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I have never encountered or heard of this behaviour. I would be rather startled if someone I had just met asked me to buy them a drink. I'd guess they were too poor to get their own (and with all respect to poor people, my interest in pursuing a relationship with them would substantially diminish).
I can understand your explanation, but I would find an opposite explanation just as plausible (they are trying to determine if the cost of a drink is a mere trifle to you, hence buying them one = good).
Is this a culturally specific thing? Where is this action, with this meaning, a standard pattern of behaviour?
Indeed, this pattern seems totally strange to me. While on the dating scene, if a woman brazenly asked a man to get her a drink, I would consider it a test to see if he can handle assertiveness. That is, if he is fun and easy-going. If he said no, I would think she could consider him either not interested in her enough to part with a few dollars AND too cheap to satisfy a small request, or insecure about his status in the company of a woman. Hopefully, he would say yes, and they could enjoy a drink together.
Do men really say, 'no, I won't' and find success with that??
[Apologies for the editing and then un-editing; I commented naively and then realized I'm kind of over my head here with the inferential distance; culture and values-wise. I think things have changed since I was dating, or I noticed different things.]
The above is correct but this part would depend a lot on how the "no" is delivered:
The real status test is about whether he considers his company to be as valuable as hers. If he complies with the request (without any quid pro quo), then he's ceded her the higher social status -- which was what the question was testing (either intentionally or unintentionally), in the common case.
Declining the request, reversing it (you buy me one), or insisting on a quid pro quo, are the only ways to maintain equivalent or higher status in the interaction (absent an ongoing equal relationship wherein the quid pro quo is assumptive). Also, skillfully handling any of these options raises the observer's estimate of your social coprocessor's power rating as well. ;-)
There are a wide variety of context-sensitive ways to decline or redirect such a request, depending on the situation and level of rapport of the conversation... from the polite to the downright rude, all of which can be functional if delivered with confidence. But certainly, "fun and easygoing" no's are possible.
(For example: pretending to misinterpret the request as an offer, eg. "Oh, yes please. That's very kind of you. I'll have a..", a playful, "Oh? And what are you going to do for me?", or even a humorous, mock-offended and effeminately-voiced, "Hmph! What kind of boy do you think I am? Are you trying to get me drunk and take advantage of me?")
As thomblake points out, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"contains his story of finding out this counterintuitive fact - although the specific story involves calling a woman "worse than a whore" for getting him to buy $1.10 worth of sandwiches. She then proceeded to pay him back the $1.10... and then came over later to have sex with him.
In Feynman's second story, he asks “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?” -- and gets a "yes".
Amusingly, the "Player Guide" (an open-source guide for beginning PUAs) isn't quite so bold - it only recommends asking for a french kiss as the quid pro quo. ;-)
Of course, all of these anecdotes and advice are subject to selection bias - i.e., to the mostly-NT women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks. My guess is that most non-NT women don't ask guys to buy them drinks unless there's either an ongoing quid pro quo (i.e., "I'll buy the next round"), or they've consciously chosen to exploit the social dynamic for financial/alcoholic gain.
tl;dr: a man is generally best-off treating a request for a drink as a test to determine whether he has low enough self-esteem to believe he needs to pay for female company, and an opportunity to display an unruffled and socially-skillful response.
Hang on half a second here. No more than 1% of Americans are autistic. (CDC estimates 1 in 110.) Autism is four times as common among males as females. This whole "NT" vs "non-NT" thing you're talking about is distinguishing 99.75% of women from 0.25%. I think this may be misguided. There are way more women who don't ask to be bought drinks than that.
I didn't say that (most NT women) (ask men for drinks), I said (most women who ask men for drinks) are NT.
Given your statistics, this would be expected even if half of all women asked men for drinks, because then you'd have half of 99.75% of women being NT+drink.asking and half of .25% being non-NT+drink.asking.
That being said, I do not assume that non-NT-ness requires actual autism or even diagnosable Asperger's. High intelligence alone (IMO) qualifies one for being neurally "atypical" in my book.
