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Comment by Miraste | Hacker News Reader

This is off base. Socially intelligent people occupy all of the best paid and most powerful positions in society. Social manipulation is the most valued kind of intelligence in America, far more than academic intelligence.

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Social intelligence is how you capture all of the added value of a trade, leaving none for the other guy. But you have to generate value in the first place, otherwise you can use social intelligence only for theft.

Exactly, it's useful for theft. Taking the value other people produce is the whole benefit of social intelligence. If you can convince someone that a scam is a good deal, you don't need to create any value at all. This is the origin of, among others, the political class.

>Taking the value other people produce is the whole benefit of social intelligence.

This is myopic almost to the point of satire. You really can't think of a single other benefit of social intelligence?

Of course it has other benefits. The context of the conversation was in terms of advancement in society,

The question was not about if being manipulative socially later in life is not a benefit. Of course it is a benefit.

But you get graded based on your ability to read, write, do math, memorize data points. Not on your ability to lie to your teacher in a believable manner.

You may excel later in life, but it's not like you can enter Yale because you can manipulate people.

You also need a certain level of other intelligence to properly manipulate people, or at least a certain level of self narcissism.

I mean you kind of proved my point, perhaps we should be teaching/discussing social skills.

General intelligence and social intelligence are correlated, which makes discussion difficult. Yale's a good example, though. Applicants need a base level of academic achievement to get in, but it's not actually that high. They didn't even require test scores for the last few years. If that were the main criterion, the whole school would be East Asian. Instead, what matters is marketing yourself. Knowing people, or building a narrative the admissions committee is looking for. Social intelligence.

I completely agree that social skills should be emphasized in school-not to reward the people who are already adept, but to impress on the others that they're the primary determinant of success.

> Social manipulation is the most valued kind of intelligence in America

It's incorrect to think that's limited to America. Humans are mostly powerless against the charm of narcissists and other sociopaths.

You see it over and over throughout human history all over the world.

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