= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
siduri comments on post proposal: Attraction and Seduction for Heterosexual Male Rationalists - 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 (144)
A front page post on PUA would not jibe well with the previously-articulated goal of attracting more women to this community, and might drive some of the existing ones away.
In women-dominated communities, it is a truism that this sort of statement is generally uttered by guys who are jerks but don't realize it. These men are referred to as Nice Guys(TM), a mocking designation that distinguishes them from actual nice guys, who we like. Here are a few blog posts breaking down the definition. See also http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Niceguysyndrome for a summary of views on this phenomenon from female perspectives.
A post that claims to explain why women only go out with jerks is therefore very liable to be extremely alienating to most female readers, especially when the answer turns out to be "because evolution."
I'm aware of this discourse, if by "women-dominated" communities, you mean "feminist-women-dominated" communities.
Do you think this truism is actually true? It seems awfully convenient that once a guy starts complaining about lack of success with women on the grounds of "niceness," he can be categorized as a jerk who isn't really "nice," and who is different from the non-complaining good type of "nice guy."
What do you think is a realistic breakdown of self-identified "nice guys" who report lack of success with women?
I think it accurately identifies a phenomenon that occurs with some frequency. Not that it is true in every case.
I think it's more that guys who are actually nice don't tend to identify their basic human decency as the source of their trouble. The "Girls only go out with jerks!" cry is often infused with a generalized hostility towards women, which isn't very nice at all.
Right, I didn't think you thought it was true in every case. I was asking what you think the breakdown of "not-nice nice guys" vs. "genuine nice guys" might be among self-identified "nice guys" who report lack of success with women.
"Actually nice" presupposes a particular definition of "nice." If a guy who is normally high in agreeableness and empathy gets rejected and feels bitter, is he not actually "nice?" If the guy believes that he has a right to sexual contact from women due to positive treatment of her, then yes, that's getting into jerk territory. If he actually faked being friends with her, then yes, that's also departing from conventional notions of "niceness" (though being unable to maintain the friendship after being rejected is not sufficient evidence that the friendship was fake).
However, outside such behaviors, calling a guy "not nice" merely for being resentful and bitter about rejection seems like an example of the fundamental attribution error.
Regardless of whether this belief is true, is it really so beyond the pale as to brand one as not "actually nice"? Have there been any consideration of alternate reasons for men to believe that "women don't like 'nice guy's" other than then not being "actually nice"? To make an analogy, lots of women complain that "men only care about looks." While I know that the complaint isn't true, it's not difficult to imagine how a woman could run into a bunch of highly appearance-focused men, which would lead her to believe something like that with her being not "actually nice."
Couldn't he just be unlucky? Let's imagine that women's preference for "niceness" (whatever that is) is normally distributed, and imagine that the average women indeed has a preference for nice fellows. Yet if a guy has the bad luck to run into a bunch of women below the mean in preferences for "niceness" in a row, he may well get the impression that women in general don't prefer it. That's a reasonable hypothesis based on the anecdotal data he has available. If this guy complains, would you say that he is not "actually nice"?
If you are high in sensitivity, everyone else is a jerk.
Even if women do prefer the components of "niceness" in men, is more always better? Let's say that women on average prefer men who are in the 60-80 percentiles of Agreeableness to men with lower Agreeableness. Yet perhaps more Agreeableness isn't always better, and men in the 80th+ percentiles of Agreeableness are less preferred to men with somewhat above average Agreeableness. Consequently, men in the 80th+ percentile of Agreeableness really do have a correct complaint that women don't want them because they are "nice" (same reasoning applies for altruism, empathy, etc...).
These guys have "overkill" for niceness, yet ironically they might get categorized as not "actually nice" according to your comment. It's possible to believe that men can be rejected on the grounds of being "too nice," and also believe that women do prefer men who display basic human decency.
That being said, female preference for "basic human decency" may be normally distributed, and intelligent/nerdy/feminist women women are probably on the right side of that distribution. I wouldn't expect them to have a very good idea of what women on the left side of the hump are doing.
And those are just the reasonable explanations of the complaint without even assuming that it might be true, for some operationalizations of "nice." The research is all over the place, so it's actually an open question.
That's true. The cry also occurs without a generalized hostility towards women. Unsurprisingly, the men who do make that complaint with generalized hostility towards women are probable more memorable to feminists and female observers. Combined with their own biases, they may be able to read "generalized hostility" into complaints where it isn't really present.
