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Alicorn comments on Mate selection for the men here - Less Wrong
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I, speaking from whatever position of expertise you care to suspect of me based on my gender, have the following input:
While not all women find intelligence an appealing trait, the ones who do (and these are probably the ones people here should be pursuing) tend to avoid (or break up with) adequately smart guys not because they aren't smart enough, but because they are lacking in some other dimension (niceness, attentiveness, ideological conflict, and lack of indefinable romantic spark are some of the ones I've heard). There seems to be a general tendency to suspect that if a girl likes that her boyfriend is intelligent, and then the relationship cools, the solution is for him to try to become smarter/more knowledgeable (or signal smartness/knowledge more strongly). I have never seen this work.
It is my suspicion that the audience of Less Wrong is near-universally already smart enough to meet the minimum intelligence standards of anyone who finds intelligence appealing and isn't aiming outrageously high. While becoming smarter is a great thing to do for other reasons, if the idea is to locate a girlfriend, your time as a single male rationalist might be better spent concentrating on not being a jerk, preserving and consolidating spare time to spend on a girlfriend, and looking through the available females in your area to find one who is basically agreeable and spark-y with you in particular.
Agreed, but "trying not to be a jerk" might not be the most productive approach for those who need that advice the most, if the problem is that they don't understand why they are being considered a jerk. What they would really need is a better model of the other person's responses, which would lead them to understand why they would be seen as a jerk in the first place.
I'll also observe the opposite problem: being perceived as overly submissive may be a turnoff for some women, too.
Agreed.
Looking at the women available in reality is indeed the best heuristic, rather than trying to define in advance the prototype of the ideal woman and then try to approximate her as best as possible in real life, or try to turn real life women into that image. That approach is problematic because it is too theoretical and not empirical enough: it may lead to disappointment when reality doesn't hold up to a poorly conceived, unnecessary, or just flat out wrong ideal. A better approach is to actually interact with women and to discover through experience what qualities to look for, and because you might find compatibility with someone when you didn't expect it.
Of course, as Silas observes, this advice only applies for men who actually have choices among the women around.
"Some" is an important word here. Some women like their boyfriends to come pre-domesticated, especially for long-term-relationship purposes. If one can pull off "domesticated" without it turning into "spineless loser", that can be made to work.
I notice all advice on finding a girlfriend glosses over the actual nuts-and-bolts of it. In Alicorn's post here, the assumption seems to be that there's an immense pool of women receptive enough to me (e.g. by common acquaintances, organizations, etc.) and I can just roll the dice until I find one, and all the supposed problems for rationalists worth getting advice on, arise ... er, sometime later.
Where am I supposed to find this pool of bachelorettes? And if it's common interest organizations, which should it be, since we've ruled out those related to rationality? And isn't it strongly advised not to show romantic interest soon upon joining such an organization? In which case, how does your advice differ from "Join a random group ... and wait ... and wait ... and wait"?
FWIW I recently joined a group (actually a subgroup of a larger group which is not held in high regard here) and did click with one of the women there, and asked her out, but we only went out for a few days before she lost interest. And then I found out there's a taboo against dating within the subgroup (though I don't think that had anything to do with her calling it off), which puts me right back to square one in terms of being expected to start relationships with near-complete strangers.
With apologies, it gets a bit annoying constantly getting dating advice that assumes away the most critical problems, and I can't be the only one in this position.
I imagine having those problems would be trouble, and I'm sorry. In fairness though, your problems don't sound like they stem from your being a rationalist. I guess it is too bad one of your interests is something that doesn't lead to meeting a lot of women... but straight men interested in sports, cars, bbq etc. all have that problem. So there are probably better forums to ask these questions. The advice thats being given here is advice for rationalists qua rationalists. If your problem is just meeting women google it, get on match.com, go to a bar, whatever. If your problem is that the women you do date lose interest in you after a few days– how do you know it isn't because of one of the problems alicorn suggested? I'm sure there are answers out there, you can't fault a rationalist community for not being a relationship/pick up community.
If you do not know any women, something is wrong. It either means that (1) you don't know anyone at all, in which case you should take care of that before "find a girlfriend" reaches the top of your list of priorities, or it means that (2) none of the men you know have introduced you to any of the women they know, which probably means something needs to be addressed on your end too, or it means that (3) the men you know themselves do not know any women, in which case something is wrong with them and you need to look into your choice of friends and associates. We comprise more than half of the population. We are not hard to find. Some of us are probably related to you.
If you know some women, but all the women you know are all taken or for some reason unacceptable, the odds are good that they know women who are neither taken nor unacceptable. Behave in a decent manner to these women and they are likely to introduce you to these friends of theirs. If you can sincerely do so, it may help alert your acquaintances that you are looking if you express a vague interest in having kids someday, or you could express general opinions about long term relationships/weddings/romantic customs in your local culture/what you look for in a woman/child-rearing strategies. Tick off enough boxes on a friend of a friend's checklist and, assuming the intermediate friend is well-informed and cooperative, he or she may provide an introduction. If you're antisocial and have no friends, relatives are an alternative route.
This isn't quite Silas' complaint. Clearly, he does know some women. What he is looking for is women who are receptive to his attempts to date them. This means he needs to know them in a context where he can actually make advances, and he needs to know how to actually make advances (which are appropriate to that context). His other complaint was that he was getting a date, but then it fizzled because she lost interest.
I won't speak of Silas' specific situation, but I will emphasize that there are many men who are decent guys from the standpoint of society, and who don't have anything major wrong with them psychologically, physically or financially, but who don't have significant options with women. This isn't because they don't know women, but because the women they know aren't available to them because the women don't find them attractive enough (since women are more selective, the average women is going after men with above average attractiveness, not after her average male friends), and/or because they are insufficiently knowledgeable of all the societal rituals around dating. Those rituals place a higher burden on the male for initiating things, and men don't have that stuff encoded in their DNA. It's something that the cooler kids learned in adolescence, and the less cool ones didn't.
