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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 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 Power of Reinforcement
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).
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Comments (1529)
Unless you mean “78% of college students worldwide”, please specify what country you're talking about.
What ought one do when the problem is not solved by social skills?
I seem to have a tendency to feel extremely inadequate about any skill at which i am not noticeably better than everyone I know about. Due to this quirk of my psychology, I spent a significant portion of my life believing myself to have horrendous social skills. And, for a long time, I attributed my social and sexual failings to that perceived lack of social skill, despite a gradually growing mass of evidence in favor of my social skills being adequate.
(relatively) Recent evidence and experience has now finished falsifying the premise that my social skills are not viable.
Unfortunately, having (a lack of) social skills ruled out as a cause of the problem leaves me, seemingly, without any more low-hanging fruit to pursue. And when even the woman who literally wrote the sequence on self-awareness tells me that she doesn't know why her interest in dating me suddenly evaporated, I begin to... worry, and that feeling of helplessness starts showing up.
(And this doesn't even touch the non-trivial problem of meeting suitable mates, which is obviously a prerequisite to attracting anyone.)
You look at:
The "social skills" referred to when considering mating potential are somewhat specific and include particular emphasis on displaying confidence, particularly sexual confidence. Google "dating inner game" and you'll have an overabundance of resources explaining what signals you need to send and giving tips on how to change yourself so that you are the kind of person who sends those signals more.
This is my primary problem. "Meeting people that I can interact well with, regardless of the mate-suitability criterion" is a fairly/relatively trivial (and different) problem, but all my approaches to meeting people generate massive amounts of noise-results, such that finding a combo-match of (person-I-could-find-suitable) + (person-that-could-find-me-suitable) + (meeting-said-person) + (sufficient-common-knowledge-barrier) statistically becomes very hard. For each of the above "suitable mate met" events, I would have to generate tens of thousands of "person met" events.
Considering the amount of time required to generate these events, and the relative resulting chance of a payoff, it becomes trivially obvious that my time is better spent otherwise (such as reducing the noise through learning better event-generation behaviors) since it computes to rather low expected value.
If p(X would be a suitable mate|you met X) is actually around 10^-4, then maybe trying to lower your standards (if you can manage to do that) might help.
Well, widening / loosening the "margin" or distribution of suitability criteria is indeed one of the valid approaches, but one this is still only part of the equation for the problem AFAICT.
Yes, currently, to my model, that P() really is in that ballpark. I'm currently hitting (with P>.98) way off my current "sweet spot in personspace", with few hits ever getting closer to it and forming a cloud around a completely different area, so my best WAG pretty much give those numbers when trying to project how many I'd have to meet to expect at least one statistical outlier to hit the margin. Making said sweet spot larger is something that would indeed help a lot, but doing so without reducing the total expected payoff of this whole calculation is also non-trivial, for reasons I hope are obvious.
I strongly suspect that my current noise is in no small part due to my current approaches / general behaviors. There's at bare flat minimum 1 in 50 people (assuming IQ stats are any indication) with sufficient reasoning ability for me to find them very interesting, of those at least 1 in 3 is using that ability in a way that I probably wouldn't perceive as noise (so I'd probably notice quickly enough), my preferences / personspace "sweet spot" check would eliminate around (WAG: intuitions from personspace stuff) 80-95% of those remaining.
Which means that, by those numbers and assumptions, around 1 in 750 to 1 in 3000 would be a valid match if I were meeting persons according to a uniform personspace probability distribution and breaking the sufficient-common-knowledge barrier in a proportionally uniform manner over persons met. The clear difference indicates that I'm probably doing something wrong, so the most efficient way I know of solving the problem is to find what I'm doing wrong and fix it first, not just meeting more people.
IMO, 1 in 750 is not a particularly constraining margin, especially if you consider that under ideal circumstances you should do the reverse of what I'm doing and actually be concentrating your hits around your sweet spot, not some other place far away from it.
Also, I dislike the term "lowering your standards". The imagery puts person on a scale basically equivalent to transforming personspace into a Me.perceivedValue(X) function that outputs the scalar distance between Me.perceivedPSLoc(X) and Me.sweetSpotCenter. It gives exactly zero information about the other components of the equation. It also gives very little information on the measurement unit of the scalar.