Furthermore, there is no attention towards the base rate of this complaint from men. Anecdotally, tons of guys feel that "women don't like nice guys" at some time or another. Most of these guys probably never complain, and the ones that do are probably mostly not hostile to women as a group (for any meaningful notion of "hostile").
Furthermore, does feeling some temporary anger about a member of another group of humans really make someone "not very nice at all"? Even when it's due to a particular situation that humans are known to handle badly, like rejection?
By that standard, 95%+ of human beings are "not very nice at all." I think it makes more sense to say that "nice" people (of either gender) can have sexist beliefs (about either gender). I heard female friends of mine in college complaining about "men" in ways that I thought were unfair (and which a sufficient zealous men's rights activist could call "hostile"), but I didn't go thinking that they were horrible people.
You're pointing at a generalized hard problem-- how can you tell who's trustworthy enough?
I'm inclined to think that anyone who habitually vents about the awfulness of a group you're part of is riskier for you than someone who doesn't. It may be excessive paranoia on my part that such venting even once is a sign of trouble. Certainly, that level of sensitivity has been encouraged lately, and I've been trying to figure out what's a good level for my quality of life.
There's also the question of people who aren't venting about various groups-- they have settled opinions of the groups, with theories backing the opinions. Danger sign if they're overgeneralizing about a group you can about?
As for the "women only want jerks" thing, I do wonder how anyone can believe that. Don't they look at a range of couples? My tentative theory is that the people who put the most into heterosexual gender display are easiest to notice, and maybe they're (especially when youngish) apt to make beautiful woman/dominant jerk pairings. Maybe the "women only want jerks" guy is only seeing the supernormal stimuli.
Even if a guy starts out nice, if he's becoming resentful of women in general, he may become a much less good person for his next partner.
I'm willing to cede this, but because the former is true it does put me (and many other women) on my guard when I hear it.
I like your hypothesis about women preferring men who are in the 60-80th percentile of Agreeableness, but punishing those who are higher -- it sounds at least plausible to me -- but I'd want to see some surveys before I started actually believing it.
Look, you seem completely reasonable so I'm sure you can understand this -- it's just irritating to hear, over and over, these sweeping assertions about what women "are like" or what we "really want," which are then confidently backed by appeals to evopsych (but never any real data beyond the anecdotal), especially when I disagree with the characterization and every woman I know disagrees with the characterization. Conveniently, though, our objections are dismissed on the grounds that we don't understand "how evolution has programmed our brains," or that we are not brave enough to confront the truth. You get why that's obnoxious, right? The "women only date jerks!" line is just one aspect of this recurring syndrome.
In this case, you have my sympathies when your perspective is dismissed on the grounds of evolutionary theory. While I am a big fan of evolutionary theories, I see it as a tool for generating hypotheses, and I think it only provides weak evidence for any beliefs on its own.
In the case of "programming," I don't really agree with your objections to the term. The metaphor of "programming" for biology has holes (e.g. lack of a programming agent), but it's useful enough in other ways to be employing by scientists. Take, for instance, the terms genetic code and developmental program.
My guess is that you would be bothered by the following passage:
Who wrote this passage? The pickup artist Mystery, perhaps? Actually, it was researchers in a book chapter on evolutionary social psychology:
Graziano, W.G., Jensen-Campbell, L.A., Todd, M. & Finch, J. (1997). Interpersonal attraction from an evolutionary psychology perspective: Women’s reactions to dominant and prosocial men. In J.A. Simpson & D. Kenrick (Eds.), Evolutionary Social psychology. (pp. 141-167). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
As for the notion that women being "programmed" being offensive, I can't completely relate to that, because ever since puberty, I've taught that men are visually programmed to respond to women's bodies. Given that we are all used to the notion that men have automatic and mechanistic sexual responses to women, the notion that women have automatic and mechanistic sexual responses to men hardly seems groundbreaking. Of course, you might well reject such metaphors towards either gender.
As far as I can tell, the problem is that some men have anecdotal observations of women's preferences that differ from your understanding of your own preferences, and of other women's. I understand your frustration with overbroad generalizations about women's preferences, and the use of evolutionary theories in the absence of empirical studies. That being said, I do hope that weaker versions of those claims won't be dismissed. And I must caution against putting much weight on the preferences of yourself and your female friends when considering what weaker theses might be true of women on average (see the typical mind fallacy).
Actually, no, since the language isn't gender-specific. I'm still not convinced by the theory, but I don't find the terminology nearly as objectionable when it's applied to people in general rather than women in particular.
Awesome. I agree with your point about not generalizing overmuch from my own experiences, either. And I don't hold a strong position against all evopsych. So as far as the basic groundwork here goes, we are in agreement.
