Jessica Livingston spoke about it at the Female Founder's Conference earlier this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEp9aaQuYp4&index=1&list=PLQ...

Thank you for the link. It was a good talk. Actually, I am struck by what a large percentage of the talk and this essay are identical in content.

I was taking acting lessons around the time I got involved with this startup. I would recommend them - such things would be very useful for the stereotypical IT person. Essentially, you (at least I did) start to get a conscious, thought oriented / theoretical understanding of people and their behavior - and how to link that to a better understanding of their 'character' and conscious/unconscious drives, etc. Self-obsessed, neurotic introvert me never got socialized properly in high school..

All very nebulous, I know, but part of acting is learning to listen to your intuition or impulses and not immediately discount them or ignore them (something left brained me is very prone to doing)

I could tell something was wrong with this 'founder' but I rationalized as 'anal-retentive'. Then I got sucked into my OCDness, and stopped taking acting classes while trying to get this startup running. 4 years of hell later, I finally realized I was dealing with a full blown psychopath (i.e. failed to do any background checks on the guy in my rush of enthusiasm at the start of any project). The guy who introduced me to him finally decided to tell me some stories...

Just an example of the hazards of not listening to one's gut. The books about acting tend to be "flaky", from an engineer's point of view, but once you understand the concepts they are trying to explain and the lingo, it is useful.

I'm not Jessica (just a guy on HN), but I do want to add that my social radar increased a bit by doing Vipassana meditation (= body-scan meditation). Or perhaps I should say social intelligence, since I didn't look at the character of people, but I felt what people were feeling quite intensely.

Body-scan meditation allows for the insula in your brain to develop (more than normal). Note that the insula maps to the body in a visceral sense. In my experience, this results in that everything that you will see you will also feel. So that means when you see a facial expression, you will feel it as well in a quite intense fashion. The most interesting example was when my best friend went to the movie Oblivion the evening after a 10 day meditation retreat. He told me he felt like he was in it.

Caveat: you do need to meditate (aka 'feel your body') every day to keep up this level of 'social intelligence' (for lack of a better word).

If you'd want to know more about it, search for: Search Inside Yourself written by Chade-Meng Tan. He worked as a software engineer Google and writes from a software engineer's mind.

Sorry, but how do you know this isn't some kind of placebo, exactly? This reads like pseudoscience.

I do believe some people are certainly better at determining honesty and character than others. But without any sort of blind testing, or even some kind of empirical foundation or proposed specific techniques, it's very difficult to know for sure if a particular person really is better than average or not.

I never equated the words "social radar" with "lie detector". So perhaps I confused a thing or two here. It happens.

The short version of what I claimed is if you have good empathic skills (e.g. being better able to feel the facial expression other people are making at that moment), then you'll have part of the answer of how to detect genuine people (and I believe being not genuine and lying are two completely different things).

About meditation itself and its relationship on social intelligence, there's not much written about it, since I made the term "social intelligence" up. I'd recommend reading about meditation and emotional intelligence on Science Daily. Then practice it for 5 days in a retreat and then see for yourself how it could improve your 'social radar'. I know it's a lot of effort, but in my opinion that's the minimal amount of investigation that you'd need in order to see if it holds value. The 5 day retreat is needed to gain the tacit knowledge that cannot be explained through language (just like the feeling of playing an instrument very quickly can only be practiced).

I've read articles claiming both that there exist a small percentage of people who are amazing at detecting honesty in others and different articles claiming that no such people exist, so I don't really know what the latest accepted view is.

I wouldn't think there's anything magical to it. Keep in mind the context she operates in - one filled with nerdy founders. Based on most of the "nerds" I know, myself included, we tend to be less socially skilled. Someone who is very socially skilled would seem magical in that context. Just like our ability to make machines do things seems magical to regular folks.

Personally I've invested a lot more time in my computer skills than my social ones. I imagine if it was the reverse I'd have some social radar. Instead I can make pixels do my bidding while peers in my age group have trouble with email but don't freak out about networking mixers.

I think it would be pretty difficult for her to write about social radar. It probably involves a lot of intuition that has been learned and honed over years of socializing.

> I wouldn't think there's anything magical to it.

I might not be so quick to discredit what's required to be a great judge of character. Even many of the people who can be considered to be more socially adept, maybe business or humanities majors, are quite poor judges of character.

It might be difficult to write about, but I imagine that even trickier would be to take the written word and internalize it.