I believe that this is a serious problem in itself. It's probably undercutting your quality of life in many ways,
In particular, it's probably on your mind when you're in relationships, distracting you from what's actually going on between you and the other person.
Cognitive behavioral therapy might help. It goes into detail about undercutting that sort of belief.
More generally, I believe that the crucial thing is to believe that it's safe to be on your own side. Getting to that belief can be amazingly difficult (believing that you shouldn't be on your own side is probably the result of gut-level fear from repeated attacks), but it's worth the trouble.
Have you tried reading PUA-Game material (and then selectively applying the ethical parts of it)? I could /feel/ my attraction to my OH increasing just by getting him to Game me.
It turns out that making friends and attracting mates requires different sorts of social behaviour. For example, women seeking mates tend to be very status-aware, but you can get on with friends perfectly well without any ability to signal high status. If you felt inadequate very often, that itself could mean you were projecting low status and driving off mates.
I might, if I had any idea where to find said material (rather that just people talking about the material), or how to identify the optimal starting point within the material. (Or anyone to apply it to.)
It depends on what data you need. My general recommendation would be:
"The Blueprint Decoded" -- a video about pickup and social skills in general that gives you a greater context, instead of just throwing thousand random details at you. (Buy, or find a torrent.)
Married Man Sex Life -- a blog about maintaining attraction in marriage. I recommend reading the older articles (before he published a book) because they seem to have much better signal:noise ratio.
From all the PUA stuff I have seen, these two seem highest-quality to me. The first one is like "the best of PUA". The second one contains additional information about human chemistry; the author is a nurse. Both of them seem to me ethically OK, but because different people have different degrees of OK-ness, let me add a data point: The author of the second one has a wife who is also reading the blog and commenting on it; and they seem to have a very good relationship. This is also an evidence that the advice is long-term-relationship compatible.
Thanks for actually providing a link. Being told to "just google it" gets frustrating.
However...
I started at the beginning of the archive, the oldest posts, and I am reading them in order. Granted, I have only yet read a handful of posts, but I can't imagine a person who thinks like the author writes having a worthwhile life. What he advocates seems so hollow and dishonest that I've had a steadily growing sense of disgust since I began reading. Frankly, I think I'd rather be alone forever than relate to people in the way he seems to, because I would feel just as alone either way.
This is an example of the "good" version of PUA material?
I am going to continue reading in case there is useful information, despite my disgust, but I haven't seen any yet.
If that is what you really want then by all means go ahead. To the external observer that just looks like someone sitting in the corner sulking because the universe doesn't give them what they want.
Isn't that a false dilemma? That's just one relative comparison, which is meant to illustrate just how much he dislikes that particular option by visibly placing and signalling it as even lower than something else generally understood as being a net negative option.
Basically: "I've considered this, but so far found that it was even worse than other options I've already considered, so I'll keep looking" - is what I understand as the main point behind the wording he used.
Please imagine I inserted "would rather" in appropriate places in the grandparent so that the token relativity is duly represented in the declared observations of the typical observer.
I.E. If what you want is magic, magic won't work.
Be specific. Taboo "hollow". Taboo "dishonest".
The important information from that website, and from PUA materials in general, is that (heterosexual) women have sexual preferences, too. Those preferences were shaped by evolution. The preferred traits would statistically increase reproductive success in ancient environment (which is not necessarily true today).
This should not be a surprise, unless you believe that men are beasts, but women are pure angelic souls that only happen to have a body. (Problem is, that idea is implicitly present in our culture. That does not make it true.) However, many (heterosexual) men either don't understand women's preferences, or keep forgetting; simply because those are not their preferences.
Unlike men's preferences, which are mostly about the shape of the body, women's preferences are more behavior-based. This is a problem, because a man, despite once having been selected by a women, can simply forget to display the same behavior that made him attractive to her. He will not notice that he is doing something wrong! She will notice that something is wrong (she feels less attracted), but usually can't pinpoint what! A few months or years later, they have a divorce, and no one really understands what happened. And this happens to maybe 50% of the population, in some cultures.
