I don't know how much of them can wear the NLP label or not, but in all case the skills you are referring to can be used either for good or bad purpose. It is always the ambiguity of what is usually called "manipulation" techniques. Under one form or another it is always a significant part of the activity of people having to interact with other people.
It can be a salesman (or some politic, if that makes any different) trying to sell their product, it can be a manager trying to raise the confidence of an employee.
It is often a question of saying the right words. I remember this classical example: as a manager, do not tell that a task you would-like a employee to do is easy, this is belittling, instead explain why this employee has all the capacity required to fulfill it.
The idea remains the same in both situation. In the second one however, both people have made a step forward which is a good thing.
Some people are better at it than other. Being on an IT Security website, I guess there might be some experienced social engineers around there that may know a lot about such things ;) !
@Aria Regarding Tor: people always hope to find the ultimate universal panacea. They hope that a firewall will bring total security to he whole network, that Tor will bring total anonymity. Even in the medical domain, new discoveries were always aimed at being the so awaited general solution.
The truth is that the world is complex, and there is no single solution to solve all problems, only a mix of partial solutions can help to advance toward a coherent and sane posture.
This is precisely such kind of wrong hope that some politician try to abuse by presenting the world using simplistic schemes with simplistic solutions.
There is on one side some boring politician telling gibberish about world economy and politics, how it is complex and hard to handle, etc. On the other hand you have some politician presenting such simplistic schemes and solutions.
Some people have the tendency to go toward the discourse they understand, no matter if it is right or not, at least they understand it.
Parkinson's law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. He provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike-shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important but also a far more difficult and complex task.
The law has been applied to software development and...
Or how people prefer to argue about the color of a bike-shed instead of having to deal with nuclear plants issues.
@Aria By the way Trump is among the 400 most wealthiest billionaire on earth, his money let him play the "US dream" card, so no you will never hear him say "We have no money". "Not enough", maybe, nobody has enough money, but never "no money" ;)
