I've actually been discussing pickup on LessWrong for a while. I've been attempting to de-jargonize it, and translate the language into terms that are less likely to offend people. The result is a lot of dry and verbose comments in dark corners of other threads. Here is a haphazardly-organized index of my comments that either discuss pickup, or discuss related issues about ethics or personal development:
Pickup and rationality: naive realism and the availability heuristic in pickup, rationalist practices in pickup communities
Female preferences, and PUA models thereof: priors when approaching women the need for impersonal initial heuristics and stereotypes in social and sexual interaction, PUA vs. feminist views of women's preferences, flaws in the standard PUA model of women, how PUAs observe gender-typical women, and how they fail to model gender-atypical women, while gender-atypical women fail to understand gender-typical women that PUAs are modeling, greater female selectivity about behavior, creating models of human interaction from anecdotal data
Sexual ethics: manipulation, questions to ask about whether sexual influence is ethical, buyer's remorse, "duping" wom
Do Not Want.
Everything you say in the proposed post may be factually true to within individual variance. AND YET: just posting on and discussing this topic on LW communicates a certain message -- whether you like it or not and no matter how vigorously you disclaim it. That message is that the typical reader of LW is 20-34 and heterosexual and single and male and we prefer it that way, and if you do not fit that demographic then you may very well find that conversations here may well revolve around strategizing for how to manipulate you into doing things that, in a more reflective state, you would much prefer not to do.
Nobody is going to write the gay male or lesbian or women-seducing-men version of this post, because of the skewed demographics of this website. There's little point in pretending that LW would be an equally welcoming forum for those hypothetical posts.
I hate to see probably my single favorite current contributor to LW take such an (I believe unintentionally) offensive step. Furthermore, does it become a person who by his own admission is extremely interested in ethics (granted, metaethics, but still) to post a topic whose ethical status is very dubious and simply...
That message is that the typical reader of LW is 20-34 and heterosexual and single and male and we prefer it that way
Why does a self-improvement article aimed at 20-34 heterosexual single males communicate that we prefer such a membership at LessWrong? Is it because of the particular subject of pickup?
I think it's a good thing that lukeprog has the humility to avoid overgeneralizing his advice to other populations.
if you do not fit that demographic then you may very well find that conversations here may well revolve around strategizing for how to manipulate you into doing things that, in a more reflective state, you would much prefer not to do
Your reaction presupposes a certain view of sexual and social ethics. Your characterization of pickup as "manipulating women into doing things that in a more reflective state, they would much prefer not to do" is loaded:
"Manipulation" is thrown around a lot, yet in a recent discussion I noted that nobody had given any concrete examples of "manipulation," or made attempts to demarcate it from ethical behavior (though at least the difficulty of doing so was acknowledged). As I remarked in that post, "ma...
I am a straight female. I would like to see this subject discussed, for various reasons:
It doesn't strike me as unethical in and of itself, as long as people don't misuse it. I doubt it would be extensively misused.
It could help other people, and I wish them well.
I am curious about the subject matter.
I could use some help with my general social skills; this could be useful.
I'd like to see a similar article for women.
I dislike censorship, including self-censorship, and think all nearly all topics should be freely discussed.
In sum, I wouldn't be driven away by PUA discussion, and I'd like to see it on here, aimed at both genders (unfortunately, I'm a major nerd who can't write the women-attracting-men post).
That's just my two cents, and I'm fine with it if the majority would rather not.
I notice that I'm confused.
If (as is being claimed) the principles underlying PUA are useful for becoming the best man you can be and succeeding in all areas of life, and discussing those principles is beneficial for those reasons, and (as is also being claimed) signaling alliance with PUA alienates women and nonheterosexual men and is bad for the community for those reasons, it seems to follow that it's a good idea to do the former without doing the latter: for example, to talk about the underlying principles as they apply to "holistic self-improvement" and "improv[ing] social relations in general" rather than as they apply to sexual attraction.
But instead I'm seeing people who endorse the first claim respond to the second claim by dropping the subject altogether.
That would make sense if it turns out that there isn't a post's worth of stuff that comes out of PUA research that isn't about sexual attraction. But that would be evidence against the claim that PUA research is useful outside of that area, and I'm not seeing people updating on that either.
I tentatively conclude that the discussion has been more of a set piece than an actual exchange of positions. Which is sort of a pity, if true, though understandable.
I would like to address the perception that pickup excludes people other than single heterosexual males. Although single heterosexual males dominate the seduction community in its current form, certain ideas and ways of thinking are catching on for other gender combinations, even though they aren't yet very well developed.
There are female PUAs. Here is an excellent FAQ from the Playettes forum of mASF. It's way better than anything in The Rules or Cosmo.
