My relationship story is almost the complete opposite of Luke's. I didn't date anyone until I met my wife through a matchmaker (mutual acquaintance), and we've been happily married for four years.
And then there's Eliezer's story of his girlfriend expressing interest over the Internet due to learning about his work.
Generalizing from three examples, my conclusion is this: in romance, as in all things, seek your comparative advantage. (Mine happens to be coming from a culture with a strong tradition of matchmaking. :)
Completely and clinically selfish, without apology. "I don't blame her" but no claim that her pain ever weighed upon you. Matter of fact and remorseless in admitting to having behaved foolishly (waiting too long to experiment). Bragging.
I wonder if anyone would admit to downvoting for those reasons. The reasons given in comments are more Spock-worthy.
I enjoyed it. Writing that risks such offense parses as honest to me. My reading between the lines fleshes you out quite sympathetically.
The frequency of first letter of last names in the U.S. suggests your split is probably correct.
I wonder why the number of downvotes is hidden.
To my mind, one of the advantages of being poly is that it forces you to rewrite the rules of how relationships run. This is good not only because you'll do better by explicitly thinking about these things than most people do by trying to go with the flow, but also because your assumptions about what the rules are may differ from a partner's.
Also, writing up pages and pages of definitions and parameters in excessively formal language is fun!
...Is that just me?
Down-voted for being a "Just-so story". I don't see any evidence that rationality was actually a major factor here. How much time did you spend practicing (i.e. the "use science and drugs" section)? Do you believe that a "control group" that read a random self help book and then just practiced for the same time would do significantly worse?
How did relationships work? How did women work? How did attraction work?
(reading this to Alicorn)
Me: Women! How do they work?!
Alicorn: Well, I consume food, and then it is metabolized, and...
Me: (stares at her, wide-eyed with shock) ...really?!
This kind of post symbolizes a lot of what seems wrong to me about LessWrong. Women are attracted to men who they enjoy spending time with? Fashion matters to a lot of women? Women prefer confident men? It amazes me that many extremely intelligent people are unable to make predictions that could be made by the average truck driver. It indicates, I think, that what is lacking in those people is not analytical intelligence. Because of this, I'm deeply sceptical as to what extent applying rationality techniques such as those taught on LessWrong to social interactions will really improve peoples results.
I'm a very analytical thinker; I excel at math, physics and related subjects. At the same time, I have quite poor social skills. I'd love it if I could read some social psychology books and improve my social and romantic outcomes, but I'm unconvinced, both by this post and the community as a whole. In particular, I think that there is what I'll term the 'rationalists fallacy' -- the hidden assumption, in much of thought by rationalists, that other people and the world in general are supposed to behave rationally. They're not, and by and large they don't. So, to make sense of this, ratio...
Women are attracted to men who they enjoy spending time with? Fashion matters to a lot of women? Women prefer confident men? It amazes me that many extremely intelligent people are unable to make predictions that could be made by the average truck driver.
When Luke said that, his "aha" moment wasn't that these things existed, it's why they exist. And more importantly, why it's a good idea to focus on that instead of saying "concentrating on looks is vain, a woman should like me for who I am."
the hidden assumption, in much of thought by rationalists, that other people and the world in general are supposed to behave rationally.
This assumption is not there. The assumption is that there is a reason people behave how they do, and this behavior is a logical conclusion from evo psych. I doubt anyone would say women's attraction to red is rational, but it is still used in PUA books.
And yes, you can just use the results, but there aren't many books that have all the conclusions made without any of the explanation.
I was delivered from fear, fear of man, of heart, from rejection from a woman when I was 29 years old. The ministry team gave a word of knowledge regarding my birthday, May 26, confirmed the calling on my life and what was holding me back. No more timidity. I was delivered from self and was told I would be buried in Him and wake up in Christ. I was just reading Romans 6. Blessings and thank you for your obedience to God!
From Spiritual Healing Testimonies
Testimonials are not strong evidence. I don't know Luke, so don't know in any detail what he did, but based on his post it seems like he did a lot of things over a several year period. Peoples personality can change significantly, especially at a young age, in the absence of any external factors over a period of a few years. If Luke was also, as he indicates in his post, trying to spend substantially more time around women, then I don't see how we can conclude that it was his scholarship that helped him. And, if it was, then it could easily have been that he gained confidence by believing that he understood people.
