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Disliking talk about PUA in a place like this is very ironic, as that's the best example of practical use of evolutionary psychology I can think of.
If we also start disliking behavioral economics as equally manipulative, we're running of real world examples.
As far as I can tell most people who dislike PUA techniques don't really understand them.
But is PUA discussed here because it's a great example of evolutionary psychology in practise, or because this is a community of mostly single men who are interested in evolutionary psychology? I find neuro-linguistic programming endlessly fascinating and would love to see a good article on it at Less Wrong, but what are the odds that it will reference* pickup artists rather than, say, Derren Brown?
*The odds that no pop cultural references will be made are low. This is Less Wrong.
I admire Derren Brown enormously for his cleverness, but he's not doing NLP (if indeed there's anything to do: an article which addressed the evidence would be good, I think). He just wants you do think he is. The bit at the end of the trick where he gleefully shows you how he did it using NLP to implant words in people's minds is itself misdirection. It's part of his act, as pretending to be psychic would have been back in the days when people kind of believed in that.
Brown: "Years ago the issue was whether or not you told people it was psychic because people were prepared to believe in psychic ability--and how far down that road do you take them. Now we're in a situation where we're into pop psychology, and NLP, all these huge industries, and people are prepared to believe in that, and maybe in a way that's the new psychic realm." The whole interview the quote came from is worth reading.
Especially since it contradicts what you just said about Brown not doing NLP. From the interview:
It struck me that the interviewer was really pressing Brown rather hard to say that things like NLP and hypnosis are shams and false, and Brown was pressing back rather hard with the idea that no, people can actually get some benefits from learning these things, they just won't be able to duplicate all my effects that way.
Of course, I've seen Brown do certain things that are pretty much straight-up, textbook NLP or hypnosis with no real embellishing. For example, confusing a woman about what color her car is - a simple submodality anchoring belief-change exercise, straight out of the NLP textbooks, with no alterations that I noticed.
And the one where he uses blank pieces of paper to pay for things as if it were money, he uses an NLP language pattern to prime the person at a critical moment with the idea that "it's good; take it". (Although I suppose you could say it's an Ericksonian hypnosis pattern; the NLP inventors certainly were among the first to document it, however.)
That having been said, quite a few things he does are not NLP at all, or at least not any cataloged NLP technique I know of.
In neither of the two cases that I just mention, did Brown draw any attention to the NLP aspect of the effects, either verbally or nonverbally. He provided no explanation at all for either, actually. (Maybe he only does it with techniques that aren't real NLP?)
Anyway, I had to very carefully view the paying-with-paper footage several times in order to notice what he was doing, as he was telling different stories each time in which to embed the "it's good, take it" message, which was always timed to occur just as he was handing them the "money".
(Of course, I also respect him for including outtake footage in the episode of him trying the trick on a suspicious hotdog vendor (whose English wasn't so good) and having it fail miserably. I'm glad he's not representing these things as working every time on everybody without fail.)
So, the context is whether it's ethical to let people believe they've understood how the tricks work when their understanding is that it's done with psychic powers or with NLP.
There's also Brown's statement in Tricks of the Mind (see the Straight Dope article on Brown and NLP) that
Given the way NLP is a "dirty word", I don't think Brown is doing whatever you find on NLP courses, or at least, he doesn't think it's quite ethical to let people think he is and as a result decide to pay for an NLP course.
Whether there's anything to NLP is a separate consideration from whether Brown uses it on stage (except that if there's nothing to it, it's obviously not how Brown does it). On the wider question of whether there's anything to it, in the section on NLP in Tricks of the Mind, he says there's some valid stuff in NLP, but he was put off actually being an NLP practitioner by attending an NLP course where there was a lot of bunk mixed in with the valid stuff.
The tricks where I've seen him "explain" how it was done using what I think of as NLP (although, as Brown says, he never uses that word) were the one where he predicted Simon Pegg's ideal birthday present (a BMX bike), and the finale of one of his stage shows, where the effect is that he predicts a word freely chosen from a newspaper which itself was freely chosen from a bunch of possible newspapers (I can't access the formerly working YouTube links for any of these, or indeed your own link, but that may be because I'm in the UK, so you might have more luck viewing them). In both cases, the "explanation" involved words hidden within sentences ("that would B-aM-Xellent present"). "Part of what I do" might mean that he does some stuff which NLP lays some claim to (telling people are lying by watching eye movements) and/or that his act includes him making it look like it was done using NLP :-)
As I pointed out above, at least one effect of his is a straight-up use of two pure textbook NLP techniques: submodality elicitation plus anchoring. Thus in at least one case, "part of what I do" refers to "the entire mechanic of the effect", while perhaps leaving out things like:
However, the actual application and result of what's shown is precisely what you'd expect from a reasonably responsive subject, in response to the demonstrated NLP procedures.
On a semi-unrelated note, if someone you don't trust to muck around with your head ever asks you the questions that Brown asks at the beginning of that video -- i.e. asking you about something that you believe and something that you don't believe -- you would probably be best off answering "no, thanks". AFAIK, even the slimiest, mind-hackiest of NLP and hypnosis-trained PUA teachers don't suggest doing something as unethical as what Brown actually did in that video would've been, if it were done to a non-consenting subject.
I did not realize that NLP was involved in that trick, probably because I know little about it past the name (suggested remedy?).
Which video?
The one I linked to in the grandparent comment, which shows Brown confusing a woman about her car color.
