Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics
Part of the Sequence: The Science of Winning at Life. Co-authored with Minda Myers and Hugh Ristik. Also see: Polyhacking.
When things fell apart between me (Luke) and my first girlfriend, I decided that kind of relationship wasn't ideal for me.
I didn't like the jealous feelings that had arisen within me. I didn't like the desperate, codependent 'madness' that popular love songs celebrate. I had moral objections to the idea of owning somebody else's sexuality, and to the idea of somebody else owning mine. Some of my culture's scripts for what a man-woman relationship should look like didn't fit my own goals very well.
I needed to design romantic relationships that made sense (decision-theoretically) for me, rather than simply falling into whatever relationship model my culture happened to offer. (The ladies of Sex and the City weren't too good with decision theory, but they certainly invested time figuring out which relationship styles worked for them.) For a while, this new approach led me into a series of short-lived flings. After that, I chose 4 months of contented celibacy. After that, polyamory. After that...
Anyway, the results have been wonderful. Rationality and decision theory work for relationships, too!
We humans compartmentalize by default. Brains don't automatically enforce belief propagation, and aren't configured to do so. Cached thoughts and cached selves can remain even after one has applied the lessons of the core sequences to particular parts of one's life. That's why it helps to explicitly examine what happens when you apply rationality to new areas of your life — from disease to goodness to morality. Today, we apply rationality to relationships.
Relationships Styles
When Minda had her first relationship with a woman, she found that the cultural scripts for heterosexual relationships didn't work for a homosexual relationship style. For example, in heterosexual dating (in the USA) the man is expected to ask for the date, plan the date, and escalate sexual interaction. A woman expects that she will be pursued and not have to approach men, that on a date she should be passive and follow the man's lead, and that she shouldn't initiate sex herself.
In the queer community, Minda quickly found that if she passively waited for a woman to hit on her, she'd be waiting all night! When she met her first girlfriend, Minda had to ask for the date. Minda writes:
On dates, I didn't know if I should pay for the date or hold the door or what I was supposed to do! Each interaction required thought and negotiation that hadn't been necessary before. And this was really kind of neat. We had the opportunity to create a relationship that worked for us and represented us as unique and individual human beings. And when it came to sexual interactions, I found it easy to ask for and engage in exactly what I wanted. And I have since brought these practices into my relationships with men.
But you don't need to have an 'alternative' relationship in order to decide you want to set aside some cultural scripts and design a relationship style that works for you. You can choose relationship styles that work for you now.
With regard to which type(s) of romantic partner(s) you want, there are many possibilities.
No partners:
- Asexuality. Asexuals don't experience sexual attraction. They comprise perhaps 1% of the population,1 and include notables like Paul Erdos, Morrissey, and Janeane Garofalo. There is a network (AVEN) for asexuality awareness and acceptance.
- Celibacy. Celibates feel sexual attraction, but abstain from sex. Some choose to abstain for medical, financial, psychological, or philosophical reasons. Others choose celibacy so they have more time to achieve other goals, as I (Luke) did for a time. Others are involuntarily celibate; perhaps they can't find or attract suitable mates. This problem can often be solved by learning and practicing social skills.
One partner:
- Monogamy. Having one sexual partner at a time is a standard cultural script, and may be over-used due to the status quo bias. Long-term monogamy should not be done on the pretense that attraction and arousal for one's partner won't fade. It will.2 Still, there may be many people for whom monogamy is optimal.
Many partners:
- Singlehood. Singlehood can be a good way to get to know yourself and experience a variety of short-term partners. About 78% of college students have had at least one 'one-night stand', and most such encounters were preceded by alcohol or drug use.3 Indeed, many young people today no longer go on 'dates' to get to know a potential partner. Instead, they meet each other at a social event, 'hook up', and then go on dates (if the hookup went well).4
- Friendship 'with benefits'. Friends are often people you already enjoy and respect, and thus may also make excellent sexual partners. According to one study, 60% of undergraduates have been a 'friend with benefits' for someone at one time.5
- Polyamory.6 In a polyamorous relationship, partners are clear about their freedom to pursue multiple partners. Couples communicate their boundaries and make agreements about what is and isn't allowed. Polyamory often requires partners to de-program jealousy. In my experience, polyamory is much more common in the rationality community than in the general population.
Hugh points out that your limbic system may not agree (at least initially) with your cognitive choice of a relationship style. Some women say they want a long-term relationship but date 'bad boys' who are unlikely to become long-term mates. Someone may think they want polyamorous relationships but find it impossible to leave jealousy behind.7
The Science of Attraction
A key skillset required for having the relationships you want is that of building and maintaining attraction in potential mates.
Guys seeking girls may wonder: Why do girls say they want "nice guys" but date only "jerks"? Girls seeking rationalist guys are at an advantage because the gender ratio lies in their favor, but they still might wonder: What can I do to attract the best mates? Those seeking same-sex partners may wonder how attraction can differ from heterosexual norms.
How do you build and maintain attraction in others? A lot can be learned by trying different things and seeing what works. This is often better than polling people, because people's verbal reports about what attracts them don't always match their actual behavior.8
To get you started, the virtues of scholarship and empiricism will serve you well. Social psychology has a wealth of knowledge to offer on successful relationships.9 For example, here are some things that, according to the latest research, will tend to make people more attracted to you:
- Proximity and familiarity. Study after study shows that we tend to like those who live near us, partly due to availability,10 and partly because repeated exposure to almost anything increases liking.11 A Taiwanese man once demonstrated the power of proximity and repeated exposure when he wrote over 700 letters to his girlfriend, urging her to marry him. She married the mail carrier.12
- Similarity. We tend to like people who are similar to us.13 We like people with faces similar to our own.14 We are even more likely to marry someone with a similar-sounding name.15 Similarity makes attraction endure longer.16 Also, similar people are more likely to react to events the same way, thus reducing the odds of conflict.17
- Physical attractiveness. Both men and women prefer good-looking mates.18 Partly, this is because the halo effect: we automatically assume that more attractive people are also healthier, happier, more sensitive, more successful, and more socially skilled (but not necessarily more honest or compassionate).19 Some of these assumptions are correct: Attractive and well-dressed people are more likely to impress employers and succeed occupationally.20 But isn't beauty relative? Some standards of beauty vary from culture to culture, but many are universal.21 Men generally prefer women who exhibit signs of youth and fertility.22 Women generally prefer men who (1) display possession of abundant resources,23 (2) display high social status,24 (3) exhibit a 'manly' face (large jaw, thick eyebrows, visible beard stubble)25 and physique,26 and (4) are tall.27 Both genders generally prefer (1) agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion,28 (2) 'average' and symmetrical faces with features that are neither unusually small or large,29 (2) large smiles,30 (3) pupil dilation,31 and some other things (more on this later).
- Liking others. Liking someone makes them more attracted to you.32
- Arousing others. Whether aroused by fright, exercise, stand-up comedy, or erotica, we are more likely to be attracted to an attractive person when we are generally aroused than when we are not generally aroused.33 As David Myers writes, "Adrenaline makes the heart grow fonder."34 This may explain why rollercoasters and horror movies are such a popular date night choice.
But this barely scratches the surface of attraction science. In a later post, we'll examine how attraction works in more detail, and draw up a science-supported game plan for building attraction in others.
Attractiveness: Mean and Variance
Remember that increasing your average attractiveness (by appealing to more people) may not be an optimal strategy.
Marketers know that it's often better to sacrifice broad appeal in order for a product to have very strong appeal to a niche market. The Appunto doesn't appeal to most men, but it appeals strongly enough to some men that they are willing to pay the outrageous $200 price for it.
Similarly, you may have the best success in dating if you appeal very strongly to some people, even if this makes you less appealing to most people — that is, if you adopt a niche marketing strategy in the dating world.35
As long as you can find those few people who find you very attractive, it won't matter (for dating) that most people aren't attracted to you. And because one can switch between niche appeal and broad appeal using fashion and behavior, you can simply use clothing and behavior with mainstream appeal during the day (to have general appeal in professional environments) and use alternative clothing and behavior when you're socializing (to have strong appeal to a small subset of people whom you've sought out).
To visualize this point, consider two attraction strategies. Both strategies employ phenomena that are (almost) universally attractive, but the blue strategy aims to maximize the frequency of somewhat positive responses while the red strategy aims to maximize the frequency of highly positive responses. The red strategy (e.g. using mainstream fashion) increases one's mean attractiveness, while the blue strategy (e.g. using alternative fashion) increases one's attractiveness variance. Hugh Ristik offers the following chart:
This goth guy and I (Luke) can illustrate this phenomenon. I aim for mainstream appeal; he wears goth clothing when socializing. My mainstream look turns off almost no one, and is attractive to most women, but doesn't get that many strong reactions right away unless I employ other high-variance strategies.36 In contrast, I would bet the goth guy's alternative look turns off many people and is less attractive to most women than my look is, but has a higher frequency of extremely positive reactions in women.
In one's professional life, it may be better to have broad appeal. But in dating, the goal is to find people who find you extremely attractive. The goth guy sacrifices his mean attractiveness to increase his attractiveness variance (and thus the frequency of very positive responses), and this works well for him in the dating scene.
High-variance strategies like this are a good way to filter for people who are strongly attracted to you, and thus avoid wasting your time with potential mates who are only feel lukewarm toward you.
Up next
In future posts we'll develop an action plan for using the science of attraction to create successful romantic relationships. We'll also explain how rationality helps with relationship maintenance37 and relationship satisfaction.
Previous post: The Neuroscience of Desire
Notes
1 Bogaert (2004).
2 About half of romantic relationships of all types end within a few years (Sprecher 1994; Kirkpatrick & Davis 1994; Hill et al 1976), and even relationships that last exhibit diminishing attraction and arousal (Aron et al. 2006; Kurdek 2005; Miller et al. 2007). Note that even if attraction and arousal fades, romantic love can exist in long-term closed monogamy and it is associated with relationship satisfaction (Acevedo & Aron, 2009).
3 Paul et al. (2000); Grello et al. (2006).
4 Bogle (2008).
5 Bisson & Levine (2009).
6 Two introductory books on the theory and practice of polyamory are: Easton & Hardy (2009) and Taormino (2008).
7 See work on 'conditional mating strategies' aka 'strategic pluralism' (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000).
8 Sprecher & Felmlee (2008); Eastwick & Finkel (2008). Likewise, there is a difference between what people publicly report as being the cause of a breakup, what they actually think caused a breakup, and what actually caused a breakup (Powell & Fine, 2009). Also see Inferring Our Desires.
9 For overviews of this research, see: Bradbury & Karney (2010); Miller & Perlman (2008); Vangelisti & Perlman (2006); Sprecher et al. (2008); Weiten et al. (2011), chs. 8-12. For a history of personal relationships research, see Perlman & Duck (2006).
10 Goodfriend (2009).
11 This is called the mere exposure effect. See Le (2009); Moreland & Zajonc (1982); Nuttin (1987); Zajonc (1968, 2001); Moreland & Beach (1992). The limits of this effect are explored in Bornstein (1989, 1999); Swap (1977).
12 Steinberg (1993).
13 Zajonc (1998); Devine (1995); Rosenbaum (1986); Surra et al. (2006); Morry (2007, 2009); Peplau & Fingerhut (2007); Ledbetter et al. (2007); Montoya et al. (2008); Simpson & Harris (1994).
14 DeBruine (2002, 2004); Bailenson et al. (2005).
15 Jones et al. (2004).
16 Byrne (1971); Ireland et al. (2011).
17 Gonzaga (2009). For an overview of the research on self-disclosure, see Greene et al. (2006).
18 Langlois et al. (2000); Walster et al. (1966); Feingold (1990); Woll (1986); Belot & Francesconi (2006); Finkel & Eastwick (2008); Neff (2009); Peretti & Abplanalp (2004); Buss et al. (2001); Fehr (2009); Lee et al. (2008); Reis et al. (1980). This is also true for homosexuals: Peplau & Spalding (2000). Even infants prefer attractive faces: Langlois et al. (1987); Langlois et al. (1990); Slater et al. (1998). Note that women report that the physical attractiveness is less important to their mate preferences than it actually is: Sprecher (1989).
19 Eagly et al. (1991); Feingold (1992a); Hatfield & Sprecher (1986); Smith et al. (1999); Dion et al. (1972).
20 Cash & Janda (1984); Langlois et al. (2000); Solomon (1987).
21 Cunningham et al. (1995); Cross & Cross (1971); Jackson (1992); Jones (1996); Thakerar & Iwawaki (1979).
22 Men certainly prefer youth (Buss 1989a; Kenrick & Keefe 1992; Kenrick et al. 1996; Ben Hamida et al. 1998). Signs of fertility that men prefer include clear and smooth skin (Sugiyama 2005; Singh & Bronstad 1997; Fink & Neave 2005; Fink et al. 2008; Ford & Beach 1951; Symons 1995), facial femininity (Cunningham 2009; Gangestad & Scheyd 2005; Schaefer et al. 2006; Rhodes 2006), long legs (Fielding et al. 2008; Sorokowski & Pawlowski 2008; Bertamini & Bennett 2009; Swami et al. 2006), and a low waist-to-hip ratio (Singh 1993, 2000; Singh & Young 1995; Jasienska et al. 2004; Singh & Randall 2007; Connolly et al 2000; Furnham et al 1997; Franzoi & Herzog 1987; Grabe & Samson 2010). Even men blind from birth prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio (Karremans et al. 2010).
23 Buss et al. (1990); Buss & Schmitt (1993); Khallad (2005); Gottschall et al. (2003); Gottschall et al. (2004); Kenrick et al. (1990); Gustavsson & Johnsson (2008); Wiederman (1993); Badahdah & Tiemann (2005); Marlowe (2004); Fisman et al. (2006); Asendorpf et al. (2010); Bokek-Cohen et al. (2007); Pettay et al. (2007); Goode (1996).
24 Feingold (1990, 1992b).
25 Cunningham (2009); Cunningham et al. (1990).
26 Singh (1995); Martins et al. (2007).
27 Lynn & Shurgot (1984); Ellis (1992); Gregor (1985); Kurzban & Weeden (2005); Swami & Furnham (2008). In contrast, men prefer women who are about 4.5 inches shorter than themselves: Gillis & Avis (1980).
28 Figueredo et al. (2006).
29 Langlois & Roggman (1990); Rhodes et al. (1999); Singh (1995); Thornhill & Gangestad (1994, 1999). We may have evolved to be attracted to symmetrical faces because they predict physical and mental health (Thornhill & Moller, 1997).
30 Cunningham (2009).
31 Cunningham (2009).
32 This is called reciprocal liking. See Curtis & Miller (1986); Aron et al (2006); Berscheid & Walster (1978); Smith & Caprariello (2009); Backman & Secord (1959).
