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Comment by invalidOrTaken | Hacker News Reader

>The study’s lead author, John Antonakis, a psychologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, suggests leaders should use their intelligence to generate creative metaphors that will persuade and inspire others—the way former U.S. President Barack Obama did. “I think the only way a smart person can signal their intelligence appropriately and still connect with the people,” Antonakis says, “is to speak in charismatic ways.”

This stood out to me. I would be interested to hear the thoughts of HN readers on this.

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I think charisma is best used to signal a lack of intelligence. Someone else posted a link to a op-ed about GWB, but Trump follows a similar approach. Lots of people question his intelligence and decision-making ability, yet, every one of us hear or talk about him several times a day.

He also has a political sleight-of-hand that I don't think has ever been matched. Every time a key policy decision is being debated, the news channels are focused on Trump's latest gaffe rather than the decisions being made in Washington.

Appeal to emotion to get results, not reason.

I think charisma isn't a signal for intellectual weakness, but it does suggest that the person isn't speaking intellectually to you. Most people aren't at a place to understand policy implications, so charisma is a better proxy.

Minor nit-pick, I didn't say it was a signal of intellectual weakness (clearly it's the opposite), but instead that it is best used to "trick" the person you're speaking to into thinking you're at their level.

Obama spoke like a college professor because he knew his audience would respect that kind of person.

Trump speaks like a "straight talker" because he knows his audience respects that kind of person.

To use a metaphor as a counterargument, if there were a 6 foot spider in my shower you'd better believe I would talk about it at least a few times a day. That doesn't mean the spider has charisma, just that it's a clear and present danger weighing heavily on my mind.

If anyone is exercising political sleight of hand I'd say it's the legislators and executive staff who are getting in all their unpopular actions while the getting is good, like a looter in a riot. Trump doesn't have to be politically savvy or even aware of what they're doing for that to happen.

Trump's skillset is that of a reality TV star. He knows what to say and how to say it to engage people in drama. His presidency has been a continuation of this. It freaks out the intelligentsia because it seems insane to them that a person in such a high place of power could get involved in things like Twitter flame wars. That's low class/blue collar behavior that is totally foreign to their own culture. That is why people on the blue collar end of the spectrum are more capable of realizing that this particular aspect of his behavior does not represent a genuine threat, because it's part of their culture.

> Twitter flame wars ... does not represent a genuine threat

...until it's a flame war between two nuclear powers with unstable leaders.

Your depiction of Trump as unstable is exactly this cultural bias I'm referring to. He doesn't exhibit the upper class white culture behaviors you're willing to accept in a president, so he seems unstable.

It's worth mentioning that while he's always been rich, Trump spent a significant portion of his youth around construction sites, so he has adopted a lot of low class blue collar behavior.

Maybe the title should be "Why Really Dumb People Dislike Really Smart Leaders". "Talk to them like they're five" is what that suggestion sounds like to me.

"Talk to them like they're five" when they're adults that can figure out that they're being talked down upon is a quick way to alienate the crowd even more.

If instead you mean to use more common words and to make concepts relatable to everyday life - that usually works out pretty well in my experience. It's not an easy thing to do either for the "smart" leader.

There's a difference between metaphors and speaking down to someone. When I talk about topics in CS or mathematics with my girlfriend or some members of my family, I speak in metaphors. I don't speak to them like they're five. I speak to them like they're intelligent people who have a model of the world that is different than mine or the things I want to discuss, and I relate my work or interests to their models.

Plenty of people don't talk down to 5 year olds. That's an assumption you've made regarding 'explain like I'm 5'.

Ironically, that's what makes 'explain like I'm 5' so useful - it takes away the assumptions people have in their heads and forces them to use simple language and explain things from first principles.

It's quite powerful really. Richard Feynman was famous for being to explain physics in a way a layman could understand. Neil deGrasse Tyson does the same and people love it.

> Richard Feynman was famous for being to explain physics in a way a layman could understand.

Agreed. And the Challenger O-ring demonstration was a beautiful example of metaphor even if it wasn't correct. (Morton-Thiokol engineers had evidence that the O-rings didn't seal even at 75F and had been trying to stop launches PERIOD).

However, Feynman was also famous for "proof by intimidation" if you caught him out on something he didn't understand.

There is another element beyond explaining clearly, and that is that people tend to remember and relate to tangible examples better than abstractions. Metaphors are great memory devices even for people who are not dumb or uneducated.

The minimum education level for the group I work in is a STEM bachelor's degree. The mode is probably a STEM masters with 5-10 years of experience. And, within the "small" group, everyone is a STEM PhD, MD, or both. We use a lot of metaphors, partially because some of the stuff we're talking about doesn't have a name yet, and we are still trying to figure out what the important properties are.

A smart leader need more than technical/logical intelligence. They need emotional intelligence and charismatic/social intelligence. Who cares if you can repeat all the numbers of PI when you are not able to look a crowd in the eyes and pick up subtle social cues?

If you're a local mayor or something, that might work. Above that level you need the press to communicate it, and they won't bother communicating your carefully thought out message. At best you get a one sentence sound bite.

I went and read some Obama speeches back in my university days. Some of them were quite well thought out, but they mostly got zero press coverage. And that's at the presidential level.

It would be nice, before giving Barack Obama as an example of how to act, to present some evidence that he was an exception to this trend. For example, was his IQ significantly above 120? I'm not saying it was or wasn't, or that he was or wasn't perceived as an effective leader, but they give no reason why this data point should be an example to follow.

Isn't it obvious what their reason is?

Are we still usig IQ as an argument un-ironically?

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, David Kahneman writes about "peak-end rule" - people tend to rate experiences by their peak level of emotion during the experience, and by the way experiences end.

My takeaway is if you want people to remember an experience positively, what matters is a high peak of pleasure, and to have a good end.

These are places where clever metaphors can help.

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