It's going to take me a couple posts to respond properly to your comment, since I'll be bringing in a couple citations.
That's understandable, but I'll still maintain that the base rate of belief in the nice guy stereotype is very high, and probably only a minority of people with such beliefs are hostile towards women. You know why I say that? Because many women share those beliefs:
Herold & Milhausen asked a sample of women the following questions:
Do you know of women who have had the choice of dating nice but sexually inexperienced men but chose to date men who are very sexually experienced but not as nice?
You may have heard the expression, ‘Nice guys finish last.’ In terms of dating, and sex, do you think women are less likely to have sex with men who are ‘nice’ than men who are ‘not nice’ ?
56% percent of the sample answered "yes" to both questions. Since most women in this sample agreed with certain components of the "nice guy" stereotype, and presumably most women aren't hostile towards women, then clearly it's extremely easy for someone in our culture to attain that perception without being hostile towards women. It's ironic that most women may hold beliefs about other women's preferences that would get a man tarred and feathered as a "Nice Guy(TM)" if he mentioned them in some places on the internet.
I think we should wait for evidence for actually believing that it is true, but we should also wait for evidence for believing that it is false. It seems to me that certain attitudes towards self-identified "nice guys" already assume that this hypothesis is false (and other hypothesis that might make the complaints of these guys sound more reasonable).
This helps me understand your stance on the complaints of self-identified "nice guys," but it doesn't really help me agree with it. How representative do you think that you and your friends are of the general female population? Women who post on LessWrong, and who are bisexual (which I believe you mentioned identifying as, though it could have been someone else) are likely to be psychometric outliers.
Of course, even if just a small minority of women differ from the generalizations made by frustrated "nice guys," then the strong version of their complaints are literally false. For instance, "women only date jerks" would be false. I do understand why you are bothered by the literal interpretation of this complaint.
I am not certain, however, that these complaints are intended literally. Conversational English is bad for communicating quantitatively. So if a man complains "women only date jerks," or a woman complains "men only care about looks," it's unclear whether they believe those statements to be literally true. I wouldn't expect a female friend of mine to come home from a bad night at a club and complain "most of the variance in men's preferences is explained by looks!"
Even if the strong thesis was intended literally, there could be a weaker version of the thesis that could be true, depending on the operationalization of : e.g. "most women go for 'jerks'", or "women on average go for 'jerk-itude'". I understand if you don't have the inclination to be charitable to every single complaining "nice guy," but I think it's a bit harsh for some feminists to make theories which depend on even these weak theses being false.
Feminist women touting the "Nice Guy(tm)" label seem to have the attitude that if they can catch the "nice guy" making one generalization that is a little too broad, then they can slap the "Nice Guy(tm)" label on him and disregard the meaningfulness of his experience, or the possibility of any weaker versions of his claims being true. This attitude will let them "win" the debate... but it won't help them understand what women other than themselves actually do.
Can we do a bit more groundwork-laying before we dig into this?
When you read this letter from a self-described "nice guy," does he sound to you like a reasonable person with a justified gripe? Or does he sound to you like an asshole who's looking to blame women in general for the trouble he's had getting laid, probably because he's an asshole?
Because I think it possible that we are talking crosswise: you are saying "I know for a fact that there exist truly nice guys who have trouble with the ladies," and I am saying "I know for a fact that the 'women won't date nice guys' complaint is often heard issuing from the mouth of guys who actually aren't nice at all" -- and it is entirely possible that both of these statements are true at the same time.
Well, this is a bit No True Scotsman, isn't it? I don't doubt that there exist women who are only attracted to jerks, the same way I don't doubt that there exist men who will only date bitchy ladies. Tastes vary widely in matters of romance. Where I start to object is when I hear people making categorical assertions about What Women Want, when such assertions contradict my own experience and observations.
The Herold & Milhausen survey you linked is interesting, and thank you for the citation. There are of course other surveys in which women overwhelmingly indicate that they are looking for nice guys. This one is particularly interesting in that the researchers have been asking the same questions since 1939, and have found significant generational shifts in the traits women are seeking:
So it may be true that women aren't placing as much of a premium on niceness as they used to, but this study at least still finds that it's a desirable quality in a mate. (Obviously surveys are prone to various kinds of biases, and I'm sure we agree that no single survey is going to provide a conclusive answer to this question, but it's still interesting to look at what data we can.)
Or maybe we've just heard a lot of aggressive misogyny along the lines of the letter linked to above, and we're objecting to that, not to the actual nice guys who are struggling with social awkwardness? I have only sympathy for the latter.
