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Prismattic comments on Open thread, July 29-August 4, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Ugh. I am generally in the unsympathetic-to-PUA thinking camp, so I offer the following not to bring up a controversial subject again, but because I think publicly acknowledging when one encounters inconvenient evidence for one's priors is a healthy habit to be in...
Recently I added the following (truthful) text to my OkCupid! profile:
Having noted that I am a)unavailable and b)getting lots of competing offers, a high status combination, the result is... in three days, the number of women rating my profile highly has gone from 61 to 113.
There is this competing hypothesis, that the women upvoted you for being honest with them, or for being faithful to the lady you wrote about. (As opposed to just trying to bed as much women as possible.)
So... how about the number of women contacting you -- has it increased, decreased, or remained the same? Perhaps that could provide some evidence to discriminate between the "he is unavailable, therefore attractive" and "he is unavailable, upvoted for not wasting my hopes" hypotheses.
Wait a moment... How long did it take to go from 0 to 61? How long hadn't you logged into OkC before writing that? Maybe the increase is due to more people finding your profile when looking for people “Online today” or “Online this week”?
Alas, there are no loopholes here. 0-61 took almost exactly a year (it would have been more like 10 months, but you lose the votes of people who deactivate their profiles), and I was logging in at least weekly, usually more, during that time.
Funny, I read your post and my initial reaction was that this evidence cuts against PUA. (Now I'm not sure whether it supports PUA or not, but I lean towards support).
PUA would predict that this phrase
is unattractive.
I dunno, in the context it sounds clearly tongue-in-cheek -- though you usually can't countersignal to people who don't know you (see also).
Good point.
The irony is that the phrase was sort of serious, but in the context of a profile much of which is a lengthy exercise in countersignalling to people who don't know me, I can probably count on most people making the same assumption you did.
More specifically: “I devote myself to worshiping the ground she walks on” is the kind of sentence you mainly say for its connotations, not its denotations. In isolation, the connotation would be ‘she's so much awesome than me’, which is low status, but in context it's ‘she's so much more awesome than you’, which is high status.
Note also that the same action may be interpreted as a sexual advance if the recipient is available (or at least there's no common knowledge to the contrary) and as a sincere compliment for its own sake otherwise; therefore, if someone is willing to do the former but not the latter for whatever reason (e.g. irrational fear of creep- or slut-shaming due to ethanol deficiency)...
“People will be more likely to (say they) like you once you're in a relationship with someone else” isn't something only people in the sympathetic-to-PUA thinking camp usually say.
OTOH I wouldn't at all be shocked to find out that profiles rated highly and profiles most often responded to are significantly different sets. Signalling preferences vs revealed preference yada yada.
+1 for acknowledging the inconvenient (without regard to subject matter).
+1 for a (+1 for acknowledging the inconvenient) on a subject you dislike discussion of.