counselor, but I'm not completely sure of that. I went to a public school, but probably an unusually well-funded one - I'm not sure how usual it is for schools to provide this sort of help.

I think something must have worked for me, because my social skills don't feel deficient in most situations I've encountered as an adult, and most of my friends who had similar problems as children do still have some problems like this. This sort of socialization could also be done through an institution, though - maybe make membership to after-school activities a requirement of the gifted program, or include more group work in advanced classes. There's also the risk of causing anxiety problems, though - being in a room full of children is stressful if you can't read them well enough to predict what they're going to do next.

I'm also not sure if what I have counts as increased social intelligence - I might just have done the equivalent of memorizing multiplication tables. (Communicating with new people takes more mental energy than people who I'm used to, as though I need to re-learn some things for each specific person.) Practically, it seems to be enough to get up to the waterline, though.

Some of the most well known "social intelligence" classes were held by Dale Carnegie in 1912, and many business schools still make students read his book. Nowadays social training exists in many forms, and there are programs aimed specifically at kids as well, although maybe nothing aimed at making future computer scientists less awkward. Studies show positive results, but mainly treatments for more serious behavior problems are studied.

Is there reason to believe that social skills are more difficult to teach than math, or rationality?

It's by definition, if you define social intelligence as "personal skills not measured by IQ that correlate with career success". I haven't seen this definition explicitly, but that's what you get when you choose career success as your metric and factor out IQ.

What would that prove? That a society that values high IQ rewards people with high IQs.

You do realise that it's rare for co-workers to know each other's IQs? Obviously there's a third thing that both IQ and success correlate with.