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kodos96 comments on The Social Coprocessor Model - Less Wrong
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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
To put it more clearly, it's not that this domain of human behavior is actually particularly irrational. In reality, it has its well-defined rules, and men who have the knowledge and ability to behave according to these rules are, at least in a libertine society such as ours, awarded with high status in the eyes of others -- and lots of sex, of course, if they choose to employ their abilities in practice. In contrast, men who are particularly bad at it suffer an extreme low status penalty; they are are a target of derision and scorn both privately and in the popular culture. However, what complicates the situation is that this is one of those areas where humans practice extreme hypocrisy, in that you're expected not just to navigate the rules of the game cleverly, but also to pretend that they don't exist, and to discuss the topic openly only with mystical reverence and unrealistic idealizations. Realistic open discussions are perceived as offensive and sacrilegious. It's an enormous bias.
I don't really agree but I think this describes the fear that underlies much of the hostility to discussing these controversial topics.
I think you're partly correct, but some other biases are in fact more relevant here. However, going deeper into this would look too much like attacking other people's motives, which would be perceived as both unproductive and hostile, so I'd rather not delve into that line of discussion.
I would also like to know more about biases you mentioned, can PM me this too? Or just post it here for everyone to read, because it's a very big teaser on a topic which you seem to have a lot of interesting insights.
I've enjoyed all your posts on this topic and would love to know what you mean about other biases. If you don't want to say it here, can you PM me?
I don't think I understand the connection you're trying to make.
Have you never encountered this attitude amongst religious people over atheism? The idea that atheism is an inherently dangerous idea, that merely engaging with it risks infection. That atheism might be a kind of aqua regia for morality, capable of dissolving all that is good and right in the world into some kind of nihilistic nightmare. Even (or perhaps especially) those who think atheism might be true see it as potentially dangerous, that gazing into the abyss may permanently damage the seeker's moral core. This belief, whether implicit or explicit, seems quite common among the religious and I think explains some of the hostility born of fear that is sometimes observed in the reactions to atheism and atheists.
I'm suggesting something similar may underlie some of the reactions to discussions of the below-the-surface game theoretic realities of human social interaction. People fear that if they gaze into that abyss they risk losing or destroying things they value highly, like traditional concepts of love, loyalty or compassion. I think this fear is misguided, and personally prefer the truth be told, though the heavens fall regardless, but I can understand and to some extent sympathize with the sentiment that I think sometimes underlies it.
Rationalism, which leads to atheism, is just such an aqua regia. Contact with it can destroy any and all of one's beliefs. The result is not necessarily an improvement:
It is. It can.
I agree that in principle it's possible that someone will do worse (or become more harmful to others) by becoming more rational. But do you take it to be likely?
I've no basis for attaching numbers. But some of the things some people have said right here on LW or on OB make me wonder.
We are dealing with fire here. Most people learn to use matches safely. That does not mean that matches are safe.
Yes, and no. My objection to the citation of PUA tactics is motivated by fear that it could lead down the dark path... but not fear that it might be true. Rather, it's fear that something that might be true in one narrow domain might get applied as a general rule in broader domains where it is no longer applicable.
In PUA circles, "winning" is defined by getting laid. So if you go to a meat-market and try your PUA tactics all night long, you may end up getting rejected 50 times, but be successful once, and your brain records that as a "win", cause you didn't go home alone (just like audiences at psychic shows remember the "hits" and forget the "misses"). But does that really tell you that PUA theory correctly describes typical social interaction? No, it just tells you that there is a certain, small minority of people on whom PUA tactics work, but they are a non-representative sample of a non-representative sample.
So when you then take one of these PUA tactics, which isn't even effective on the vast majority of people even in the meat-market pickup context, and start talking as if it was a universal truth applicable to all manner of human social interactions, it makes my head explode.
So where does my "fear" come in? Well, here's the thing... I suspect that a large portion of the audience for PUA material is AS spectrum, or otherwise non-GPU possessing people, who have trouble finding sex/romance partners on their own, so they learn some PUA techniques. Fine. But these techniques often require the abandoning of "black and white morality", as has been said earlier on this thread. Applied solely to the realm of picking up women, I don't necessarily have a problem with that - "all's fair in love and war" after all. But the thing is, most NTs are able to compartmentalize this kind of thing. I know many NT, "ladies man" types who are perfectly moral, ethical, upstanding people in just about every other way imaginable, but who have no problem lying to women to get in their pants. I find this a bit distasteful, but I don't object to it, I just recognize that this is how the world works. But the thing is, many AS/non-GPU people have difficulty compartmentalizing things like this in the same way NTs do.
So I fear that if you teach these kind of dark arts to the non-compartmentalizing, non-NT crowd, they're going to take away from it the message that abandoning "black and white morality" is the way to go about fitting in in the NT world, in areas beyond the meat-market. I fear that we may end up unintentionally creating the next generation of Bill Gates and Henry Kissingers.
You make a fair point that PUA probably doesn't explain all of human interaction - it explains just the bare minimum needed to get that 1 in 50 hit rate, so the majority of girls could be PUA-invulnerable and we wouldn't know it. But you also claim that a hit rate of 1 in 50 is bad and shouldn't be considered a "win", and I take objection to this. Do you also think that a good mathematician should be able to solve any problem in the world or give up their title? Or do you have an alternative theory that can beat PUA at PUA's game? (Then you should head over to their forums and if you're right, they will adopt your theory en masse.) If not, why should we suppress the best theory we've got at the moment?
If your goal is to pick up women, then yes, absolutely 1 in 50 is a "win". But if your goal is to refine the art of human rationality, I just don't see how it's relevant.
If I apply the same methods for the same amount of time to many problems, and I solve only 1 in 50 of them, then I should seriously consider the possibility that there was something special about that 1 in 50 that made them especially accessible to my methods. I should not conclude that the 1 in 50 were typical of all the problems that I considered.
I expect that a man can maximize his number of sexual partners by focusing his attentions on women who will be especially receptive to his advances. But it would be a mistake to infer that such women are typical.
No, I'm just saying that a 1 in 50 hit rate is more likely to be explained by a peculiarity of the particular people involved in the interaction, rather than a universal truth of all human social interaction.
Do you think the costs to women are negligible in a utilitarian sense, or just not of interest to you?
I'm not sure really. I just meant that I file it under "things about the world that are beyond my power to control"
Maybe we should be working on the FHI problem.
FHI?
That reminds me - I'd been intending to add more applause lights to my comments.
I think if you look at the original source for that phrase it reflects the double-edged sword concerns raised by this comment:
I think perhaps discussion of the topic is also seen as low status. And you giving advice to us is implying we are low status.
Because a high status confidant man would just expect the world to conform to them because of their manifest qualities, rather than trying to adapt to the world.
Well, even if Geoffrey Miller's theories are overshooting it a bit, the role of sexual selection in the evolution of the human mind should not be underestimated. Rather than being some isolated dark corner or irrationality that can be safely corralled and ignored, it seems to me that various inclinations and biases related to the mating behaviors, whether directly or indirectly, are very much all-pervasive in the workings of human minds. Therefore, careful dissection of these behaviors can reveal a lot about human nature that is applicable more widely.