Ask HN: Why is machine learning easier to learn than basic social skills?

I don't know why it is and whether it is true or not. But I felt the same. And after several years of individual gestalt therapy and group therapy I have developed some social skills which I have been missing. Before that I tried reading books about developing social skills and they didn't help me almost at all.

My theory is that everyone starts off with the assumption that other people work like they do and, in the vast majority of cases, this is true so learning is easy. e.g. if you care about these annoying unwritten rules yourself, then it's easy to follow them. If you're one of the people who finds this annoying, you probably also don't care when other people break them, and then you have to learn by observation alone, which is much more difficult. In machine learning terms, their models are pre-trained, to a degree, out of the box, and yours isn't. What I don't understand is why this seems to so often coexist with a mind that can learn machine learning off of Youtube.

It's not. I think you just need to go out more. Social skills are not improved by spending all your time indoor in front of your computer playing with the latest cool new framework, or learning about ML from youtube or grinding leetcode for that next fancy job or playing videogames or watching Netflix.

IMHO social skills are easy to pick up, and that's coming from an introvert, you just need to put yourself out there as much as possible in as many new situations as possible, even though that means you'll miss out on the latest tech developments/opportunities or that latest Netflix show.

Basically you need to constantly keep venturing out of your usual routines and comfort zones and you need to be OK with failing at a lot of those new endeavors since there's no one size fits all formula for success here. You need to find your own way and pe prepared to feel exhausted a lot.

I think tech workers are most affected by this because of the SW dev culture both in workers and in employers that have normalized this FOMO driven, "carrot dangling on a stick", need to keep up with the latest tech developments or grind leetcode or you'll face the risk of becoming outdated and be overtaken by more ambitious new-grads, or be offshored, or just miss out on the more lucrative career opportunities, which is not helped by ageism and old-tech-stack-ism discrimination when hiring, plus crazy long multi stage interview sessions, take-homes assignments and what have you, that massively eat into your free time whenever you switch jobs, so these people are most likely the ones who have spend their prime years mostly indoor in front of a screen working away on code and algos, chasing that top dream job, instead of "out-there" working with people.

Well, youhave managed to ask a question on a public forum. So consider it as "Asking questions" achievement unlocked.

What do you consider basic social skills? You still have to unlock achievement "I don't expect other people to read my mind.":P

Keep trying. If you’re like me, the first 18 years will be the hardest. It will feel like trying to learn a game where the rules are continually changing. The gap between how a 12 year old communicates and how a 15 year old communicates is massive. Once you reach adulthood, the rules stabilize. This gives you a chance to catch up.

Comfort yourself in the knowledge that for most of the population, it's the other way around. We're all gifted in our own ways, and we need every "type" for a functioning society.

Plus, if things get too wild, and we're facing societal collapse, are at the brink of a robot uprising - at leas you are able to program a backdoor for the robots to ignore you. No amount of social skills will persuade a robot ;-)

The whole premise of this question is wrong, because it's not. Pretty sure a machine learning person would have an easier time learning social skills than it would be for a non-technical business person to learn the ins and outs of how a neural network works (and by that I dont mean learn how to use a pytorch api, but actually learning the theory and mathematics behind it).

Serious suggestion: have you tried watching YouTube videos and reading books on acquiring social skills? You did, after all, make some effort, however haphazard, to pick up ML. You might start with Charisma on Command's free videos [0] or How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/Charismaoncommand [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...

How easy is it for you to make "Machine learning" into smaller subproblems? What are basic social skills. Do your methodic differs?

For me it's that I'm more likely to see my error with a topic like CS. While basic human interaction is not that manageable. It's interaction with Human A and Human B. These are distinct as Computer Science and biology. Finding the common denominator between them takes time for me. And don't forget that you interact with a lot of entropy. Communication is not easy.

How do you tackle these two problems ?

Because there is no right answer when it comes to social skills. It isn’t something that you can study and formulate in the same way you can an engineering problem. Even calling them skills casts them in the wrong context. On top of that, each person has to find their own solution that fits their personality, life, and friends.

