Overview: This is a proposal for a LessWrong Pick Up Artist (PUA)-like sub-community; PUA without the PU (get it?)1. Members would focus on the deliberate practice of social artistry, but with non-mating goals. Origins and intent of the goal are discussed, possible topics for learning are listed, and suggestions for next steps are solicited.
Origins:
The PUA Community began decades ago with men that wanted to learn how to get better at seducing women. As I understand it, they simply began posting their (initially) awkward attempts at love online. Over the years, they appear to have amassed a fairly impressive set of practical knowledge and skills in this domain.
I admire and applaud this effort. However, my ability to meet women is not currently a limiting factor in my life satisfaction. In reading some of the PUA literature, I was struck how often different authors remarked on the unintended side benefits of their training: better relationships at work, better interviewing skills, more effective negotiations, more non-pickup social fun, better male friendships, more confidence, etc. These guys were able to make major strides in areas that I've struggled to improve at all in... without even bloody intending to! This struck me as an something worth taking very seriously!
I find it alarming that such a valuable resource would be monopolized in pursuit of orgasm; it's rather as if a planet were to burn up its hydrocarbons instead of using them to make useful polymers. PUA ought to be a special case of a more general skill set, and it's being wasted. I say that my goals are noble, and as such I should have the opportunity to sharpen my skills to at least the keenness of a PUA master!
Statement of Purpose:
The purpose of this post is to open discussion on how to construct a community of developing social artisans, modeled after the useful components2 of the PUA community. If there is sufficient mass, the next goals are probably sussing out learning methods and logistics.
The mission of the hypothetical community will probably need to be fleshed out more explicitly (and I don't want to be too prescriptive), but pretty much what I was thinking was expressed well by Scott Adams:
...I think technical people, and engineers in particular, will always have good job prospects. But what if you don't have the aptitude or personality to follow a technical path? How do you prepare for the future?
I'd like to see a college major focusing on the various skills of human persuasion. That's the sort of skillset that the marketplace will always value and the Internet is unlikely to replace. The persuasion coursework might include...
- Sales methods
- Psychology of persuasion
- Human Interface design
- How to organize information for influence
- Propaganda
- Hypnosis
- Cults
- Art (specifically design)
- Debate
- Public speaking
- Appearance (hair, makeup, clothes)
- Negotiations
- Managing difficult personalities
- Management theory
- Voice coaching
- Networking
- How to entertain
- Golf and tennis
- Conversation
You can imagine a few more classes that would be relevant. The idea is to create people who can enter any room and make it their bitch. [emphasis added]
Colleges are unlikely to offer this sort of major because society is afraid and appalled by anything that can be labeled "manipulation," which isn't even a real thing.
Manipulation isn't real because almost every human social or business activity has as its major or minor objective the influence of others. You can tell yourself that you dress the way you do because it makes you happy, but the real purpose of managing your appearance is to influence how others view you.
Humans actively sell themselves every minute they are interacting with anyone else. Selling yourself, which sounds almost noble, is little more than manipulating other people to do what is good for you but might not be so good for others. All I'm suggesting is that people could learn to be more effective at the things they are already trying to do all day long.
Word! [EDIT: We need not be bound by this exact list. For instance, there is no way I'm going to be doing any golfing.]
I've met people who were shockingly, seemingly preternaturally adept in social settings. Of course this is not magic. Like anything else, it can be reduced to a set of constituent steps and learned. We just need to figure out how.
Next steps:
I have a rather long list of ideas ready to go, but they made this post kind of awkward. Plus, Scott Adam's post says much of what I was trying to get at. Let's just start the conversation.
So, what do you think?
1 I have nothing whatsoever against the majority of the PUAers with whom I've had encounters, and the title is just meant to be funny. No offense!
2 The mention of PUA drags along several associations that I want to disavow (think anything obviously "Dark Arts"). I considered omitting the fact that much of the intellectual heritage of this idea is the PUAers to avoid these associations, but I couldn't think of another way to tie it together. This idea owes its genesis to the PUA community, but the product is not intended to be its exact replica. Undesirable elements need not be ported from the old system to the new.
PUAs are more interested in signaling high social status than specifically socioeconomic status. I disagree with the analogy between status signaling and makeup. It's a lot harder to assess the "truth" of a status signal than it is to assess how someone really looks.
