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Blueberry comments on On the Power of Intelligence and Rationality - Less Wrong
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The benefits to having charisma are obvious. I'm wondering about the benefits of being under the spell. Having a property (x) that leads people to follow you is way beneficial for survival. But how is it that humans evolved to follow people with characteristic x. Presumably it is some kind of proxy for competence in the ancestral environment. Or a side effect of something else.
You are looking at it backwards. It's not that humans evolved to follow people with characteristic X, it's that people evolved to exploit human psychology to get people to follow them. There are not necessarily any benefits to being under the spell. Compare: predators evolved to have hunting skills, but that doesn't mean there are benefits for the prey to being hunted.