If you mean the paper-as-money one, that one is probably more accurately classified as a hypnosis trick using "quotes" to mask an embedded command ("it's good, take it"), although there are NLP books that explain/teach the same process. (You could consider it a form of applied priming, discovered by hypnotists and NLP people long before the modern studies of priming.)
Do you want technical/theoretical knowledge or practical applications? There are zillions of practical application books, most of which contain considerable amounts of nonsense.
Bandler and Grinder's books also contain lots of nonsense, but it's far more useful nonsense. (I think one even began by saying, "we're going to tell you lots of lies. None of them are true, but most of them are useful. And if you pretend to believe these lies, and act as if they're true, then your clients will also pretend to change. And if you pretend really well, they will continue to pretend to be better, for the rest of their lives.")
Anywho, Structure of Magic I and NLP Volume I are probably the best books for getting the fundamental ideas/theories, and Using Your Brain For A Change contains the basics of the technique Derren Brown used in the car-color-confusion video. The "quotes" pattern and embedded commands (as used in the paper-money trick) are discussed in Frogs Into Princes and Trance-Formations. (All of the above are by Bandler and Grindler, or Bandler by himself, except for NLP Volume I which is by Dilts and others.)
Hats off to you for explaining this concisely. People are overly quick to bash on NLP. I just hope they have other means to get what they want. For those who might have quickly disregarded NLP for a quick laugh: if you learn it, you will be able to do some amazing things, from gaining control over your emotional responses, to befriending people out of your league, to learning to lead groups of people, to helping get yourself in the proper frame of mind or mood for what you're supposed to be doing, such as getting in a frame of mind to work in the morning and to relax and enjoy cooking when you get home.
To avoid NLP quacks, yes there are some, do as much research on your own first and start by absorbing all the free material you can and test it and practice it. It may take a few years until you get your enhanced powers, but god damn it was so worth it for me. And many times I've sat there and watched people bash NLP and remained silent because I was happy to benefit and keep it secret how I do it... but now that I'm studying Buddhism, I've been practicing empathy and preferring to share with others how NLP can be useful... so take my words with a grain of salt and I wish for everyone, everywhere a lifetime of happy living.
Well, about fourteen lines later he starts talking about NLP again and says "I've taken NLP courses and learned some NLP" and "It's part of what I do." I do think it's all part of his act when he lets you in on the NLP "secret", but I think it's also part of the magic that he puts it out in plain view so that people say "ah, that's misdirection" and discard it. I think magicians have been using NLP much longer than NLP has been an acronym, and I think Brown uses it, along with a host of other methods. However, I think it is often mistaken for more fundamental (and tried & true) psychological techniques like priming.
Thanks for the link.
I'd love to see a detailed text on Derren Brown because the Wikipedia article about him is so intriguing.
My favourite of his shows is his Channel 4 special "Messiah". It's an extraordinary piece on confirmation bias, but worth watching purely for the entertainment value as well. Unfortunately, Brown declines to share his actual methods, although many can be inferred.
[edit] Adding to this, Brown himself is a rare phenomenon: an entertainment celebrity who promotes overcoming bias. Since he appeals to a large audience, not just those who are interested in 'magic' or psychology, I wouldn't be surprised if his shows have caused a measurable increase of critical thinking among his viewers.
I didn't get around to watching this until today, but having just finished part 3/8, I want to urge everyone to watch it and the end of part 2 as well; it was extremely moving and horrifying for me.
It didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about what must necessarily be true about irrational believers, but it gave me a more detailed and authentic set of examples than I'd imagined.
Of course, it does occur to me that some of his amazing feats may have involved a few less successful attempts that didn't make the cut - i.e. I feel like his success must be in some way exceptional or unusual (but probably it isn't).
Great recommendation. Just watched it on youtube.
ETA: I'll be sharing that video with family members that I've had fruitless discussions with in the past on psychics, alien abduction, etc.. It's too bad that his programs aren't shown in the USA and his DVDs aren't available here for purchase. I wonder why that is? Surely not lack of interest, given that there are 5 times as many people in the USA than the UK. And the greater number (proportion?) of proudly irrational people in the USA would only ensure that any such program would be that much more controversial and thus that much more lucrative.
One could also reference marketing; there are two NLP-in-advertising blogs out there that I read, for example. (http://nlplanguagepatterns.blogspot.com/ and http://nlpcopywriting.com/). Both are pretty shallow, though, compared to, say, the stuff Frank Kern does. Kern sort of is to other NLP marketers as Brown is to other NLP magicians -- i.e., he disclaims any expertise in the subject, but wields it like a master of the craft instead of like a geek fascinated by the subject.
Funny thing that. Your mention of marketing gave me an instant "ick, sleazy" reaction. Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she's coming from!
(This will be my first post on the current flamewar, which I've been hesitant to post on, for obvious reasons.)
If that's where she's coming from, it's a horribly wrong reason to exclude discussion of it. Whether or not PUA techniques repulse you, whether or not you'd be receptive to them, whether or not you intend to use them...
You do need to understand why such counterintuitive methods work, to the extent that they do in fact work. Otherwise, you have a huge hole in your understanding of social psychology, and are setting yourself up to Lose, whether your are a man or a woman.
For what it's worth, I also get a negative physical reaction from PUA discussion, though for very different reasons. I would describe it as a combination of hopelessness at my own ignorance, and refusal to accept that it could be true. In fact, the first time I'd heard about PUAs, someone referenced a related Feyman anecdote, and I rushed to look it up, and after I read it, I felt really, really, unexplainably miserable, almost giving up all hope. By itself, that almost made me fly into a rage.
