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Comment by dawg- | Hacker News Reader

What you call a "smooth-talker" is what someone else would call an articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others. Perhaps if this was the standard college admissions used, public schools would have more incentive to educate students as functional humans rather than test-taking drones.

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The problem is that "articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others" is (a) highly subjective, and (b) only a means to an end. The end is to have a productive civil society where people do not prey on other people. Unfortunately, all these highly subjective characteristics are used by people to prey on other people instead of to help with having a productive, civil society. So by themselves they can't be used as a standard. There has to be some objective criterion to distinguish people who can actually contribute to a productive civil society from people who prey on other people.

How exactly do standardized tests identify those who will or won't prey on other people?

They don't identify that directly. But they do identify the potential to do something productive. Obviously that can't be the only thing being used to judge people; but some objective standard like that has to be part of what is being used.

Also, regardless of what standardized tests do or don't do, judging based on "articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others" is, IMO, a very poor way of filtering out people who will prey on other people, since anyone who preys on other people has to have those skills (or at any rate be able to fake them well enough to pass a test for them) to be successful at it.

"They don't identify that directly. But they do identify the potential to do something productive." It think your definition of what is productive might be very different than mine.

"since anyone who preys on other people has to have those skills" If you look at history you will find many without those skills that preyed on others.

If a university's objective is to select the applicants most likely to reflect prestige and wealth back onto it, the university is best served by picking those who can most effectively cause themselves to be selected (rather than the most academically gifted students).

Admissions essentially boils down to "impress me." (Not saying that's good for society, but it's good for the university.)

It's one of the exceptional cases where Goodhart's Law—"a targeted metric is no longer good"—doesn't hold.

Distrusting social skills, linguistic ability, and emotional intelligence doesn't sound like a recipe for success.

It's not like there aren't plenty of engineers, scientists, math folks, i.e. those "honest", quantitative folks, who aren't also crappy or deceptive people.

Just look at Facebook! ;)

> Distrusting social skills, linguistic ability, and emotional intelligence doesn't sound like a recipe for success.

It's not a matter of "trusting" vs. "distrusting" them. It's a matter of what universities (and other exclusive institutions, for that matter) select for. If you select for "social skills, linguistic ability, and emotional intelligence" without also having any objective way of measuring actual productive potential, not to mention evaluating a person's actual willingness to use their talents in support of a cooperative civil society, you're going to get a lot of people who will be very good at preying on others and using the system they are gaining entrance to as a tool to that end.

> It's not like there aren't plenty of engineers, scientists, math folks, i.e. those "honest", quantitative folks, who aren't also crappy or deceptive people

Yes, that's true, but without those social skills they do a lot less damage, because they can't get very many people to interact with them.

> an articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way

Yes, that's me.

> and who is comfortable making connections with others

And that will never be me.

Leadership is inherently nepotistic. You simply aren't permitted to lead if you have the wrong class background or the wrong ethnicity. (There's a reason all Senators look exactly the same.) You're literally just advocating for an old boys' club, and if that's what you want, you might as well be explicit about it.

Language is a social creature, you can't have language without society and social interactions, if you're not able to communicate with spoken word you simply can't work as effectively with others. Especially if you can't make connections with others.

In fact, most of history the etymology of words wasn't a huge topic because everyone would pronounce the words in their language similarly and thus language wouldn't evolve nearly as rapidly--the phoneme is as important as the lexeme when it comes to language.

The insert bridge here wasn't built in a day, with one person.

> In fact, most of history the etymology of words wasn't a huge topic because everyone would pronounce the words in their language similarly and thus language wouldn't evolve nearly as rapidly--the phoneme is as important as the lexeme when it comes to language.

Uh, what? How do you think we got more than one language in the first place? How do you think we have entire language families with mutually-unintelligable members? Or what about dialectal continuums? If anything, I would posit that we are closer to your statement now than at any other time, because the printing press calcified spelling -- which could vary quite a bit in the time of scribes. And radio and TV and the Internet have started spreading linguistic innovation faster.

This is straight from Saussure, and then Chomsky. You can read his first course in linguistics [1].

It was highly disputed in the 1800s.

I'm not an expert, but:

> Uh, what? How do you think we got more than one language in the first place?

We would compete for resources, new languages would be created rapidly from old languages instead of the gradual change we're seeing in the last 4000 years.

> How do you think we have entire language families with mutually-unintelligable members?

All language, like I said, is composed of many -emes. Chomsky's big discovery was that you can't seaparate syntax and semantics when it comes to any language.

> Or what about dialectal continuums? If anything, I would posit that we are closer to your statement now than at any other time, because the printing press calcified spelling -- which could vary quite a bit in the time of scribes. And radio and TV and the Internet have started spreading linguistic innovation faster.

