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Roko comments on The Social Coprocessor Model - Less Wrong
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Imagine if someone came to lesswrong. He was very interested in winning and knew and applied a decent amount of probability theory. However he was only interested in winning football matches. He'd do articles on picking the optimal side taking into consideration fitness of players, opponents strengths, weather etc Also articles on picking the optimal training regimen to strengthen the right muscles for football and showing the bad heuristics other trainers use to pick training regimens.
Now I'd find it moderately interesting for a bit, despite minimal interest in football, but I'd get bored of it pretty soon, but I think I would be in the minority, People would lack the background knowledge to understand it (e.g. Golden goals, how long a football game lasts etc), they would find it boring. And they would probably voice their confusion and lack of interest, which I in turn would find boring. It would decrease the signal to noise ratio of the website.
I suspect something like that might happen if you use examples from the PUA arena. An example of what happens with a lack of background knowledge can be seen by RichardKenneway's thread. So while mildly interesting it has its bad points in terms of the level of discussion, and if you are somewhat autistic, you are likely to go on about it if at all encouraged! So you won't get encouragement from me.
There is a decent sub population of lesswrong interested in it, it would be ideal for a sub reddit. But spare a thought for those of us that are female or just not that into dating.
I have little problem with the way that Robin Hanson discusses status, signalling, and human interactions including mating. He doesn't give advice to the people on OB on how to pick up chicks though. If you are not interested in the practicalities it is enough to know that women test for a variety of personality and material traits in potential mates (with different tests dependent upon the women's personality). You don't need to know what tests go with what personality. Knowing that the majority of women like dominant, smooth talking, humorous men is useful in predicting what men will cultivate in themselves. But I don't need to know how to fake it.
I think it's the "faking it" part I and many other people find objectionable.
ETA: you edited this post after I replied, so I don't think my original reply makes sense any more....
How is this different from "if you disagree with me, keep it to yourself"?
This is where you and several other people here make a critical mistake. You view various aspects of human mating behavior exclusively in terms of signaling objective traits, and then you add a moral dimension to it by trying to judge whether these objective traits supposedly being signaled are true or fake.
In reality, however, human social behavior -- and especially mating behavior -- is about much more complex higher-order signaling strategies, which are a product of a long and complicated evolutionary interplay of strategies for signaling, counter-signaling, fake signaling, and fake signaling detection -- as well as the complex game-theoretic questions of what can ultimately be inferred from one's signaled intentions. Nobody has disentangled this whole complicated mess into a complete and coherent theory yet, though some basic principles have been established pretty conclusively, both by the academic evolutionary psychology and by people generalizing informally from practical experiences. However, the key point is that in a species practicing higher-order signaling strategies, signaling ability itself becomes an adaptive trait. You're not supposed to just signal objective traits directly; you also have to demonstrate your skill in navigating through the complex signaling games. It's a self-reinforcing feedback cycle, where at the end of the day, your signaling skills matter in their own right, just like your other abilities for navigating through the world matter -- and most things being signaled are in fact meta-signals about these traits.
Therefore, where you see "faking it" and "head games" and whatnot, in reality it's just humans practicing their regular social behaviors. You'll miss the point spectacularly if you analyze these behaviors in terms of simple announcements of objective traits and plain intentions and direct negotiations based on these announcements, where anything beyond that is deceitful faking. Learning how to play the signaling games better is no more deceitful than, say, practicing basic social norms of politeness instead of just honestly blurting out your opinions of other people to their faces.
I agree with you, and pjeby, who made similar points: the complexity of actual social games is higher than they appear on the surface, and much signaling is about signaling ability itself. But these insights also imply that the value of "running social interactions in software" is limited. Our general purpose cognitive machinery is unlikely to be able to reproduce the throughput and latency characteristics of a dedicated social coprocessor, and can really only handle relatively simple games, or situations where you have a lot of time to think. In other words, trying to play mating games with an NT "in software" is kind of like trying to play basketball "in software".
Your argument is fallacious because it rests on overstretching the software/hardware analogy. Human brain contains highly reconfigurable hardware, and if some particular computations are practiced enough, the brain will eventually start synthesizing specialized circuits for them, thus dramatically boosting their speed and accuracy. Or to say it the traditional way, practice makes perfect.
Whether it's throwing darts, programming computers, speaking a foreign language, or various social interactions, if you're lacking any experience, your first attempts will be very clumsy, as your general cognitive circuits struggle ineptly to do the necessary computations. After enough practice, though, specialized hardware gradually takes over and things start going much more smoothly; you just do what it takes without much conscious thinking. You may never match someone with greater natural talent or who has much more accumulated practice initially, but the improvements can certainly be dramatic. (And even before that, you might be surprised how well some simple heuristics work.)
"Practice makes perfect" has a rather different emphasis from Roko's suggestion of "running social interactions in software", which is what I was addressing.
But to answer your point, I agree that improvements in social skills from practice can be dramatic, but probably not for everyone, just like not everyone can learn how to program computers. It would be interesting to see some empirical data on how much improvement can be expected, and what the distribution of outcomes is, so people can make more informed choices about how much effort to put into practicing social skills.
I'm also curious what the "simple heuristics" that you mention are.
why what? Why do I find "faking it" objectionable? Dude, you're talking about playing head games to trick insecure women into sleeping with you!