He sounds like a confused person with a justified gripe who is now being an asshole (and so does Jeff Fecke, the author of that article). The "nice guy" has been taught a certain approach to female sexuality based on exchange: rather than understanding how to arouse female sexuality, he is taught to attempt to exchange some sort of platonic goods. This view of sexuality is extremely misguided, but it is ubiquitous in our culture among both men and women.
When the attempted exchange failed, he grew frustrated: "You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy." Of course, this notion is ridiculous because emotional intimacy and physical intimacy are not the same "kind" of good.
Where I part ways from Fecke is where he starts reading the Nice Guy's mind:
When Fecke says that the guy wasn't "nice," he is equivocating on the word "niceness" so that he can say that the guy lacks it. Believing in exchange over sex is misguided, but so many people believe in it that I don't that we can say that they are all assholes. Unless he was actively trying to obligate particular women into sex in exchange for platonic favors, it's too much of a stretch to accuse him of "antipathy toward this woman, and all women". Merely feeling stiffed on the "exchange" makes the guy misguided, but not an asshole. (Analogously, women who feel stiffed after hookups that don't turn into relationships aren't entitled assholes; they are just misguided.)
There is also no basis for Fecke to say that he wasn't her friend. There is no contradiction between being friends with someone, pursuing them, and feeling frustrated and resentful if they reject you, even to the point of not being able to still be friends with them.
Fecke goes even further:
Here Fecke manages to be both sexist and ableist at the same time. People who have high social anxiety, or who are non-neurotypical, may often have trouble making a move, yet according to Fecke, these folks aren't acting like adults. Furthermore, the "wait and see" strategy that Fecke observes in "nice guys" is actually a common dating strategy for women, who apparently aren't acting like adults in his view, either. Fecke is trashing men for having trouble taking the masculine initiator role, which is highly unfair; I expect people with a feminist background to know better.
Fecke does make a good point when he says "But if you never make your intentions clear, you can't complain that your One True Love didn't read your mind." It's not clear, however, that the "nice guy" was expecting her to read his mind.
The closing of the essay sounds assholish on the part of the "nice guy," but it's really hard to assess how assholish, because it depends on certain empirical questions that we don't know the answer to. To me, it mainly sounds confused and defensive.
Let's buy his argument that during youth, a disproportionate amount of female attention goes towards exciting men who make good short-term mates, but not necessarily good long-term mates. Eventually, when they are older, women who were using short-term mating strategies switch over to looking for a long-term mate, at which point they notice some guys that they didn't notice before.
If the "nice guy" acknowledges that during youth women prefer exciting short-term mates, I'm not quite sure why he sounds so exasperated towards women and tells them to "get their head out of their ass" and "Take a look at what's right in front of you and grab ahold of it." There is no contradiction between prioritizing excitement during youth, and later wanting a more stable, but less exciting long-term mate later in life.
I am skeptical of the claim by the "nice guy" that women would be better served by getting off the short-term carousel at an earlier age. How do we know? Women's mating strategies may be a lot more instrumentally rational than he acknowledges. Ultimately, the "nice guy" may be resenting women merely for following a self-interested, but perhaps viable, mating strategy. But why should they do anything differently?
Both Fecke and the "nice guy" get it wrong when they start slinging blame. The "nice guy" seems to have some level of resentment towards women, though he shows glimmers of understanding why he fell short of their preferences. Fecke blames the "nice guy."
In my view, the probably culprit isn't the "nice guy's" female friends, nor the "nice guy" himself: the culprit is the culture that brainwashed him into such maladaptive and self-defeating mating scripts and expectations. The "nice guy" didn't wake up one day during puberty and say to himself "I'm going to try to pursue women in ways that fail miserably, and then resent them for it."
Unless the "nice guy" took out his resentment on the women involved at a personal level (other than breaking off being friends, because that can be an understandable response to rejection for some people), then the primary victim of these scripts is the "nice guy" himself.
If so, Fecke's disparagement of him is a form of victim-blaming. If so many men with certain temperaments and upbringings are getting trapped in these unrealistic and outdated scripts, maybe the main problem is with the brainwashing that they are subjected to (see this and this for examples from popular culture).
Those are my reactions to the article, and I'd be interested to know why you characterize it as "aggressive misogyny." If there is misogyny, it lies in the exchange-oriented scripts (which I would also call misandric), and he is merely the confused pawn of those scripts.
Back to you:
Well, that depends on how we operationalize "nice." It's possible that both of those statements are true of some population of guys, which is why I've been wondering about the ratio of the good sort of "nice guys" to the evil "nice guys."
