We evolved a natural tendency to like charismatic and funny people, because (I'm speculating) you need a high minimum level of broad cognitive competence to pull that off.
Things like empathy, quick thinking, emotional intelligence, a fresh perspective, broad knowledge of the world, a large vocabulary, and the self-confidence to go with your judgement calls are all involved in telling a single good joke to a crowd.
These are all fantastic things to see in a leader.
On an evolutionary scale, it's probably a little simpler than correlation with cognitive competence.
A group united towards a stupid purpose can be more effective than individuals acting towards more reasonable purposes. If this is true, you can select for both following (susceptibility) and leading (charisma).
I feel like the only characteristic needed to be a popular speaker is self-confidence. Have you seen most of the word salad coming out of Trump's mouth?
It’s word salad, but for his demographic, it’s a salad of carefully selected words they love, delivered with great warmth, charm, or aggression, as appropriate.
All of his 'success' is purely derived from charisma as far as I can tell. He isn't particularly adept at his prior career of real estate business given that he has under-performed in the markets he has participated in, and he had to commit felony fraud to do it. His biggest success is making people believe that he is more successful than he is.
What intellectually rigorous activity would you say he has an aptitude in?
Looking at the wildly hostile media coverage of him post-2015, you’d come away thinking he’s a major charlatan.
Looking at the glowing media coverage of him pre-2015, he seems like a unique business genius.
The truth is probably in between.
Business and marketing aren’t rigorous intellectual activities like math, but they are bloody hard in a different way - even with an inheritance (how many born-rich kids die 100x richer? Almost none). The problems are very fuzzy and open-ended, and frequently don’t even look like a problem.
You can’t consistently solve these problems profitably over many years without some skill.
I disagree. I know quite a few people who are incredibly charismatic, but exceptionally narrow in their cognitive competence. In fact, one of the problems that I would highlight about charisma is that it allows you to be get away with a lot more stupid shit than you would if you had to get by on other talents.
I agree with your point, but I think your examples are charming one-on-onenor in small groups only.
To be considered charming to a large group of people, like half the USA, you need to be conversant in things that are relevant to all of them. A narrow person can never have a wide appeal.
Things like empathy, quick thinking, emotional intelligence, a fresh perspective, broad knowledge of the world, a large vocabulary, and the self-confidence to go with your judgement calls are all involved in telling a single good joke to a crowd.
These are all fantastic things to see in a leader.