And childhood is a pretty important time for social development, where kids learn cooperation ("You hold the bucket over the door and I'll get Kevin."), negotiation ("You got to be Batman last time, so now you're Robin."), how to handle hurt feelings ("They won't play with me because I have cooties?") and how to handle conflict ("No, YOU'RE a stupidhead!"). Honestly, the last one takes a couple decades to sort out.

The Bleacher Report

Many decades sometimes.

Anyway, you think, Fine, so growing up is going to be a little awkward for these kids but they'll be the ones laughing at the rest of us when they buy a yacht with their brain surgeon money. Actually they may not even get there. Let's see what happens when little Johnny -- violin virtuoso, Math Olympics champion and 5.0 GPA high school class valedictorian -- starts applying for med school.

Med schools and universities in general have always made a big thing about looking for "well-rounded" students, but they've always had terrible ways of looking for it. Clubs are a joke -- I went to a high school that was a spawning pool for doctors and lawyers, and someone was always starting a very productive-sounding club like the Asian-American Debate Club or what have you, which did nothing all year but let the founder and all her friends put a "club officer" position on their college apps. There was an actual debate club, that actually did things, but seriously, like the college admissions officer would know which was which.

Even a meaningful, productive club is still a small and often homogeneous group, so while the kid may learn to talk to some people, they may never get out of a comfortable bubble. And again, it's absurd to expect the admissions officer to have any idea which type of club they're looking at.

The Buffy Fanfiction Club speaks for itself though.

The extremely insincere typical form-letter college essay doesn't help either, and a lot of hobbies just indicate that the kid doesn't study in a tower room every waking moment, not that they actually engage with people. Maybe they learned a lot about teamwork and heartbreak and jealousy and humility on that baseball team, or maybe they just stood in the outfield and stared into space. You can't know.

So instead of having the kid tell you what a think-on-his-feet diplomat he is, why not have him just show you? Makes more sense.

Which leads to the bigger question: Why is this so important to med schools? Well, because ...

Now, those who haven't watched Patch Adams might think that the basics of medicine are making the right diagnosis and giving people the right drugs and surgery for it, and having the doctor be nice to you is sort of a luxury, but doesn't affect the real serious problem of your cancer or diabetes or whatnot.

The truth is, just like Patch Adams' painfully corny comedy consistently made patients' physical conditions worse ...

Tell me your blood pressure didn't go up a little.

... a good doctor-patient relationship can result in better blood sugar levels in diabetics. And doctors making patients feel important caused an observable decrease in symptoms a month later.

And patients aren't the only ones affected by doctor assholery or awkwardness. Not surprisingly, when doctors and nurses don't get along, patients don't do so well either. Doctors play such a big leadership role in a hospital that when they're difficult, everything is difficult, and someone fucks up a chart and they end up amputating the wrong leg or giving a man a Cesarean.

IMP Awards

Which has historically been appropriate in only one case.

We watch shows like House and get used to the idea of curmudgeonly doctors being impossible in a quirky, interesting way, but the reality is that people acting like that have probably indirectly killed people.

Fine, you might think. I can see why doctors would need this stuff, and probably business types. But, hey, if you can't talk to people, you can still become a programmer or something.

First, as an aside, apparently business graduates are also becoming incompetent at human interaction, increasingly demonstrating "unacceptable handshakes, inappropriate manners at business meals, improper

introductions and unsuitable lunch behavior as well as some general office errors."

Unsuitable lunch behavior?

Secondly, sure, IT and engineering are magnets for people increasingly desperate to find some kind of job that won't expose their inability to talk to others, as you can see in these somewhat touching forum posts.

If you read the rest of that thread you will see that those poor guys are out of luck. The only job where you don't have to deal with any people at all is probably wilderness explorer, and nowadays, chances are you will attract a camera crew following you around anyway. As an engineer, you don't have to be a super-suave schmoozer, but you do have to have a fairly impressive array of interpersonal skills to really get far.

But there's help! MIT is actually teaching people skills classes to some of its best students, tired of seeing them passed over for promotions in favor of dumbass MBAs with winning smiles. And a lot of IT professionals, tired of getting nowhere because they keep sighing loudly every time someone doesn't understand something, take the initiative to fix things at professional how-to-talk-to-people courses.

Lesson 1.

Because the truth is, the people that move up are the people who understand people. They may not understand the most efficient way to pursue technological developments, or the difference between a hard drive and a memory stick, or what a computer is, but they know "appropriate lunch behavior." So, like many office humorists have observed, many workplaces are full of smart, technical people being managed by smooth talkers who are still amazed by email.

That's kind of horrible. And that's why ...

And all this could have been stopped if some knowledgeable but shy employee had stepped up and taken one of them Carnegie interpersonal skill classes or just made himself practice chatting with a different co-worker at lunch every day, or something. That employee could work their way up to a position where they could focus the department on something that's actually physically possible. Also they would have more friends and dates.

Because this isn't just about faking social skills and manipulating people with some stupid "social engineering" tricks. Learning things like empathy and listening puts you in a place where you understand other people a little better, and saves you from living in a paranoid world where you imagine everyone's thinking bad things about you, or everyone you don't get along with is an oversimplified villain or shallow stereotype.

And if you like to be honest and blunt, that's one thing, but it's another thing when half the people you're talking to think you're insulting them just because you don't know what phrases come across as condescending. You'll alienate both the people you meant to rip on, and the people you didn't. Maybe you want to come across as that sarcastic, insulting guy -- but not on accident, right?

Getty

"But I said you were PLEASANTLY plump! That's a positive!"

I know a lot of us don't have the energy to socialize with more than a certain number of people every day, and that's no problem. I'm just saying that I see a lot of Internet people express the view that 90 percent of people out there are boring or vapid and they don't need to learn to deal with them. They'll just hang out with the few people that respond positively whenever they blurt out whatever is in their head at the moment, and trying to adapt their manner to get along with anybody else is "being fake" and "not being themselves."

You miss out on a lot of life that way. And if that's fine with you, keep in mind it's that kind of attitude that's going to lead to some company spending millions on developing sentient kangaroos when one employee has an AIDS cure gathering dust or something. You could have stopped that. Just saying.

For classes we need to teach our kids, check out The 10 Most Important Things They Didn't Teach You In School. And then check out things people actually learned about, in Smash Bros Theory: 6 Absurd Classes Taught at Actual Colleges.