As someone who is here mostly to improve my personal life (and perhaps since that tends to generate a surplus, get some EA done along the way) it’s definitely worth it for me. A few points on the things in your list
Think of your practice:theory ratio for a thing you’re good at. Think of how often you deliberately practice conversational skills like connecting with other people. Realize you should be doing less reading more doing. Feel scared to start. Go somewhere nobody will know you and practice anyways.
Side note: I feel like there must be a better feedback loop since this just gives a fail/pass/ace result and little feedback as to why. Close friends are poor feedback loops for this due to their bias and selection bias in general.
Tone and posture > attractiveness. Marilyn Monroe could turn her charisma on and off with body language. Read the whole book for more specifics. Controlling my lisp and lordosis causes a visible change in the reaction of people I approach. Losing 20 lbs of muscle in a long period of sloth changed things a little but not proportional to the amount of time it took to gain 20lbs of muscle.
In my experience, those are the only things specific to rhetoric I’ve had to learn to get to the level I could have fulfilling and productive interactions with other humans. I’m aware I’m still behind a lot of other people so I would be happy if someone pointed out things they feel are important. Discovering a new deficiency always comes with some great effort:reward areas of focus.
As someone who is here mostly to improve my personal life (and perhaps since that tends to generate a surplus, get some EA done along the way) it’s definitely worth it for me. A few points on the things in your list
Think of your practice:theory ratio for a thing you’re good at. Think of how often you deliberately practice conversational skills like connecting with other people. Realize you should be doing less reading more doing. Feel scared to start. Go somewhere nobody will know you and practice anyways.
Side note: I feel like there must be a better feedback loop since this just gives a fail/pass/ace result and little feedback as to why. Close friends are poor feedback loops for this due to their bias and selection bias in general.
Tone and posture > attractiveness. Marilyn Monroe could turn her charisma on and off with body language. Read the whole book for more specifics. Controlling my lisp and lordosis causes a visible change in the reaction of people I approach. Losing 20 lbs of muscle in a long period of sloth changed things a little but not proportional to the amount of time it took to gain 20lbs of muscle.
Making a habit of simulating other people with your system 1 side before including your system 2 side makes conversation more fun and makes people feel more cared about by you. But that’s something I got from this site so you may have already read about this.
In my experience, those are the only things specific to rhetoric I’ve had to learn to get to the level I could have fulfilling and productive interactions with other humans. I’m aware I’m still behind a lot of other people so I would be happy if someone pointed out things they feel are important. Discovering a new deficiency always comes with some great effort:reward areas of focus.