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As another commenter pointed out, "their goal" may not be what you think it is. It's much more accurate to say, "their goals", plural. There are people who want harems, and there are people who want to find a nice girl to settle down with and want to be the best person they possibly can. There are people who find out that a big part of what they really wanted was deeper friendships with -- or more respect from -- other men. Some people just wish they knew how to meet people and talk to them. Quite a lot of people start out thinking they need women to get self-esteem, and then end up realizing they could've had the self-esteem all along, and women have nothing to do with it.
And then, within each of these major goal areas, there are a wide variety of subgoals pursued by different schools, and different worldviews to go with them.
This means that the odds are very likely that, if you speak of "their goal" in the singular, you're speaking about a projection that has very little to do with "them". In a very real way, a significant part of the seduction community is really more like the "men's movement", disguised under a cooler-sounding cover identity, with less drumming and hugging.
It is possible that my distaste for the subject has led me to be insufficiently familiar with the intricacies of the motivations of pickup artists. What I have seen (I read this blog, and otherwise have only passing knowledge) leaves me with a very bad taste in my mouth about the practitioners, their attitude towards my gender, and the revolting dishonesty of the entire genre of interaction.
That having been said, it's possible I'm an outlier. Maybe the fact that I don't generally hang out in bars or attend parties has left me with too high an opinion of the sort of women who can be found in those places. Maybe they're just as bad. I don't know. This is exactly the kind of uninformed, emotional shuddering I suspected no one would be interested in.
When I lived in Asia. I would bow to people, be extremely deferential to my superiors, and avoid saying any original thoughts out loud in any situation where I was not the highest status person. I didn't do this because that's Really Deep Down Who I Am, I did it because I read a book on dealing with Asian people, and that was what you were supposed to do. As a result, I got along with the Asians I knew and had pretty good relationships with most of them. If I'd been completely direct and honest all the time, the Asians wouldn't have "appreciated my honesty". They'd have fired me from my job and stayed away from me.
I don't feel guilty for "manipulating" any Asians. I did what I had to do to be successful in Asia, it made me happy, and it made the Asians who worked with me happy.
I interact every day with two groups of people whose ways I find even stranger than the Asians', those being extroverts and women. I basically coexist with extroverts the same way I coexisted with Asians; I read books about their behavior, I figure out what I need to do to get along with them, and I do it. Do I wish I could win their friendship solely by being myself? Yeah. But that was what I tried for about fifteen years, it ended up with me being unhappy and friendless, and instead of me blaming the extroverts for it I decided to learn techniques to get along with them. I think it makes us all better off.
I have split feelings about the seduction stuff. As a "how to trick stupid girls into sleeping with you so you can dump them later ha ha" sort of thing, it is clearly evil. But when I think of it as a guide to dealing with romance in the same way I've already used guides to dealing with Asians and extroverts, well, I could kind of use something like that.
I guess the difference is that the only thing I consider morally wrong is making other people unhappy. To trick a woman who really doesn't like me into having a one-night stand she'll regret later - that's bad. But if there's a woman whom I think I could have a really good relationship with that would make us both very happy, and the only thing stopping her from going out with me is that my body language is unattractive and I don't know how to ask right, then I wouldn't feel too bad about counteracting the stupid tricks her brain is using to prevent her from going out with me with stupid tricks to make her want to.
(disclaimer: this is all probabilistic. There are a few Asians, extroverts, and women whom I have a much easier time getting along with, but in general I find these categories of people harder to understand.)
As an extrovert who likes talking to clever people, but often finds that there's a barrier between myself and the shy that needs to be pushed through, I really appreciate the efforts you have made to make it possible for us to genuinely like one another. I feel I ought to reciprocate. Is there a 'guide to getting along with introverts' somewhere? I'd imagine that since I don't know whether I'm doing anything wrong, I'm probably doing lots of wrong things and alienating people that I'd enjoy being friends with.
