| Academics do have a reputation that way, but only the 100% safe, tenured ones. The majority of academics are required to have a strong level of communication just to get their grants accepted. Imagine if, on top of working your normal job at maximum efficiency, you then had to make a presentation to the government every year about why you and everyone that depends upon you deserves to eat, while the government you make the presentation to becomes increasingly antagonistic and detached. There's quite a lot of people skills involved in surviving as an academic in today's environment. Imagine if you had to teach calculus to 150 random, uninterested teenagers (barely adults) every 12 weeks. There's some serious people skills involved in doing a good job at that (most people do actually try to teach well, I've known multiple people this year refused tenure based on rate-my-teacher ratings). It's a different set of skills for sure, but being an academic isn't as socially challenged as the zeitgeist appears to believe. |
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| ▲ | nfw2 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > do you think communication skills and people skills are the same thing? yes, or at least largely overlapping circles | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They might co-occur, but they aren't the same thing. It's easy to communicate something in a way that (a) the recipient understands clearly; and (b) the recipient refuses to acknowledge despite understanding it. And in the other direction, you can persuade people to do things without them ever understanding what you want or why the things should be done. | | |
| ▲ | nfw2 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Persuasion based on pathos or ethos instead of logic is also communication |
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| ▲ | doctorpangloss 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | okay... here's another way of thinking about it: claude, gemini and chatgpt are very good at communicating. but, would you marry claude? would you want claude to be your boss? would you want claude to be your coworker? a lot of people are choosing claude to be their intern, which is something. what i am saying is, having people skills are the answers "yes" to all those questions. you can cynically call getting a job nepotism, or you can call it, well people like to work with their friends at the cost of measures of competency. and maybe, the core competency is being pleasant to work with or work for. another place people struggle with this is executive compensation. if i told every DoD employee they could get a 10x better boss for only $20/y, every single one would, which is $58m in executive compensation. but the DoD CAN'T do that, and its leadership is TERRIBLE, so... do you see? | | |
| ▲ | jmalicki 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > would you want claude to be your boss? would you want claude to be your coworker? I've had worse. Mostly much better, but I've had worse. | |
| ▲ | LoganDark 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > claude, gemini and chatgpt are very good at communicating There is no communication there. No concepts for them to communicate. It is just math. | | |
| ▲ | nfw2 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Regardless of the implementation, claude causes concepts to enter my brain, so it is at least one-way communication. Human brains have mundane implementations as well: chemical signals firing across neural synapses. No magic special sauce, at least not that we can detect | | |
| ▲ | bavell 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | My rock collection causes concepts to enter my brain, but I don't think I'd say they're communicating with me, nor I with them. | |
| ▲ | LoganDark 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I would say you communicate to the model and you interpret the model's outputs. I would not say the model communicates back though. I'm not sure that models are complex enough to have a consistent internal representation of a concept the same way that organic brains can to communicate. I'm not sure of any quantitative science backing this up though. Models don't know anything across iterations yet. | | |
| ▲ | blackoil 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Models don't know anything across iterations yet. Can you expand. They have both context and memory? | | |
| ▲ | LoganDark 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Most models do not have any persistent state or output that is separate from their input. They consume a stream of tokens and then output a probability distribution. The probability distribution will always be the exact same for that particular stream of tokens. There is no internal state, thoughts, mood etc., only prediction based on the input. "Memory" is usually just something injected into context by the harness and updated by usually a tool call from the model. I'm sure there are research prototypes that work differently from this but I haven't seen any enter the mainstream yet. Also, diffusion language models have a different evaluation order but I think they also do not really have internal thoughts or feelings because they also do not seem to have any sort of hidden state that encodes anything like that. |
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