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.
Great, we're getting down to the nitty-gritty here.
The original problem I had with this comment was that it triggered a certain schema of men trying to figure out ways of interacting with women sexually, and then women accusing them of bad things.It kind of looked to me something like this:
PUAs: Let's do a lot of work fulfilling women's criteria and figure out some more reliable ways of being successful with them.
SarahC: Wait, if you guys do that, you could think that you are guaranteed success with women, and then if you get turned down... it could turn into RAPE!
That perceived reaction is not quite what SarahC said (and my version of what PUAs say is not quite what she has heard). And it's not her full reasoning. But until she clarified and explained more about her priors (e.g. George Sodini), there seemed to be some sort of slippery slope going on in her comment, which the above is an exaggeration of.
There is quite a gap between getting turned down and becoming violent. Yes, even for men. Although men being violent is highly visible, the base rate of rejections that men respond violently or punitively to is very low (in Western middle-class Anglo-American culture, at least). That's because since men typically have to make the advances and women are more selective, men get rejected a lot. Some PUAs approach hundreds or thousands of women in the space of years; there just isn't time to be violent or make a stink with every woman who rejects them. The fact that PUAs can even approach so many women indicates that they have some abilities to handle rejection.
Now, what about the feeling of some men that it's unfair when women turn them down, and whether this view should be linked to creepiness or violence?
Again, this is an issue of inferential distance. I'll try to spell out a scenario where men might feel it's unfair when women turn them down, yet nevertheless not be bad people with bad intentions:
Let's examine the case of shyness (EDIT: It's interesting that I picked this example when drafting this post... I couldn't post it last night due to a 500 error, and then I wake up this morning and see that komponisto admits to having experienced social anxiety disorder). You know the percentage of women who say that shyness is attractive in men? 2% (the study is by Burger & Cosby, but I'll have to dig up the cite later). Shyness is extremely damning of the attractiveness of men in the eyes of most women, but it really doesn't seem to hurt the chances of women so badly unless we are talking about something like full-blown clinical like social phobia (and if anyone has some reasons to believe that shyness in women is more of a dating handicap than I do, I would like to hear it).
So if you are a shy, awkward guy in college who has trouble getting dates, but you see shy, awkward women getting dates, you might feel a little frustrated at the situation (especially since the shy, awkward woman probably don't consider you a viable date). Why is a trait, such as shyness treated unequally based on gender?, you might ask. You might start start feeling that this unequal treatment is a little unfair.
Now, fairness can be conceptualized in different ways. "Fair" is often relative to a certain standard of how things should be. When fairness is used as a synonym for justice, then unfairness entitles the "wronged" party to redress, perhaps by violence or state-enforced violence. That's not the type of fairness I'm thinking of. The kind of fairness I'm thinking of is more like a sense of equality. You might feel that in an ideal world, shy men wouldn't be systematically disadvantaged relative to non-shy men and shy women for a psychological condition that isn't their fault and is difficult to change. Of course, you can recognize that we don't live in this ideal world, and abhor any attempt to create it by force or coercion.
Btw, I'm not convinced by this ideal world argument; I just present it as a plausible example of how a man could feel that doesn't make him a Bad Person. Feeling an abstract sense of unfairness, even a misplaced one, isn't the same thing as feeling a sense of injustice that you are entitled to recompense for from some particular individual.
I think women's preferences for certain personality traits are so intimately woven into their sexual psychology that to try to change them would be to re-engineer women's psychology from the ground up. It's a lot easier to imagine this ideal world "fairness" argument applying to men's preferences for looks in women, actually. Discriminating against potential mates due to physical appearance seems a lot more arbitrary than discriminating based on personality traits.
Unfortunately, our culture encourages naive notions of "fairness" and nondiscrimination, so it's easy to see how as this hypothetical shy guy, you could believe that they apply in dating, especially after hearing arguments that men shouldn't judge women's dating potential based on looks so much. You simply don't realize that many women feel the same way towards shy guys that you feel towards [insert type of women you are least attracted to here]. The reason for not making those connections might partly be a failure of empathy or imagination, but I think it's really a failure of knowledge, because society propagates a lot of ignorance and falsehoods about the relative importance of certain male personality traits to women on average.
If you are a shy guy who wants to better understand women's perspective on what they value, people in our culture will systematically lie to you that "oh plenty of women like shy guys," or "every woman wants something different," or "don't change yourself for anyone, eventually you will find the one for you" (note the horrible rationality of all these platitudes). The bias in our culture is that men and women go for the same things until proven otherwise, except for admitting that men care more about looks. When even the men who try to understand women's dating criteria are lied to and silenced, there is a limit to how much we can blame men for not knowing the finer points of female sexual psychology, and thinking that certain aspects of women's preferences are arbitrary (like men's preferences for looks), capricious, or otherwise unfair.
SarahC didn't exactly show "a fundamentally inadequate level of sympathy for 'unattractive' men," but her original post, and others in the discussion, did show a lack of knowledge of the potential psychology of unattractive men, leading to the slippery slope from notions of "guaranteed success" to men feeling "unfairness" when they are turned down, to "violence." That procession only makes sense with a limited model of the minds of romantically frustrated men.
Women are not experts on the mindsets of unattractive, romantically frustrated men (and many men are not, either). In fact, women may have the most biased notions of those mindsets, because their impression of those men is dominated by the subset of them who are creepy, entitled jerks. Romantically frustrated men who are entitled jerks make themselves and their mindsets known to women. Romantically frustrated men who are decent people suffer in silence, and nobody cares. Unfortunately, when the second group of romantically frustrated men air their concerns on the internet, sometimes they trigger pattern matches with the creepy group of romantically frustrated guys. (Ironically, the guys who care most about avoiding such pattern matches may learn to self-censor themselves, leaving only guys without such sensitivity doing the complaining.)
It's not women's fault that creepy romantically frustrated men and the things they believe are so cognitively available. There are very good reasons for that. It also leads to bias which needs to be watched out for in discussions with men they care about communicating with.
The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he expresses frustration or unfairness about women's preferences to a woman in real life may be nontrivial. The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he secretly feels, but does not express, frustration or unfairness about women's preferences: probably much lower, because there are all sorts of decent men that feel those things and suffer in silence. The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he expresses frustration over women's preferences on LessWrong: that's probably closer to the second lower probability than the first, because LW is known as a place where people often talk about uncomfortable things that they wouldn't say in other contexts.
This has gotten messy, but I think your insights have been accurate throughout.
I am sympathetic to romantically frustrated men. I'm a shy woman, and I recognize that I can get away with it because I'm female -- that if I had been born male, society would have punished me more for aspects of my personality.
I kind of regret yelling "Rape!" in a crowded theater by now, because by now I've been shown that the nastier side of PUA is unrepresentative. Folks here are obviously not the people I need to be concerned about, and the people who actually do endanger women probably wouldn't listen to me or anyone. :(