That guy's stuff has been said to have a shitload of mistrust, manipulation and misogyny which poisons reasonable everyday advice about getting along.

Check out the comments there on how this overall attitude to relationships that he (and other stereotypical PUA writers) present can be so nasty, despite some grains of common sense that it contains. Seriously, would you enjoy playing the part of a cynical, paranoid control freak with a person whom you want to be your life partner?

Comment author: [deleted] 23 July 2013 03:38:50PM * 7 points [-]

Athol's advice is useful, he does excellent work advising couples with very poor marriages. So far I have not encountered anything that is more unethical than any mainstream relationship advice. Indeed I think it less toxic than mainstream relationship advice.

As to misogyny, this is a bit awkward, I actually cite him as an example of a very much not woman hating red pill blogger. Call Roissy a misogynist, I will nod. Call Athol one and I will downgrade how bad misogyny is.

Comment author: pragmatist 23 July 2013 06:11:29PM * 2 points [-]

Athol's advice is useful, he does excellent work advising couples with very poor marriages.

Is there evidence that he is more successful at this than the typical "Blue Pill" marriage counselor/relationship expert? Even better would be evidence that he is more successful than the top tier of Blue Pill experts. I realize these are hard things to measure, and I don't expect to see scientific studies, but I'm wondering what you're basing your claim of his excellence on. Is it just testimonials? Personal experience?

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 24 July 2013 09:35:19AM 2 points [-]

I guess nobody measured Athol's counselling scientifically; we only have self-reports of people who say it helped them (on his web page), which is an obvious selection effect.

Maybe someone measured Blue Pill counselling. I would be curious about the results. For starters, whether it is better or worse than no counselling. (I don't have any data on this, not even the positive self-reports, but that's mostly a fact about my ignorance.)

Comment author: Multiheaded 23 July 2013 05:40:52PM -2 points [-]

Oh, he is not a misogynist, all right, I just said that he frames his stuff in language that's widely used and abused by misogynists. Geeks can't appreciate how important proper connotations are in all social matters! We've talked about that before! The comments I linked to say as much; that might be some decent advice, but why frame it like that?

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 24 July 2013 10:16:41AM 7 points [-]

he frames his stuff in language that's widely used and abused by misogynists

He is reclaiming the language! (Half-seriously.)

Look, there are some unsympathetic people everywhere. "Red Pill" people have Roissy. Feminists had Solanas. Comparing these two, at least Roissy didn't try to kill anyone, nor does he recommend killing, so let's cut him some slack. The difference is that Roissy is popular now, Solanas is mostly forgotten. Well, ten years later maybe nobody will know about Roissy, if the more sane people become more popular than him and the ideas will enter the mainstream. Try to silence Athol Kay, and then all you have left are the Roissys. Because the idea is already out there and it's not going to disappear; it fits many people's experiences too well. (For example myself.)

Connotations of ideas are a matter of political power. If you have the power, you can create positive connotations for your keywords and negative connotations for your opponents' keywords. You can make your ideas mainstream, and for many people mainstream equals good. Currently, feminism has the power, so it has the power to create the connotations. And it has the power to demonize its opponents. And you are exercising this power right now. (You take a boo word "misogynist" and associate it with someone, and you have a socially valid argumentum ad hominem. If I tried to do the same thing using the word "misandrist", I wouldn't get anywhere, because people are not conditioned about that word, so they would just laugh at that kind of argument.)

Someone else could try to tell the same advice, avoiding to use the sensitive words. Which means that for many words he would simply have to invent synonyms. Which would be academically dishonest, because it is a way to use someone's research without giving them credit. But it would be technically possible. Maybe even successful. The question is whether other people would not connect the old words with the new words. Some words, like the "Red Pill" are not necessary. With some other words, the offensive part is the concept (for example that female attraction is predictable, and this is how specifically it works).

Fun fact: There is a RedPillWomen group on Reddit. Are those women misogynists too? (Here is a thread about hating women and their choices, here is a thread about feminism versus the Red Pill.)

Comment author: Multiheaded 24 July 2013 03:47:12PM * 1 point [-]

Fun fact: There is a RedPillWomen group on Reddit. Are those women misogynists too?