The result is that by high school, it's common for males with certain personality traits such as introversion and systemizing (i.e. personality traits typical of males who identify as rationalists) to be so far behind socially that their ability to get something going romantic with the women around them is limited, even to the extent of being practically locked out. Women with similar personality traits will also experience difficulties, but not to the same magnitude since they aren't typically expected to be the initiators, and because personality traits like confidence (that can easily be damaged during adolescence) aren't so important for their attractiveness. This is not to say that women don't experience challenges and difficulties in relationships; they do, but their primary challenges occur at different points (e.g. once some sort of dating has actually started, not so much difficulty getting any kind of date) and are a totally different subjects (e.g. being seen only sexually).
It is possible for a man to be surrounded by women, yet be walled off from them. As someone who experienced this years ago, I can say that it was no fun. And meeting friends of friends isn't any use if you can't capitalize on it, not to mention that it's a slow and unreliable way of meeting people. And even if you can get a date, there are a million more ways for the male to bungle than for the female to bungle it (again, women are more selective, and male behavior is a larger factor in female attraction than female behavior is in male attraction... just think about the ways women use words like "weird" or "creepy" in describing potential suitors), which enforces a steep learning curve that is difficult to climb when you don't know what you are doing.
You might say that there is a problem these guys have, which "needs to be addressed on their end," and you would be absolutely right. But that is exactly Silas' complaint. What is the nuts and bolts of what these men need to address such that they can successfully date the women all around them, and who is going to show them how to do it? Who is going to teach them all the dating rituals that they missed during adolescence, and give them back the self-confidence that they lost? Society isn't.
Society used to teach some of this explicitly in the form of cotillion classes. One modern analogue for adults is PUA workshops. I took The Art of Attraction class from Pickup101 a few years ago and found it extremely worthwhile. My favorite part of the class was learning how to improve my body language in various ways. Confidence is a lot about physical behaviour - how to stand, how to walk, how to look at people... The most interesting and persistently useful part was learning how to touch someone one doesn't know well and have this come across as friendly rather than creepy or awkward. Some people are naturally physically demonstrative - they find it easy to give a reassuring pat on the shoulder or the wrist or the back, or a hug. Most women have this ability; many men don't. But being able to touch people in an appropriately friendly and comforting way is a physical skill which can be acquired with training and practice. Now that I have had this training, I even find it easier to touch or hug my own parents than before I took the class.
Another option is dance classes - you can learn Salsa at any age. Anything that gives you lots of practice comfortably standing and moving in close physical proximity to members of the opposite gender can't help but help.
I feel the need to say that this is a superb comment -- perhaps the best I have seen on this topic.
I particularly appreciated the following passages:
(...)
(...)
I would just add that this is one of those subjects on which people are particularly prone to other-optimizing.
You sort of touch on this later, but I think it's important to point out that the word "attractiveness" does not mean the same thing to men and women, which means that a lot of people reading the above are going to think you're talking about appearance. I.e., I just want to highlight what you said later:
...and add that it's also a larger factor in female attraction than physical appearance is, once you control for factors that a man can control about his appearance (i.e. grooming and other social signals of appearance) which can thus be reduced to "behavior", anyway. It's just behavior that's done before the meeting occurs, rather than after.
"The correlation between liking of the date and evaluation of the date's physical attractiveness is .78 for male subjects and .69 for female subjects. . . Sheer physical attractiveness appears to be the overriding determinant of liking."
Also interesting: "The correlation between how much the man says he likes his partner and how much she likes him is virtually zero: r = .03."
"Male's MSAT scores correlate .04 with both the woman's liking for him and her desire to date him." (For females the equivalent figure was around -.06.)
"Importance of Physical Attractiveness in Dating Behavior", Elaine Walster, et al., p. 514-515 http://www2.hawaii.edu/~elaineh/13.pdf
I trust this data more than folk psychology or self-reports, but I would be interested if anyone knows of any subsequent studies confirming or disconfirming these types of figures, or assessing its generalizability from 18 year olds on blind dates.
You left out a really important factor, mentioned in the paragraph before this. These were the participants' ratings of their partners' physical attractiveness, and were not taken independently. The correlations were only half as good with an independent rating of physical attractiveness, made by four raters who were not going to be dating any of the subjects, and didn't interact with them for more than a few seconds.
In other words, the data of the study actually support a hypothesis that people find people they like more physically attractive, rather than the other way around... and it supports that hypothesis for both men and women, though more so for women than for men.
The correlations with independent ratings of attractiveness were still .44 and .39. Compared to .04 and -.06 for intelligence, that still supports the conclusion that "sheer physical attractiveness appears to be the overriding determinant of liking."
They also used various personality measures assessing such things as social skills, maturity, masculinity/femininity, introversion/extroversion and self-acceptance. They found predominantly negative correlations (from -.18 to -.08) and only two comparatively small positive correlations .14 and .03.
Speaking from a hypothetical PUA's point of view, there are still some uncontrolled-for factors:
Degree of a male's control over his rating of physical attractiveness (via choice of clothes, grooming, posture, voice tone, etc.)
Male's ability to display desirable characteristics through attitude, touch, story, listening, and other ways of creating mood, chemistry, or attraction.
Degree of interest shown in a male by other females (note that other studies have found that women are much more likely to perceive men to be attractive if it appears that other women are attracted to them)
These are just a few of the qualities that PUAs use to influence attraction, none of which were measured or controlled for by the study.
So, your summary is an overstatement: at .69 individual correlation, this means that even by a woman's own judgment of physical attractiveness is not an absolute factor. You can still come out ahead (or screw it up) by what else you have/do.
What's more, at .39 independent rating correlation, this means that people differ in attractiveness ratings for the same person. Whether people in general find you attractive matters considerably less than what the individual you're after thinks.
Last, but not least, IIUC not a single PUA theory of attraction is even tested by this research, let alone debunked. So even if you're ugly, there's still hope for you. ;-)
Thanks for clarifying what factors you think are relevant. I agree that those have not been tested.
Nobody. Their problem, they fix it. If they can't, well, not all problems have solutions, and if you're screwed enough, you're screwed.