There are also numerous blogs written by women who have been influenced by pickup, such as Dolly, the NY sex blogger who ended up meeting PUAs and eventually speaking at a pickup convention:
http://cocksanddolls.blogspot.com/2006/01/playing-with-player.html http://cocksanddolls.blogspot.com/2006/02/sarging-friday-night-part-ii.html http://cocksanddolls.blogspot.com/2006/07/cliffs-notes-part-ii.html http://cocksanddolls.blogspot.com/2006/07/cliffs-notes-part-iii.html
Male-male seduction? Some quick Google searching found gay forums using seduction community terms. And of course, gay male culture has pickup and cruising scenes that predate the modern seduction community.
As for female-female pickup, I don't know much, but we recently had...
I wonder if part of the reason we see so few queer or trans people into the seduction community (in addition to their lower population) is that such folks will get hated on by practically everyone. Not only do they get marginalization by the mainstream culture, while encountering homophobia in the seduction community, but they may get marginalized within progressive/feminist circles for studying pickup. Notice how the lesbian woman with pickup background I quote got negative reactions when trying to discuss the pragmatics of dating with her queer or feminist female friends.
If you are a lesbian female or bisexual male PUA... who is gonna be your friend?
It is a controversial topic, already considered taboo here by many people, and would offend a lot of people.
But I would like very much to read it. And I am offended by people who try to prevent people from saying things that offend them. So you have to offend somebody!
I don't care if people are turned away by it. We've gotta have one place that is pure, where people can speak truth and be as politically incorrect and offensive as they dare, and not make reason bend over backwards in the name of popularity. And this is that place.
I will say, though, that I've read/heard/watched/tried a lot of material over the past 4 years by DeAngelo, Style, Mystery, Lance Mason, etc.; and none of it has ever helped me one bit. I think that most of it works for a certain personality-type of guy, which I am not, on a certain personality-type of woman, who don't like guys like me. The branches of the PUA industry descended from Copeland, DeAngelo, and Mystery (we need a phylogenetic tree here) are focused on picking up the type of shallow, party-girl, bitchy woman that is not interested in intellectuals. I bore them, and they bore me. IMHO "cocky comedy" backfires on a large percent...
none of it has ever helped me one bit
I should be more specific:
It would have helped me a great deal to have read this material when I was in college. It would have destroyed the dysfunctional things I had been taught (e.g., "Dating leads to sin; banter is rude; sex is dirty; women don't want sex; love is spiritual, not physical; just be yourself; just wait, and the right woman for you will be attracted to you"), and I probably would have been able to connect with at least some of the women who threw themselves at me when I was in college.
It has helped me get a lot of phone numbers and emails from women - not using specific techniques, which I'm lousy at, but just knowing that nothing awful will happen if I walk up to a strange woman and talk to her and ask for her number. But those phone #s and emails that I got using PUA techniques, don't usually convert! And I've lost at least one woman by using those techniques, so I'm maybe breaking even.
Bodybuilding was a more effective way of pickup up women. For me, spending an hour a day in the gym, and fifteen minutes talking to women, is more effective than spending an hour and fifteen minutes in a bar. For many gu
Bodybuilding was a more effective way of pickup up women. For me, spending an hour a day in the gym, and fifteen minutes talking to women, is more effective than spending an hour and fifteen minutes in a bar. For many guys that is probably not the case. I am a bar-environment-defective personality. Being the quiet type is appealing if you are muscular, possibly because women know it's by choice and not out of fear, and definitely because some women are intrigued by the contrast. Women like the strong and silent type, not the silent type.
My experience exactly. The gym makes an enormous difference to attractiveness. The trifecta of physical appeal, self confidence and hormone adjustment.
I don't think your approach is good. From what I see, you would like to discuss this topic from a practical self-improvement perspective. But there are already lots of places on the web that offer much better opportunities for such discussions than LW ever could, so I see no point at all in seeking them here.
What is, in my view, really interesting in this topic from the perspective of the LW mission statement is the possibility of distilling more general insight about human thought and behavior. As I wrote in a recent comment, this topic is unique in that it provides a no-nonsense dissection of a large and important area of human social interaction with a level of detail, accuracy, and depth that no other approach has managed to reach. This is a true intellectual breakthrough in an area that has otherwise been hopelessly fruitless, confused, and overburdened with nonsense and bullshit. For people who are able and wiling to discuss it in an unbiased and intelligent way, this should open a floodgate of first-rate insight, much of it directly relevant for the essential questions about the ways human minds function realistically.
So, if you'd like to open discussions of this topic on LW, I'd suggest this latter angle: what can we learn about human minds and human behavior in general by applying insights gathered from it? That is where the real challenge and the real potential for insight is.
A front page post on PUA would not jibe well with the previously-articulated goal of attracting more women to this community, and might drive some of the existing ones away.
I used to be one of those poor guys who complained that "Girls say they want nice guys, but they only go out with jerks!"
