• 1 Post
  • 791 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle






  • You think most people lack soft skills

    Here’s an interesting example you just gave me. I don’t think that and never said as much. As I said, my impression, while anecdotal, was developed doing psychological evaluations professionally. Our understanding is that soft skills are not a given, there are actually several dimensions and degrees of different soft skills involved. Some people might be very good conversationalist, but completely emotionally inflexible at work at the same time, for example. Certainly, different social advantages derive into different opportunities to develop different soft skills. This complexity is exactly why I said that soft skills are hard to teach and learn. Also, why some people on the field are calling to rename them something else. The soft adjective is perhaps inaccurate.

    Now to the example. It’s extremely frowned upon in a conversation to affirm what others think, when they haven’t explicitly expressed so themselves. Specially when the other person is still a complete stranger. It could be interpreted as hostility or an attempt to misrepresent other people’s positions in order to attack them.






  • Must be a cultural thing. Where I’m from, if a doctor doesnt call you by name it is a red flag. It means they didn’t read the patient’s file. Teachers would flag student doctors negatively for it. You treat people, not loosely grouped collections of symptoms. Nurses are also strictly trained to call people by name (perhaps by Mr/ms surname, but that’s part of a holdover from reinforcing hierarchies), you know why? Because our hospitals have wards of anything between 12 and 30 beds and up. Calling “Sir please return to your bed” means nothing with 40 men in the same room, you have to be specific.

    On the other hand, if you work a position of power, most people will call you doctor. It’s lawyers fault, really, as they historically used to hold all the political positions. They insisted so aggressively to be called doctors that now anyone in a position of authority or hierarchy, however slight it might be, is called doctor, even if they aren’t. Including in the medical field. Tons of people who aren’t doctors in medicine are called doctors, students of medicine are called doctors from day one, administration staff in medical settings will be called doctor, etc.

    It also reinforces the first part. Lowly patients must call everyone inside a hospital doctor, but doctors don’t owe any title to anyone below them. Sure, it might arise from general ignorance about how the education system works, but it also illustrates how titles are always about separating people into hierarchies. It’s just an academic dick measuring contest.