No shit, Sherlock. Internalized sexism exists. Luckily, one lady who just wanted "traditional gender roles" in her relationship, and less of the fucked-in-the-headedness, has escaped that goddamn cesspool and reported her experience:
http://www.reddit.com/r/TheBluePill/comments/1hh5z5/changed_my_view/

Also:
http://www.reddit.com/r/TheBluePill/comments/1gapim/trp_why_i_actually_believed_this_shit_for_a_month/

Comment author: [deleted] 17 July 2013 07:47:20PM * 6 points [-]

I disagree that his outlook is toxic. He uses a realistic model of the people involved and recommends advice that would achieve what you want under that model. He repeatedly states that it is a mistake to make negative moral judgement of your partner just because they are predictable in certain ways. His advice is never about manipulation, instead being win-win improvements that your partner would also endorse if they were aware of all the details, and he suggests that they should be made aware of such details.

I see nothing to be outraged about, except that things didn't turn out to actually be how we previously imagined it. In any case, that's not his fault, and he does an admirable job of recommending ethical relationship advice in a world where people are actually physical machines that react in predictable ways to stimuli.

Seriously, would you enjoy playing the part of a cynical, paranoid control freak with a person whom you want to be your life partner?

Drop the adjectives. I strive to be self-aware, and to act in the way that works best (in the sense of happiness, satisfaction, and all the other things we care about) for me and my wife, given my best model of the situation.

I do occasionally use his advice with my wife, and she is fully aware of it, and very much appreciates it when I do. We really don't care what a bunch of naive leftists on the internet think of how we model and do things.

Someone asked for rational relationship advice, an IMO, Athol's advice is right on the money for that. Keep your politics out of it please.

Comment author: bogus comment score below threshold [+] (37 children)

Comment author: [deleted] 17 July 2013 08:05:46PM * 7 points [-]

Serious damage to who? Idiots who fail to adopt his advice because he calls it a name that is associated with other (even good) ideas that other idiots happen to be attracted to? That's a tragedy, of course, but it hardly seems pressing.

Seems to me that people should be able to judge ideas on their quality, not on which "team" is tangentially associated with them. Maybe that's asking too much, though, and writers should just assume the readers are morally retarded, like you suggest.

Comment author: bogus 17 July 2013 08:36:23PM -1 points [-]

Maybe that's asking too much, though, and writers should just assume the readers are morally retarded, like you suggest.

You're not familiar with the whole "Red Pill" meme cluster/subculture, I take it? It strongly promotes misanthropic attitudes which most people would consider morally wrong, and it selects for these attitudes in its adherents.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 July 2013 02:28:41AM 7 points [-]

I'm somewhat familiar. My impression is that the steelman version of it is a blanket label for views that reject the controversial empirical and philosophical claims of the left-wing mainstream:

Everyone is cognitively equal across race and sex and such
Cognition and desire are not embodied in predictable biology
Blank slate atomic agent model of relationships and such
(Various conspiracy theories)
democracy is awesome
etc.

Pointing out that an idea has stupid people who believe it is not really a good argument against that idea. Hitler was a vegetarian and a eugenicist, but those ideas are still OK.

It selects for these attitudes in its adherents

So?

Here's why that's true: "Red Pill" covers empirical revisionism of mainstream leftism. What kind of people do you expect to be attracted to such a label without considering which ideas are correct? I would expect bitter social outcasts, people who fail to ideologically conform, a few unapologetic intellectuals, and people who reject leftism for other reasons.

Then how are those people going to appear to someone who is "blue pilled" (ie reasonable mainstream progressive) for lack of a better word? They are going to appear like the enemy. The observer has been brought up with the assumption that anyone who disagrees on point X Y and Z are evil. Along comes a label that covers exactly disagreement with the mainstream on X Y and Z, so of course the people who identify with that label are going to appear evil.

Note that I've offered a plausible explanation for the existence of idiots and jerks in the red-pill cluster, and their appearance of evil without reference to the factual or moral accuracy of the "red-pill" claims. Your impressions are orthogonal to the facts.

Now of course, by the selection effect you mention and I explain, the "red pill" space is going to be actually filled with idiots and evil people, who will tend to influence things a lot. But I'm from 4chan, so I have the nasty habit of filtering out the background noise of idiots and evil to find the good stuff, and the "red-pill" space has a lot of good stuff in it, once you start ignoring the misogynists, conspiracy theorists, misanthropes, and antisocial idiots.

Comment author: gothgirl420666 18 July 2013 05:01:20AM 12 points [-]

I've been reading a lot of red pill stuff lately (while currently remaining agnostic), and my impression is that most of the prominent "red pill" writers are in fact really nasty. They seem to revel in how offensive their beliefs are to the general public and crank it up to eleven just to cause a reaction. Roissy is an obvious example. About one third of his posts don't even have any point, they're just him ranting about how much he hates fat women. Moldbug bafflingly decides to call black people "Negroes" (while offering some weird historical justification for doing so). Regardless of the actual truth of the red pill movement's literal beliefs, I think they bring most of their misanthropic, hateful reputation on themselves.