We do not know you, so any concrete advice is probably misguided. But no matter your hang ups, social behavior can only be practiced with others. No amount of roleplay in your head will help, and it may hurt. You sound to still be young, go out and make a fool of yourself. Not everyone will like you, respect you, enjoy your humor, or want to even talk to you, but that doesn’t mean you cannot find someone who will. Just remember everyone else is also a person too, with their own fears, prides, interests, and concerns. They are not just dolls there to entertain you or make you feel better about yourself.

Talk to a therapist for most concrete advice.

Solution: Use machine learning to learn social skills.

One aspect of learning anything is that you have to risk making mistakes.

Possibly, in your mind you view the cost of making mistakes in social situations to be much greater than the cost of making mistakes in machine learning.

Mess up in machine learning, and you just kill the process, fix the code and run it again. No one needs to know. Mess up in a social situation and every one will find out, you will be judged harshly and they will think of you as a failure and will never let you forget it.

The key to getting over this is to teach yourself that actually making mistakes in a social situation is no big deal and people are actually pretty forgiving. The only way to teach yourself this is to take that risk and find out for yourself.

Most of people don't have problems with it at all. If you have it's possible you have some undiagnosed problems related to autism spectrum (like Asperger's Syndrome). Many of them are completely undiagnosed in childhood and results in severe difficulties when interacting with other people in adulthood. The best way would be to consult with a psychologist. Or at least read up on this and try to self-diagnose.

Because you are probably on the autism spectrum. Get tested or do a self diagnose.

In one sense, social skills are incredibly complex, it has been argued that the actual reason we grew such large brains was to make complex societies possible, not to solve practical problems.

On the other hand, social skills come naturally to most people, like learning to walk or talk, so normally it takes no effort at all. But because it's natural and innate, if you're not wired for it, you can imagine how hard it would be to learn to walk - I mean it took until very recently until we managed to build walking machines.

As to advice, the only way to learn is exposure. Spend a lot of time with people and try to mimic their behaviour.

ML learning has rapid and explicit feedback. Fast feedback lets you iterate and build upon what you have learned.

Social skill learning fewer opportunities to 'practice' and the signals are often littered with high false positives (due to social niceness) or false negatives (external factors like the person was just having a bad day), so therefore its very difficult to build an accurate mental model.

> But 18 years of human interaction and I'm still missing out on social skills apparently. It's like everyone else has a degree in all these unwritten rules that I'm just supposed to know.

It's very hard to answer your question due to a lack of context. Maybe, you just need more practice. I also wasn't very good at social interactions but got a lot better once I was a cab driver for a few years during my studies. But maybe your brain is relatively better at other things than social interactions. For example, it is known that people who score high on the autism spectrum have trouble reading emotions. You are probably the best person to judge which of these suggestions is more likely or whether something else causes you missing out on social skills. If you find that missing out on social interactions have a negative impact on your life and you don't think that you can fix it yourself, then consider talking to a therapist.

As someone with a passable grasp of both (using ML professionally, and having a wife+friends), here are some 5am thoughts: 1. They're not along a single scalar of difficulty, so I imagine you mean "Why can't I (and some subset of others) master ML but not social skills. 2. ML has large amounts of explicit knowledge, while social skills are largely about tacit knowledge. There are tons of books/videos/etc about social skills too, but they all fall back on metaphors and obvious over-generalizations. It's not (just) because the authors are being lazy - it would take a very long book to capture all the nuance! 3. To extend that point, humans never really figured out a good way to explicitly lay out the rules of language, even though almost every baby picks them up fairly quickly. Language is immensely complex, we just forget that because the human brain is so optimized for it. Social skills are that complexity squared, but (most) human brains are optimized for learning them as well. But writing down the rules as code or (far less efficiently!) a guide book is nearly impossible 4. "It's like everone else has a degree..." I completely understand that. If it's a help, I felt that way too through college. I know you're joking, but let me rephase it: They got good at it because they practiced it. Though you've spent the same number of hours on this earth as your peers, your attention was focused on math/computers/ML, and theirs was focused on observing/gossiping/socializing. Some of them instead focused on working out, and have biceps to prove it. You get what you practice, and you practice what you deeply resonate with.

