"Emotional Intelligence" is just a marketing term for awareness of other people's emotional needs/thoughts/behaviour/etc. and modulating one's interactions accordingly.
The trick is to do it effectively without allowing oneself to be manipulated/becoming a doormat/hurting the other person's ego.
The books Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations by Kerry Patterson et al. are useful in this regard.
The number of people seeking truth who are silenced and banned within these examples for various forms of non-compliance says otherwise.
It’s a laughable generalization that doesn’t hold up in reality. So easy to write words, but so hard to back them up convincingly.
To think some call us an echo chamber.
… repeatedly in a chamber is just a circumstance.
On a continuum with preferring the truth on one end, and preferring good vibes on the other: communities like HN and Less Wrong are very far on the preferring the truth end. Much more so than the general population, which prefers good vibes. I called this difference "radical", and I think that's apt.
You can see this in practice. Someone forcing an unpleasant truth on someone else is much more acceptable on HN, than in cocktail party conversation, or in the line at the grocery store, or even on reddit.
It's a statement about the kind of discussion that is welcomed/encouraged, not the beliefs of the median HN user.
The sentence in isolation was too funny to pass up though. To your credit, you never said there was any guarantee HN would arrive at the truth.
You should expect that generally intelligent people will also be good at dealing with people. The idea that smart people are often lopsided or lack "people skills" is not supported by psychometric data.
The next thing to understand is that most people do not want to engage with reality any more than they absolutely have to. Most people, most of the time, are choosing what they say in order to positively manipulate someone's emotional state and cultivate a stronger relationship. People care more about being happy than the truth.
The HN community is a bubble of radical truth seeking. This is objectively useful in most professional contexts. Part of the "culture fit" test at a high performing company will be a check for blunt honesty and truth seeking. No "yes men".
But it's not the way to win the social game that you will play in most interactions throughout your life, and you just have to accept that. You are not optimizing for giving someone an uncomfortable truth, you are optimizing for making them happy. Making them like the way they feel when you are around.