Children of widely different ages playing together are a wonderful but increasingly rare sight. I strongly agree that age segregation within schools is a big part of the problem. But in a sense it's a subset of what I'm talking about on the scale of the whole culture. I'm not advocating a return rigid to social ritual or an overly formal system - say, the Masai cattle raid or even the Scouts. But something must be found to fill the gap. Groups and subgroups of teenagers are left to make do in a system that merely tries to keep them together, under control -- and obediently consuming junk. And the rest of us end up with a social system that mirrors High School instead of schools that reflect society as a whole.

I will have a similar policy if and when I happen to breed. As Jowibou alludes to, this means I will have to take the initiative in seeking high quality social interactions for my children myself. It may be a better option for my children but it certainly will not be easier!

(Care to share your thoughts on the subject?)

Have you found ways for them to nevertheless socialize with their peers?

Actually, some of my more intelligent friends complain that they can't find a man (that they would consider dating) that isn't threatened by their intelligence.

Now is this a social narrative, a post hoc justification of a failed relationship fueled by the self serving bias, or something else entirely?

Dating is one area of interest where anecdotage should be taken with a mountain of salt.

Thank you for your input, Laura, but you have not quoted a study that would persuade me that what I know from other study reports is false. As far as I know, extreme IQ's simply are more common among men than they are among women.

Since this is compatible with my own anecdotal experience, it is hard for me to be persuaded by your anecdotal experience, unless you can point to evidence stronger than that.

I would prefer this to be evidence that doesn't attempt to disqualify the whole concept of IQ because of discomfort with the findings of IQ studies.

Now, as for the other issues you raise, those are fun to discuss, so I'll engage, lack of scientific quality regardless... :)

"Smart girls go for successful men and not isolated introverts" is another way of saying "females are attracted to confidence and dominance", as well as "high IQ does not necessarily mean confidence and dominance". I would agree with that.

"Some of my more intelligent friends complain that they can't find a man that isn't threatened by their intelligence" probably means that those friends of yours aren't that hot. Their intelligence compels them to find a guy that's successful and at least as smart, but guys like that can get hot women, and guys prefer hot women to intelligent, but not that hot women.

I would personally not mind an extremely smart partner at all, but frankly, when one person is able to earn enough for the whole family, I do think it's more convenient for the other person to be someone who is along for the ride, rather than someone whose career will try to pull the partnership, and the family, in conflicting directions. A successful career woman would possibly do better with a stay-at-home husband, which do exist, although it's not quite the most traditional role.

just to correct a bit here, Natalie Portman apparently has a rather high IQ, her being a multilingual Harvard graduate and all... Poor example is all I'm saying, not questioning your point (yet)

AnlamK, I agree that IQ is the measure of a mere shadow of actual ability. When describing a single individual, their IQ does provide a partial indicator as to their competence, but does not even begin to describe a human being.

In more macroscopic terms, however:

(1) People with an average IQ lower than X will not be able to perform task Z which requires IQ much greater than X.

(2) Having a higher IQ than needed for task Z does not make you much better at it, but may qualify you for another job, Q, which is more demanding.

(3) Contrary to what many people think, average IQs can be compared somewhat across cultures; they can be compared somewhat to a common point of reference; and the resulting average IQ measures can differ greatly across countries. Countries that have lower average IQs do not perform nearly as well, which I attribute mainly to argument (1), above.

There are a variety of reasons I can think of that would cause people with extreme IQ's (150+) to perform randomly on average. In general, my interpretation is that the higher IQ hurts them more than it helps them. With an extreme IQ, it is hard to find an environment in which to develop social skills, and it is harder to enjoy random company. Meanwhile, there are few occupations that require such a high IQ. Instead, the most high-end occupations can be performed by people whose IQs are less extreme, but are more socially developed, and would thus be preferred for those occupations over the maladjusted extreme ones.

I would be very surprised to learn, however, that a study of subjects with merely above average IQs - rather than extremely high ones - didn't show them to have markedly improved outcomes over subjects whose IQs are below average.

A mostly static view of human potential is probably correct. If you'll agree that other animals don't have the same potential as humans because of their genetic differences, then it is far fetched to assume that there are no differences in potential among humans, too.

I used the word "manipulation" as a provocation to get across my point. Exactly those negative connotations made that provocation possible. So my use of the term "manipulation" was already a manipulation of the reader.

Although "influencing" is a broader notion, it is often too general.