Ok, then could you give me a specific example, other than one I've already stipulated (e.g. telling anecdotes about friends who don't exist during the first 10 minutes of conversation)? No, there isn't really a fight outside, and no, you don't really have a friend who is buying his girlfriend a cashmere sweater.
But can't we excuse such white lies in helping people learn to socialize? Once a guy gets some social experience under his belt, then he will have entertaining anecdotes about friends that are actually true, and he will be as cool as those canned stories make him seem.
I agree with wedrifid below. It's hard to assess the "falseness" of charisma, since so much of social reality is decided by perception.
There is a difference between duping someone in a way that will never be true, and trying to get people to believe something that will be true if you can get enough people to believe it. No matter how much makeup you use, it will not make the underlying face more beautiful. Yet many ways of supposed fakeness in social interaction actually can become real.
The mechanism I propose is biofeedback and the looking-glass self. Just like people holding pens in the teeth making them smile can make them feel happier, people acting charismatically (even the aid of scripts) can make them feel more charismatic, facilitating non-scripted charismatic behavior in the future. The theory of the looking-glass self is that people create their self-concepts based on feedback from others (i.e. seeing the reflection of their behavior in other people's reactions). So if you can get people to think you are charismatic, they will treat you like a charismatic person, and you will learn from them that you are charismatic, leading to more charismatic behavior in the future.
Except PUA don't advocate this sort of lie. If you think they do, we are not on the same page, and I'm wondering what sources you are basing these conclusions on.
I don't see a strong view in the seduction community advocating convincing a woman you are interested in her when it is false.
The closest is how Mystery points out that telling a woman that she has been on your mind can be potent for seducing her if said at the right time. Mystery says absolutely nothing about the truth value of the statement. Does that mean that he thinks it's OK to lie? I really don't know. I do know that Mystery believes that he often falls in love. So he might be saying these things truthfully (or at least, he can self-deceive himself into believing that he has feelings for women he is trying to seduce, such that he can feel that he is authentically expressing those feelings).
In contrast, a big component of Juggler's method is trying to get a woman to show you a quality that you genuinely like, and then rewarding her by expressing how you like that quality. Juggler does seem to believe that showing more-than-sexual interest should be genuine.
In general, most pickup methods don't actually use displays of platonic interest as a major part of seduction. It's viewed as too close to "nice guy" complimenting of women. PUAs are more likely to feign indifference than feign interest.
Yes, there is a subset of PUAs that engage in lying beyond inventing imaginary friends to get their foot in conversations. The point is that PUA literature in general doesn't advocate such behavior.
I think that PUAs engaging in impression management, or even using scripts as a temporary measure to learn social skills, are not in the same moral category as substantive deception (lying about accomplishments, career, and income) or the same moral category as deception on a permanent basis (makeup, push-up bras). I think women should recognize that the intention of PUAs is not to deceive women about how they measure in qualities that women use to evaluate them, but to actually develop those qualities over the long term.
Furthermore, even the use of canned routines for training purposes may demonstrate qualities that women find attractive: it shows a sort of resourcefulness and ambition. Even the choice of a canned routine requires a certain level of social savvy.
It's widely accepted that it's OK for women to deceive men about their physical attributes. Part of the reason it is acceptable is that we recognize that men have more restrictive preferences for looks than women do. By the same token, we should recognize that women are more selective about the personality traits and behaviors that men display.
Botwin and Buss (1997) found that:
When lesbian journalist Norah Vincent dressed up as a man for a book (I harvest some revealing quotes from her here, she was in for a rude awakening in the dating world:
Given the kind of challenges that men face matching up to the character appraisals that Vincent describes as "harsh," it may be justifiable for men to "fake it 'til they make it."
Except for the ones who are. Beginning PUAs often aren't ready for relationships, but since beginners are less attractive to women, there is less of a chance of women trying to have relationships with them. By the time a PUA reaches a significant level of attractiveness, I'm skeptical that PUAs are any less interested in relationships than other non-PUAs that the same women would be attracted to instead.
As I mention in the post, most of the pickup instructors I've met (who probably qualify as guys who are "really into" pickup) do relationships. It's just hard to date lots of women and not eventually run into one who you fancy for something a bit longer term.