I understand that this is often the case, and that this is how "pick ups" often work in the real world. The thing is, I just think that human's sexual rituals are ingrained so deeply in our little monkey brains, that I don't think generalizing from what works in that domain to the broader world of "refining the art of human rationality" is a really good idea. This particular domain of human behavior is so ridiculously irrational that I don't think it serves as a good model for ordinary, everyday human irrationality. So if you're reasoning by analogy to it, you're basically patterning against a superstimulus
See previous comment about signal to noise ratio.
Edit: Practical advice that is appropriate for the majority of people on this site is fine, it doesn't create the noise of confusion and boredom. Akrasia being a good example of appropriate practical advice. As is advice about sleeping, eating, teaching, communicating ideas.
Look at it from the flip side. Should we do make up tips for nerdy girls?
Sure, why not? If a nerdy girl feels she has learned something about rationality from exploring makeup techniques, I would absolutely be interested to hear about it on LessWrong. If other people don't care about makeup, they don't have to read her posts.
I have a question, since you seem to know a lot about human sociality. What exactly is wrong with handling the dilemmas you describe by saying to the other humans, "I am slightly more committed to this group’s welfare, particularly to that of its weakest members, than most of its members are. If you suffer a serious loss of status/well-being I will still help you in order to display affiliation to this group even though you will no longer be in a position to help me. I am substantially more kind and helpful to the people I like and substantially more vindictive and aggressive towards those I dislike. I am generally stable in who I like. I am much more capable and popular than most members of this group, demand appropriate consideration, and grant appropriate consideration to those more capable than myself. I adhere to simple taboos so that my reputation and health are secure and so that I am unlikely to contaminate the reputations or health of my friends. I currently like you and dislike your enemies but I am somewhat inclined towards ambivalence on regarding whether I like you right now so the pay-off would be very great for you if you were to expend resources pleasing me and get me into the stable 'liking you' region of my possible attitudinal space. Once there, I am likely to make a strong commitment to a friendly attitude towards you rather than wasting cognitive resources checking a predictable parameter among my set of derivative preferences."?
Why is this being downvoted? Even those Clippy's proposed strategy doesn't work at all for reasons that Jack explained, he is asking an excellent question. For people (and AIs) without social experience and knowledge, it is very, very important for them to know why people can't just talk all this stuff through explicitly. They should be asking exactly these sorts of questions so they an update.
Upvoted.
A guess: because everything in quotes in Clippy's comment is a copy and paste of a generic comment it posted a week ago.
I don't actually know myself, though - I upvoted Clippy's comment because I thought it was funny. Copying an earlier comment and asking for feedback on it where it's semi-relevant is exactly in keeping with what I imagine the Clippy character to be.
Saying this explicitly is extremely weak evidence of it being true. In fact, because it sounds pre-prepared, comprehensive and calculated most humans won't believe you. Human courtship rituals are basically ways of signaling all of this but are much harder to fake.
When human females ask "Will you buy me a drink?" they're testing to see if the male does in fact "demand appropriate consideration".
Also, relative status and genetic fitness are extremely important in human coupling decisions and your statement does not sufficiently cover those.
That's a good point. Let me try a different one.
Let X be 'I am slightly more committed to this group’s welfare, particularly to that of its weakest members, than most of its members are. If you suffer a serious loss of status/well-being I will still help you in order to display affiliation to this group even though you will no longer be in a position to help me. I am substantially more kind and helpful to the people I like and substantially more vindictive and aggressive towards those I dislike. I am generally stable in who I like. I am much more capable and popular than most members of this group, demand appropriate consideration, and grant appropriate consideration to those more capable than myself. I adhere to simple taboos so that my reputation and health are secure and so that I am unlikely to contaminate the reputations or health of my friends. I currently like you and dislike your enemies but I am somewhat inclined towards ambivalence on regarding whether I like you right now so the pay-off would be very great for you if you were to expend resources pleasing me and get me into the stable 'liking you' region of my possible attitudinal space. Once there, I am likely to make a strong commitment to a friendly attitude towards you rather than wasting cognitive resources checking a predictable parameter among my set of derivative preferences.'
Then, instead of saying my previous suggestion, say something like, 'I would precommit to acting in such a way that X if and only if you would precommit to acting in such a way that you could truthfully say, "X if and only if you would precommit to acting in such a way that you could truthfully say X."'
(Edit: Note, if you haven't already, that the above is just a special case of the decision theory, "I would adhere to rule system R if and only if (You would adhere to R if and only if I would adhere to R)." )
Wouldn't the mere ability to recognize such a symmetric decision theory be strong evidence of X being true?
Yes, I understand the signal must be hard to fake. But if the concern is merely about optimizing signal quality, wouldn't it be an even stronger mechanism to noticeably couple your payoff profile to a credible mechanism?
Just as a sketch, find some "punisher" that noticeably imposes disutility (like repurposing the signal faker's means toward paperclip production, since that's such such a terrible outcome, apparently) on you whenever you deviate from your purported decision theory. It's rather trivial to have a publicly-viewable database of who is coupled to the punisher (and by what decision theory), and to make it verifiable that any being with which you are interacting matches a specific database entry.
This has the effect of elevating your signal quality to that of the punisher's. Then, it's just a problem of finding a reliable punisher.
Why not just do that, for example?
We do. That's one of the functions of reputation and gossip among humans, and also the purpose of having a legal system. But it doesn't work perfectly: we have yet to find a reliable punisher, and if we did find one it would probably need to constantly monitor everyone and invade their privacy.
Yet another reason why people invented religion...
That is good!
Attention Users: please provide me with your decision theory, and what means I should use to enforce your decision theory so that you can reliably claim to adhere to it.
For this job, I request 50,000 USD as compensation, and I ask that it be given to User:Kevin.