33 Carducci et al. (1978); Dermer & Pszczynski (1978); White & Knight (1984); Dutton & Aron (1974).
34 Myers (2010), p. 710.
35 One example of a high-variance strategy for heterosexual men in the dating context is a bold opening line like "You look familiar. Have we had sex?" Most women will be turned off by such a line, but those who react positively are (by selection and/or by the confidence of the opening line) usually very attracted.
36 In business, this is often said as "not everyone is your customer": 1, 2, 3.
37 For discussions of relationship maintenance in general, see: Ballard-Reisch & Wiegel (1999); Dinda & Baxter (1987); Haas & Stafford (1998).
References
Acevedo & Aron (2009). Does a long-term relationship kill romantic love? Review of General Psychology, 13: 59-65.
Aron, Fisher, & Strong (2006). Romantic love. In Vangelisti & Perlman (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships. Cambridge University Press.
Asendorpf, Penke, & Back (2010). From dating to mating and relating: Predictors of initial and long-term outcomes of speed dating in a community sample. European Journal of Personality.
Backman & Secord (1959). The effect of perceived liking on interpersonal attraction. Human Relations, 12: 379-384.
Badahdah & Tiemann (2005). Mate selection criteria among Muslims living in America. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26: 432-440.
Bailenson, Iyengar, & Yee (2005). Facial identity capture and presidential candidate preference. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the International Communication Association.
Ballard-Reisch & Wiegel (1999). Communication processes in marital commitment: An integrative approach. In Adams & Jones (eds.), Handbook of interpersonal commitment and relationship stability (pp. 407-424). Plenum.
Belot & Francesconi (2006). Can anyone be 'the one'? Evidence on mate selection from speed dating. Centre for Economic Policy Research.
Ben Hamida, Mineka, & Bailey (1998). Sex differences in perceived controllability of mate value: An evolutionary perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75: 953–966.
Berscheid & Walster (1978). Interpersonal Attraction. Addison-Wesley.
Bertamini & Bennett (2009). The effect of leg length on perceived attractiveness of simplified stimuli. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 3: 233-250.
Bogaert (2004). Asexuality: Prevalence and associated factors in a national probability sample. Journal of Sex Research, 41: 279-287.
Bogle (2008). Hooking Up: Sex, dating, and relationships on campus. New York University Press.
Bokek-Cohen, Peres, & Kanazawa (2007). Rational choice and evolutionary psychology as explanations for mate selectivity. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 2: 42-55.
Bornstein (1989). Exposure and affect: Overview and meta-analysis of research, 1968-1987. Psychological Bulletin, 106: 265-289.
Bornstein (1999). Source amnesia, misattribution, and the power of unconscious perceptions and memories. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 16: 155-178.
Bradbury & Karney (2010). Intimate Relationships. W.W. Norton & Company.
Buss (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses testing in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12: 1-49.
Buss & Schmitt (1993). Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review, 100: 204-232.
Buss, Abbott, Angleitner, Asherian, Biaggio, et al. (1990). International preferences in selecting mates: A study of 37 cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 21: 5-47.
Buss, Shackelford, Kirkpatrick, & Larsen (2001). A half century of mate preeferences: The cultural evolution of values. Journal of Marriage and Family, 63: 291-503.
Byrne (1971). The Attraction Paradigm. Academic Press.
Carducci, Cosby, & Ward (1978). Sexual arousal and interpersonal evaluations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14: 449-457.
Cash & Janda (1984). The eye of the beholder. Psychology Today, November: 46-52.
Connolly, Mealey, & Slaughter (2000). The development of waist-to-hip ratio preferences. Perspectives in Human Biology, 5: 19-29.
Cross & Cross (1971). Age, sex, race, and the perception of facial beauty. Developmental Psychology, 5: 433-439.
Cunningham, Roberts, Wu, Barbee, & Druen (1995). "Their ideas of beauty are, on the whole, the same as ours": Consistency and variability in the cross-cultural perception of female attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68: 261-279.
Cunningham (2009). Physical Attractiveness, Defining Characteristics. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 3 (pp. 1237-1242). Sage Reference.
Curtis & Miller (1986). Believing another likes or dislikes you: Behaviors making the beliefs come true. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51: 284-290.
DeBruine (2002). Facial resemblance enhances trust. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 269: 1307-1312.
DeBruine (2004). Facial resemblance increases the attractiveness of same-sex faces more than other-sex faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 271: 2085-2090.
Dermer & Pszczynski (1978). Effects of erotica upon men's loving and liking responses for women they love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36: 1302-1309.
Devine (1995). Prejudice and outgroup perception. In Teser (ed.), Advanced Social Psychology. McGraw-Hill.
Dinda & Baxter (1987). Strategies for maintaining and repairing marital relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 4: 143-158.
Dion, Berscheid, & Walster (1972). What is beautiful is good. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24: 285-290.
Dutton & Aron (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30: 510-517.
Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Kennedy (1991). What is beautiful is good, but...: A meta-analytic review of research on the physical attractiveness stereotype. Psychological Bulletin, 110: 109-128.
Easton & Hardy (2009). The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures, 2nd edition. The Celestial Arts.
Eastwick & Finkel (2008). Sex differences in mate preferences revisited: Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94: 245-264.
Eldridge (2009). Conflict patterns. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of human relationships: Vol. 1 (pp. 307-310). Sage Reference.
Ellis (1992). The evolution of sexual attraction: Evaluative mechanisms in women. In Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 267-288). Oxford University Press.
Fehr (2009). Friendship formation and development. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 1 (pp. 706-10). Sage Reference.
Feingold (1990). Gender differences in effects of physical attractiveness on romantic attraction: A comparison across five research paradigms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59: 981-993.
Feingold (1992a). Good-looking people are not what we think. Psychological Bulletin, 111: 304-341.
Feingold (1992b). Gender differences in mate selection preferences: A test of the parental investment model. Psychological Bulletin, 116: 429-256.
Figueredo, Sefcek, & Jones (2006). The ideal romantic partner personality. Personality and Individual Differences, 41: 431-441.
Fielding, Scholling, Adab, Cheng, Lao et al. (2008). Are longer legs associated with enhanced fertility in Chinese women? Evolution and Human Behavior, 29: 434-443.
Fink & Neave (2005). The biology of facial beauty. Internal Journal of Cosmetic Science, 27: 317-325.
Fink, Matts, Klingenberg, Kuntze, Weege, & Grammar (2008). Visual attention to variation in female skin color distribution. Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology, 7: 155-161.
Finkel & Eastwick (2008). Speed-dating. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17: 193-197.
Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica, & Simonson (2006). Gender differences in mate selection: Evidence from a speed dating experiment. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121: 673-697.
Ford & Beach (1951). Patterns of Sexual Behavior. Harper & Row.
Franzoi & Herzog (1987). Judging personal attractiveness: What body aspects do we use? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 13: 19-33.
Furnham, Tan, & McManus (1997). Waist-to-hip ratio and preferences for body shape: A replication and extension. Personality and Individual Differences, 22: 539-549.
Gangestad & Simpson (2000). The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23: 573-644.
Gangestad & Scheyd (2005). The evolution of human physical attractiveness. Annual Review of Anthropology, 34: 523-548.
Gillis & Avis (1980).
Gonzaga (2009). Similarity in ongoing relationships. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 3 (pp. 1496-1499). Sage Reference.
Goode (1996). Gender and courtship entitlement: Responses to personal ads. Sex Roles, 34: 141-169.
Goodfriend (2009). Proximity and attraction. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 3 (pp. 1297-1299). Sage Reference.
Gottschall, Berkey, Cawson, Drown, Fleischner, et al. (2003). Patterns of characterization in folktales across geographic regions and levels of cultural complexity: Literature as a neglected source of quantitative data. Human Nature, 14: 365-382.
Gottschall, Martin, Quish, & Rea (2004). Sex differences in mate choice criteria are reflected in folktales from around the world and in historical European literature. Evolution and Human Behavior, 25: 102-112.
Grabe & Samson (2010). Sexual Cues Emanating From the Anchorette Chair: Implications for Perceived Professionalism, Fitness for Beat, and Memory for News. Communication Research, December 14.
Greene, Derlega, Mathews (2006). Self-disclosure in personal relationships. In Vangelisti & Perlman (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships (pp. 409-428). Cambridge University Press.
Gregor (1985). Anxious Pleasures: The sexual lives of an Amazonian people. University of Chicago Press.
Grello, Welsh, & Harper (2006). No strings attached: The nature of casual sex in college students. Journal of Sex Research, 43: 255-267.
Gustavsson & Johnsson (2008). Mixed support for sexual selection theories of mate preferences in the Swedish population. Evolutionary Psychology, 6: 454-470.
Haas & Stafford (1998). An initial examination of maintenance behaviors in gay and lesbian relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 15: 846-855.
Hatfield & Sprecher (1986). Mirror, mirror... The importance of looks in everyday life. State University of New York Press.
Hill, Rubin, & Peplau (1976). Breakups before marriage: The end of 103 affairs. Journal of Social Issues, 32: 147-168.
Ireland, Slatcher, Eastwick, Scissors, Finkel, & Pennebaker (2011). Language style matching predicts relationship initiation and stability. Psychological Science, 22: 39-44.
Jackson (1992). Physical appearance and gender: Sociobiological and sociocultural perspectives. State University of New York Press.
Jasienska, Ziomkiewicz, Ellison, Lipson, & Thune (2004). Large breasts and narrow waists indicate high reproductive potential in women. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B, 271: 1213-1217.
Jones (1996). Physical attractiveness and the theory of sexual selection. University of Michigan Press.
Jones, Pelham, Carvallo, & Mirenberg (2004). How do I love thee? Let me count the Js: Implicit egotism and interpersonal attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87: 665-683.
Karremans, Frankenhuis, & Arons (2010). Blind men prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31: 182-186.
Kenrick, Sadalla, Groth, & Trost (1990). Evolution, traits, and the stages of human courtship: Qualifying the parental investment model. Journal of Personality, 58: 97-116.
Kenrick, Keefe, Gabrielidis, & Cornelius (1996). Adolescents' age preferences for dating partners: Support for an evolutionary model of life-history strategies. Child Development, 67: 1499-1511.
Kenrick & Keefe (1992). Age preferences in mates reflect sex differences in reproductive strategies. Behaivoral and Brain Sciences, 15: 75-133.
Khallad (2005). Mate selection in Jordan: Effects of sex, socio-economic status, and culture. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 22: 155-168.
Kirkpatrick & Davis (1994). Attachment style, gender, and relationship stability: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66: 502-512.
Kurdek (2005). What do we know about gay and lesbian couples? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14: 251-254.
Kurzban & Weeden (2005). HurryDate: Mate preferences in action. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26: 227-244.
Langlois & Roggman (1990). Attractive faces are only average. Psychological Science, 1: 115-121.
Langlois, Roggman, & Reiser-Danner (1990). Infants' differential social responses to attractive and unattractive faces. Developmental Psychology, 26: 153-159.
Langlois, Roggman, Casey, Ritter, Riser-Danner, & Jenkins (1987). Infant preferences for attractive faces: Rudiments of a stereotype? Developmental Psychology, 23: 363-369.
Langlois, Kalakanis, Rubenstein, Larson, Hallam, & Smoot (2000). Maxims or myths of beauty? A meta-analysis and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 126: 390-423.
Le (2009). Familiarity principle of attraction. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 1 (pp. 596-597). Sage Reference.
Ledbetter, Griffin, & Sparks (2007). Forecasting 'friends forever': A longitudinal investigation of sustained closeness between friends. Personal Relationships, 14: 343-350.
Lee, Loewenstein, Ariely, Hong, & Young (2008). If I'm not hot, are you hot or not? Physical-attractiveness evaluations and dating preferences as a function of one's own attractiveness. Psychological Science, 19: 669-577.
Lynn & Shurgot (1984). Responses to lonely hearts advertisements: Effects of reported physical attractiveness, physique, and coloration. Personal and Social Psychology Bulletin, 10: 349-357.
Marlowe (2004). Mate preferences among Hadza hunter-gatherers. Human Nature, 4: 365-376.
Martins, Tiggermann, & Kirkbride (2007). Those speedos become them: The role of self-objectification in gay and heterosexual men's body image. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33: 634-647.
Miller & Perlman (2008). Intimate Relationships, 5th edition. McGraw-Hill.
Montoya, Horton, & Kirchner (2008). Is actual similarity necessary for attraction? A meta-analysis of actual and perceived similarity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25: 889-922.
Moreland & Beach (1992). Exposure effects in the classroom: The development of affinity among students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 28: 255-276.
Moreland & Zajonc (1982). Exposure effects in person perception: Familiarity, similarity, and attraction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18: 395-415.
Morry (2007). The attraction-similarity hypothesis among cross-sex friends: Relationship satisfactions, perceived similarities, and self-serving perception. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 24: 117-138.
Morry (2009). Similarity principle in attraction. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 3 (pp. 1500-1504.
Myers (2010). Psychology, 9th edition. Worth Publishers.
Neff (2009). Physical attractiveness, role in relationships. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 3 (pp. 1242-1245). Sage Reference.
Nuttin (1987). Affective consequences of mere ownership: The name letter effect in twelve European languages. European Journal of Social Psychology, 17: 381-402.
Paul, Wenzel, & Harvey (2000). 'Hookups': Characteristics and correlates of college students' spontaneous and anonymous sexual experiences. Journal of Sex Research, 37: 76-88.
Peplau & Fingerhut (2007). The close relationships of lesbians and gay men. Annual Review of Psychology, 58: 405-424.
Peplau & Spalding (2000). The close relationships of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. In Hendrick & Hendrick (eds.), Close relationships: A Sourcebook. Sage.
Peretti & Abplanalp (2004). Chemistry in the college dating process: Structure and function. Social Behavior and Personality, 32: 147-154.
Perlman & Duck (2006). The seven seas of the study of personal relationships: From “the thousand islands” to interconnected waterways. In Vangelisti & Perlman (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships (pp. 11-34). Cambridge University Press.
Pettay, Helle, Jokela, & Lummaa (2007). Natural selection on female life-history traits in relation to socio-economic class in pre-industrial human populations. Plos ONE, July: 1-9.
Powell & Fine (2009). Dissolution of relationships, causes. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships: Vol. 1 (pp. 436-440). Sage Reference.
Reis, Nezlek, & Wheeler (1980). Physical attractiveness in social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38: 604-617.
Rhodes, Sumich, & Byatt (1999). Are average facial configurations attractive only because of their symmetry? Psychological Science, 10: 52-58.
Rhodes (2006). The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty. Annual Review of Psychology, 57: 199-226.
