Slytherin 2.0, after its triumphant remake following Draco’s enlightenment!
The skills in question have appeal across the Houses:
Draco smiled. “Father has, um, a rather refined sense of humor, but he does understand making friends. He understands it very well. In fact he made me repeat that before I went to bed every night for the last month, ‘I will make friends at Hogwarts.’ When I explained everything to him and he saw that’s what I was doing, he not only apologized to me but bought me an ice-cream.”
Harry’s jaw dropped. “You managed to spin that into an ice-cream?”
Draco nodded, looking every bit as smug as the feat deserved. “Well, father knew what I was doing, of course, but he’s the one who taught me how to do it, and if I grin the right way while I’m doing it, that makes it a father-son thing and then he has to buy me an ice-cream or I’ll give him this sort of sad look, like I think I must have disappointed him.”
Harry eyed Draco calculatingly, sensing the presence of another master. “You’ve gotten lessons on how to manipulate people?”
“For as far back as I can remember,” Draco said proudly. “Father bought me tutors.”
“Wow,” Harry said. Reading Robert Cialdini’s Influence: Science and Practice probably didn’t stack up very high compared to that (though it was still one heck of a book). “Your dad is almost as awesome as my dad.”
Ask yourself: How would a cunning but ultimately good-hearted Slytherin commenter get a message they believed useful to others read when there are hundreds of other comments competing for the same limited attention?
By responding to the most-upvoted, and therefore highest-up-in-the-page existing comment, one of the only ones likely to get future eyeballs.
I read the first wave of pick up materials when I was a teenager, way back in the Internet Usenet days. It would not be an exaggeration to say they changed my life – not for romantic reasons, but because they spelled social interaction out in the way I needed at the time and got me on track to leading a fulfilling social life.
I read this thread on Less Wrong a few years back and it deeply resonated with me. Since then I documented over 2000 useful, intriguing or otherwise noteworthy observations of social interactions happening around me – ways people bragged, compliments that warmed my heart, techniques for starting conversations with strangers.
I’m now in the process of coding and analyzing my empirical observations, publishing the results in my blog, Less Penguiny: https://www.lesspenguiny.com/
(Less Awkward, as other commenters suggested, was sadly unavailable.)
PS Sorry for hijacking the comments, but I honestly believe my project is of value to Less Wrong readers for whom this thread was important, and I knew that there would be little chance of getting noticed if I instead appended comment #630.
And so the Noble House of Slytherin begins to take form.
Slytherin 2.0, after its triumphant remake following Draco’s enlightenment!
The skills in question have appeal across the Houses:
Ask yourself: How would a cunning but ultimately good-hearted Slytherin commenter get a message they believed useful to others read when there are hundreds of other comments competing for the same limited attention?
By responding to the most-upvoted, and therefore highest-up-in-the-page existing comment, one of the only ones likely to get future eyeballs.
I read the first wave of pick up materials when I was a teenager, way back in the Internet Usenet days. It would not be an exaggeration to say they changed my life – not for romantic reasons, but because they spelled social interaction out in the way I needed at the time and got me on track to leading a fulfilling social life.
I read this thread on Less Wrong a few years back and it deeply resonated with me. Since then I documented over 2000 useful, intriguing or otherwise noteworthy observations of social interactions happening around me – ways people bragged, compliments that warmed my heart, techniques for starting conversations with strangers.
I’m now in the process of coding and analyzing my empirical observations, publishing the results in my blog, Less Penguiny: https://www.lesspenguiny.com/
(Less Awkward, as other commenters suggested, was sadly unavailable.)
PS Sorry for hijacking the comments, but I honestly believe my project is of value to Less Wrong readers for whom this thread was important, and I knew that there would be little chance of getting noticed if I instead appended comment #630.