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LauraABJ comments on Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks - Less Wrong
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This is an oversimplification of something very complex involving many subtle nuances. It's sorta like saying Newton was wrong because a bowling ball falls faster than a feather... What is meant by asked for example. "Leave me alone" vs "I'm just going to have to walk across that room mister," are not equivalent.
I'm sure it is, but just for the record, your explanation isn't going to deconfuse any poor male who isn't deconfused to begin with. (Perhaps you already know that.)
Well, pardon my frustration, but point of these questions is to make sense of and reveal these nuances, which is why the earlier answers you gave weren't what I was looking for.
Obviously, if a woman says something sarcastic and teasing, that's ... flirting, not a rejection. The problem cases are more common and more ambiguous. If a request for a date is flatly turned down, how do you know if it's a test, or if further pursuit constitutes harassment? If I'm ignored, is that a test, or am I beting told to go away?
It may seem clever to use this as a filter, but, as I think I've demonstrated, there are disastrous consequences to it. You can't simultaneously promote "No means No, morons!" and "I like when guys aren't deterred by rejection."
The stakes are even higher when it comes to date rape, but I'm sure as hell not going to spell out the mapping on that one.
Someone who says "I'm just going to have to walk across that room mister" or similar, is not necessarily being sarcastic/flirtatious. More generally, there's genuine uncertainty about "hard to get" plays: the best that can be said about them is that they are not solid evidence either way, although they do "up the ante", so they're not without effect from a "strategic" point of view.
Luckily, a reasonably knowledgeable guy generally has collected enough bits of evidence to make a proper decision. Nevertheless, even the most confident pick-up artist would take a statement such as "leave me alone" at face value unless there was very solid evidence to the contrary.
Most guys have the opposite problem: they are overconfident (or more rarely, underconfident) about their counterparty's interest in them, and find it hard to properly update their estimate in the face of available information. The only way around this problem is for such people to train in LessWrong-style debiasing and improve their "dating/seduction/etc." skills, as detailed in the OP. Focusing on the "nuance" of verbal statements is a mistake.
Yes.
What leads to this impression? My impression is that the majority of males are underconfident. But it may vary depending on subculture and peer group.
Tangent, but there are two different kinds of "overconfidence":
If you're 95% sure that you will not be President of the USA, then you're underconfident in the first sense but overconfident in the second sense.
The two sometimes go together in that if you believe you're better at finding out the truth than you are, you'll have more strongly peaked probability distributions than you should.
Some thread necromancy...
Not yes. I remember listening to one PUA (don't remember the name, has a strong foreign accent) say that if they tell you to go away, you should tease them about it, and not go away.
And for him, it apparently works.
Great job there, women. I just love when I can't tell if you're serious that I should go away.
Hey cowards -- you can vote me down all you want, if that makes you feel better. It still won't change the f'ed up incentive structure that results from women favoring men who trivialize of their rejections.
That is the real problem, not the fact that I'm talking about it.
Oh boy, I guess I'm one of the cowards.
I didn't downvote you for articulating an admittedly fucked up incentive structure. I downvoted you for bitterly criticizing all women because you find the behavior of some women to be inconvenient.
(Tangent: why dance around "fuck"? We all know what you meant, and I'm pretty sure this community has figured out that particular words aren't intrinsically evil.)
If you want to know what to do about the fucked up incentive structure that so irks you, it's really quite simple: don't be a dick. If you have to run the risk of ruining someone's evening or making them feel unsafe, that's really not worth a minor bump to your odds of getting laid on a particular night out.
1) It is appropriate to target women in general with this critcism. Even if they don't engage in this kafkaesque practice, they fail to criticize women for promoting it, even as they complain about the (predictable) results of this policy.
When I dislike a practice common among "my own", I criticize my own, even and especially if I'm pure as snow on that issue. That goes double for when I criticize the countermeasures that only exist because of this practice. Why should I expect any less from women?
2) It's not about what I want, or about inconviences. If the good men unilaterally disarm by following your policy, their numbers get thinned out over time, as typically happens under unilateral disarmament. Why do you consider that to be a pro-woman policy?
You're going to have to present some evidence that "good" men are systematically disadvantaged in getting relationships if you want this to be a universally accepted premise in this discussion. But if we're only speaking anecdotally, then in my experience jerks find it easier to get laid, but good men find it easier to obtain long term relationships involving children. Anyhow, if you want to bring up the betterment of the gene pool as a serious argument, then you have to prove that abusive men are at more of a reproductive advantage than they were historically.