But rather than ask to be shielded from this mental pain, I save the threads devoted to them, so I can process them at a later time, once I've built up the courage.
To avoid discussion of the topic on the grounds that it makes some people, even most people, feel icky, is to go against everything this site stands for.
Agreed, but there's a world of difference between a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is actively interested in applying them, and a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is interested in learning more about "the enemy".
In much the same way, there would be a world of difference between a post that gave advice on how best to convert people to Christianity, or to market the latest designer piece of crap, and a post that documented commonly used conversion or marketing techniques for the purposes of understanding how people can come to believe silly things or buy stupid products.
I accept that, in the interest of good communication, people can do a better job with their tone and emphasis when they make PUA posts.
The danger, however, is buying into this idea that you have to adhere to some vague feminist concern that can only result in good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases. While there are valid feminist concerns about objectification, this kafkaesque hypervigilance simply serves to enforce a very self-limiting mindset in posters.
It wussifies them, in other words. I believe that has been my experience, having resolved at an early age to be supersensitive to offending women. I've certainly avoided it, but it's not very conducive to leaving copies of me in the next generation.
Feminist concerns are vague and the only possible result of thinking about them is "good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases"?
I guess I can see how, if you don't understand the relevant feminist concerns, then they will seem vague, and that the effect of not really knowing what it is you're supposed to avoid could be quite frustrating. But I tend to think that vagueness, like probability, is in the mind, rather than being a property of the concerns themselves. If you do understand and appreciate such concerns, then it's usually not very difficult to avoid offending people - and even if you do end up accidentally offending someone, it's easy enough to just apologise after the fact, without it opening yet another front in the gender wars.
Maybe this means that the feminists among us need to do a better job of communicating the concerns, but it would also be nice if attempts to do so didn't result in (IMHO pretty ridiculous) accusations of "kafkaesque hypervigilance".
P.S. If trying to understand others' perspectives and attempting not to unnecessarily offend them means that I'm a wuss, then I'll wear the badge proudly. I can't speak for anyone else, but certainly hasn't affected my ability to leave copies of me in the next generation.
But the thing is, we're interested in the truth. What you or anyone else will use it for is their own business. Our goal is not to filter out topics which could potentially enable marketers to sell more crap or something.
Interesting, I don't agree with this at all. Perhaps it comes down to a difference between those of us who are most interested in truth, and those of us who are most interested in winning.
Insofar as anyone's utility function has a term for people-not-being-converted-to-Christianity, people-not-buying-loads-of-crap-they-don't-need, or people-not-treating-members-of-whatever-gender-they-happen-to-be-attracted-to-as-sexual-trophies, what others do with knowledge is their business. Which is not to say that they should somehow censor people who advocate such things; but I wouldn't expect them to sit idly by and pretend that they think these goals are all fine and dandy either.
I agree, but on the other hand, how important is the topic? We can rationally decide to lose the topic here on this ground: not everyone posting or reading has achieved perfect equanimity, but we can help them develop that quality more effectively by tricking them into thinking that we already have it (the illusion would be shattered in the type of failures elicited by each discussion of the sensitive topic).
An absolute prohibition would be ridiculous, though.
Be a rationalist and get over it, since it will inhibit your ability to accomplish "real world" goals like getting paid for your work. But more than that, it'll diminish your quality of life, by requiring you to avoid things that are just a normal part of life.
One reason I'm here is because I used to be the sort of person who got all squicked out by PUA and marketing and whatnot, before I realized that most of my "rationality" was being used in the service of justifying my pre-existing emotional reactions to things.
The thing that really opened my eyes about marketing was understanding that people want experiences, not things, and trying to get them to want what you believe they should want (vs. giving them what they actually want) is not really about being nice to them: it's just your ego talking.
This insight is equally applicable to marketing and PUA, as in both cases, the objection is, "but people shouldn't want that", whatever "that" is. Women "should" want nice guys, and people "should" want products based on their quality, instead of what makes them feel good or enhances their status or sounds more like it's specific to their goals.
But they don't. Not even the people who are talking about how it "should" be; they're just not paying attention to how they actually make buying or mating decisions at the time they're doing it. (It's easy to rationalize afterwards.)
When I first started studying marketing, I began paying closer attention to how I made buying decisions, especially in areas where I had incomplete information or was in a hurry, or focused on some goal other than obtaining the best possible product. And I saw that what I'd been reading was true: I did make decisions based on all sorts of stupid little things, like a difference in one word on the box.
Not because I was stupid or being manipulated, but because I was using the best information I had to make a decision.
Meanwhile, I was also instantly filtering out and rejecting other products, because something sent up a red flag or a question in my mind.
So marketing and PUA are both practical arts of not getting filtered, and giving people what they actually want, without injecting your own ideas of that.
I read and view PUA stuff to understand marketing better, because the best of both have one concept in common: it's called disqualification.
Disqualification means quickly turning off people who are not going to be happy with your product (or person), so as to better turn on the people who will be happy with the product (or person).
This is an inherently polarizing process, though, which is why all the people who aren't in the market for "Obeying 1 Rule Of Fat Loss" or whatever are gonna get squicked, in the same way that women who aren't attracted to the confidence of a man who says he has 30 girlfriends and she can only be his if she's not jealous are going to be squicked by the very idea of it, let alone the actual experience of it.
This is also probably related to the "fandom requires something awful" concept. If you're not willing to turn people off, you'll be forced to dilute your signal to the people you actually want to reach.