In women-dominated communities, it is a truism that this sort of statement is generally uttered by guys who are jerks but don't realize it. These men are referred to as Nice Guys(TM), a mocking designation that distinguishes them from actual nice guys, who we like. Here are a few blog posts breaking down the definition. See also http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Nice_guy_syndrome for a summary of views on this phenomenon from female perspectives.
A post that claims to explain why women only go out with jerks is therefore very liable to be extremely alienating to most female readers, especially when the answer turns out to be "because evolution."
I think it accurately identifies a phenomenon that occurs with some frequency. Not that it is true in every case.
Right, I didn't think you thought it was true in every case. I was asking what you think the breakdown of "not-nice nice guys" vs. "genuine nice guys" might be among self-identified "nice guys" who report lack of success with women.
I think it's more that guys who are actually nice
"Actually nice" presupposes a particular definition of "nice." If a guy who is normally high in agreeableness and empathy gets rejected and feels bitter, is he not actually "nice?" If the guy believes that he has a right to sexual contact from women due to positive treatment of her, then yes, that's getting into jerk territory. If he actually faked being friends with her, then yes, that's also departing from conventional notions of "niceness" (though being unable to maintain the friendship after being rejected is not sufficient evidence that the friendship was fake).
However, outside such behaviors, calling a guy "not nice" merely for being resentful and bitter about rejection seems like an example of the funda...
If you don't like what happens when you frame your material in terms of PUA, try a different framing. Write a post about the science of attraction, based on published research, and call it a post about the science of attraction. Or write about how social skills can help people be more successful, and portray it as a post about whatever specific social skills you're discussing. You could even include examples from the romantic/dating domain in your post, or mention that the experiences of pickup artists are a source of some of your information (possibly with a link http://lesswrong.com/lw/298/more_art_less_stink_taking_the_pu_out_of_pua/), but the focus should be on the specific skills or techniques and the ways in which they're beneficial. If you start the post with a one-paragraph summary, that summary shouldn't need to devote more than a few words to romance or contain the word "pickup."
This post proposal that you've written encourages people to focus on PUA. It is framed in terms of pickup artistry from the first sentence, it has "seduction" in the title, and it repeatedly mentions things like "how to trick women into bed" and "getting ex...
It's also annoying that a discussion of basic science of human sexual attraction response could be such a mind-killer merely because it's framed in terms of PUA.
Perhaps you could refocus your proposal in this direction? If you're interested in writing it, a review of the experimental work on the psychology underlying human mating behaviors, both male and female, would be more broadly useful and should be better received than giving dating advice to a subset of the community. It would be entirely in line with the Less Wrong theme of understanding human motivation as it actually is, no different to the discussion of biases and heuristics, or status and signaling. I couldn't say the same about a how-to guide for manipulating women, and I'm glad you decided not to pursue it.
I do see the wisdom the caution on your side and that of the commenter on having material specifically tooled to one demographic with little hope for later expansion.
But.
I would still very much like to see an article of this kind (a rationalist approach to pickup) somewhere. I doubt very much that the PUA community is a very rational one. Yes they do have a strong culture of empiricism "the game is played on the field" but the community does have its glaring blind spots (mostly shameless selfpromotion) as well as seems particularly vulnerable t...
...you know what I want to see now? A post for the rational fashion of finding other people who are attracted to the same sex. I have never read any advice on this regard (nor do I have any experience in this regard), and societal signalling is really sketchy in this area.
I'm a male who falls explicitly in a PUA thread's target demographic. I don't think PUA is an inherently bad idea. I think there's a lot of good, worthwhile information to be learned that isn't necessarily sexist. I would like to be in a relationship but suck at avoiding the friend zone. I'd prefer a PUA discussion in an environment where the premier focus is on rationality rather than sex.
I still think this is a bad idea. For a lot of reasons. But the number one is:
As much as I'd like to improve my own abilities to get women to see me as a relationship pr...
I thought it was the long-held consensus that PUA was dark-arts, possible mind-killer, potentially off-putting and off-topic. Suggestion to lukeprog is to use his (awesome) powers of research to pull up the old posts in which this consensus was reached before proceeding. I've had enough whiskey to prevent me from doing so.
I think it's quite possible that, as other people suggest, this will put off many people from LW. However, as a heterosexual male in a LTR, I am still interested in this topic. From what I gather, much of the usefulness of the PUA literature is about understanding what is (statistically speaking) sexually appealing to women. I want to be maximally appealing to my partner, and it seems like the PUA literature might help with that.
Perhaps we can have small discussion level posts ?
I would be interested to see the full post. PUA is not a subject about which I have much knowledge. Neither, admittedly, is attraction/seduction, as I am an undergraduate at a science/engineering university with only ~30% women.
