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Xachariah comments on Instrumental rationality/self help resources - Less Wrong
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Would you recommend it to gay men and women?
Yes. It's not exclusively about picking up women, and from what I can recall the vast majority is about becoming an attractive person in general. Even the stuff about attracting women should generalize to women/gay men attracting straight/gay men.
I strongly disagree. I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone other than a straight man. It is definitely not catering to anyone else. A huge theme is that men and women feel attraction in drastically different ways and therefore need to pursue different strategies, so I expect that the majority of the advice would not transfer. And even if parts of it did, I'm not sure how you would go about identifying those parts. Lots of the general social skills and life attitudes might transfer, but again, not all of it, and it's heavily tied in with the themes of attracting women.
I would only watch it if you're looking for ways to spend your time and are interested in the subject of relationships / social dynamics.
I think you underestimate the value of the general lessons in instrumental rationality, personal development and healthy psychology that are conveyed and demonstrated. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in practical rationality. In fact, for males specifically interested in social dynamics I wouldn't necessarily recommend the blueprint decoded as a primary source. If anything it errs on the side of too general and abstract for that purpose.
I'm four hours in and I see what you mean by abstract. What would you recommend instead?
My exploration of that broad field of knowledge was never optimised specifically for the goal of pickup so I cannot confidently state which is the best. Someone more practically involved in that subculture would be able to give better information. An example of something much more on the practical side than Blueprint would be the notorious 'Mystery Method' resources. The downside is that it is highly specialised for a specific goal (pickup) in a specific kind of context. There are lessons that can be generalised but far fewer.
I would also suggest looking at the earlier material from the author of The Blueprint Decoded and his company. He had to establish himself with practical stuff before being able to indulge himself with sharing his Blueprint theories which are (purportedly) what excite him. David DeAngelo (Eban Pagan) took a similar path.
Many thanks!
I'm surprised by your reaction. You list only general benefits in social interaction and none yet in actual attraction, so I mostly asked my question, because you aimed the recommendation so specifically at straight men.
Do you think the improvements in social interaction you noticed are not big enough on their own to justify a recommendation, or do you think that anyone that is not a straight male would not get those same benefits out of it?
I think that if you're not a straight male you might not get the same benefits. You might get something, but it wouldn't be worth watching a twenty hour video series unless you have time to spare. It's sort of hard to explain why I feel this way. The best I can say is that the discussion and atmosphere is very man-centric, and even if some of the advice applies to women as well, it would be hard to have it hit on an emotional level, hard to differentiate between things that would and wouldn't apply to women, and hard to sit through all the discussion of nightclubs and getting laid to the relevant stuff.
Or, here's another angle. The program goes something like "women are primarily attracted to men who are assertive, independent, confident, and leaderlike - the 'alpha male'. Now I will spend hours upon hours talking about what this type of attractive man would do in a club. Okay, have you internalized this attitude yet? Surprise, you are now a little closer to becoming this independent, confident, leaderlike man, and this will help you in areas outside of women, as a nice bonus!" Can you see why this approach might not work for women?
If you still want to watch it, by all means download it and check out the first few hours for yourself, I might be wrong. But don't blame me if you don't find it useful. d:
EDIT: Apparently everyone disagrees with me, so maybe you should in fact go ahead and check it out. This is just my intuition, I guess.
It almost sounds like you must have watched a different movie series than I did. Or, perhaps, different parts felt salient to you than felt salient to me due to different pre-existing abstractions and intentions when watching. (Your testimony is useful to me.)
Well, there is that part at the beginning where he says "this program is like a secret code with many layers, each time you watch this you will find an entirely different message within", etc.
It depends on whom they are trying to attract. (I do like independent, confident, leaderlike women, but I guess the majority of men don't.)
I feel like the thing about leadership/dominance/confidence/assertiveness/independence is that it's a wholly desirable trait for men. If you have it, women will want to have sex with you, men will want to be your friend, and employers will want to hire you.
But women have to deal with the dual memeplexes of traditional patriarchy and modern-day feminism present in our culture. Having this trait is probably not strictly desirable for women - there are pros and cons, sometimes it'll come in handy, sometimes it'll put people off. (I imagine.)
I kind of assume that a well-rounded woman should both be able to show indipendence/confidence, and have the social skills of a good team-player and negotiator. If commonly reported anecdotes are any guide, these qualities are not really fostered by either of these memeplexes. Conservative/traditional social norms do little more than stunt women's confidence and assertiveness, but modern feminism does not really encourage them to be more assertive; it just makes them more rude and complaining, even in intimate contexts where this would otherwise be seen as highly inappropriate. Few people would describe an old curmudgeon as "independent", "assertive" and "confident", but somehow this description gets applied to women who do not behave in an appreciably different way.