Rosenbaum (1986). The repulsion hypothesis: On the nondevelopment of relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51: 1156-1166.
Schaefer, Fink, Grammar, Mitteroecker, Gunz, & Bookstein (2006). Female appearance: Facial and bodily attractiveness as shape. Psychology Science, 48: 187-205.
Simpson & Harris (1994). Interpersonal attraction. In Weber & Harvey (eds.), Perspective on close relationships (pp. 45-66). Allyn & Bacon.
Singh (1993). Adaptive significance of waist-to-hip ratio and female physical attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65: 293-307.
Singh (1995). Female health, attractiveness, and desirability for relationships: Role of breast asymmetry and waist-to-hip ratio. Ethology and Sociobiology, 16: 465-481.
Singh (2000). Waist-to-hip ratio: An indicator of female mate value. International Research Center for Japanese Studies, International Symposium 16: 79-99.
Singh & Bronstad (1997). Sex differences in the anatomical locations of human body scarification and tattooing as a function of pathogen prevalence. Evolution and Human Behavior, 18: 403-416.
Singh & Young (1995). Body weight, waist-to-hip ratio, breasts, and hips: Role in judgments of female attractiveness and desirability for relationships. Ethology and Sociobiology, 16: 483-507.
Singh & Randall (2007). Beauty is in the eye of the plastic surgeon: Waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and women's attractiveness. Personality and Individual Differences, 43: 329-340.
Slater, Von der Schulenburg, Brown, Badenoch, Butterworth, Parsons, & Samuels (1998). Newborn infants prefer attractive faces. Infant Behavior and Development, 21: 345-354.
Smith & Caprariello (2009). Liking. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 2 (pp. 978-982). Sage Reference.
Smith, McIntosh, & Bazzini (1999). Are the beautiful good in Hollywood? An investigation of the beauty-and-goodness stereotype on film. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 21: 69-80.
Solomon (1987). Standard issue. Psychology Today, November: 30-31.
Sorokowski & Pawlowski (2008). Adaptive preferences for leg length in a potential partner. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29: 86-91.
Sprecher (1989). The importance to males and females of physical attractiveness, earning potential, and expressiveness in initial attraction. Sex Roles, 21: 591-607.
Sprecher (1994). Two studies on the breakup of dating and relationships. Personal Relationships, 1: 199-222.
Sprecher, Wenzel, & Harvey, eds. (2008). Handbook of Relationship Initiation. Psychology Press.
Steinberg (1993). Astonishing love stories (from an earlier United Press International report). Games, February: 47.
Sugiyama (2005). Physical attractiveness in adaptationist perspective. In Buss (ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 292-342). Wiley.
Surra, Gray, Boettcher, Cottle, & West (2006). From Courtship to Universal Properties: Research on Dating and Mate Selection, 1950 to 2003. In Vangelisti & Perlman (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships. Cambridge University Press.
Swami, Einon, & Furnham (2006). The leg-to-body ratio as a human aesthetic criterion. Body Image, 3: 317-323.
Swami & Furnham (2008).
Swap (1977). Interpersonal Attraction and Repeated Exposure to Rewarders and Punishers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3: 248–251.
Symons (1995). Beauty is in the adaptations of the beholder: The evolutionary psychology of human female sexual attractiveness. In Abramson & Pinkerton (eds.), Sexual nature, sexual culture (pp. 80-118). University of Chicago Press.
Taormino (2008). Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. Cleis Press.
Thakerar & Iwawaki (1979). Cross-cultural comparisons in interpersonal attraction of females toward males. Journal of Social Psychology, 108: 121-122.
Thornhill & Gangestad (1994). Human fluctuating asymmetry and sexual behavior. Psychological Science, 5: 292-302.
Thornhill & Gangestad (1999). The scent of symmetry: A human sex pheromone that signals fitness? Evolution and Human Behavior, 20: 175-201.
Thornhill & Moller (1997). The relative importance of size and asymmetry in sexual selection. Behavioral Ecology, 9: 546-551.
Vangelisti & Perlman (2006). The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships. Cambridge University Press.
Walster, Aronson, Abrahams, & Rottman (1966). Importance of physical attractiveness in dating behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4: 508-516.
Weiten, Dunn, & Hammer (2011). Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century, 10th edition. Wadsworth Publishing.
White & Knight (1984). Misattribution of arousal and attraction: Effects of salience of explanations for arousal. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 20: 55-64.
Wiederman (1993). Evolved gender differences in mate preferences: Evidence from personal advertisements. Ethology and Sociobiology, 14: 331-352.
Woll (1986). So many to choose from: Decision strategies in videodating. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 3: 43-52.
Zajonc (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9: 1-27.
Zajonc (1998). Emotions. In Gilbert, Fiske, & Lindzey (eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology, 4th edition. McGraw Hill.
Zajonc (2001). Mere exposure: A gateway to the subliminal. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10: 224-228.
Loading…
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Comments (1403)
"Long-term monogamy should not be done on the pretense that attraction and arousal for one's partner won't fade. It will."
This is precisely the point of monogamy. Polyamory/sleeping around is a young man's game. Long-term monogamy is meant to maintain strong social units throughout life, long after the thrill is gone.
Way too many coments to reed, but..
"We are even more likely to marry someone with a similar-sounding name.15"
Perhaps not. I googled it and found this: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/workshops/marketing/archive/sp10/Spurious20100424.pdf
I would like to propose that any post immediately become locked once its number of comments reaches 1337.
Having read every single one of the 1337 comments, I have concluded that there is nothing to be gained from any further comments that might be added, and that the above solution should be applied immediately so as not to waste anyone else's time or karma.
On December 7th, your prediction was falsified.
Wow.
The greater the value of your comment, the greater benefit there has been from allowing more than 1337 comments on posts.
But seriously, I don't think the risk of this discussion being continued in an unrelated, peaceful post is worth it.
NOT discussing the moral implications here, but I saw this study and found it relevant. One of the arguments re: PUA is that there have been no scientific studies as to whether it works or not. Apparently, that isnt true. Here is a link to an article about a study that shows that a light non-sexual touch (what the PUA folks would call "kino") ups the chances that a woman will give you her phone number.
The relevant part is #7 "Touch for a Date". Excerpt:
I can't access the full text of the actual study, but maybe some of the university students here can read and summarize.
I have purposefully stayed out of the PUA discussion so far, but as it is still going on and no one seems to have taken a macro view, I am going to just this once give some of my opinion on it:
I think that the vast majority of people on this site want a general egalitarianism between the sexes. I’m not saying that I think men and women are completely equal in all ways, but rather that I think that women making 80 cents to the dollar is bad. Males growing up being taught to be ashamed to talk about feelings (especially in cases like PTSD or suicide) is bad. All the hidden messages society teaches our children about what they can’t do because of their gender is bad.
Rationalize it however you want. Call it utilitarianism or values ethics or whatever. But I for one want to live in a society where the children I care for don’t have their choices limited (directly or indirectly) by their gender. I am willing to bet that the majority of people on this site, both male and female, agree with me. If I am wrong about that, well then I wouldn’t want to be on this site anyway. But how does that apply to PUA?
Parts of PUA may work. Parts may be moral. Parts may be immoral. I will definitely say that I think SOME of it is misogynist. I will also agree that there is stuff out there that is completely OK. But all of that is irrelevant to the point I want to make now, which is that PUA is bad for gender equality in the macro view.
Don’t focus on the ethics of ONE guy seducing ONE girl, who may or may not want to be seduced. Think about the affect of MANY guys thinking of women as “things to be seduced”, and countless young girls stumbling upon PUA on the internet or on the tv, and consequently thinking of THEMSELVES as things to be seduced.
In other words, my problem with PUA is that it precipitates a CULTURE that is not conducive to gender equality. Of course, PUA isn’t the only problem, nor is it even the main problem. For example, I think this is a WAY more important fight than PUA.
That being said, I do not think all PUA stuff is bad. I myself am, for all intents and purposes, a professional PUA, and when I looked it up on the internet (after reading so much about it here), I actually thought it was pretty amazing that they had terms for the stuff I learned through trial and error. So I definitely don’t want to bash everything that PUA can teach on an individual basis.
What then to do about men who lack the confidence and social skills to obtain relationships? Firstly, I would like to say that I think this is another way that gender inequality raises its head. Females are socialized from childhood to have high social skills. Men are not. Therefore they have trouble interacting with the generally much higher social skills of women. (Guys, think of a person you know with the lowest level of social skills. Imagine having a conversation with them. Get the picture?)
I would be totally ok, if certain aspects of PUA were taught instead as general social skills. Not “how to seduce women”, but rather “how to strike up conversations with random people and have them like you”. I would even be ok if there were UNDER THE GENERAL RULES some specific exceptions for how to interact with women, and how to interact with men. However the very one-sided way it is right now (with some small exception to girl game) is NOT helpful to humanity overall, regardless of whether it actually works or not. And regardless of whether it is moral on a case-by-case basis or not.
After reading your comment, my thoughts are somewhat confused. The first half seemed like a censorship by association: "some people feel that X is related to Y, we agree that Y is bad, therefore we should never tolerate a discussion about X".
Then, the last paragraph seemed very reasonable, which makes me wonder whether the rest of the comment was just one huge disclaimer necessary to remove the guilt of speaking about X (which as we know is associated with Y, which is bad).
Now on the topic -- Teaching about general social skills, with some gender-specific sidenotes, seems to me like a great idea. But I feel that this version somehow removes the most motivating part for some people. The "you should learn this because it can make your life awesome!!!" motivation turns into rather anemic "you should learn this because we told you so".
Is this a necessary cost? It is even allowed to discuss things that seem awesome to a typical guy but not to a typical girl, or does any such discussion automatically deepen gender inequality? Seems to me that focusing too much on inequality leads to a zero-sum worldview. Generally, creating a positive utility for some people and zero utility for other people seems like a net improvement; but if it happens to statistically deepen some inequality, should we percieve it as bad and try to avoid it? So even things that highly motivate men to learn social skills should be replaced by their less attractive alternatives, simply because men are already having it too awesome today.
Upvoted for:
I can talk to anyone, you're engaging, he's a creepy PUA?
I don't understand the question, sorry. Will you rephrase?
That phrase doesn't mean just one thing. I think that the vast majority of people on this site want a fair system of college admissions. That just means the label "fair", like "general egalitarianism" points inward at the speaker towards the speaker's values. "General" backs away from meaning anything too specific, and its use provides the opportunity for readers to insert their own idea of reasonableness.
Meta comment
There are more than a thousand comments on this thread now (is that an LW record?). This makes it very difficult for newcomers to navigate the threads and arguments. As such it might be worth summarising some of the discussions and splitting them into separate discussion threads.
Why did you not mention PUA? This sucks. No, PUA sucks. This post is almost ok because it is mostly gender neutral. No, it does suck because it is censored. Why is the word 'rational used?' Boo! Ethics! Morals! You're a bunch of one-dimensional stereotypes! Women like jerks - or not. Nice guys are grossly obese and smelly girls - or not. Utilitarianism! I deny Bayes theorem! No, Bayes is awesome, even better than science. You are a rapist. No I'm not. You forgot polygynous relationships under the polyamoury category. Ooh, ooh meta, let's discuss whether this was good or bad, with polls!
On second thoughts let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
If nothing else, I am now convinced there's nothing to be gained from trawling through the thread.
I figure this comment was mostly intended as a joke but it is honestly a useful summary (and a useful overview of some LW memes, especially ones relating to relationships).
My favorite humor tends to be flippantly sincere. :)
Do the dangling variable dance! It goes something like this:
I'm a conservative! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
Abortion is murder! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
I'm a libertarian! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
Taxation is slavery! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
I'm a liberal! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
This just saved me so much time.
Followed by: this thread is lame, everything's lame.
("Followed by followed by" coming soon?)
In any case, sing it with me: I respect women when I'm on a date/I take them to the park/or maybe a museum...
(Upvoted)
Now that this thread has gathered around a thousand comments, and with presumably two more such threads ahead of us, let's have a poll to help us figure out whether deciding to discuss such subjects as gender and politics was a good idea.
All things considered, has this comment thread made LessWrong more or less valuable to you? (ETA: This is excluding Luke's original post, and relative to what you would have expected the site to be like if the comment thread had not taken place, not relative to what it would be like if the comment thread disappeared now.)
See the child comments for the poll options. If neither applies, don't vote.
I dislike the loud and bad-feelings-producing retread of old topics that the comment thread appears (I have skimmed and sampled only) to have become, but I specifically wish that posts like this one are not prohibited/avoided in the future.
Less. A bunch of bickering about ethics with almost no actual practical content describing the world. Basically it is embarrassing to be associated with.
I agree that this whole thread, while admittedly I have been following it myself, is a net negative for LW.
It's my contention that (1) some people will be attracted to PUA tenets with a largely negative outlook regarding women, (2) some people will be attracted to PUA tenets with a largely positive outlook regarding women (3) some people will just organically figure it out without any significant use of literature and (4) people that enjoy reading/writing/debating about this will continue to do that and may or may not actually pursue relationships.
I don't think lukeprog's writing is going to substantially change anyone's inclinations or abilities in this area because relationships and dating are something one learns by doing and becoming, not talking and thinking.
Thank you for this poll!
I would like to endorse an idea that there should be a separate PUA discussion post. It's acceptable if LW-ers want to discuss PUA at length, but the main disutility I get from it, is that it seems to constantly rear its head in posts that aren't explicitly about PUA (such as this one.)
I would have loved to have been involved in a discussion on the original post topic, and do not at all think that the subjects of gender and relationships should be discouraged. I just think it would make more sense if there were a separate thread for PUA-related discussion, and any time someone tried to bring up PUA in a non-PUA post they were referred to the PUA post.
I would post it myself, but I doubt I have the karma to handle the inevitable downvoting that would ensue without going deep into the negatives.
EDITED: see below
I got to agree here. having a single discussion thread with PUA would let out some steam, and if some people feel wierded out/ threatened by it, they can just not read the thread. As it is, avoiding the topic seems very hard, since it comes up almost every time relationships, polyamory. dark arts, or rational social skills are mentioned. This makes the tabooing of PUA pretty moot.
I'm pretty okay with modding posts with PUA outside of the designated area, though, if only because it's so damn mindkilling.
Indeed PUA discussion has proven impossible to avoid without tabooing relationship/romance to the same extent as politics (which is something I advocated should be done in a different comment here).
I like this suggestion. One thread where the beliefs, practice and theory of PUA can be discussed. Actually to make any progress whatsoever, I think we need to go further, lets make that thread explicitly devoid of any ethical recommendations implied or explicit.
A thread that just discusses the theories, practices and beliefs of the PUA community. First establish what they are, then how well they map to reality.