Ok, things aren't quite as harsh as that, there's the whole PUA thing (I have no experience of how effective it is), and various insights to be had from evolutionary psychology. Information is out there. (Can anyone suggest any other worthwhile -- by rationalist standards -- sources on the subject?) But no advice will magically solve the problem. Unlike giving someone a Google Maps pointer to a destination, the individual still has to apply himself with no certainty of success.
"You have before you the disassembled parts of a high-powered hunting rifle, and the instructions written in Swahili. In five minutes an angry Bengal tiger will walk into the room." -- Eugene Miya
I hate to make this recommendation (especially 2 years late), but figuring out how much alcohol you need to turn from an underconfident introvert to a comfortable socialite (without tipping too far in that direction) has helped me.
Introversion and confidence are completely unrelated. You probably weren't implying that, but for anyone who comes across this in the future: introversion is not about confidence, shyness, self-esteem, anxiety or anything of that sort. The sheer amount of people who fail to make this distinction is one of the most irritating things I have come across.
Hmm. Yeah, I agree with you. But booze loosens something up for me. It turns something in my social brain on high. This is not the same thing as confidence, so my wording was bad.
Again, you seem to assume away the problem. Does no one ever leave home for college or move to a different city in your world? And whenever you do find something that could move me into the situation that you see as normal, you assume away its problems as well: what's the standard method for addressing the (1), (2), and (3) you listed? You act like it's an easy step to just casually change my "choice of friends and associates".
In any case, like others mentioned, you misunderstand the situation. At my workplace, I do know women (not single) who could introduce me to women they know. As a matter of fact, they unsolicitedly remark about how "women must be all over you!" and "some lady's going to snatch you right up before you know it" (note the similarity of their assumptions to yours). But then they inevitably don't know anyone's they'd introduce me to.
Yes, and this was the point. Of course I can "find" women, but that doesn't mean I could follow your advice with those women. I could go to the supermarket, the mall, bars, etc. and see lots of women. Are these the ones you're suggesting I approach?
I hope I don't need to explain why these women are off the list... j/k But anyway, relatives don't help if they all live far away. You were aware of that possibility, right?
In summary: Your advice is predicated on the recipient having a kind of social network that would have obviated the problem to begin with, and you don't know how a male should go about establishing such a network except based on other assumptions that aren't as likely as you think. Can you see why that might not be helpful?
And again, before you say how I must be soooo much of an outlier that I can't possibly be a representative case, keep in mind, I did get a date with a woman in a group that I joined, so really, I'm apparently not that much of a freak.
Nice casual, sweeping judgment there. Makes me wonder what the net effect of this attitude being widespread among females would be.
You don't have to wonder. The net effect would be the propagation of the genes that led to the formation of this attitude. ;-)
In fact, you have your wondering backwards. Any time you find human behavior to be inexplicable, it would behoove you to work backward to any likely evolutionary cause. Not so that you can prove women (or people in general) are broken and bizarre, but so you can understand why they might feel that way, and accept their concerns and feelings as valid, within their own sphere of reference.
In this particular case, for example, consider what a guy being "creepy" (i.e., lacking social ties) would mean in our ancestral environment.
Indeed, but I wasn't wondering about the attitude's origin, nor did I say I find it inexplicable.
No thanks. There's an evolutionary cause to the male tendency toward violent behavior, and I can empathize with what it feels like to want to hurt someone, but that doesn't mean I accept it as "valid". If I encounter someone whose "sphere of reference" involves public validation of macho violence, I am doing everyone a disservice by pretending it's okay. Likewise for blind prejudice.
So, if you prefer women with certain physical qualities, is that a blind prejudice, too?
If a woman prefers chocolate ice cream, does that mean she's blindly prejudiced against vanilla?
If a company says they prefer job applicants to have references, is that blind prejudice also?
I think you are confused, especially if you're connecting this to violence. To women in general (though not at all always for any particular woman) a man's social connections are his references... and for many, it's also his flavor.
Granted, Alicorn's way of expressing this fact was not especially PC from a male perspective. To a guy, caring about who you know can sound "elitist", in precisely the same way that guys' concerns about various female characteristics can sound "shallow" and un-PC to women.
However, if you understand and correctly translate this female preference to whatever preferences you have for your partners (that women in their turn don't necessarily understand or appreciate), then it would be easy to accept/forgive Alicorn's way of putting it.
Meta-comment unrelated to the substance of this thread: I want to apologize for the above response. I do think your analysis of my perspective is incorrect, but I realized that it's stupidly counterproductive to actively discourage random strangers from taking stabs at my underlying psychology or motivation. I'm usually annoyed by such speculation (not just when it's directed at me) because of its low average accuracy and distracting nature, but the expected utility of just one penetrating insight would easily outweigh the "cost" of ignoring or tersely refuting the inaccurate ones. It's my choice whether or not to "take it personally".
This analogy is based on a reinterpretation of the original statement . Consider instead the trivially false statement: "if you don't have references, you will be a lousy employee".
Which "this"? Your statement seemed to imply that I should "accept as valid" (which I assume means something along the lines of "don't publicly object to") a sentiment or preference with an understandable evolutionary origin. Why not a preference for violence?
According to you, her way of expressing this fact was to express a different fact.
Thanks for draping me with stereotypes and assuming the worst, but that wasn't my objection. I was objecting to the elevation of a mere social intuition or preference to the status of a logical truth (note the if-then, case-by-base logical structure of the original context). If Alicorn had said "I think it's creepy when a guy doesn't know any women", I would not have replied.
Understood, and fair enough. However, it would've been much more helpful if you'd just said that to start with, rather than answering her with a sweeping dismissal.
I personally don't see what she said as that big a deal; I took the "something wrong" part as meaning "you have characteristics women in general will find undesirable" or "you lack characteristics that women in general will require" -- and I see that as a true statement.
If you take this as meaning there is something morally or ethically wrong with you in some absolute sense -- as opposed to merely "wrong" for the result you desire -- then I could see how you might consider it prejudice.
