Overall, I feel like social skills are far more procedural than observational for adults. One interesting subset of strategies involve observation and practice at the same time. Mimicking body language makes people like you more.
Often that's true. Mimicking body language is about imposing intimicy with the other person. It's possible that the other person doesn't want that intimicy and then you can trigger resistance.
It's like physical intimicy. There are studies that suggest a woman is more likely to say yes when asked to dance when the person doing the asking touches her. If you take that as a lesson to touch woman as much as possible to make them like you, you are going to creep out a few women.
Furthermore mirroring someone else's body language is a low status signal. For that reason most of the pickup folks don't do it.
I would not recommend that someone who doesn't really know what he's doing starts making a conscious effort to mirror other people's bodylanguage in the wild based on internet or book advice.
It's a useful tool for doing hypnosis but it takes some calibration to know when to use it and when not.
Can you give an example or evidence of how mimicking is a low status signal (besides when their body language shows low status)? I hadn't heard this before.
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.