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.

I would want my control group to be given techniques that are entirely harmless and neutral, or as close to it as is reasonably possible.

While that would be an interesting test, being entirely harmless and neutral is how to flop, PUAs predict. People don't want to date people they feel neutral towards; they want to date people they are excited about. Since women are more selective, this principle applies even more to women, and makes for some interesting problem-solving.

Since there a bunch of different taxa in female preferences (yes, my model of the preferences of the female population accounts for significant differences in female preferences in certain dimensions), and these taxa have strong, differing, mutually-exclusive preferences (e.g. the preference to definitely kiss on the first date, vs. the preference to definitely not kiss on the first date), and which preference taxon a woman belongs to in advance is not always reasonably predictable, certain behaviors will have a polarizing response. There is only a certain set of behaviors that is universally attractive to women (e.g. confidence), and outside that set, behaviors that attract one woman might annoy or repulse another (cousin_it's arm around the waist example falls into this category).

Unfortunately, you can't always explicitly ask what preference taxon a woman is in; your ability to guess based on either strong or weak cues may be one of her filters. And asking too much about someone else's preferences can signal that you consider her higher status, which many women may find unattractive. It might also signal that you think something in particular is going to happen, when she hasn't decided if she wants it to happen yet. Even if a woman could have an explicit discussion of her preferences and not consider your obsequious for doing so, you can't really know this in advance. And you can't ask her if she is part of the taxon of women who can discuss their preferences explicitly without docking status points from men for raising the subject; nor can you ask her if she part of the taxon of women who can be asked which taxon of women she is in: the problem is recursive. So the only rational solution is to guess, unless you are comfortable screening out women who can't have explicit discussions of their preferences early in the interaction. (Though you can help your guessing by starting oblique discussions of preferences, such as talking about relationship history and listening carefully.)

You can't just avoid polarizing behaviors that women will have either strong positive or negative responses to, because then you risk relegating yourself to the boring guy heap. You are stuck doing an expected value calculation on these polarizing behaviors taking into account the uncertainty of your model of her. If you decide to make a certain move, you hope your calculation was right and you don't weird her out. And if you decide not to make that move, you hope your calculation was right and you don't get docked points for not making the move and failing to make a strong enough impression. A lot of guessing is going on here; if your hardware doesn't steer you down the right path, you need to get better at guessing, which is a job for rationality.

Shorter version of the above: Men need to make strong positive impressions on women to be reliably successful. Many of the behaviors that make strong positive impressions on some types of women make strong negative impressions on other types of women. The result is that men need to engage in high-risk, high-reward behaviors to make strong positive impressions on many types of women, though the risk is substantially mitigateable with experience and knowledge. This leads to some interesting ethical dilemmas. It also leads to some interesting practical consequences, where sometimes it's better to increase the variance in your attractiveness even at the cost of your average attractiveness to the female population. But now I'm just rambling...

So the only rational solution is to guess, unless you are comfortable screening out women who can't have explicit discussions of their preferences early in the interaction. (Though you can help your guessing by starting oblique discussions of preferences, such as talking about relationship history and listening carefully.) .... It also leads to some interesting practical consequences, where sometimes it's better to increase the variance in your attractiveness even at the cost of your average attractiveness to the female population.

I think you've highlig... (read more)

4kodos9616y

No, you misunderstood what I was saying. I meant that for the purposes of maintaining a valid control group, they be given instructions which neither help nor harm their chances, i.e. have a completely neutral effect on their innate "game" or lack thereof.

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