= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
mattnewport comments on The Social Coprocessor Model - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (570)
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.
I'd love to hear an elaboration of this. How can rationality be so dangerous?
Perfect rationality is, by definition, perfect and can never go wrong, for if it went wrong, it would not be perfect rationality. But none of us is perfect. When an imperfect person comes into contact with this ultimate solvent of unexamined beliefs, the ways they could go wrong outnumber the ways they could go right.
"There is no such thing as morality, therefore I can lie and steal all I like and you're a chump if you don't!" "There is no afterlife, therefore all is meaningless and I should just cut my throat now! Or yours! It doesn't matter!" "Everything that people say is self-serving lies and if you say you don't agree you're just another self-serving liar!" "At last, I see the truth, while everyone else is just another slave of the Matrix!"
That last is a hazard on any path to enlightenment, rationalistic or otherwise. Belief in one's own enlightenment -- even an accurate one -- provides a fully general counterargument to anyone else: they're not as enlightened.
ETA: Those aren't actual quotations, but I'm not making them up out of thin air. On the first, compare pjeby's recent description of black-hat PUAs. On the second, a while back (but I can't find the actual messages) someone here was arguing that unless he could live forever, nothing could matter to him. On the third, black-hat PUAs and people seeing status games at the root of all interaction are going that way. On the last, as I said above, this is a well-known hazard on many paths. There's even an xkcd on the subject.
I hope that my reply does not in any way discourage Richard Kennaway's reply. I am curious about different responses. But mine: rationalism intends to find better ways to satisfy values, but finds in the process that values are negated, or that it would be more rational to modify values.
Some time ago, I had grand hopes that as a human being embedded in reality, I could just look around and think about things and with some steady effort I might find a world view -- at least an epistemology -- that would bring everything together, or that I could be involved in a process of bringing things together. Kind of the way religion would do, if it was believable and not a bunch of nonsense. However, the continued application of thought and reason to life just seems to negate the value of life.
Intellectually, I'm in a place where life presents as meaningless. While I can't "go back" to religious thinking -- in fact, I suspect I was never actually there, I've only ever been looking for a comprehensive paradigm -- I think religions have the right idea; they are wise to the fact that intellectualism/objectivity is not the way to go when it comes to experiencing "cosmic meaning".
Many people never think about the double think that is required in religion. But I suspect many more people have thought about things both ways ... a lifetime is a long time, with space for lots of thoughts ... and found that "intellectualism" requires double think as well (compartmentalization) but in a way that is immensely less satisfying. In the latter, you intellectually know that "nothing matters" but that you are powerless to experience and apply this viscerally due to biology. Viscerally, you continue to seek comfort and avoid pain, while your intellect tells you there's no purpose to your movements.
A shorter way of saying all of this: Being rational is supposed to help humans pursue their values. But it's pretty obvious that having faith is something that humans value.
Although this comment is already long, it seems a concrete example is needed. Culturally, it appears that singularitarians value information (curiosity) and life (immortality). Suppose immortality was granted: we upload our brains to something replicable and durable so that we can persist forever without any concerns. What in the world would we be motivated to do? What would be the value of information? So what if the digits of pi strung endlessly ahead of me?
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.
The thing is, with any model (PUA or otherwise), there are many reasons you could lose out on the 49 in 50 (to go with your terminology for now):
They aren't into your body type, facial structure, height, race, or some other superficial characteristic
They have preferences that are explained by your model, but you messed up or otherwise failed to fulfill them (Similarly: they have preferences that are explained by your model, but you didn't go far enough in following the model.) This is exacerbated by the tendency of people to go for partners at the edge of what they can realistically expect to attract, which makes it really easy to fall just a tiny bit short of fulfilling their preferences. Even when your improve your attractiveness, then you may set your sights on a higher tier of partners, and you will still be on the edge of being accepted. P(rejection | you go for a random person in the population you are into) is much less than P(rejection | you go after the most desirable person in that population who you still consider a realistic prospect).
They have preferences that are explained by your model, but someone else around fulfilled them better (or they weren't single)
Taking into account these factors, from the start we know that there is a ceiling for success of under 50. Let's say that at least one of these factors apply 50% of the time. Then we are really seeing a max success rate of 1 in 25. 1 in 10 max success rate out of 50 is even plausible. If you only pursue people on the higher edge of your attractiveness bracket, then the number could go even lower, and one success looks more and more impressive.
When you expect to meet rejection >50% of the time via your model, using rejection to test your model is difficult. It's hard to test such theories in isolation. At what point do you abandon or modify your model, and at what point to you protect it with an ad hoc hypothesis? A protective belt of ad hoc hypotheses isn't always bad. Sometimes you have actual evidence inducing belief in the presence or absence of the type of factors I mention, but the data for assessing those factors is also very messy.
Stated in a more general form, the problem we are trying to solve is: how do I select between models of human interactions with only my biased anecdotal experience, the biased anecdotal experience of others (who I select in a biased non-representative fashion), and perhaps theories (e.g. evolutionary psychology) with unclear applicability or research studies performed in non-naturalistic settings with unclear generalizability? Whew, what a mouthful!
This is not a trivial problem, and the answers matter. It is exactly the kind of problem where we should be refining the art of human rationality. And an increase in success on this problem (e.g. 1 in 500 to 1 in 50, to continue the trend of pulling numbers out of thin air to illustrate a point ) suggests that we have learned something about rationality.
I actually agree with this completely, and I think your analysis is rather insightful. Your conclusion seems to be that PUA topics are deserving of further study and analysis, and I have no problem with that... I only have a problem with assuming PUA-isms to be true, and citing them as "everybody knows that..." examples when illustrating completely unrelated points.