And how do you get "unilateral disarmament" from "going away when a woman tells me to go away" anyway? What about the relationships that ensue from encounters that both partners enjoy and want to continue? Hint: the majority of healthy relationships.
Women can't change the way they behave until they're assured that behaving with assurance and aggressiveness won't penalize them socially or put them at risk of violence (since women can't back up their assertiveness with physical force). You're severely oversimplifying the issue if you think it's just a matter of women "choosing" to behave differently than they do.
I did -- the PUA I mentioned. I can cite more if you want.
That seems like an unnecessarily high threshold to meet. If a policy is destructive on its face, I needn't wait for the damage to suggest it not be done.
That's game-theoretic terminology. "Uniltareral disarmament" refers to abandoning a selfish strategy (analogous to giving up your weapons in an international conflict), irrespective of whether the other players abandon it as well. I contend that giving up the strategy of "persisting after being told to go away" is a case of UD.
Well, that's what we all wish were true and want to believe anyway. Recalling the earlier part of the thread I resurrected, there is a non-trivial number of cases of healthy relationships that originated from excessive persistence (edit: sorry, sentence wasn't complete first time around).
What? Only telling a suitor to go away when you really mean it is aggressiveness? The entire problem I'm citing is that women tell suitors to go away in more cases than they really mean (at least retrospectively). That would imply that any problem would be in the opposite direction!
I didn't say that it was. Remember, the problem I cite is not that women reject when they don't really mean it, but that they do so and also complain about men who ignore their rejections. You really can't have it both ways.
People generally treat criticisms of one's own group differently from criticisms of other groups, though which is considered to be more acceptable varies. Compare "America: love it or leave it" and the reclamation of racial slurs, for example. I generally lean more towards the latter camp because, ceteris paribus, criticisms that come from within a group are less likely to have untoward motivations.
I'm sorry, but the genetic argument is ridiculous. Even 500 years would be a preposterously short amount of time for a selection pressure this weak to have a significant effect, and I find it trivially unlikely that humans will both exist and not have mastered genetic engineering (assuming genetics are even still relevant) after we've seen another five centuries of progress.
Your argument would just as well prove that no one can criticize anyone outside their group. Surely you don't mean that? And how would it invalidate the argument? At the least, it would be a valid point to say,
"I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?"
Right?
Phrasing my point in terms of a gene pool might be imprecise, but there are relevant effects at all the relevant levels.
For one thing, the genetic effects are augmented by memetic effects. That is, it's not that there's just a "disrepect women" gene that is being selected for. It's that children will learn from their parents, even if they don't say, "Hey, you've got to ignore women who tell you to go away."
Second, there's the dating pool. If dating capability feeds on itself, then prematurely complying with a request to leave will cause the dating pool to be dominated by disrespectful men, and women increasingly believe that their only option is a disrepectful man.
So there are enough natural selection-related effects that even if you ignore the purely genetic effects -- which as you point out, are going to be minimal -- that we do have to worry about the propagation of disrespectful men as a result of respectful men not using all the effective strategies that the former use.
Just because that PUA gets women after they've told him to go away, doesn't mean that when they told him to go away they didn't mean it. It just means that he eventually changes their minds (at least temporarily). There's a Master vs. Slave thing going on.
But if they don't stick to their original rejection, then they are incentivizing (there, I finally started using that word!) the very behavior they claim to oppose.
Yes, I had earlier drawn the analogy to akrasic purchases from telemarketers. But why aren't there women who, on principle never go out with a man they rejected once, just as there are people who, on principle, never purchase a product through telemarketing / spam?
Edit: And why isn't there social pressure against going out with a man you had recently rejected, just as there's social pressure against buying from telemarketers / spam. ("You idiot! That just encourages them!")
I think Silas is actually pushing in a correct direction. I'm just not sure there needs to be a solution.
The thing is, if you're a (straight) man, it's no credit to you if you're with a woman who's a pushover. And if you're a (straight) woman, it's also no credit to you if you're with a man who's a pushover. Having a date who can stand up to you is a sign that you're a quality person -- persuasive, attractive, admirable, etc.
And as long as men are proposers and women are accepters, this means that women want men who are relentless in pursuing them, and men want women who relentlessly evade them. (Something like the Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn dynamic.)
I don't see this as a problem ... in most cases. Obviously we don't want men to threaten or attack women. And we don't want too much of a stigma against women who say "yes" right away. But, appropriately moderated, it's not a terrible dynamic. And I think we do moderate it; increasingly, people consider rape unacceptable, and consider female sexual eagerness acceptable, if a little ill-advised.