Only after this is done open a separate thread where we discuss ethical implications and recommendations related to PUA. It has been demonstrated time and time again since at least 2008, that LW/OB blow up when this is discussed. "Is" is constantly interpreted as should and vice versa. I am convinced that quarantining and breaking up the debate in two such threads would drastically improve the signal to noise ratio on the comment sections of all romance and relationships discussions and might even eventually allow us to begin making progress on something we have systematically failed on as a community for years.
I like the idea of having a designated PUA discussion thread, and I absolutely love the idea of making that thread explicitly ethics-free. The idea seems good enough to just try it and see what happens! Do you want to write that post (in the discussion area, I guess) and lay down the rules?
You've got the karma for it. Why not you?
Thanks for the offer! Konkvistador has a prior claim to the idea, so I'll do that if he/she prefers me to do that.
I'm considering posting such a thread, but I'm thinking very very carefully if this is a good idea. It seems best to me to wait a few days, perhaps even consider a meta thread or two in preparation.
Discussion in the absence of ethics, dosen't really cover discussion that may hurt the community image or the image of posters, at least not explicitly. And while the current situation is intolerable I don't want to cause any damage with a botched fix.
See here. I'm inclining more and more toward the opinion that this topic-cluster simply doesn't belong here, any more than (other) controversial contemporary political issues do. It's too fraught with (perceived) implications for tribal struggles that people (even unconsciously) feel themselves to be party to.
In all honesty, I'm not even terribly enthused about Luke's proposed sequence being here, especially in Main. (It might well be okay in Discussion.) It sends the signal that LW is full of people who have trouble with these sorts of relationships. Maybe that's true, but it's not exactly something one would want to showcase, it seems to me.
Thanks for replying. I think you're right.
Upvoted, but... it looks like the kind of shiny clever idea nerds love and that blows up in their faces big time. "Purely factual questions discussed separately from ethics" sounds like something Paul Graham would pat you on the back for. Specific instances thereof, such as "Do people have more sex if they ignore body language expressing discomfort?" are significantly less tasteful.
The problem is that this is a public forum. In our ivory towers - inside our own heads, and with other people who like to toy with weird ideas - we can totally argue that genocide is legitimate if there's a genetic disorder spreading whose carriers only have male children with the disorder. But we don't expect it to be harmless to discuss that in front of the neonazis (or even ourselves, really). There are people I don't want looking at a factual discussion of how to get away with rape.
For onlookers wondering about the genetic disorder thing, it was discussed in Evolving to Extinction. The relevant part:
It just occurred to me that such a situation can rectify itself without the need for genocide :-) If females can detect males carrying the segregation-distorter, they will avoid mating with such males, because having female children is a reproductive advantage in a population where males outnumber females. Or am I getting confused again?
It seems easier to evolve a preference for incest.
There would also be strong selective pressure for any genes which can override the segregation-distorter, even if the females can't recognize the males which carry it.
Rather than rely on females recognizing things about males, what about genes that capitalize on the difference between regular males and those with the disorder - sisters!
Females could more greatly than presently value aggression (this would only need a boost, the trait already exists), and a gene could make females intervene to break up their brothers' fights. Young males with the disorder would tear each other to shreds or be too timid to reproduce, and males without the disorder would have sisters preventing them from killing each other.
A modest proposal:
If mothers made a habit of snacking on (each other's) litters of all sons, that would counteract the problem. That wouldn't require being able to differentiate among adult males, just between male and female children.
If the species takes a long time to wean children and doesn't reproduce until that process ends, this works better.
Mice, pigs, rabbits etc. (animals with large litters) already eat weak children fairly often, so this is somewhat plausible.
I love lesswrong!
"Strong" for sure. Unfortunately for the species it would have to emerge fully functional in the time it takes for the species to evolve to extinction. Not so easy.
My cursor was literally hovering over the upvote button from the first paragraph on... and then I got to the last sentence, which completely reversed my view of it. Then I went back and parsed it more carefully, and now it looks to me like there's some pretty sketchy rhetoric in there.
Specifically: there's mindkilling ideas and then there's ideas which represent a physical propagation risk, and while PUA is undoubtedly the former, framing it with rape and genocide implies the latter. Now, I suppose it might look like that to some of its more extreme opponents, those who see it as not just squicky or disrespectful but actively dangerous. But that's not the consensus, and there are substantial differences in the way we should be approaching it if it was.
On the other hand, if you'd cast your objection in terms of signaling or associational problems, I'd be right there with you. I'm pretty much neutral on PUA as such, but it's an incredibly polarizing topic, and this isn't a big enough site that we can discuss stuff that volatile in public and expect it not to reflect substantially on the site as a whole.
Almost certainly not! That's valuable information needed to calibrate optimal seduction technique, even for a PUA of perfect soullessness.
Certainly something to keep in mind if Luke goes and posts a "Part 2" on the subject. He (or someone else) should also post a corresponding "trolling about morals" thread so as to minimize the damage.
I'd almost as soon we just banned the ethical discussion entirely; as that's the part that's actually mindkilling. People with "PUA=bad" or "PUA=good" labels basically trash the place over that argument, and neither are particularly interested in listening to the "PUA=lots of different stuff with varying levels of good, bad, and effective-ness" folks.
All in all, we might get rid of some of the need for the "PUA=evil misogynist manipulation" rants by banning the "PUA=good, righteous savior of downtrodden oppressed men" ones (and vice versa). There are plenty enough people here who've shown themselves capable of avoiding either trap; we just need someone who can be trusted to swing the banhammer hard on comments that are more about signaling who they're for and against, than they are about informing or problem-solving.
Actually, I suppose it's not really a problem of ethics discussion per se, just that ethics is a useful wedge topic for partisans on either side to get their foot in the door.
Hm. Maybe we'd be better off just not answering partisan posts. I suspect that (counter to my intention), trying to moderate partisans on either side just prolongs the amount of ranting the forum is subjected to. If I'd just downvoted people (instead of trying to educate them), it might've been better for all concerned.
I'm indifferent to the primary point, but curious about a tangent -- do you believe that LW is capable of creating that first thread? Or only that, if it did so, that would help?
I belive most LWers are capable of this. However those who aren't make this in my opinion very difficult for the community to pull off. And then there are the signalling concerns, one big reason behind the politics taboo was for LW to not look bad. This is why I previously proposed tabooing the subject (romance ect.) in the same way we did for that other problematic topic. I also found someone's proposal to set up a rather elitist and private mailing list for certain delicate and difficult discussion appealing.
If LW did that we might actually make some progress on the issue for a change in that we would at least unambiguously establish what people's maps of reality are (allowing everyone involved to update accordingly) and engage in a, you know, dialogue instead of speaking past each other and slipping into factionalism.
A post entitled "[censored] Romantic Relationships" is non-PUA? That's assuming conclusions to all kinds of open questions.
At the least all non-PUA relationship posts would require giant Happy Death Spiral warnings atop them.
Good point. I should have phrased better. I will edit my post to say "posts that aren't explicitly about PUA.
It's been awhile since I read the OP, and honestly I forgot about all the social interaction stuff that was posted. Being poly, I focused on the first part, and was sorta hoping there would be a discussion about different relationship styles. :)
Vote this comment up if this comment thread has made LessWrong less valuable to you.
Meh. It's not like anyone forced me to read the whole thread (which I haven't done).
Apologies for cluttering up the poll area, but it seems like relevant information that I haven't read much of the comment thread at all because I don't think it'll be valuable to me. If I had to break it down, I'd say that I don't expect it to be particularly useful or interesting to me.
More valuable because it's the weekend and I will read most but not all of it, but bad for signal/noise ratio overall.
Vote this comment up if this comment thread has made LessWrong more valuable to you.
If you're going to conduct such a poll, I'd recommend asking a similar question about some other thread on some other topic (or possibly several) to act as a control group. (I would also recommend these be staggered in time in the hopes of simulating independent measurement, and the results reported as ratios to the number of posts in the thread.)
We've hit over 800 comments. Is it time for a new thread?
Maybe even one with a new topic? ;)
Lukeprog, you have produced exactly that which we have been warned against: an article and a paradigm which has all the appearances and dressings of rationality (lots of citations, links to articles on decision theory, rationalist lingo), but which spectacularly fails to actually pursue the truth.
Vladimir_M puts it better than I could:
he continues:
And finally:
Yvain is also on point:
In three worlds collide, we were introduced to the "Order of Silent Confessors", which is "charged with guarding sanity, not morality". In this post especially, I feel that sanity is lying beaten and abused on the floor. I think we need the "Order of Silent Confessors" now.
As a start, Lukeprog, I think you should include the exerpts by vladimir_M and Yvain above in your article.
I should disclose immediately that I am one of the people who find the PUA community distasteful on a variety of levels, intellectual and ethical, and this may colour my viewpoint.
The PUA community may present themselves, and think of themselves, as a "disreputable source of accurate information" but in the absence of controlled trials I don't think the claim to accuracy is well-founded. Sticking strictly to the scientific literature is not so much ignoring the elephant in the room as suspending judgment as to whether the elephant exists until we can turn the lights on.
If it's been said already I apologise, but it seems obvious to me that an ethical rationalist's goals in relationship-seeking should be to seek a relationship that creates maximal utility for both parties, and that scientific evidence about how to find suitable partners and behave in the relationship so as to maximise utility for both partners is a great potential source of human happiness. It's obvious from even the briefest perusal of PUA texts that the PUA community are concerned very much with maximising their own utility and talking down the status of male outgroup members and women in general, but not with honestly seeking means to maximise the utility of all stakeholders.
Given that their methodology is incompatible with scientific reasoning and their attitudes incompatible with maximising global utility for all sentient stakeholders, I think it's quite correct to leave their claims out of a LW analysis of human sexual relationships.
They write stuff on their version of ArXiv (called pick-up forums) then they go out and try it, and if it works repeatably it is incorporated into PU-lore.
What definition of science did you have in mind that this doesn't fit?
There are a significant number of methodological problems with their evidence-gathering.
PUAs don't change just one variable at a time, nor do they keep strict track of what they change and when so they can do a multivariate regression analysis. Instead they change lots of variables at once. A PUA would advocate that a "beta" change their clothes, scent, social environment(s), social signalling strategies and so forth all at once and see if their sexual success rate changed. However if this works you don't know which changes did what.
The people doing the observation are the same people conducting the experiment which is obviously incompatible with proper blinding.
The people reporting the data stand to gain social status in the PUA hierarchy if they report success, and hence have an incentive to misreport their actual data. When a PUA reports that they successfully obtained coitus on one out of six attempts using a given methodology it is reasonable to suspect that some such reports come from people who actually took sixteen attempts, or from people who failed to obtain coitus given sixteen attempts and went home to angrily masturbate and then post on a PUA forum that they had obtained success. We can't tell what the real success rate is without observing PUAs in the wild.
Even assuming honest reporting it seems intuitively likely that PUAs, like believers in psychic powers, are prone to reporting their hits and forgetting their misses. It's a known human trait to massage our internal data this way and barring rigorous methodological safeguards it's a safe assumption that this will bias any reported results.
There's no comparison with a relevant base rate, which is a classic example of the base rate fallacy in action. We don't know what the success rate for a well-groomed, well-spoken person who does not employ PUA social signalling tactics is compared with a similarly groomed and comported person using PUA social signalling tactics, for example.
A successful PUA was mentioned as having obtained coitus ~300 times out of ~10 000 approaches. That's useless unless we know what success rate other methodologies would have produced. In any case people aren't naturally such good statisticians that they can detect variations in frequency in a phenomenon that occurs one time in 33 at best with a sample size for a given experiment in the tens at most.
PUA mythology seems to me to have built-in safeguards against falsifiability. If a woman rejects a PUA then it can be explained away as her being "entitled" or "conflicted" or something similar. If a woman chooses a "beta" over a PUA then it can be explained away in similar terms or by saying that she has low self-esteem and doesn't think she is worthy of an "alpha", and/or postulating that if an "alpha" came along she would of course engage in an extra-marital affair with the "alpha". As long as the PUAs are obtaining sex some of the time, or are claiming they are doing so, their theories aren't falsifiable.
We shouldn't trust a PUA's reported opinion about their ability to obtain sex more often than chance any more than we should trust a claimed psychic's reported opinion about their ability to predict the future more often than chance. Obviously our prior probability that they are reporting true facts about the universe should be higher for the PUA since their claims do not break the laws of physics, but their testimony should not give us strong reason to shift our prior.
You're assuming that there's no feedback other than a single yes/no bit per approach.
Not something you have shown (or something that appears remotely credible).
Not much better and also not a particularly good reason to exclude an information source from an analysis. (An example of a good reason would be "people say a bunch of prejudicial nonsense for all sorts of reasons and everybody concerned ends up finding it really, really annoying").
It is not clear to me that utilities can be easily compared. What tradeoff between my satisfaction and my partner's satisfaction should I be willing to accept? I can see how to elicit my preferences (for things like partner happiness, relationship duration, and so on) and try to predict how the consequences of my actions will impact my preferences, but I don't quite see how to add utilities, or compare the amount of satisfaction I could provide to multiple potential partners.
It's not clear that they want to talk down the status of women in general. Men becoming more attractive and less annoying to women seems to be better for women, and there's quite a bit in the PUA literature of how to keep a long-term relationship going, if that's what you want to do.
You are absolutely right that utilities cannot be easily compared and that this is a fundamental problem for utilitarian ethics.
We can approximate a comparison in some cases using proxies like money, or in some cases by assuming that if we average enough people's considered preferences we can approach a real average preference. However these do not solve the fundamental problem that there is no way of measuring human happiness such that we could say with confidence "Action A will produce a net 10 units of happiness, and Action B will produce a net 11 units of happiness".
In the case of human sexual relationships what you'd really have to do is conduct a longitudinal study looking at variables like reported happiness, incidence of mental illness, incidence of suicide, partner-assisted orgasms per unit time, longevity and so on.
That said this difficulty in totalling up net utilities is not a moral blank cheque. If women report distress after a one night stand with a PUA followed by cessation of contact then that has to be taken as evidence of caused disutility, and you can't remove the moral burden that entails by pointing out that calculating net utility is difficult or postulating that their distress is their fault because they are "entitled"/"in denial"/etc.
While this would give people more knowledge about how their actions turn into consequences, this doesn't help people decide which consequences they prefer, and so only weakly helps them decide which actions they prefer.
So, let's drop the term utility, here, and see if that clarifies the moral burden. Suppose Bob and Alice go to a bar and meet; they both apply seduction techniques; they have sex that night. Alice's interest in Bob increases; Bob's interest in Alice decreases. What moral burdens are on each of them, and where did those moral burdens come from?
