The Social Coprocessor Model

Roko

Followup to: Do you have High-Functioning Asperger's Syndrome?

LW reader Madbadger uses the metaphor of a GPU and a CPU in a desktop system to think about people with Asperger's Syndrome: general intelligence is like a CPU, being universal but only mediocre at any particular task, whereas the "social coprocessor" brainware in a Neurotypical brain is like a GPU: highly specialized but great at what it does. Neurotypical people are like computers with measly Pentium IV processors, but expensive Radeon HD 4890 GPUs. A High-functioning AS person is an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition - with on-board graphics!

This analogy also covers the spectrum view of social/empathic abilities, you can think about having a weaker social coprocessor than average if you have some of the tendencies of AS but not others. You can even think of your score on the AQ Test as being like the Tom's Hardware Rating of your Coprocessor. (Lower numbers are better!).

If you lack that powerful social coprocessor, what can you do? Well, you'll have to run your social interactions "in software", i.e. explicitly reason through the complex human social game that most people play without ever really understanding. There are several tricks that a High-functioning AS person can use in this situation:

(Most importantly) Find a community of others - who are trying to solve the same problem (Though be careful not to wind up with a group of people who have weaker social coprocessors and aren't doing anything about it, as you will tend to conform to this behavior). Having even a few friends who are in a similar niche to you is worth a huge amount in terms of motivating social pressure, as a sounding board to bounce ideas off, and simply for the instinctive feel of support that having a group of people "in the same boat as you" gives.

Cached answers - you can precompute the "right" responses to social situations. Probably the best example of this is the answer to the "buy me a drink" problem: you approach an attractive NT person who you might like as a future partner. After a short time, they ask you to buy them a drink. The logical answer to this question is "what kind of drink would you like?", because in most social situations where you want to build up a positive relationship with a person, it is best to comply with their requests; not creating explicit conflict is usually a safe heuristic. But this is the wrong answer in this context, and you can store in your cache of counter-intuitive answers.

Scientific theories of social games - including game theory and especially signaling games, information economics and evolutionary psychology. Building on the "buy me a drink" problem, instead of simply storing the answer as an exception, you can use evolutionary psychology and information economics to see the underlying pattern so that you can correctly answer the "drink" problem and many other similar problems. The NT is using the drink request to solve a cheap talk problem - they don't really want the drink, they want to know if you have higher dating market value than them, for example higher social status, income, success with other partners, etc. This is because evolutionary psychology makes some people want high-status people as partners. If they just asked you directly for these facts about yourself, you would have a strong incentive to lie. So they make a request that is somewhat rude, where only a lower-status suitor who thought they were worth "sucking up to" would comply, and then reject suitors who comply. This is really a kind of screening, where ability to give the "right" answer plays the role of a credential. Neurotypicals play some devious games, and this is actually quite a tame example.

The wisdom of nature heuristic - the human social coprocessor is perfectly optimized for an environment that we are no longer in. The EEA has significant differences to the present environment: most prominently, we have police and laws so other humans mostly don't act on their desire to kill you. This means that you can get away with things that you have an innate fear of, and you should strongly distrust your fear of other people's disapproval. There are also some reliable proxies of fitness that are no longer reliable, for example height (can be modified by higher shoes - a trick that women have cottoned on to, but men are totally missing out on).

Neuroplasticity and desensitization - your brain is plastic: you can train it and you can desensitize yourself to situations that scare you. Desensitization relies most on objectifing and dis-identifying with your maladaptive gut fear of doing something scary, for example public speaking or attending a social function where you know almost no-one. Realize that your brain contains small, simple, dumb circuits that produce your emotions, and some of them are outright harmful to you. You need to ignore their output and expose yourself to the stimuli.

Realizing that your brain contains nonrational psychological variables - that can be reset, often through a process known as "self transformation". Examples include general outlook on life, confidence, self-estimated status, self-esteem, sense of "fun" and rational irrationalities such as vengefulness, honor and pride. Approaches to self-transformation include eastern-style "spirituality", "new age" positive psychology works such as Eckhard Tolle, and more mainstream self-help like Tony Robbins. Changing your use of self-talk and framing is critical to resetting these variables.

Followup to: Do you have High-Functioning Asperger's Syndrome?

(Most importantly) Find a community of others - who are trying to solve the same problem (Though be careful not to wind up with a group of people who have weaker social coprocessors and aren't doing anything about it, as you will tend to conform to this behavior). Having even a few friends who are in a similar niche to you is worth a huge amount in terms of motivating social pressure, as a sounding board to bounce ideas off, and simply for the instinctive feel of support that having a group of people "in the same boat as you" gives.

Cached answers - you can precompute the "right" responses to social situations. Probably the best example of this is the answer to the "buy me a drink" problem: you approach an attractive NT person who you might like as a future partner. After a short time, they ask you to buy them a drink. The logical answer to this question is "what kind of drink would you like?", because in most social situations where you want to build up a positive relationship with a person, it is best to comply with their requests; not creating explicit conflict is usually a safe heuristic. But this is the wrong answer in this context, and you can store in your cache of counter-intuitive answers.

Scientific theories of social games - including game theory and especially signaling games, information economics and evolutionary psychology. Building on the "buy me a drink" problem, instead of simply storing the answer as an exception, you can use evolutionary psychology and information economics to see the underlying pattern so that you can correctly answer the "drink" problem and many other similar problems. The NT is using the drink request to solve a cheap talk problem - they don't really want the drink, they want to know if you have higher dating market value than them, for example higher social status, income, success with other partners, etc. This is because evolutionary psychology makes some people want high-status people as partners. If they just asked you directly for these facts about yourself, you would have a strong incentive to lie. So they make a request that is somewhat rude, where only a lower-status suitor who thought they were worth "sucking up to" would comply, and then reject suitors who comply. This is really a kind of screening, where ability to give the "right" answer plays the role of a credential. Neurotypicals play some devious games, and this is actually quite a tame example.

