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NancyLebovitz comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong
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I'm copying this comment from the PUA discussion because that post is being downvoted to oblivion and I don't want this comment to get lost.
PUA and Last Minute Resistance: I have no idea why PUA gets its bad reputation from negging when something like this was easy to find "Distract her thoughts with banter: It’s very simple to distract her logical mind… just don’t answer questions, deflect them. If she says “Where do you live” say “Oh, it’s like 5 minutes away”. Keep the conversation flowing and she will be fine."
This one has an explicit "no means no", but a strong recommendation to distract her from anything short of an emphatic no.
This one is interesting-- it puts seduction in the category of salesmanship, and has some clue about why being manipulated isn't fun.
I recommend Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser to give some idea of the range of thought and technique in the PUA communities. Chapter 3 covers PUA and Last Minute Resistance, and is an excellent description of how to not pressure people into behavior they don't want. Key points: withdrawing from connection counts as pressure. If you respect the person and they need time to process what's going on, give them that time.
The LMR stuff is pretty ethically backward.
It also strikes me as really counterproductive for the stated PUA goals of social success and having lots of fun. I guess there are those who just want to maximize the number of women they can say they've slept with. But to me it just sounds like a recipe for rushed, communication free, one-time-only sex-- which is to say really bad sex. Not to mention it reeks of the ego-obsessed neediness PUAs generally suggest rejecting.
Regarding parallels between seduction and salesmanship, there is a recent interesting post on Overcoming Bias about the asymmetry between the behavior of buyers and sellers in a trade transaction: buyers tend to take a cautious, passive role, while sellers take an active, persuasive role.
I think that Hanson's signalling explanaition is wrong, but he is right to notice that this behavioral asymmetry exists.
My explanation is that this phenomenon is caused by information asymmetry: in a typical transaction, the seller has usually less uncertainty about the utility that they will get from the transaction than the buyer, since while both parties can evaluate the utility of money, the seller has usually better information about the object being sold than the buyer has.
Therefore, it makes sense for the risk averse buyer to adopt a cautious stance, creating incentive for the seller try to persuade them.
The more information asymmetry exists in a markert, the more manipulative pressure sales techniques we observe: used car salesmen get their reputation from the fact that the used car market is indeed a textbook example of high information asymmetry market.
Back to the seduction scene, it might make sense that in a typical club pickup scenario, men have less uncertainty about the utility of an encounter than women do: a man looking for a one-night stand may only care about (generalized) looks, which are easy to evaluate, while even a women looking for casual sex might be seeking for status, which is difficult to evaluate in strangers you just met, or she might be taking into account the risks of being raped, robbed or otherwise abused, or she might be unconsciously considering the risk of an unwanted pregnancy.
If that's the case, it might be explain why women tend to take a cautious passive role while men take a persuasive role, and may even resort to salemanship-like techniques.
Disclaimer: My knowledge of PUA comes mostly from third party accounts. I've rarely read their own material or seen a self-described PUA in action, and I've never tried to implement their techniques myself, so my views on PUA might be inaccurate.
I'm under the impression that both advocates and critics tend to exagerate PUA:
I mean, if you are a normally attractive, or maybe even a slightly lower-than-average attractive man, and you go to clubs where sexually available women go searching for mates, and you approach a lot of these women, then provided you don't do something terribly stupid or awkward, you have good chances of getting laid.
Practice will further increase your chances, but I suppose it's mostly a matter of learning how to quickly filter out unresponsive women and move to the next target, rather than applying some arcane forbidden mind control tricks.
I'm inclined to believe that most of the controversial stuff like "negging" or NLP is likely overrated, at least until proven effective by proper scientific evidence.
Sure, there may be lots of guys using them and getting laid, so they may genuinely believe that they've mastered the dark arts of mind manipulation, while in fact the women they score might be clearly seeing through their tactics and choose to go along with them because, hey, these women want to have sex!
Similarly, those who criticize PUA on the grounds that it's dishonestly manipulative might be underestimating the decisonal autonomy of the women that choose to sleep with these men.
I suppose there are also extreme cases of men who clearly break social rules and even laws in order to have sex, such as targeting severely intoxicated or mentally disabled women, or completely misrepresenting themselves to the point of legal fraud and identity theft, but I assume that these sociopathic behaviors are not typical of most PUAs.