This is well put. The issue you raise is why I tried to be a little more explicit about the priors that I was using here. Obviously it's a long way from giving the explicit probabilities that would be necessary to automate the Bayesian updating, but at least we can make a start at identifying where our priors differ.
Sure... maybe for when you're starting out as a rank beginner, doing "cold approach" and "night game". But my success rate at "social circle game" was an order of magnitude better than that before I knew any PUA stuff in the first place... and in retrospect I can easily see how that success was based on me accidentally doing a lot of things that are explicitly taught to PUAs for that type of game.
Hell, even during the brief period where I went to nightclubs and danced with girls, there are times that I realize in retrospect I was getting major IOIs and would've gotten laid if I'd simply had even a single ounce of clue or game in my entire body... and at a better success rate than 1 in 50.
So, I'm not sure where you pulled the 1 in 50 number from, but in my experience it's not even remotely credible as a "success" for a PUA, if you mean that the PUA has to ask 50 to get 1 yes.
However, if you mean that a PUA can take 50 women who are attracted to him, and then chooses from them only the one or two that he finds most desirable, then I would agree that that's indeed a success from his POV. ;-)
(And I would also guess that most PUAs would agree that this is much closer to their idea of "winning", and that even a PUA of modest or average ability should be able to do much better than your original estimate, even for nightclub game.)
AAARGH! You're still totally responding to this as if we were having this discussion on a PUA forum, rather than on LW.
The 1 in 50 number was totally pulled out of my ass, a hypothetical intended to illustrate the idea that if a given technique works only 1 in X times, but that's enough to result in getting laid, your brain is likely to count that as a "win", and ignore the (X - 1) times it failed, leading you to incorrectly assume that the technique illustrates some universally applicable principle of human behavior, where none in fact exists.
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.
That's exactly what cousin_it has described himself doing, at least in the case of women who ask him to buy them drinks. His hug test (for lack of a better word) very quickly identifies which women are receptive to being physically companionable with him.
In PUA terminology, he's taking her opener and screening it. Other relevant PUA terminology in this space:
AI (Approach Invitation) - reading signals that indicate a woman wants you to approach
Forced IOI (Indicator Of Interest) opener - engaging in a behavior that forces a woman's body language to immediately reveal her interest or lack thereof, such as by gazing directly into her eyes while approaching, in order to see whether she looks down, away, or back at you, and whether she smiles.
Some men swear by these things as the essence of their game; others, however, want to be able to meet women who will neither AI nor accept a forced IOI, such as women who get approached by dozens of men a night and therefore have their "shields up" against being approached.
Anyway, your hypothesis isn't a better PUA than PUA; but practical methods for actually applying that hypothesis are part of the overall body of knowledge that is PUA.
But my question is, does PUA theorizing help him get an accurate model of what women in general are actually like? More generally, does it give him tools to get a better understanding of what reality is like? Or is it just giving him tools that help him to focus his attentions on a certain small subset of women?
If I go into a library, I can easily tell the English books from the books in Chinese, so I can quickly narrow my attention to the books that I can get something out of. But that doesn't mean that I know anything about what's going on inside the Chinese books. And, if the vast majority of the books in the library are Chinese, then I actually know very little about the "typical" book in the library.
I'm having trouble parsing this sentence. What's the "hypothesis" here?
I'm not sure about that... It's actually a mathematical question, but the proper formalization escapes me at the moment. (Maybe someone could help?) At first glance, any value of hit rate can be equally well-explained by hidden characteristics or by simple randomness. Right now I believe you have to notice some visible characteristic that determines the success of your method before you can conclude that it's not just randomness. But I can't prove that with numbers yet.
I should be a little clearer about the priors on which my claims are based.
What I am saying is that the observed level of PUA success is very likely on the hypothesis that the PUA description of the "typical woman" reflects only a small subset within a very heterogeneous population. If I furthermore take into account my prior that women are a heterogeneous population, the observed PUA success is not sufficient evidence that their description is accurate of the "typical woman".
To be a little more precise:
Let
H = "Traits vary among women with a certain kind of distribution such that the population of women is heterogeneous. Moreover, insofar as there is a typical woman, the PUA description of her is not accurate."
T = "The PUA description of the typical woman is accurate. That is, PUA methods can be expected to 'work' on the typical woman."
S = "PUAs have the success that we have observed them to have."
X = Prior knowledge
I grant that p(S | T & X) > p(S | H & X). That is, PUAs would be more likely to have their observed success if their model of the typical woman were accurate.
However, I think that p(S | H & X) is still fairly large. Furthermore, I think that p(H | X) is sufficiently larger than p(T | X) to imply that
p(H | S & X)
= [ p(H | X) / p(S | X) ] * p(S | H & X)
\> [ p(T | X) / p(S | X) ] * p(S | T & X)
= p(T | S & X).
[ETA: I'm not sure why that ">" sign is not escaping properly.]
That is, the PUA model of the typical woman is probably inaccurate.
OK, now we're getting somewhere.
Counterpoint: whether it's due to hidden variables, or simple randomness, in either case, what general principle are you able to extract from the example which can be usefully applied to topics other than male/female mating interactions?
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.
Yep, I certainly got that point. (See the edited comment.) But today the real choice is between PUA that yieds little but positive results in the field, and alternative theories that yield no results.
OK, fair enough.
But I'm not arguing that PUA is bad. I'm arguing that the lessons learned from PUA aren't generally applicable outside that arena, and are not good examples to use when illustrating a point on an unrelated human-rationality topic.
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?
Friendly Human Intelligence.
Sorry, I'm not following...
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: