Possible, yes, but I think it’s unwise. For me at least, there are just too many good people who do lots of social manipulation for me to be willing to cut them all out of my life.
Personally, I am willing to keep them in my life as long as I trust other, harder-to-fake signals that they are value-aligned with me, or at least the values I consider core. (Though one of those values is not wanting to be manipulated except towards my own best interests.)
To clarify, should I understand this to mean something like:
“Many people I know are good, despite doing lots of social manipulation (which is bad). They are so good that even this bad thing that they do does not outweight their otherwise-goodness. So, I am unwilling to cut them out of my life.”
Or is it instead this:
“Many people I know are good, and even though they do lots of social manipulation (which is often/usually/otherwise bad), when they do it, it is in a good way, and not bad. Therefore this does not in any way make them bad, or less good, or any such things. Thus I do not want to cut them out of my life.”
More like the latter. I think that the primary or most common purpose of social influence/manipulation is not to hurt anyone, but simply to get what one wants. It‘s like a knife: sure, it can be a weapon, but the vast majority of knife-uses are just using the knife as a tool.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what sort of things you classify as “social influence/manipulation”, but to me manipulating other people “simply to get what one wants” is pretty much a paradigmatic example of something bad.
As far as I understand “Telling a good joke with the intent that people will think I’m funny and thus high status” would be social influence/manipulation in the sense Sarah uses the words.
You likely need to be in the company of people with a lot of self awareness and control over their social actions for people not to engage in behavior like that constantly.
If so, then it seems there’s been some topic drift, because the context from a few comments upthread is this remark of Sarah’s: “I’ve had a hard time with people using emotional/social rapport-building tools in communication, because it feels like it’s exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply.” I don’t think Sarah would regard telling jokes with the goal of being seen as funny-hence-high-status as “exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply”.
Maybe the average person who tells a joke wouldn’t count but a good comedian who’s actually skilled at it would count as someone who can do social magic. They get undo influence that isn’t do to anything besides their ability to do social magic.
A good comedian is hypnotic in the sense that Sarah uses the term.
Possible, yes, but I think it’s unwise. For me at least, there are just too many good people who do lots of social manipulation for me to be willing to cut them all out of my life.
Personally, I am willing to keep them in my life as long as I trust other, harder-to-fake signals that they are value-aligned with me, or at least the values I consider core. (Though one of those values is not wanting to be manipulated except towards my own best interests.)
To clarify, should I understand this to mean something like:
“Many people I know are good, despite doing lots of social manipulation (which is bad). They are so good that even this bad thing that they do does not outweight their otherwise-goodness. So, I am unwilling to cut them out of my life.”
Or is it instead this:
“Many people I know are good, and even though they do lots of social manipulation (which is often/usually/otherwise bad), when they do it, it is in a good way, and not bad. Therefore this does not in any way make them bad, or less good, or any such things. Thus I do not want to cut them out of my life.”
More like the latter. I think that the primary or most common purpose of social influence/manipulation is not to hurt anyone, but simply to get what one wants. It‘s like a knife: sure, it can be a weapon, but the vast majority of knife-uses are just using the knife as a tool.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what sort of things you classify as “social influence/manipulation”, but to me manipulating other people “simply to get what one wants” is pretty much a paradigmatic example of something bad.
As far as I understand “Telling a good joke with the intent that people will think I’m funny and thus high status” would be social influence/manipulation in the sense Sarah uses the words.
You likely need to be in the company of people with a lot of self awareness and control over their social actions for people not to engage in behavior like that constantly.
If so, then it seems there’s been some topic drift, because the context from a few comments upthread is this remark of Sarah’s: “I’ve had a hard time with people using emotional/social rapport-building tools in communication, because it feels like it’s exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply.” I don’t think Sarah would regard telling jokes with the goal of being seen as funny-hence-high-status as “exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply”.
Maybe the average person who tells a joke wouldn’t count but a good comedian who’s actually skilled at it would count as someone who can do social magic. They get undo influence that isn’t do to anything besides their ability to do social magic.
A good comedian is hypnotic in the sense that Sarah uses the term.