This isn't evidence against scholarship helping, of course. It may well have done. But I don't think we can take Luke claiming that it helped him as particularly strong evidence that it actually did.
I think this may be one of the weirdest posts I have ever read on LW. Deconstructing that feeling it's probably because it's combining near and far mode subjects, relationships and scholarship. Examining that it's unlikely because I've been reading around the PUA subculture for a while, so it might be the framing, the tone and description of your intellectual learning is like nothing I've read in that. The style is also different from HughRistik's writing on PUA on this site, which is also markedly different in tone to normal PUA stuff but doesn't push the weird button.
The description of your breakup filled me with awe-struck horror. I'm not sure at what point I would have been able to say why that was such an awful idea but even before I could explain then I wouldn't have done it, more because I have had the misfortune never to have had a relationship with someone who was all that interested in discussing abstract ideas than anything else, but also because it's been obvious to me for a long time that the supermajority of people aren't into intellectual conversation ever.
It's extremely clear, coherent and provides actionable advice all the way through. The finale ends with a hip, hip hooray! that's good although I dislike the "by golly" and am ambivalent on "Rationality for the win"
I'm neither upvoting nor downvoting this, because a lot of it meshes too well with my preconceptions on the subject and I don't trust myself to make an objective decision on its quality. From that quite-probably-biased perspective it seems sane, and I particularly like the emphasis on being willing to modify deep parameters, but gender politics is such a volatile subject around here that I very strongly suspect any substantial analysis of dating behavior would benefit from having at least one cowriter of a different gender and/or orientation, if only for signaling purposes.
By this time my misgivings about the idea of owning another's sexuality had grown into a full-blown endorsement of polyamory. I needed to deprogram my sexual jealousy, which sounded daunting. Sexual jealousy was hard-wired into me by evolution, right?
How did you determine that monogamy and jealousy are not terminal values of yours? How is this not a simplification of value, or at least an exchange of terminal value? What safety measures did you use?
I agree with your ultimate points - I have recently traveled a similar self-improvement journey. But somehow your presentation is slightly off-putting. It seems just right to draw in someone like myself but leave a bad taste afterwards despite being objectively good advice.
On further reflection, I think it may be entirely due to the feeling that attraction is being reduced to an algorithm which can be run to draw in a female of the species. It's extremely emotionally alienating. I much prefer the method employed by The Last Psychiatrist, which gives the sa...
So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked.
I do not get this but it would be immediately clear if you were more specific, e. g. you said you decided she is too fat.
So, what was it?
(I am not going to comment on this thread again because I am curious and I am going to go read the l-z version right now.)
Well, now this is going to make my post on hacking myself poly, which I was going to publish after confirming success with a month or two of field-testing, look redundant.
Also, I register disapproval for trying to split the audience of the post this way.
I would love to see a post on hacking yourself poly from a woman's perspective. To be honest, I'm a little frustrated with the extent to which all dating advice on LessWrong is aimed at those attracted to females. (Luke's post is great and well considered, though).
The only real problem I have with Luke's post is that thus far, this type of post has been very male-centric, and I think a pair of articles would have helped alleviate that. (It might even make sense to deliberately collaborate, and it could be interesting to initially hide your identities and keep gender references neutral [I currently don't know whether you prefer women exclusively] and see if people can tell the difference).
I felt proud, but even Luke2005 also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because she hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?
I think you're too quick to ascribe to poorly optimized social norms behaviors that are entirely sensible as preference optimization. If an individual is wired for monogamy by nature, then social behaviors that protect the monogamy of their relationships wi...
Neither upvoting nor downvoting, prior to reading the other post. Most of this lines up with other things I've heard rationalists say about romance. I don't have enough experience to know for sure what I think about it.
upvoted because it was an enjoyable read and I definitely don't want it to fall under karma-barricade. I'm now going to go read the other post, but before I do I'd say this is really not particularly new information, and feels to me like just a testimonial about the effectiveness of PUA-like thinking.
The most interesting part to me is the mind-hacking into polyamory, and I think work on choosing your own preferences could be expanded usefully.
