<insert ineffectual bleat against the indiscriminate deployment of the word "rape" here>

Here's my understanding of manipulation.

Physical coercion forces you to do something that you don't want to do, don't enjoy while you're doing it, and regret doing afterwards.

Emotional manipulation causes you to do something that you didn't want to do before, and regret afterwards -- but you may like it in the meantime.

For example: violent rape causes you to have sex against your will. You don't want to have sex ahead of time, you don't want to have sex while you're being raped, and you aren't glad you were raped afterwards.

Manipulating someone into sex means that she didn't want to have sex before, and she regretted it afterwards, but you got her to want to have sex while she was doing it. It's not strictly speaking coercion, but you did get her to do something that's out of character and not in keeping with her usual desires.

The third option is "try it, you'll like it." The person didn't intend to take the action before, but she wanted to do it at the moment she acted, and she was glad she did it afterwards. I don't see a moral problem with this. It's influence, but it's not harmful. To continue the sex example, if the woman's initial impression is negative, but the man gets her to want to have sex and afterwards she's glad she did then he's just good at attracting women, not a harmful manipulator.

Influencing someone to take an action that you know she will regret afterwards is manipulative.

God, grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.

-- adapted from Reinhold Niebuhr

Is this a piece of traditional deep wisdom that's actually wise?

the joint stock corporation is the best* system of peacefully organizing humans to achieve goals. the closer governmental structure conforms to a joint-stock system the more peaceful and prosperous it will become (barring getting nuked by a jealous democracy). (99%)

*that humans have invented so far

Talent is mostly a result of hard work, passion and sheer dumb luck. It's more nurture than nature (genes). People who are called born-geniuses more often than not had better access to facilities at the right age while their neural connections were still forming. (~90%)

Update: OK. It seems I've to substantiate. Take the case of Barrack Obama. Nobody would've expected a black guy to become the US President 50 years ago. Or take the case of Bill Gates, Bill Joy or Steve Jobs. They just happened to have the right kind of technological exposure at an early age and were ready when the technology boom arrived. Or take the case of mathematicians like Fibonacci, Cardano, the Bernoulli brothers. They were smart. But there were other smart mathematicians as well. What separates them is the passion and the hard work and the time when they lived and did the work. A century earlier, they would've died in obscurity after being tried and tortured for blasphemy. Take Mozart. He didn't start making beautiful original music until he was twenty-one by when he had enough musical exposure that there was no one to match him. Take Darwin and think what he would have become if he hadn't boarded the Beagle. He would have been some pastor studying bugs and would've died in obscurity.

In short a genius is made not born. I'm not denying that good genes would help you with memory and learning, but it takes more than genes to be a genius.

All right, I'll try to mount a defence.

I would be modestly surprised if any member of Congress has an IQ below 100. You just need to have a bit of smarts to get elected. Even if the seat you want is safe, i.e. repeatedly won by the same party, you likely have to win a competitive primary. To win elections you need to make speeches, answer questions, participate in debates and so on. It's hard. And you'll have opponents that are ready to pounce on every mistake you make and try make a big deal out of it. Even smart people make lots of mistakes and say stupid things when put on the spot. I doubt a person of below average intelligence even has a chance.

Even George W. Bush, who's said and done a lot of stupid things and is often considered dim for a politician, likely has an IQ above 120.

As for decency and honesty, a useful rule of thumb is that most people are good. Crooked people are certainly a significant minority but most of them don't hide their crookedness very well. And you can't be visibly crooked and still win elections. Your opponents are motivated to dig up the dirt on you.

As for honestly trying to serve their country I admit that this is a bit tricky. Congresspeople certainly have a structural incentive to put the interests of their district above that of their country. But they are not completely short-sighted and neither are their constitutents. Conditions in congressional district X are very dependent on conditions in the US as a whole. So I do think congresspeople try to honestly serve both their district and their country.

Non-corruption is again a bit tricky but here I side with Matt Yglesias and Paul Waldman:

The truth, however, is that Congress is probably less corrupt than at any point in our history. Real old-fashioned corruption, of the briefcase-full-of-cash kind, is extremely rare (though it still happens, as with William Jefferson, he of the $90,000 stuffed in the freezer).

Real old-school corruption like you have in third world countries and like you used to have more of in Congress is now very rare. There's still a real debate to be had about the role of lobbyists, campaign finance law, structural incentives and so on but that's not what I'm talking about here.

Are there still some bad apples? Definitely. But I stand by my view that the vast majority are not.

I was once told "Believe in yourself" -- yes, in those words -- by a person I respect.

Knowing him, I know he must mean something genuine by it: there's some kind of behavior that he figured out how to do that he thinks would help me. But how the hell do you "believe in yourself"? That phrase is opaque to me.

That's sort of what I'm getting at. It's not that I'm a condescending asshole who always thinks advice-givers are stupid. In fact, I know this particular guy is very bright. It's just that you'd need to phrase it some other way before I'd understand "Oh! That's what he means! I'll just do that now!"

I agree, I don't think these kind of 'easy' wins are all that common in real life, certainly not those offering 300x improvements. I would like to see some better examples.

Entrepreneurship / business seems likely to be relatively fertile ground for finding good examples since short term financial gain can often be used as a relatively good proxy for 'success' and is relatively easy to measure. Too much focus on short term financial gain isn't always an optimal strategy even in business however since it may result in getting stuck in local maxima or directly compromising longer term success.