Again addressing the question I assume you're asking, here's some advice from one nerd to another: 5. Like any academic discipline, you don't need to know everything to be useful. In fact, you begin to see positive results far earlier on the learning curve because people don't value novelty for its own sake. I was largely saved from ostracism by what my parents called 'good manners': Being cheerful, polite, and (by default) quiet. I was definitely considered a nerd, but everyone was nice enough to me 6. You will never be the Prom Queen/King, but I bet you don't want to. Just find a few people who seem to have similar interests and be cheerful, polite, and ever-so-slightly less quiet. If they have anything non-trivial to say about a topic you're also interested in, keep at it! DON'T get discouraged if it doesn't go smoothly - they are probably also learning social skills 7. Have some humility. You might need to buy new clothes, get a haircut, or something else to 'fit in'. Maybe in a perfect world that wouldn't be necessary, but after 18 years of trying you should give yourself a budget of $180 and 18 hours of eye-rolling conformity preparation. People have gone through worse to make it in this world. 8. That doesn't mean that you totally forget about your true self, just that you spend your 'weirdness points' carefully. Be 90% conformist, find the people that resonate with that 10% you're showing, and maybe you can mutually inch down from there until you're comfortable.

Finally, the books/videos/blogs aren't totally useless. Maybe ask someone that you trust which one might be best for you (since it depends on where you're starting) and just rigorously follow the advice for a week. Yes you will roll your eyes, but half of it will work just a little bit. PAY CAREFUL ATTENTION TO WHAT GETS POSITIVE REACTIONS FROM PEOPLE. I put this in caps because I don't have a better way to break it down into actionable steps, and I know it will be hard. But feedback it the core of learning, and I'm going with the theory that you have some (however attenuated) ability to read positive emotions in others. There are literally videos and books on this if you want to practice (remember, you have 18 hours in your budget...

You don't necessarily get better at <thing> by just routinely doing the <thing>. If you drive mostly the same route every day for ten years, you'll hardly become any better driver. If you keep adding similar boilerplate bulk code by routine in your work, you'll hardly become any better programmer. You don't become more socially skilled through social interaction if you just do the routine things to get by.

To learn things well, you need feedback loops. To learn from your social interactions you need to

a) get the feedback. Not smelling bad is a basic social skill. Yet many people smell bad because nobody tells them that they smell bad. What are the ways you could get more feedback? Is there somebody you could ask to tell you what to do better?

b) interpret the feedback and care about the feedback. Some people are better than others in interpreting subtle social cues (nuances of words and expressions, etc); they will naturally get better in social skills faster. Some people are more open to feedback and willing to improve than others (e.g. Not going "she doesn't like the way I smell, huh? Oh well, I'll forget about it"). Fortunately, these meta-skills can be improved; just accepting that they are important is a good first step.

Youtube videos (Charisma on Command is good), books and other resources (e.g. https://www.succeedsocially.com/) can help.

> But 18 years of human interaction and I'm still missing out on social skills apparently.

Also consider who told you this.

I'm well liked but I have had my doubts because some people constantly make a big fuzz of nothing. When I look back at it after 7 years I realize I was significantly more well behaved than the person picking on me.

Furthermore, something I made note of from minor celebrity around here. He said something like: once I earned my first million people started taking me seriously. Maybe the same is true for social skills?

This would also rhyme with the old Jewish/Yiddish(I think?) saying that "With money in your pocket, you are wise and you are handsome and you sing well too."

Finally: make note of who your friends are now, who helps you or at least is a reliable friend.

To some extend it’s easy. Whenever you feel like not doing some specific form of social interaction, do it anyway (and do it right now).

When you say “apparently” … who is telling you that? And why do you trust their judgement?

The book, Impro by Keith Johnstone was very practical for me. If you take part in an actual improvisational workshop even better.

It's not for everyone and it might be less general than what you aim for, but imho it' a good start.

Able to contribute to ML is already better than many of us, so congrats and don't downplay it.

As a general rule of thumb, I would say just be yourself, be good to others in general and there's no rush for it (some people would choose to like or not like you, and it's totally fine). It takes time (~10+ year) to be mature.

When I was your age, I have no clue too other than just finishing my first public exam. I happened to work for a community center to promote the usage of Internet as a summer job. That job transforms me to be more confident in front of people as I need to face people in different walk of lives. It's a good starting point as I can use my computer skill as a stepping stone.

get yourself checked out for being on the autism spectrum. most people find the opposite true.