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.
In the marginal Roissysphere, maybe. I've seen many attempt to get away from words like "pickup" or "seduction" though I haven't seen any consensus on an alternative. The problem is that our culture simply has no value-neutral or positive terms for, uh, how do I put it... systematically investigating how people induce each other to want sex and relationships, and how one can practically make use of that knowledge oneself.
(It took me about four tries to write the part in italics after thinking about this subject for years, and it's still really clunky. I could have said "understand the mating process and act on that understanding," but that's a bit too watered-down. My other best attempt was systematically investigating the process by which people create contexts that raise the chances of other people wanting to have sex and relationships with them, and how one can practically make use of this knowledge oneself. That phrasing is clunkier, but gets rid of the word "induce," which a bunch of feminists once told me is "mechanical" and "objectifying.")
"Game" has its own problems, of course. What I like about the term is that it implies that social interaction should be playful and fun. "Game" also highlights certain game-theoretic and competitive aspects of human interaction, but it might risk leading people to overstate those aspects. What I don't like is the connotation that a game isn't "serious" (e.g. "you think this is just a game, huh?") and that PUAs (or critics of PUAs) may believe that "game" involves not taking other people's feelings and interests seriously.
As I'm sure you know, some gurus (e.g. TylerDurden) have advocated viewing the process of learning pickup like learning a videogame. A similar frame is the "experiment frame," where you think of yourself as a scientist engaging in social experiments. Such frames can be extremely valuable for beginners who need to protect themselves emotionally during the early stages of the learning process, when most of what they try isn't going to work. Yet they are a form of emotionally distancing oneself from others; in a minority of people with existing problems, they could inhibit empathy, encourage antisocial behavior, or exacerbate feelings of alienation. In general though, I view the possible harm of such attitudes as mainly affecting the PUA.
I see these frames as training wheels which should soon be discarded once the need for such an emotionally defensive stance is gone. Most socially cool people don't see other people as part of a video game they are playing, or as subjects in a science experiment they are running (though some Dark Triad naturals do... one favorite quote of mine from an intelligent and extremely badboy natural friend of mine who had no exposure to the seduction community: "I love causation... once you understand it, you can manipulate people"). I still engage in social experiments all the time, but when I go out, I no longer think "I'm gonna run some cool experiments tonight," I think "I'm gonna hang out with some cool people tonight."
I have the impression that "game" is used much more widely even as the primary general term, let alone when people talk about specific skill subsets and applications ("phone game," "day game," etc.). But I'm sure you've seen a much broader sample of all sorts of PUA-related stuff, so I'll defer to your opinion.
That said, I see game primarily as a way of overcoming the biases and false beliefs held about male-female interactions in the contemporary culture. I would say that by historical standards, our culture is exceptionally ... (read more)