That doesn't mean you're going to be perfect at it, of course. I'd prefer it, for example, if my "signal" were accessible to a few more people at LW than it is (notably EY), and I've made some minor tweaks for the LW audience in general. But I'm not going to change it significantly, because the most vocal parts of LW do not always correspond to the parts of LW that enjoy or are informed by what I write... any more than EY is going to change his style to attract religious people, just because Robert Aumann believes in God.
I've noticed several instances of "that's so gross and low-class" signaling at LW, and agonized over whether it was worth pointing out (that it's signaling). I don't claim that the internal gross-out feeling is affected; I have had similar reactions all by myself, especially to pumped-up motivational speak on e.g. pjeby's site.
I've decided it's still a valid signal, so I won't be bitching about it when I see it, and I'll continue to express disgust at trashy (even if effective) persuasion (I'm so sophisticated!), but I'll try to moderate my actual feelings of revulsion, so (I hope) I can evaluate the content more accurately.
Relevant post. There is a huge difference between marketing communications which is the garden-variety sort of marketing you're talking about, and marketing research, which is about giving people the things they'll want to buy. (And not just what they say they want to buy, but what they'll actually put cash down for).
Neither of which is, of course, the same thing as what they'll actually enjoy the most.
I am extremely leery of rationalism being used as a reason not to feel things.
I would just like to say that among the things most likely to make me want to scream at someone is when they try to give me what they think I want, or what they would want, or what most people superficially similar to me want, instead of what I tell them I want. In words. Out loud.
And I'm extremely confused by your reference here to my post, which was an attempt to illustrate the dangers of allowing your thought process to be driven by your emotions, and to illustrate a tool for identifying whether that is happening (i.e., observing somatic markers).
When I say "get over it", I don't mean "don't pay attention to your feeling", I mean, "pay careful attention to this signal you aren't thinking or behaving rationally, and do whatever it takes to change your thinking in such a way that the feeling does not arise in the first place."
That is, when you can think about the subject in question without the somatic marker of "ick", then you will know you've successfully removed whatever cached thought was making you feel that way. The "ick" does not exist in outside reality, it exists solely in your mind and body, and any attempt to justify it as existing in outside reality is prima facie bottom-line reasoning. That is, irrational.
Wow. That post was particularly hard to read, but somehow I got the impression it was about quite the opposite.
Emotions are powerful tools, and should not be undervalued.
It said that your emotions control your thought process. It didn't say that was a good thing, it said it was a fact.
Nor are they to be used inappropriately. Negative emotions in lasting doses are likely harmful to your health, as well as to your rationality. Depressed people aren't thinking rationally.
Huh?!? Seriously, marketing seems sleezy to you but PUA doesn't? To each his own I guess.
I really agree with pjeby below though.
Cousin It lives in Moscow, where people tend to have a different take on free-market institutions such as speculators, middlemen and (as now appears likely) marketing.
Nah, I like free markets. My negative impression is more of an intellectual aversion to the output of Western marketing gurus like Seth Godin.
Cousin It has "an intellectual aversion to the output of Western marketing gurus like Seth Godin".
Godin seems pretty icky to me too. [Paul Hawken's book Growing a Business][1] had some nice insights into marketing.
I recently unsubsribed from Godin's feed after a sequence of particularly atrocious posts.
clientk writes about marketing, but in a pleasant and often insightful manner.
I'm not even sure what relevant difference there is, the fundamental character of both seem pretty much identical to me.
I'm curious why you have such different reactions to the two.
50/50. I think Derren Brown has been mentioned the same number of times as PUA; it's just that the latter threads are longer and less pleasant. Google doesn't make it look like a lot, though.
I don't think Eliezer is saying he doesn't like PUA techniques, but rather that the way they're brought up here can make women feel like they're not part of the intended audience - hence the Frank example, which shows a situation where those techniques could be discussed without giving off that impression.
Yup. Is there somewhere in the PUA literature where they tell you to, you know, notice the way women react to your speech? We're not talking about slavish adaptation here. We're talking about noticing.
Yes, it's called "social calibration", and from the way teachers go on about it, I gather it's one of the most difficult things to teach to someone who doesn't have it. By default, people pay more attention to their projections of what other people are thinking about what they're doing, than they are to either what they're actually doing, or how people are actually reacting to it.
Of course, social calibration is even harder in a purely textual environment, especially one where it's easy to mistake one's conversation for a one-on-one interaction with the person you're directly replying to. Here, it can be almost as if you're having a nice little person-to-person chat in a noisy club, and then all of a sudden, the music goes quiet just as you're yelling (to make yourself heard to the person next to you) some embarassingly out-of-context thing , and then everybody's staring at you...
I don't want to have to be socially calibrated on LW.
Social calibration for the seduction community has a very simple rule about talking about pick-up techniques: don't do it, except with other trusted members of the community. If someone outside the community brings it up, just don't mention it, because society has conditioned them to start going into a feminist death-spiral about it.
So if I follow that rule, I will just have to not mention it here.
That seems awfully close to "I want to act like an asshole on LW and not care what effect it has on anyone else". I hope that if you do then you'll get voted into the ground.
I think that holding a belief of the form "You mustn't admit to X outside our inner circle, because the unenlightened have been conditioned by society to hate and fear it" should be treated as a warning sign that one might have been sucked into something unpleasant. I expect the members of various cults have similar rules.