I don't know of any guides. My own strategies for working with introverts include:
- Explicitly create a space for them to express their ideas, without obliging them to do so. E.g., ask open-ended questions in a diffuse way, rather than either putting them on the spot to express a position on a topic of my choice or counting on them to grab the floor when they have something they want to say
- Explicitly pick up on the stuff they say, refer back to it often as I respond to it. (This is also helpful with extroverts, but for different reasons, and not nearly as necessary.)
- Allow myself to be comfortable with silence... don't feel obligated to fill it.
- Find tasks we can both concentrate on together, rather than concentrating exclusively on one another. (This is also helpful with extroverts, but for different reasons, and not nearly as necessary.)
I find extroverts are also less likely to remember what they have previously said. They are much more likely to get confused when you refer to their own statements.
Huh.
I've never had that thought, but it is entirely consistent with my experience.
*Adds to toolkit *
This is the best place to start, I think- note how it is a foundation for the first and last items on your list.
Sometimes. Sometimes not. Depends on the person and the situation.
But it's one of the easiest things to do on that list, and it's something I can practice even in groups of extraverts. So, yeah, it's often a good place to start.
That explains a lot about a meeting several months ago in which I was the only Caucasian. I was only trying to signal my willingness to engage on the issue by coming up with a "helpful" idea but there were pained expressions and then the PI "responded" by just repeating exactly what he had just said before my comment.
I would love to spend a few years learning Asian culture. I imagine it would greatly expand your skill-set to understand both Western and Asian paradigms. Or do the memes compete and confuse? I suppose a child raised in both cultures could find the synergy -- but what about a 'typical' adult? What did you find? Do the ideas synergize or broadly need compartmentalization?
In response to komponisto, below: I did mean 'principle investigator', apologies if it was inappropriately assumed common knowledge.
Sorry to be off-topic, but:
Even after consulting this list, I can't come up with a single meaning of "PI" that would make sense in this sentence. ( "Principal investigator" is perhaps the closest, but that would only be appropriate if you are a research scientist and everyone here knows this, likely because they're research scientists too.)
Private Investigator? :-O
Just a note: if what you says about Asians is true, then that is clearly a major cultural impediment to doing anything technological where you have to divide the cognitive load between multiple people. It would also explain some rather bizarre deficiencies in how Japan handled Fukushima which go beyond the incompetence of Soviet Union with Chernobyl.
An honest question--would you find it as objectionable to similarly discuss other areas of interpersonal communication? e.g., I've seen a very similar tone and style (and even similar tricks suggested!) used in the context of discussing, for a business, how to make sales and retain customers.
That is to say, is it the manipulative social engineering that bothers you? Or is it specifically that it's in the area of dating and romantic relationships?
ETA: I notice after posting that Nominull does indeed find objectionable the entire idea of manipulative social engineering.
(Warning: My reactions to this topic have become affected by emotion. This doesn't change my actual opinions, but it is likely to change how I present them.)
I object to all forms of manipulation. I wish businesses, for example, would purely and simply be honest about the features of their product and compete on those alone. Advertisements annoy me unless they have independent entertainment or social value.
However, I think socially manipulative behavior is especially repulsive in dating/romantic relationships and between (ostensible) friends, because these are supposed to be paradigmatic cases of personal closeness and genuine affection. The closeness and affection seem to me much less than genuine if they're wrapped up in layers of showmanship. Whether I think retailers will live up to their ad promises or not, at least I don't operate under the delusion that they value me deeply and individually for my hard-earned personal traits and accomplishments. They want my money.
I recommend Elana Clift's honors thesis on the subject.
Before I download a PDF, could you say a bit about what is in the thesis and why you recommend it?
Here, let me do you the inestimable service of pasting from the intro...
Long story short: the author's brother couldn't get a girl, so he joined them; this is her account of the motivation of such people, tied in with an attempt at a comprehensive account (as she notes, the best general overview of the seduction community seems to be Wikipedia!).
Thanks, Gwern. I would add only that the thesis highlights that although prestige in the seduction community depends on having good game, this isn't the only or even the main thing men get from membership.
If a man's prestige in the seduction community depends on his reports of how many women he has seduced, then, in the absence of non-gameable standards of observational evidence, this potentially invalidates everything they have ever concluded about anything.
