Hugh, your complaint as I understand it is that society not only doesn't provide rituals which turn "dating and mating" into a well defined process with agreed upon rules, but in fact actively resists the demands of people who would use such rituals.

Dating already involves enough rules and rituals. I'm not advocating adding any more. What I want to see is more specification of how to perform under the existing rules and constraints (e.g. the constraint of the typical desires of the people you are trying to date).

Although it's often difficult to define in advance how to behave in a particular situation, it can sometimes be possible to codify the types of things to avoid, or to know what result your behavior needs to achieve, even if you must improvise how you get to that result.

Furthermore, on a more global level, it's possible to taskify the problem of learning how to date. For instance, learning how to increase your attractiveness in general, or learning how to dynamically improvise in situations of uncertainty.

I'm arguing that society is blocking problem-solving on both local problems ("what do I see when I approach the attractive stranger at this party?" or "what do I need to accomplish with the first few things I say to this person?") and global problems ("what do I need to do to develop into the kind of person who knows what to say to attractive strangers at party without even needing introspection?").

Yet when one researches the question "what are the formalized rituals of dating and mating", well, there's plenty of information out there. May I suggest that it would be wortwhile to yourself and to your readers to do the research, and report back on what you found, and then possibly point out any remaining large gaps?

What makes you think I haven't? Yes, I haven't really got specific about what exactly I think is lacking in conventional dating advice, though I might in the future if I consider it on topic for LessWrong. For now, my main topic has been an attitude about breaking down dating—and the process of learning how to date—into tasks to the extent that this is possible.

The strategy that relied on building up a social network looked a lot more appealing to me, at least in the professional domain.

One's social network is important in both business and dating. Social network is a big plus, but it isn't a prerequisite for dating.

That rather depends on the specifics of your problem statement. The "problem" of sexual encounters is at least partly taskified (think "oldest profession in the world")...

Most people do not have a problem statement that can be solved by the oldest profession.

In this context, society's enforcement mechanism is social pressure/shame. Your examples - speed dating, online dating, prostitution - are all considered more or less shameful (I know because I've seen the shamed body language of people admitting to them). This shows that society's enforcement measures are working.

The algorithm for what to do when you meet someone is simple.

As you admit, the simplicity of this algorithm is dependent on one's communication skills.

You talk about yourself and listen to them talk about themselves and ask them questions about themselves.

Interestingly, a lot of conventional dating advice insists that people shouldn't talk about themselves too much.

This is an example of advice that is trivially correct, but encourages the wrong focus. Yes, there is a danger of talking about oneself too much, but there is also a danger in talking about oneself too little.

In my experience, the best way to get someone to talk about themselves and open up is not to just start asking them questions. Instead, talk about yourself for a bit, and then ask them questions or simply shut up and they will often start talking about themselves. People tend to feel more comfortable opening up after you have shared something about yourself.

Another very common piece of dating advice is "ask open-ended question rather than close-ended or yes/no questions. Open-ended questions are great, but you can't just jump into them with someone you don't know very well, or when the conversation isn't lubricated yet.

To develop enough rapport to transition to open-ended questions, I will instead make statements, or talk about myself or what I've been up to, or I'll free associate on something in the environment. Or I will use close-ended questions! Close-ended questions are actually very powerful for several reasons:

1. You can use them to give the other person a choice to give either a short response. The type of answer I get will let me gauge how engaged the other person is in the conversation. If they aren't engaged enough to give an extensive answer, then I just keep talking, and then try another question soon.

2. You can use them precisely because they will elicit a short response. A property of many questions is that people will often give a short answer and ask them right back. You can make use of this. Pick a subject you want to talk about. Ask a close-ended question that relates to it (or I might use an open-ended question that I don't expect them to be ready to answer extensively). If they give a long answer, great, let them talk. But if they don't, they will often ask the question right back. And then you can answer the question any way you want. And when they listen to what you are saying, it will get them thinking about the subject and engaged. Then you bring in the open-ended questions and you will actually get interesting answers.

In short, for a conversation to flow, there are certain tasks that need to be accomplished:

1. The other person has to be comfortable with you, to a degree that increases with the intimacy of the conversation.
2. To talk about certain subjects, the other person needs to get thinking about them (questions like "what is your favorite music?" or "what is your type in people you are into?" are actually cognitively hard for many people to answer on the spot)

So as you can see, I agree with your advice, but I can break it down even further into the nuts and bolts of actually how to have a conversation that flows. I think about it at a much greater level of granularity because that is what has been useful for me (other people's mileage might vary). All the stuff I mention, many people already do without being conscious of it. For people who experience conversation as a problem, this greater granularity might be helpful. I'm interested in taking what is intuitive to socially-skilled people, and breaking it down into pieces and articulating it, making it accessible for people who don't currently have intuitive social skills.

For instance, I asked the question, what do you do when you end up meeting someone (e.g. from an online dating website)? Your answer was that you talk about yourself and listen to them talk about themselves and ask questions. But you skipped a step or two. A date doesn't start in the middle of conversation. It starts with saying "hi" and a few pleasantries. How do you get from there, to people talking about themselves? That's not an incredibly hard problem, but how do you do it in a strong way with minimum awkwardness, such as a long uncomfortable pause after pleasantries? Transitions between different types of conversation is a nontrivial problem for many people.

It's this level of granularity that is lacking from conventional dating advice. Dating advice typically covers certain scenarios and stages, but doesn't really discuss how to glue those pieces together and transition (e.g. when you are starting a first date, how do you go from exchanging pleasantries to starting a conversation that flows, in the minimum amount of steps and the minimum amount of awkwardness?)