One of the things that makes Michael Vassar an interesting person to be around is that he has an opinion about everything. If you locked him up in an empty room with grey walls, it would probably take the man about thirty seconds before he'd start analyzing the historical influence of the Enlightenment on the tradition of locking people up in empty rooms with grey walls.
Likewise, in the recent LW meetup, I noticed that I was naturally drawn to the people who most easily ended up talking about interesting things. I spent a while just listening to HughRistik's theories on the differences between men and women, for instance. There were a few occasions when I engaged in some small talk with new people, but not all of them took very long, as I failed to lead the conversation into territory where one of us would have plenty of opinions.
I have two major deficiencies in trying to mimic this behavior. One, I'm by nature more of a listener than speaker. I usually prefer to let other people talk so that I can just soak up the information being offered. Second, my native way of thought is closer to text than speech. At best, I can generate thoughts as fast as I can type. But in speech, I often have difficulty formulating my thoughts into coherent sentences fast enough and frequently hesitate.
Both of these problems are solvable by having a sufficiently well built-up storage of cached thoughts that I don't need to generate everything in real time. On the occasions when a conversations happens to drift into a topic I'm sufficiently familiar with, I'm often able to overcome the limitations and contribute meaningfully to the discussion. This implies two things. First, that I need to generate cached thoughts in more subjects than I currently have. Seconds, that I need an ability to more reliably steer conversation into subjects that I actually do have cached thoughts about.
Below is a preliminary "conversational map" I generated as an exercise. The top three subjects - the weather, the other person's background (job and education), people's hobbies - are classical small talk subjects. Below them are a bunch of subjects that I feel like I can spend at least a while talking about, and possible paths leading from one subject to another. My goal in generating the map is to create a huge web of interesting subjects, so that I can use the small talk openings to bootstrap the conversation into basically anything I happen to be interested in.
This map is still pretty small, but it can be expanded to an arbitrary degree. (This is also one of the times when I wish my netbook had a bigger screen.) I thought that I didn't have very many things that I could easily talk with people about, but once I started explicitly brainstorming for them, I realized that there were a lot of those.
My intention is to spend a while generating conversational charts like this and then spend some time fleshing out the actual transitions between subjects. The benefit from this process should be two-fold. Practice in creating transitions between subjects will make it easier to generate such transitions in real time conversations. And if I can't actually come up with anything in real time, I can fall back to the cache of transitions and subjects that I've built up.
Naturally, the process needs to be guided by what the other person shows an interest in. If they show no interest in some subject I mention, it's time to move the topic to another cluster. Many of the subjects in this chart are also pretty inflammable: there are environments where pretty much everything in the politics cluster should probably be kept off-limits, for instance. Exercise your common sense when building and using your own conversational charts.
(Thanks to Justin Shovelain for mentioning that Michael Vassar seems to have a big huge conversational web that all his discussions take place in. That notion was one of the original sources for this idea.)
Though there is great ethical value in helping people avoid influence techniques, I contend that there is also great ethical value in teaching people how to influence others. I argue that social skills (of which social influence is a subset) are distributed inequitably in society, and that this result is unjust. Some people are dramatically better at social influence (status, etc...) than others knowingly or unknowingly, due to different personality traits and upbringings. There are the haves, and the have-nots in the area of social skills.
The only way for social equality to exist is for people to be in the same bracket of social skills (and social influence ability). We can't make things equal, but we can compress the disparity between the top and the bottom, so the people at the bottom aren't getting stomped on so badly.
Either the haves must give up their social skills, or the have-nots must attain more social skills. The first solution is impossible. With their higher social status, the haves can't be forced to do so, and they will scoff at requests to disarm out of the goodness of their hearts. The cool kids aren't going to change how they do things no matter how much the uncool kids stamp their feet. Furthermore, some of the haves are naturally that way due to their phenotype, and they can't lower their social skills (at least, not without the help of the Handicapper General ).
The solution is for the have-nots to learn to be more socially influential. Yet if you do so, you join the ranks of the haves, though you may be one of their more restrained and reflective members. Unfortunately, if you become one of the haves you will still encounter have-nots. You should avoid stomping on them, but they may end up at a disadvantage relative to you. It isn't your fault that they aren't educated about social influence, and it isn't your individual responsibility to do so.
A society where disparities in social skills have been compressed by pulling people at the bottom upwards would be more equal than what we have today. Reducing this inequality is a good thing. There would be great transparency about social influence. That's part of the reason I write so much about these subjects: I'm trying to do my part to get the knowledge more evenly distributed. Yet there is a strange agreement in society between the haves and the have-nots: they both often look down on have-nots trying to become haves.
I also believe that there should be more discussion of the ethics of social influence. Yet in discussions of the ethics of social influence, I often notice a greater degree of scrutiny on people who are learning social influence, rather than on those who are already doing it. Furthermore, some ethical criticisms of social influence (usually leveled at those learning it) seem overly idealistic. When social influence and status is woven so deeply into the fabric of society, the phrase "don't hate the player; hate the game" can often be a valid defense.
I see learning status gaining skills as an arms race. That is you gaining more social influence will encourage others to gain more to try and stay ahead of you so that they can get what they want. Thus forcing you to spend more time and energy on socialising. It is not as simple as have and have-nots.
I'd guess the haves socially denigrating the have-nots for trying to get more social skills is part of their way of fending off competitors.
Why the have-nots might do it? Well if they are part of your social group there are a number of reasons.
They might no