As I understand it, gurus usually compete in the field, with students watching. It's not how many you did pick up in the past, it's how many can you pick up today, with what degree of elegance/speed, and with how "hot" of girls, as judged by the watching students. Such a rating method may not be objective, and lead to debates over who "won" a showdown, but it keeps them from devolving into complete non-usefulness.
By the way, in-field trainers and coaches are routinely expected to demonstrate for their students in the field, usually when, like Luke with Yoda, the student says that, "but that's impossible!" (Trainers sometimes remark that this is the most pressure-filled part of their job, not because they need validation from the woman or fear rejection, but because they'll be embarrassed in front of several students if they can't show some kind of positive result on cue.)
When my wife is upset, she likes me to hug her and tell her that things are going to be okay. Am I being a showman if I do that, regardless of how I actually feel in that moment?
If she's in a funk, and I say something funny or tease her to make her smile, am I being manipulative?
If I go shopping with her, even though I'm not interested in shopping, but because I know if I'm there and I smile and ask questions and be helpful, she'll be happier, does that make me dishonest?
And if, the first four or five times I did these things, I felt awkward and fake because it "wasn't really me", does that make me an evil person?
If you want your wife to be happy, and you do things to make her happy, that's nothing but genuine. If you had to adjust your automatic instruments for happy-making to suit her preferences, as long as it's known that you're doing that, that isn't dishonest.
If she asks you outright if you are interested in shopping... and you tell her you are... then I am pleased not to be your wife.
But this is me. As I have said, I could easily be an outlier. Maybe I'm the only person in the world who hates being lied to enough to really want this kind of honesty.
You are not alone!
Why does it have to be known that I'm doing that?
(Btw, all three things are things I learned about from the seduction community -- specifically, the importance of doing them whether I think they're "honest" or not.)
If I were your wife, then what I'd want you to do would be to remark at some point while trying to bring me out of a funk, "This wouldn't have been my first instinct, but it really seems to make you feel better," or something along those lines. Then, assuming that in this parallel universe I retain my trait of honesty, I could determine whether it makes me feel better by a wide enough margin to be worth the cost and communicate that information.
My wife prefers I make the appearance into a reality, and is willing to overlook the time in between where I'm still working on making it such. Like me, she prefers an improved relationship to truth-at-all-costs.
Don't get me wrong -- we went through many years of doing it your way, which also used to be my way.
And it really, really sucked.
I had argued for doing things that way, because in one of my first relationships, I was hit with a bombshell when my newly-ex told me that she'd had sex with me because she wanted me to like her, not because she wanted to.
At that point, I went all radical honesty in my relationships, because I never wanted to be responsible for someone else doing something they didn't like or want, just for my approval. And it made a mess of several years of my relationship with my wife, because we were both unhappy and unsatisfied, because I insisted that we be "honest" in this fashion.
Fortunately, we eventually came to our senses and decided to do something about it. Granted, it's only in recent years that we've had the technology that's allowed us both to start making the necessary changes in ourselves, not only so that we don't have to pretend, but also so that we don't care any more if the other person is "just doing that to make me happy".
Because, as it turns out, doing something to make someone else happy is actually a good thing, as long as the person is happy to be doing it. If I'm happy that she's happy, then she's happy I'm shopping with her. 'Nuff said.
Radical Honesty is a movement of its own. Interestingly one of the selling points seems to be success with women...
I'm afraid that's going to be a selling point of any movement that's marketing itself to men, irrespective of whether it's actually true.
There's an old Dave Barry column I'm trying to find which claimed that if you wanted to advertise to men, you must either show that your product will get them dates with bikini models, or that your product will save them time and money, which they will need, in order to date bikini models. He went on to say that given that the female mind is so much more complicated and nuanced than the male mind, you must convey a much more subtle message in order to advertise to women: you must tell them that, if they buy your product, they will be bikini models.
I saw that one in The Dilbert Principle. I don't know where Scott Adams got it from, though.
This approach conflates honesty with tactlessness.
