Interesting feedback.
When I said that it is learnt observationally, I mean that if someone simply tells you something, eg. that you should use social touching (http://www.businessinsider.com/habits-of-incredibly-charming-people-2014-4?IR=T), it doesn't give you enough information to be able to integrate it into your habits. You'd want to actually see other people using that technique, then you might be confident enough to try it yourself without worrying that you were doing something inappropriate. Now you could try and write a description of what situations it works and what situations it doesn't - but that would be very hard to enumerate and the instructions would be very hard to follow. But if you just show someone a few situations, they'll probably be able to figure it out.
So, I was talking about observation vs. description - I wasn't talking about the trade-off between time spent observing and time spent practising.
There was a post (which I unfortunately couldn't locate) that argued that rationalists should aspire to more - that a successful rationalist should be able to master other skills too that make it obvious that being a "rationality master" is something to aspire to.
Several skills such as writing, speech craft and social skills are different from more procedural skills in that they are best learned by observational learning. Strong logic skills don't provide the same advantages here that they do in maths or science - in fact an intermediate level of logic is often a disadvantage as it leads to expecting other people to behave logically.
So if we wish to develop these skills as a community, we would need to develop a repository of examples with notes to explain what principles each example is intended to show. There might be some disagreement as to how applicable each principle is and whether a particular decision is correct - but it would still be far, far better than what else is out there. Unfortunately most communities on the Internet (ie. reddit.com/r/socialskills) end up with huge amounts of rather general advice. This advice is helpful in the beginning, but you quickly get to a stage where you have heard all of it before many, many times. But with examples, even people who are extremely talented may get something out of it.