Thank you for the positive mention, but I'm afraid I disagree with your model of me. Luke is a far braver man than I to even enter this minefield; I won't condemn him for not dancing a merry jig on top of it too.
Luke originally tried to write an article referring to PUA. People told him this was controversial, not just among ignorant people but among long-time readers of this site, that it had always led to unpleasant flame wars in the past, and that it was making us look bad "abroad".
Now he seems to be writing more or less the same thing, but communicating it in a less offensive way. I don't fault him for leaving anything out yet because it's only been one post in a series. I don't think anything he wrote is actually false (well, I have issues with the 'Mean and Variance' section, but he retracted the meat of that). And I think he made the right decision in trying to pitch it to a wider audience.
He's not entering a minefield so much as dragging it back to his village.
I just deleted the two paragraphs about OkTrends. Also, see here.
I really liked this post because 1: I like picking up women for the obvious reasons, and 2: I love people who are into LW style rationality and I think the best way for it to spread is to demonstrate its applicability to a diverse range of standard human endeavors.
But I have to say that the method of marketing to a specialized group can be taken way too far. And it isn't too hard to do this. I for instance, have long unkempt dreads down to my ass. I get compliments on this at least three times a day (no exaggeration). But all in all, I think I would likely be more successful in picking up women if I had short well kept hair. If your style is so eccentric that only 1/100000 women will find it attractive (though they'll find it insanely attractive), and you live an area where you meet 1 or 2 new women a day, you might need to de-eccentiric-ize a bit to be effective.
In my experience dressing differently, not necessarily trying to abide to specific subculture dress code often attract a lot, maybe not (always) because you appeal to some special preference but rather you highlight yourself, thus increasing the total number responses (good and bad).
What will it be today? Tuxedo, Quarterback or Clown outfit . . . Hmm tough choice.
It's the other way around.
This comment might not be popular on a quick knee-jerk level, but it's worth getting out there for accuracy.
Under "Many partners" you've got Singlehood, Friendship 'with benefits', Polyamory.
You're missing one of the most common historical kinds of relationships - monogamous commitment from woman to man, man taking care of multiple households in a committed way.
The first Tokugawa Shogun, for instance -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Ieyasu#Ieyasu_as_a_person
16 children with 11 wives and concubines.
King Ts'ao Ts'ao of Wei -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_Cao#Family
Muhammad -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad#Wives_and_children
It's not a Western tradition. The West has a strong romantic/platonic love ideal, that moves into monogamy under Christianity, and some non-monogamy later built on some mix of liberalism, enlightenment values, and humanism.
But still, it's been a very common family/dating/relationship through history. It still persists, though it doesn't get much media coverage.
Current Sheik of Dubai -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_bin_Rashid_Al_Maktoum#Personal_life_and_education
Current Prime Minister of Italy -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Berlusconi#Sexual_scandals
Honest question: has this ever been common? All the cases you list are "king" of their time and place.
I thought you were going to point out that adultery was the classical way of having multiple partners...
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/?single_page=true
Well, there is woman shortage in China, so...
I am told this relationship style (polygynous with multiple households) is common in Latin America, and I do know several males there who have engaged in it. These males are middle-class - doctors and the like. Polygyny also occurs in other Western cultures, although more covertly, in the form of the prestigious man and his "bit on the side" (who is usually non-reproductive, monogamous and hoping to oust the current alpha female - in the absence of contraception this would probably end up with multiple households). So I'm inclined to think it happens whenever there are massive power inequalities both between males (such that a woman is better off with a fraction of the resources of a wealthy man than with all the resources of a poor man) - and between males and females (such that wealthy men are better off "collecting" multiple poor women than marrying one wealthy one).
It's probably hard to answer that accurately. I've read arguments about how commonplace polygamy and harems were and they usually go like this:
a) Old sources rarely take interest in the lives of common men, but we know that society tolerated multiple wifes and households in extraordinary people.
b) Household requires wealth. More households require more wealth.
c) Common men could support one household at most, if any.
d) Monogamy was de-facto standard (for economic reasons).
Hope this helps.
I've heard that absolute rulers liked to keep everyone else down, to cement their own position. This often involved limiting the number of wives other men could have, and limiting how closely they could marry (oftentimes the emperor would ban cousin marriage for everyone else, but then marry his own cousins and sisters, to prevent having to lose anything by way of dowry).
I don't think "taking care" is always the best description, especially in the case of Berlusconi, for example.
Great post, though it seems the exact same advice is useful for career success too. You want to find an employer who is very invested in your particular skills/personality/values/culture. A high variance approach is more useful for this than trying to display mean characteristics. I think this is why a lot of people end up unhappy with their jobs. They settle for average employment criteria.
Lastly, I dislike all this mention of things like fashion and common/social behavior. Those are specific things that function as detractors for me. I want to wear what I like to wear, behave how I like to behave, and have someone be attracted to me for that stuff by default. If I happen to be at an extreme end of some distribution in either of those categories, oh well. Better to be satisfied with infrequent relationships than force myself to live in a category that I don't like. Fashion as wealth/value signaling is to me like a sink full of water is to a cat.
So basically this series will try to do this but systematically avoid any PUA references and trying to find ways to find some relevance to a few extra groups of people (besides heterosexual males) in order to avoid mind killing?
Your comment sounds like a complaint. Is it?
Partially yes. Some PUA concepts are really neatly formulated, a fraction of LWers are familiar with them and at the end of the day the original synthesis was done by the PUA community, having a bottom line partially written by X, then searching for academic papers to help write up stuff to fill the void once X is cut out is an easy way to stumble rationality-wise once or twice along the way, and thus is bad practice, but mostly I was just curious.
Generally I think avoiding mindkillers is a good thing for the community in my mind, and the comment section of this discussion is better than I expected, so perhaps the comment is coming of harsher than intended.
It was mean more in a "oh I see what you did there, am I right?" way.
I think your comment was quite appropriate. Even under the best imaginable scenario, these articles and their follow-up discussions will suffer from at least two problems.
First, there is the conspicuous omission of any references to the PUA elephant in the room. The body of insight developed by this particular sort of people, whatever its faults, is of supreme practical importance for anyone who wants to formulate practical advice in this area. Without referencing it explicitly, one can either ignore it altogether and thus inevitably talk nonsense, or pretend to speak based solely on official academic literature, which is disingenuous and unfair in its failure to attribute credit (and also misleading for those who would like to pursue their own research in the matter). It's as if someone wanted to talk about electronics but insisted that the only legitimate references should be from pure academic quantum theory, and the nuts-and-bolts work of tech entrepreneurs and industry engineers is forbidden and unmentionable.
Second, really good practical advice in this area simply cannot be inoffensive. To take a clear and obvious example, one absolutely essential sort of knowledge is what kinds of people are likely to lead to various sorts of trouble if you entangle yourself with them. In principle, this is an exercise in assigning conditional probabilities that should be greatly attractive to the LW folks fond of Bayesianism. Yet since in our culture the discussion (let alone practical use) of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people is considered immoral, discussing these things while remaining within the contemporary inoffensive bounds is as if one wanted to discuss sexual techniques while respecting the prudery norms of 17th century puritanism. (Also, on a more mundane level, LW is still far from the standards of rationality that would make people who recognize themselves in some of these conditional probabilities refrain from destroying the discourse by crying offense, and various others not to try boosting their staus by joining them in solidarity, or even complaining preemptively on their behalf.) There are of course many other important aspects of the topic where one faces similar problems.
On the whole, the article is based on the premise that an accurate and no-nonsense analysis of the topic will result in something that sounds not just inoffensive, but actually strongly in line with various fashionable and high-status norms and ideals of the broader society. This premise however is flawed, and those who believe that this has in fact been accomplished should apply the powerful debiasing heuristic that says that when a seemingly rational discussion of some deeply problematic and controversial topic sounds pleasant and reassuring, there's probably something fishy going on. There is simply no way to approach this topic without ending up with something that's either offensive to the mainstream sensibilities and apt to upset certain sorts of people, or disingenuous and inaccurate to a significant degree.
And this was the reason why, I didn't expect a direct response to the original question, from any of the authors. But as well as your opinions stated here resonate with my own, I feel I do need to play the devil's (who is a thoroughly socialized chap) advocate:
People still realized when sex was talked about. And some information was distributed in this way.
While obviously this is not necessarily a stable situation, besides the euphemism treadmill people do eventually shorten the useful inference gaps. Indeed I would argue that cycles form around these sorts of things, perhaps 19th century Victorian society with its anomalous attitude to discussing sexuality is an example of such a spiral and I think in the 20th century there are also to be found potential examples of such spirals in some places.
Generally some information is better than no information and I would say that for all intents and purposes mainstream advice on dating and relations between the sexes is more or less no information. Now I would say that what would be welcomed is a clear acknowledgement of what occurred and what the situation is. While it would be scandalous for a Victorian gentleman or lady to write up a article offering advice on sexuality, and commenting that the original was modified to preserve decency, it would not be scandalous to note that certain things can not be discussed due to decency.
I maintain that to write up such a series of articles and have a discussion such as it is here, would be a net gain and even would not mislead greatly as long as it was clearly and transparently acknowledged that certain things can not be said due to "decency". Obviously anyone interested in additional this could simply check the archives, or discreetly PM the author of the article for "indecent" advice.
We even have a passable candidate that could serve as the euphemism for the word or rather phrase that is the modern equivalent of the indecent: mindkilling.
But to not clearly acknowledge the situation will lead only to a false consensus emerging, and arguably to a certain extent it already has! That this be addressed is especially important because of the constant stream of new arrivals, who often have no experience whatsoever in thinking critically of such matters. I would argue that if that is the only kind of debate possible we should rather taboo the subject as a whole for a period of twelve months or more, not speaking of it rather than risking increasing irrationality on LessWrong. Before people flinch away from such a situation, this obviously goes for all the "sides" involved, please consider that we basically have exactly this kind of situation when it comes to politics!
Not only is sex and its associated status games as important to our monkey brains as politics, arguably in modern Western society sex is politics.
Actually, I'd say there's a whole lot of strongly misleading information, and the situation is much worse than in most other areas of life. For example, in the conventional wisdom about job hunting there is certainly a lot of trite and suboptimal information, and truly great advice is always a matter of insider information to which few people are privy -- but there is nothing like, say, the respectable opinion telling you that it's best to show up for the job interview drunk and puke on the interviewer's desk. Whereas in dating and inter-sex relations in general, a lot of the respectable opinion, if taken at face value, advises equivalently bad acts of self-sabotage.
Now, a body of advice whose quality is a mixed bag may be on the net either good or bad. If you're given ten tips about driving, nine of which will make you a somewhat better driver but one of which will vastly increase your probability of getting killed in an accident, we'd probably agree that the "some information is better than no information" conclusion doesn't apply. However, if the tenth one merely increases your parking fines slightly, it may well be the case.
So, what about the quality of advice that will be produced by a LW discussion on these topics operating under such constraints of respectability, where disreputable sources of accurate information are tabooed, a pretense must be maintained that the discourse is grounded in officially accredited scholarship and other high-status sources of information, and -- most important of all -- the entire discourse and its bottom line must produce a narrative that is in line with the respectable, high-status views of humanity and society? I am not at all optimistic, especially having seen what has been produced so far!
Yes, I think this is an important issue even aside from the question of the quality of the generated advice. The whole tone of these supposedly successful LW discussions about dating, relationships, and related topics assumes that the relevant high-status ideological views and official scholarship are a product of genuine free-thinking and rationality, so that a truly rational debate about these matters simply cannot lead to anything that respectable and accredited people would frown on. (And, by extension, that people who purportedly try to break the happy death spirals and draw the discourse closer to reality must be dishonest and delusional, and are thus obnoxiously stirring up bad blood without good reason.) This represents delusional wishful thinking of a sort that would be seen as unacceptable on LW if practiced about many other topics.
In the past people have obviously retrospectively looked for academic sources to support PUA ideas. It's instrumentally fine, just a bad habit. Also, it is easy to hint at what is unsaid by saying it would be offensive, and hinting at exactly how offensive it would or wouldn't be. Imagine a map of the world where every feature north of 35 degrees latitude was only described (Canada? Way north, I can't put that on the map, it's not even close! Korea? Look, that's just not the sort of thing that can be boldly painted on the map. I'll sketch a rough outline in pencil, OK?) Such a map would not be misleading.
The reason that convention is difficult to use here is that the taking of offense all goes one way. If one says "Because it is mind-killing, I will not speak of the temporal order, quantity, and relative amount of coercion involved in all property dispossessions in the Middle East since 1800," one does not thereby share much about one's opinion.
If one says "Because it is mind killing, I will not discuss the relationship between sexual attractiveness and time for men and women," it may be that one believes that they are the same, or that there isn't a steep fall for anyone, or whatever, and merely doesn't want to provoke people into speaking of a counterargument. But usually not.
Only one side takes offense regarding this issue, so to say that one's opinions are offensive, and especially the degree to which they are, is to reveal them. People are neither motivated to, nor good at, using the same language for "I will not share my opinion because people will take offense," and "I will not share my opinion because the way some people discuss the topic is offensive." In both cases, people take the opportunity to signal and communicate rather than maintain an ambiguous neutral convention to end conversations.
"Mindkilling" refers to the idea that it is particularly hard (although not impossible) for humans to discuss politically or ideologically controversial subjects without succumbing to bias. The implicit prohibition on "mindkilling" political discussion seems to have worked well here in creating a very civilised discussion forum.
On the other hand, you would redefine mindkilling as dissent from the ideological mainstream. This is unwise, because this merely priviliges a certain view of things at the expense of truth-seeking - it enshrines bias, since the ideological mainstream (American?) view of all things cannot be considered true or rational by definition.
To merely acknowledge that "indecency" (dissent) is forbidden, so caveat lector does little to counteract the inherent bias of the arrangement, since people are still going to read articles on a rationality forum expecting them to be essentially accurate, which they will not be to the extent that the dissenting view of things is the only fully accurate view. In other words this acknowledgement is hardly going to cancel out the persuasive force of a biased article unless the caveat is written in massive bold letters at the top of every such article "This Is Not True", which is clearly unsatisfactory.
In other words the choices are:
1) Allow no discussion of ideologically controversial matters (to minimise mindkilling, but limit the scope of the forum)
2) Your solution, i.e. permit only the mainstream view (also minimising the possibility of mindkilling arguments, but legitimising bias)
3) Anything goes (possibly degrading the civility and in the long term the rationality of the forum)
Since the prohibitions are in fact only implicit, luckily there is no need to actually make a choice and some kind of uneasy equilibrium between 2 and 3 can exist (in which dissent is allowed, but is only encouraged in small and perhaps euphemistic doses). But I think this clarifies the point Vladimir_M is making.
