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whpearson comments on The Social Coprocessor Model - Less Wrong
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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.
Hauling a heavy box is not at all analogous to the drink example. When a woman asks a man for help with heavy physical work, this puts him in a much better initial position status-wise. She is the weaker party, asking for necessary assistance from his greater physical strength. Helping a weaker party from a position of greater power is a first-rank status-winning move. Therefore, it's best for him to do it cheerfully with a "that's nothing for a man like me" attitude; grumbling and saying "you owe me" is a bad idea since it suggests that he actually finds it hard, rather than an act of negligible difficulty from his superior position.
Of course, if a woman regularly exploits a man for such favors or makes him spend unreasonable time and effort helping her, that's another story altogether. However, a random request for some small help with a hard physical task nearly always conforms to this pattern of status dynamics.
In contrast, when a woman asks a man to buy her a drink, she is asking him to satisfy a random and capricious whim, not help her as a weaker party from a superior position. Therefore, acceptance carries no positive status signals at all, but instead signals that he is willing to obey her whims for the mere privilege of her company. Compared to the box example, it's like accepting to pay extortion money versus giving to charity. The former is an expression of weakness and submission, the latter a dispensation of benevolence.
My point was more that the situations could be confused by people with broken social coprocessors and inappropriate behaviour translated across from one domain to another. Without a lot of explanation of the appropriateness.
Buying drinks can also be seen as someone weaker (financially) asking someone stronger. Considering that men earn more on average than women, and if you are picking up college girls and have a real job that is likely to be even more the case. So I don't see the way that these situations can be easily distinguished that way by someone without much social experience.
I agree about the grumbling, don't grumble about the weight, grumble about the time taken.
I have a few meta-rules of thumb in such matters:
Anything can mean anything.
Corollary: Never explain by malice that which is adequately explained by intelligence.
The rules are never what anyone says they are.
The rules may not even be what anyone thinks they are.
Nevertheless, there are rules.
It is your job to learn them, and nobody's job to teach them to you.
All advice, however universally it may be expressed, is correct only in some specific context.
Application of the last to the whole is left as an exercise. :-)
This whole list is brilliant. Particularly,
This makes "Never explain ... stupidity" a special case of this rule!
whpearson:
Well, yes, but that's what explanations are for. Once you grasp the underlying principles, it's not that complicated -- and more importantly, you gradually start to make correct judgments instinctively.
No, if you understand the status dynamic fully, you'll realize that you shouldn't grumble at all. Grumbling, of whatever sort, indicates that you assign a significant cost to the act, and in order to come off as high-status, you must make it look like it's a negligible expense of effort from your lofty high-status position, a casual dispensation of benevolent grace. As soon as you make it seem like you perceive the act as costly in any way, it looks like you're making the effort to fulfill her wishes, clearly displaying inferior status to hers.
Remember we are talking about nerdy girls, that is not the norm that the PUA deals with. I remember a recent post by someone saying that nerdy girls prefer men who dominate everything but them. I can't remember who posted it, at the moment.
Getting back to an earlier discussion of whether more women are wanted at LW..... anyone who's likely to show up here is nerdy. Perhaps it would be a good idea to remember, and keep remembering, and make it clear in your writing, that "women" are not a monolithic block and don't all want the same thing.
NancyLebovitz:
Assuming that there are non-Anglospheric folks here, this is probably an unjustified generalization due to a cultural bias. The idea that smart people interested in the sorts of things discussed here have to conform to the stereotype of "nerdiness" is a historically recent North American cultural phenomenon, which doesn't necessarily hold in other places. It's actually a rather curious state of affairs by overall historical standards.
Your observation is probably accurate statistically, though.
That's interesting. Any theories about what's going on?
People who appear socially low-status can end up in economically high-status knowledge-based professions in an industrial society, which upsets people's intuitions of how the social hierarchy should work. Put-downs have evolved for making things look right again.
Could be.
I still find American anti-intellectualism kind of shocking. Do you know if there are other cultures where children reliably punish each other for getting good grades?
A woman who doesn't want a generalization applied to them? :)
But that is an extremely normal human interaction.
You haven't clarified the all-important context. Is this a friend? Stranger? Do they need boxes moved often? What are your goals? Friendship? Company? Just getting a good feeling from helping people out?
Certainly, the default response, assuming a member in good standing of your extended tribe, is to help. This doesn't make it the "appropriate" response for all goals and contexts, however.
Agreed. Don't see anyone talking about "just trying to get into an extrovert girls pants," though. The rough consensus I'm seeing lately from proponents of learning normal social interaction is that it is useful for improving interaction with people in general.