That's a sure sign that your friends aren't very bright. Charisma is itself a learned skill, and intelligent people very often possess it. While it is not a sure sign of intelligence, if everyone doesn't like you, then you're in trouble.
"All the idiots" is a pretty arbitrary term, and it is also really questionable - how do you define idiots, then? As those who disagree with you?
Manipulating idiots is actually generally easier than manipulating average people, and idiots are not any sort of single group - low-functioning persons often fight amongst themselves.
I agree that one can learn skills to impress people, and those skills are very useful. Also that intelligent people have an advantage in this: the intelligence itself is impressive, and can help learn those skills faster.
On the other hand, humans are not automatically strategic (even the intelligent ones), "charisma" is not a one-dimensional value (different things impress different people), and there is also some tension... let's say it this way: most good scientists would fail doing a car salesman's job, and most car salesmen would fail to do g...
Today's post, Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes was originally published on 29 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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