I think you're being a little disingenuous... You say you really hate being lied to and you really want the kind of honesty where your husband would not lie to you about enjoying shopping but you also say that too much honesty is tactlessness. It almost sounds like you want complete honesty but only as long as it doesn't offend.
People tell white lies all the time. They generally do it because they are being 'tactful' - they would rather mislead than offend. There's nothing wrong with that, white lies are a social lubricant. A preference for honesty is fine, even admirable, but if you believe you have a way of being always honest without ever being tactless then I'd love to know it.
I consider tact to be about what topics one brings up and in certain decisions about how to phrase a truth. If you're talking about X, you can say all and only true things about X without being unnecessarily rude. If you're not already talking about X (or doing something that implicitly makes X the topic), and it's not something that's polite to bring up, there is no need to express truths about it; that isn't dishonesty, that's being appropriately topical.
If I were under a mistaken impression about a significant other's enjoyment of shopping (not that this would be likely to come up, since I don't care for shopping myself), that would be to no one's benefit. in a distant possible world where I go out and buy things recreationally, I would prefer to do so with people who actually share that interest and trust me enough to believe me when I say I want honesty. I am not a friendless loner; people who are friendless loners probably should look into that before they start hunting for romantic relationships anyway. If my significant other lied to me and said (s)he liked shopping, I'd take him/her along and be missing out on an opportunity to go shopping with someone who genuinely liked it instead.
All of these hypotheticals have the common thread of having her best interests at heart.
The objection Alicorn is making to the seduction community is that much of their technique is both dishonest and against the interests of the target. The goal is to get a woman really interested, sleep with her, then move on to the next woman, even knowing that this has a good chance of causing net suffering on the women involved. At least, that's what I understand her objection to be, and it's something I would also object to.
A comparable (though still imperfect) hypothetical would be that you go shopping with your wife because you know it will make her feel obligated to agree when you propose something that she really doesn't agree with and that imposes substantial cost or sacrifice on her. You're manipulating her with the principle goal of advancing your own interests at her expense. Having a moral objection to this seems quite understandable.
On the other hand, using techniques that have proven effective because it makes you better at breaking the ice, when you have reasonably good intentions, seems morally quite justifiable.
I appreciate your honesty.
Personally, I have to say that I get uncomfortable when I read or hear people discussing any sort of mind control techniques, whether they be the art of the pickup or the art of the sale, or even the art of the job interview. Why can't we just exchange information like cold mechanical robots and then make decisions only on the facts presented? Anything else strikes me as fraud.
But I appreciate that this is a personal flaw of mine, that this wish is impossible, and that I would not want it granted even if it could be. What makes human interaction interesting is our attempts to control each other's minds, and I don't see how you can eliminate salesmanship without eliminating those things we value about human relationships. We would be left in something along the lines of Eliezer's catgirl dystopia, where you would never need to fear someone else's influence because everyone else who was real had been safely sequestered where the two of you would never meet.
I disagree vehemently with this statement. I don't want other people to approve of me for my salesmanship. I'm working on systematically eradicating dishonesty, secrecy, manipulation, and other forms of "salesmanship" from my personal relationships. I'm quite sure that this is going to result in me having fewer personal relationships over time, but they seem to be of higher quality. Since I started this project, I have not lost any friends to whom I was already close and someone has fallen in love with me. I have not turned into a "cold mechanical robot". Among the things I am honest about are my emotions.
Another, purely pragmatic, trouble with personal salesmanship is that it confuses feedback. If you are being duplicitous in this way and someone disapproves of you, it could reflect either on your salesmanship or your actual characteristics and you don't know what to change if approval is your goal - and changing your sales pitch won't actually improve you for the better, which ought to be the real function of feedback. If I am honest and garner disapproval, I have the facts about what the disapproval was about and I can decide whether I value the disapproved characteristic over the potential approval or not.
If you are such a wonderful person that people will fall in love with you on their own accord, without being persuaded, then more power to you. Most human beings, myself definitely included, are not that lovable.