What exactly is "hollow" about this? Women having sexual preferences? Guess what, evolution does not care about what you decide to label as "hollow". Would you rather not know about it, and worship your ignorance? That actually is what many men do, but then there are consequences like cheating, divorce, and child support.
What exactly is "dishonest" about fulfilling one's wife's sexual preferences? Not more dishonest than a woman applying make-up and dressing nice, to make her husband happy. It's a role-play to satisfy the instinctual need to mate with a tribal leader from ancient environment, which no longer exists. And unlike many other PUA materials, this one recommends it only to maintain a marriage.
Certainly some of these ideas can offend people; especially people with wrong models of the world. Some people are offended by evolution; some people are offended by reductionism; some people are offended by the idea of husband and wife doing something to make each other happy. Unlike other PUA materials, this one has scientific support; the author explains (in a simplified version, accessible to layman) the effects of dopamine, oxytocine, and testosterone on human body; which is more than typical "just so stories" with evolutionary or pseudo-evolutionary explanations.
If this offends you, then I'm afraid that reality offends you. Sure, that happens to many people, too. In which case I cannot recommend you a better material, except maybe to read something PUA-unrelated but still related to sexuality and evolution, for example some books by Matt Ridley, and come back later when the idea of sexual behavior reductionism stops being so offensive.
Who would have thought?
Which culture? I suppose that this misconception might be present in cultures where women are considered little more than chattel, but if you live in a culture where women freely choose their partners, you would have to be stupid or delusional to think they don't have sexual preferences.
Actually, it looks like pseudoscience. Just throwing in the names of a few neurotransmitters and hormones doesn't make a claim scientifically supported.
The idea of individual female sexual preferences is OK, as long as they remain mysterious.
The outrage starts at the moment when someone suggests that they are statistically predictable, and gives specific examples. This is quickly labeled as "offensive to women". And in some sense, the label is correct -- being unpredictable is higher status than being predictable. On the other hand, there is no harm in saying that male sexual preferences are statistically predictable.
I suggest a thought experiment -- imagine starting a discussion in LW Open Thread about which female sexual preferences are most frequent, and what is the easiest way to trigger them. Then, watch the downvotes and offended complaints. (This is just a thought experiment, don't do it really.) The topic is probably instrumentally important to majority of LW readers, yet it will never get the same space as e.g. a rational toothpaste choice. So there is some kind of a taboo, isn't it?
I'm under the impression that hypergamy is common knowledge, but I suppose that it may be politically incorrect to discuss it in public in certain subcultures.
Other aspects of female sexual preferences, like social intelligence, athletic physique, masculine facial bone structure, deep voice, etc. are also well known and not so controversial to discuss.
LW might not be the best place for such an experiment, even as a thought experiment. I think this should actually be experimented in some other, "general-population" forum, perhaps with a control test in a different one replacing "female" with "male" for comparison framing. It would still obviously not be study-material, but it certainly sounds fun.
Translation into usual Less Wrong language:
Men and women all have elephants and riders. While female riders are not intrinsically different from male riders, female elephants have lots of differences to male elephants, which is expected if the elephant is the animal hardware/operating system that we are run on.
Therefore, just as to understand and be successful in your own decision you must be aware of your biases and cognitive quirks, to successfully interact with others you must be aware of theirs. Most biases are shared across the human population, but sexual partner preferences are obviously not. Also, elephants can't be reasoned with: you correct elephant biases by tricking the elephant. You don't adjust well for the priming effect by trying to out-reason your instincts. You adjust for the priming effect by making sure you're primed correctly for achieving your aims.
It's important therefore to distinguish between tricking the elephant and tricking the rider. Tricking the rider is usually considered unethical, but tricking the elephant can be a case of correcting someone else's biases for them: the wife thinks (rider, or attachment part of elephant + rationalisation) she should be attracted to the husband, after all she married him, but she (attraction part of elephant) isn't. There are two ways of resolving that: one the rider decides to leave, or two the husband makes himself more attractive to the elephant.
Beisutsukai unlock Option III at level 25: Get the rider to look down and see the elephant, craft reins for the elephant, and cooperate to steer the elephant.
