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polymathwannabe comments on Open Thread: March 4 - 10 - Less Wrong
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As a long-time student of PUA, I call bullcrap on that one. PUA is, in general, highly manipulative and unethical. It also says nothing about:
Additionally, when your feelings of attraction run so high you can barely speak, when your misery is so great you cannot sleep, when your thoughts keep intrusively going back to your beloved, "removing the mystery and not worshipping your own ignorance" helps about as much as knowing medicine and physiology while drunk off your ass; it doesn't change the fact that you're drunk, it doesn't mitigate the alcohol's effects, and your judgement is perturbed enough that you might not even be able to use your knowledge.
That's why, for being drunk as well as for being in love, you take your precautions in advance.
PUA techniques are unabashed realpolitik. It's horrible between nation states, and horrible between individuals.
Yeah but States are non-personal entities that don't care.
Actually, one problem with 'realpolitik' theories in international politics is that they assume that states do care, specifically about their safety from outside coercion. This is quite strange when you think about it. Even when an inpersonal institution appears to 'care' about something, say a business caring about profit, this is typically a result of well-defined incentive structures, such as residual claimants controlling the business. But there is no equivalent for states (except for strong monarchies, dictatorships or oligarchies - or neocameralist/formalist polities), so how is this realpolitik thing supposed to work? Maybe it could work like PUA after all - evolutionary dynamics in the course of history have led states to pick up lots of adaptations that improve their security, and they execute on these adaptations even if they aren't security maximizers?
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It's very dangerous to play at evolutionary psychology when one isn't from the field. I'd abstain.