I, for one, find obscurantist posts hinting that there are unspoken-because-unpalatable-to-the-mainstream truths to be far more irritating than posts explicitly saying things that I personally find distasteful. The former leaves the dissident view just amorphous enough to be impossible to subject to scrutiny. Given that, even in cases where the mainstream view is wrong, the implied dissident view may also be wrong in some important regard, the obscurantism is highly suboptimal.
I haven't been downvoting for this phenomenon so far, but I'm going to start doing so if it keeps happening.
To whoever is upvoting this, it seems like you must be taking one of the following positions:
Could you guys clarify?
Isn't is possible that Prismattic's comment could be receiving so many upvotes because other people also find comments of the sort described irritating and are embracing the opportunity to signal that irritation? Like Prismattic, I don't generally downvote comments on this basis alone. But I'm definitely tired of seeing the types of comments described, especially in those instances when, at least to my eyes, the commenters seem to be affecting a certain world-weary sorrow and wisdom while hinting at the profound truths that could be freely discussed but for -alas!- the terrible tyranny of modern social norms. But because the commenters are hiding the exact substance of their own views, there's no basis on which to judge whether these views are, as Prismattic suggests, actually more correct than the mainstream view, or perhaps equally or even more wrong in some different direction.
If what's suggested is "You guys would punish me for stating my arguments, therefore I win the debate", I agree that's unreasonable. If what's suggested is "You guys would punish me for stating my arguments, therefore no real debate has taken place", I think that's far more reasonable.
Trying to put words to my own intuitions on the matter, I would stipulate a modified 3:
It may be unsafe (in terms of image/status/etc - I would certainly expect and hope not physically) to express certain views, particularly those sufficiently far from both societal mainstream and LW mainstream, and particularly those that touch too heavily on mind-killing topics.
It is reasonably within norms to acknowledge this, particularly with an eye to reducing its effect.
What is decidedly a violation of norms, I think, is to do so in a self-serving manner.
"Norms forbid honest discussion of my pet issue X, therefor X" is obviously flawed.
"Norms forbid discussion of my pet issue X, and I have strong evidence for X but can't share it because of those norms, so just trust me that X" amounts to the same thing, in terms of what kinds of discussions are possible. It is also, to some degree, inconsistent - it is unlikely that we forbid evidence for a proposition while allowing discussion otherwise implying/assuming it.
I upvoted Prismatic, and I'm taking this position: 4. It may or may not be safe to post certain views on Less Wrong, but whatever they are, I precommit that I will not be part of a blowup over them. If your views are justified, I will update on them, and if they are not, I will calmly state my objections, but I will not punish you for dissent. If other people punish you unfairly for dissent, I will punish them. I would rather you post your dissenting views than hide them, and I will support you for doing so.
If enough of Less Wrong takes this position, eventually position 1. will be correct. I hope to bring about this state of affairs.
I always appreciate when someone else comes along and explains my position better than I did, so thanks.
I am also interested in a clarification.
Why not publish the "unsafe" arguments under a pseudonym (or an alternate pseudonym if your main identity is already a pseudonym)?
To do so consistently and stay safe, you'd need to take the unusual or otherwise identifiable parts of your set of concepts, favorite examples, verbal quirks, patterns of reasoning, and so on, and split everything into two: one part for use under your true identity, and one part for pseudonymous use. Even then, each of your novel ideas could taint each of your other novel ideas. There would also still be the harm to LessWrong's reputation as a whole. And what would it accomplish? It's notoriously hard to get people to change their minds on these topics, even here, and if you do there's no clear causal path from that to better long-term future outcomes. I'd rather just collectively give up.
I second this question.
Yes, why should the heretic have the right to remain silent! If he speaks truth the good doctors of the holy mother church will surely update their theological arguments accordingly and if not, well why is he risking his immortal soul by relying only on his feeble and fallible mind?
So you prefer the situation in which a dubious mainstream view remains entirely unchallenged to a situation where a doubter, instead of remaining silent, states that it is likely wrong but that spelling out an explicit argument why it is so would violate social norms? As far as I see, the information made available in the second case is a proper superset of the information available in the former. So how can this constitute "obscurantism" in any reasonable sense of the term?
Your question rests on an assumption that obscurantism must decrease information, but I see that assumption as incorrect. In fact, under this assumption I should never regard anything said to me as obscurantist, as it should never decrease the amount of information available to me.
Wikipedia defines "obscurantism" as "the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known", and it seems to fit the bill. Of course, it may be useful or beneficial species of obscurantism, though I agree with Prismatic that it is not.
The situation as you describe it seems pre-biased by postulating that the mainstream view is dubious. This may be obvious to you, but to me, the person who's faced with the "hints" as described, it is not - if it were, I shouldn't need the hints to begin with. I think it's incorrect to condition on the dubiousness of the mainstream view. If I am to decide on how to best to take into account hints of that nature, the possibility that the mainstream view is correct after all, and the hint entirely specious, should not be disregarded. In fact, in real-life situations where such hints are offered, this may be the more frequent scenario.
The hint that says "this view is incorrect, but I will not explain why, for doing that will violate a social norm" is annoying and distracting; it engages my attention, bringing no real evidence for its claims. Because it posits a mystery, I'm likely to err on the side of giving it more attention than it deserves. The benefit is that it may cause me to investigate the view more thoroughly than I would otherwise have, and realize it is incorrect. If I precommit to ignoring such signals, I will miss some chances of that, and I will also avoid giving my attention, and more closely investigating, all those views that are correct after all, and where the signal was specious. The bargain may well be worth it.
What makes obscurantism a relevant category is that certain ways of withholding information and intentional abstruseness can be very effective for misleading people and producing convictions without evidence. In LW parlance, it is a particular kind of Dark Arts. Now, of course, it makes no sense to debate definitions when there is a true disagreement about them, but I think it shouldn't be controversial to insist that the normal meaning of "obscurantism" involves this Dark Arts element. In other words, it involves withholding information with the intent to mislead and produce mistaken or unsubstantiated beliefs, and it cannot be applied to every act of withholding information intentionally.
I do think the Wikipedia definition you quoted is unreasonably overbroad, considering the standard usage of the word. It would cover all sorts of completely honest, reasonable, and non-misleading acts of communication where one chooses to limit the amount of information given -- for example, saying that you got a new job but not disclosing the salary, or writing blog comments under a pseudonym.
It is not true that it brings no significant evidence, if the source of the hint is someone about whom you have other information -- and information about the intellectual abilities, knowledge, and likely biases of frequent commenters is easy to get in a forum like this one (if you don't in fact have it already). And you can always simply ignore such hits if you believe you have insufficient information, or you don't feel like looking for it, the way you presumably ignore any other comments that are not of interest to you.
Also, I note that your complaint here doesn't state that these hits are misleading and apt to trigger biases leading to incorrect beliefs, so you must indeed be working with the broadest possible (and I would say overbroad) definition of "obscurantism."
It may indeed -- but why precommit unconditionally, without considering the source of these signals?
I'd prefer social norms be violated. Asserting that a proposition is wrong without explaining why one has reached that conclusion or presenting an alternative is not a behavior that is generally viewed as beneficial in any other context on Lesswrong.
ETA: I also see the widespread use on Lesswrong of "politically correct" as an attribution that prima facie proves something is wrong to be problematic. Society functions on polite fictions, but that does not mean that everything that is polite is inherently false.
I do not. If things are thought false, its critics say so. Otherwise, its critics suppress it socially. If some idea is socially suppressed, I infer its critics fear it is true. There is a famous essay on this I couldn't find, but here is a discussion on it.
Do you upvote people that do?
I have mostly grown tired of making comments where I mention a contrarian position. I get asked to explain myself; it sometimes leads to an argument, and I put a lot of work into comments that often end up at negative karma. I suspect those threads add to LW, but the feedback I'm getting is that they don't.
This does not answer my question. You claim that a situation in which information X and Y is made available constitutes "obscurantism" relative to the situation where only information X is provided. Now you say that you would prefer that not just X and Y, but also information Z be provided. That's fair enough, but it doesn't explain why (X and Y) is worse than just (X), if (X and Y and Z) is better than just (X and Y). What is this definition of "obscurantism," according to which the level of obscurantism can rise with the amount of information about one's beliefs that one makes available?
It sounds, then, as though you should be talking to the people punishing norm violations, not to the people responding rationally to such punishment.
What is obscurantist exactly? What I said is perfectly clear, if you look at the context of the two preceding posts.
No particular claim about male-female relations was intended (although if you want to know I endorse Roissy's view of male-female relations, if not his value-set); I was objecting to the idea that "mindkilling" should be redefined as "saying things likely to offend mainstream sensibilities". Mindkilling refers to the effect of political content on human reasoning powers in general, and the suggested redefinition struck me as Orwellian.
It is not your post that I think is obscurantist. I was commenting on the undesirability of posts that presuppose option 2 has been selected and proceed to imply that the mainstream view is false without actually making explict what alternative is being proposed.
I think the alpha-beta classification is excessively reductive. I would say that I am fairly physically intimidating to a majority of other males, but this doesn't translate into automatic adoration by nearby females.
An acknowledgement that something can't be said because of decency implies that practical and true things could be said in the absence of decency.
This is indeed a real concern. But I would say that a sentence like :
Would have a positive effect on Lesswrong.
The point I was making is that "mindkillers", under its original definition, refers to political content in general. If someone writes about male-female relations and excludes "politically offensive" material, this does not mean that their article has no political content. It just means that it is the mainstream political line!
In the Soviet Union, Mendelism might have been considered indecent. On the Soviet rationalist forum, Lysenkoist articles might have a caveat attached that political indecency is omitted. Nonetheless it is hardly fair to say that the Mendelism is a mindkiller and Lysenkoism is not in this context - the label "mindkilling" properly applies to the subject of heredity in general, given that it is politically controversial in this scenario.
Likewise if there is political sensitivity involved in the subject of male-female relations, then the subject in general is a mindkiller. The mainstream line is no less "mindkilling" than the dissenting position - it just happens to enjoy hegemony.
The distinction is that mindkilling argument can be avoided if dissent from the mainstream line is taboo; but this does not imply that dissent is mindkilling and mainstream views are not - mindkilling is a property of ideologically controversial subjects in general.
You may wonder why I am arguing about definitions: there is a taboo against mindkilling arguments, and a rational recommendation that politics is the mindkiller and therefore something to be regarded warily. If mindkilling is subtly redefined to mean dissent, people might grow to believe that it is dissent that is the mindkiller, not subjects of political controversy in general, and they should therefore steer clear of it. That is Orwellian (although I don't mean to suggest that your intentions are bad).
Ah I finally clearly see your objection now. I misused the term "mindkiller" in a way that suggested that the "indecent" explanation was the mindkilling one rather than the field or subject itself.
Indeed something like this could happen if people where not careful with the usage.
Yes you are right, a different formulation needs to be found otherwise my arguments for why such a situation might be better than pure taboo is mostly invalid in the long run.
I wanted something like: "This is as far as I will go in this contribution on the subject on LessWrong for the sake of the community, but it is by no means the full rationalist approach, if anyone wants to discuss this in private or research it on their own and I would in fact encourage this/there is nothing wrong with that. This subject is pretty mindkilling and so these precautions are needed."
Many modern PC beliefs about women first showed up in Victorian times, which beliefs were I to mention them would be get me as down voted now as much as they would get a Victorian gentlemen in trouble.
Before Victorian times, pretty much everyone agreed with the position taken by Chateau Heartiste - that the alarmingly powerful, reckless, irresponsible, and immoral sexual urges of women, unless restrained, would destroy civilization.
Women's motives are generally purer than men's. Women are much more often good mothers than men are good fathers. Women are nearly always more interested in committed relationships than just sex with the most attractive male. Women should be held much less accountable for their criminal and unscrupulous actions than men. Women are always the victims never the abusers. Women do not lie about rape. Women are overwhelmingly sexually attracted to virtuous men (noticeable echo's of Calvinism in this). A woman's complaints and grievances are generally reasonable, while a man's are generally not. Women's sexual instincts are benign to society while men's sexual instincts are malign. Women are more altruistic and fair than men. ect.
Most of this is obviously bunk and most of this is also obviously implicitly accepted though it may be denied.
And Sam, I don't think I will get down voted for stating this.
In practice however if I wasn't very careful when challenging a argument that implicitly rested on two or more of the above as an axiom I might get down voted on LW (but less so than many other places).
That follows the pattern of a clever way of phrasing arguments such that they can be interpreted as either tautologies or meaning something stupid. It's more insidious than just unambiguously stupid arguments.
A solution might be to make a sort of subforum for mindkilling topics, and associating them with some karma cost. Doesn't eliminate the mindkilling aspect, but hopefully makes it so that people with low karmas are kept out, which is hopefully correlated with some minimal rational ability.
Or maybe not. Holding off on that sort of thing is sometimes a good idea.
I quite liked the post, I only have one niggle:
"For example, in heterosexual dating the man is expected to ask for the date, plan the date, and escalate sexual interaction. A woman expects that she will be pursued and not have to approach men, that on a date she should be passive and follow the man's lead, and that she shouldn't initiate sex herself."
this is an extremely US-centric view of dating culture.
In Aus, women do not expect men to pay for dates, and while the bias is still weighted towards the men being more likely to ask woman out or to initiate sexual advancement... it's not the expectation.
It's only one data point, but most of my BFs I pursued, rather than the other way around - and most of my girl-friends have similar stories.
Fixed, thanks.
Just wanted to say - I'm impressed by your dedication to improving your writing style - both in the amount of reference-reading you're doing to fuel your topics, and in how much you're willing to take on board the feedback from the community.
The whole goth guy/ alternative look point misses a significant part of the appeal. People (particularly men) who prominently display membership in a subculture often have a strong sense of self. This kind of self-confidence is generally attractive to women, so those who aren't immediately put off by his group identity are likely attracted to that confidence and the charisma that goes with it.
Practically, this means that alternative styles only tend to work when they're genuine and you're comfortable with them. Someone who feels most natural in more conservative clothing may actually hurt themselves by trying niche appeal, because they need to belong to that niche.
In other words it comes of as incongruent.
I find that claim bewildering because the partnered men I know aren't jerks. It could be that I'm filtering for non-jerkness, but my tentative alternate theory is that the maybe the most conspicuously attractive women prefer jerks, and the men who resent the pattern aren't noticing most women. Or possibly a preference for jerks really is common in "girls"-- not children, but women below some level of maturity (age 25? 30? whatever it takes to get tired of being mistreated?), and some men are imprinted on what they saw in high school.
For those of you who believe that women prefer jerks, what sort of behavior do you actually mean? What proportion of women are you talking about? Is there academic research to back this up? What have you seen in your social circle?
