ewbrownv 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: ewbrownv 13 September 2010 04:35:22PM 7 points [-]

An interesting proposal, but you've got an important obstacle to overcome if you want (PUA-PU) to amount to more than anecdotes and philosophizing. Sales, marketing and PUA all share the unusual characteristic of being amenable to the experimental method, because you can try them repeatedly on large numbers of people and get clear feedback about what doesn’t work. Most of the other areas you mentioned are either too fuzzy for an easy evaluation of success, or too slow/rare to allow much testing.

If you want to establish a reliable body of knowledge about topics like ‘projecting charisma’ or ‘having better relationships’, the key step is going to be finding some way to apply the same experimental approach. A community that can easily run experiments to test its theories can make discoveries and build expertise with surprising speed, but one that can’t is going to find the biases of its members overwhelming any weak signal you might get from more ambiguous forms of data.

Comment author: XFrequentist 13 September 2010 04:52:28PM 0 points [-]

You're exactly right. I see this as one of the key challenges, actually.