I like this post. I also wish that it had a more explicit list of books to read (though there is a small list in the center, the post doesn't make it as explicitly clear as I would like it to whether you think these are the best.)
I'd also welcome a post from you on fashion.
I have non-voted, because there's something unclear from the text. I appreciate the retelling of the journey taken and the lessons learned, I took a similar path myself. However: you've learned to signal extremely well the things that women are attracted to, like confidence and humour, or you have confidence and are a humourous person? You learned to dress well to impress women, but are you dressing the way you like to dress? You have taken a suboptimal social norm and substituted it with a more optimal norm.
I did not upvote or downvote, because I thought it was a decent post as anecdotes go, but too scattered and kitchen-sinky to be really useful. It also plays into stereotypes about LessWrong, but that's just you being you, so I'm not worried about it.
This passage is really funny, because I would find this unbelievable behavior in a fictional character, but here a fully adult intelligent man is doing it:
...So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection h
I'm not voting on this because, um, well, okay. I completely understand your point about how "monogamy good, non-monogamy bad" is largely a cached thought, but a part of my current beliefs it is nonetheless. Does it pay rent? Well, in our current monogamy-dominated society, it does pay in the form that "if you are a faithful partner you will be appreciated and if you are an 'unfaithful' partner you experience negative consequences", but whether polygamy is actually optimal is another question entirely. Whether "relationships that a...
But what REALLY puts a bad taste into my mouth is the casual mention that you basically slept with several different women for research purposes. This is due to a combination of the aforementioned cached thoughts, and... seriously, dude? I mean, are you down with animal testing? Because if you are that's cool, but... gosh. Seriously. It just bothers me and... I can't really be coherent here, it's a cached reaction but damn.
The only part I agree with is that you are not being coherent. Having sexual experiences for the sake of growth and experience is approximately what most people do throughout their teens as a part of natural human development. It is certainly not harmful to others, all else being equal.
But what REALLY puts a bad taste into my mouth is the casual mention that you basically slept with several different women for research purposes.
I would be interested to know why this comment leaves such a bad impression. Some people have casual flings primarily for pleasure. Some people have them to raise their self-esteem. lukeprog had them mostly for research purposes. Are any of these goals incompatible with the other person enjoying themselves?
Is your intuition that empirically, if people are pursuing casual flings for the conscious goal of research, then it is likely that they won't treat their partner in a beneficial way?
I have seen cases where this happens, but merely an experimental motivation isn't enough. I've seen some cases of people experimenting on others and being a jerk, but that's mainly because experimenting merely amplified some pre-existing negative traits, like lack of empathy, resentment of others, or a desire for revenge on other people.
Personally, I'm consciously trying to learn something from my interactions with everyone, all the time. I don't feel that this attitude is counter to recognizing their personhood, or that it entails viewing people as lab...
What does my last name count as for purposes of determining which post to read? Clippy? Or Paperclips? (My Google handle is clippy.paperclips.)
I think I've seen parts of this before on LW somewhere, but I don't remember where. V ibgrq va na hcjneq qverpgvba, if you want to screen out my contribution to the results.
I am impressed that you seem to have written a non-creepy post on essentially the same skillset as PUA.
Upvoting for being an interesting life-story that a good chunk of the LessWrong demographic can probably relate to, though I'm not sure I agree with all the conclusions you draw. I wouldn't mind seeing more posts in this vein from different perspectives.
I also like the idea of splitting up the two versions of the post, I don't know what it's for (I haven't read the other version), but it can be interesting to compare responses to the same story with different spins (though I'm not sure you'll get enough responses to have a sufficiently significant differen...
Upvoted for the first lesson.
The obvious fix for the gender-related drama these posts tend to cause, and the uncertainty caused by small smaples sizes, is for people interested in that kind of topics to co-write posts.
"Aha! It's not that women prefer jerks to nice guys, but they prefer confident, ambitious men to pushovers."
This whole chunk skeeves me out, since it seems to treat women as something "other" than men, all built to a specific template.
Politics, religion, math, and programming are basically never the right subject matter when flirting.
This also felt like an unsupported generalization. I think the post would benefit a lot if you framed these as "worked for me to accomplish X". i.e. "When trying to pick up attractive ...