The wisdom of nature heuristic - the human social coprocessor is perfectly optimized for an environment that we are no longer in. The EEA has significant differences to the present environment: most prominently, we have police and laws so other humans mostly don't act on their desire to kill you. This means that you can get away with things that you have an innate fear of, and you should strongly distrust your fear of other people's disapproval. There are also some reliable proxies of fitness that are no longer reliable, for example height (can be modified by higher shoes - a trick that women have cottoned on to, but men are totally missing out on).

Neuroplasticity and desensitization - your brain is plastic: you can train it and you can desensitize yourself to situations that scare you. Desensitization relies most on objectifing and dis-identifying with your maladaptive gut fear of doing something scary, for example public speaking or attending a social function where you know almost no-one. Realize that your brain contains small, simple, dumb circuits that produce your emotions, and some of them are outright harmful to you. You need to ignore their output and expose yourself to the stimuli.

Realizing that your brain contains nonrational psychological variables - that can be reset, often through a process known as "self transformation". Examples include general outlook on life, confidence, self-estimated status, self-esteem, sense of "fun" and rational irrationalities such as vengefulness, honor and pride. Approaches to self-transformation include eastern-style "spirituality", "new age" positive psychology works such as Eckhard Tolle, and more mainstream self-help like Tony Robbins. Changing your use of self-talk and framing is critical to resetting these variables.

What's the "hypothesis" here?

The portion of your comment that I quoted, i.e.:

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.

I was saying that PUAs don't entirely agree with your hypothesis (and incidentally, don't necessarily value the "maximize his number of sexual partners" part)... but they do have tools for taking advantage of attuning to women who will be especially receptive.

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?

Both. As I mentioned earlier, PUA models of social behavior have been successfully applied in and out of pubs, with people who the PUA is not even trying to sleep with, both male and female. Anecdotally, PUAs who focus on learning social interaction skills find that those skills are just as useful in other contexts. (For example, Neil Strauss noted in The Game that learning PUA social skills actually helped his celebrity-interviewing technique, as it gave him tools for pepping up conversations that were starting to go stale.)

Most of the criticism here about PUA has been claiming that it has poor applicability to women, but this is the result of a severe misapprehension about both the goals and methods of PUA-developed social models. PUA social signaling models are actually applicable to humans in general, even though the means of effecting the signals will vary.

My impression is that the typical LWer has little familiarity with these models, and has only heard about a few bits of (highly context-sensitive) specific advice or techniques. Are you familiar with microloop theory? Frames? Pinging? There's a metric ton of of systematization attempts by PUA theorists, some of which is very insightful. Also, a lot of practical advice for dealing with a wide variety of social situations.

I would predict that if you took an experienced social-game theorist PUA trainer and threw him into a random physical social environment with a goal to make as many friends as possible, vs. an untrained male of similar geekiness (I'm assuming the social game theorist will be a geek, present or former) and similar unfamiliarity with the group or its rules/topics/etc., and the PUA will kick the untrained person's ass from here to Sunday.

What's more, I would bet that you could repeat this experiment over and over, with different PUAs and get the same results. And if the PUA in question is a good trainer, I'd be they'd be able to take a modest-sized group of similarly-geeky students and quickly train at least one student to beat an untrained person by a solid margin, and to get most of the students to improve on their previous, untrained results

That's how confident I am that PUA social interaction models are sufficiently correct to be broadly applicable to "typical" human beings -- not just women.

(Btw, I'm aware that I've left a huge number of loopholes in my stated prediction that an unscrupulous experimenter could use to skew the results against the PUA, but I don't really want to take the time to close them all right now. Suffice to say that it would need to be a fair contest, apart from the PUA's specialized training, and I'm only betting on PUA trainers being able to totally kick an untrained person's ass; I would expect experienced PUAs to do say, maybe 2-3 times as well as the untrained on average. Trainers and "in-field" coaches have to have a better grasp of social dynamics than the people they're training. Also, there's a big gap between theory and execution -- if you can't get your body and voice to do what the theory tells you to, it doesn't matter how good the theory is!)

I would predict that if you took an experienced social-game theorist PUA trainer and threw him into a random physical social environment with a goal to make as many friends as possible, vs. an untrained male of similar geekiness (I'm assuming the social game theorist will be a geek, present or former) and similar unfamiliarity with the group or its rules/topics/etc., and the PUA will kick the untrained person's ass from here to Sunday.
What's more, I would bet that you could repeat this experiment over and over, with different PUAs and get the same results

... (read more)

2kodos9616y

Ok, I swore to myself I wasn't going to comment on this thread anymore, but now you've made me think of something that hadn't occurred to me before: Assuming for the moment that it's true that a skilled PUA trainer would beat an untrained person at this test, how much of that effect do you think is attributable to simply being more confident vs actually having a more accurate model of human social behavior? I.e. you could, in principle, test for what I'm talking about by replacing the untrained geek with a geek trained with a different, completely fabricated set of PUA rules and theories, which he'd been led to believe were the real, PUA methods.... tell him these methods have been extensively experimentally tested, maybe even fake some tests with some actors to convince him that his bogus PUA skills actually work, just to give him the confidence of thinking he knows the secrets of the PUA masters. Then test him against someone given an equal amount of training on the "real" PUA techniques. Oh, and for bonus points, for the fabricated set of techniques, you could use stuff taught by Scientology, just to make sure there's consensus that it's bogus ;) How do you think that test would turn out? (I'm taking no position on the issue - I honestly don't know)

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