= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
The Social Coprocessor Model
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.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (570)
Warning: Some posters may regard this advice as an act of terrorism (in moral equivalence if not by that label).
What? Huh?
Do you remember the Summer '09 LW flamewar about the proper policy regarding PUA discussion here? If so, I was referring to the people on one side of that. (obvious caveat about there not being two sides but fine gradations of positions in multiple dimensions, &c.)
I'm new here at LW, and was unaware that this had previously been the subject of a flamewar. I guess I stepped into the middle of an ongoing battle without realizing it.
If this is the case though, then I wonder why so few other people seem to be stepping in on the other side of the issue here on this article's comment threads. Was the pro-PUA faction declared the victor of the previous debates? Was some kind of detente or cease-fire declared?
Or is it just because the PUAs are karma-bombing the anti comments below default visibility threshold?
Hm, good question. To the extent that there were "sides", the other side's most vocal proponents aren't posting in this discussion, though there do seem to be comments objecting to frank discussion of female preferences, using much of the same reasons.
Here, for example, is a characteristic exchange about whether PUA discussion is appropriate on LW, discussing relevance to rationality, where it's being compared to discussion of football or makeup.
I recommend not anticipating the mistakes you expect people to make. I believe it makes updating more difficult.
Good point.
While we're on the topic of giving advice, I recommend that posters here not throw off strong Bayesian evidence that they hold a very adversarial position with respect to truthful, non-PC advice about the psychology of romance as it pertains to women. Had I lacked such evidence from posters, I would have also refrained from making the above post.
'Terrorism' is strong, but it is a pet peeve of mine when people present knowledge they know is contentious as though it were obvious, so this did annoy me considerably and lower my opinion of the poster. (I am more or less neutral on the question of whether it is good advice or not; I do not go to bars, so it does not affect me.)
The example that came to mind for me was, "''Sup?" which I used to hate with a passion, but I later parsed into a fairly complex, ritualistic phrase somewhere in the range of:
"Non-specific greetings to you. If we are both continuing on our paths, I expect similar non-specific greetings in return and indicate a slight preference toward the revelation of any bite-size knowledge you feel is important regarding your current activities or news that you feel I would be particularly interested in.
"If either one of us approached the other and stopped, this indicates anticipation of a slightly longer exchange, and I am querying the reasons for your approach or I am using a handshake protocol to determine if you have the current time-capacity and willingness to engage in a topic I consider interesting or important but for various reasons I do not wish to state outright, though with an equal potential that I am just bored and seeking non-specific social interaction."
Not entirely, although there does seem to be some shame attached to doing this.
I do much the same thing by wearing hiking boots everywhere. They're waterproof, well-insulated for cold weather, and also increase my height more than sneakers.
Yes, cowboy boots have bigger heels, but are they waterproof and insulated? ;)
If I wore boots like that, I would feel obligated to also wear jeans, a button-up shirt, and a cowboy hat. Is this considered acceptable in most social situations?
Jeans with a cool wash, definitely. Button-up shirt, sure, but you could swap in a nice graphic T-shirt instead. You don't need a cowboy hat.
Military boots are also good for a little height, and they are stylish and will go with just about anything.
Relevant link/discussion: http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/why-not-fake-height/
Women seem to have a strong urge to check out what shoes a man has on, and judge their quality. Even they can't explain it. Perhaps at some unconscious level, they are guarding against men who 'cheat' by wearing high heels.
When you edit your post, there's a button that shows a green horizontal bar. Click that to insert a section break in your post. Only what's before the break will show up on "NEW".
I have seen this comment many times recently. It would perhaps be good if the posting box suggested doing this, or even insisted on it for posts over a certain size.
I have never encountered or heard of this behaviour. I would be rather startled if someone I had just met asked me to buy them a drink. I'd guess they were too poor to get their own (and with all respect to poor people, my interest in pursuing a relationship with them would substantially diminish).
I can understand your explanation, but I would find an opposite explanation just as plausible (they are trying to determine if the cost of a drink is a mere trifle to you, hence buying them one = good).
Is this a culturally specific thing? Where is this action, with this meaning, a standard pattern of behaviour?
Never. That could explain it. I don't watch romantic movies either, or any TV.
So, how does the script normally play out?
"No."?
"No, we don't know each other well enough yet?"
"snort Too poor to get your own, are you?"
Ignore or somehow deflect the request and talk about something else?
None of the above?
If I had to guess I'd go with the fourth, but I'm only guessing.
ETA: I don't mind getting the karma, but I'm curious about why I'm getting several upvotes within minutes of posting this.
I voted you up because I wanted to attract attention to your comment, because I also wanted the questions contained within answered as well.
Decline, but the conversation would never have got that far anyway, and isn't going to get any further. I'm not very good at maintaining a conversation, but when I deliberately put out the "please shut up and go away" vibes it has no chance. :-)
I'm not sure what this has to do with the original scenario, where the two people are still trying to assess each other. Or what status has to do with those examples.
I've never understood why people think that's effective.
What good does it do to act like you're higher status if you're not? You can't change your face or your income by signaling. Is everybody really so gullible?
And also -- I've not spent a huge amount of time in bars, but I've never seen anyone ask a stranger for a drink.
As long as we're piling on anecdotes, I've asked folks for drinks on numerous occasions. And the bartender at a club I frequented back in the day used to give me my drinks for free.
Income and looks are only one component of status. Other components are determined by signaling and other forms of implicit communication in actual interactions. So, merely acting like you are high status will go a long way to convince people that you are, as long as you aren't giving off contradictory low status signals also.
One of the reason that people play status games (of which "buy me a drink" often is), is because there is a margin of error in status perception, and poking the other person with a status ploy is a way to confirm or disconfirm your initial impression of their status. If you believe that you are higher status that someone, and you attempt a successful status grab that they submit to, then it confirms that you are higher status.
As I've hypothesized, the way normal people tend to interact (or at least, a typical mode for certain types of extraverts to interact) is to constantly bump up against each other socially in mini-dominance battles and figure out the pecking order by seeing who can away with what against who.
This form of interaction used to be rather alien to me, and I would interpret it as an affront (which is how RichardKennaway seems to interpret it), but Ben Kovitz's weird psychology wiki gave me some ideas to help understand it.
From an article on negotiation:
From another negotation article:
Status is partly a process of empirical discovery. It is decided through negotiation. People with different phenotypes approach this negotiation in different ways. Some people negotiate by acting lower in status to everyone. Some people negotiate by acting equal in status to everyone. Some people (such as neurotypical extraverts) negotiate by acting higher in status to everyone. Non-neurotypicals are simply unaware of this negotiation.
To people like us, neurotypical socially-dominant extraverts will seem annoying with their constant status grabs. But they aren't necessarily trying to be jerks, they are just interacting the only way they know how. They are attempting to negotiate with you, they just begin the negotiation by driving a hard bargain. They may assume that you are like them, and expect you to stand up for yourself and give them a counter-offer back of a different status relationship, where instead of them being on top, you two are equals, or you are on top. They may even want you prove that you are higher status, and their test is an opportunity for you to do so. They will expect you to negotiate yourself, by either submitting, or attempting to fight back; what they won't be able to understand is someone who doesn't even participate in this sort of negotiation in the first place.
I've heard this before, but framed as 'Ask Culture meets Guess Culture'.
Even guess cultures have that distinction; look up the etymology of otaku sometime.
Yep. And depending on the way you opt out of the negotiation, you may be perceived as either very low self-esteem, or as an arrogant bastard.
The latter category (which I personally have been categorized as a lot) tends to happen when you assume that all people are supposed to be equal, dammit, and refuse to give ground to anything that isn't Right with a capital R. This results in the problem of causing others to have to lose face when you win... and people don't like it.
(Later in life, I've realized that it generally works better to arrange things so that other people can receive status strokes by siding with you, and they then tend to return the strokes.)
Status isn't something you have, it's something you do.
The way we respond to others has a lot more to it than that. If I'm approached by someone of the wrong sexual orientation for me, then my declining their advances has nothing to do with status. The same with 15-year-old girls (the only example in the original version of your comment). My response to these people will be whatever is necessary to get them to give up on the sexual advances. This does not strike me as a useful response to someone that I would like to get together with.
Perhaps the idea you are trying to get across is that you should begin by trying to put the other person off, but (if you still want to get together with them) take care not to do so too effectively? I am familiar with the custom of ritually refusing a gift before accepting it -- is this something similar?