In my case, it's easy to see Alicorn as speaking through the lens of a worldview in which it's simply common sense that of course you would know other people, because otherwise you'd have to be some sort of creep, or at least have a terrible life that's in urgent need of repair. And within the sphere of women's social lives (in general), such an assessment is perfectly logical and sensible.
I mean, "understand why a human being might feel that way and separate your opinion of the behavior from your judgment of the person" - to disagree without being disagreeable, in other words.
I think it's more helpful to sweepingly dismiss sweeping, incorrect generalizations of people that others may take to heart.
I don't, except in the tautological sense ("there's something wrong with men who don't know any women, and that something is women find them undesirable, because they don't know any women").
Ah, I see. You're talking about "wrong" in the sense that it's wrong to have gay friends, if you want to meet Christians.
Out of curiosity, what would you be inclined to say about a random woman who simply did not know any men and who socialized exclusively with women, none of whom knew any men either? Assume this scenario is in a country not dominated by strict Islam or similar social structures.
The mind boggles at such a concept. However, you probably mean a woman who did not know any men she considered potential partners, and who socialized with women, none of whom knew any men they considered introducing as potential partners... in which case, that sounds like a lot of women. ;-)
So, I'm not entirely sure where you meant to draw the line, there. But unless you were trying to imply that she's a nun or a lesbian, though, you need to understand that men (in general, though not always in every specific case) simply wouldn't care.
Likely male responses to this condition in reality would be things like, "Cool, a virgin", or "Great, she won't have anybody to compare me to", or "wow, so many women not knowing guys... think of the opportunities for me!"
In fact, my first joking response that I almost typed at the beginning of this comment was that I'd say, "Welcome to Fantasy Island!" -- because that's more or less the evolutionary-instinctual male response to the idea of "lots of women without any men around", i.e. "awesome".
IOW, the female preference for men to have social connections just doesn't translate in reverse. Men have different evolutionary drives in this respect, which is why guys who think just enough about this stuff to notice it (but not enough to properly translate/balance) tend to end up with all sorts of grudges against women's preferences as being "irrational" and "unfair" (i.e. not-the-same-as-men's).
This wasn't addressed to me, but I have to say I don't quite agree with the responses.
Ignoring its trivial impossibility, I'd believe such a woman was (at least in a romantic sense, and probably in a non-romantic one) very naive and very socially awkward, or that she was a lesbian. As I understand it, it's fairly hard to be a woman without encountering at least a few men, so if a woman totally lacks any male friends in her entire social network, that would signal serious, debilitating shyness, a lack of social skills, or a lack of interest in men. Of course I'd change this belief in the face of any contradictory evidence, but absent further evidence, that's what I'd infer.
Given that I'm male, by definition I haven't known any women in that situation, so I don't have anything to say.
Also, cultivating social confidence (as opposed to confidence in the rightness of one' s opinions), and an unconditional interest in individual human beings (as opposed to "humanity") would be good ideas as well. AFAICT, these correlate strongly with (if they don't equate to) "not being a jerk".
(Social confidence mostly means being relaxed and emotionally unreactive to disagreements or differences of opinion, as opposed to argumentative, tense, or submissive. An actually confident person has no need to either harangue or dismiss those who they disagree with, or indeed to express any outward semblance of disagreement. And cultivating genuine interest in human beings as-they-are, not as-you'd-like-them-to-be, helps one to react to the most bizarre ideas and beliefs with, "Ah, how fascinating" -- without putting off any social signals of arrogance.)
Any idea HOW to do that?
Re: Social confidence... you can fake it 'til you make it. You don't actually have to be confident (my uninformed guess is that a lot people who seem confident aren't– but that might just me projecting my own experience on to others). You just have to look confident to others. Don't brag (explicitly, at least) but never self-deprecate either. Friendly teasing of the opposite sex *, joking... all good. I made a conscious effort to do these things and now they're just a part of my personality and I like myself better for it.
Though I wonder if this would be harder if I was older (I picked this up only a few years after I got interested in girls so I didn't have as many bad habits to break)
*I don't know how this would work for those who are not interested in the opposite sex. It may or may not signal the same things.
Mostly, this means being relaxed and at ease. If you're not sure what confidence is, you'll probably think it means being aggressive, boisterous, or some sort of backslapping, hand-grabbing, "hail-fellows-well-met", can-do attitude. Everybody actually hates that guy. Be relaxed and at ease, instead, but match your overall "energy level" to the group you're in. It's okay if you're a little lower or higher, but being close in energy level signals social calibration - i.e., that the group's preferences are important to you.
One of the really nasty side effects of being introverted is that if you're not socially calibrated, you may well be constantly signaling to other people that they're both boring and beneath you.
My own improvements in nonreactivity and interest in others have been largely due to mindhacking; e.g. removing triggers that caused me to fear rejection of particular types, removing negative "ideals" that triggered judgment of self or others, deleting conditioned appetites driving approval-seeking and status-seeking behaviors, etc. (A blog post I wrote on dirtsimple.org in May mentions in passing a bit about how removing a negative ideal/compulsion to be "good" created a mini-renaissance in my marriage, for example.)
I've posted here a lot about ideal-belief-reality conflicts (Robert Fritz's term) which are a primary driver of hypocritical behaviors -- e.g., being obsessed with the future of "humanity" while not being able to be nice to individual humans you disagree with. This is precisely the sort of signaling that will label you as a "jerk" to others. The fewer IBRCs you have, the less often you'll make judgments of others that trigger automatic contempt signals from your body.
(If you feel contempt for someone in a real-time social situation, trust me, other people are noticing, and judging you accordingly. The only real fix is to make it so you don't have the contempt in the first place.)
this is my problem. I look great on paper but as soon as you get me in a social situation I can't hide the fact that I feel contempt for the vast majority of the people around me (including desirable partners). I think the problem is that I connect behaviors I see in those around me to larger scale social problems even though this is stupid overgeneralizing. is there anything you could point to since your awareness of it makes me think you've dealt with it yourself.
Two thoughts:
Learn humility. When you think about how much superior you are to others, challenge that idea: think of ways in which you are not superior. Perhaps more important, remind yourself that your superiority is partially determined by luck. Practice, practice, practice.