Tastes vary, but the distributions may not be the same shape depending on gender. Would you expect the same proportion of men or women to date assholish/bitchy people? If so, then your priors are different from mine. To resolve such a difference, we would have to talk about specific studies.
The problem is that many of those studies involve checklist self-reports, which is an extremely crude for of measurement. From Herold & Milhausen:
As you correctly observe, there is a problem of bias.
I'm not confident that those two groups of "nice guys" are always correctly demarcated.
Yeah, no. This guy is ranting at an audience filled with imaginary women who have wronged him or someone like him, taking apparent pleasure in telling them all what shallow bitches they are (that's the misogynist part) and how many men are "out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you" (that's the aggressive part).
I give zero credence to the "let's pity him because society screwed him over" argument. First, I observe that most men seem to to do just fine in the romantic arena, which is a big strike against the generalized-societal-brainwashing hypothesis. And secondly, if if he did have a run of bad luck, it's no excuse for the way he's generalized his resentment against women. Look, I got mugged by a black guy not too long ago. If I start ranting about how black men are dangerous criminal thugs, people are going to quite rightly perceive me as racist--my experience might go some way toward explaining my racism, but wouldn't justify or excuse it. Same with this guy and his hostility toward women.
And yes, the fact that you see him as sympathetic or "the primary victim" in the situation tells me that we have radically different ideas of what "nice" really is.
Yes, I would expect the proportions to be about the same, although this is a weak expectation and I wouldn't be incredibly surprised to see some variance, on average, between the genders. I would be surprised by a really large variance.
The problems with self-reporting are well known (which is why I attached the disclaimers I did to the university survey) but I'm not sure the Herold methodology is such an improvement: in asking women to comment on the behavior of their gender in the abstract, it's getting more at women's ideas about other women than it is at what women really do. Best of course would be "study[ing their] actual relationship choices," but that's not what the survey you cited does. Do you know of any that do?
I don't think it's a surprise to either of us that we read the rant differently. Could it be consistent with the thoughts of an asshole misogynist? Yes. Could it be consistent with the thoughts of a genuinely "nice" person who is in a bad mood, who's bark is worse than his bite? Yes, and I think that's more probable. Could we say that the rant contains misogynistic ideas? Yes.
He never refers to women as "bitches." He refers to their preferences as "infantile," which is insulting, but is it misogynistic? That depends on the definition of "misogyny."
He is observing that there will be a bunch of cynical and resentful guys who women have ignored, and women will run into those guys. It's unclear how much he is talking about himself, and if he's not, then he's not being aggressive: he's just making an observation that follows from his previous ideas.
Even if he is talking about himself, he is rather vague about what he actually intends to do. Remember, this is a guy who thinks practically every guy who is more successful with women than him is a jerk, so his idea of being a "jerk" may be pretty mild.
I don't think his language compels us to believe that he is out to get women. It's a rant, and if we asked this guy whether he is out to unleash his cynicism and resentment on women, he would probably say "no." I think his essay is a bunch of angry posturing, and I'm skeptical that he could back any of it up (based on observations of other guys making similar complaints).
I said that it was particularly men with "men with certain temperaments and upbringings" who were vulnerable to that brainwashing. For instance, certain young men who are more introverted and sensitive are more attracted to notions of courtly love, rather than going to parties to make out with people while wasted. Furthermore, men who are less socialized disproportionately base their ideas off what the media and authority figures say about how romance works, which doesn't always match up to reality.
The fact the well-socialized male extraverts can see through a lot of sappy shit in pop culture doesn't mean that other guys can. The former sort of guy might hear this song and shrug it off, while a less well-socialized guy might hear it and start thinking of women as porcelain goddesses.
How does he know that he's had a run of bad luck, or whether he is running into a larger pattern?
The problem with that analogy is that the preferences he observed in women weren't as rare as you getting mugged. A better analogy would be if, when you were growing up, all or most of the black guys you tried to befriend ended up mugging you. Can you see why, at the time, you might have had trouble assessing that those guys weren't representative?
Language like "infantile" aside, I have trouble seeing his views as analogous to racism. Is it really sexist to wrongly generalize about the preferences of a gender based on your experiences so far? I'm uncomfortable with that idea, because it fails to make clear how one can attempt to point out any pattern in a gender's mating preferences without being sexist. Exactly what is the bar of evidence that we need?
Do you think women who generalize about men's preferences are misandric? For instance, "men just like dumb blondes", "men only care about looks", "men only care about sex", "men don't like intelligent/strong women"?