Are you speaking from personal experience or is this something you have only worked out on paper?
I would call that simply value. If their status matters to me, it is part of their value to me; if it does not, it is irrelevant.
Tested by you? Ok, maybe that's too personal a question, but I'm aware in general terms of the PUA stuff, and I have only a limited interest in soup of the soup.
On a very narrow and self-selecting sample, i.e. people who show up at bars and clubs with the express intention of getting "picked up"
Sorry, what is "NT"? I read this blog often enough that I feel like I should know, but I don't.
"Neurotypical" - in context, not being significantly autistic.
Thank you.
I completely understand the general idea here, I just think the drink-buying thing is a bad example. In my experience, refusal to buy a drink for someone who's flirting with you doesn't send the signal "you're X statusvalue lower than me", it sends the signal "I'm not interested in playing this game at all"
I think you're misunderstanding the "refusal." It's not a "No, go away," it's more like "you buy me one first, I'm cuter" said playfully.
Well hang on. It isn't that simple. The man buying the woman a drink is more or less the courtship norm. They haven't actually stepped that far out of line by asking for a drink so the way you respond has to be calibrated to their status. If their status isn't that high and it was something of a gutsy move to ask for one, there is nothing wrong with letting them down softly with a "Nope. It isn't anything personal, you seem cool. I just don't buy drinks for women I just met" and you can segue into a conversation about how silly the norm is if you like. If the person has really high status then something more along the lines of lightly mocking them for being a spoiled brat who won't buy their own drinks can go over fine.
Umm, only with someone with whom I was already acquainted and I think the way I phrased it sounds worse than I meant it to sound. Spoiled is a bit much, I meant it to describe the extreme end of the possible responses you were suggesting. My point was more (1) when someone asks you to buy them a drink while they are testing your status they're also putting themselves at risk for rejection. So if your status is fairly equal already, be nice about it. And (2) the greater the initial status differential between you and the other person, the more confident you need to be (which, as I understand it has been well tested, I can anecdotally testify to and which is consistent with dominance hierarchy theory.)
This was not a particularly constructive example to use in the original post, for several reasons.
There are basically two situations that lead to this: First, the other person is interested in you, but is somewhat awkward and uses this as a rather blunt test to measure your interest in them. Second, if person is not interested in you, but sees you as a means of getting a free drink.
As the latter tends to be more likely, and in the former, there are still ways you can show interest without buying them a drink, you should not buy them a drink. However, buying them a drink is not wrong insofar as no unpleasant social consequences result from it (as they might result from, for example, an unflattering comment about a person's weight or appearance). All that happens is you're out $3-10, depending on the bar.
It's also worth noting that with certain people and in certain circumstances, you may actually be seeking someone with the qualities indicated by this request. If I were a rich and not particularly attractive older man, and the subject were a much-younger and attractive woman, this comment may actually suggest we could establish a mutually beneficial relationship. Our response to the request is really a response to the person making the request, and your hypothetical assumes we should a negative response, which is generally but not invariably true. Your description of the
That doesn't cover Mallah's story. I think the free drinks explanation is largely a confabulation by girls who don't know why they do it.
I believe that covers that story perfectly. he approached an attractive woman, who saw him as a sucker who'd buy her an expensive drink, which he did, whereupon she promptly ignored him. If that's not exactly what I said, I don't know what is.
It covers the story up to the point of her not taking the drink. Perhaps she just wanted to see if she could. I agree that getting him to buy the drink may be more significant than actually consuming it. Or it could simply be a way of chastising someone she didn't believe should be talking to her. Or, perhaps, she simply forgot.
For practical purposes, she's not different whether she takes the drink or not. It's still a waste of money. If she didn't forget, it's likely she simply got a kick out of ordering some guy around. Not a situation I anticipated, but certainly deserving the same response as the selfish drinker.
This seems very odd to me. You seem to be suggesting that this is the typical way a socially successful NT responds to being asked for a drink, and that just seems truly, bizarrely wrong to me. Where did you learn this? Is it a PUA thing? I'm not necessarily saying it wouldn't work - it might, in the same way that weird PUA crap like "peacocking" might work, but it definitely isn't normal behavior, even for NTs
I'm confused why you think this is so bizarrely wrong. I mean, yes, some inexperienced guys are easily manipulated by attractive women, but I think that more successful and more experienced people would just make a joke of it, and not allow themselves to be manipulated easily.
And everyone "peacocks" every time they dress for an occasion or buy clothes because they like how they look. That's not weird or bizarre either.
It just runs counter to my own experience and observation. Deflecting the request with a joke would be an effective way to avoid getting played for free drinks, if you think that's what's going on, or of politely declining if you're just not interested, but it doesn't seem like a generally effective, or commonly practiced, method of actually parlaying the interaction into a "score" - not unless you happen to be dealing with the kind of person who's attracted to assholes. My impression is that these kind of PUA style techniques are geared towards successfully picking up people with low self esteem. That may work, but I think it's a mistake to draw conclusions from that about "normal" social interaction.
I am very confused by this comment. Who are you talking about as the "asshole" in this scenario? I think you may be misunderstanding it. The idea is that two people are talking and flirting, and the girl asks the guy for something (like a drink, but it could be anything: taking a picture, helping her with something) at which point the guy teases her about it. I'm not seeing anything about low self esteem here.
The guy who says "no" when, in the middle of flirting, a girl asks for a drink. This just doesn't happen IRL unless the guy is intentionally trying to shut down the interaction.
Could you explain your basis for this claim a little more?
Roko explicitly wrote about using a status-lowering level of teasing.
Part of the problem may be that a lot of play is inhibited attack, and it can be hard to judge just how much of a verbal attack is either intended or received.
I think that the emphasis on status here is misplaced. Here's an analogy:
Imagine that you, dear reader, are very smart, and when you get into conversations about intellectual topics, people almost always say "Wow, you're smart," based on superficial indicators, and seem impressed. Now imagine that you meet someone who reacts differently: they take it for granted that you're smart, and actually try to engage with you intellectually, rather than being awed and amazed by your intellect.
Can you see that your reaction might be very different? You might be more likely to like and be interested in talking to this person, intrigued that they weren't so easily won over, and possibly a little motivated to prove your intelligence to them.
That's what's going on in the example with attractive girls, except with looks and sexuality rather than intelligence. It's less of a "Oh wow you have high status" reaction on the girl's part, and more of "Hey, finally someone who isn't a pushover just cause I'm hot. He might actually be fun to talk to." This is communicated all the time with little things like body language, the way you turn to look at someone, the way you stand, and how you speak. It usually isn't as direct as "Will you buy me a drink?"
Yes, I like this analogy between intellectual interaction and social (status) interaction. Both types of interaction have "I'll push you until you stop me" behavior, that would be considered offensive or attacking if it was manifested in the other form of interaction.
A common mode of interaction for intellectuals is to argue for positions that you aren't sure of in order to figure out if they believe in, or even to argue for positions that they don't believe just to play devil's advocate. These debate styles push against people, expecting them to push back, analogous to the social styles of many neurotypical extraverts.
Just as introverts on the autistic spectrum hate it when neurotypical extraverts try to turn everything into a status game, neurotypical extraverts hate it when autistic spectrum introverts try to turn everything into a debate.
In a group of neurotypical extraverts, saying something like "you're such a dork" to someone else is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to handle it and fire back. Likewise, in a group of autistic spectrum introverts, saying something like "you're wrong" is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to be able to handle it, and either defend or concede their position.
Both groups have different norms for showing assertiveness, and an assertiveness display in one group could be considered an attack if it was performed in the other group.
Good point about "you're wrong," which has unnerved me a few times. Also, especially on this site: "you're unethical" or "that's unethical."
In bars and clubs in the UK, US and Canada at least.
It seems very weird to me that this seems unfamiliar to you. It's a cliche in movies and the like.
It's a cliche in movies but it's actually rare in real life, in my experience, except as a joke.
I just realized that one person's joke is another person's status test, of course.
Indeed, this pattern seems totally strange to me. While on the dating scene, if a woman brazenly asked a man to get her a drink, I would consider it a test to see if he can handle assertiveness. That is, if he is fun and easy-going. If he said no, I would think she could consider him either not interested in her enough to part with a few dollars AND too cheap to satisfy a small request, or insecure about his status in the company of a woman. Hopefully, he would say yes, and they could enjoy a drink together.