Ah, I misunderstood (I've only ever heard "NT" to refer to "not autistic.")
You're quite right, technically; I perceived an implication the other way as well but you may not have meant that.
Personality is a factor, not just attractiveness. Women who are some combination of the following don't engage in testing like this, or are less likely to do so:
Sweet, sensitive, nerdy quiet types of both genders just don't like status games very much, and they tend to be bad at them.
The standard PUA model focuses a lot on women who do engage in testing and status games, because they tend to disproportionately encounter women who play them. This is understandable, but flawed.
I expect that women who match one or more of your bullet points are less likely to be the most eye-catching.
I suppose that's true.
My confusion with this whole business is quantitative. The assumption in Roko's drink-buying model is that this is the right way to interact to attract the kind of women his audience would be interested in. That's a statement of probability. It's likely that you'll be going to bars to meet women, it's likely that any women you're interested in engage in shit-testing, it's likely that any women you're interested in respond the way the girls in the Feynman story do. I'm really not sure about that.
There are, as I mentioned, very, very few autistic women. So Roko and Nancy lump in the less attractive women. Fine, in principle. I'm still not convinced that a typical straight male LW reader won't find, in his dating pool, quite a few women who don't behave like the prototypical chick in a PUA parable. I only have anecdotes, of course, but I and most of my female friends and family members don't behave like that. We hit a lot of HughRistic's bullet points. And we've stumbled into our fair share of good relationships.
In other words: I think nerdy women are pretty numerous, far too numerous to be diagnosable autistics, and do just fine on the dating market. And I suspect the typical straight male LW reader wouldn't mind dating one.
Actually, it's a statement of conditional probability, conditioned on a woman asking a man for a drink in such a setting, often as a prelude to having any conversation at all.
(It's not, however, a great example of a cacheable response. Really, the whole point of it as a status/social skill test is that it is hard to fake!)
Anyway, here's the reasoning: if a man is asked for a drink, it may or may not be a test, conscious or unconscious. However, in all possible cases, the man is highly likely to improve the situation by skillfully declining or negotiating a quid pro quo, because the situation is still a signaling opportunity, even if the woman's attraction wouldn't have decreased upon acquiescence. (In other words, you either win, or don't lose - a positive expected outcome over multiple trials.)
For example, let's say it's one of those "nerdy women" -- she is not fishing for a drink, not consciously testing, and (probably) not unconsciously testing, but maybe has been taught that this is how you signal openness to being courted, or just doesn't think about it at all.
Well, in that particular case, it's an opportunity for a signal like, "Not a feminist, huh?" -- probably leading to a thought-provoking conversation about feminism, chivalry, and the impact of social trends on dating behaviors...
A conversation that wouldn't have happened if the response was a bland, "okay". If he'd simply agreed without further comment, maybe he wouldn't have lost any points, but he certainly wouldn't have gained any either -- he has simply failed to distinguish himself from any other man who lacks the social skill to finesse the situation. He is out a drink, and gets nothing except (maybe) the continuation of the conversation... assuming that her attraction doesn't mysteriously evaporate shortly thereafter, due to her unconscious lowering of his status.
But the (extreme) case of a nerdy woman who's both sincerely asking for a drink and won't subconsciously decrease attraction upon compliance, is actually the worst case scenario for measuring the advantage of the "never buy a drink without quid pro quo" heuristic... and yet it still comes out well ahead of compliance in the best case, and only slightly better in worst-case!
And in all other scenarios, such as a woman using this to get rid of the guy or to get drinks, using it as a filter for non-interesting guys, or even a woman who thinks it's normal but unconsciously feels less attracted to men who comply... the heuristic produces much better results on average than buying the drink does. (Assuming, again, the guy has developed the social skills to pull it off.)
Among other things, it's also a counter-filter, since the woman who truly has no interest in the guy outside his ability to procure alcohol will immediately depart in search of another sucker, no matter how skillfully it's done. For the rest, you still either win, or else you don't lose.