I haven't read Athol Kay, so I don't know what his deal is.

Comment author: bogus 18 July 2013 05:37:02AM 4 points [-]

Moldbug bafflingly decides to call black people "Negroes" (while offering some weird historical justification for doing so). ...

It's not that baffling if you know where Moldbug's ideas come from. Since he is effectively restating the ideas of Thomas Carlyle and other 19th century conservatives (admittedly in modernized terms), it's quite fitting in a way that he should lift some of their lexicon as well.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 July 2013 05:58:57AM * 3 points [-]

Moldbug bafflingly decides to call black people "Negroes" (while offering some weird historical justification for doing so).

What is baffling to me is that it is ok to call black people black people. Both terms amount to labelling a race based on the same exaggerated description of a visible difference and in general requiring latin use is higher status than common English words. Prior to specific (foreign) cultural exposure I would expect "black people" to be an offensive label and so avoid it.

Comment author: gothgirl420666 18 July 2013 06:05:28AM * 5 points [-]

The euphemism treadmill is basically arbitrary most of the time. For example, "people of color" is very PC right now, but "colored people" is considered KKK-language. It is what it is.

Also black people is a kind of strange term. Pretty much all black people are okay with it, but a lot of white people are weirdly afraid of saying it, especially in formal settings.

continue this thread »

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 July 2013 12:00:09PM 1 point [-]

Language can be pretty arbitrary. It's not as though science fiction reliably has any science in it, even fake science.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 19 July 2013 01:39:08PM 3 points [-]

Isn't a similar dynamic involved anywhere where people are developing an idea that offensively contradicts the belief of a majority?

We could similarly ask why are some atheists so agressive, and whether it wouldn't be better for others to avoid using the "atheist" label to avoid the association with these people, otherwise they deserve all the religious backlash.

There are two strategies to become widely popular: say exactly the mainstream thing, or say the most shocking thing. The former strategy cannot be used if you want to argue against the mainstream opinion. Therefore the most famous writers of non-mainstream opinions will be the shocking ones. Not because the idea is necessarily shocking, but because of a selection effect -- if you have a non-mainstream idea and you are not shocking, you will not become popular worldwide.

I may sometimes disagree with how Richard Dawkins chooses his words, but avoiding the succesful "atheist" label would be a losing strategy. I disagree with a lot of what Roissy says, but "red pill" is a successful meme, and he is not the only one using it.

There are words which have both positive and negative connotations to different people. To insist that the negative connotation is the true one often simply means that the person dislikes the idea (otherwise they would be more likely to insist that the positive connotation is the true one).

Comment author: bogus 19 July 2013 06:55:39PM * 1 point [-]

Isn't a similar dynamic involved anywhere where people are developing an idea that offensively contradicts the belief of a majority?

This looks like begging the question to me. Whether an idea offensively contradicts mainstream beliefs has a lot to do with the connotations that happen to be associated with it. Lots of reasonably popular ideas contradict mainstream beliefs, but are not especially offensive. Obviously, once an idea becomes popular enough to be part of the mainstream, this whole distinction no longer makes sense.

We could similarly ask why are some atheists so agressive, and whether it wouldn't be better for others to avoid using the "atheist" label to avoid the association with these people ...

Indeed, this explains why many non-theistic people steadfastly refuse to self-identify as atheists (some of them may call themselves agnostics or non-believers). It also partially explains why the movements "Atheism Plus" and "Atheism 2.0" have started gaining currency.

Similarly, any useful and non-offensive content of "red pill" beliefs may be easily found and developed under other labels, such as "seduction community", "game"/"PUA", "ev psych" and the like.

Therefore the most famous writers of non-mainstream opinions will be the shocking ones.

It's not clear why we should care whether a writer of non-mainstream opinions is famous especially when such fame correlates poorly with truth-seeking and/or the opinions are gratuitously made socially unpopular for the sake of "controversy".

There are words which have both positive and negative connotations to different people.

Serious question, name a positive connotation of "The Red Pill" - which is not shared by "Game"/"PUA"/"seduction community" or "ev psych".

continue this thread »

Comment author: gothgirl420666 19 July 2013 06:12:46PM 0 points [-]

I'm not necessarily disagreeing that the red pill writers are pursuing an effective strategy in disseminating their beliefs. To be honest, I can see it either way. On the one hand, offending people gets them to notice you, and emotionally charged arguments are more interesting. On the other hand, some of the rhetoric might needlessly alienate people, and to a certain extent it can discredit the ideas (e.g. someone recommends Athol Kay, someone says "isn't he one of those red pill guys? I saw Roissy's blog and it was appalling, no way I can listen to one of them"). I definitely don't think that being deliberately offensive is literally the only way to spread a contrarian belief.