Do men really say, 'no, I won't' and find success with that??
[Apologies for the editing and then un-editing; I commented naively and then realized I'm kind of over my head here with the inferential distance; culture and values-wise. I think things have changed since I was dating, or I noticed different things.]
Feynman would end up with the woman buying him a drink.
Yes. Especially if success is partly defined by "not wasting money on other people". But even if it isn't. You have to be humorous about it but, yeah, the only time I would ever buy a woman I just met a drink is if it is her birthday. I'll also buy second rounds if the girl buys the first.
On the other hand this tradition makes going out to bars with my girlfriend a lot cheaper since she can just walk away for a minute and someone will come up to her and buy her a drink. After which she comes back to me, drink in hand. (ETA: Though, I don't think she's ever asked for a drink. She's much too nice for that. People just come up and offer.)
The above is correct but this part would depend a lot on how the "no" is delivered:
The real status test is about whether he considers his company to be as valuable as hers. If he complies with the request (without any quid pro quo), then he's ceded her the higher social status -- which was what the question was testing (either intentionally or unintentionally), in the common case.
Declining the request, reversing it (you buy me one), or insisting on a quid pro quo, are the only ways to maintain equivalent or higher status in the interaction (absent an ongoing equal relationship wherein the quid pro quo is assumptive). Also, skillfully handling any of these options raises the observer's estimate of your social coprocessor's power rating as well. ;-)
There are a wide variety of context-sensitive ways to decline or redirect such a request, depending on the situation and level of rapport of the conversation... from the polite to the downright rude, all of which can be functional if delivered with confidence. But certainly, "fun and easygoing" no's are possible.
(For example: pretending to misinterpret the request as an offer, eg. "Oh, yes please. That's very kind of you. I'll have a..", a playful, "Oh? And what are you going to do for me?", or even a humorous, mock-offended and effeminately-voiced, "Hmph! What kind of boy do you think I am? Are you trying to get me drunk and take advantage of me?")
As thomblake points out, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"contains his story of finding out this counterintuitive fact - although the specific story involves calling a woman "worse than a whore" for getting him to buy $1.10 worth of sandwiches. She then proceeded to pay him back the $1.10... and then came over later to have sex with him.
In Feynman's second story, he asks “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?” -- and gets a "yes".
Amusingly, the "Player Guide" (an open-source guide for beginning PUAs) isn't quite so bold - it only recommends asking for a french kiss as the quid pro quo. ;-)
Of course, all of these anecdotes and advice are subject to selection bias - i.e., to the mostly-NT women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks. My guess is that most non-NT women don't ask guys to buy them drinks unless there's either an ongoing quid pro quo (i.e., "I'll buy the next round"), or they've consciously chosen to exploit the social dynamic for financial/alcoholic gain.
tl;dr: a man is generally best-off treating a request for a drink as a test to determine whether he has low enough self-esteem to believe he needs to pay for female company, and an opportunity to display an unruffled and socially-skillful response.
Later that night...
"So... you wanna come in for a cup of tea?"
"Ummm... okay, but just a cup of tea then."
"[mock relief] Phew, and here I was afraid you were trying to get into my pants!"
Hang on half a second here. No more than 1% of Americans are autistic. (CDC estimates 1 in 110.) Autism is four times as common among males as females. This whole "NT" vs "non-NT" thing you're talking about is distinguishing 99.75% of women from 0.25%. I think this may be misguided. There are way more women who don't ask to be bought drinks than that.
Personality is a factor, not just attractiveness. Women who are some combination of the following don't engage in testing like this, or are less likely to do so:
Sweet, sensitive, nerdy quiet types of both genders just don't like status games very much, and they tend to be bad at them.
The standard PUA model focuses a lot on women who do engage in testing and status games, because they tend to disproportionately encounter women who play them. This is understandable, but flawed.
I expect that women who match one or more of your bullet points are less likely to be the most eye-catching.
I'm curious what you mean by this. Do you mean you think they will have put less effort into clothing, hair, makeup, etc. (perhaps true, but perhaps less relevant to male attraction than you think) or do you mean that you expect some inverse correlation between physical attractiveness and the personality traits described?
Partly that they put less effort into their appearance (which, for many, also includes a non-trivial effort to be thin), but also that a desire to be noticed is more related to extroversion and dominance than their opposites, and skill at being noticed favorably is related to neurotypicallity.
With introversion, agreeableness, and sensitivity, I wouldn't suspect any negative correlation with conventional attractiveness (agreeableness could even have a weak positive correlation). Nerdiness and lack of socialization may be related, and even if there is a negative correlation between them and attractiveness for whatever reason, that correlation may not be particularly strong.
I would hypothesize that personality traits are at least as big a factor as looks in explaining variance in female status testing behavior. As a result, I agree with SarahC's view that neurotypical vs. non-neurotypical status does not adequately demarcate women who ask men to buy them drinks from women who don't. And I also disagree with Roko's suggestion that women who don't engage in this behavior predominantly lie in the left tail of the attractiveness distribution for age.
If pjeby's original intent, however, was to present NT women as those most likely to engage in this behavior, and non-NT women as least likely, then I would agree with him that such a correlation is plausible. If Roko wanted to hypothesize a weak-to-moderate correlation of attractiveness and status-testing behavior, than I would agree. I just consider certain personality traits that are probably uncorrelated with beauty as having a large effect on engaging in this kind of behavior.
FTFY
[citation needed]
I actually didn't state either of the things that people are attributing to me. I simply referred to "the mostly-NT women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks".
The mostly-NT is hyphenated because it is an attribute of "women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks" -- and this attribution does not require any correlation. The simple fact that non-NT women are a minority, period, ensures that most of the women who do this showing up at bars and asking of drinks will be neurotypicals.
I was making a point about the selection bias effect of this on PUA models, not attempting to draw any conclusions about the likelihood of drink-asking behavior given neurotypicality. (I did suggest a negative correlation between neuro-atypicality and drink-asking behavior, however.)
I suppose that's true.
My confusion with this whole business is quantitative. The assumption in Roko's drink-buying model is that this is the right way to interact to attract the kind of women his audience would be interested in. That's a statement of probability. It's likely that you'll be going to bars to meet women, it's likely that any women you're interested in engage in shit-testing, it's likely that any women you're interested in respond the way the girls in the Feynman story do. I'm really not sure about that.
There are, as I mentioned, very, very few autistic women. So Roko and Nancy lump in the less attractive women. Fine, in principle. I'm still not convinced that a typical straight male LW reader won't find, in his dating pool, quite a few women who don't behave like the prototypical chick in a PUA parable. I only have anecdotes, of course, but I and most of my female friends and family members don't behave like that. We hit a lot of HughRistic's bullet points. And we've stumbled into our fair share of good relationships.
In other words: I think nerdy women are pretty numerous, far too numerous to be diagnosable autistics, and do just fine on the dating market. And I suspect the typical straight male LW reader wouldn't mind dating one.
I don't see any necessary contradiction between Roko and SarahC's perspectives in determining an optimal dating strategy for men with LW-reader phenotypes that doesn't rely on luck.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology not correctly described by the standard PUA model? Yes. Should these guys go outside that model to understand these women? Yes.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology that is correctly described by the standard PUA model, in part or in whole? Yes. Would these guys benefit from attaining knowledge of neurotypical social behaviors (from PUAs or elsewhere) to be able to date these women, instead of arbitrarily cutting them out of their dating pool? Yes.
I take an empirical approach to romantic success. Being able to date many kinds of people gives you a lot of options. Sometimes, you can't know whether you would be compatible with a certain type of person until you try dating someone like that. Saying "but I don't want anyone like that anyway" about people out of one's reach because of a lack of common social skills is a failure mode. Yet if you attain the skills to date someone like that, and you find it doesn't work, then you know that you are not merely the fox calling the grapes sour in Aesop's fable.
Umm. The purpose of dating is to find someone you're compatible with. "Expanding your dating pool" to include personality types you don't like defeats the whole point.
I think a lot of what I'm disagreeing with you and blueberry about is this assumption that meat-market type bars and clubs, and the PUA style tactics that may work well in those environments, are a representative sample of "typical social behavior"
Well, the "buying a drink" story is an extreme example that's been canonized to make a point. But I'm convinced that in general, human beings are always unconsciously "testing" each other, and that this applies to everyone, male or female, autistic or NT. It's just part of how humans talk and joke around and communicate. For instance, saying hi to someone and smiling is "testing": you're seeing what kind of mood someone is in. Making a joke, or laughing at a joke, is "testing": you're seeing how other people react.