(Of course, sometimes it might be perfectly correct; see, e.g., Paul Graham's essay on what you can't say. But my guess is that such occasions are outnumbered considerably by ones where the reason why you'd get in trouble for saying X in public is because X is stupid or unpleasant or something of the kind, and people who haven't been desensitized to it will notice.
Fully general counterargument against any unpleasant truth.
That sentence wasn't an argument. The two paragraphs containing the sentence do constitute an argument or something like one; they are not "fully general" in any sense that seems problematic to me. The most one can say is this: they claim that if a proposition is socially unacceptable to state then it's less likely to be true. I'm happy to stand by that: I think "unacceptable" propositions are less often true than "acceptable" ones. Do you really disagree with that?
Incidentally, I wasn't primarily thinking of X as being a proposition but as a behaviour or an attitude. I bet that among, say, politicians, advertisers, tobacco company executives, television evangelists, there are common habits or ways of thinking that "of course we wouldn't mention in public -- they wouldn't understand". And that neither you nor I would be keen to defend those habits or ways of thinking, even if we're pretty sure we do understand them.
For the avoidance of doubt, let me repeat something I already said. Of course, some "unacceptable" ideas, behaviours and attitudes are in fact perfectly sensible and are unacceptable only because of silly social traditions or whatever. I claim only that such unacceptability is a useful warning signal.
Apt simile. Noted for posterity.
I can't tell whether your comment was sarcastic or sincere. If the latter, the answer is: yes, oh yes. PUAs devote a lot of effort to reading female responses. But you aren't going to appreciate this noticing when you see it up close. Example (don't click, this is my last warning): Doggy Dinner Bowl Look.
Most people here don't understand them because they have this model in their mind that if you treat an attractive woman nicely, try to respect her desires and needs, perhaps compliment her, with the internal attitude that women should be "respected" she will respond in kind by respecting your desire to have sex with her.
They never test this model by going to a bar and trying to use it to achieve the goal of sex with an attractive woman. I know this, because if they had tested it even 3 nights in a row, they would have discarded it as "broken". I would love to go out into the field with 10 guys from LessWrong and alicorn to coach them, and watch them get rejected time after time by attractive women.
I would write a top level post explaining the techniques, the PUA model of the generic male-female interaction, the predictions it makes, and how you can go out and collect experimental evidence to confirm or disconfirm those predictions, but I think that I would not get promoted (no matter how good the post was from a rational perspective, measured in bits of information it conveys about the world) and not get much karma, because people here just don't want to hear that truth.
Do PUA techniques withstand the woman's reflection? Once made aware, do they acknowledge the effectiveness and accurately reaffirm their interest independently of the technique's effect? If incredulous, is her attention held after a demonstration on another woman?
If the answer is yes, that does a good deal in converting PUA from a ("dirty") trick (like Fool's Mate, in chess) into a valid strategy (like Sicilian defense). If you could demonstrate valid strategies, you'd get a lot more karma out of the effort.
For PUA styles described as "inner", "direct" or "natural" game, the answer is yes, since they all focus on making the man actually have attractive qualities (such as honesty, confidence, social connections, and emotional stability), rather than simply presenting the appearance of these qualities.
It's rather like "How to Win Friends and Influence People", in that respect. (Whose advice is to cultivate a genuine interest in other people, as opposed to merely faking an interest in other people.)
I missed most of the PUA stuff, so bear with me a bit. Does "honesty" include averred intention? Does the "natural" style promote the mutual and explicitly acknowledged one night stand associated with PUA, or does it foster a "Relationship Artist"?
Have discussions of the "inner" style conjured "ick" factors? Would continued discussions be frowned upon? (If yes, I think this is a more fruitful area for dissection.)
Yep.
Different teachers promote different things. Daniel Rose, for example, says that one-night stands are stupid because you can't get the same physical or emotional intensity that you can with a longer relationship. Soporno doesn't seem to have an explicit duration preference, but implies that most of the women in his circle have been there for years, and that those who left because they thought they found "the one" are always welcome to return.
But now I'm sitting here repeating stuff that really should be in a FAQ. You should probably just search for my previous comments about these teachers, or perhaps just google their stuff directly; my comments are based on free materials of theirs, as I don't actually spend any money on pickup stuff. I just read it for the articles, so to speak.
I think most of us here have had at least some exposure to the PUA worldview and a sizable fraction (including me) feels quite sympathetic to it. That said, I wouldn't want to see a toplevel post introducing the basics. There's already plenty of good introductory material elsewhere on the 'net, a couple clicks away. Our site will interest me more if it follows the general direction that Eliezer and Robin initiated at OB, not getting overly sidetracked into applied rationality topics like pickup, marketing or self-help.
The subject definitely deserves a few top posts, considering how important it is, and how many misconceptions there are.
You get positive expected karma for almost every kind of activity, and karma doesn't make much difference anyway, so I don't know why you're concerned about it.
I suspect that efficiency is not necessarily the reason that many dislike PUA techniques. Personally, I don't particularly doubt that there are patterns for how women react to men (and vice versa), and that these can be used to have more sex. On the other hand, spiking people's drinks or getting them drunk can also be used for the same purpose, and that's commonly known as rape.
Sure, there are ways to hack into people's minds to get them to do what you want. The fact that they exist doesn't make them ethically acceptable.
Now, I don't know whether PUA methods are or aren't - but the fact that "the attitude that your partner should be respected" is seen as a negative thing seems to be pointing pretty clearly towards the no direction.
Right. But now we have an ontological problem: "hack into someone's mind" and "not hack into someone's mind" are not natural kinds.
