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Comment by grimtrigger | Hacker News Reader

> Social skills are learned, not innate

They're a combination of both.

There is a natural tendency (or lack of it) towards being a social person. I have two kids, a boy and a girl (6.5 and 2.5). They are both smart for their age and very verbal, and of course raised in the same home, and share most of their genetic traits.

But you can already see that my son is a geek (well, what might "save" him socially is that he's tall and athletic), and my daughter is probably going to be popular. She simply has a better natural grasp of how people interact, and is much more interested in interactions, than say, imagination games. They are both very charming and outgoing, but you can already tell she has or will have better social skills.

There is probably also a snowball effect at play, too - if you have a tendency to be social, you might develop stronger social skills, etc.

I would expect the "snowball effect" to be pretty strong, especially for social interactions. Given a day where you tend to seek social interaction vs. a day when you tend to shy away from it, you can get a very different number of (practice) interactions.

There's a lot that can be learned by paying attention to other people and trying to understand what they're thinking. The earlier that someone who's not naturally adept at it realizes that this is important to pay attention to, the earlier they get better at social skills. Some of that can be highlighted for little kids while reading (story) books; paying attention to and asking questions about why the characters do the things in their interactions highlights the idea that other people do things for reasons, and that you can guess what they are (the guessing well is a skill).

> But you can already see that my son is a geek (well, what might "save" him socially is that he's tall and athletic)

You can tell how tall a boy who is 6.5 years old is going to be as a teenager/adult?

not with absolute certainty, but, a. a boy who's at 95 percentile height probably won't be short, and b. he has my genes and I'm pretty tall, and so are males on his mother's side.

I agree with you. Social interaction is the one thing no one has ever been able to 'scientifically' figure out. Otherwise we could all just read some books and be good at socializing.

There's people with just born 'charisma', the entertainers, the storytellers,the comedians, the incredible sales people.

And it's a spectrum of people who have this innate social ability from the terrible to the genius socializers.

No matter how many books people read they will never be as quick witted as Robin Williams or as empathetic as Oprah.

"I agree with you. Social interaction is the one thing no one has ever been able to 'scientifically' figure out. Otherwise we could all just read some books and be good at socializing."

"No matter how many books people read they will never be as quick witted as Robin Williams or as empathetic as Oprah."

Think about it: you can't get good at programming just by reading books. And programming is logic based and requires much slower reaction times etc than holding a conversation.

You can definitely improve your social skills by reading and more importantly practicing. Once you can pick up if somebody is interested and engaged with what you are saying you can try all sorts of conversation skills to try and find patterns to how they work.

And again just like programming you cannot simply expect that because you are good at writing webapps (talking to a particular social/cultural/age/gender group) that you will be good at writing embedded systems.

How much of our skills are learned and how much is genetic ability is an old debate ("nature vs. nurture"). I come down quite hevily on the learning side: You can remove half the brain of a person and if you do it slowly or early enough he will grow up into a quite normal human. I mean, even walking is mainly a learnt skill!

It's very dangerous to assume too much about genetic pre-dispositions - most commonly they are just assumptions & they're dangerous.

But isn't assuming that something is a combination of both the least dangerous kind of assumption in this context?

I think an example is in order because this really hits a spot on this cultural analysis debate that I think everyone is missing. We often lean on the side of innateness which the theory that we want to prove has a domain whose scope is really big — "innateness" is the formulation of words necessary to describe the phenomenon within the speech genre underway. The point behind Chomsky sentences is that truth plays a role in language, all language, even scientific language, which is not always necessarily and sufficiently conditioned by the morphological construction presently being given attention, or what can we call an object of intention. So, the point here is that lots of theories exist, but regardless of their linguistic narrative, they tend to fail at larger orders of abstraction.

There are two absolutely perfect examples.

1. Most families don't celebrate Mother's Day.

2. Cross-country runners are breed, not born.

1 not only is a combination of both, but we behave very often as if it were false. We have such a trait in virtue of an innate quality, namely of having a mother. Yet we all learned not by any conscious effort to warn ourselves from the principle; it's part and parcel of our "innate" characteristic.

With 2, I often hear this expressed in terms of geological factors. Does the environment at any given time contribute to the innate material our theory describes?

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