I don't see the "PUA" stuff as about sex or dating or men and women. It's about human social interaction in general.
Yes, status-testing is a general component of typical human interaction. I think this is the point that Roko was trying to make, even though his particular example was rather gendered. If you want to see status testing in a non-male-female context, watch the behavior of frat boys, for example.
The point is that for those unfamiliar with this behavior, they need to be able to identify it when it happens, to not take it personally or as a sign of hostility, and know how to respond. Roko's advocation of "caching responses" is very helpful, until one gets a gut feeling and can be guided towards a satisfactory response merely by emotions.
I suggest there's a difference between "testing" and "checking". In a test, you're trying to find out whether the other person will fail or (in the case of bullies) hoping they will, while in a check, you'll hoping they'll succeed. I gather there are some people who are pretty evenly balanced on the chack/test scale-- if the other person passes, fine, it's a potential friendship, and if the other person fails, the harassment commences.
I think that a lot of small talk is what I call "pinging"-- "Hello, I'm here and friendly".
I think you're letting an instrumental approach to psychology affect your epistemic rationality.
I didn't say that (most NT women) (ask men for drinks), I said (most women who ask men for drinks) are NT.
Given your statistics, this would be expected even if half of all women asked men for drinks, because then you'd have half of 99.75% of women being NT+drink.asking and half of .25% being non-NT+drink.asking.
That being said, I do not assume that non-NT-ness requires actual autism or even diagnosable Asperger's. High intelligence alone (IMO) qualifies one for being neurally "atypical" in my book.
Ah, I misunderstood (I've only ever heard "NT" to refer to "not autistic.")
You're quite right, technically; I perceived an implication the other way as well but you may not have meant that.
I can confirm that this does happen at least sometimes (USA). I was at a bar, and I approached a woman who is probably considered attractive by many (skinny, bottle blonde) and started talking to her. She soon asked me to buy her a drink. Being not well versed in such matters, I agreed, and asked her what she wanted. She named an expensive wine, which I agreed to get her a glass of. She largely ignored me thereafter, and didn't even bother taking the drink!
(I did obtain some measure of revenge later that night by spanking her rear end hard, though I do not advise doing such things. She was not amused and her brother threatened me, though as I had apologized, that was the end of it. She did tell some other lies so I don't know if she is neurotypical; my impression was that she was well below average in morality, being a spoiled brat.)
You assaulted her because she asked for an expensive drink, you gave her the drink, and then she ignored you?
You say you don't recommend what you did, but I'm curious about why, considering that you seem to think she deserved it.
It was a single swat to the buttocks, done in full sight of everyone. There was other ass-spanking going on, between people who knew each other - done as a joke - so in context it was not so unusual. I would not have done it outside of that context, nor would I have done it if my inhibitions had not been lowered by alcohol; nor would I do it again even if they are.
Yes, she deserved it!
It was a mistake. Why? It exposed me to more risk than was worthwhile, and while I might have hoped that (aside from simple punishment) it would teach her the lesson that she ought to follow the Golden Rule, or at least should not pull the same tricks on guys, in retrospect it was unlikely to do so.
Other people (that I have talked to) seem to be divided on whether it was a good thing to do or not.
Thanks for the explanation.
I still don’t understand how she “deserved” to have you escalate the encounter with a “hard” physical spanking; nor do I understand how, if you spanked her in a joking context, you would consider it punishment or “some measure of revenge.” From what you’ve said, it doesn’t seem like you were on sufficiently friendly terms with her that the spanking was in fact treated as teasing/joking action; you previously stated that she was not amused by the spanking, her brother threatened you, and you apologized.
I’m certainly not trying to say that her behavior wasn’t worthy of serious disapproval and verbal disparagement. But responding to her poor behavior with physical actions rather than words seems at least equally inappropriate.
It sure was one hell of a low status signal. The worst possible way you can fail a shit test is to get visibly hurt and angry.
As for whether she deserved it, well, if you want to work in the kitchen, better be prepared to stand the heat. Expecting women you hit on to follow the same norms of behavior as your regular buddies and colleagues, and then getting angry when they don't, is like getting into a boxing match and then complaining you've been assaulted.
[Note: this is going to sound at first like PUA advice, but is actually about general differences between the socially-typical and atypical in the sending and receiving of "status play" signals, using the current situation as an example.]
I don't know about "good", but for it to be "useful" you would've needed to do it first. (E.g. Her: "Buy me a drink" You: "Sure, now bend over." Her: "What?" "I said bend over, I'm going to spank your spoiled [add playful invective to taste].")
Of course, that won't work if you are actually offended. You have to be genuinely amused, and clearly speaking so as to amuse yourself, rather than being argumentative, judgmental, condescending, critical, or any other such thing.
This is a common failure mode for those of us with low-powered or faulty social coprocessors -- we take offense to things that more-normal individuals interpret as playful status competition, and resist taking similar actions because we interpret them as things that we would only do if we were angry.
In a way, it's like cats and dogs -- the dog wags its tail to signal "I'm not really attacking you, I'm just playing", while the cat waves its tail to mean, "you are about to die if you come any closer". Normal people are dogs, geeks are cats, and if you want to play with the dogs, you have to learn to bark, wag, and play-bite. Otherwise, they think you're a touchy psycho who needs to loosen up and not take everything so seriously. (Not unlike the way dogs may end up learning to avoid the cats in a shared household, if they interpret the cats as weirdly anti-social pack members.)
Genuine creeps and assholes are a third breed altogether: they're the ones who verbally say they're just playing, while in fact they are not playing or joking at all, and are often downright scary.
And their existence kept me from understanding how things worked more quickly, because normal people learn not to play-bite you if you bare your claws or hide under the couch in response ! So, it didn't occur to me that all the normal people had just learned to leave me out of their status play, like a bunch of dogs learning to steer clear of the psycho family cat.
The jerks, on the other hand, like to bait cats, because we're easy to provoke a reaction from. (Most of the "dogs" just frown at the asshole and get on with their day, so the jerk doesn't get any fun.)
So now, if you're a "cat", you learn that only jerks do these things.
And of course, you're utterly and completely wrong, but have little opportunity to discover and correct the problem on your own. And even if you learn how to fake polite socialization, you won't be entirely comfortable running with the dogs, nor they you, since the moment they actually try to "play" with you, you act all weird (for a dog, anyway).
That's why, IMO, some PUA convversation is actually a good thing on LW; it's a nice example of a shared bias to get over. The LWers who insist that people aren't really like that, only low [self-esteem, intelligence] girls fall for that stuff, that even if it does work it's "wrong", etc., are in need of some more understanding of how their fellow humans [of either gender] actually operate. Even if their objective isn't to attract dating partners, there are a lot of things in this world that are much harder to get if you can't speak "dog".
tl;dr: Normal people engage in playful dog-like status games with their actual friends and think you're weird when you respond like a cat, figuratively hissing and spitting, or running away to hide under the bed. Yes, even your cool NT friends who tolerate your idiosyncracies -- you're not actually as close to them as you think, because they're always more careful around you than they are around other NTs.
I don’t like to go meta, but this comment and its upvotes (4 at the time I write) are among the more disturbing thing I’ve seen on this site. I have to assume that they reflect voters’ appreciation for a real-life story of a woman asking a man to buy a drink, rather than approval of the use of violence to express displeasure over someone else’s behavior and perceived morality in a social situation.
I’m also surprised that you’re telling this story without expressing any apparent remorse about your behavior, but I guess the upvotes show that you read the LW crowd better than I do.
Correct in my case.
I'm wondering if it's a true story. The part about the drink is conceivable. I'd be surprised if the woman's behavior is at all common,. though.
The violence..... where is there enough privacy at a bar to spank someone?
I didn't get the impression that the spanking was done in privacy.
You think he lied about the story?
If it wasn't done in privacy, then I understand my culture less than I thought.
Would people just let a man grabbing a woman and spanking her happen? No one calls the police? There's no bouncer?
If the glass of wine was expensive, this isn't an extremely sleazy bar, if that matters.
The story is so far off from my priors of how people behave that I think the possibility that it isn't true should be considered.
He didn't say "grabbing", and in context, I'd guess that by "spanking" he meant a single swat to the buttocks.