The reason I call him the "primary victim" of these outdated scripts is that he is obviously coming out the worst off, based on what we know. He never mentions taking any sort of revenge, or hurting anyone. Perhaps he victimized someone in the past, but we don't know that. It's possible that in the future the victim might turn into a victimizer, but again, we don't know.
All we know is that partly due to misguided notions about female preferences, he has spent years failing with women without truly understanding why. These misguided notions are a reasonable error given the bullshit he was force-fed without any choice. That's a sucky situation which deserves sympathy, and I'm not going to revoke that sympathy because of his horrible, horrible crime of ranting about that situation on the internets and trying to bolster his shattered ego by convincing himself that he's too good for his female peers.
As for whether he is "nice" or not, some of the things he says in the rant aren't "nice" (and could be interpreted as misogynistic, depending on how we conceptualize sexism and where our threshold for it is), but again, it's a rant. As I've stipulated, the guy could be an asshole now, and it's possible that his lack of success with women was partly due to him being an asshole in the past. Yet there is nothing in the essay that's inconsistent with a confused, but generally nice person in a bitter mood... unless we want to risk the fundamental attribution error.
I take it you are referring to the guy mentioned here? I ask because I was expecting to see an example case that was, well, hostile against women. There certainly are people who fit that category.
It seemed to be a guy communicating in an aggressive masculine style. The sort of bluntness that is more commonly used when guys are showing 'tough love' to other guys. Complete with the bravado. The content was fairly circumspect as far as such things go. It seems more condescending than hostile. That it was a response to women complaining about their lot rather than purely a complaint about his own also changes the interpretation somewhat.
When I make aggressive exhortations on that subject it tends to be for the benefit of another guy, emphasizing their personal responsibility for their own success. That is, "quit being a pussy and stop whining" rather than "quit having internally inconsistent preferences and stop whining".
It is worth adding that part of the 'brainwashing' process includes spending too much time in communities where more effective instrumental beliefs are stigmatised but where romantic advice is still given.
If it is then it'd have to be the first case of a truism being true that I've ever seen. I hate truisms. Come to think of it I should have mentioned 'overuse of truisms without satire or irony' as a 'dealbreaker' in the dating preferences thread.
That may be true generally; I don't date men. However, I know some serious past relationships have been destroyed by my being too nice and not sufficiently asserting my own interests. Women generally get put-off by guys who make a serious effort to cater to their every whim, regardless of the jerkishness of their motives, and a lot of guys fail to understand this. While there is certainly the strain of guys who are overly nice because they think it'll get them some, there are also guys out there who are genuinely nice because they obliviously think it will actually accomplish their goals.
ETA: There's a difference between "Nice Guys (TM)" and nice guys. The former are perhaps justly disadvantaged. The latter can often find themselves unjustly disadvantaged, and PUA does a lot to counter that.
I very much agree with siduri's comment, as well as grouchymusicologist's below. I don't know for sure which way the pros and cons of the proposed post go, but I do think it's important to consider not just the possible benefit to the current "average Less Wrong Reader" but also the other effects Siduri and grouchymusicologist identify - as Siduri says, not attracting women to the community/possibly driving women away, and as grouchymusicologist says, communicating the message "that the typical reader of LW is 20-34 and heterosexual and single and male and we prefer it that way." I think those effects are real - I would personally feel that LW was just a tiny bit less welcoming with such a post - even if I don't have a good sense of how to measure them.
I'm torn because I'm sure that lukeprog's post would probably benefit some members of the LW community. I've read enough of the comments about PUA here to recognize that the PUA community is diverse and some of the voices that are most known/infamous outside of the community (e.g., Roissy) are not representative of what a lot of members of the PUA community (and certainly the LW community) study and admire.
I'm also sympathetic that to those PUA members who don't like the Roissy-type approach, it must be frustrating to be lumped in with him. But, at least from what I can tell, that kind of PUA is all a lot of people casually familiar with the subject know, and so the mere mention of PUA evokes negative feelings for a lot of people. So I fear lukeprog's post would evoke those feelings and turn people away from LW, even if it also had the more agreeable effect of providing more balanced information to those who stuck past the original negative reaction to "PUA" and read on.
Anyway, lukeprog, if you're collecting votes, I would have to vote no. At any rate, thank you for asking for input from the community.
This is a very good point, the disclaimer itself hammers home some information that may move the reader to a certain impression of what LW is.
In some ways I prefer not to know too much about the typical LW reader. Especially if I learned their political affiliations it might activate unwarranted biases against them.
