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MrMind comments on Optimizing for attractiveness - Less Wrong
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Eliezer, I'm trying to lose fat to increase my attractiveness, but I've read on this site that you already have four girlfriends in a polyamorous relationship. Is that true? If it is, how did you achieve that without losing weight? I'm assuming of course that you are overweight given your interest in diets, I've not seen a picture of you.
If I already had 4 girlfriends, to hell with fat. I would just concentrate on staying healthy.
Anyway, if after careful and extended research it would come out that liposuction is the only way to lose fat, and losing fat is a prerequisite for attracting girls, then I would do that, if there were no unreasonable risks.
High status, enough fame to broadcast across many possibilities, and sufficiently good Harry Potter fanfiction to convey a sense of my personality. (If you like HJPEV's personality you will probably like mine, though we are not the same person.) Currently down to 2 local and 1 East Coast girlfriend, btw. This pathway is not tremendously duplicable, but it was easier for me than learning to dress well or studying light-side pickup because I needed to do the work for other reasons anyway.
Fat is a problem for me because of how it affects things like sleep, and energy during daily work - having your fat cells suck out all the glucose you need is not helpful. If you can lose weight, you should obviously do so. If you haven't yet tried low-carb and Shangri-La, both seem relatively obvious things to attempt; the first seems to have a high success rate and the second is very easy. It's the people telling you to buckle down and use willpower who should be ignored - I know of exactly one case of that working, all other cases of weight loss in my personal experience did not involve what I would consider to be significant willpower.
Some years back, I believe you said that working on FAI was too important to leave time for a girlfriend. How has that worked out? Have you found that romantic entanglements detract from your work, or enhance it?
"I ran out of ability to not have a girlfriend" would be the real answer. Some labor complementarity, some time costs, doesn't matter much from my perspective because I ran out of ability not to have a girlfriend. I don't regret the dedicated labor I put in up until that point, back when being alone didn't seem like much of a problem.
No time for hedonism except exactly enough to maintain the meat.
Huh, I see. May I ask you if those girls just proposed them to you, or did you actively searched and seduced them? I understand that's a fairly personal question, I'm just trying to understand if I can copy a portion of your behaviour.
Poor Eliezer :p
Yes, I've read HPMOR up to chapter eighty-something and I really liked it, maybe one day you should tell other people who want to start writing how to do it correctly.
I will certainly try, with even more focus. But I doubt Shangri-la can work for people who have been overweight for a long time, their leptin loop is far too off-track to be changed by such weak stimuli. I don't remember where but I've read that hypothalamus can develop leptin resistance.
I brute-forced the other side of the problem (status/fame/impression) hard enough that I never learned to search and seduce. Sometimes contemplating this makes me feel very lazy, but heck, brute-forcing the other side of that took a lot of work. It was not the minimum-effort pathway if that had actually been the primary goal.
I was overweight for a long time before I lost 20 pounds on Shangri-la, after which it never worked again, but they were a nice 20 pounds to lose.
Oh no! Eliezer no longer has one girlfriend for each of the Harry Potter houses. I wonder which one he is missing.
Some women prefer overweight men, and some don't mind dating overweight men. If I'm honest I'm more likely to be attracted to slimmer men (certainly most of the men I've dated are slimmer), however I have been attracted to fat guys in the past, if they have other attractive qualities (being smart, amusing, relaxed about sex, for instance).
You are one of the few commenters who indeed didn't suggest to lose weight. Based on your experience, what would you suggest a fat guy should concentrate on if he wanted to result attractive?
I think concentrating on improving social skills and learning to dress better are important. Regarding social skills, if you suffer from social anxiety, CBT, mindfulness and antidepressants work well. Apart from that, I don't really know, as my social skills improved without a great deal of effort, but good self help advice is probably the way to go. I also don't know a great deal about men's fashion, but googling "how to dress for overweight men" brings up lots of results. A word of caution though - after getting internet fashion advice check how things look with a friend!
I think losing weight is also good idea, but you may not be able to lose it sustainably, so doing other things as well is important. Recently, I've wanted to look better. I am going to try to lose weight (I don't have a great deal to lose, but I'd look better if I dropped a few kilos), but the first thing I did was buy some new clothes and get a new haircut.
At the moment I cannot really assess my social skills, but I don't think I'm terribly anxious. If my plans come to fruition, I'll have a good environment where to practice socializing. Although I suspect that amiably chatting with girls won't bring me the results I'm searching for :)