Of course, this is all conditional on the man's skill in making use of all the available information in the situation... for one thing, he's got to be socially calibrated enough to be able to tell the difference between the woman who'll respond to "Sure, bend over, you spoiled brat" vs. the one who'll respond to "Not a feminist, eh?"... and preferably be able to tell that before even starting the conversation. (Oh, and let's not forget that those two can be the same woman, in different moods!)
But that's the "software" way of doing it... the "coprocessor" way is that the guy ideally just believes that it'd be silly to buy a woman a drink without a quid pro quo (like Feynman's advisor) and lets their social hardware handle the details of responding.
Attempting to cache a specific behavioral response in "software" isn't going to cut it, though; the PUA methods that revolve around "canned" material are necessarily probabilistic and essentially manipulative. So, if there's a flaw in Roko's example, that would be it: caching a specific response pretty much guarantees it's not going to be done with a truly beneficial level of skill.
And yet, even in that case, it's still probably positive-sum advice, as long as the man continues learning and improving over the long haul.
Well, if "behave like that" is asking guys for drinks, then there's no conflict with what Roko said, since the situation will never come up.
However, if "behave like that" is responding with increased attraction to a display of confidence, tact, humor, and/or other social skills, I'd be surprised. (It's just that what you would personally consider to be such a display is going to depend on a lot of situational factors that a single canned response can't possibly take into account.)
I think this needs to be emphasised a lot. Also the differences between types of women. While a nerdy girl may not ask for a drink, they may ask for help with a heavy box. Now from the canned advice given this can be seen as a shit test, will the guy demean himself by lugging a heavy box to try and get with someone of my level. If so they don't want to be with a loser who lifts his own boxes. So a response like "Do I look like a shelf stacker?" said in a suitably amused tone, would be appropriate.
However the nerdy girl might just want the box moved and be interested in people who can just get stuff done with a minimal amount of prodding. The appropriate response in this case is to help. Grumbling (with a grin) while doing so, or making a light comment about being owed one might show you aren't a complete push over and won't put up with too much of that sort of thing without something in return, would be appropriate I think.
I'd have a lot less problem if advice were couched in term of normal human interaction rather than just trying to get into an extrovert girls pants.
Aaaaaaaugh.
As someone who is fairly good at predicting my own behavior in various counterfactual situations, I'd like to hereby offer to tell people how I'd react to lines about which they are curious. I don't know to what extent I'm in the reference class anyone's aiming for, but if the information would be useful, there it is.
Well, the "buying a drink" story is an extreme example that's been canonized to make a point. But I'm convinced that in general, human beings are always unconsciously "testing" each other, and that this applies to everyone, male or female, autistic or NT. It's just part of how humans talk and joke around and communicate. For instance, saying hi to someone and smiling is "testing": you're seeing what kind of mood someone is in. Making a joke, or laughing at a joke, is "testing": you're seeing how other people react.
I don't see the "PUA" stuff as about sex or dating or men and women. It's about human social interaction in general.
I suggest there's a difference between "testing" and "checking". In a test, you're trying to find out whether the other person will fail or (in the case of bullies) hoping they will, while in a check, you'll hoping they'll succeed. I gather there are some people who are pretty evenly balanced on the chack/test scale-- if the other person passes, fine, it's a potential friendship, and if the other person fails, the harassment commences.
I think that a lot of small talk is what I call "pinging"-- "Hello, I'm here and friendly".
Yes, status-testing is a general component of typical human interaction. I think this is the point that Roko was trying to make, even though his particular example was rather gendered. If you want to see status testing in a non-male-female context, watch the behavior of frat boys, for example.
The point is that for those unfamiliar with this behavior, they need to be able to identify it when it happens, to not take it personally or as a sign of hostility, and know how to respond. Roko's advocation of "caching responses" is very helpful, until one gets a gut feeling and can be guided towards a satisfactory response merely by emotions.