But I don't think the red pill movement should be able to have their cake and eat it too. You can't deliberately make your writing as offensive and obnoxious as possible in order to try to get it to spread, and then turn around and say "People are offended? This just shows that anyone who doesn't think like the mainstream becomes a public enemy!"

continue this thread »

Comment author: bogus 18 July 2013 03:07:39AM * 1 point [-]

My impression is that the steelman version of it ...

ALERT. Fully General Counterargument detected in line 1.

Seriously, how many people would actually refer to thoughtful critique and even rejection of mainstream views as "Red Pill" material? Basically nobody would, unless they are already committed to the "Red Pill" identity for unrelated reasons. That's just not what Red Pill means in the first place.

And yes, the 'Red Pill' thing attracts jerks and losers, but that's the least of its problems. A very real issue is that this ensures that ideas in the Red Pill space achieve memetic success not by their practical usefulness or adherence to truth-seeking best practices, but by shocking value and being most acceptable or even agreeable to jerks and losers.

Yes, you can go looking for diamonds in the mud: there's nothing wrong with that and sometimes it works. But that does not require you, or anyone else, to provide enablement to such a deeply toxic and ethically problematic subculture.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 July 2013 03:53:11AM * 6 points [-]

Seriously, how many people would actually refer to thoughtful critique and even rejection of mainstream views as "Red Pill" material?

Mencius Moldbug
Athol Kay
High quality PUA
etc.

Arguing about what a term means is bound to go nowhere, but in my experience, "red pill" has been associated with useful and interesting ideas. Maybe that's just me and my experience isn't valid though.

I don't think it's fair to characterize an entire space of ideas by it's strawest members (shock-value seeking "edgy" losers). I could use that technique to dismiss any given space of ideas. See for example Yvain's analysis of how mainstream ideas migrate to crazytown by runaway signalling games.

I think there is a high proportion of valuable ideas in the part of "redpillspace" that I've been exposed to. Maybe we are looking at different things that happen to be called the same name, though.

But based on your terminology and attitude here, I think you are cultivating hatred and negativity, which is harmful IMO. In general, I think it is much better to actively look for the good aspects of things and try to like more things rather than casting judgement and being outraged at more things.

ALERT. Fully General Counterargument detected in line 1.

Correct, I attempt to see the good parts of things and ignore the crud with full generality.

Comment author: bogus 18 July 2013 04:36:33AM * 0 points [-]

Mencius Moldbug

This is beside the point, IMHO; Moldbug's references to "taking the red pill" are well explained by his peculiar writing style. I think they are mostly unrelated to how Athol Kay, reddit!TheRedPill and others use the term. OTOH, Multiheaded's comment upthread provides proof that Kay's views are genuinely problematic, in a way that's closely related and explained by his involvement in TheRedPill meme cluster. For the time being, I make no claim one way or the other about other "high quality PUAs".

Do also note that I really am criticizing a subculture and meme cluster here. AIUI, this has nothing to do with idea spaces in a more general sense, or even factual claims about the real world. Again, connotations and attitudes are what's most relevant here. Moreover, I'm not sure what gave you the feeling that I am "cultivating hatred and negativity", of all things. While it's quite true that I am genuinely concerned about this subculture, because of... well, you said it already, the real issue here is Kay's providing enablement to it, with the attendant bad effects. (Of course, this may also apply to other self-styled PUAs).

continue this thread »

Comment author: David_Gerard 17 July 2013 11:22:31PM 1 point [-]

The Red Pill on Reddit. Is this the one you're talking about?

Comment author: bogus comment score below threshold [+] (3 children)

Comment author: kgalias 17 July 2013 10:16:02PM 4 points [-]

Can you point to some less blatantly biased commentary?

Comment author: bogus 17 July 2013 07:25:39PM * 3 points [-]

This might seem surprising, but I broadly agree with this assessment, except that I can't tell what "stereotypical PUA writers" might mean in this context. The "Red Pill" is a very distinctive subculture which is characterized by wallowing in misogynistic - and most often, just plain misanthropic - attitude!cynicism (I'm using Robin Hanson's "meta-cynical" taxonomy of cynicism here) about gender relations, relationships and the like. Its memes may be inspired by mainstream PUA and ev-psych, but - make no mistake here - it's absolutely poisonous if you share the mainstream PUA goal of long-term self-improvement in such matters.

nyan_sandwich comments on Open thread, July 16-22, 2013 - Less Wrong

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