What's most likely is that becoming "awesome" in this context requires learning a complex set of strategies, which can't be boiled down to any simple ideology. Men actually tend to face comparable issues, which is why you tend to see such a sharp divergence between "nice pushovers" and "naturally confident, overly aggressive jerks" - well-rounded personalities (i.e. not a pushover, but not inclined to physical aggression either) do exist, but they are comparatively rare. Some PUA practitioners have suggested that the women they approach can intuitively tell that they have such a conflation of good traits, and find it especially attractive.
I... really don't see why this would be true. This kind of sounds like something a misogynist would come up to justify their beliefs. (Not to imply that you're a misogynist, just that it feels to me like you might have absorbed a misogynist meme and forgotten to question it.)
In a way, being an asshole often comes from insecurity, and so can be a sign of lacking confidence/etc.. I sort of feel like the coolest, winning-est, most comfortable in their own skin dudes are probably also going to be some of the nicest.
But then of course there obviously also exist plenty of alpha male types who are assholes because they don't really care and can get away with it. In the end, I think niceness and confidence are mostly orthogonal traits.
Well, admittedly, I was going by reasonably widespread anecdotal evidence. You're right that this is something that could be used to make feminism look bad, but - speaking personally here - it struck me as the sort of thing that's quite likely to happen as a purely unintended consequence, with no bearing on the broader issue of feminism as a social or political movement.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to find more nuanced or evidence-based treatments of such issues, because things like feminism tend to have strong halo effects or ugh fields attached to them; most folks will think of them of "good things" or "bad things" altogether, but not many will "pull the ropes sideways" in order to improve overall outcomes in win-win ways.
The thing is, many insecure folks find that being more of an asshole is an eminently viable way of making up for their insecurity, since it gives them some situational confidence, or something which can substitute for it - hence they never bother to fix the more basic issue. I agree that some especially cool and confident guys are quite nice; they can afford to be, after all. But my worry is that this might be a rare occurrence.
The error seems to be overstatement of the degree to which those two traits are incompatible. The claim after the 'just' is true but does not (in theory or practice) exclude also encouraging more assertiveness. In fact, practicing being rude would likely result in more assertiveness via the mechanism of comfort zone expansion.
I think that mindslaver-like situations may be more frequent in real life than you think.
Thanks for explaining. I suspect I might be put off by it, based on the way you described it earlier and here, but if I might benefit from it I'd like to give it a chance. I would like to be more assertive, independent and confident, just not with the goal of attracting women. Based on this and the other responses I think I'll give it a shot.
I won't be able to get a hold of it now, but I'll check it out once I can.
The blueprint makes that distinction but it's wrong. Male attraction is isomorphic to female attraction. The blueprint simply doesn't look into what it takes to attract men, so it doesn't make any statements about male attraction other than the superficial.
Anecdotally, as I became more attractive to women I became more attractive to men too. Not in a gay way, they just wanted my approval more and listened more and wanted to be my friends more than before. I felt the same way about my PUA friends as well; I could tell that they were getting cooler and I just wanted to be around them more.
There's no doubt in my mind that the teachings work on men too.
This is interesting to me, what do you mean by this statement? For example, the blueprint says that men's attraction is more or less binary and relatively fixed, while a woman's is a highly dynamic sliding scale. Would you disagree with this idea?
Yes I disagree. The blueprint covers that both sexes attraction is value based. Women's attraction is dynamic because man's value is dynamic; man's attraction is static because women's value is static (looks based). I'd argue that women's value is static because they don't know how to hold intrinsic value and project that value to others aside from with their looks, just as 90% of men don't know how to do so either.
A repeated message in the blueprint is the idea that you'll become attractive towards women, sleep with a lot of attractive girls, then you'll find the one that you really want and use your blueprint skills maximize your chance to get her, then you'll settle down with the one when you're ready to exit the game. This is basically the promise that's made throughout. However, the one you really want isn't defined as the hottest girl, but the awesome girl that you want to be with more than anything. There's an implicit acknowledgement that traits other than physical attractiveness matter when men look at women.
My argument is that yes those traits matter, and yes they're the same traits that the blueprint teaches men to have.
I'm a straight, polyamorous, and financially successful man. And I say unto ye: Huh?!
whoops, misplaced a word. I've edited it.
One the one hand the argument is that a guy isn't attracted to the girl which whom he wants to be with more than anything because of looks (because she's the hottest) and one the other hand the argument is that male attraction is all about looks?
Correct. My point is that the Blueprint has conflicting messages about male attraction. It says one thing explicitly and very different thing implicitly.
I hold that the implicit teachings more closely match reality.
Fact is, the skills needed to attract her may be different than the skills needed to attract the typical total stranger in a night club (though some skills do transfer).
(See e.g. this about short-term vs long-term.)
I think it underestimates the differences within each gender compared to those between the genders. (Men are taller than women in average, but if I mean ‘tall people’ I don't say “men”, I say “tall people”.)