I don't see any necessary contradiction between Roko and SarahC's perspectives in determining an optimal dating strategy for men with LW-reader phenotypes that doesn't rely on luck.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology not correctly described by the standard PUA model? Yes. Should these guys go outside that model to understand these women? Yes.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology that is correctly described by the standard PUA model, in part or in whole? Yes. Would these guys benefit from attaining knowledge of neurotypical social behaviors (from PUAs or elsewhere) to be able to date these women, instead of arbitrarily cutting them out of their dating pool? Yes.
I take an empirical approach to romantic success. Being able to date many kinds of people gives you a lot of options. Sometimes, you can't know whether you would be compatible with a certain type of person until you try dating someone like that. Saying "but I don't want anyone like that anyway" about people out of one's reach because of a lack of common social skills is a failure mode. Yet if you attain the skills to date someone like that, and you find it doesn't work, then you know that you are not merely the fox calling the grapes sour in Aesop's fable.
I think a lot of what I'm disagreeing with you and blueberry about is this assumption that meat-market type bars and clubs, and the PUA style tactics that may work well in those environments, are a representative sample of "typical social behavior"
Umm. The purpose of dating is to find someone you're compatible with. "Expanding your dating pool" to include personality types you don't like defeats the whole point.
With introversion, agreeableness, and sensitivity, I wouldn't suspect any negative correlation with conventional attractiveness (agreeableness could even have a weak positive correlation). Nerdiness and lack of socialization may be related, and even if there is a negative correlation between them and attractiveness for whatever reason, that correlation may not be particularly strong.
I would hypothesize that personality traits are at least as big a factor as looks in explaining variance in female status testing behavior. As a result, I agree with SarahC's view that neurotypical vs. non-neurotypical status does not adequately demarcate women who ask men to buy them drinks from women who don't. And I also disagree with Roko's suggestion that women who don't engage in this behavior predominantly lie in the left tail of the attractiveness distribution for age.
If pjeby's original intent, however, was to present NT women as those most likely to engage in this behavior, and non-NT women as least likely, then I would agree with him that such a correlation is plausible. If Roko wanted to hypothesize a weak-to-moderate correlation of attractiveness and status-testing behavior, than I would agree. I just consider certain personality traits that are probably uncorrelated with beauty as having a large effect on engaging in this kind of behavior.
I actually didn't state either of the things that people are attributing to me. I simply referred to "the mostly-NT women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks".
The mostly-NT is hyphenated because it is an attribute of "women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks" -- and this attribution does not require any correlation. The simple fact that non-NT women are a minority, period, ensures that most of the women who do this showing up at bars and asking of drinks will be neurotypicals.
I was making a point about the selection bias effect of this on PUA models, not attempting to draw any conclusions about the likelihood of drink-asking behavior given neurotypicality. (I did suggest a negative correlation between neuro-atypicality and drink-asking behavior, however.)
FTFY
[citation needed]
I'm curious what you mean by this. Do you mean you think they will have put less effort into clothing, hair, makeup, etc. (perhaps true, but perhaps less relevant to male attraction than you think) or do you mean that you expect some inverse correlation between physical attractiveness and the personality traits described?
Partly that they put less effort into their appearance (which, for many, also includes a non-trivial effort to be thin), but also that a desire to be noticed is more related to extroversion and dominance than their opposites, and skill at being noticed favorably is related to neurotypicallity.
I think you're letting an instrumental approach to psychology affect your epistemic rationality.
Ah, then we have a miscommunication. I think it could have been worded better in order to avoid an unsavory misinterpretation.
A woman asks a man for a drink at a bar.
The PUA theory explains this in terms of a status interaction. The woman is testing, 'is this man so low status he feels compelled or obligated to buy me a drink?'
I am wary of explanations based on status interactions. It is the kind of explanation that can explain anything and therefore nothing. Also, I am skeptical based on my sense of the woman's subsequent disappointment and embarrassment if the man says no directly -- this is not a test where the level 1 correct answer is 'no'.
