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TakisMichel comments on Open Thread: March 4 - 10 - Less Wrong
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Well, yeah, but I don't mean "seduction methods", I mean basic discipline, among which are ethics and forethought. Such as "Don't cheat on a partner. If you're going to cheat on a partner anyway, don't lie to the other partner about having the first partner's consent. If you're going to lie to the other partner anyway, for god's sake don't leave them drunk and alone together. " "Don't do things that you'll later feel the need to keep secret" also sounds to me like very sound general advice. "Don't put yourself into a situation in which you're likely to do something you'll later regret ." (such as getting intoxicated on whatever, without a sober party you absolutely trust to watch your back).
You know, the relationship equivalent to "never, under any circumstances, point a gun at anything you don't want dead", or "don't even try heroin, and if you're going to do so anyway, lie on your side, not your back", or "do not fuck with the IRS". Or don't piss on an electric fence. Or even "don't run with scissors" and "put your seatbelt on" and book your flights in advance and study your materials every day rather than cram for the exam.
You know, basic stuff. Stuff that, if Harry heard you doing, you know he'd think "You EEEEDIOT!" with a consternated voice. Stuff that would make Quirrell think "Humans never fail to live down to my expectations." That kind of stuff.
So, principles instead of methods. Like this? I'm not sure universal, empirically-validated game exists. With one relationship, it isn't usually as simple as 'this caused this'. With multiple, you might be able to pick out correlations and hypothesize causation. The best you can do is gather everyone's stories, create theories, test them, see what sticks, and then use blog/forum archives to write handbooks for people seeking general relationship advice. This has obviously been done many times, focusing on sex, long term relationship, marriage, family, and religious family.
I don't think it makes any sense to model a relationship as "a system with subsystem and component failures". Doing so successfully would probably be human-level AI-complete.
That's just sickening. Also, it's a list of attitudes, ways to manipulate your lover into being obsessed with you, mostly by exploiting the addictive effect of "unreliable reward".
I'm surprised that as a "longtime PUA student" you haven't come across that before, and even more surprised that you'd describe it like that, unless you recently had a huge change of heart regarding PUA/game stuff.
Regardless of ethics, I think something like what I linked would work better for most people (for creating a good, hurt-free relationship) than an overly-complicated fault tree analysis. (I'm still confused about the practicality of such a tree, can you give a small example?)
I already did; look at the whole thread.
And my change of heart over PUA was a long and painful disillusion after the original discovery. I'm not a Pachinko machine; if I have to keep my partner addicted, obsessed, and insecure, it hurts me. When I have to refrain from showering my beloved with affection and kindness, it tears me apart. The kind of shit PUA suggest is something I am incapable of doing with someone I truly care about. And as for someone I don't care about, those do not make it to my bed. I only f--k when I I give a f--k. I tried the alternative, and it found it disgusting and hollow.
You should note that PUA does not advocate this, at least not necessarily. There is an extremely broad spectrum between "trying to keep your partner insecure and obsessed with you" and "boring them to death until they up and leave you for someone else". Many of the posts on Chateau Heartiste seem to be written in an over-the-top way for the sake of stirring up controversy; he is far from being representative of all of seduction/'PUA'.
All I ever see of PUA is around this tone. The art as it is commonly understood and practised is a method to pick up chicks and get laid, not an ethos to build satisfying, durable relationships. If you compare it to actual martial arts, I see a lot of Krav Maga and very little Aikido.
There are probably some parts you have missed.
Also, remember the Sturgeon's law.
That sounds great, I'll give it a good look. And Sturgeon's Law applies to literary genres; if it applies to socio-political movements, then we have a problem. We certainly can't judge, say, the Catholic Church or the Objectivist movement by their 1% of most virtuous fellows.
If you ask an average Catholic to to explain you some things about their religion, and if you ask a Pope, you will find a lot of differences. You may also find Catholic theologists saing that Pope is actually not a Catholic.
This is not merely a criticism of Catholicism... this is what happens when you have a sufficiently large movement. It happens to other religions, it happens to policial movements, it happens everywhere. I guess even Ayn Rand couldn't prevent it. This is what humans do.
We might ask what is the true Catholicism? But that's assuming that words have a meaning on their own, instead of merely being labels attached to meanings, inconsistently by different people. If you would look at people's beliefs as points in the belief-space, you could empirically find a few clusters: there would be current version of the official belief (or a few competing versions) that only educated theologists know, schisms and heresies, various kinds of folk interpretations, etc. That's the territory. It's your choice whether you apply the label "true Catholicism" to the opinion of the current Pope, or to the most popular folk version. Either way, someone will insist that you are using the label incorrectly.
I believe this is a source of many hopeless arguments about politics. For any political label X, you get many people self-identifying as X, with many different beliefs, sometimes contradictory. Now are the "true X" the most educated of them, or the most numerous ones, or those most visible in media? How about those who are very educated, but controversial within the group; how much weight to we assign to their opinions? How about those who try to follow their leaders, but misunderstand what the leaders are trying to say; is their true belief what the leaders believe, or the most frequent misinterpretation of the leaders? -- And in real life, most people will use "what most of my neighbors who self-identify as X seem to say", which is a different answer for different people.
Should alchemists be considered part of the same group as chemists? Today most of us would say "no", but what if we lived when chemistry was new? Etc.
I've read the thread. I mean an example of one of the trees, drawn out in whatever software that is.
That website is a PUA website, so probably not what Ritalin is looking for.
More importantly, I couldn't follow that advice if I tried. I don't think it's even possible to do that if you're actually in love with someone.
Even if it genuinely made the object of your love happier?
The essence of all persuasion, manipulation, whatever you call it, is giving others what they want; sometimes knowing what they want better than they themselves.
If they are as cold and calculatingly manipulative as you imply, most people who do PUA would almost definitely have no problem being kind, committing and caring towards women if that worked, i.e. made women happy to be with you.
Not at all. Consider the standard FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) -- it is manipulation, it is clearly not giving the subject what it wants.
This seems like a dictionary dispute.
In one sense, a con-man who sells you a fake medicine to treat a serious affliction is "giving you what you want". After all, you willingly paid for the medicine, and — not knowing that it is fake, and expecting it is a real cure — you believe that you are better off than before the exchange. You feel better having bought it; in the moment, you are glad to have bought it.
But in another sense, he is not "giving you what you want", because your goal in buying the medicine was to get a cure for the affliction, and fake medicine won't do that. Once you find out that you have been defrauded, you are not glad any more, but probably angry or indignant at being deceived. Not very many people would react to discovering that they have been cheated, by fondly recalling how nice it felt to believe that they would be cured.
No, I don't think this is a meaningful sense of "what you want". In the same way giving your wallet to an armed robber is "what you want", too.
I agree; I wouldn't use the word that way — but that notion of "want" would explain the way miekw is using it above.
Do you think that it's completely implausible that someone would want to experience those emotions too?
I'm not claiming you'll have much success giving only those, but the wider the range of emotions you can incite, the better.
The claim that most would want this is more extreme and more difficult to find evidence for. I have no evidence beyond my own experience.
It's plausible, I guess, but that's not what actually happens in 99% cases of manipulation through FUD.