Let us consider the following situation: I tell my 2 years old daughter: "Do you want me to read you a story, or you rather watch some video before going to sleep?"

This is a very common technique: focusing her attention on something pleasant in order to make her do something else I want. More sophisticated variants of the same trick work even with adults, for example this is the base of all "bait and switch" scams.

I think most people would agree: I manipulated my daughter. ("Influencing" is also true, but it sounds like a strange euphemism in this context.) Still, I did nothing wrong. "Manipulating" just means that I consciously employed some technique to modify her behavior in a way she did not perceive consciously.

One could argue that manipulation is not necessary with adults, because it is always more efficient to argue rationally, so manipulation necessarily means scam.

I don't buy that, since it could even make sense to employ mind hacks on your own future self: for example enter a situation you know you won't like just to force yourself to achieve some more important goals. I think the term "I scammed myself" does not make much sense in such a situation.

Women are great manipulators. They employ all kinds of tricks to make men, each other and children to do stuff they deem desirable while avoiding conflicts. On average, they outperform the average man in this respect by great lengths, which makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary point of view. Funnily enough, women also are attracted to manipulative men, which again, makes just as much sense from an evolutionary point of view. :)

So, when women say, they like "charming men", they really mean: "shameless manipulators". Males that can manipulate well enough to show their genes are worthy enough to be combined with theirs, (at least in this respect).

Still, this does not mean, a "shameless manipulator" has to be a jerk, evil or dehumanizing. It is simply independent. Being unskilled does not imply being ethical, just that one can inflict less harm when trying hard.

This is one aspect of partner dancing I found extremely educational: Leading skills are the parallels of this kind of seductive manipulation in a nonverbal setting. Good leaders can make beginner followers to make what they want by using a set of carefully trained tricks to exploiting her own movement and momentum and modify it subtly at the right time and place to achieve their goals. It is very similar to soft martial arts that employ the same techniques in a confrontational setting.

With that said, here's the diagram. You'll probably laugh, or deem it true, or both.

This is the coolest shit I've seen on LW in a long while. Probably about two months. You're officially my nigga, mate.

Too bad you're inactive :(

It also depends on where the woman is from.

That's a great diagram!

I'd personally move the back of the neck to the purple zone - it can be considered intimate touch.

I'd also add feet to the diagram (they're currently in white) and I'd personally colour them purple. Note that offering a foot-massage, is often a good "move" to test the waters (or even just be nice to a friend who's had a hard day).

But I fully applaud this kind of clear instruction - I like it.

No data on boko-maru? :)

Cute!!! I would note that most men are too conservative with touch in general. What you're touching is not always as important as that your touching, which immediately establishes an intimacy not achievable by mere conversation. The woman will let you know in one way or another if she wants you to stop, but she will almost never say she wants you to start, or even know it herself. Learning how to give a backrub is probably a good idea.

Nice one! True(ish). A bit on the conservative side, but that's probably what you were aiming at!

Thirded - but don't take my interest as evidence one way or the other as to whether most women would find such a thing offensive.

Now you have to show it.

Link?

I think the biggest reason that most dating advice sucks is that good advice is only possible if you actually view the realtime performance of the person and thus get an idea of what kind of mistakes they're making. Once you see what mistakes they're making, giving good advice becomes orders of magnitude easier. Then it would be called "teaching" instead of "advice-giving".

Is there anything on which the mainstream advice isn't horrible? If you look at what is said about jobs/money/education/time management/happiness/depression/weight management/virtually any personal subject imaginable, the advice is invariably counterproductive nonsense.

Disregard the mainstream society, and just enjoy your dating advantage over competition.

Do you think Flow could be applied to, e.g., piano performance?

I've experienced the state called "flow" when playing the piano, so consider this a big. fat, YES.

You are talking about the same thing I'm talking about, right?

I agree - "flow" happens to masters who have taskified the process and practiced it so many times that it becomes procedural rather than declarative knowledge.

Yeah, I think you're attempting to take over a separate concept (fluency?) with your idea of taskification. You generate tasks when you want to complete something piece-wise, and it may be valuable to break complex things into tasks for explanatory purposes, but fluency isn't based primarily on understanding the tasks as tasks, it's based on experience and, well, fluency.

I imagine her entering the classroom, glancing at the audience composed of actual average guys and going "...oh, you meant that kind of average? I had no idea such people even existed. Obviously, teaching them to approach women would be disgusting and a gross betrayal of my sex. I'm outta here."