Okay, but how would men get reliable advice on which kinds of "standing up" are okay, and which kinds convert them into an evil terrorist creepy stalker guy that all women should stay away from? Or to distinguish between "stop for real" and "try harder"? And how would the existence of this advice not destroy its usefulness to women, as I warned about before?
Edit: And if there doesn't need to be a solution, that suggests I shouldn't care about date rape, stalking, abuse, etc. because this is all just the predictable result of women filtering for non-pushovers. But that's ridiculous -- surely, something needs solving.
Nah. From my experience, this matters way less to men than to women. Whether a woman "stands up to me" doesn't factor into my judgment of her as a partner. Moreover, if a woman "evades" me, this is a turn-off for me.
I think you've hit upon the root of the problem; like the other phenomena you mention, the strength of the trend seems to be diminishing.
What is your evidence that there are no such women?
Because I'm familiar with standard advice given to women, and I never see a taboo against "giving in" to continued unwanted advanced "just because you decide you like the guy now".
If you really can't reliably tell when people are being serious or not, err on the side of respecting their articulated preferences.
I think it's safe to say that the majority of women who flatly reject an offer for a date or continually ignore an advance, do NOT want to be pursued further. There are exceptions, and some people do change their minds, but if that's what you meant by 'rejection,' then No means No. Hard to get is a more complicated dance than "Will you go out with me," "Uhhh.... you're not my type. No."
But it's not nearly as simple as you just portrayed it.
I mean, we all like to feel superior as we shake our heads in contempt at the poor guy who just won't give up. She's obviously not into you, man! She told you "no". Just let it go!
Er ... until we look over there and see the women talking glowingly about how charming and romantic it was for her husband/fiance/current boyfriend to keep pursuing her even when she flatly told him no, and is now glad that he didn't take her seriously then.
Given those cases, it's quite a bit more understandable why a man would refuse to give up on such an "obvious" case.
I'm not familiar with any such cases. Are they really as common as you think they are?
Perhaps you're hearing these stories because they're exceptional?
Let's assume for a moment that these cases are exceptional. (I would in any case agree that they're not the norm, but not rare either.) Does that exceptionality not suffice to explain the commonality of overpersistent (and overcautious) men?
Of the people heading to Hollywood with big dreams, the ones that become movie stars are the exception. Yet the potential rewards suffice to explain the hordes of people who try anyway.
Of the people working up the corporate ladder, millionaire executives/VPs are the exception. Yet the potential rewards suffice to explain the hordes of people who try anyway.
Of the people trying to become professional athletes, those that can make a living at it are the exception. Yet the potential rewards suffice to explain the hordes of people who try anyway.
So the "woman who rejects firmly and later changes her mind" is the exception? So what. It's still understandable why such cases would have a disproportionate motive force.
But I supsect that if there's any bias in counting up these cases, it would understate their availability in our recollection. Remember, once the suitor has become "the good guy", the halo effect kicks in. See now, my guy never acted in contravention of the "No means No" rule. See, I didn't give a real no. My guy isn't one of those freaks who would disobey the rules we promote...
That's assuming she continues to remember her impression of him at the time of rejection in the first place.
By the way: of the people voting on my comments in this discussion, your downvotes are the exception ;-)
Actually, they largely don't. There is such a thing as overconfidence bias, you know. Most people would be better off ex-ante if they did not try to become top executives, movie stars, or pro athletes. Similarly, contraventing flat, "just say no" refusals is not a rationally optimal choice.
I know -- I didn't mean they're justified by a standard rational utility maximization analysis. The point was just that it's consistent with general overconfidence/miscalibration we observe in people in many other areas, even under the unfavorable assumptions thomblake gave.
ETA: Note that I said the incentives explain the numerous people who compete, not that the incentives justify such action. Also, I said it was "disproportionate motive force". And no, I didn't edit the original post just so it would have all that. :-P
More to the point, how do we trust these second- and third-hand stories to be reported accurately? My guess is that the "just say no" refusals were anything but, and that the stories are extremized. At the very least, the participants would have had plenty of side information which we'd know nothing about.
I know of no such cases.
I'll see your anecdotal absence of evidence and raise you another anecdote.
(Two friends of mine, who recently got married, tell just such a story.)
Me neither. But I do often hear about such cases second-hand. So even if these cases aren't common, they may have a big impact on those who witness them.
Yes you can. And that cuts back to the core of the OP.