It says more that you don't get out much, or aren't very observant when you do. I don't get out much, and never got out much, even during the brief few years when I was both single and of age, and such a story as this one is so utterly mundane and commonplace in its elements as to seem scarcely worthy of comment in the first place.
Most guys that protest such behavior from women make some other form of scene than swatting, of course, and most simply whine to their buddies or suffer in silence rather than make a scene at all. But apart from that, it's an utterly ordinary story, and observable many, many times a night in any "meet market" where the women go to dance and drink, funded by deluded potential suitors.
I agree that "spanking" is ambiguous, and a single hit would be plausible.
It's true that I don't get out much in that sense-- I don't like loud noise (as in really hate it) or drunk people.
Probably.
Bouncers are a way to get around the bystander effect.
Hey, I never thought of that— having a designated person to come over and break up a fight is probably more valuable than a naive analysis would reckon, not even counting the other security benefits.
Lily Allen has. The relevant section:
Cut to the pub on our last night out,
Man at the bar cos it was his shout,
Clocks this bird and she looks OK,
Caught him looking and she walks his way,
"Alright darling, you gonna buy us a drink then?"
"Err no, but I was thinking of buying one for your friend.
As pointed out in several of the comments on that post, women do not wear high heels primarily to increase their height but rather to change their posture, gait and apparent leg length.
Well, maybe not totally :-)
I have had drinks with friends and friends of friends in bars, pubs and beverage rooms in UK, Canada and US. I am almost 70 years old. I have never asked for a drink, I have never been asked for one. If I saw this happen, I would assume that the asker either wanted to have a favour done for them because they were feeling low or was out of money. I would not suspect that it was some sort of test. I would expect the response to be buying the drink, making a joke about the request or avoiding further conversation (or maybe all of them). I am used to people buying drinks for one another in some situation but not asking for a drink.
In my experience, people are by and large not testing; they have good will towards others; and they like company. This includes Aspergers and NTs. Why start out suspicious?
Then maybe it's a generation thing. I am over 50. La, what curious customs these young things invent!
What about the other side of the same coin: how can we get neurotypicals to use more of their cognitive resources to solve non-social (e.g., technical) problems? When I look at people who seem to spend almost all of their time and energy playing social games that largely don't matter, I can't help but think "what a waste."
To use myself as an example, I think I'm neurotypical, but lost interest in making friends and socializing in my teenage years due to negative feedback (not "fitting in" after immigrating from China and having different interests from my peers). As a result, I now have a lot more time to think about technical and philosophical problems. And while perhaps not quite GPGPU, I speculate that due to neuroplasticity, some of my neurons that would have gone into running social interactions are now being used for other purposes instead.
I've thought a bit about this question, and what I've come up with so far is that neurotypicals will become more interested in developing technical abilities when doing so is considered cool, and all their friends are doing it.
Let's use them to simulate an economy!
LOLed and upvoted.
(Well, it was more like I made a wheezing screeching noise than an actual "laugh" out loud, but still...)
Since when do social games not matter?
When your utility function assigns little weight to them. Social games matter quite a bit to a lot of people, and less to others. I know that sounds almost tautological, but the point is that people differ here.
Even if you don't like or care about social games, other things you may care about can depend on them, such as:
For social games to truly not matter, you need to have a very narrow preference set where you not only don't care for social games, but you don't need or want anything that can be achieved by them. It would be like not caring about money, and also not caring about anything money can buy you. It's possible to have that preference set; it's just a tall order.
A large amount of doors in neurotypical society are closed to you if you can't play social games at some level. I would speculate that for many people who think they don't care about silly things like social games, those very social games actually do impact other things they care about, and they are either unaware of that impact or in denial about it.
I think social games do matter, just not nearly to the degree that most people seem to think, judging from how they spend their time. I think the explanation for this is that social games mattered much more in the past than they do now, but most people don't realize this yet. And on the other side, there are a lot more opportunities for technical problem solving, which weren't available in the past.
I was bullied in school, but eventually graduated, and I don't think anyone tried to push me around after starting work. If they did, I would have complained to my boss or changed jobs. In a less mobile society, if you didn't know how to "handle yourself", you were probably stuck with low status for life.
Being single isn't that bad. I imagine it was a lot worse in the past, where there was much less you could do to entertain yourself.
I spent most of my spare time in college writing an open source C++ library, which led to plenty of business and job opportunities. I really doubt that I would have gotten more opportunities if I had spent most of my time socializing instead. I also didn't put any effort into networking after starting work, and I don't think that it's hurt me much.
Looking back at my past job interviews, I now realize that when the interviewer asked me what salary range I was expecting, that was supposed to be the start of the negotiation. At the time, I just told them honestly that I don't know, and that I care more about how interesting the job is than the salary.
That was probably not optimal, but I don't think I was hurt too badly by my lack of negotiation skill. And the reason for this is that salaries and other prices are constrained by market competition, and markets are more efficient today than in the past, leaving less room for negotiation.
Anthony Robbins is OK if you take his book/videos as a kind of pep-talk, but Eckhard Tolle? I suffered through the deeply neo-religious, anti-rationalist The Power of Now. I would not recommend that to anybody.
Actually both authors have in common that their practical advice is much better than their skill at theorizing.
Actually, most self-help authors have this in common -- it's just that some are also bad at the practical advice.
Contrary to sometimes-popular belief, a correct theory is not a prerequisite for having useful advice.
Well said; it's a very good point when thinking about, say, Anthony Robbins, Stephen Covey, David Allen or Dale Carnegie and a couple of others. They are interesting enough to overcome the 'cringe-factor' of their semi-scientific theorizing.
But Eckhard Tolle goes way beyond that, coming up with his own metaphysics and ontological meanderings... That's just too much for me.
David Allen, as in "Getting Things Done"? I find it odd that you would put him in that category: his book is a concrete organizational system he's developed from working with many clients.
Well, David Allen's system is a bit different in the sense that it is much more concrete and comes with less how-the-mind-works baggage (though still a bit), but you are right, 'semi-scientific theorizing' is a bit too strong a term for that...
Anyway, regardless of theorizing, I have found GTD concepts very useful in daily life / work.
Actually, I didn't notice that there was anything Tolle said that wasn't already in some interpretations of various Eastern religions; he just occasionally gave clearer, more modern examples of the patterns people get into.
On the coprocessor model itself -- the phenomenon we're trying to explain here is people who are good at analytical thinking but bad at social interaction. I really think there's a tendency around here to automatically identify that pattern with Asperger's, or with being at some point on the "spectrum." It's way more parsimonious to think of it as a result of specialization. If you're kind of good at (or interested in) analytical things, and kind of bad at (or uninterested in) social things, you'll specialize your own brain in that direction. It may even be in your best interest to specialize to some extent, to play to your strengths.
In fact I'd hypothesize that a lot of this specialization happens in early childhood, from rather small chance events like being an early reader, or being nearsighted. It's a little easier and more pleasant to sit still and read than to go out and play, so you start specializing from the age of three or so. Or you're Robert Louis Stevenson and develop a rich inner life directly because of childhood illness.
Children naturally play to their own strengths. They wear their favorite pathways down smooth, and ignore the thornier, more unpleasant ones. If you're a "systematizing" child, you'll do more and more systematizing, and it probably won't be until adolescence or adulthood that you'll want to go back and learn the skills that always felt unnatural. It takes a certain degree of self-awareness to go against the grain of your own nature. (Optimizing globally instead of locally, I think, is the appropriate metaphor.)
The thing is, "hardware" metaphors treat neurotype as static, and I think for many people it's more likely to be dynamic, and the result of a specialization process. It goes the other way, too: people who have much stronger social than analytical skills have probably put more effort into developing social skills, and then created a positive feedback loop of playing to their strengths. Sure, there are fixed brain differences on the extremes (autism or Williams syndrome) and a specialization process may well begin with a small fixed brain difference, but I don't think the fixed stuff explains the great human variation in social vs. analytical skills.
Voted up. You got away from the bar room chat and said something about the heart of the post. I am sure that many people have their adult lives fenced in by decision about themselves taken in childhood. It is always a good idea to challenge yourself to overcome such fences.
I'd say there are different forms of nature that can lead to having a broken social coprocessor than just Aspergers. So I would be careful about generalising from your own example.