Average guys or average single guys? The latter is lower than the former for obvious reasons.

You should actually suggest that. Alicorn doesn't seem stupid, it might produce insight.

Dude that shit had me rollllling! Props.

And it fits right into the framework. Having a smoke is a task for a human, but a problem for the alien.

I think your description of the alien with the cigarette pack highlights the fact the problem with advice often lies in the fact that it's too chunky. By that I mean the steps are described at too high a level. This can happen when there's a great difference in the levels of experience of the advisor and the advised, and the advisor has become so familiar with the processes they have been conceptually black boxed. In fact the black boxing is a necessary part of the process - you ride a bike well when you no longer think about how to ride a bike, and you socialise well when you're no longer aware of what you're doing to make your socialising successful. If the advisor doesn't realise that the advised has no idea how these black boxes work, the advice isn't worth much to him.

Damn! That's exactly the kind of vague advice that HughRistik decries.

I wasn't trying to communicate a thoroughly systematic method for acquiring social skills, so I confess that this phrase may have been a bit vague.

That said, it's English, not a formal language. "Just get out of the house" does not mean, "position yourself in some location X such that X is not a member of the subset of locations within your house."

The expression means that one should get out of the house and go to places that are conducive to some form of social interaction. Appropriate places vary tremendously from person to person, which is why the phrase is so non-specific. But if you pick some social event or scene where there are likely to be people vaguely similar to you, and you keep going to these events, there's a pretty good chance you'll meet interesting people and get better at socializing generally, if you need work at that. Hell, as long as you pick some social event where you don't actually have contempt for everyone there, and you keep going out even after things go poorly, you're probably going to do OK.

You can't expect to be a great skier the first time you hit the slopes, and if you give up because you're falling too much, you'll never even be a competent skier. You can't expect to have decent social skills if you don't make a sincere effort to socialize. I understand that, in some cases, people sincerely try, deal with falling down a lot, keep trying, and still fail. I admit I have no easy solution for that. But I think that's a pretty small minority of cases. If I'm wrong about that, please correct me.

"Get out of the house" is a totally useless piece of advice for the kind of person that needs it. Okay, I'm out of my house right now, what next?

Indeed. Get out of the house and go where?

Just for fun: "There Is Life Outside Your Apartment"

I've entertained the idea of suggesting to Alicorn that she apply her superior understanding of women to teach pickup to male students. I imagine her entering the classroom, glancing at the audience composed of actual average guys and going "...oh, you meant that kind of average? I had no idea such people even existed. Obviously, teaching them to approach women would be disgusting and a gross betrayal of my sex. I'm outta here."

It's not at all clear to me why I'd enter the classroom in the first place, unless I had a corresponding roomful of women and was going to play Yentl for my own amusement. I don't really consider myself someone with expertise in the matter! Apart from a few vague hints like my remarks about meeting people through other people, I've confined myself to ethical claims, not practical advice. My ethical claims have been peppered with reassuring remarks that they don't spell practical disaster (excessively demanding ethical philosophies tend not to be very popular), but they are still just ethical claims. I don't have that stellar of a dating history to draw on for practical help: mostly, I collect admirers through the Internet and they turn out to live far away. In terms of actually going to a physical location alone with a romantic interest on an explicitly-purposed date, I've been on two.

And so on, and so forth. "Get out of the house" is a totally useless piece of advice for the kind of person that needs it.

It's really not that bad as far as advice goes. If you get out of the house you'll get bored. Then, inevitably, you'll find something to do. Usually it will involve either other people, exercise or something that expands your cultural experience. All good steps. In fact, 'get out of the house' is rather important advice even to those who have thoroughly absorbed all the relevant mating advice. Sometimes it is easier to learn how stuff works than actually do it.

I've entertained the idea of suggesting to Alicorn that she try applying her superior understanding of women to teach pickup to male students. I imagine her entering the classroom, glance at the audience composed of actual average guys and go "...oh, you meant that kind of average? I had no idea such people even existed. Obviously, teaching them to approach women would be disgusting and a gross betrayal of my sex. I'm outta here.

All too true.

Rules of the game, yes. But also the technique by which the athlete throws a ball. He cannot describe how he throws a ball now, but he or his coaches can describe the process he went through and the drills he practiced to get to that level of unconscious competence.

The truth about it is not politically correct enough for school, there's no way this is happening.

But that doesn't explain why there isn't bad advice in school. I suspect that spriteless is correct, about diversity of parents.