Learn confidence. This may or may not be true in your case, but people often feel contempt towards people that they worry may judge them harshly. If you are confident enough not to be threatened by their judgment, then you can act more wisely and learn to manipulate the interactions.
#2 is very interesting and something that hadn't occurred to me before. It is a reciprocal relationship. I judge others too harshly and in turn (since i generalize others from the example of myself) worry that I will be judged too harshly.
thank you very much!
edit: font is showing up weird for me even though I did no formatting...
In the "recent comments" segment of the sidebar, a pound sign appears which doesn't show up in the full comment. Could that be it?
Testing. This paragraph begins with a pound sign.
#Testing. This paragraph begins with a backslash followed by a pound sign.
So apparently you did do formatting, accidentally. Escape the pound sign with a backslash to rid yourself of the giant bold text.
Cool! That's not documented in the help.
Markdown's official syntax documentation. (LessWrong's Markdown implementation may not perfectly match this.)
One of the easiest methods to get started with is The Work of Byron Katie. The critical key to making it work, though, that is not emphasized anywhere near enough in her books (or anyone else's, for that matter), is that you need a mental state of genuine curiosity and "wondering" when you ask the questions. It simply will not work if you use the questions as a way of arguing with yourself or beating yourself up, or if you simply recite them in a rote fashion, like magic words.
The magic isn't in the words, it's in the "search queries" you're running on your mind. As with all mind hacking, the purpose is to create new connections between existing memories and concepts in order to update your "map". So, it will also not work if you try to consciously reason out the answers; you want to keep silent verbally, so you can notice when System 1 answers, without being verbally overshadowed by System 2.
I don't use the Work that much on IBRCs and judgment issues, myself. (I have techniques that generalize better to entire groups or classes of people, rather than just focusing on individual people.) But The Work is good practice for the basic skill underlying all mind hacking: asking System 1 a question, then shutting up system 2 and waiting for an answer. And it'll definitely give you a taste of what it feels like to drop a "should" or judgment about a person, and how it changes your felt-responses to them.
The reference you recommend seems to advocate changing one's attitude be engaging in a sequence of biases.
First, one is supposed to construct a strawman of their reasons for not liking someone or something:
Rather than seeking out one's true objection, one should express their dislike in terms of their pettiest reasons, and identify with that expression. And one should "Simply pick a person or situation and write, using short, simple sentences", discouraging deep explanation, which in turn discourages deep understanding. An important filter is bypassed, allowing the bad reasons to mix with the good. The question "What is it that they should or shouldn’t do, be, think, or feel?" in the context of asking one's opinions is a setup to appear to commit the Mind Projection Fallacy. Priming someone to say "X should" when they mean "I want X to" so you can later say "In reality, there is no such thing as a 'should' or a 'shouldn’t.'" is a sneaky debating trick.
And then, the strawman is subjected to unreasonable standards:
Of course one can not absolutely know that it's true, one should not assign probability 1 to anything. Does one have a large accumulation of evidence that causes one to have high confidence that it's true? That seems like a more reasonable question, which one of course should apply to one's true objection.
Then the question is asked:
which would be fine if it were setting up to ask, "Is that reaction constructive? Are there more constructive ways you could react?". But instead, the follow up is:
Hm, who would I be if it didn't bother me to have my face burned. Probably the sort of person who doesn't avoid being touch in the face by hot pokers.
And finally, there is the "Turn it around" concept. Now, holding oneself to the same standards one expects of others is good, but a big problem comes from asking one to "find three genuine, specific examples of how the turnaround is true in your life". This is advocating the Confirmation Bias. One is encourage to find supporting evidence for the turn around, but not contradicting evidence. If I have a problem with someone for being a chronic liar, it does not make sense for me to think it is OK because I can recall three time she told the truth, or three times I told a lie. What does make sense is to notice her unusually high proportion of lies to honest statements, and to not believe what she tells me without corroboration, and maybe even associate instead with others who reliably give me truthful information.
If this is the sort of mind hack you advocate, it is no wonder that people express skepticism instead of trying it. After all, our sister site is not called "Embracing Bias".
It's engaging in System 1 thinking, which of course has a different set of biases than System 2 thinking. The object is to activate the relevant System 1 biases, and then update the information stored there.
Absolutely. How else would you expect to reconsolidate the memory trace, without first activating it?
You mean your System 2 explanation whose function is to make your System 1 bias appear more righteous or socially acceptable. That "true objection"?
Precisely. We don't want System 2 to verbally overshadow the irrational basis for your reactions, by filtering them out and replacing them with good-sounding explanations.
Actually, it's an attempt to identify what conditioned standard or ideal you believe the person is violating, creating your irrational reaction.
Of course it's a debating trick. If fair, logical reasoning worked on System 1, there'd be no need for mindhacking, would there?
And you are discussing this with System 2 reasoning - i.e., abstract reasoning. When you ask yourself this question about a specific thing, e.g., "can I absolutely know it's true that Tom should listen to me?", it is a request to query System 1 for your implicit epistemology on that particular topic. That is, how would you know if it were true? What if it weren't? How would you know that? In the process, this retrieves relevant memories, making them available for reconsolidation.
You are confusing a concrete system 1 practice with abstract system 2 reasoning. Again, if the two were the same, we would have no need for mindhacking, and the Dark Arts could not exist.
(That being said, I've honestly never found this particular question that useful, compared to questions 1, 3, and 4.)
Indeed. However, if you were to translate that to a System 1 question, it'd be more like, "How do I know that it's true?". That is, something closer to a simple query for sensory data, than a question calling for abstract judgment. (I've actually used this question.)
One's "true objection" is of course in most cases an irrational, childish thing. If not, one would likely not be experiencing a problem or feelings that cause you to want to engage in this process in the first place.
Again, we need to distinguish System 1 and 2 thinking. "Is that reaction constructive?" and "Are there more constructive ways you could react?" are abstract questions that lead to a literal answer of "yes"... not to memory reconsolidation.