In any social, romantic interaction, there is some degree of mind-hacking going on. When a person spends all their time and energy chasing a member of the opposite gender who is not interested, what has happened is mindhacking. The pain of unrequited love is a result of asymmetric mindhacking.
Love itself is symmetric mindhacking: you have hacked her mind, and s/he has hacked yours, and both of your implicit utility functions have been shifted to highly value the other person.
What the Seduction community seeks is to allow men to create an asymmetric situation to cause a woman to have sex with them (and this is a place where some members of the community really do behave like assholes and not let the woman down gently afterwards, a practise know as "expectation management", though the community has built up a tradition of karma: we ostracise men who break the rule of always managing expectations and leaving the woman in a happier state than when we met her).
The other major goal of the community is to allow the man to create a symmetric situation - which is usually achieved by first creating an asymmetric situation (male strong), and then gradually evening it out by allowing yourself to fall in love with the woman.
Women who have been "screwed and left" by pickup artists feel good about themselves more often than one would naively expect - and this surprised me until I realized that if the PUA has demonstrated enough alpha quality, the woman's emotional mind has classified him as "good to have sex with even without commitment" because alpha-male sperm is so evolutionarily advantageous - if you are impregnated by an alpha male then your male descendants will have whatever alpha qualities he has - and will impregnate other women, spreading your genes.
I'll also say that insofar as women think that PUA "mind-hacking" techniques are black-hat subversions of female rationality, the most obvious solution I see is disseminating more information about them. Knowledge of these techniques would allow women to at least attempt to "patch" themselves, assuming they are open to the idea that they actually work.
For example, say I learn about negs. I can either think, "Oh good, it's fun to be attracted to guys, so I hope guys neg me effectively," or "I think it is immoral to neg girls, the world would be a better place if guys didn't do it, and individual guys who neg are probably not worth my time, therefore I will avoid them even if their techniques work and I find myself attracted to them."
Either way, I think I'm better off knowing about negs and how they work. (Apologies for a not very nuanced view of the neg, but it's not that relevant to my main point.)
I realized after I wrote this comment that I think learning about PUA is an excellent exercise in rationality for women in general and me specifically, since it exposes areas where I have in the past not always been aware of the reasons for my decisions.
I could see how women who believe themselves to be immune to PUA (perhaps because the are in fact immune), would not find the topic as interesting.
No! NO! NO!
Your long-term partner should be your soulmate, with a high degree of mutual trust and respect. But a woman who you have not yet had sex with is simply not going to respond well to you "respecting" her.
I think that some people will easily misread your comment as implying that men should not respect women early in the interaction.
My guess is that you are actually trying to say something different, based on your use of "respect" in quotes: You are saying that women may not respond well to attempts by men to signal respect.
If you are saying the second thing, then I agree: it is important to hold respect for the other person at all points in the interaction, yet certain ways that society encourages men to signal respect are counterproductive and unattractive.
Actually, people in general will be creeped out or think you're of lower status if you're too easily impressed, i.e. offer too much "respect" before they feel they've earned it. It's got nothing to do with gender, except insofar as low status-ness is unattractive.
You can always write it up on another blog and link to it here. I'm sure many people would follow and comment on it there. I'd certainly be interested in what experimental evidence you propose to collect in order to really confirm or refute the predictions of the theory.
What about women who dislike PUA techniques, them too?
Women are basically anosognosiacs about pick-up. In fact, I once discussed the efficacy of PU with a woman, and she started insisting that women couldn't possibly be that stupid. I had to remind her that she'd left her long-term boyfriend for a fling with afellow PUA a few months earlier.
Some women aren't. I know because I'm one of them. I've already commented on this subject, and my views haven't changed much since then.
While I'm open to the idea that discussing PUA on LW is a net loss, selfishly I want the discussion to stay because I find it fascinating. Since I know it works on me, learning about it helps me understand myself better and make more informed choices.
Personally, I think controversy is more interesting than not. The internet keeps proving this over and over again. So if you want to attract more females, KEEP TALKING ABOUT THEM.
Getting offended is one way to get started on a rationalist path because it evokes an emotion. It evokes an inner-conflict. Which can result to greater self-understanding. Offending people is fine. Since it reflects more badly on the offensive person than on the offended person. It might even reflect badly on this community as a whole, but hey, if it gets people to start thinking, what's so bad? If it gets women to understand something about themselves? What's so bad?
However I would try to balance it out by ALSO examining men in such a way. There's a lot of literature on PUA, and it is actively discussed here. Why not just find proven methods for attracting men and discuss them also? In a rationalist fashion, of course. If it offends the men on the site, then... all the better. Men need a wake-up call, too.
The topic of PUA seems to suffer from the Streisand effect around here. Mentioning reasons people shouldn't talk about it gets people talking about it, as evidenced by this now quite long, and expanding, thread, and most of the previous threads as well.
I deleted my initial comment here since I didn't want to contribute. Now I'd say to others that non-engagement may be a better strategy.
Rather than non-engagement, I would advise dependency management: if there is a topic we find it difficult to inquire into, switch priorities to observing and discussing why we find it difficult to have the object-level discussion.
I think I can solve the mystery: people keep bringing up PUA because they like thinking and talking about sex and things related to sex.
The only reason it "appears to be relevant" is this weak relationship to dark side epistemology that everyone keeps mentioning. But I haven't seen a 'dark side' discussion, separate from sex, in a long while.
If politics is the mind-killer, then what is an even more fundamental drive?