Also, at level 45, they unlock the legendary Option IV (both riders must have this ability to use successfully): Both riders perform a combo-takedown on the elephants and develop low-maintenance long-term elephant-control plans that guarantees self-perpetuating elephant attraction and automatic steering (e.g. by training the elephants to follow the road/eachother on their own without further direction).
Incidentally, all Beisutsukai unlock Option 0 at level 5: Find a mate that already knows how to ride the elephant in the first place.
I have an elephant riding strategy, it involves throwing rocks at the environment and surrounding elephants to entice/scare it into going the right way. It's kinda hard work, but elephants don't really do reins... (How do people actually steer elephants, out of interest?)
Two methods are anchoring and positive reinforcement. Availability control is also usually very effective. Essentially, the same stuff as for behavior/habit training works best, since as per my best model you're essentially training a psychological/biological behavior there too. That's more for "training" elephants though. Direct, in-the-moment steering requires actually training the elephant to respond to steering by whatever reins you craft, in the first place, otherwise it's very hard and sketchy (and usually, as you say, involves throwing rocks).
I forgot where, but I recall reading a study that concluded that making one kind of sexual stimulus more "present" and reducing the availability/presence of other stimuli would increase the natural response of men to that stimulus later on (with long-term effects) in those subjects. I'm not sure of the specifics anymore, but for "sexual stimulus" think "pictures of mostly-naked ladies in X", for X being wearing a specific item of clothing, fetish setup, or particular situation/setting.
Most studies I've found regarding such things seem to be crafted exclusively around men, so it's pretty hard to find good "official" scientific data for women in that regard. Most of the data apparently comes from PUA material, unfortunately.
My wife really didn't appreciate this when I explained it to her. Can't work out what went wrong in that conversation...
Um, wow. Clearly you've pattern-matched to something completely different than the objection I was trying to convey. I'm so not in any way offended by sexual behavior reductionism.
To me, the author of MMSL only seems to care about creating something that looks like an intimate relationship from the outside. And he's other-optimizing; very egregiously so. My revulsion stems from my belief that I wouldn't be any happier living the way he advocates than I am now. I want something that feels like an intimate relationship from the inside, and the sort of relationship he depicts as ideal wouldn't.
That's what I mean by hollow.
I also doubt I could ever feel safe with someone with whom, to use the metaphor, appealing to the elephant is more effective than appealing to the rider, but he seems to live in an isolated bubble where he only interacts with other riders through the intermediary of their elephants, which I would find just as lonely as my current life of no interaction at all.
That's what I mean by dishonest.
I'm totally with you there, in that it wouldn't be any fun to be in a relationship with someone who wasn't aware of this stuff.
You have to be aware though that sometimes appealing to the elephant IS more effective than appealing to the rider. It is not possible to consciously reason myself into being turned on. I am /not/ in conscious control of my hormone emitters. I need my environment to influence them for me. Even if I'm consciously aware that you're a great guy and super smart and all that, if you don't press my elephant buttons, so to speak, being in a relationship with you just isn't any fun. Placating the elephant isn't a terminal value for sufficiently awake people, but for most people it's an important instrumental value.
Also, the impression he usually gives is not that he interacts with only his wife's elephant, just that his rider-rider interaction is fine and he never struggled with it. He also occasionally gives advice for female riders regarding male elephants.
Also, take it from me that this stuff adds to rather than detracts from intimate relationships. From the inside. (If it helps you believe me, this is what Athol's wife thinks.)
Indeed, it is pseudo-endocrinology instead. (I usually take these with the same grain of alt I take the other 'layman science' explanations.)
MMSL is my personal source and what I had in mind as something that worked when I recommended just googling it. Most Game material sounds weird without being able to put the ideas into practise, which is why I recommended you search for material more applicable to you: I was able to get instant feedback on ideas by getting or prompting my OH or myself (depending on material) to try them.
