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Comment by tboyd47 | Hacker News Reader

"How to be a friendly, well-liked person" is not a "social skill."

"How to use the Internet to learn: Google, Wikipedia." This is "learning about learning" to you?

Kids used to have to be taught how to use the library. Card catalogue, Dewey decimal system, all that. The kinds of things one may find at a library other than books. People aren't born knowing this stuff and may not realize what can and cannot be gained from a resource, or how to go about getting it, if they aren't told at some point.

Hell, you have to teach kids about book features like captions and tables of contents and indices and footnotes and, believe it or not, kids aren't always great at picking up that knowledge even when taught.

I get that, it just strikes me as ridiculous that a curriculum about how to use the internet to learn would be summed up by: "Google, Wikipedia." Maybe the author is sacrificing too much depth here and I'm missing the overall point, but I'd rather teach my kids how not to use Google than teach them how to use it.

Yeah, that makes sense. Hopefully that's an incomplete list of examples.

yes, this is a starting point. I agree this topic has considerable depth which I omitted.

there are 100s of great resources (Wolfram Alpha, Khan Academy, GitHub, Wiktionary, to name a few) and techniques (Google search tricks like using quotes, site: tag, etc., good habits like avoiding distractions) to augment Internet learning

you could evenly weight this area like any other class, and expect to spend many hours on it.

> "How to be a friendly, well-liked person" is not a "social skill."

Why not?

Being "friendly" and "well-liked" sound like the kinds of goals children would come up with on their own because they crave attention and positive reinforcement, not what adults should be teaching them.

The ability to be friendly in adverse situations is absolutely a social skill. I have a couple of coworkers that have the ability to remain friendly even in intense situations. I find it really helps deescalate situations (or keep them from escalating in the first place) without derailing the conversation.

The specific instruction is "how" to accomplish that goal, not that the goal exists- obviously, the goal exists for the reasons you specify. The difficulty is how to get there, which is extremely hard, doubly so for a brain that doesn't necessarily have the archiecture required for fully understanding the restraint, thoughtfullness, empathy, etc. of being friendly/well-liked.

Still, being "friendly" and "well-liked" is an important skill for later. People tend to not want to work or have sustainable relationships with people they can't stand.

It's probably poorly phrased, but I think we've all met people who just ∂on't really know _how_ to be a friendly, approachable person.

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