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Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

I refuse this terrible term and invite everyone to use (following zitterbewegung's udemy link) to use "metacognitive skills" instead.

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Why do you think "metacognitive skills" is better? The definition of "metacognition" is "awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes." How does that relate to what the researchers were studying?

Seconded. Non-cognitive has a pretty clear intuitive meaning so to then define term to mean almost the polar opposite doesn't make any sense to me.

> Non-cognitive has a pretty clear intuitive meaning so to then define term to mean almost the polar opposite doesn't make any sense to me.

FWIW, I didn't interpret it as the polar opposite. I don't see that much of an issue with a model of skills as physical, cognitive, and emotional.

Meta means self-referential. How are emotional skills "self-referential cognitive skills?"

Meta-x = x about x. E.g. meta-theory is a theory about theories, not a theory about itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta

(Douglas Hofstdadter made a career of cheerfully pointing out that a theory about theories must include itself as the kind of theories it is about -- "I am a strange loop" and all that. But still, what the language means is that.)

Right but that doesn't apply here. Meta almost means "higher-level" as you're using it, but emotional processing isn't a higher-level cognitive skill. It's just a different type of cognition.

Meta implies a hierarchy.

I see the problem here. It's too strong to say that being good in using your emotions (say, as an actor) is a form of level 1-cognitive grasp of a level-2 cognitive process.

"Non-epistemic" might be an alternative to "non-cognitive".

GNU/cognitive skills

(but really, the term "cognitive" used in this context boils down to g-loading, so "non-kernel processing" is as apt as anything else — an improvement over "non-cognitive" at the very least.)

I like the para- prefix here. Para-congntive: alongside, auxiliary to cognitive skills.

Paracognitive is good, but I feel it understates the role of emotional/social/etc. skills in performing the tasks we've been over-crediting to cognitive skills altogether. The point that's being made by users of "non-cognitive" is not that emotional skills are good for emotional affairs while cognitive skills are good for computer programming, but rather than being a effective programmer requires dipping on those other skills as well.

I'm beginning to like "non-epistemic". Not everything about being a succesful intellectual or knowledge worker is about discovering the Truth.