(Caveats: Small N, college-age subjects, and WEIRD) Believe it or not, someone actually tried to test the jerk theory empirically and found support for it
Hat tip: Eric Barker.
Another caveat is surrogate behavior-- what's tested is which photographs women chose, not which men.
It's occurring to me that part of what annoys me about the "women prefer jerks" meme is the implication that women are distinctively irrational. There are men who chose women who mistreat them, sometimes one such woman after another, but I've never heard anyone say "men prefer bitches".
Just on the notion level, but I've wondered whether some women (especially young women) choose bad news men for the same reason that some men (especially young men) ride motorcycles-- risk and excitement. From what I've heard, one of the reasons women chose difficult men is the hope of being able to change them.
Another possibility is availability bias-- the stereotype is the woman who spends years complaining about the awful men in her life to a patient male friend who's wondering why she never chooses him. Women who are happy with their relationships aren't going to do as nearly as much complaining about them, and probably aren't going to be talking in comparable detail about how good the relationship is.
I think the hypothesis would be that women choose men who are "jerks" partly because they are jerks, while men choose women who are "jerks" because they just don't care so much about personality traits, and/or despite those women being jerks.
Examining this hypothesis would require an operationalization of "jerk."
There, now you have. According to the Amazon Best Sellers Rank, it is currently ranked #560 overall in the Books category, #1 in Dating , #2 in Mate Seeking, and #4 in Love & Romance. Surely the idea isn't unheard of.
Partially this is because men are less often the one whose preference is at the center of the relationship (the standard cultural trope is a man pursues a woman, attempting to make her prefer him) and so there is less scrutiny of men's preference by both parties, and much more scrutiny of women's preference by men (in order to understand better how to make a woman prefer him).
Partially this is also because male attraction is determined less strongly by personality, and the "bitch/jerk" adjective is about personality.
Isn't there a stereotype whereby men prefer women who play by The Rules, which apparently consist of guidelines for emotional manipulation? That counts as bitchy in my book.
Also, can someone explain the "patient male friend" part of stereotype? I think it's one of these cases:
It occurs to me that a common factor might be that the two of them are both highly pessimistic about relationships-- neither of them is looking for someone they can be happy with.
Really? That belief isn't all that uncommon, and for reasons somewhat similar to the 'jerk' idea. Mind you the (overwhelmingly justified) belief that men are less picky than women when it comes to their mate selection makes such beliefs less emphasised.
An accurate analysis of this issue would require unpacking the cluster of traits implied by the word "jerk," and then dividing them into several categories:
Traits that are indeed actively attractive to women, or some subset thereof.
Traits that are neutral per se, but have a positive correlation with others that are attractive, or negative correlation with others that are unattractive.
Traits that are unattractive, but easily overshadowed by other less obvious (or less mentionable) traits, which produces striking but misleading examples where it looks like the "jerk" traits are in fact the attractive ones.
This is further complicated by the fact that behaviors and attitudes seemingly identical to a side-observer (especially a male one) can in fact be perceived radically differently depending on subtle details, or even just on the context. This makes it easy to answer accurate observations with jeering and purported reductio ad absurdum in a rhetorically effective way.
This question further complicates the issue. Different types of above listed traits can elicit different reactions from various categories of women. However, even just to outline these categories clearly and explicitly, one must trample on various sensibilities one is expected to respect in polite society nowadays.
Here's a couple more:
Traits that are neutral or unattractive, but help people in their mating interaction during one-on-one interaction with a potential partner (e.g. initiation or receptiveness).
Traits that are neutral or unattractive, but help people compete with others of their same gender
In sexual selection, there is a difference between intersexual choice, and intrasexual competition. "Women go for jerks" or "nice guys finish last" might not be a primarily a claim about the traits that women are attracted to; rather, it could be a claim about the traits necessary to initiate with women and compete with other men. All this stuff partially overlaps, but there are differences.
For example, pushing past competition on a crowded dance floor, dealing with competitors interrupting you, or making a physical advance on a potential mate may require a slightly different balance of traits (e.g. more assertiveness or even aggression) than what is necessary to attract mates.
Specifically, I would suggest that the male initiator script along with male-male competition jacks up the necessary amount of "jerk" traits beyond what women are actually attracted to. This hypothesis could help explain why people have trouble seeing eye-to-eye on this issue.
IOW the reason jerks are more successful might be that they cockblock other guys. It makes perfect sense to me and, in retrospect, I'm surprised that it took so long for someone to hypothesise this.
Doesn't that imply that the claim "women claim to want nice guys, but prefer to date jerks" should be downrated in emphasis and considered factually suspect until an accurate jerk-model can be constructed, and we can simply go look for the actual prevalence of what we now agree are jerks and their success at attracting women, as opposed to nice guys?
Come to that, don't we need a coherent nice-guy model as well? Or are they equivalent to a control; ie, "not jerks" = "nice guys?" And how useful does that render the resulting model?
I wish you'd just spit out whatever unPC stuff you thinks going on, even if it was rot13'd or only PM'd to people who volunteered to read it out of curiosity.
Ditto, though I would phrase it differently.
Vlad_M says a number of things which are unintuitive to me, but without more details it's hard for me to judge why the conflict exists.
I wish this kind of comment were more common.
Whatever age it takes to get past peak attractiveness and fertility.
Seems relevant.
Why did you link to Roissy rather than laying out his argument in more neutral terms?
The comment was clearly something user CharlieSheen picked up from Roissy.
I remember as an high school kid PUA seemed sensible. (I had a nerdy straight male friend into it, and no personal interest since if I wanted to get laid I could use boobies.) I mostly took home "People, especially women, dig confidence, and will chase rather than be chased. 'Bitches ain't shit' is therefore a desirable mindset.".
And then just today I looked into it again, starting with the Dating market value test for women. I had trouble believing it was serious. Not because I'm supposed to want sex with hot women and nothing else, but because their idea of "hot women" isn't hot at all. Why would I ever want that?
I get that liking androgyny and brains and being neutral to fat and small breasts are rather idiosyncratic traits. But what kind of guy wants a girl just old enough to legally consent who never swears, dresses sexy and fashionable without actually caring about it, same for sports, and has the exact three kinds of sex they show in cookie-cutter porn? That's not a person. That's what you get if you ask RealDoll's research department for a toy that reconciles your horror of sluts with your hatred of prudes.
...also, the hot photo is supposed to be the one on the left, right?
That's because it's a "blue line" test. At the beginning, it explicitly points out it's orienting on averages, and defining market value in terms of breadth of appeal. It doesn't mean lots of people will like a high scorer, it means lots of people won't rule out the high scorer.
In other words, the person who scores perfectly on this test will probably not be hideously offensive to anyone -- which means they don't get ruled out early in the selection process. But a low score just means they're more likely to need a "red line" strategy, aiming at strong appeal to a narrower audience, at the cost of turning more people off. (i.e., emphasizing one's supposed "defects" would attract people who like those qualities, while turning away more of those who don't)
(Ugh. I can't believe I'm defending that misogynist a*hole, but I don't see anything wrong with the test itself, just the conclusions/connotations being drawn from it.)
An exaggeration of a real , very common type. The better the description fits the less common the type. Practically no one who reads this site would fall in that category (I think/hope) if only because boring people are boring.
Yes.
I will respect properly written articles on almost any subject. Not these.
One thing I demand from authors claiming to be supported by "science" is that they won't make me stop thinking in mid read. The articles behind these links do not respect the reader's opinion. Instead of making you think, they seek to shock, trump and convince. I've seen this style and these patterns before in articles about climate denial, xenophobia and religious fundamentalists. (Seriously, a lifestyle article is not a valid citation.)
I'm not saying the author has not done his fair share of reading. I'm saying he should stop waving the "this is science"-sign with one hand and be clubbing down his readers with the other.
The latter trait doesn't seem all that closely linked to 'science'. It is a quality of good authorship not science.
While it's definitely interesting to point out the correlation between egg-bank and attractiveness, I have to say that my god but that site is chauvanistic! Apparently, after "hitting the wall" a woman is "sexually worthless" o_O I do not agree.
Hmmm - my comment has been quite severely downvoted. Quite interesting. I'd like to know why.
perhaps I should point out the obvious mind projection fallacy inherent in the "sexually worthless" comment, instead of leaving it as an exercise to the reader... ?
After all, he didn't say "Due to my own personal predilections, i find that a woman over the age of 40 is no longer at all sexually attractive for me", but instead made his value judgment and considers it to be some kind of inherent value of the woman (ie value == 0) completely oblivious to the fact that other men (and possibly women) may have a different value-judgment of that woman.
I disagree with his assessment because her worth is not 0... just his own personal map-value for that woman.
I don't take Roissy all that seriously but have read quite a bit of his stuff. I've never understood him as comparing women's value as people, but rather their sexual value or dating value from the perspective of the (sort of) median man.
The sexual value is something determined by "the sexual marketplace". Sure some people like the less likeable, but they are pretty rare and thus on average the person with these traits will need to be less picky, since she/he runs into those interested in them less often.
While mean sexual value is an important concept, as lukeprog points out with my graph, sometimes it is not relevant. The relevant metric of success in attracting people is something like "being over a cutoff of attractiveness for a subset of the population that you desire and that you can find, and where you don't face a punishing gender ratio in that niche."
For instance, regardless of your average attractiveness, you could be doing great even if 0.1% of the population is attracted to you, as long as (a) you know how to find them, (b) they fit your criteria, and (c) there isn't an oversaturation of people like you that you're competing with.
Yep, I can understand that. though his phraseology is very clearly as though it is an inherent value of her worth as a (sexual) person... which is what I found so unappetising.
I also disagree with his valuation. I know from... well knowing 40 YO women (and older), that they do indeed suffer from diminished sexual appeal - but certainly nowhere near zero. 40YOlds get it on all the time... therefore his valuation is wrong. It is limited by his own personal perspective - and that of the average young-ish man who is himself high up on the "sexual appeal" rating.
I can definitely understand that for a man who can "get anybody" - that they would try almost exclusively for younger women, and that therefore an older woman would hold no sex appeal for them... but for anybody not an alpha male... (especially 40-50YO average men), a 40YO woman would still hold some interest.
Her "value" on the marketplace is not zero.
It depends. Was the context marketplace value or value to the individual who most values that person sexually? Ifthe latter, it was the MPF. If the former (which it implicitly probably was there), then I don't think marketplace valuations necessarily fail in that way.
They can still be wrong valuations.
I got the sense that he was actually using his personal valuation, and passing it off as a marketplace-valuation. His references to studies felt like he was trying to find facts to fit his own valuations. However - I'll freely admit that I have not read his stuff widely. This is one of those websites where I decided it would not be a good idea for me to keep going as it simply continued to fuel my anger. It was more rational simply to stop reading.
It's not the content of what you said (though, given the topic we're on, people are getting offended, this being one of the things LessWrong can't really discuss without exploding and drawing battle lines) but the way in which you said it; your online habitus automatically marks you as an outsider. Lurk a bit more and you'll get an idea of how to phrase things.
Thank you for responding. :)
Firstly - can you define "online habitus" in this context? the dictionary gives me "physical characteristics", but I'm not sure exactly how that relates here, but I've taken a stab at it:
ie that it was the emotive content of my comment that was objected to. I', surprised that the reaction against my personal expression of shock was disliked so much so that I was downvoted. Surely rational people are allowed to be offended too? :)
Am I allowed to personally respond to a site that objectifies women and rates their value as objects (and values them at literally zero) in a way that shows that I do not agree?
How should I have expressed my reaction in a way that would not have offended?
I upvoted your original comment but I disfavored this statement because it sounded like arguing against something by saying something other than "it isn't true".
If someone tells me "Japanese-Americans have average IQs 70 points higher than Korean-Americans," I don't have to try and refute that by saying "that's racist," because I have available the refutation "that's false". When I want to disfavor or shun a true idea that's unpopular, and can't say "that's false," I will have to say something else, such as "that's racist". Observers should notice when I do that, and estimate depending on the context how likely I was to respond with a negation like that had it been available.
Factual incorrectness is not the only objection a person could have to something. In many cases, people present what they believe to be the facts and then give their response to those facts. For example, someone says that Amy is 80 years old. They could then decide:
1.) Amy should be treated with unquestioning respect--they want to live in a society that respects their elders.
2.) Suggest that Amy should treat her children with unquestioning respect since they will have to take care of her.
3.) Say that Amy should be accorded respect, but not unquestioning respect because their preference is to treat others in an egalitarian way.
4.) Any number of other things.
You could then have objections to either the fact they stated (if it is not true), or to preferences they stated (if yours differ), or to both. Preferences can reference facts, especially if they are contingent on facts to achieve other, more central, preferences. And so sometimes you can use facts to show that someone's preferences are not in accordance with their core preferences. But a person's core preferences only convey a fact about the person holding them, not a fact about the world. The world has no preference about what happens to us. Only we do.
That's why people usually use other things to object with if they are available. I don't object to a critic's value judgement that an opinion is bad if spread, but the most convenient way for the critic to encourage me to disfavor the opinion is to convince me it is false. If the critic does something else, perhaps that is because the truth of the opinion is not contested.
You don't think it's acceptable to argue against things by saying various forms of "it has bad consequences"?
Not to speak for lessdazed, but what I understood them to be saying is that when I argue against a proposition P solely by pointing to the consequences of believing P, I am implicitly asserting the truth of P. I would agree with that.
I would say further that it's best not to implicitly assert the truth of false propositions, given a choice.
It follows that it's better for me to say "P is false, and also has bad consequences" than to say "P has bad consequences."
It's perfectly fine, for me at least, but I prefer moral objections to be specified more clearly than "I do not agree", which seem more appropriate for the disputing of factual statements. I discuss this in further detail in a comment of mine above.
That wasn't how I saw the context here, because of the statement "I do not agree". Also, no consequences were enumerated. "I agree with the facts as stated, but think phrasing them this way has bad consequences," is a fine way to argue against a presentation of ideas.
I am very suspicious of obscuring truth in the name of positive consequences, of applying only or mostly first-order idea utilitarianism.
First of all, let me say I didn't downvote you. Or upvote you either.
Secondly, there's some confusion of terminology here.
a) There's "agreement" in the sense of shared beliefs about the state of the world. (Epistemological agreement - ("is" statements)
b) There's "agreement" in the sense of shared beliefs about how the world should be. (Moral agreement - "ought" statements)
c) There's "agreement" in the sense of shared preferences. (Agreement in taste - "like" statements)
(a)s have objective truth value.
(c)s are subjective.
(b)s have people always debate about their objectivity/subjectivity thereof.
Now the three types aren't always clearly distinct. If someone makes a statement about "attractiveness" it's both a (c) statement about preferences, but it may also be a statement about what real-life people like on average -- in which case it can be an (a) statement about the distribution of preferences in a population, which has a truth value.