My social coprocessor isn't very good. I think it is broken in a different way to people with Asperger's though. I have no fear about going out to places where I don't know many people. I've gone out to night clubs, events, been travelling etc on my own. I just don't talk to anyone much in night clubs and I am only good at certain types of conversation otherwise. I completely fail at set jokes, amusing anecdotes or talking about my life in general. I am relatively good at self-deprecation, surreal improvisation and amusing comments on what is going on around me or the topic at hand. So I get by. I don't find generic conversation very rewarding in itself either. But it is expected when you are around people, so I tend to go into question asking mode if I get trapped in conversation with someone generic. If it is someone that does something that I don't know much about (even stuff like marketing which is antithetical to my nature), then I can maintain conversation fairly well. I'm just gathering data about the world.
And my goal at these events isn't to meet new girls (although I quite like flirting with (introverted) female friends); it is to dance or to get a feeling of being in a tribe. I don't really care about being leader of that tribe.
But I don't tend to get out much so I'm bad at social niceties like introducing myself or remembering peoples name. I also react poorly to people bitching about other people I consider in my tribe.
I know I am not typical of non neuro-typicals. But I thought I would give you a concrete example of someone who has trouble in social situations, but is non-aspergers.
I think a certain amount of my antipathy to PUA stuff is the same as if you started talking about football a lot. I don't really care and don't want to encourage it.
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 have little problem with the way that Robin Hanson discusses status, signalling, and human interactions including mating. He doesn't give advice to the people on OB on how to pick up chicks though. If you are not interested in the practicalities it is enough to know that women test for a variety of personality and material traits in potential mates (with different tests dependent upon the women's personality). You don't need to know what tests go with what personality. Knowing that the majority of women like dominant, smooth talking, humorous men is useful in predicting what men will cultivate in themselves. But I don't need to know how to fake it.
I think it's the "faking it" part I and many other people find objectionable.
ETA: you edited this post after I replied, so I don't think my original reply makes sense any more....
How is this different from "if you disagree with me, keep it to yourself"?
This is where you and several other people here make a critical mistake. You view various aspects of human mating behavior exclusively in terms of signaling objective traits, and then you add a moral dimension to it by trying to judge whether these objective traits supposedly being signaled are true or fake.
In reality, however, human social behavior -- and especially mating behavior -- is about much more complex higher-order signaling strategies, which are a product of a long and complicated evolutionary interplay of strategies for signaling, counter-signaling, fake signaling, and fake signaling detection -- as well as the complex game-theoretic questions of what can ultimately be inferred from one's signaled intentions. Nobody has disentangled this whole complicated mess into a complete and coherent theory yet, though some basic principles have been established pretty conclusively, both by the academic evolutionary psychology and by people generalizing informally from practical experiences. However, the key point is that in a species practicing higher-order signaling strategies, signaling ability itself becomes an adaptive trait. You're not supposed to just signal objective traits directly; you also have to demonstrate your skill in navigating through the complex signaling games. It's a self-reinforcing feedback cycle, where at the end of the day, your signaling skills matter in their own right, just like your other abilities for navigating through the world matter -- and most things being signaled are in fact meta-signals about these traits.
Therefore, where you see "faking it" and "head games" and whatnot, in reality it's just humans practicing their regular social behaviors. You'll miss the point spectacularly if you analyze these behaviors in terms of simple announcements of objective traits and plain intentions and direct negotiations based on these announcements, where anything beyond that is deceitful faking. Learning how to play the signaling games better is no more deceitful than, say, practicing basic social norms of politeness instead of just honestly blurting out your opinions of other people to their faces.
See previous comment about signal to noise ratio.
Edit: Practical advice that is appropriate for the majority of people on this site is fine, it doesn't create the noise of confusion and boredom. Akrasia being a good example of appropriate practical advice. As is advice about sleeping, eating, teaching, communicating ideas.
Look at it from the flip side. Should we do make up tips for nerdy girls?
Sure, why not? If a nerdy girl feels she has learned something about rationality from exploring makeup techniques, I would absolutely be interested to hear about it on LessWrong. If other people don't care about makeup, they don't have to read her posts.
I have a question, since you seem to know a lot about human sociality. What exactly is wrong with handling the dilemmas you describe by saying to the other humans, "I am slightly more committed to this group’s welfare, particularly to that of its weakest members, than most of its members are. If you suffer a serious loss of status/well-being I will still help you in order to display affiliation to this group even though you will no longer be in a position to help me. I am substantially more kind and helpful to the people I like and substantially more vindictive and aggressive towards those I dislike. I am generally stable in who I like. I am much more capable and popular than most members of this group, demand appropriate consideration, and grant appropriate consideration to those more capable than myself. I adhere to simple taboos so that my reputation and health are secure and so that I am unlikely to contaminate the reputations or health of my friends. I currently like you and dislike your enemies but I am somewhat inclined towards ambivalence on regarding whether I like you right now so the pay-off would be very great for you if you were to expend resources pleasing me and get me into the stable 'liking you' region of my possible attitudinal space. Once there, I am likely to make a strong commitment to a friendly attitude towards you rather than wasting cognitive resources checking a predictable parameter among my set of derivative preferences."?
Saying this explicitly is extremely weak evidence of it being true. In fact, because it sounds pre-prepared, comprehensive and calculated most humans won't believe you. Human courtship rituals are basically ways of signaling all of this but are much harder to fake.
When human females ask "Will you buy me a drink?" they're testing to see if the male does in fact "demand appropriate consideration".
Also, relative status and genetic fitness are extremely important in human coupling decisions and your statement does not sufficiently cover those.
That's a good point. Let me try a different one.
Let X be 'I am slightly more committed to this group’s welfare, particularly to that of its weakest members, than most of its members are. If you suffer a serious loss of status/well-being I will still help you in order to display affiliation to this group even though you will no longer be in a position to help me. I am substantially more kind and helpful to the people I like and substantially more vindictive and aggressive towards those I dislike. I am generally stable in who I like. I am much more capable and popular than most members of this group, demand appropriate consideration, and grant appropriate consideration to those more capable than myself. I adhere to simple taboos so that my reputation and health are secure and so that I am unlikely to contaminate the reputations or health of my friends. I currently like you and dislike your enemies but I am somewhat inclined towards ambivalence on regarding whether I like you right now so the pay-off would be very great for you if you were to expend resources pleasing me and get me into the stable 'liking you' region of my possible attitudinal space. Once there, I am likely to make a strong commitment to a friendly attitude towards you rather than wasting cognitive resources checking a predictable parameter among my set of derivative preferences.'
Then, instead of saying my previous suggestion, say something like, 'I would precommit to acting in such a way that X if and only if you would precommit to acting in such a way that you could truthfully say, "X if and only if you would precommit to acting in such a way that you could truthfully say X."'
(Edit: Note, if you haven't already, that the above is just a special case of the decision theory, "I would adhere to rule system R if and only if (You would adhere to R if and only if I would adhere to R)." )
Wouldn't the mere ability to recognize such a symmetric decision theory be strong evidence of X being true?
Why is this being downvoted? Even those Clippy's proposed strategy doesn't work at all for reasons that Jack explained, he is asking an excellent question. For people (and AIs) without social experience and knowledge, it is very, very important for them to know why people can't just talk all this stuff through explicitly. They should be asking exactly these sorts of questions so they an update.
Upvoted.
A guess: because everything in quotes in Clippy's comment is a copy and paste of a generic comment it posted a week ago.
I don't actually know myself, though - I upvoted Clippy's comment because I thought it was funny. Copying an earlier comment and asking for feedback on it where it's semi-relevant is exactly in keeping with what I imagine the Clippy character to be.
There are females who are interested. And I don't just mean for academic reasons.
</heteronormativitypolice>
I suspect but can't prove that picking up girls as a girl would be different than picking up girls as a guy. Oh and that girls would have different problems with the picking up than men, even if it was the same process.
Self Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back-- an account by a lesbian of living as a man in four different male social groups. One of her experiments includes dating women, but I don't remember the details.
I read Self Made Man a couple years ago, and I highly recommend it. The author is to be commended for such an extensive debiasing project. Vincent found living as a man to have a lot more challenges than she thought. I'll post some excerpts or articles about her that might be interesting for people here.
From here:
From here:
Yes, and girls would have different problems with picking up (and maintaining relationships with) guys, but the same general social principles apply. "PUA" is just dating and relationship advice.
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.
The comments to this post and most of the other literature I've read assumes that the problem with poorly social people is that they're afraid, not sure how to carry out a conversation effectively, or make poor decisions when confronted with social dilemmas.
