
The Rising Return to Non-Cognitive Skill [pdf] - luu
http://ftp.iza.org/dp10914.pdf
======
zitterbewegung
I had to look the defninition of Non-Cognitive skills. Below is an example.

[https://blog.udemy.com/non-cognitive-skills/](https://blog.udemy.com/non-
cognitive-skills/)

Once I understood what they were I realize that I have encountered the
behavior in my life anecdotally. Also, I realize the ones that I am deficient
in.

EDIT: The study has a definition that I missed when reading it. See tboyd47's
comment below.

~~~
tboyd47
It doesn't seem that the skills in that link are relevant to this study:

> The non-cognitive score is based on behavioral questions in a 20-minute
> interview with a trained psychologist. On the basis of the interview, the
> draftee is scored along four separate dimensions (see Mood et al. (2012)):
> (i) social maturity, (ii) psychological energy (e.g., focus and
> perseverance), (iii) intensity (e.g., activation without external pressure)
> and (iv) emotional stability (e.g., tolerance to stress). There is also an
> overall non-cognitive score on a Stanine scale, which ranges from 1 to 9.

~~~
Animats
They seem to define "non-cognitive skills" as "social skills". Not manual
skills, such as those needed for carpentry. This is confusing. Is this a
translation from Swedish?

~~~
wutbrodo
Not just social skills: for example, intensity and stress tolerance. I think
"emotional skills" would be a better way to describe what they're getting at.

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exelius
In my experience, non-cognitive skills are definitely a big boost to your
career. However, the real need is for people with both cognitive AND non-
cognitive skills: if you can understand something intrinsically through your
cognitive skills, you can leverage your non-cognitive skills to lead a group
of people with high cognitive skills.

That leadership piece is what's in demand; and IMO that requires strength in
both areas.

~~~
nerpderp83
Not from my experience.

~~~
rocqua
How so? I've heard what OP said often enough I'd call it folk knowledge. What
part do you disagree with?

~~~
wutbrodo
> That leadership piece is what's in demand; and IMO that requires strength in
> both areas.

I'm not the person you asked but for me, the idea that leadership is more in
demand than intelligence doesn't ring true (anecdotally, of course). In the
course of my career, I've met more than enough capable leaders, but finding
people who meet the bar for intelligence is much harder. At some level, this
is probably due to the fact that you need far less leadership than you do
intelligence: by definition, leaders are a fraction of the workforce, but
intelligence is useful at pretty much every level in the org (for white-collar
work).

I guess I'm lucky enough that I've been in companies that were generally quite
well-run; I'm sure the demand for leaders would seem higher in dysfunctional
companies where competence in leadership isn't routinely achieved.

~~~
ianbicking
In my experience leaders are seldom judged on _being right_ , and that's the
cognitive portion of their job. A leader may be organized, sociable,
disciplined, but a leader also has to make choices. A leader in particular
must make a choice if there's no consensus, and so there is not an agreement
on the right course of action, and presumably there is no identifiable "right"
choice. In fact, though, there is usually a right choice, it's just that no
one knows for sure what it is. But as events transpire we learn about the
effect of decisions (though we still lack the counterfactual), and often it
becomes clear if a decision was right or not. I seldom see leaders judged
based on the result of their cognitive decisions.

I find there's a strong bias against even attempting to make that judgement.
"In hindsight" is used to dismiss criticism: sure, you can say that in
hindsight, but I had to make the decision at the time with the information I
had. But very few outcomes are actually entirely surprising, we weigh
information and risk and probabilities, and these can be improved. An example
I remember with particular frustration was Hillary Clinton, repeatedly
confirming her decision about the Iraq war given the information she knew at
the time. There was _lots_ of information available, she made particular
choices about how to weigh the information and risk, and while within her
decision framework at the time the choice may have seemed right, clearly her
framework was wrong even given her own conclusions. (It's also hard because we
expect leaders to always be right, and if they aren't then they shouldn't be
leaders, which leaves no room for improvement.)

~~~
tboyd47
Culturally, we don't seem to consider information gathering and filtering to
be a leadership skill. Leaders are just assumed to be the best informed people
at any given moment and we don't look how much work they are doing to get that
information.

If a ruler of a country never steps down off the throne and walks through the
marketplace to ask the people what they need, how else will he know?
Information gathering is connected to humility and manners in my mind. In
order to be well-informed you have to be able to interact with different kinds
of people and that requires a lot of social maturity, which according to the
researchers, is apparently a "non-cognitive" skill.

~~~
exelius
Information filtering is absolutely a leadership skill. It's the core
component of managing, honestly. You don't want your boss to know all of the
mistakes that people make, because it's your job as a manager to fix those. If
there are structural or systemic problems, yes. But if one of your team
members screwed up, you shouldn't be pointing fingers at your subordinates. As
an engineering manager, it's your main job to be the crap filter between your
executives and your engineers.

------
thanatropism
I refuse this terrible term and invite everyone to use (following
zitterbewegung's udemy link) to use "metacognitive skills" instead.

