Scott Adams: Future Jobs (and Irreplaceable Skill Sets)
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My major was STS (Science, Technology, and Society) with a minor in psychology. Then I studied sociology in grad school.
What I focused on was social influence, persuasion, and behavioral change. I took courses on negotiation, deception, cults, magic, minority influence, organizational development, group dynamics, arbitration, personality/social psychology, persuasive technology, and a ton more. I was a researcher in the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab for years.
And I mixed it with practical applications of negotiations in the field.
The coursework has helped me dramatically in understanding the motivations, attitudes, and behaviors of others.
I still remember one of my Comm professors talking about how other technical disciplines tend to look down on areas like psych/comm. She said something I'll never forget: "The value isn't in the difficulty of the material, but the usefulness."
I use my social psychology background in my work with people on iwillteachyoutoberich every day.
Need to raise money, get customers, convince great people to work for you, or sell the company? Draw on your STS skills. Need to write amazing software? Draw on your CS skills.
I'll have to look into STS and consider that, but unfortunately, I don't really want to double major because I want time to do other stuff (like hack and maybe have a social life).
People in hard sciences are typically elitist because they've had to prove themselves right up front. Making it through school is a more concrete accomplishment. Who knows if that psyc major will ever amount to anything.
For someone outside of college, how'd you recommend people learn those topics?
Also, check out his delicious bookmarks.
I work in the IT organization of a Fortune 100. Due to our size and modularization the skills of persuasion and influence (and consensus building, presentation skills, social skills, name recognition) are very important if I hope to have an impact here beyond that of my own code quality.
Being "right" on a technical matter is worthless if no one takes you or your ideas seriously.
As always, the only way to make someone do what you want them to do is to convince them that they want to do it because it's in their interest. Simply presenting a good idea directly to the person in charge won't be enough if the idea represents a change to entrenched organizational policies.
I was once surprised to see how many high-ranking salespeople had technical degrees like engineering or a hard science. But it makes sense -- they just struck the right balance, with enough technical knowledge to be able to talk to anyone, and then persuasion/influence skills to amplify that influence.
It's also why huge organizations are often running obsolete technology, no-one can generate enough "activation energy" to overcome the molasses.
Ye gods. Fixed it.
(The edit that introduced that text did nothing else. The user who made that edit has made no other edits to Wikipedia. [EDITED to add: and the account was created 2 minutes before that edit.] Looks like vandalism, though a rather odd sort of vandalism.)
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This would be immensely useful in creating people who were perhaps more resistant to persuasion strategies of our education system, government, product marketing, and humans in general; and instead create people who are themselves more freely thinking - producers and thinkers instead of pure consumers.
In addition, it's unbelievable that people (including me) are overcome by the simplest of persuasive strategies. If we weren't so poorly (on purpose) educated on rhetoric and debate, and if we had some understanding and dependence on our inner selves and strength, I believe things would be very different.
I'm behind this idea!
I'm a grad student in English lit at the University of Arizona, and based on my experience teaching freshmen comp and listening to various other teachers and so on, I'd guess that the world is not particularly interested in being awoken, never has been, and probably will never will be.
A small segment, yes, but definitely not "the masses."
* If we weren't so poorly (on purpose) educated on rhetoric and debate,*
I think this is highly improbable: don't attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance, incompetence, and randomness.
I apologize - I should have either not included the parenthesis comment or explained it further. So to explain it a little further, I don't think we give our forefathers enough credit when they devised the school system that they did post-civil war. I agree this thought is a bit conspiratorial at nature, however it does say something when our system is obviously missing certain basic subjects to assist in critical thought, especially with the knowledge that the most intelligent and successful minds created it. I'm still forming an opinion here, but I do find it suspicious.
"the world is not particularly interested in being awoken, never has been, and probably will never will be."
This may be true, however it is in everyone's best interest that they are 'awoken' to the best of their abilities. Also, with the semi-recent discovery/invention of frighteningly-effective persuasion techniques, I believe this is more important than ever.
For myself, I do not believe that people still truly intend it this way; I do not believe there is a mass conscious effort to prevent critical thinking skills from being developed or to deliberately hold people back from realizing their true potential. If you find your brain rebelling against the entire idea that schools could have been created for this purpose, remember this was over a hundred years ago, and I for one don't claim this is still the animus behind schools. In fact I suggest that the vast bulk of people's actions demonstrate a true desire to arm children with the best education they can be given, it's just that the average person, even the average person deeply involved with education, is clueless about how to actually bring that result about in the real world. Meanwhile, the pattern of "what a school looks like" was laid down when this was a conscious intention and through literally 5 or 6 generations now has accidentally been enshrined as Gospel, and few people are yet thinking outside the box; those that do are laughed at at best, vilified at worst. Fortunately, the Internet will, eventually, change this, though probably not until the current teen generation, the one that has never known the world without it, is the majority on the PTA.
Unfortunately what open most your mind (as Graduating in English vs CS or Engineering) and make you a better person is not what is (probably) valuated more by our society.
And for the SA post:I feel bad reading his thoughts, sometimes. He is so cynic.
This is a fair guideline, but it will also prevent you from recognizing when anyone who is malicious and pretends to be ignorant or incompetent.
Likewise, I'd be suspicious of a program that claims to "create people who can enter any room and make it their bitch."
That's bullshit. There are plenty of opportunities to make money in a mutually beneficial relationship. This is the difference between ethical business and unethical business. If your focus is getting over on other people, then you can rationalize all you want, but you are an unethical person.
You can influence people to do thing that are in their own best interest. Use the force for good, not evil.
1. Here are some good books on psychology (specifically behavioral change): http://astore.amazon.com/iwillteachyou-20?_encoding=UTF8&...
2. Hang out with persuasive friends. Try to understand the meta-lessons of what they do. You can ask them, but often people don't have cognitive access to explain what they do, so sometimes you'll just have to observe.
When you combine theory with practice, you can get powerful results.
Personally I spend more time reading up on these things than I do reading up on the latest technical developments.
(One remaining sticking points is whether I rename and retarget it as "for Software Developers," but my research shows so far that people are generally OK with the term "geek" covering the areas I mentioned. Welcoming opinions here still, though.)