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

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

#181
post #26

You don't necessarily get better at by just routinely doing the . 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…

Totally agree on the importance of feedback - another idea (a little expensive, but I'm assuming the OP has resources) is a coach/therapist/etc. Doesn't even need to be social-skills-focused. Anyone in that work obviously has above average social skills, and they want to help you. If you make it clear that it's a priority, and ask some specific questions like literally "Could I do anything to smell better?" to "Is my…

Another "first step" place to practice social skills is in the Open Source Software community. It sounds like you (OP) are familiar with the technical part of coding broadly defined, so it's an opportunity to be 80% in your comfort zone while experimenting with a bunch of human interaction. I'm reminded of this because HN's front page currently has a nice guide to interacting in the OSS community: https://polite.technology/preview

You'll want to eventually graduate to things like body language, but if you get a little lucky you might be able to build some comfort with people through e.g. Github and then take another step into video chats and, if you're really lucky, in person someday. Even if the 'in person' people end up being different OSS people than you worked with digitally.

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

#182
I do think about that about every day, i'm 31 now and have lots os friends, really lots of friends and i go to outside/social events all the time, but i still suck at it, i never know when is my time to talk, what to talk, never know how to approach someone, i have a really bad time to maintain my attention to people, sometimes i feel that social interactions hurt me so much that i fell pain, it's really hard to know how to deal with that
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