The whole nice guy vs. nice guy(tm) debate is rather interesting in itself, I feel that many critiques of gender relations (feminist and otherwise) seem like low hanging fruit for rationality and should be discussed more here when not interfering with the primary objective. I mostly agree with the article you linked too (I've read similar texts on the phenomena from a female perspective in the past).
However let me just point out that game does make such nice guys (tm) genuinely nicer even if they don't see it as such. I'm not sure how relevant this is to a debate about PUA, especially since there is overlaps between the PUA concept of a average frustrated chump and a nice guy(tm). There is even overlap in the kind of criticism and arguments both groups use against the demographic.
To explain what I mean let me just comment a few examples of the top of my head. From the wiki entry you link to:
I have yet to see a example where any PUA system has advised against interpreting such a statement as anything but a polite statement of disinterest on the part of a woman.
Or:
Is this really a view incompatible with PUA? There is s a culture in the PUA community where about any sense of bitterness and entitlement on the part of men who don't achieve success in their pursuit of sex is derided. The whole mindset that women are the one making the wrong choice is itself anathema to the basic principle of finding what women reward and value and becoming more like that.
Even Roissy in DC who is far from a pretty picture is clearly in line with this: "No one owes you sex or love. Deal with it and stop bitching."
Men's Rights activists have formulated long lists of criticism of PUA and many even actively shun it because they claim that PUA is all about men conforming to female desires in behaviour far more than women conform to male desires of behaviour and proclaimed the whole thing gynocentric.
You've hit some key points here. I'm certain the post would be helpful to lots of Less Wrongers. I'm just as certain it would alienate many female readers, even if the post is not sexist apart from using terms that are usually identified with sexism.
I'd never heard of Roissy, but I do hate being lumped in with Mystery and company. And yet, I understand tha is the public face of PUA.
It's also annoying that a discussion of basic science of human sexual attraction response could be such a mind-killer merely because it's framed in terms of PUA. Are people really that bad at focusing on the material? If somebody was reading the exact same material in a book on human sexuality, I doubt it would offend them at all.
But ah, such is humankind!
Which is not to suggest I've transcended my humanity, it's just that, being male and all, this subject doesn't push my buttons that way.
Many people are sufficiently bad at focusing on material that they would be offended even then.
Perhaps you could refocus your proposal in this direction? If you're interested in writing it, a review of the experimental work on the psychology underlying human mating behaviors, both male and female, would be more broadly useful and should be better received than giving dating advice to a subset of the community. It would be entirely in line with the Less Wrong theme of understanding human motivation as it actually is, no different to the discussion of biases and heuristics, or status and signaling. I couldn't say the same about a how-to guide for manipulating women, and I'm glad you decided not to pursue it.
If you don't like what happens when you frame your material in terms of PUA, try a different framing. Write a post about the science of attraction, based on published research, and call it a post about the science of attraction. Or write about how social skills can help people be more successful, and portray it as a post about whatever specific social skills you're discussing. You could even include examples from the romantic/dating domain in your post, or mention that the experiences of pickup artists are a source of some of your information (possibly with a link ), but the focus should be on the specific skills or techniques and the ways in which they're beneficial. If you start the post with a one-paragraph summary, that summary shouldn't need to devote more than a few words to romance or contain the word "pickup."
This post proposal that you've written encourages people to focus on PUA. It is framed in terms of pickup artistry from the first sentence, it has "seduction" in the title, and it repeatedly mentions things like "how to trick women into bed" and "getting excellent and frequent sex" (even if only to disclaim them). As other commenters have described, the offputting aspects of PUA are front and center, even if you try to distinguish yourself from them. If your version of PUA is about "holistic self-improvement" and not the sleazy stuff, then don't just tell us that, show it by making your post about that good stuff from the first sentence on.
I understand the objection to these sorts of language, but in the case of the first example, what exactly should be used instead? What is the value-neutral term for "seduction?" Unfortunately, I'm not sure we have one.
When you are attempting to seduce someone, what is it exactly that you want to get them to do? How can you tell when you've succeeded?
"Get them to have sex with me whether they want to or not" is an answer with different implications than "reduce the obstacles that impede them from acting on their desire to have sex with me" or "encourage them to act on their own desires in general" or "create a desire in them to have sex with me" or etc.
Admittedly, not all of those are value-neutral either. If the thing being talked about is negatively or positively valued, it makes sense that the word used is as well... to eliminate that by blurring the connection between word and referent does not improve communication.
Sure. I frame it in terms of PUA because that's where I learned most of those skills from, with a tiny role for Toastmasters. But that's an accident of personal history.