Apparently, I'm more confident than some others about the ability of prospective new readers to weigh a wealth of information and discussion about various topics in rationality against a single post discussing a topic that has been stereotyped to be distasteful.
If I'm mistaken in my impression that some text of the article was edited away, let me then propose that you perhaps open a blog or something link to it and have a discussion with any LW readers that might be interested in the article there and hopefully complete it.
I think that there are major gains as well as genuine insight to be made by rationally thinking about the subject and discussing it. But there is no need to stain LW with bad signalling on this topic.
I used to read LW but never commented. Then I had a change of heart when there was a post that in effect invited people to take a more active part. I commented often and even posted but the experience was not a happy one and I have gone back to only reading some items and commenting very rarely. I do not feel welcome nor feel completely rejected. There are a lot of reasons for the alienation in my case and the repeated return to PUA is one of them. But there are many other reason that are more important. In a sense PUA is political. Evolutionary psycholog...
Though potentially harmful to the LW community, such a post could be quite instrumental (especially given your scholarly style) for some, so I encourage you to write it. If deemed inappropriate for LW due to its negative externalities, the post can be placed on another site (or maybe in the discussion section?).
It seems there's some interest in PUA and attraction at Less Wrong. Would that subject be appropriate for a front-page post? I've drafted the opening of what I had in mind, below. Let me know what you think, and whether I should write the full post.
Also, I've done lots of collaborative writing before, with much success (two examples). I would welcome input from or collaboration with others who have some experience and skill in the attraction arts. If you're one of those people, send me a message! Even if you just want to comment on early drafts or contribute a few thoughts.
I should probably clarify my concept of attraction and seduction. The founders of "pickup" basically saw it as advice on "how to trick women into bed", but I see it as a series of methods for "How to become the best man you can be, which will help you succeed in all areas of life, and also make you attractive to women." Ross Jeffries used neuro-linguistic programming and hypnosis, and Mystery literally used magic tricks to get women to sleep with him. My own sympathies lie with methods advocated by groups like Art of Charm, who focus less on tricks and routines and more on holistic self-improvement.
...
...
EDIT: That didn't take long. Though I share much of PhilGoetz's attitude, I've decided I will not write this post, for the reasons articulated here, here, here and here.
...
Here was the proposed post...
...
When I interviewed to be a contestant on VH1's The Pick-Up Artist, they asked me to list my skills. Among them, I listed "rational thinking."
"How do you think rational thinking will help you with the skills of attraction?" they asked.
I paused, then answered: "Rational thinking tells me that attraction is a thoroughly non-rational process."
A major theme at Less Wrong is "How to win at life with rationality." Today, I want to talk about how to win in your sex life with rationality.a
I didn't get the part on the VH1 show, but no matter: studying and practicing pick-up has transformed my life more than almost anything else, even though getting excellent and frequent sex is, oddly enough, not one of my life's priorities. Nor is finding a soulmate.
If you want lots of sex, or a soulmate, or you want to improve your current relationship, then attraction skills will help with that. Loneliness need not be one of the costs of rationality. But even if you don't want any of those things, studying attraction methods can (1) clear up confusion and frustration about the opposite sex,b (2) improve your social relations in general, (3) boost your confidence, and thus (4) help you succeed in almost every part of your life.
This is a post about what men can do to build attraction in women.c I will not discuss whether these methods are moral. I will not discuss whether these methods are more or less "manipulative" than the standard female methods for attracting men. Instead, I will focus on factual claims about what tends to create sexual attraction in women.
This is also a post for rationalists. More specifically, it is aimed at the average Less Wrong reader: a 20-34 year old, high-IQ, single male atheist.
I will also be assuming the stereotype that many passionate rationalists of our type could benefit from advice on body language, voice tone, social skills, and attire - a stereotype that has some merit. Even if you don't need such advice, many others will benefit from it. I did.
As is my style, I'll begin with a survey of the scientific data on the subject.
Self-help methods in general have not received enough attention from experimental researchers, and attraction methods have fared even worse. That may be what drove the leaders of the pickup community to run thousands of real-life experiments, systematically varying their attire, body language, and speech to measure what worked and what didn't. The dearth of research on the subject turned ordinary men into amateur seduction scientists, albeit without much training.
Still, we can learn some things about sexual attraction from established science.
[full post to be continued here]
a I've also given two humorous speeches on this subject: How to Seduce Women with Body Language and How to Seduce Women with Vocal Tonality.
b I used to be one of those poor guys who complained that "Girls say they want nice guys, but they only go out with jerks!" Merely reading enough evolutionary psychology to understand why women often date "jerks" was enough, in my case, to relieve a lot of confusion and frustration. Even without developing attraction skills, mere understanding can, I think, relieve serious stress and worries about one's manly (fragile) ego.
c Sorry, I don't know much about homosexual attraction, and I'll leave the subject of how women can attract better men to other authors.