~~~
alistproducer2
Seconded. Non-cognitive has a pretty clear intuitive meaning so to then define
term to mean almost the polar opposite doesn't make any sense to me.

~~~
wutbrodo
> Non-cognitive has a pretty clear intuitive meaning so to then define term to
> mean almost the polar opposite doesn't make any sense to me.

FWIW, I didn't interpret it as the polar opposite. I don't see that much of an
issue with a model of skills as physical, cognitive, and emotional.

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sulizilxia
The danger area is conflating lack of success in a particular social setting
with noncognitive skills.

I.e., "this person lacks persistence" versus "this person has given up because
this social setting is pathological."

I worry that this trend is used to justify unethical behavior by making trait-
based attributions of dissenters.

I say this without denying the importance of social skills--but there's a fine
line between "socially skillful" and "psychopath", especially as you move up
the ladder.

------
tboyd47
Fascinating study & highly relevant to most people here (since many of us
"hackers" are in highly cognitive job roles)

Conclusion:

> Thus, the labor market appears to increasingly value individuals possessing
> high non-cognitive relative to cognitive skills over time.

------
bitL
How do you increase your stress tolerance? Imagine you are working on bleeding
edge stuff at some top company with crazy pace and you don't want to end up
with burnout. What would you do in order to improve this aspect? I noticed
ramping up fitness training actually decreases my stress resistance as I
stress my body and consequently brain much more and am more prone to getting
mentally exhausted than when I am not training at all.

~~~
pm90
Fitness training is a very personal and individual thing. If you're feeling
mentally exhausted after working out, you are definitely doing something
wrong. I would recommend working with a qualified physical trainer with actual
professional qualifications to get a tailored workout regime (be careful since
there are many "personal trainers" who really don't know what they're doing).

Also, consider getting involved with yoga and getting a massage. While working
out is great for building muscle and endurance, stress your body too much and
it will give away.

~~~
bitL
It's actually quite weird, I do HIIT/strength/cardio training for a few days,
I feel awesome, and then one day suddenly I hit a cliff and my brain is
shutting down. The thing is I can't predict when it happens; I saw some
relation to NO (sometimes adding NO-inducing supplements alleviates issues)
though it doesn't seem to work 100% And if you read fitness articles, I am not
the only person that has this issue. I mean "neural fatigue" is pretty common,
so probably it goes further up with some people like me...

~~~
frubar
Actually the GP is incorrect. It's pretty well understood [1] these days that
your body is like a "cup" that can only take a certain amount of stress before
it starts getting counter productive. Mental stress and center-nervous-system
stress (what weight training does) both contribute so if you already have a
lot of one you're forced to have less than the other or everything suffers.

[1] I'm not in a position to hunt links but lookup "Alan Thrall stress" on
youtube.

~~~
bitL
Many thanks, this seems to be pretty close! Anyway, do you know any way to
increase the "stress threshold", so that I can withstand more mental +
physical stress? Mental stress is given by work, and one doesn't want to look
flabby either but rather ripped without getting ill/fatigued etc. I understand
a lot of this is genetic, though I am sure there are some ways to help body
with it.

~~~
frubar
Well, this is all new to me as well but the way I've seen it presented (from
multiple sources) it seems to be person-specific. If there is a way to
increase you "cup size" either I haven't yet seen it (wouldn't be surprising)
or it isn't yet known.

~~~
bitL
Oh well, I guess it's trial and error then. I was actually doing 5 minute cold
showers for a year, alongside HIIT/strength training/cardio and bleeding edge
mental work, and I guess I was too optimistic I could handle it and went over
my limits (which seem to be pretty high already but still firmly in place...)

------
jackcosgrove
The buzzword a year or two back was "grit".

From my own experience non-cognitive skills are becoming rarer, so increasing
returns make sense.

~~~
graphitezepp
Increased internet use seems to be leading to decreased availability of non-
cognitive skills.

------
aerovistae
> Workers with an abundance of non-cognitive skill were increasingly sorted
> into occupations that were intensive in: cognitive skill; as well as
> abstract, non-routine, social, non-automatable and offshorable tasks. Such
> occupations were also the types of occupations which saw greater increases
> in the relative return to non-cognitive skill.

Isn't this a contradiction? "Increasingly sorted into occupations that were
intensive in cognitive skill" and simultaneously "greater increases in the
relative return to non-cognitive skill"? So are we just saying they saw the
heaviest rise in skills in general?

I didn't read past the abstract, maybe the body is clearer.

~~~
tboyd47
It sounds like the quoted excerpt is saying: for occupations intensive in
cognitive skill, both the number of people with non-cognitive skills entering
the job and their relative salaries increased during the examined time period.

------
asimjalis
Can these non-cognitive skills be taught? Does anyone know of good resources
for building these non-cognitive skills?

------
Boothroid
So then surely we need some measures to prevent discrimination against those
lacking in non-cognitive skills?

~~~
jschwartzi
Or our education systems need to actually train people in those skills instead
of ignoring them.