What do people think of this? The commenters here are correct that a post on social skills, or one on self-presentation, or one on human mating behavior, need not mention PUA or seduction at all. Would such posts be appropriate for Less Wrong?
There have been a number of highly regarded "instrumental rationality" posts about how to effectively achieve one's goals. These are mostly clustered around productivity (akrasia, et al), but not exclusively. I can't see why posts about how to effectively socialize would be off-topic.
That said, there is enough reflexive "Dark Arts" rejection around here that you might get more community support if you turn it around and frame it as how to best resist the techniques that other people might use to effectively socialize with you, and instead remain isolated and uninfluenced.
I'd be saddened if that turned out to be true.
Well the posts that deal directly with the dark arts don't get anywhere near this negative a reaction. As such I believe the issue is not dark arts per se but rather that they are discussed in a way that by implication lowers the status of women.
The two questions to ask yourself are 1) whether your post can avoid the bad stuff involving PUA which is offputting to so many people, and 2) whether your post will have enough good stuff to be interesting/useful/relevant.
Most of the criticisms and "nay" votes here have been about question #1. If you can successfully avoid that minefield we can move on to question 2. I think there could be a lot of interest (and even if there isn't, it's not a big deal). Posts on social skills or self-presentation fit with LW themes of instrumental rationality & self-improvement (as seen in the akrasia posts). They could also fit the theme of self-awareness (as seen in the Luminosity sequence) - in this case, being aware of the impression that you make on other people and the impact that your behavior has on the interaction. There has also been (highly upvoted) expressed interest in social-skills-related content, both in the comments here and in the More Art, Less Stink post.
If you want, you could post a one paragraph summary of a possible post to get feedback on whether people are interested. You could also try asking yourself questions like "Would people outside of the target PUA demographic of young men find this post interesting & relevant?" and "Is this post relevant to many different domains of life, not just dating?"
I wouldn't have any problem with posts like that.
Love that wiki article!
BTW, I didn't say women only go out with "jerks", but they often do. And don't expect me to say that evolution programmed women to love jerks. My bet is that evolution programmed women to be attracted to confident men (many of whom are jerks) - a point so obvious I doubt anyone will seriously disagree.
If you didn't mean to say that, you should edit this part:
"I used to be one of those poor guys who complained that 'Girls say they want nice guys, but they only go out with jerks!' Merely reading enough evolutionary psychology to understand why this is the case..."
I do, actually. Women aren't robots, and evolution isn't sapient. We aren't actually "programmed" by evolution any more than we were "designed" by God. And I don't share your intuition that confidence correlates highly to jerkitude. In fact, I think overcompensating for low self esteem is one of the primary failure modes that leads to jerkitude.
I will agree that confidence is sexy, but I'm deeply skeptical of made-up just-so-stories that purport to explain social circumstances by reference to the ancestral environment. I'd really be interested in seeing your answer to mni's comment here, since it sums up my problems with evopsych very concisely--and while it's been upvoted a lot, nobody has actually answered her.
Lol, oops. Yes, not what I meant. Edited.
As for programming, I apparently use that term in a weaker sense than you do. I'm aware that humans are not computers.
On mni's comment: I read only that one comment, and I mostly agree with it. This is a common critique of evo-psych in general, and is salient for many claims of evo-psych. I'd have to spend more time than I have now if I want to respond in a way I'd be happy with, though.
I'm sorry if that sounded condescending. The word "programmed" rubs me the wrong way when applied to women, specifically. Maybe because it always does seem to be the women who are "programmed"; men mostly get to be "strategists," rational actors following an evolutionary strategy. It's just a vocabulary distinction, but it's annoying when you're always cast as the sexbot rather than the strategist.
Thanks for explaining; this did not occur to me. I haven't encountered this particular sexism or - just as likely - haven't noticed it. In my sense of "programmed", men and women are equally "programmed."
I prefer to use the word 'optimized'. Does the job just fine, with only 1/4 of the objections!
I prefer the term 'endowed' because our adaptations are often sub-optimal.
It is a truism in a some male communities too - in particular, among those who have started to take responsibility for their own dating success but are not willing to surrender their idealistic view that the dating world should somehow be fair or even that people should be rationally self interested. It isn't and they aren't.
It is troubling to see that opinion put forward here as if it is a belief that might actually be about reality - or more to the point that it must be believed or else be alienating and generally shameful and offensive, which seems to be message being conveyed here.
It would seem to be more alienating to any male readers who has ever dated a female. At least, any of us that mind being called 'jerks'. :)