Above-average attractiveness, 12 years of college parties, 2 years in a fraternity, attended hundreds of parties, bars, and clubs, threw about a dozen parties myself, spoke to thousands of women. Did not hook up once in that manner, even with women who obviously wanted to hook up with me. There is some secret courting dance the male must do at that point, and I don't know it.
I once threw a party and invited only random strangers, where every single person who attended hooked up with another stranger, except me and my co-host. We left 2 dozen strangers silently locking jaws in pairs in our apartment and went to another party.
After that, took up bodybuilding for a couple of years, and in the second year found it easy to pick up women without ever going to those places.
At least it makes a good story.
Anyhow, I suspect the secret courting dance involves desperation and lots of awkwardness your first time. Pretty much everything unspoken does.
Above-average or above-median? The latter doesn't imply the former, as the distribution of male attractiveness is skewed to the right. (I'm asking mostly because of your last paragraph.)
Me neither. :-( Well, I might have figured it out recently, but I haven't met anyone who obviously wanted to hook up with me since.
(Fun fact: a couple of times when I was in Ireland, I would approach nearly every single woman in the club and the only one who wouldn't turn me down within minutes and I would end up making out with was the one who had approached me first. Then she would tell me that she had a boyfriend, or give me a fake number, and leave.)
I meant above median. But the graph you link to is skewed heavily to the left. Looks like women think something like 15% of men are above-medium attractiveness. I'm probably not on the right-hand side of that graph.
I constructed a graph of the distribution of number of sexual partners from a large dataset. I expected that most women were having sex with a small # of guys. This is true, but it's also true, to almost as great a degree, that most men are having sex with a small number of women.
You're using the term backwards. (I looked it up before posting my comment, and have just done so again.)
Where did you get your dataset?
At clubs?
Ok, obviously there are some men ("non-neurotypical") which find this part difficult. But my point is that the "secret courting dance" is not some mind manipulation dark ritual.
Maybe you should have considered inviting more women than men :D
I'm assuming the two of you weren't attracted to each other (possibly due to being heterosexual people of the same gender), right? :-)
Among the kind of people who read Less Wrong, that's bigger “if” than you might realize.
Now I don't know what exactly typical readers of PUA material are like, but few of the people in the audience of the RSD seminars I've watched looked like your average jock either. So, I'm under the impression that PUAs are mostly just systematizing stuff that more neurotypical guys just implement in System 1, the way that if you've just started learning a language it can be useful to explicitly study grammatical features that native speakers don't usually consciously think about.
That's why included the clause, "provided you don't do something terribly stupid or awkward", and I should add that "awkward" includes failing to send or to respond to non-verbal cues, or generally failing to adhere to normally innate courtship patterns.
I don't deny that there are people which have difficulties with that, but my point is that these courtship patterns are not ridiculously effective mind control techniques, as both PUA advocates and critics often claim.
As I said my knowledge of the matter is superficial, but every time I visited some PUA website, including this RSD thing I've just googled, they all looked quite scammy: they are all about some self-proclaimed seduction guru who keeps bragging about his seemingly super-human seductive prowess (completely unfalsifiable, of course) and would happily share his dark secrets with you, for a price.
They all want to sell you their books, DVDs, live courses, etc. Seriously, this RSD group you mentioned offers three-day bootcamps for $2,000 - $2,500. That's one-tenth of the annual tuition for a private US college, and they charge it for three days!
Compare to the amount of high-quality, reliable, valuable information you can find for free online on any kind of technical topic, and you'll see why I think PUA smells fishy.
I'm inclined to think that if there is anything dishonest about the PUA movement, it's not the sexual hypnosis of innocent women, it's rather the scamming of gullible, sexually deprived men.
That's less than a CFAR workshop! ;-)
How costly is the average divorce in USA? If "the Game" reduces the chance of a marriage followed by a divorce by 1%, was it worth it?
How much money does an average nerd spend on dating before he gets laid? Is the price of getting 1 sexual patner higher or lower after the RSD seminar?
Prices are sometimes high or low depending on the context you put them in...
How confident ought I be that "the Game" will reduce my chances of an eventual $200,000 divorce by 1%?
Of the supporters of PUA I've read, they break down into two groups - single men and married women. (Married men don't seem to write about PUA, although given that married women do, presumably there are some who have picked up its ideas and simply don't add to the discussion.)