This is the standard intuitive view with when one has no evidence. There is strong evidence to suggest that it is the individuals who mispronounce written words who cause this rapid change in language--they are mispronounced and then subsequently miswritten, and then their semantics are subsequently misinterpreted, so their syntax and semantics slowly change in this fashion.

Saussure, the founder of the modern linguistic tradition, has this all outlined in his book [1]. He outlines your view, and then shows you that it is in fact not true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_in_General_Linguistics

> You simply aren't permitted to lead if you have the wrong class background or the wrong ethnicity. (There's a reason all Senators look exactly the same.)

In what sense did, I dunno, Obama and McConnell look exactly the same?

You might consider how Obama and Clinton being president drove the over-class completely insane.

There are almost 40 million black Americans and the only one to make president went to top private schools and was raised by his WASP mom

Well, maybe.

But being the kind of articulate person college people appreciate is also a strong cultural marker that you come from the "college tribe".

Exactly. People don't talk about class enough in this topic. The kind of people that college interviewers appreciate (in terms of behavior) will almost always be upper middle class people and those who know enough to behave like upper middle class people.

That's not true anymore in the "diversity" era.

Harvard just had a huge lawsuit about that.

It's hard to create an accountable system to identify "smooth-talkers". We already know that perceived charisma is highly dependent on attractiveness, ethnicity, and other innate factors.

What we could do is gauge students' communication ability in a way that is less subject to these factors. Which we already do, by examining students' writing.

What's the difference between perceived charisma and charisma?

Charisma that can come off in a 1 hour meeting, vs. ability to communicate and work with a team towards a goal.

I think that "smooth-talker" is typically not sonmeone who is articulate and socially well-adjusted who communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way.

The typical use of the word refers to manipulative people who will smoothly pretend values and opinions they don't have in order to mislead people and take advantage of them. Alternatively it is people who talk about things they know nothing about convincingly enough for those who also know nothing about the topic.

The two are much different things. People who communicate their values and opinions have massive comparative disadvantage against them.

> people who talk about things they know nothing about convincingly enough for those who also know nothing about the topic.

Exactly. This is what a room full of smooth talkers looks like: two top journalists agreeing on national TV that 500 million divided by 327 million is greater than 1 million.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/03/06/msnbcs_br...

You’re judging people by some stupid mistake that could have any of a million reasons. Maybe their monitors are small and they couldn’t read it, or they were thinking about whatever was coming up.

Your criticism seems motivated by some prior grudges against these people. For leadership Postillions, I’d prefer someone bad at math over anyone this petty.

> test-taking drones

I've never done well on a test when I didn't understand the material, and I've always done well on test when I did.

> an articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others

If there's any correlation with this and academic success, it's not necessarily a positive one. There's a grain of truth to the stereotype of "nerds" not having great people skills.

Sure. But in the end I'd rather have my bridges designed by people that are really good at math.

Problem is, hard science has been known to be difficult to articulate, and a successful researcher may lose their characteristic as being socially well-adjusted (to the point of being burnt at stake).

OP’s “smooth talker” is a pedigreed bullshitter with a millionaire dad, big fake smile, and popped collar, who combines just enough sound bite knowledge with fancy-sounding words, signaling to similar ivy leaguers that he’s “one of them.” Pretty much the opposite of someone you’d select on academic merit alone.

functional humans ==> parasites who steal the economic output of non-smooth talkers.

The whole world is a gigantic Animal Farm, also in the West. The apparatchiks have different functions and names, but the principle is the same. The system works better though.

All this would do is benefit the already-privileged and create affinity bias. Basically just affirmative action for white people from middle class and above homes.

Why do you feel the need to name white people specifically?

Well, I am white and think that there is a difference in the way people socialize depending on their socioeconomic status, the area they grew up in, and the culture/language they are exposed to at home. And in the US it’s basically all white people who are most advantaged in these aspects. It will likely change over time as more Hispanic/Asian people become second+ generation immigrants rather than first, though

I remember going to college not so long ago and meeting kids who had grown up in the US who still had an accent/manner of speaking that they got from their parents (like a Chinese or Spanish accent). And of course there are very smart kids who grow up with AAVE or strong regional accents, some of whom are probably white but who probably aren’t from a good socioeconomic class.

Because the Senate is over 90% white, and most of the rest are at least half-white.

To people in this country, that's what leadership looks like, so if you grade based on leadership, that's what you're going to get. Not playing identity politics here, just stating a fact.

Remind me of the relationship between the Senate and testing for college admissions.

> To people in this country, that's what leadership looks like, so if you grade based on leadership, that's what you're going to get.

Valuable point, I don't see this framing enough.

maybe for low-level engineering drones who don't have any say in what gets built, which is typical for the first few years of an engineer's career. But senior engineers, and especially engineering management need to have good communications skills to work cross-functionally.

Surely MIT would rather graduate future engineering leaders and technical founders and not just engineers.

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