What is practical intelligence? How is it developed, and why does it matter?

From the text:

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls “practical intelligence. To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like ”knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.“ It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It's practical in nature: that is, it's not knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are ”orthogonal": the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other. You can have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence, oras in the lucky case of someone like Robert Oppenheimeryou can have lots of both.

So where does something like practical intelligence come from? We know where analytical intelligence comes from. It's something, at least in part, that's in your genes. Chris Langan started talking at six months. He taught ioI himself to read at three years of age. He was born smart. IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability.* But social savvy is knowledge. It's a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.