I believe it was originally brought up in a discussion about instrumental rationality - applying rationality to achieve concrete goals rather than as empty discussion. It was in the same vein as Alicorn's luminosity sequence (applying rationality to improve life outcomes) as opposed to the more abstract discussions over things like Newcomb's problem.
If rationality is supposed to be about winning then it should be possible to use rationality to improve outcomes in areas of life that you place value on. Most humans place high value on sex and relationships and so instrumental rationalists will often be interested in applying rationality to improving outcomes in these areas. Do you disagree with some part of that line of reasoning or is it simply the specific approaches of 'game' that you disapprove of?
I think sex is worse than politics when it comes to mind-killing.
I think the key question is the difference between visitors and regulars - we'd like more people to be active, not just show up. Does controversy actually bring in all that many people who stay?
P.S. Welcome to Less Wrong! Please feel free to introduce yourself in that thread.
Valid concern. I don't know how to get more people active, but it couldn't hurt to get more people aware of this community.
The more people you attract, the more likely some percentage of those people will continue to becoming active, contributing members. Everyone starts out as a visitor. Only a few of those end up becoming regulars. If you get more visitors, your regulars proportionally should rise.
Contrariwise, the worse a first impression you leave, the fewer visitors will remain long enough to become regulars. It is not a priori obvious which effect is the stronger.
I think you're assuming that the things you like will work across a wide range of people.
Speaking as a woman who posts to LW, I'm not especially interested in PUA being discussed here unless there's some consideration of consent issues. Those consent issues actually have some parallels to FAI problems-- who decides whether someone is better off? By what standards?
I would say that the equally offense-laden parallel for PUA would be methods for getting men to commit. I don't know whether they've been as carefully studied as PUA--- at a minimum, it's a harder subject because the cost of experiments is higher.
There's an optimal level of controversy and offense for individuals (not necessarily the same for interest and for learning), and it probably isn't the maximal level.
Because PUA comes off as dividing women into hackable systems and not worth hacking. If it's too accepted, it can make it seem as though talking to you isn't worth the trouble.
"Talking about women" isn't enough. How they're talked about matters.
This is a really interesting point, actually. What is about PUA that makes it more concerning from a consent standpoint than, say, advertising? Both are manipulative, and I see considerable parallels between the two. (I find it hard to believe that the big advertising firms have put less effort into figuring out how to get people to do things than pickup artists have...) Should advertising to someone require their consent? Is there a significant difference between product placement in entertainment media and PUA techniques that are based on normal conversations, as opposed to PUA techniques based on being in a traditional picking-up-dates scenario, which seem more like standard commercials? What does consent even mean in the context of situations like PUA or advertising where the point of the manipulation is to get you to say yes? Is it even possible to require consent to that kind of thing, without just pushing the problem back a level and having the manipulators focus on getting you to give your consent to be advertised/PUA'd to?
You're considering whether advertising is problematic and/or should be legal without looking at whether people on the receiving end of advertising want it or benefit by it.
If someone wrote in Less Wrong about successful techniques of advertising, and said it must be a good thing because people buy what's advertised, I don't think it would go over entirely well.
Even before I'd read Rain's comment, I was willing to bet that most LWers limit their exposure to advertising-- not so much for political reasons or for fear of it, as just that it's low information repetitive input. I admit I'm generalizing from myself on this one, though it's worth noting that even the general public tends to avoid tv ads if they can.
One thing that's clear from the akrasia and luminosity discussions is that not everything in people's minds can be relied on to make their lives better. It's reasonable to be concerned about inputs from people who are trying to influence your mind and have specific goals which do not include your welfare.
In the case of PUA, saying that some women like that approach (which is true), or that PUAs mean well (which is neither trustworthy [1] nor relevant) substitutes for a general follow-up on how women who've been PUAd perceive the experience later,.
At this stage, advertising may well be less effective than PUA-- for most things, it isn't personally directed. A small story-- I know a person who used to sell stuffed dragons, and she said she sold them by finding the little part of the potential customer which wanted one ot the dragons, and (by implication) getting that part of the person to make the decision. She didn't see any problems with that, but I later met someone who wouldn't go near that woman's table because of being afraid of getting talked into buying a dragon she didn't want all that much.
Even if the sales effort had been more carefully constructed so that anyone who bought a stuffed dragon would not be capable of regretting it, there would be more consent issues, not fewer.
If advertising becomes that effective, I don't know how this should be addressed legally or philosophically. I do think there are problems.
[1] Some PUAs start from a position of resenting women for turning them down.
I don't think this holds true for me. I am somewhat selective about what advertising I attend to but I don't in general limit my exposure to it and I sometimes actively seek it out.
I tend to skip over adverts when viewing TV on my PVR because they are of low average quality, high density and are generally interrupting something I was actually interested in. On the other hand I will sometimes watch adverts that catch my attention when skipping through either because they are visually interesting or because they are providing information about something I am interested in.
There are a variety of adverts that I don't avoid and may actively seek out. These include movie trailers for films I might be interested in watching, adverts that are notable for clever or dramatic visuals and adverts for products I am interested in purchasing. I'm interested in visual media in general and so find both filmed adverts and commercial photography interesting from that standpoint when the quality is high. I have purchased a number of DVD collections that include the advertising works of directors - many of todays most interesting film directors started out in advertising and music videos (which are a form of advertising). I also have photography books that include commercial photography.