Alternatively, there's the simplistic evolutionary explanation, that I present here as what I would use to explain the phenomenon to a true human-outsider. Asking a man for a drink at a bar covertly or overtly, and in general men buying drinks for women, is the first step in a courtship ritual in which the man is to display that he is a provider. Raising children is a big investment and a family will be successful if the man and the woman together provide for the family. The woman's investment is largely guaranteed by other mechanisms, so it is the male's investment that must be tested and assured.
When a woman asks a man for a drink, this is the modern equivalent of asking him to bring her an animal skin. Something of token value that is of some benefit to her. What happens next is variable and perhaps does depend upon status. The woman can signal that she is not a single-animal-skin female, perhaps because providing for a child is much bigger than a single-animal-skin investment. Alternatively, the female can signal loyalty (her test in the courtship game) and signal that in return for the drink, the man has secured her undivided attention (politely, for at least the length of time it takes her to consume the drink).
This is all level-1 interaction. Human beings are intelligent, and the interaction can go meta to level 2 or 3 or higher. A woman should have concerns about a man that will buy any woman a drink that asks him. If he is too nice (signals too generally that he is a provider) then you can predict he will be fixing Aunt Rosa's faucet when he ought to be changing diapers. Also, he might not be very smart, or too low status in the tribe to provide much for the family. Thus a man that can deflect the request in a humorous/intelligent way will be very attractive -- especially if it is early in the courtship (he will not provide indiscriminately to every female that asks!) and especially if he manipulates the situation to advance the courtship (he is intelligent and capable and interested!).
Level 3 or higher would be the man going meta about the courtship ritual itself. (Not feminist? Or commenting on how silly the norm is.) This can be very attractive because the man is signaling intelligence and a larger meaning-of-life potential value. This is someone you can talk to about whether you should have kids or not.
I would guess that if you are naturally successful with people of the opposite sex, you slide easily and naturally among these levels. PUA seems to recommend making it level 2 or higher. My preference in courtship would be level 1 and level 3 together: the drink and signaling at the meta level about intelligence and gender roles. Because real life is changing diapers, but it's valuable to have a mutual awareness that life is -- to some extent -- a set of choices.
My hunch is that Feynman had success with his rogue tactics because he was meta, and this is what the intelligent women attracted to his intelligence were looking for. His behavior, if given at level 1 or level 2, would flop disastrously.
This is true -- but only because just answering "no" is a DLV - demonstration of lower value. It says that you're not paying attention, or that you're either stingy or you lack resources. (Also, the PUA model is basically if that the woman ends up feeling bad, you're doing it wrong. Feynman's "worse than a whore" story should not be considered a canonical example here.)
The big problem, though, with these hypothetical discussions is that they're abstract, and what is actually a DHV or DLV is going to depend hugely on body language, voice tone, and numerous other elements of context that are impractical to talk about in text like this.
Likewise, on the flip side:
The exact same words can still be a DLV, if they're uttered without social calibration. A guy who says these things while being in his head and not actually connecting with the woman in front of him, may well be seen as a self-centered jackass or a pompous twit.
It's not just what you say or how you say it, but the degree to which both show that you are tuned in and present to what is going on around you... especially what's going on with the person in front of you. Otherwise, it's still not expensive enough of a signal! (Secondarily, the inherent riskiness of the act implies your authenticity and courage -- more expensive, hard-to-fake signaling.)
Interestingly, I've seen that there is at least one PUA school ("Authentic Man Program") that has focused their training efforts on precisely these hard-to-fake aspects of signaling, to the virtual exclusion of everything else.
That is, they appear to focus on training men to be present and responsive to what is going on, while maintaining the integrity of their own mission or principles. And they claim that it is these qualities of presence, awareness, and authenticity that female status/value testing is really trying to measure.