I don't recommend the start of MMSL though, it sounds cynical because it is; that part is mainly aimed at men who are married to wives who aren't attracted to them, who really need to do something drastic if they want to keep their relationships. I'm not actually sure I'd recommend the blog at all to someone not in a long term relationship; in terms of referring to the science of attraction it doesn't do much different from sites like Hooking Up Smart, which afaics is information of a similar quality aimed at a different audience (college students, in this case). I'm sure there are more sites of a similar quality out there. (Look for references to Helen Fisher, whose research is most commonly cited).
Apologies if the google advice isn't useful, looks like I failed to avoid other-optimising after all! (I usually take a "just google it" approach to these things myself.)
ETA: if you're having ethical "disgust" responses, it may help to keep firmly in mind the elephant/rider (in the usual LW language) or hamster/agent distinction. Manipulation is done from the rider to the other party's elephant. This can be done with or without the other rider's permission, and the ethics of the action where done without permission may well depend on how much the other rider is in control of their own elephant. In the specific case advocated by the opening posts of MMSL, the wife who says things like "I love you but I'm not in love with you" or cheats on their husband without knowing why, has an actively harmful elephant, whose rider is unaware of how to control the elephant, or worse, vehemently denying the existence of the elephant. In cases like this, calling out directly to the elephant may well be an ethical course of action. ("recognising the rider-elephant distinction" translates to "taking the red pill"; the more misogynistic sites assume that females aren't capable of this, but these sites can still have useful advice in terms of elephant-control.)
Thanks for the insights. This is shining more light on just what it is I'm looking for in a relationship, too, which should help me greatly in improving the shape of my sweet-spot-in-personspace.
I didn't really look at much of MMSL either, but I did notice an encouraging sign: the author's wife is listed as a coauthor and adds occasional remarks to the posts, which if nothing else suggests that she reads them. This puts an upper bound on how dishonest it can possibly be.
Yes, it requires that two people be lying about something for their mutual benefit, instead of just one. Two people is practically a conspiracy!
(We need to use another term for where the actual upper bound doesn't change that much at all but the probability of a moderate amount of deception is present is reduced.)
I was assuming that "hollow and dishonest" referred to the author being hollow and dishonest to his wife. And in fact I don't think this can be done very effectively when you document your hollowness and dishonesty on a blog your wife reads.
There are torrents of it. Someone linked a torrent of a bunch of books by some famous PUA a while back, I found it fairly interesting, but "what was true wasn't new." It may be helpful in building your confidence to actually go out and try things, which is the hard part but also rather key.
I did not say that. I looked at the chatlog to be sure, and I did not say that.
Ask someone who knows you and has seen you interacting with women to give you honest feedback. Such feedback will help you spot the actual causes of your inability to attract suitable mates more than anything anyone could tell you here.
When I ask that, the answer is usually “I have no idea, you are not ugly nor unpleasant nor stupid after all” or “You just haven't found the right one yet.”
(Oh, and the people who give me the former answer are almost invariably already taken, or otherwise not looking for a relationship at the moment.)
When you approached these people, did you make it clear that you were looking for honest feedback, however painful it might be?
Well... I though I had, but now that I think about that... (OTOH, I usually ask that when we're both drunk, so that --I'd expect-- there are fewer filters in place than usual.)
I've also created an account on whatiswrongwithme.com and share it on Facebook once in a while -- promising I won't get offended no matter what I read, but I didn't get much feedback there either.
You may consider offering money in exchange for good feedback. A while ago, I agreed to pay a friend of mine $5 per individual piece of feedback that I judged to be sufficiently valuable. I learned a lot about myself as a result.
"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.
That's already been proposed.
You'd probably be interested in Clarisse Thorn's Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser. She spent quite a bit of time researching PUA, both in theory and in practice.
Short version: There are a lot of kinds of PUA, ranging from types which are generally benevolent through types which are iffy to flat out misogyny. PUA is probably better for men who learn some skills, then leave the subculture(s).
Having a strong habit of maintaining "strategic ambiguity" (I think this is Thorn's phrase) can lead to loneliness, no matter how many people it attracts.
Note: there's a section about Thorn's relationship with a PUA which isn't terribly interesting. You may want to skip to the end which gets back to good stuff. She's aware of the problem with the section, but no one could agree on what needed to be cut.