Anecdotally, my experience isn't like this at all. I'm pretty good, maybe even better than average, at talking to people in one-to-one conversations, at home, at cafes, on the bus, before class, and pretty much any time other than at deliberately social events. But at bars or parties, the constantly shifting conversations of dozens of people trying to all talk to each other at once at a mile a minute, about nothing in particular, in a loud and overstimulating environment completely discombobulates me, and I usually end up either ignored, unable to break into a conversation more than once every few minutes, or just plain bored with having nothing to say but the same small talk everyone else is making.
Maybe I'm atypical of non-social people, but I also give a bit of credence to the possibility that all this "not knowing how to give the right reply in a conversation" stuff is what neurotypical people imagine being bad at socializing must be like, the same way hicks sometimes deal with non-English speakers by speaking English words really loud and slowly because they can't imagine what it's like to genuinely not understand English. But I'd like to hear from other non-social people to confirm.
(I got a 23 on the test)
Also, culture affects how social people are expected to be.
I've been in a discussion of introversion where it was clear that extroversion is much more compulsory in the US than in a lot of other places.
What you're describing seems like the introversion/extroversion distinction, which is probably different from, although possibly overlapping and somewhat correlated with, the autism spectrum/NT distinction. The introversion/extroversion literature seems to capture the difference pretty well; just about everything I've read about introversion recognizes that introverts can be competent to excellent at one-on-one or small group socializing, but that they are probably less good and certainly uncomfortable in large group settings. But I don't recall reading much about introverts that suggests they're unable to read social cues (although they may have less practice at it as well as less interest).
I haven't seen a breakdown on introversion/extroversion numbers in the population (my own quick Google search found an article in the Atlantic with this passage: "How many people are introverts? I performed exhaustive research on this question, in the form of a quick Google search. The answer: About 25 percent. Or: Just under half. Or—my favorite—'a minority in the regular population but a majority in the gifted population.'"), and as NancyLebovitz also suggests, I believe it varies between cultures, but what numbers I have seen seem to suggest that the percentage of people who fall more on the introverted side of the scale is probably considerably greater than the percentage of people who fall on the autism spectrum.
It's certainly possible that neurotypical people misunderstand autism spectrum people, and that extroverts misunderstand introverts (the Atlantic article makes that argument), but the autism spectrum descriptions about not understanding social cues seem to be getting at something real and different than introversion. Your description makes you sound like an introvert but not particularly far along (if at all) on the autism spectrum. It does seem like some of our commentary here may sometimes be casually conflating extroversion with neurotypicalness and introversion with autism spectrum.
I didn't quite say that.
There's social pressure to be extroverted in the US-- but there are a lot of unhappy introverts. There's social pressure to be introverted in other places (Great Britain?), but for all I know there are a lot of squelched-feeling, lonely extroverts.
I apologize for misreading your comment. When you wrote:
and
I had thought you were suggesting that cultural pressure would influence people to become extroverts (or introverts as the case may be in some cultures). Actually, I would guess that the dominant social culture would cause both these things: 1) some people, probably influenced from an early age, would be more likely to become extroverts in an extrovert-dominated culture (or vice versa); and 2) some people would feel unhappy because they didn't fit into the dominant culture.
No biggis.
I agree it's plausible those who have some flexibility between introversion and extroversion will probably become what fits in their culture, but not everyone can do that.
It occurs to me that we're putting a lot of thought into how people can be more like extroverts, but I haven't heard anything about how people can become more comfortable with their own company. Meditation presumably helps, but is there anything more specific?
Alas no, there is no social pressure to be introverted here in the UK, at least not in my generation and younger. We have the same celebrity culture which idolises the loud and outgoing as does America.
Middle class, middle aged British people are a bit more reserved than the younger generation.
I live in Ireland, and the social pressure in favor of extraversion is at least as great as in the United States.
Finns (disclaimer: I am one) are probably the archetypal introverts.
-- You know you've been too long in Finland when...
Your comments sound as if I wrote it myself =) But wait, do you have Asperger's? If so, I should really get checked.
Growing up, my social skills were fairly slow to develop, but at this point in my life, I've practiced enough to actually be quite socially savvy with people. I can easily weave humour, emotional intelligence, facial expressions, deep comprehension, etc into my conversations. I'm always making new friends.
But, I've never been able to handle environments with too much stimulus (bars/clubs), when someone's voice is overlapping with a dozen other voices in the room: I can't understand them. When there's constant noises, light displays, many events around me: I feel a sort of confusion / cognitive dissonance.
This is not a matter of introversion/extroversion in my case: my ability to comprehend people in these environments just drops. Sometimes to the point where I seem deaf. However in 1-on-1 situations, there's no issues. I can be quite extroverted, an initiator.
If this is your only or primary problem I would recommend having your hearing checked before you start on the neuro stuff.
For me, understanding "what's really going on" in typical social interactions made them even less interesting than when I didn't. At least back then it was a big mystery to be solved. Now I just think, what a big waste of brain cells.
Roko, do you personally find these status and alliance games interesting? Why? I mean, if you play them really well, you'll end up with lots of allies and high status among your friends and acquaintances, but what does that matter in the larger scheme of things? And what do you think of the idea that allies and status were much more important in our EEA (i.e., tribal societies) than today, and as a result we are biased to overestimate their importance?
Their importance is a function of our values, which came from the EEA and are not so easily changed. Those values, like wanting friendship, community, relationships, and respect, are a part of what make us human.
I actually don't interpret social interactions as "status and alliance games," which is kind of cynical and seems to miss the point. Instead, I try to recognize that people have certain emotional requirements that need to be met in order to gain their trust, friendship, and attraction, and that typical social interactions are about building that type of trust and connection.
Most of what we call values seem to respond to arguments, so they're not really the kind of fixed values that a utility maximizer would have. I would be wary about calling some cognitive feature "values that came from the EEA and are not easily changed". Given the right argument or insight, they probably can be changed.
So, granted that it's human to want friendship, community, etc., I'm still curious whether it's also human to care less about these things after realizing that they boil down to status and alliance games, and that the outcomes of these games don't count for much in the larger scheme of things.
Well, is it also human to stop desiring tasty food once you realize that it boils down to super-stimulation of hardware that evolved as a device for impromptu chemical analysis to sort out nutritionally adequate stuff from the rest?
As for the "larger scheme of things," that's one of those emotionally-appealing sweeping arguments that can be applied to literally anything to make it seem pointless and unworthy of effort. Selectively applying it is a common human bias. (In fact, I'd say it's a powerful general technique for producing biased argumentation.)
Not to stop desiring it entirely, but to care less about it than if I didn't realize, yes. (I only have a sample size of one here, namely myself, so I'm curious if others have the same experience.)
I don't think I'm applying it selectively... we're human and we can only talk about one thing at a time, but other than that I think I do realize that this is a general argument that can be applied to all of our values. It doesn't seem to affect all of them equally though. Some values, such as wanting to be immortal, and wanting to understand the nature of reality, consciousness, etc., seem to survive the argument much better than others. :)
Honestly, I don't see what you're basing that conclusion on. What, according to you, determines which human values survive that argument and which not?
Merely "tuning in" to a social interaction isn't enough. Subtextual conversations are often tedious if they're not about you. You have to inject your ego into the conversation for things to get interesting.
Wei_Dai:
However, that's not how human brains work. It's not like someone who on an average day spends, say, eight hours doing intellectual work and four hours socializing could do 50% more useful intellectual work by spending 12 hours working instead of socializing. For the overwhelming majority of people, it's impossible to employ their brains productively for more than a few hours a day. You get tired and lose focus to the point where you're just making a mess instead of progress.
Similarly, if you develop skills independent of your main intellectual pursuits, it's not like they will automatically steal resources and make you less productive. Human brain just doesn't work that way. On the contrary, a suitable schedule of entertaining diversions can increase your productivity in your main pursuit.
Of course, there are exceptions. Some people really can spend nearly all their waking hours intensely focused and fully productive, without the need or want for anything more in their lives. However, this is a very small minority, even among people working in math, hard science, and technical professions.
That argument can be used to deny the importance of absolutely everything you do. Unless you believe that some part of you came into existence supernaturally, or you're carrying some highly consequential recent mutation, absolutely everything in your thoughts and deeds is a result of some impulse that evolved in the EEA (although of course it might be manifesting itself in a way very different from the original in today's environment).