"Who would you be without that thought?" is a presuppositional query that invites you to imagine (on a sensory, System 1 level) what you would be like if you didn't believe what you believe. This is a sneaky trick to induce memory reconsolidation, linking an imagined, more positive reaction to the point in your memory where the existing decision path was.
This question, in other words, is a really good mind hack.
Mind hacking questions are not asked to get answers, they are questions with side-effects.
You are equating physical and emotional pain; the Work is a process for getting rid of emotional pain created by moral judgments stored in System 1, not logical judgments arrived at by System 2.
On the contrary, it is countering confirmation bias. Whatever belief you are modifying has been keeping you from noticing those counterexamples previously. Notice, btw, that Katie advises not doing the turnarounds until after the existing belief has been updated: this is because when you firmly believe something, you react negatively to the suggestion of looking for counterexamples, and tend to assume you've done a good job of looking for them, even though you haven't.
So instead, the first two questions are directed at surfacing your real (sensory, System 1) evidence for the belief, so that you can then update with various specific classes of counterexample. Questions 3 and 4, for example, associate pain to the belief, and pleasure to the condition of being without it, providing a counterexample in that dimension. The turnaround searches provide hypocrisy-puncturing evidence that you are not really acting to the same standards you hold others to, and that your expectations are unrealistic, thus providing another kind of counterexample.
You will not arrive at useful information about the process by discussing it in the abstract. Pick a specific situation and belief, and actually try it.
Sure. And if you can do that without an emotional reaction that clouds your judgment or makes you send off unwanted signals, great! The Work is a process for getting rid of System 1 reactions, not a way of replacing System 2 reasoning.
Mind hacking is working on System 1 to obtain behavioral change, not engaging in System 2 reasoning to result in "truth".
That's because, when your System 2 tries to reason about your behavior, it usually verbally overshadows system 2, and ends up confabulating.... which is why pure system 2 reasoning is absolutely atrocious at changing problematic behaviors and emotions.
(Edit to add: Btw, I don't consider The Work to be a particularly good form of mindhacking. IMO, it doesn't emphasize testing enough, doesn't address S1/S2 well, and has a rather idiosyncratic set of questions. I personally use a much wider range of questions and sequences of questions to accomplish different things, and last, but far from least, I don't unquestioningly endorse all of Katie's philosophy. Nonetheless, I recommend the Work to people because, performed properly it works on certain classes of things, and can be a gentle introduction to the subject. Another good book is "Re-Create Your Life" by Morty Lefkoe, which provides a difference evidence-based reconsolidation process, but The Work has the advantage of having a free online introduction.)
IAWYC, but you didn't need to quote and refute every sentence to get the point across about System 1 and System 2 and our real vs. signaled reasons for affective reactions. It's a question of style, not content, but I think you'd communicate your ideas much more effectively to me and to others here at LW if you focused on being concise.
No, I mean if, for example, it bothers you that your roommate never comes through with his share of the rent, you would not want to focus on how you get annoyed by his stupid shrug (which you probably only find annoying and stupid because you associate it with him and his flakiness).
You seem to have gone from missing my point to agreeing with it. If you understood why I said it is a debating trick, why would you argue that it is something else instead?
If it were countering the confirmation bias, it would ask something like, "Consider the last ten time X had an opportunity to do Y. How many of those times did X actually do Y?" (If the answer is ten, it seems probable that this method has the wrong goal.) And even with that, you have to be careful not to over do it. You would not want to excuse someone punching you in the face when you meet, just because he only actually does it one time in twenty. But asking for three examples ever of not doing the wrong thing, and expecting people to change their minds based on that, is encouraging irrationality. That just is not enough evidence.
It seems I wasn't clear. My problem with the method in this case is not that it wouldn't work. My problem is that it might work, and I would lose my ability to protect myself against those who would manipulate my behavior through lies.
You seem pretty much in agreement with my impression that the method is to engage in a series of biases, but you seem to actually think this is a good thing, because somehow these biases will exactly cancel out other biases the person already has. I see no reason to expect this precise balance from the method. I expect someone who uses this method to forgive people they should not forgive (that is, the forgiveness is not in their interest), and will be easy to take advantage of. After all, they do not have XML tags that say "Should not be taken advantage of", and they could imagine not being bothered by it.
Contrast this with dedicated rationality, confronting your biases head on, acknowledging the real extent of things that bother you, neither exaggerating nor down playing. You would actually recognize the difference between an abusive relationship and not always getting your way.
But the purpose if you were doing The Work, would be to focus on that stupid shrug and his "flakiness", precisely so that you can drop them from consideration. Presumably (I assume this is a hypothetical situation), you would be having a judgment like "he shouldn't be flaky" or "he should be responsible", or some other character judgment based on his behavior. The point of the Work is not to do rational computations, it's to drop emotional attachments from the system whose job it is to make you reinforce your tribe's value system through emotional displays.
Once you've dropped whatever "irrational" stuff you have going on, the reasoning about what to practically do gets a LOT easier. As often as not, the first thing that happens upon thinking about the problem afterward is that an obviously sensible solution pops into your head, that you feel you can actually execute -- like, say, calmly starting the search for a new roommate.
Yeah, that's totally not the point of the exercise. The point is to drop the emotional judgments that are clouding your reasoning, not to perform reasoning. You do the reasoning after your head is free of the attachment. Because while System 1 is thinking "irresponsible" and "flaky" -- i.e., "this person is violating the rules of my tribe", System 2 tends to stay busy figuring out what arguments to use to accuse him with in front of the tribe, instead of actually trying to solve the problem.
No, it means you've directed the tool to the wrong target: you're not supposed to apply it to the practical problem, you apply it to the most emotional, irrational thoughts you have about the problem... the ones that System 2 likes to keep swept under the rug.
No, because what you're supposed to use it on is ideas like, "People should be responsible" or "People should do their share", or whatever "tribal standard" you have an emotional attachment to, interfering with your reasoning.
Some people here, for example, get in a tizzy about theists or self-help gurus or some other group that is violating their personal tribal standards. For a while, I got in a tizzy about people here violating one of mine, i.e. "people should listen to me". I used the Work on it, and then quit beating that particular dead horse.