She says that feminists have been working on explicit verbal consent, and PUAs have been working on understanding non-verbal consent, and the two groups have useful things to learn from each other.
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.
If people are willing to learn calculus, so that they can learn physics, so that they can go out and actually do engineering, I think it would be feasible to have entry-level training in general etiquette and ethics as a prerequisite before someone can learn rigorously scientific flirting.
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?
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.
It seems easier to evolve a preference for incest.
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.
Note that this may be a feature, not a bug: a PUA with unwavering belief in their method will likely exude more confidence, regardless of the method employed.
I remember one pickup guru describing how when he was younger, he'd found this poem online that was supposed to be the perfect pickup line... and the first few times he used it, it was, because he utterly believed it would work. Later, he had to find other methods that allowed him to have a similar level of belief.
As has been mentioned elsewhere on LW, belief causes people to act differently -- often in ways that would be difficult or impossible to convincingly fake if you lacked the belief. (e.g. microexpressions, muscle tension, and similar cues)
To put it another way, even the falsifiability of PUA theory is subject to testing: i.e., do falsifiable PUA theories work better or worse than unfalsifiable ones? If unfalsifiable ones produce better results, then it's a feature, not a bug. ;-)
Only in the same sense that the placebo effect is a "feature" of evidence-based medicine.
It's okay if evidence-based medicine gets a tiny, tiny additional boost from the placebo effect. It's good, in fact.
However when we are trying to figure out whether or not a treatment works we have to be absolutely sure we have ruled out the placebo effect as the causative factor. If we don't do that then we can never find out which are the good treatments that have a real effect plus a placebo effect, and which are the fake treatments that only have a placebo effect.
Only if it turned out that method absolutely, totally did not matter and only confidence in the method mattered would it be rational to abandon the search for the truth and settle for belief in an unfalsifiable confidence-booster. It seems far more likely to me that there will in fact be approach methods that work better than others, and that only by disentangling the confounding factor of confidence from the real effect could you figure out what the real effect was and how strong it was.
This really, really underestimates the number of confounding factors. For any given man, the useful piece of information is what method will work for him, for women that:
(Where "with" is defined as whatever sort of relationship both are happy with.)
This is a lot of confounding factors, and it's pretty central to the tradeoff described in this post: do you go for something that's inoffensive to lots of people, but not very attractive to anyone, or something that's actually offensive to most people, but very attractive to your target audience?
You can't do group randomized controls with something where individuality actually does count.
This is especially true of PUA advice like, "be in the moment" and "say something that amuses you". How would you test these bits of advice, for example, while holding all other variables unchanged? By their very definition, they're going to produce different behavior virtually every time you act on them.
There are two classes of claim here we need to divide up, but they share a common problem. First the classes, then the problem.
The first class is claims that are simply unfalsifiable. If there is no way even in theory that a proposition could be confirmed or falsified then that proposition is simply vacuous. There is nothing to say about it except that rational agents should discard the claim as meaningless and move on. If any element of PUA doctrine falls into this category then for LW purposes we should simply flag it as unfalsifiable and move on.
The second class is claims that are hard to prove or disprove because there are multiple confounding factors, but which with proper controls and a sufficiently large sample size we could in theory confirm or disconfirm. If a moderate amount of cologne works better than none at all or a large amount of cologne, for example, then if we got enough men to approach enough women then eventually if there's a real effect we should be able to get a data pool that shows statistical significance despite those confounding effects.
The common problem both classes of claims have is that a rationalist is immediately going to ask someone who proposes such a claim "How do you think you know this?". If a given claim is terribly difficult to confirm or disconfirm, and nobody has yet done the arduous legwork to check it, it's very hard to see how a rational agent could think it is true or false. The same goes except more strongly for unfalsifiable claims.
For a PUA to argue that X is true, but that X is impossible to prove, is to open themselves up to the response "How do you know that, if it's impossible to prove?".
Sure... as long as you separate predictions from theory. When you reduce a PUA theory to what behaviors you expect someone believing that theory would produce, or what behaviors, if successful, would result in people believing such theories, you then have something suitable for testing, even if the theory is nonsensical on its face.