So, if someone calls someone else "sexually worthless", and you say you don't agree -- do you mean that you simply have different preferences -- are you making a (c) statement? That you believe his statement factually false -- you're making an (a) statement about the distribution of attraction feelings towards such women in the real world?
Or do you mean that you consider it MORALLY WRONG for him to speak and behave in such a rude way?
If the last of these, then "I morally object to such an attitude" is obviously a clearer way of talking about your objection rather than "I do not agree" which is vague and imprecise.
This dosen't deserve down votes. Roissy's style (aesthetically pleasing but quite outrageous) and persona are hard to stomach (at first?).
Forever.. Ok, probability one minus epsilon.
I see the "just jealous" claim as equivalent to A attempting to lower B's status, and when B says they don't like it, A says "you just don't like having your status lowered, so your point should be ignored".
Um, for many people (e.g. me) , it is hard to stomach at all, and I'm a het male, the sort of entity he is nominally writing for. The reason for this is simple: at a certain point style does reflect substance, and moreover, Sapir-Worf issues come into play.
Sometimes the persona comes across as fake and bizarre. Take this article on frame control. It's completely reasonable, and meshes well with what you'd read here or in books on social skills. Then he lazily throws in
and continues talking about framing, having reminded his readership that bitches be crazy. Maybe the equivalents reminders on LW ("Remember, humans don't operate in a logical universe; we abide by our biased emotions first and foremost") and social skills books ("Remember, humans don't operate in a logical universe; we abide by our emotions first and foremost, and that makes us wonderful beings because rationality means Spock") sound as artificial when you're not used to them?
Agreed. There's a sense of futility in life there that doesn't really have an upside, or even a non-downside
You haven't heard of Roissy before have you?
This is a terrible debate and you should all feel bad for having it. Now let me join in.
The research on this topic is split into "completely useless" and "mostly useless". In the former category we have studies that, with a straight face, purport to show that women like nice guys by asking women to self-report on their preferences. To illuminate just how silly this is, consider the mirror case of asking men "So, do you like witty charming girls with good personalities, or supermodels with big breasts?" When this was actually done, men rated "physical attractiveness" only their 22nd most important criterion for a mate - number one was "sincerity", and number nineteen was "good manners". And yet there are no websites where you can spend $9.95 per month to stream videos of well-mannered girls asking men to please pass the salad fork, and there are no spinster apartments full of broken-hearted supermodels who just didn't have enough sincerity. So self-reports are right out.
Other-reports may be slightly less silly. Herold and Milhausen, 1999, found that 56% of university women believed that women in general were more likely to date jerks than nice guys. But although women may have less emotional investment in the issue than men, their opinions are still just opinions.
The few studies that earn the coveted accolade of "only mostly useless" are those that try to analyze actual behavior. Bogart and Fisher typify a group of studies that show that good predictors of a man's number of sexual partners include disinhibitedness, high testosterone levels, "hypermasculinity", "sensation seeking", antisocial personality, and extraversion. Meston et al typify a separate group of studies on sex and the Big Five traits when she says that "agreeableness was the most consistent predictor of behavior...disagreeable men and women were more likely to have had sexual intercourse and with a greater number of partners than agreeable men and women. Nonvirgins of both sexes were more likely to be calculating, stubborn, and arrogant in their interpersonal behavior than virgins. Neuroticism predicted sexual experience in males only; timid, unassertive men were less sexually experienced than emotionally stable men...the above findings were all statistically significant at p<.01"
These studies certainly show that jerkishness is associated with high number of sexual partners, but they're not quite a victory for the "nice guys finish last" camp for a couple of reasons. First, men seem to come off almost as bad as women do. Second, there's no reason to think that any particular "nice" woman will like jerks; many of the findings could be explained by disagreeable men hooking up with disagreeable women, disagreeing with them about things (as they do) and then breaking up and hooking up with other disagreeable women, while the agreeable people form stable pair bonds. Boom - disagreeable people showing more sexual partners than agreeable people.
I find more interesting the literature about intelligence and sexual partners. In high-schoolers, each extra IQ point increases chance of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% by females. 87% of 19-year old US college students have had sex, yet only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex. There's conflicting research about whether this reflects lower sex drive in these people or less sexual success; it's probably a combination of both. See linked article for more information.
The basic summary of the research seems to be that smart, agreeable people complaining that they have less sex than their stupid, disagreeable counterparts are probably right, and that this phenomenon occurs both in men and women but is a little more common in men.
Moving from research to my own observations, I do think there are a lot of really kind, decent, shy, nerdy men who can't find anyone who will love them because they radiate submissiveness and non-assertiveness, and women don't find this attractive. Most women do find dominant, high-testosterone people attractive, and dominance and testosterone are risk factors for jerkishness, but not at all the same thing and women can't be blamed for liking people with these admittedly attractive characteristics.
There are also a lot of really kind, decent, shy, nerdy women who can't find anyone who will love them because they're not very pretty. Men can't be blamed for liking people they find attractive either, but this is also sad.
But although these two situations are both sad, at the risk of being preachy I will say one thing. When a girl is charming and kind but not so conventionally attractive, and men avoid her, and this makes her sad...well, imagine telling her that only ugly people would think that, and since she's ugly she doesn't deserve a man, and she probably just wants to use him for his money anyway because of course ugly women can't genuinely want love in the same way anyone else would (...that would be unfair!) This would be somewhere between bullying and full on emotional abuse, the sort of thing that would earn you a special place in Hell.
Whereas when men make the same complaint, that they are nice and compassionate but not so good at projecting dominance, there is a very large contingent of people, getting quite a lot of respect and validation from the parts of society that should know better, who immediately leap out to do their best to make them feel miserable - to tell that they don't deserve a relationship, that they're probably creeps who are only in it for the sex and that if they were a real man they'd stop whining about being "entitled to sex".
EDIT: But see qualification here
I suspect a large number of upvotes were purely for this line. I approve.
After talking to a couple of people about this, I should qualify/partially-retract the original comment.
Some people have suggested to me that the best metaphor a man can use to understand how women think about "nice guys" isn't an ugly duckling woman who gets turned down by the men she likes, but a grossly obese woman who never showers or shaves her legs, and who goes around complaining loudly to everyone she knows that men are all vapid pigs who are only interested in looks.
I would find this person annoying, and although I hope I would be kind enough not to lash out against her in quite the terms I mentioned above, I would understand the motivations of someone who did, instead of having to classify him as having some sort of weird Martian brain design that makes him a moral monster.
The obesity metaphor is especially relevant. Since there are people out there who think becoming skinny is as easy as "just eat less food", I can imagine people who think becoming socially assertive really is as easy as "just talk to people and be more confident".
For people who honestly believe those things, and there seem to be a lot of them, the obese woman and the socially awkward man would reduce to the case of the woman who never showered but constantly complained about how superficial men were to reject her over her smell - annoying and without any redeeming value.
That would seem to apply better if at least some (but not all) of the significant elements of gross obesity and bad hygiene were rewarded with approval and reinforced with verbal exhortations for a significant proportion of the woman's lives. So basically the metaphor is a crock. Mind you the insult would quite possibly do the recipient good to hear anyway unless they happen to be the kind of person who will reject advice that is clearly wrong without first reconstructing what the advice should have been, minus the part that is obviously nonsense.
This is taking the unfortunate/entitled/nice/beta/shibboleth-of-your-choice males' complaint too far at face value - i.e., that they are sexually unsuccessful on account of being kind and prosocial.
People are really bad at measuring their own levels of altruism, which is hardly surprising. Those in this cluster of peoplespace are worse than average at reading social cues and others' assessments of them, and are apt to interpret "nice" and its congnates as "particularly kind and proscial," instead of what it usually means, which is "boring, but not actively offensive enough to merit an explicitly negative description." (Consider what it usually means when you describe your mother's watercolors or the like as "nice," sans any emphatic phrasing.) Likewise, we halo bad predicates onto those whom we resent - "jerk" is the male equivalent of "slut," in this sense.
What's creepy about this group is precisely the entitled attitude on display - that they deserve to enjoy sexual relations with those on whom they crush merely for being around them and not actively offending, or indeed in some cases for doing what in other contexts would be rightly considered kind and prosocial. This transactional model of sex is, well, creepy, and quite evident if you're specifically doing {actions that would otherwise be kind and prosocial} for unrequited loves and not people in general. The complaint is accurate in that yes, their being inoffensive and helpful isn't getting them laid, but the conclusion - that if they were jerks they would get laid - reveals a fundamental confusion. (I also think the PUA types are 100% right when they say displaying confidence is key, but that it's a bit confused to treat it as relating to dominance or women's preferences specifically - if you think you suck, others will assume you're right; this is the key to all sales work, and I've known a number of decent-looking women and gay men who aren't getting laid due to a lack of self-confidence as well.)
I have sympathy for these young men in that having poor native social skills and low self-confidence sucks, and, hey, I've been there. But they're not getting any approval for this, except when they meet up for affective death-spirals.
I used to believe this, but after doing some research, and further experience, I changed my mind.
First, the available research doesn't show a disadvantage of altruism, agreeableness, and prosocial tendencies for men.
I used to experience agreeableness and altruism as disadvantages. Now I experience agreeableness as sometimes a big advantage, and sometimes a moderate disadvantage. Altruism is neutral, as long as I can suppress it to normal population levels (I have excessive altruistic tendencies).
Hypotheses that reconcile this data and anecdata:
While some people who believe they are sexually unsuccessful on account of being kind and prosocial have this attitude of entitlement, ascribing an entitlement mentality to that entire class of people is a hasty generalization. It is likely that people who believe they are sexually unsuccessful on account of being kind and prosocial with a genuine entitlement attitude are very visible (far more visible than people in that class without that attitude), and this visibility may distort estimates of their prevalence due to the availability heuristic.
Furthermore, in this context perhaps you would agree that "entitlement" is political buzzword that has not been appropriately operationalized. In some hands, it is used as expansively and unrigorously as "nice" and "jerk."
I said, which was given some implicit endorsement (I think):
It is doing no such thing. Make no mistake - I don't conflate altruism with approval seeking niceness and I recommend "quit being a pussy" as a far more practical bite of self talk for people in the category you describe to use than the "women only like jerks" message; I'm clearly not rejecting the analogy because I'm supporting a sob story. No, what I am doing is rejecting one soldier that happens to be on the opposite extreme to the one above. Because it is a false analogy.
I don't give any approval for this either, but I don't do it out of judgement or blame. I don't give approval or sympathy because that would be counterproductive to their own goals.
And it is that easy. Just like becoming an engineer is as easy as "getting a degree and being better at math".
There's a community of men how are in fact to find effective ways to be socially assertive in a way that's attractive to women, it's called PUA.
For what it's worth, my reflex before reading a bunch of stuff here was closer to hearing "socially awkward man who can't manage to attract women" was closer to thinking of various annoying men who have hung around me, who I find unattractive (sometimes at the skin-crawling level [1]), but who never cross a line to the point where I feel justified in telling them to go away. This can go on for years. It is no fun.
After reading these discussions, I conclude that my preconception was a case of availability bias (possibly amplified by a desire to not know how painful things are), and so I use a more abstract category.
[1] To repeat something from a previous discussion, this isn't about being physically afraid. If I were, I'd be handling things differently. It also turned out to my surprise, that at least some men have never had the experience of that sort of revulsion. It seems to me that it's not quite the same as not wanting to be around someone who just about everyone would think was overtly ugly, though women frequently agree (independently, I think) about some men being uncomfortable to be around.
It wouldn't surprise me if there are specific elements of body language or facial expression which cause that sort of revulsion, but I don't know what they are.
My understanding is that it is an instinct intended to protect you from threats to your reproductive success, not threats to your survival. ie. I expect it to tend to encourage behaviors that will prevent pregnancy to losers more so than behaviors that prevent losers from killing you.
I don't think people are highly optimized. Evolution aims for good enough, rather than best hypothetically possible, and when I say hypothetically possible, I mean hypotheses generated by people from a time when no one knows the limits of what's evolutionarily possible.
I've had the skin crawl effect from men of varying status, though I admit the average status is on the low side.
Having a 'repulsion/creepiness' response to supplement an 'attraction' response seems like something to expect as an early, basic optimization. Something that would begin to be optimized before even bothering with things like human level intelligence.
Has anything like the repulsion response been seen in animals?
Something I don't think I've seen discussed is that the men who set off the repulsion response seem to be pretty rare. I haven't heard of the response being studied scientifically.
If PUA helps, it might not distinguish between men who have been ignored and men who have been actively avoided.
From what I understand of the philosophy a personal development program based on PUA would be expected and intended to reduce the amount that the guy is placed in the 'ignored' category while actually increasing the 'actively avoided' category. Because being ignored is useless (and 'no fun') while being actively avoided actually just saves time. Bell curves and blue and red charts apply.
There tends to be some lessons on how to reduce 'creepiness' in general because obviously being creepy in general is going to be a hindrance to the intended goals.
My brief searching for 'creepiness research' didn't turn up much either. But to be honest I don't really know where to look. :)
Thanks a lot! Your comment made something click for me.
The obvious conclusion from these premises: If you had the belief that "This could go on for years and is no fun" is a valid justification for telling someone to go away then your life would contain less 'no fun'.
Right, but more specifically, the annoying parts are their denial of the problem and reluctance to improve. We'd all be a lot more sympathetic otherwise.
I agree as far as this goes. But remember that we don't chiefly want to prevent people calling women ugly. We chiefly want to prevent this, because we think it increases actual rape. (The cited research does not establish this with any clarity, but it does establish that you left out another potential distorting factor.)
Would you actually feel surprised if you found out the belief that women only date jerks causally increases talk of rape fantasies, and that this increases rape? What about the belief that a simple and general method will allow guys to have sex with the women they desire?
Is the 'we' royal, referring to some specific group you are a part of or a normative presumption that I, and the people in some group of which I am a part all must have this attitude? Because for my part I am perfectly ok with being outraged at insulting women by calling them ugly for its own sake and not due to any belief in some complicated causal chain whereby talking about ugliness causes rape and the torture of puppies.
I would be somewhat skeptical, read the details of such a study closely and in particular look at the degree of the purported effect as well as the significance. I would be equally as surprised to find that belief that women only dated jerks reduced incidence of rape due to the other obvious causal chain (involving reducing sexual frustration by identifying and implementing those elements of 'jerkiness' that are effective).
I think the causation may be going the other way: it's that men who are willing to rape are more likely to enjoy rape jokes, not that men who read rape jokes thereby become more willing to rape.
From what I understand Dark triad traits have been shown to be sexually attractive.
Edit: Damn you gwern! :)