(Side note of possible interest: they may also be the only PUA school that employs more female teachers than male ones - some of their workshop samples show panels of three or four women working with two male teachers, or pairs of women giving students feedback on their presence qualities, while the male coaches then just tell the guy what to do (mentally and physically) with the feedback that's been given. IOW, it seems like the women are used as experts on the female experience of the men, while the men focus on how those things are generated or experienced inside men.)
Anyway, their goal seems to be to train men to actually have these attractive qualities (and get rid of the beliefs and behaviors that interfere with them), rather than teaching all the ways the qualities can be signaled or faked, as other PUA schools do.
This is what I mean by status theories can explain anything: if buying the drink for the girl on average results in a good outcome, you could say that buying a drink on average raises your status in her point of view. If not buying the drink for the girl on average results in a good outcome, you could say that not buying a drink on average raises your status in her point of view. In either case, you assume rather than establish that higher status corresponds to the more successful outcome.
How do you know if "status" is a real thing if you can't measure it directly but only infer it from successful outcomes? The problem is that maybe higher status is redefined in each case as getting the good outcome, in which case "status" is just the property-of-resulting-in-successful-outcomes. Even if status is some external objective thing, if we don't know how to objectively measure whether it has increased or not, this is missing in theories based on predicting what happens if it's increased or not.
Later edit: I thought about it a little longer and my true argument isn't that good outcomes aren't correlated with higher status, I suspect they are. It's that the theory is missing where you predict which things will raise status and which will lower status. If not buying the drink helps, you deduce that this raised your status. But why should it have been raised? This last part is just filling in the blanks.
Some PUA theories use "value" and "compliance" as their currency rather than status. i.e., giving compliance implies the other person has value to you. This is at least marginally better, although as your previous comment points out, there are various levels and dimensions on which "value" can be measured.
There are PUA terms for value demonstration - "DHV" for demonstration of higher value, and "DLV" for demonstration of lower value. Self-deprecating behavior, deference, and compliance are DLVs, while confidence, humor, leadership, social proof (e.g. having friends or followers) are all DHV's. PUA's also attempt to tell stories that contain oblique references to things that imply value, by showing how you treat your friends and allies, protect your mates, and that you have other positive qualities such as openness to new experiences (implied bravery and resource/fitness surplus), etc.
Of course, at level 1 this is just boasting that you work out and have a fast car; so PUA's select stories that show these qualities implicitly, rather than directly boasting about them, so that the inferences are drawn subconsciously, instead of being presented on the surface for conscious dismissal.
(Btw, as with so many things in PUA, these concepts apply to other social interactions as well. A marketing message (or really, any story) is more effective when it "shows" instead of "tells" the things it wants you to conclude.)
Related Less Wrong post.
Another proxy for measuring status is how attractive you are to attractive women - given that the fundamental attractor is reliable status signals.
The explanation is fitted to the observations of the custom. It is therefore not supported by the observations. Had the observations been different, the explanation would never have been invented.
Later that night...
"So... you wanna come in for a cup of tea?"
"Ummm... okay, but just a cup of tea then."
"[mock relief] Phew, and here I was afraid you were trying to get into my pants!"
Feynman would end up with the woman buying him a drink.
Yes. Especially if success is partly defined by "not wasting money on other people". But even if it isn't. You have to be humorous about it but, yeah, the only time I would ever buy a woman I just met a drink is if it is her birthday. I'll also buy second rounds if the girl buys the first.
On the other hand this tradition makes going out to bars with my girlfriend a lot cheaper since she can just walk away for a minute and someone will come up to her and buy her a drink. After which she comes back to me, drink in hand. (ETA: Though, I don't think she's ever asked for a drink. She's much too nice for that. People just come up and offer.)
As a non-drinker, I often passed proffered drinks onto my friends, who could make use of them. Obviously I would never ask for a drink, except maybe a glass of water.
I'll buy you an orange juice if you want. ;)
The point was partially made by the fact that water is free, at least everywhere I've lived. Thanks, though.