Lots of people believe in "The Secret" because it appears to produce results, despite the theory being utter garbage. But then, it turns out that some of what's said is consistent with what actually makes people "luckier"... so there was a falsifiable prediction after all, buried under the nonsense.
If a group of people claim to produce results, then reduce their theory to more concrete predictions first, then test that. After all, if you discard alchemy because the theory is bunk, you miss the chance to discover chemistry.
Or, in more LW-ish speak: theories are not evidence, but even biased reports of actual experience are evidence of something. A Bayesian reductionist should be able to reduce even the craziest "woo" into some sort of useful probabilistic information... and there's a substantial body of PUA material that's considerably less "woo" than the average self-help book.
In the simplest form, this reduction could be just: person A claims that they were unsuccessful with women prior to adopting some set of PUA-trained behaviors. If the individual has numbers (even if somewhat imprecise) and there are a large number of people similar to person A, then this represents usable Bayesian evidence for that set of behaviors (or the training itself) being useful to persons with similar needs and desires as person A.
This is perfectly usable evidence that doesn't require us to address the theory or its falsifiability at all.
Now, it is not necessarily evidence for the validity of person A's favorite PUA theory!
Rather, it is evidence that something person A did differently was helpful for person A... and it remains an open question to determine what actually caused the improvement. For example, could it simply be that receiving PUA training somehow changes people? That it motivates them to approach women repeatedly, resulting in more confidence and familiarity with approaching women? Any number of other possible factors?
In other words, the actual theory put forth by the PUAs doing the teaching shouldn't necessarily be at the top of the list of possibilities to investigate, even if the teaching clearly produces results...
And using theory-validity as a screening method for practical advice is pretty much useless, if you have "something to protect" (in LW speak). That is, if you need a method that works in an area where science is not yet settled, you cannot afford to discard practical advice on the basis of questionable theory: you will throw out way too much of the available information. (This applies to the self-help field as much as PUA.)
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.
Yes, I would also like to congratulate Lukeprog for caving in to social pressure and posting information which is deliberately misleading. I am sure that all the (male) people who read this article, and start using his politically correct nonsense to improve their dating lives will really appreciate it too! (As for female dating advice, I don't know what I am talking about, so I will shut up)
Since the advice given in the article is actively harmful, a better solution would be for Lukeprog to just tell people to google pick up. That way, nobody could flame him on LW, and he wouldn't be spreading actively harmful information.
he is telling people to display "agreeableness" - pretty much the opposite of PUA advice, he is telling you to "like" others - a dangerous piece of advice which could quickly turn into desperate, supplicative behavior, complimenting, etc. He is emphasizing physical looks over dominance and alpha-male behavior, again the opposite of PUA advice.
I will edit my comment to take account of what you said.
Your point about agreeableness is well taken, so I looked up his reference, Figueredo et al. (2006).
First, keep in mind he's using agreeableness in the OCEAN sense, not in the sense of "a person who always agrees to everything". So it's not diametrically opposed to PUA belief, although I agree there's still a problem that has to be explained.
That brings us to the reference. Figueredo's study itself found no impact of agreeableness, but in the introduction, it cites eight previous studies that it said found "extraversion, openness, and agreeableness are reliably correlated with mating success". I looked up one of these studies, and it was on the success of long-term marital relationships, which is a whole different kettle of fish than the PUA's usual focus. So depending on the other seven studies I didn't have the energy to look up, they could both be right. It would have been nice if Luke had qualified that in his post, but really the fault was on Figueredo and not him.
Other than that, I would honestly like to hear what advice of Luke's you consider misleading. Again aside from the "Mean and Variance" section, it all seems pretty well referenced and backed up.
I would consider the article misleading in the sense that "Women like alpha males, men like beautiful women" is the central truth of dating, in the same sense that evolution is the central truth of biology.
A creationist pamphlet which briefly mentioned a watered-down version of evolution - such as "microevolution"- in small print on page 7 is seriously misleading a student. Likewise, this article briefly mentions status, but then gives a lot of contradictory tips about being "agreeable" and "liking her", both of which are low-status behaviours, all in amongst a morass of irrelevant, non-field-tested nonsense.
