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Yvain comments on Instrumental vs. Epistemic -- A Bardic Perspective - Less Wrong
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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.