They're way more interesting than video games, for example. Or watching television. Or numerous other activities people find fun and engaging. Of course, if you're bad at them you aren't going to enjoy them; the same goes for people who can't get past the first stage of Pac-Man.
So if I'm with a bunch of people from my class, and I already know who's considered "high status", and none of us have any major conflict of interest that would make us want to assess whether or not the others are allies or not, wouldn't we all just be broadcasting generic "I like you well enough and consider you pretty much an equal, except in the context of this and this and this fact which we already both know quite well" signals? Go to a party with thirty people, and unless someone's committed the faux pas of inviting my arch-enemy, I do this thirty times. If anything, this seems even less interesting than literally talking about the weather.
If you can recommend a good free source of information that explains this (or a book that's worth the money), even better.
EDIT: Yeah, what Wei Dai said.
This mirrors my experience, but then how come other people, whose lives are generally just as boring as mine, seem to like parties?
If you were a character in a sitcom I was writing, I'd have your dream girl walk in just as you were saying that.
For what it's worth, you've echoed my experience precisely.
It's easy and good to talk in one-on-one or small groups of people. It's also easy for me to speak publicly or in front of an audience. But interaction in strictly social settings - parties, bars, clubs - is almost painful. I don't know how to begin. The impression is just that of trying to start climbing a wall that admits no footholds.
I'm pretty certain I don't fall very far on the Asperger's spectrum. In particular, I can read body language and subtext pretty well, and I'm considerate of others to a degree I haven't seen in people I know who actually have Asperger's. I suspect that, as others have said, we're conflating distinct causes under a single banner.
It's really fascinating to me how someone with a list of Asperger's symptoms can so readily describe a lot of elements in my psychological life.
I have noticed for a long time that I tend to think about all sorts of things other people don't, and that I am just totally confused about other people's emotional responses.
In addition to "Find a community" I would recommend identifying people who behave as you would like to (whatever that may be) and trying to spend time with them. This lets you leverage the specialized hardware our brains contain for imitating others. In my experience it's much easier to copy an example of desirable behaviour than to construct it from a description or from EP first principles, particularly if the natural imitation mechanism is "overclocked" by conscious observation and noting of the behaviour one wishes to imitate.
It seems this post bundled together the CPU vs. GPU theory regarding the AS vs. NT mindset, with a set of techniques on how to improve social skills. The techniques however - and in a sense this is a credit to the poster - are useful to anyone who wants to improve their social skills, regardless of whether the cause of their lack of skill is:
1) High IQ
2) Introversion
3) Social Inexperience
4) AS
5) <Suggestions>
A combination of several of these factors might be the cause of social awkwardness. It's possible to place too much importance on looking for a root cause. The immediate cause is simply a lack of understanding of social interaction - the techniques will help anyone develop that understanding.
Some NTs are somewhat unconscious of the game, but that doesn't mean they don't understand it. I'd argue the most useful definition of "understanding" is that one's brain contains the knowledge - whether one is conscious of it or not - that enables one to successfully perform the relevant task. Any other definition, is quite literally, academic. Furthermore, I'd argue that those best at the game actually become conscious of what is unconscious for most people, such as the degree to which status plays a role in social interaction. This helps them gain an edge over others, such as better predicting the ramifications of gossip, or the ability to construct a joke. A joke that works well socially, often consists of the more socially aware person bringing to the surface an aspect of someone else's self-serving behavior that was previously just under the social group's conscious radar. It would be impossible to construct such jokes without a conscious understanding of the game.
If you want to learn social skills, hang out with people who have them. And it's not enough to just hang out - you have to enjoy it and participate. And to be frank, often the easiest way to do that is with alcohol. And don't assume you're so different to other people - why do you think they're drinking?
I think the distinction can be helpfully represented in terms of my levels of understanding.
NTs understand social interaction at Level 1, the level at which one is capable of outputting the right (winning) results, even if that is due to an inscrutable black-box model contained inside oneself (which is the case here).
But there are higher levels to reach than that, and it is not an academic distinction. To advance to Level 2, you must not only produce the right results, but also be able to "plug in" your understanding of the social interaction domain to various other domains, and make inferences between them. And most NTs cannot do this: they get the results "for free", even (and perhaps especially) if they cannot derive these results as implications of other domains (or vice versa).
Roko's point, in turn, can be rephrased as saying that HFASes try to build up a Level 2 understanding directly, checking for cross-domain consistency before they adopt any rules; and that this is because their hardware doesn't feed them the correct black-box output, as happens in NTs. Further, inferences that HFASes make come from applying a more general-purpose "reasoning engine" to social interaction; to NTs, the inferences just look dumb, even if they can't explain why.
Someone with sufficiently advanced understanding will be able to connect the NT black-box model to useful models for everything else, explaining the basis for NT conventions. This can grow from an NT mind or a HFAS one, but they will take different paths.
In any case, there's a higher level of understanding to reach, even if a specific threshold suffices for some purpose.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I can understand how introversion, at least if the introvert has been able to follow his or her own preferences, must correlate with social inexperience, at least relative to the average extrovert.
But why is it that introversion must correlate with AS?
My understanding is that introversion may be partly about ability to socialize, but primarily reflects lack of desire to socialize ( and especially lack of desire to socialize in larger versus smaller groups). It’s also my understanding that with AS, there is at least sometimes a component involving inability to socialize, for example, many of those with AS have a hard time reading facial expressions (and this inability comes not merely from lack of practice, but is more innate).
I have also met a number of people with AS who are extroverts, that is, they have a desire to socialize, although they may have some difficulties in execution. I don’t have any breakdown on the numbers, but it seems to me that if introversion is more about lack of desire to socialize and AS is more about inability to socialize, they don’t necessarily need to be correlated, although they may very well be.
Wikipedia quotes diagnostic criteria for AS that focus on 'impairment' and 'repetitive, stereotyped behavior,' which sounds like it's just based on ability, not desire/introversion. That's consistent with your hunch.
I also skimmed for studies correlating AQ (Autism-Spectrum Quotient) with introversion, and discovered the AQ is built from 5 question types, one of them testing social skills. But the social skill questions don't just test for ability (#36, 'I find it easy to work out what someone is thinking or feeling just by looking at their face'), they test for desires too (#1, 'I prefer to do things with others rather than on my own'). (Source is Simon Baron-Cohen's paper about the AQ.) So I'd expect the social skill subtest to tap into introversion as well as social ability, which would make the AQ correlate with extroversion/introversion (and it does).
I expect the correlation of AS with introversion depends how you measure Asperger-ness. The binary criterion 'diagnosed with Asperger's' probably has a weak correlation; the AQ scale would have a better one. It's interesting that AS diagnosis criteria are based just on social ability, while the AQ scale tests far more than that - that suggests the AQ is measuring quite a lot more than Asperger-ness.
(I also found a forum called Typology Central, 'a personality type indicator community.' For some reason the idea of a forum for discussing personality types makes me giggle.)
One definition I've seen is that extroverts get energy from being with people, while introverts need to be alone to recharge.
I have in the past used precisely the latter to describe myself to others. Last Saturday I was at a student party: I spent the late afternoon and early evening chatting with both friends and new acquaintances pretty much non-stop, drank up to the point where my behaviour became just a bit more impulsive than usual, danced into the wee hours of the morning and exchanged some crude sexual rites with a stranger.
I unquestionably had fun. It will also take me at least a couple of weeks before I can talk to more than one people at a time without feeling exhausted. Until then, my free time will be spent with a pair of headphones, my reading queue, a 4X videogame, and no human interaction closer than Skype.
the "totally missing out" link goes to the wrong place... should go here: http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/why-not-fake-height/
I believe our culture is an outlier so far as men dressing up is concerned. My impression is that in most cultures men and women do about equally elaborate display.
Colonial America is the only culture I can think of where men were dressier than women.
This comment makes me want to sing "The Creation of Man" from The Scarlet Pimpernel. "La, but someone has to strike a pose and bear the weight of well-tailored clothes, and that is why the lord created men."
I've completely taken myself off of the dating market; I have nothing of value to offer anyone. :(
Beware the self-fulfilling prophecy...
I'm just not in a place in my life where I'm ready to look for a romantic partner, and, to be honest, I don't think I'll ever be. On the other hand, I'm much less pessimistic about my prospects for being friends with women, though.
Even if you don't, maybe other people have something of value to offer you.