Academics who write papers on dating "science" are simply not in the same kind of tight feedback relationship with reality that pickup artists are, so they produce a collection of half truths and irrelevant effects, as well as missing out the most important aspects of the game. So the fact that he has referenced this stuff is pretty useless. Far better to take a look at what others who have tried stuff have found. The PU community can be thought of as a giant social psychology experiment, except without the arbitrary restrictions of academic science. Mystery is rumoured to have done 10,000 cold approaches and sexed 200-300 women. All the way from meet to penis-in-vagina, with a sample size of 10,000. Then multiply that by all the hundreds of highly successful PU artists. Compare that to a social science experiment which has a small sample size (~30) and only looks at one aspect of relationships and dating, and probably looks at correlations rather than causation. By the way, props for actually pursuing these references. It is a shame that this is hard and tiring to do.
I'm confused - you seem to take it as a given that PUA techniques are the only/best tool for pursuing the many forms of relationship mentioned in the article. I'm by no means an expert, but I'd be surprised if PUA worked as well for, say, a woman trying to extend her list of partners with a man with a shared interest in classical music. (Quickly glancing at some lists, "get out there and meet people" seems to be good advice; but quickly approaching lots of partners may not work well in this case.)
Isn't it possible that the broader scope of this article justifies de-emphasizing pickup artistry? Even if you don't think that PUA should be avoided for its mind-killing properties, shouldn't we at least give lukeprog the benefit of the doubt? If nothing else, there may be follow-up articles dealing with this.
I didn't say that, let me explicitly disclaim: PU works for hetero men who want to have relationships of any kind with attractive hetero/bi women.
If you are female and looking to have more success dating guys, then I make no claim to be an expert or give advice.
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.
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.
"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.
After diligently reading through most of Vladimir_M's comment history, I have no option but to express my fervent agreement. I've always had a great dislike of vague hints, but the style in which he does those is just fucking unbearable.
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?
We're not discussing anyone's right to remain silent. The objection is to a heretic's tendency to announce himself as a heretic without mentioning any doctrinal specifics, then run away giggling.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
Why does this debate always assume that the causal arrow points from being a jerk to sexual success? We know that power over others tends to make you a jerk. Sexual attractiveness is power. Thus, attractive jerks.
That is true. Pretty much every guy I know with a partners is quite decent,
Conversely however, the guys who score one hot chick after another, who don't have a partner except in the sense that they have half a dozen partners, those guys are jerks, Max Tucker being the infamous example.
I know a guy who is a male model and a thoroughly decent, caring and loving guy, also financially quite well off and highly intelligent. People pay him money to put his face and body on their products. Women often try to pick him up on sight. But after they get to know him a bit, they don't like him nearly so much. It does look to me that he is far too nice, and could profit from a fair bit of ruthless and cynical brutality towards women. I have put this to him, but he strenuously disagrees. He does not do that well with women, though if I had women hitting on me like he does, I know what I would do.
And while those partnered men are not jerks, they don't live up to politically correct standards for not being a jerk. Stereotypical women's work is largely done by their partner. So, yes, unlike Max Tucker, they are decent people, but our standards for a decent male person differs from that standard that one pretends to.
Does the male model have any women he's spontaneously interested in, or is it all women who choose him more than him especially wanting them?
I don't know the details of enough households to be sure of the housework distribution. I can think of two where the men definitely weren't doing it. One ended in divorce (mostly for other reasons), the other seems to be stable. One household where I think it's pretty equal, but I'm not sure. Statistics back up the idea that husbands typically do less housework than their wives.
He is heterosexual. I don't know if his relationships started with him hitting on the girl or the girl hitting on him. I have seen quite a few hot chicks hit on him and he brushes them off, or pretends not to notice. With his girlfriends he acts excessively needy, and respectful, as if they are very important to him. I don't act that needy, even though women never hit on me, and are frequently hitting on him.
I don't see how he can actually be needy. Girls think he is candy when they first see him. But he acts needy, leaning in to his girlfriend rather than his girlfriend leaning into him. Needy body language, even though girls somehow appear whenever he is around.
(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.