Short version:
There are patterns in human sexual behavior and preferences that are perceivable anecdotally, or discoverable through research. These patterns can be used to make useful predictions.
In order to create a certain outcome, it helps to fulfill the criteria necessary to produce that outcome. There is a strong incentive to self-modify towards traits that are attractive to the people you want to date, unless such self-modification is sufficiently costly in terms of time, money, ethics, and sense of self.
Be as pragmatic as you can let yourself get away with, when needed. Don't be impragmatic unless you have a good reason!
There is an incentive to self-modify one's sense of self in order to satisfy the requirements for the type of sexual or romantic outcomes that you desire, and in order to allow pragmatic self-modification in other areas.
Learning how to date taught me more about my sense of self than my sense of self taught me about learning to date.
Notice instances where an attempt at self-modification fails, or feels overly strained. If you can't figure out a way to make that form of self-modification work, stop it, and try something else.
If you never strain your sense of self, you probably aren't being curious enough (or your current self is already sufficiently successful).
Try to cultivate a self that will be successful for your goals (up to limits of time, energy, ethics, and empirically-discovered traits) without feeling that you are trying hard. Instead of constantly trying to micromanage your behaviors and traits, create yourself an identity that manifests those behaviors and traits for you. (e.g. if you want to date people who like athletic partners, then, within the limits mentioned in previous points, try to cultivate an identity and sense of self that makes you want to engage in exercise and feel that exercise is an authentic expression of your values.)
The effectiveness of explicit verbal communication is limited, especially when not dating people who are nerdy with ridiculous IQ.
Examine your view of ethics for false-negatives (i.e. things that you don't currently consider unethical, but should). A useful sort of question might be "if I was to try behavior X with 100 people, how many times would they have a negative response, and am I comfortable with that?"
Examine your view of ethics for false-positives (i.e. things that you currently consider unethical, but shouldn't). A useful sort of question is "does this ethical principle literally ban a sexual or romantic behavior that the majority of the population currently engages in?" If you are holding yourself to a vastly more restrictive ethical standard than the vast majority of the population, then either everyone else are pigs, or you are being overly idealistic.
Consider the outcome of other ethical theories than your current one, and the views of people whose ethics differ from yours. (Both for enabling or prohibiting behaviors.)
The goal is not to maximize the average desire for you in the population, it's to exceed a threshold of people (with characteristics you want) who desire you strongly enough to actually date you.
Self-modify to temporally disable analytical thinking (such as throughout this post) to enjoy being in the moment.
Successful self-modification often involves forgetting what you were like before, and all these other bullet points.
If you are holding yourself to a vastly more restrictive ethical standard than the vast majority of the population, then either everyone else are pigs, or you are being overly idealistic.
Can't see why everyone else couldn't be pigs. "Slaves are people" was a true positive.
Recently I asked for feedback on two versions of a new post, 'Rationality Lessons from Romance'. 'Version 2' was my original draft. 'Version 1' was a more recent draft edited in response to comments from a collaborator. We wanted to test whether my collaborator's comments genuinely improved the post. Version 2 now sits at 1 upvote and version 1 now sits at 16 upvotes, and I take this to be some evidence in favor of the hypothesis that my collaborator's comments improved the post.
My thanks to those who participated in that experiment; we got the information we wanted!
Thanks also to those of you who provided feedback on either version of the post. Most comments were critical, but this is often the case even with massively upvoted posts like Build Small Skills in the Right Order. My hope is that relationships posts on Less Wrong merely need to be better and more sensitive to a wide variety of sensitivities than my first attempt was, not that sex and relationships are inherently mind-killing topics. There is an amazing interplay between rationality and relationships, and I feel it would be a shame to leave them unexplored.
So I'm trying to learn how LessWrongers can discuss relationships productively.
One difficulty in extracting lessons from the feedback on 'Rationality Lessons from Romance' is that different people had different complaints. Some were 'seriously skeeved-out' by the overtly personal nature of the post, even though earlier posts of a similar personal nature have fared well on Less Wrong, and even though others didn't mind the personal-ness of the post. Some didn't like the promotion of polyamory, others didn't mind. Some thought my interactions with women were unethical, others didn't. Some disagreed with a premise of the post, that sexual jealousy and monogamy are suboptimal for some people. Some felt the brief lessons pulled out from the stories were effective, others didn't. Some thought I was, like Socrates, being skewered for looking at things with too much clarity, others thought my post was weird and confusing.
I may try to rewrite 'Rationality Lessons from Romance', incorporating as much of the feedback as I can. In the meantime, I'd like to ask the Less Wrong community to very different questions: