pjeby comments on More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA - Less Wrong

66 Post author: XFrequentist 10 September 2010 12:25AM

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Comment author: pjeby 13 September 2010 12:31:57AM *  6 points [-]

And moreover that despite apparently being better at social intuition, they fail to understand that men aren't?

I don't suggest that women fail to understand that individual men aren't good at social perception or intuition (as you imply, that would indeed be contradictory); I'm merely suggesting that women are prone to perceiving this failure as meaning the men in question are broken (i.e. not "real" men).

The default tendency is for people to assume that people unlike themselves are defective; it is an uncommon person who can look at a typical person of the opposite sex and not see an apparently-broken person of their own sex.

(Presumably, this is because our mental machinery for predicting others' behavior relies far too heavily on our own habits, experiences, ways of thinking, etc.)

Comment author: CronoDAS 13 September 2010 05:55:18PM *  0 points [-]

I don't suggest that women fail to understand that individual men aren't good at social perception or intuition (as you imply, that would indeed be contradictory); I'm merely suggesting that women are prone to perceiving this failure as meaning the men in question are broken (i.e. not "real" people).

Fixed that for you.

The default tendency is for people to assume that people unlike themselves are defective; it is an uncommon person who can look at a typical person of the opposite sex and not see an apparently-broken person of their own sex.

This bears repeating.

And read this, too.

Comment author: whpearson 13 September 2010 01:47:42AM 0 points [-]

(Presumably, this is because our mental machinery for predicting others' behavior relies far too heavily on our own habits, experiences, ways of thinking, etc.)

I've been thinking about that. I'm not sure what the solution is. Thinking that other's behaviour is unlike our own is very unhelpful, because it doesn't say which bits are unlike our own.

Also people tend to form groups of people like themselves, so there is less data to gather naturally. I'm also not sure fiction helps either, it tends to be unrealistic.