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HughRistik 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 understand this sentiment, but I'm not quite sure about your analogy between football and mating. Football is a sport; mating is a species-typical task. Articles on mating are relevant to a wider audience than articles about football. A better analogy would be between mating and another challenge that almost everyone deals with, such as akrasia.
Not everyone is equally interested in akrasia, but the community seems to find it worth discussing as an example of applying rationality to personal development. Why is mating different?
I see rationality as relevant for females to improve their dating and relationship success, also.
As for those who are just not that into dating, I think this population may contain heterogenous groups:
People who are already in satisfying relationships
People who genuinely aren't interested in dating, or in relationships that can be achieved by dating.
People who want relationships, but aren't interested in the dating steps necessary to get there.
People who want relationships and would want to be dating, but have challenges in those areas, and have suppressed or denied their desires.
For people in groups #1 and #2, I can indeed see how they would quickly become bored by discussions of rationality applied to mating, just as someone who has their akrasia issues handled would become bored by continued discussion of akrasia. Individuals in groups #3 and #4 might benefit from such discussions, even if they found them initially uncomfortable. It may be hard to distinguish people in the last three groups from each other.
Hmm, it might be worth doing a questionnaire to try and distinguish between these and find out the demographics on this site.
Questions about how well they interact with women etc.
The sorts of relationships I'm interested might possibly be achieved by dating/going to clubs. But most standard relationships don't appeal. There is a probability of low pay off for me for learning about standard techniques. I'm better off seeing if I mesh well with people on a shared task/problem.