But note that this does not mean I now think that people are listening to me more, or that I now believe I have nothing to say, or anything like that. All I did by dropping the "should" is that I no longer react emotionally to the fact that some people listen to some things more than others. That is now a "mere fact" to me, such that I can still prefer to be listened to, but not experience a negative response to the reverse.
That's because you're imagining using it for something that it's specifically not intended to be used on. It is aimed at System 1 (aka "the heart", in Katie's terminology) rather than System 2 (aka "the head"). It's not for changing your intellectual appraisal of the situation, it's for removing the emotion that says tribal standards are being violated by a member of the tribe.
That's why the emphasis is on "shoulds", and simple, emotional language -- the real target is whatever standard you've imprinted as a "moral", usually at a young age.
It doesn't interfere with your rational desire not to be taken advantage of. You will still prefer that not to happen. You just won't have emotions clouding your judgment about doing something about it.
Have you ever noticed how often people complain and complain about someone else's behavior, but never actually do anything about it? This is a fix for that.
(Hypothesis: in a tribal environment, individual enforcement of an important group standard is less advantageous than bringing the matter before the tribe, where you can signal your own compliance with the standard and your willingness to punish violations, without having to take on all the risks and costs of private justice. Thus, our emotions of judgment and outrage are evolved to motivate us to expose the violation, rather than taking action on our own. The Work and certain of my own techniques appear to switch off the emotional trigger associated with the standard, ironically freeing one to contemplate whatever enforcement or alternative responses one rationally sees fit.)
Previously in this thread: PJ Eby asserts that the inability to refrain from conveying contempt is a common and severe interpersonal handicap. Nazgulnarsil replies, "This is my problem. . . . I can't hide the fact that I feel contempt for the vast majority of the people around me (including desirable partners)."
I probably have the problem too. Although it is rare that I am aware of feeling contempt for my interlocutor, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that messages (mostly nonverbal) conveying contempt are present in my face-to-face communication with non-friends (even if I would like the non-friend to become a friend).
I expect that PJ Eby will assure me that he has seen himself and his clients learn how to transcend this problem. Maybe he can even produce written testimonials from clients assuring me that PJ Eby has cured them of this problem. But I fear that PJ Eby has nothing that a strong Bayesian with long experience with self-help practitioners would consider sufficient evidence that he can help me transcend this problem. Such is the state of the art in self help: there are enough gullible prospective clients that it is never in the financial self-interest of any practitioner to do the hard long work to collect evidence that would sway a non-guillible client.
I notice you ignored the part where I just gave somebody a pointer to somebody else's work that they could download for free to help with that, and then you indirectly accused me of being more interested in financial incentives than results... while calling nazgulnarsil gullible, too!
If that's an example of your ordinary social demeanor, then it's not in the least bit surprising that people think you hold them in contempt, as it's not even necessary to observe any of your "nonverbal" communication to obtain this impression.
Previously in this thread I opined as follows on the state of the art in self help: there are enough gullible prospective clients that it is never in the financial self-interest of any practitioner to do the hard long work to collect evidence that would sway a non-guillible client.
PJ Eby took exception as follows:
Lots of people offer pointers to somebody else's writings. Most of those people do not know enough about how to produce lasting useful psychological change to know when a document or an author is actually worth the reader's while. IMHO almost all the writings on the net about producing lasting useful psychological change are not worth the reader's while.
In the future, I will write "lasting change" when I mean "lasting useful psychological change".
The mere fact that you are human makes it much more probable than not that you are more skilled at self-deception and deception than at perceiving correctly the intrapersonal and interpersonal truths necessary to produce lasting change in another human being. Let us call the probability I just referred to "probability D". (The D stands for deception.)
You have written (in a response to Eliezer) that you usually charge clients a couple of hundred dollars an hour.
The financial success of your self-help practice is not significant evidence that you can produce lasting change in clients because again there is a plentiful supply of gullible self-help clients with money.
The fact that you use hypnotic techniques on clients and write a lot about hypnosis raises probability D significantly because hypnotic techniques rely on the natural human machinery for negotiating who is dominant and who is submissive or the natural human machinery for deciding who will be the leader of the hunting party. Putting the client into a submissive or compliant state of mind probably helps a practitioner quite a bit to persuade the client to believe falsely that lasting change has been produced. You have presented no evidence or argument -- nor am I aware of any evidence or argument -- that putting the client into a submissive or compliant state helps a practitioner producing lasting change. Consequently, your reliance on and interest in hypnotic techniques significantly raises probability D.
Parenthetically, I do not claim that I know for sure that you are producing false beliefs rather than producing lasting change. It is just that you have not raised the probability I assign to your being able to produce lasting change high enough to justify my choosing to chase a pointer you gave into the literature or high enough for me to stop wishing that you would stop writing about how to produce lasting change in another human being on this site.
Parenthetically, I do not claim that your deception, if indeed that is what it is, is conscious or intentional. Most self-help and mental-health practitioners deceive because they are self-deceived on the same point.
You believe and are fond of repeating that a major reason for the failure of some of the techniques you use is a refusal by the client to believe that the technique can work. Exhorting the client to refrain from scepticism or pessimism is like hypnosis in that it strongly tends to put the client in a submissive or compliant state of mind, which again significantly raises probability D.
To the best of my knowledge (maybe you can correct me here) you have never described on this site an instance where you used a reliable means to verify that you had produced a lasting change. When you believe for example that you have produced a lasting improvement in a male client's ability to pick up women in bars, have you ever actually accompanied the client to a bar and observed how long it takes the client to achieve some objectively-valid sign of success (such as getting the woman's phone number or getting the woman to follow the client out to his car)?
In your extensive writings on this site, I can recall no instance where you describe your verifying your impression that you have created a lasting change in a client using reliable means. Rather, you have described only unreliable means, namely, your perceptions of the mental and the social environment and reports from clients about their perceptions of the mental and the social environment. That drastically raises probability D. Of course, you can bring probability D right back down again, and more, by describing instances where you have used reliable means to verify your impression that you have created a lasting change.