So apparently a lot of women appreciate being "Gamed" in long-term relationships as well, and appreciate the changes in attitude from guys who switch to it. No idea about the statistics. "Alpha attitudes" preclude jealousy, dependency, and insecurity, all attitudes which tend to be destructive. There seem to be a lot of threads on PUA forums about how to maintain a facade of confidence and security going into a LTR. Heh. The major failing point of PUA - it more frequently teaches guys how to pretend to be confident, independent and secure in themselves than how to -be- confident, independent and secure in themselves. For some people, that's enough; they become what they see themselves as. For others, not so much.
Some aspects of it have been useful in my personal life - simply recognizing that neediness was an unattractive element. I had previously expected, incorrectly, that women wanted to be needed. Distinguishing neediness from desire was helpful.
So there are some elements there that are helpful. Unfortunately, Sturgeon's Law applies.
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes this is explicitly mentioned; it's called "inner Game".
Absolutely.
I agree, but Viliam_Bur raised that particular hypothetical, so I was curious as to his estimate of its likelihood.
ETA: note that "useful skills for establishing and maintaining long-term relationships" is presumably beside the point, though. That is, if "the Game" makes its practitioners more likely to never have a long-term relationship they will thereby also be made less likely to have a $200,000 divorce.
An experiment with a control group is indeed needed. And yes, it should both evaluate the probability of a divorce per participant, and per married participant.
My estimate... well, it would depend on how much of the Game one knew "naturally" before the seminar. It probably wouldn't work for both extremes -- probably even more for the extreme that couldn't ever get married (and therefore divorced) without the training. :D
For an average person, I would guess that taking the "red pill" does decrease the probability of a divorce by maybe 5%... but I have nothing to support this guess.
OK, thanks.
I'm under the impression that the book The Game itself explicitly laments that PUAs aren't good at that. (OTOH, there's no point in learning how to maintain a relationship if you don't even know how to establish one in the first place, so it can still be useful. Not to avoid divorce, though.)
I've seen Game/PUA blogs that discuss applications of Game to maintaining relationships.
Yes (see OrphanWilde's comment), but OTOH V_V did say “mostly”.
False alert. That is not Pascal's Mugging.
Probability theory rejects your social rule. It will not play favorites for you for any reason.
Either you are using the word 'evidence' incorrectly or you haven't looked. Consider replacing 'no' with 'insufficient' in order to make your claim plausible.
You may or may not find a rip of those DVDs for free online, if you know where to look. ;-)
(I agree that they're way overpriced -- but they're nowhere as bad as you'd guess from the advertising.)
My point is that if most detailed information about a subject is legally non-free, the prices are high, and there is no independent verification, the chances of the whole market being largely fraudolent are high.
I suppose they are a bit of common sense and lots of nonsense. It could have some placebo effect, but so does homeopathy.
Anyway. The Blueprint Decoded has been recommended by quite a few LWers (from googling I can find this and this, but I'm pretty sure there were more) though I'm under the impression that very little of PUA in general is that good.
The Blueprint Decoded.
I add my recommendation of that product... even to those not particularly interested in dating. As a pop-psychology and personal development product it is excellent. In fact it is sufficiently non-specialised that I would recommend those specifically interested in maximising their PUA success to also seek out a more tactical and less identity-based guide to complement it.
Fixed.
If I copied and pasted that, that might explain why I got so few search results... [tries] Apparently not.
Others have already commented about The Blueprint Decoded.
Foundations seemed to me to be lots of common sense and a bit of nonsense¹: it's mostly stuff that I'd guess most anywhere-near neurotypical people already know on some level. Of course, Egan's Law must apply, so it's not surprising that what PUAs teach isn't that different from what sexually successful non-PUAs already do.
Transformations is essentially the life stories of a bunch of guys who used to be unsuccessful with women and then started doing PUA. It may be helpful for certain people due to this effect, but then again I'd rather read Feynman's biography again. (I stopped watching it halfway through it.)
The books and DVDs thing is a problem, yes. AIUI, it is quite possible to find high quality free information, but it takes some looking around.
As for the bootcamps; these are some of the highest-profile events in the PUA community. Also, assuming that they actually work with reasonable probability and also generalize to a sustained improvement in social skills, economic/monetary returns for the participants might suffice to justify a significant fraction of that cost.
That's a big assumption given the lack of independent verification.