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pjeby comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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Your post is consistent with my understanding, also.
Furthermore, Mystery's model of women is biased towards the modal female extravert. Since he based most of his understanding of women on his club interactions, he was vulnerable to the availability heuristic. (Look! We are talking about rationality and pickup!)
It is indeed important to understand the modal/median/average women, but unless you actually want to date the type of woman, you need to understand other types of women, also. Yet the view of women in the community seems a bit over-homogenized towards the types of women that PUAs encounter most often.
Furthermore, I think part of the reason that some PUAs sound cynical or patronizing when they talk about women is that PUAs are not the average male. They are probably higher than average in intelligence and introversion, yet they are comparing female extraverts of average intelligence to themselves and finding them lacking; this is an unfair comparison.
Modal?
Oh, I guess you mean "typical", as opposed to atypical. I thought maybe it was a typo for "model", since Mystery's aim was reported to include models, bartenders, strippers, hostesses and other "women hired for their beauty".
Which kind of underscores your point in an odd way -- his observations were NOT based on "average" women at all, but on neurotypical extroverts of above-average appearance.
"Modal," as in "pertaining to the mode."
Yes, my broader point is that a lot of the observations of PUAs are based on the women they meet the most often. The type of women they meet the most often is club-goers of above average attractiveness. The average intelligence of these women is likely to be around the population average, they are probably above average in extraversion, and they have highly "people-oriented" interests (and they may well be above average in neuroticism and below average in conscientiousness).
These female phenotypes may be common, but there are plenty of other female phenotypes that are less well understand by PUAs. Furthermore, the phenotypes of female club-goers are massively, massively different from the phenotypes of PUAs, who are probably 1-2 standard deviations above the mean in intelligence, above average in introversion, and "thing-oriented" rather than "people-oriented" in their interests (many PUAs might not even be completely neurotypical).
So when we see PUAs holding cynical attitudes towards women, such as "chick crack," or talking about women as children or pets (these last attitudes are rare, but not unheard of), we should consider that they are unfairly comparing average women to themselves. When PUAs talk about women like they are a different species, perhaps it is because average-intelligence people-oriented female extraverts do seem like a different species from 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts.
If PUAs were to be interacting with women more psychometrically similar, perhaps they wouldn't experience the feelings of alienation from women that so many currently do, and which women find off-putting in their speech. Furthermore, my experience is that once I started interacting with women who weren't 1-2 standard deviations different from me on most major psychometric traits, a lot of the "problems" I was having interacting with women (e.g. not being sufficiently extraverted and dominant) suddenly vanished.
Yet I am reluctant to blame PUAs for not going after women who are like them. First, these women are harder to find, since they are introverts and less likely to go to clubs. Second, I have good reasons to believe that there are simply less nerdy women than nerdy men, for any reasonable operationalization of "nerdy." There is not a nerdy girl for every nerdy guy.
I find it perfectly understandable that PUAs are basing their models of women on the women that it is easiest for them to find, but I do wish there was a bit more emphasis on building a model of the type of woman that you want and figuring out where to find her. Day game is certainly progress in that direction, and I've also had some good results with online dating.
I'd be interested to hear them. I'm aware of the stereotype but not any evidence (other than perhaps dubious IQ data).
Other than that, your comment matches my impressions. I have in the past seen nerdy friends of mine go to bars "to meet women", and had to ask, "Why would you do that? You'll just meet women who like going to bars!"
Also, I've found that most people seem stupid, so I imagine if I were the sort of person who specifically aimed to meet lots of women, I'd likewise form the impression that most women are stupid. It seems like an easy mistake of generalization for someone with nerdy male friends and average female acquaintances to think "women are stupid"; there but for the grace of FSM go I.
Does nerdy = intelligent? Or (as I suspect) is nerdiness the only kind of intelligence of interest to most nerds?
Both.
On reflection, I'm not sure "women who are easy to find" is a such a good excuse. They haven't seen intelligent women in their families or classes?
I realize it's hard to notice things that you aren't in the habit of noticing, and I make a serious effort not to insult people for ignorance-- if you don't know something, you don't know it. Still, I wish these guys could notice that "women are stupid" is an idea which is likely to be self-reinforcing.
And it's harder to pay attention to other factors when you're in an environment which includes a lot of supernormal stimuli.
I take your last point in a somewhat different direction-- if you don't know what you want, but you're trying to build yourself a good life, you'll be over-influenced by status considerations.