This whole chunk skeeves me out, since it seems to treat women as something "other" than men, all built to a specific template.
But they are, on average, reliably different from average men in certain predictable ways.
And yes, it sucks for non-gender-typical women that the best set of priors that men can achieve fails to describe how those women actually work. But when you think about it, the situation is that both gender-atypical women and PUAs are languishing under the statistical tyranny of gender-typical women. Original
I don't know what your experience is mixing flirting with "Politics, religion, math, and programming" but given that these are all Far mode subjects and flirting is Near, mixing them seems likely to be on average sub-optimal. If you can think of a way of mixing the two besides puns I'd be grateful to hear it.
I didn't say there was a universally compelling pickup line. I didn't mention PUA.
I did link directly to two summaries of the most recent mainstream scientific research on intimate relationships and relationship initiation.
So unless there's some extremely shocking studies I'm not aware of, calling any of these "female" traits is bullshit.
I won't take the time to respond to all your concerns, but here's just a sampling from the book I linked to above. On women preferring confidence (p. 17):
What approaches work best as conversational openers? Much of the research examining the effectiveness of openers has focused on those deployed to initiate male–female encounters in meeting places. The best openers for men, this research shows, appear to be those that are not seen as “lines” by women: Confident, direct, or innocuous overtures are more likely to get a conversation off to a good start than are indirect, cute, or clever gambits (Clark et al., 1999; Cunningham, 1989; Kleinke & Dean, 1990).
On status (partially displayed by confidence), and ambition (p. 58):
...Although [sexual strategies theory (SST), the mainstream view] views both sexes as having long-term and shor
In my post I said:
Aha! It's not that women prefer jerks to nice guys, but they prefer confident, ambitious men to pushovers.
This doesn't suggest a gender disparity, merely that I now understood something about how the 'women love jerks' meme had been started, and what was actually going on.
But, as it turns out, there is a gender disparity here. Women place a higher premium on status and ambition than men do (see the studies cited in my comment above). Women also place a higher premium than men do on confidence. See here.
Next, I said:
Aha! Body language and fashion matter because they communicate large packets of information about me at light speed, and are harder to fake than words.
This suggests no gender disparity. It merely says that body language and fashion are powerful signaling tools, which they are.
Aha! Women are attracted to men with whom they have positive subjective experiences. That's why they like funny guys, for example!
You're right, this does imply a gender disparity that isn't clearly supported by any studies I know about. Correction accepted. Oops. Perhaps a better example would have been the importance of touching during relationship initiation - for bot...
Note: I am testing two versions of my new post on rationality and romance.
Please upvote, downvote, or non-vote the below post as you normally would if you saw it on the front page (not the discussion section), but do not vote on the other version. Also, if your last name begins with a–k, please read and vote on this post first. If your last name begins with l–z, please stop reading and read this version instead.
Years ago, my first girlfriend (let's call her 'Alice') ran into her ex-boyfriend at a coffee shop. They traded anecdotes, felt connected, a spark of intimacy...
And then she left the coffee shop, quickly.
She told me later: "You have my heart now, Luke."
I felt proud, but even Luke2005 also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because she hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?
This is an account of some lessons that I learned during my journey into rational romance. That journey started with a series of realizations like the one above — that I wasn't happy with the standard cultural scripts: monogamy, an assumed progression toward marriage, and ownership of another person's sexuality. I hadn't really noticed the cultural scripts up until that point. I was a victim of cached thoughts and a cached self.
Lesson: Until you explicitly notice the cached rules for what you're doing, you won't start thinking of them as something to be optimized. Ask: Which parts of romance do you currently think of as subjects of optimization? What else should you be optimizing?
At the time, I didn't know how to optimize. I decided I needed data. How did relationships work? How did women work? How did attraction work? The value of information was high, so I decided to become a social psychology nerd. I began to spend less time with Alice so I could spend more time studying.
Lesson: Respond to the value of information. Once you notice you might be running in the wrong direction, don't keep going that way just because you've got momentum. Stop a moment, and invest some energy in the thoughts or information you've now realized is valuable because it might change your policies, i.e., figuring out which direction to go.