In the age of the Internet there is a blurred line between advertising and product information and I'm not uncomfortable reading information in the blurred area, though I prefer clear disclosure of any commercial interests driving the material. I quite happily use a manufacturer's website as one source of product information for products I am considering purchasing though and I also find that third party reviews can be valuable even when it is disclosed that the product was provided free to the reviewer or that there are other reasons to treat the opinions provided as not entirely unbiased.
In general I find advertising less problematic in terms of bias and manipulation than political speech or much journalism (which is very often just lightly disguised political speech).
At the risk of being seen standing up for low-status males, I feel obliged to point out that that's not incompatible with "meaning well".
It's not incompatible with meaning well, but I wouldn't recommend taking their word that they aren't doing harm.
In the case of women using beauty-enhancing techniques (high heels, push-up bras, make-up, hairstyling), saying that some men like that in women (which is true), or that women mean well (which is neither trustworthy [1] nor relevant) substitutes for a general follow-up on how men who've been allured perceive the experience later.
At this stage, advertising may well be less effective than sexy attire on women -- for most things, it isn't personally directed. ...
If advertising becomes that effective, I don't know how this should be addressed legally or philosophically. I do think there are problems.
[1] Some women start from a position of resenting men for not caring more about their personality.
I'm not sure that many would object to this analogy. It strengthens the case that sharing PUA techniques isn't an appropriate use of LW, just as sharing beauty-enhancing techniques isn't.
It seems to me that the situation is pretty simple, for PU artistry as well as for advertising. Most PUA techniques that I've seen amount to efforts to persuade using Dark Side Epistemology. Bottom-lining is rampant. For example, with "negging", the PUA starts with the bottom line "You should feel self-conscious and insecure", and then seeks only evidence that supports this conclusion.
Such PUA techniques should be discussed like any other Dark Side methods: with a view towards minimizing their use and effectiveness.
I can't say that I've ever seen women make as general claims for benevolence and good general effects for dressing up as I've seen made for PUA.
Afaik, woman either say they have fun doing it, and follow up with what's wrong with that?, or they say they're pushed into it because men want it. They don't say they're making men better off even if men say they don't like it.
Also, (and this may be more interesting than the above), being resentful about women dressing up isn't a mainstream modern point of view. It's common in a number of religions and also showed up in communist China.
There are some PUA techniques, at least, which only work on people who are not aware of them. There's this funny passage in The Game which discusses how one group of guys is preemptively spoling another group's pick-up lines at a party, and later on something along the same lines happens to the protagonist (it would be spoilerish to give any more detail).
By contrast I doubt that advertising agencies would suffer much if their techniques were exposed; the reason Avatar was so successful, I surmise, is simply that they saturated the public's awareness with it, which only required a large cash outlay.
"Techniques which only work against you because you're not aware of them" is one of the reasons for the PUA's bad rap, I suspect. (There are others, such as insincerity, but that'll have to be for another time.)
This sounds intuitively like a good heuristic, but the underlying logic isn't obvious to me. Can you expand?
Assume that when someone finds out about a technique, they judge whether they think it ought to work on them or not, and adjust their behavior accordingly. If a technique doesn't work when the subject is aware of it, that usually means that they would decide, for some reason, that they don't want it to work. So if a technique works only when the subject is unaware of it, then using that technique is going against their preferences.
FWIW, it's the increasing frequency of such events occurring that has forced the evolution of "natural" methods, which aren't vulnerable to such revelations. (Since they attempt mainly to modify the male's personality and expressiveness, rather than teaching him ways to manipulate.)
"My opinion is that LW shouldn't be for PUA/beauty tips or how-to's. But it would be appropriate to discuss why these methods work, under what conditions you'd want to resist them, and what countermeasures you can take. (And I suspect some don't even want it to go this far, or want to restrict PUA more than beauty.)"
To clarify, I was promoting discussing PUA under this context, not FROM THE LENS of a working PUA. Certainly Pickup Artistry should never be actively encouraged on this site - there are way too many sites that handle this better than this one. But to discuss PUA from an observer's lens - discuss its merits and its pitfalls - I don't see why this type of discussion would drive individuals away unless the majority of the discussion turned into nonsense.
I think discussing PUA is going to attract a lot of individuals, and the right kind of individual. As long as the community continues to discuss this highly controversial topic in a rationalist manner, then other would-be rationalists are going to be find that unique and hopefully interesting. It's when controversial topics are viewed in a rationalist light that you truly shine a beacon declaring, "We are mindful. Not mindless."
If the discussion truly devolves then it should be a banned topic.
Well, whether it's been researched or not, it's certainly being sold:
On a side note... I actually was at a conference where the guy who writes the sales material for the above products discussed the psychology of their advertising methods for using women's fears of "dying alone" to drive sales, as an example for how to identify and exploit irrational fears in general.
So yes, advertising is definitely researched at least as much as PUA, especially by PUAs-turned advertisers. ("Christian Carter/Catch Him And Keep Him" is a brand owned by the same company that owns "David DeAngelo/Double Your Dating" -- both are character/stage names, like "Sara Lee" or "Ronald McDonald". And the names are alliterative for reasons that were also discussed at that conference...)
People in general often misstate their preferences, or their behavior fails to match it. According to research summarized on my blog, both men and women do this, and women on average just do it more.
From Urbaniak, G. C., & Kilmann, P. R. (2006). Niceness and dating success: A further test of the nice guy stereotype. Sex Roles, 55, 209-224. (emphasis mine):
From the Sprecher article:
Thanks for that study!
Have you ever learned a useful fact from the PUA discussions here?