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army1987 comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong
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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.