While walking through the day many thoughts may avail themselves upon me, not all of them can fit within the strict structure of The Self Similar Book.
One thought I have right now is the phantom degrees of charisma, because charisma is about applying commonalities (directly or inversely) to manipulate the bond structure of another entity. But truly charismatic people rely on contextual entities to mediate these modulations.
What I mean is this, I do not need to be a kind person, I do not need to like children, I do not need to be smart, but if I want a job at a top tier private elementary school all I need is to make you believe I have those properties. Two ways to achieve this are,
- lie
- tell selective truths
Lying is simple and almost trivial, it’s just simulating the necessary connections and using known information about how you “should respond” to manipulate the interviewer.
The selective truths is more interesting to me, it is a method that takes advantage of the inherently lossy nature of communication. In this case you are doing the conversational equivalent of “bubble porn” — a form of pornography where only naked skin is shown by making negative spaces that cover any clothes resulting in someone who is clothed appearing to be naked. So, what a charismatic individual will do is tell stories, breadcrumbs of information, and take advantage of the dissembling process of the interviewer to infer that they are the right candidate. They can talk about the time they helped a child, neglecting the motivation of hitting on the mom, or they can obliquely reference a book they found in the background of a photograph of the interviewer online, despite never having truly read it.
What is happening here feels more interesting. Instead of attempting to directly address the configuration shift you want to make, you instead allow the other entity to create an imaginary scaffold out from your statements to reach that conclusion. Taking advantage of the drive to systematically define a person and compress their representation of you by shooting out a statement that is semantically close enough that they can mentally create the causal chain required to reach a much lower energy thought. Because remembering “this candidate’s first word was paediatrician and they referenced a quote from a book I read that I consider intelligent” is harder than “this candidate is smart”, despite