For readers who want to read more, here are two of Eliezer's sceptical responses to PJ Eby: [001][1], [002][2]
If it makes you feel any better, I am not seeing you any more harshly than I see any other self-help, life-coach or mental-health practitioner, including those with PhDs in psychology and MDs in psychiatry and those with prestigious academic appointments. In my book, until I see very strong evidence to the contrary, every mental-health practitioner and self-help practitioner is with high probability deluded except those that constantly remind themselves of how little they know.
Actually there is one way in which I resent you more than I resent other self-help, life-coach or mental-health practitioners: the other ones do not bring their false beliefs or rather their most-probably-false not-sufficiently-verified beliefs to my favorite place to read about the mental environment and the social environment. I worry that your copious writings on this site will discourage contributions from those who have constructed their causal model of mental and social reality more carefully.
You missed the point - I was pointing out there is no financial incentive for me to send somebody to download somebody else's free stuff, when I sell workshops on the same topic.
Holy cow, you're confused. To actually refute the huge chain of fallacies you've just perpetrated seems like it would take me all day. Nonetheless, I shall try to be brief:
I do not use formal hypnosis. I have recently been interested in the similarities between certain effects of hypnosis and my techniques.
I am not aware of any connection between hypnosis, dominance, and hunting parties, and would be very, very surprised if any arose, unless perhaps we're talking about stage hypnotism. The tools I work with are strictly ones of monoidealism and ideodynamics... which are at work whenever you start thinking you're hungry until it becomes enough of an obsession for you to walk to the fridge. That is what monoidealism and ideodynamics are: the absorption of the imagination upon a single thought until it induces emotional, sensory, or physical response.
I do not consider my work to be done until someone is surprised by their behavior or their automatic responses, specifically in order to avoid "false placebo" effects. Sometimes, a person will say they think they changed or that something changed a little bit, and my response to that is always to question it, to find out specifically what is happening. A true success nearly always involves something that the person did not expect -- indicating that their S1 behavior model has changed, relative to their S2 self-modeling.
A state of submission is not useful to my work; I spend a considerable effort getting clients out of such states, because then they will spend ridiculous amounts of time deprecating themselves, instead of actually answering the questions I ask.
Whew. I think that'll do for now.
I do not believe I have produced such an improvement. I have had only one client who asked for anything like this, and it was for alleviation of specific fears in the matter... and the result was what I'd consider a partial success. That is, the alleviation of some of the fears, and not others. The client did not pursue the matter further with me, but has a girlfriend now. I don't know whether he met her in a bar or not, but then, the situation we discussed was talking to a girl on the subway. ;-)
If someone wants to learn to do pickup, they should go to a pickup coach. I don't teach pickup, and I'm not a coach.
Since it is my clients' perceptions that determine their behavior (not to mention their satisfaction), what else is it that I should measure, besides their perceptions? What measurement of the goodness of their lives shall I use? Is there such a thing as a scale for objectively determining how good someone's life is?
I seem to remember someone who said something along the lines of "we pretend to treat people, and if we pretend really well, they will pretend to get better... for the rest of their lives." The point is not about pretending, the point is that virtually all of the measuring tools we have for subjective experience are themselves subjective. (Somatic markers are at least empirical, though still not entirely objective.)
I am most curious as to what this evidence would look like. How would you measure it? I would truly love to know about such an absolute measure, if it existed, because even if my methods scored low on it, it would offer me untold opportunity to improve -- provided, of course, it gave relatively fast feedback.
(I use somatic markers for measurement because they give extremely fast feedback, and sometimes fast feedback with modest accuracy can be much more useful than a precise measurement that takes weeks or months.)
Replying to me with this type of thing is not a good way to discourage me from writing here.
Your models are not nearly as carefully constructed as mine, or you wouldn't be confusing hypnosis with social dominance.
When I wrote that "it is never in the financial self-interest of any [self-help] practitioner to do the hard long work to collect evidence that would sway a non-gullible client," I referred to long hard work many orders of magnitude longer and harder than posting a link to a web page. Consequently, your pointing out that you post links to web pages even when it is not in your financial self-interest to do so does not refute my point. I do not maintain that you should do the long hard work to collect evidence that would sway a non-guillible client: you probably cannot afford to spend the necessary time, attention and money. But I do wish you would stop submitting to this site weak evidence that would sway only a gullible client or a client very desperate for help.
And with that I have exceeded the time I have budgeted for participation on this site for the day, so my response to your other points will have to wait for another day. If I may make a practical suggestion to those readers wanting to follow this thread: subscribe to the feed for my user page till you see my response to pjeby's other points, then unsubscribe.
If you're going to insult someone, just do it. Don't write insults directed at "lots of people", when it's obvious who you're talking about. Perhaps if you made your attacks more concrete, you would realize that you have an obligation to check your facts first.
Probably true. But if you use those statistical facts about most people as an excuse to never listen to anyone, or even to one specific person, you're setting yourself up for failure. How will you ever revise your probability estimate of one person's knowledge or the general state of knowledge in a field, if you never allow yourself to encounter any evidence?
Is that your true rejection? If P.J. Eby said "why, yes I have," would you change your views based on one anecdote? Since a randomized, double-blind trial is impossible (or at least financially impractical and incompatible with the self-help coach's business model), what do you consider a reasonable standard of evidence?
Given the vigorous dissent from you and others, I don't think "discouraging contributions" is a likely problem! However, I personally would like to see discussion of specific claims of fact and (as much as possible) empirical evidence. A simple assertion of a probability estimate doesn't help me understand your points of disagreement.
A reasonable standard of evidence is established by what it takes to change your mind (ideally you'd need to work from elicited prior, which allows to check how reasonable your requirements are). If it's double-blind trial that is required to change your mind, too bad it's unavailable.
Regardless of its (in)applicability to pjeby, whose participation on this site I generally approve of, this beautiful rant reinforced and gave reasons for my own similar feelings toward self-help salesmen in general.
Really? My experience is the opposite (at least when the person is trying to hide it)
del
The people who are best at it are sociopaths, because they don't care. So brain surgery to damage selective parts of your limbic system may help.