It’s really a question of intent. One of my favorite observations was a comment made by Day9 (a pro Starcraft commentator) on the topic of strategy. He said tha

It’s really a question of intent. One of my favorite observations was a comment made by Day9 (a pro Starcraft commentator) on the topic of strategy. He said that, when he was younger, he used to think that strategy was just “whoever had the best trick.” But as he grew and improved at the game, he began to understand that strategy was more a matter of focus, consistently good decision-making, and occasionally some deep situational insight. I think working on your social skills is similar. If you are just trying to learn “one simple trick” to manipulate other people, you’re really missing the point and being kind of a bad human being to boot. You’ll almost certainly sabotage yourself and head down a bad path. But if you’re genuinely trying to improve your interactions with other people and to understand why conversations may not go as smoothly as you would think, and if you have good intent, I think these sorts of things can be very useful for people that are not intuitively skilled at meeting strangers.