It's not hard to see why this should be the case, either. The world is full of people optimizing their relationships for being loved. A person who optimizes his relationships working under the constraint that he cannot influence his target's decision processes is at a severe disadvantage, and will need serious natural advantages to remain competitive.
I used to be a hopeless romantic. I credit/blame Eliezer's writing for changing that.
It's just the one person, and I'm not discounting the luck factor. But if no one would fall in love with me "of their own accord", I should not lie, cheat, and steal to get them to do it anyway. That not only isn't the kind of love I'm interested in achieving, it bears no resemblance to the kind of love I'm interested in achieving.
I am not an unusually wonderful person. I have a mixed bag of traits, and I happened on someone who isn't unduly bothered by my flaws and is remarkably enthralled with my positive characteristics - "honesty" among the latter. That is the way it's supposed to work; and if someone has so many flaws or so few positive traits that they can't find anyone who'll put up with them, the last thing they should do is add "manipulative liar" to the "flaw" column.
I think part of the reason women have a problem with the seduction community is because they have literally no idea what it is like to be a heterosexual male. Any girl within about 2 standard deviations of the mean of physical attractiveness will have been approached on numerous occasions by men who will introduce themselves and suggest further meetings. This tends to reinforce the belief that if you just 'be yourself' then someone out there will recognize you as a unique and special flower and fall for you. The truth is however that a guy who takes that attitude will never meet a woman, unless he's Brad Pitt or a rock star. The life experience of your average man and woman means that they will have great difficulty understanding each other since they literally live in different worlds.
I have a problem with the seduction community because it openly advocates treating women dishonestly.
Some schools are just as vehement about being absolutely, utterly, bluntly honest. But if you're a reporter, which parts of the community are you going to write a story about?
I'm going by the way people talk about it here; most hint darkly, and Sirducer who has spoken most openly has explicitly advocated dishonesty. I'm glad to know there's another side to it - I'd be interested to read more about that, if you have pointers.
False. False false false.
This applies only to women with a certain social attitude who frequent certain social situations. (I'm bi, and therefore qualified to judge whether the women I've met fall into the physical attractiveness range you specify.)
Look, I have some sympathy. There are some lingering cultural norms and an average sex drive to each gender that probably make things very difficult for heterosexual men to scratch their itches, for free, with women "within about 2 standard deviations", without resorting to either rape or the art of pickup. But you know what? Lots of people have desires they can't satisfy ethically. This isn't just the plight of straight men. It's the plight of physically unattractive or shy or cautious women; it's the plight of gay people in small towns; it's the plight of pedophiles and zoophiles and other people with unconscionable fetishes.
I have some sympathy, but I'm not going to ethically greenlight dishonesty so you can get what you want by exploiting the poor judgment of other members of my gender. I'm just not.
Incidentally, have you heard of the whole thing where "nice guys" are in love with their female friends and pine for them in long laments that they post on the Internet? It happens to girls, too. It is not the case that no one ever falls for a guy based on his personality. It's not even the case that no one ever falls for a basically average guy based on his personality. The difference is she probably doesn't say anything, and she might be a little farther south of the "mean of physical attractiveness" than the more shallow type of guy prefers.
It may have been a slight exaggeration to say that any girl within 2 sd of the mean will be approached but would you accept that overall women are much more likely to be approached by men than the other way around? I would think that's a fairly uncontroversial claim. I can't provide direct evidence for that if you doubt it but there is supporting evidence from studies of online dating. That paper found that the median number of first contacts for men was 0, the mean 2.3 and fully 56% of men received no first contacts. The figures for women were a median of 4, a mean of 11.4 and only 21% of women received no first contacts. My guess would be that real world first approaches are more heavily skewed than that because of the greater pressure of social convention in public situations that men should be the approachers.
Anyway, it would seem your main concern is the ethics of pick up. Specifically it seems to be dishonesty that concerns you. That brings us back to the original discussion of whether your image of the seduction community reflects reality. I think you've picked up on the most unethical/dishonest aspects and letting that blind you to the range of other approaches that fall under the general umbrella.
