= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
cousin_it comments on More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (616)
I've studied pickup for many years, and I can confirm that in areas of life aside from mating. I have skills in about half the items in Scott Adams' list that I wouldn't have if I hadn't studied pickup.
Many PUAs are already applying the pickup framework to be successful in other areas of their life; as you observe, PUAs talk about this all the time. Yet while I think it's useful to take the mating component out of pickup, the mating component may actually a big part of how PUAs develop skills in non-mating areas.
If you are a beginning PUA, then you have a lot of areas that you need improvement in. You will probably need to work on your voice, fix your body language, get over shyness, become a lot more confident, and improve your fashion sense. Most normal self-improvement focuses on any one of those areas as its entire goal.
It may be that a big part of what makes pickup work for self development is that you are focusing on improvement in so many areas at the same time that tie together and mutually reinforce each other, and you do it all in service of a greater superordinate goal of mating.
Many people struggle with a goal like getting over shyness or insecurity on its own. But when you have an even bigger superordinate goal that depends on those goals, they seem comparatively less hairy, and you can't afford to fail at them.
I'm not sure whether having mating as a superordinate goal is special, or whether any other big superordinate goal will do.
I really like the idea of your project, but I'd like you to talk a bit more about the ideas in the seduction community that you think will be most relevant (I have some ideas, which I will share at some point).
I'm not sold on the idea of explicitly associating what you are doing with pickup, and least not in the title. Actually, I'm not sold on calling pickup itself "pickup." I see contemporary pickup as merely the systemization and extrapolation of what socially and sexually successful men are already doing.
Right on. To summarize: PUAs succeed because they have something to protect (or rather conquer). The same reason Eliezer succeeded in inventing something new in the Sequences - he had a big external goal (AI) that was more important than intellectual pleasure. (Incidentally, the same goal motivated many people to create many wonderful things, e.g. Lisp.) Here's a quote from his post that could just as well have come from a creepy lonely man setting out to invent PUA:
hmmm... so do you think we would need a common big external goal? Could it work if people just import whatever goals they're working with anyway, and see this as purely instrumental training?
Goal setting/discovery seems like it could even be a possible topic/subtopic of study. I don't imagine we could find a single unifying goal like the PUAs have.
For example mine's easy: I work in a bureaucracy, and I work on stuff I think is important to do right. Being in a position to ensure things get done right takes more social smarts than I currently have. Ergo, I need to get better at this shit, which does not at all come naturally to me.
I imagine most people have something like this, but they might be too idiosyncratic to focus the necessary collective efforts. Something like Existential (or at least Big- Ass) Risk Mitigation maybe?
Ordinary goals aren't strong enough.
Last winter I became very ill. Felt pain all the time, couldn't eat or sleep, had trouble even drinking water through a straw. It took me four days in that state to overcome my aversion to doctors and seek good medical help. If it hadn't been so extreme, I'd have simply waited it out like I do everytime I get a cold or something.
There are many guys who don't get any female attention, suffer greatly from it (comparable to my illness I'd say), know about PUA, but never give it a try. In fact most unpopular guys are like that. Some of them are more willing to kill themselves than make an effort.
Are your work-related desires comparable in strength?
Yup. I'm worried about this, and I'd like to hear any thoughts on how we could get around it.