Before long, I noticed that Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. I was unhappy, and I knew I could one day attract better mates if I had time to acquire the skills that other men had; men who were "good with women."
So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty.
She asked that I kindly never speak to her again. I can't blame her. In retrospect, it's hard to think of a more damaging way to break up with someone. This gives you some idea of just how incompetent I was, at the time. I had an inkling of that myself - though I'm not sure if I realized right away, or if it only dawned on me six months later. But it was part of the motivation to solve my problems by reading books.
Lesson: Know your fields of incompetence. If you suspect you may be incompetent, sanity-check yourself by asking others for advice, or by Googling. (E.g. "how to break up with your girlfriend nicely", or "how to not die on a motorcycle" or whatever.)
During the next couple years, I spent no time in (what would have been) sub-par relationships, and instead invested that time optimizing for better relationships in the future. Which meant I was celibate.
Neither Intimate Relationships nor Handbook of Relationship Initiation existed at the time, but I still learned quite a bit from books like The Red Queen and The Moral Animal. I experienced a long series of 'Aha!' moments, like:
Within a few months, I had more dating-relevant head knowledge than any guy I knew.
Lesson: Use scholarship. Especially if you can do it efficiently, scholarship is a quick and cheap way to gain a certain class of experience points.
Scholarship was warm and comfy, so I stayed in scholar mode for too long. I hit diminishing returns in what books could teach me. Every book on dating skills told me to go talk to women, but I thought I needed a completed decision tree first: What if she does this? What if she says that? I won't know what to do if I don't have a plan! I should read 10 more books, so I know how to handle every contingency.
The dating books told me I would think that, but I told myself I was unusually analytical, and could actually benefit from completing the decision tree in advance of actually talking to women.
The dating books told me I would think that, too, and that it was just a rationalization. Really, I was just nervous about the blows that newbie mistakes (and subsequent rejections) would lay upon my ego.
Lesson: Be especially suspicious of rationalizations for not obeying the empiricist rules "try it and see what happens" or "test yourself to see what happens" or "get some concrete experience on the ground". Think of the cost of time happening as a result of rationalizing. Consider the opportunities you are missing if you don't just realize you're wrong right now.
The dating books told me to swallow my fear and talk to women. I couldn't swallow my fear, so I tried swallowing brandy instead. That worked.
So I went out and talked to women, mostly at coffee shops or on the street. I learned all kinds of interesting details I hadn't learned in the books:
After a while, I could talk to women even without the brandy. And a little after that, I had my first one-night stand.
I was surprised by how much I didn't enjoy casual flings. I didn't feel engaged when I didn't know and didn't have much in common with the girl in my bed. But I kept having casual flings, mostly for their educational value. As research projects go, I guess they weren't too bad.
Lesson: Use empiricism and do-it-yourself science. Just try things. No, seriously.
By this time my misgivings about the idea of owning another's sexuality had grown into a full-blown endorsement of polyamory. I needed to deprogram my sexual jealousy, which sounded daunting. Sexual jealousy was hard-wired into me by evolution, right?
It turned out to be easier than I had predicted. Tactics that helped me destroy my capacity for sexual jealousy include:
This lack of sexual jealousy came in handy when I built a mutual attraction with a polyamorous girl who was already dating two of my friends.
Lesson: Have a sense that more is possible. Know that you haven't yet reached the limits of self-modification. Try things. Let your map of what is possible be constrained by evidence, not by popular opinion.
I now enjoy higher-quality relationships — sexual and non-sexual — of a kind that wouldn't be possible with the social skills of Luke2005. I went for years without a partner I cared about, but it felt okay because the whole journey was seeded with frequent rewards: the thrill of figuring something out, the thrill of seeing people respond to me in a new way, the thrill of seeing myself looking better in the mirror each month.
There might have been a learning curve, but by golly, at the end of all that DIY science and rationality training and scholarship I'm seeing an awesome poly girl, I'm free to take up other relationships when I want, I know fashion well enough to teach it at rationality camps, and I can build rapport with almost anyone. My hair looks great and I'm happy. If you start out as a nerd, setting out to become a nerd about romance totally works, so long as you read the right nerd books and you know the nerd rule about being empirical. Rationality for the win.