Dishonesty is not a requirement of pick up. Some people might advocate it but others will strongly advise against it. Neither is it the case that the main goal of pick up is a one night stand by whatever means necessary. Again, there are elements of the community that see that as the primary goal but they are probably in the minority. It's mostly about finding things that work to improve the chances of a positive interaction with women. It's up to the individual to decide whether any given technique is something they are ethically comfortable with and act accordingly.
I have to say, I went Googling for PUA next to words like "honesty" and "feminism" in the hope of finding a PUA community that was loud about ethical principles, and what I found was more exactly the opposite. What I read makes me want to press the work of sex-positive feminists like Susie Bright, Pat Califia, Carol Queen, Avedon Carol, or Greta Christina into the hands of everyone in the PUA community.
Over the course of human history, about twice as many women as men have been able to reproduce at all. How do you propose to end the inequality?
Even supposing the inequality needs to be ended, what makes you confident that it can be, ethically?
Inequalities are only bad if they deprive someone of a right. You don't have a right to sex that you don't provide yourself - no one does. You certainly don't have an absolute right to father children. No way in hell do you have that right.
Upvoting you doesn't seem like quite enough.
There needs to be a "this comment is strongly confirmed by my experiences" button
I bet if you squint a little, they would look a lot alike, actually.
Why do you think you're special? Why are you taking the inside view? Do you think humans in general don't want people to fall in love with them if they have to work on them to bring it about? This talk of "the way it is supposed to work" strikes me as irrational; you are looking at what "ought" to be, what you want to be, and ignoring what actually is.
I don't know what humans in general want, but I don't think I'm completely alone - an illustrative cartoon - in wanting affection that is genuine in the way I describe. But maybe I'm a rare specimen? If you're content to have relationships where you and others model each other on a web of carefully selected half-truths, I'm not exactly going to parasail in and demand that you stop like a spandex-clad vigilante for truth and transparency. You simply won't have anything, in having that relationship, that I have an inclination to value, promote, or normatively endorse.
Also, I don't see how the link is relevant. The article is about deadlines and cost estimates and there's nothing apparently applicable to this topic.
The article is about the dangers of considering yourself a rare specimen, the talk of deadlines and cost estimates is just for concreteness.
That's a really good cartoon, by the way, because it can make two people on the opposite sides of an argument each think it supports their own point. To me it seems like the construction of the third robot was just as wrongheaded as the first two, and that the scientist has a fundamental confusion about the nature of love stemming from romanticism. But clearly you see it differently.
I considered it illustrative not because of the third robot, but because of the second one. It had - ostensibly - freedom, but circumstances were manipulated by the scientist so it would love the scientist. The resulting love is not valuable. Seduction is a subtler circumstance manipulation than that, but otherwise similar-looking.
Why is it irrational to think that the ways things ought to be is different from the way they are?
It's not, of course. But you should be careful not to mix the two up and, for example, give romantic advice based on how you feel relationships ought to work.
I wasn't giving romantic advice. I was giving ethical advice, and my personal data point on why the ethical advice won't necessarily spell romantic doom.
It's not. What's irrational is to let your idea of the way things ought to be prevent you from acting in such a way as to achieve your desired goals given the way things actually are
And if one's goal is "have a relationship that meets criteria X", disregarding criteria X only serves to better attain the goal "have a relationship" which isn't what one actually wanted in the first place.
You seem to be making unwaranted assumptions about other people's goals.
Again, if you want to obtain the result of getting sex, learning how to manipulate people and not being afraid to lie in social interactions is a great way to get that result.
...and we come full circle to:
If your goal is to get sex and that's all, the ethical choices are to explicitly advertise this goal and find someone who shares it, or to take the solo route. As I said, I'm not offering practical advice for the morally indiscriminate pickup artist. I'm talking about ethics.
Are you interested in becoming more informed or is it just a topic you prefer not to touch? Both are valid positions but in the latter case the discussion is probably best ended here.
The blog I linked to in another comment is my dose-controlled information drip. If you want to offer a substitute that you think is more representative, I'd be interested in that. I don't care to spend a large block of time investigating the art of pickup.