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HughRistik comments on [LINK] Ethical Pick-Up Artistry (Clarisse Thorn) - Less Wrong Discussion
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I find this advice has a couple good points, but is mostly pretty bad.
This advice can be helpful if you have a relationship with strong gender roles, but it's not so useful for (a) people with substantial social difficulties, or (b) men in gender traditional relationships.
(a) If you have substantial insecurity or social anxiety, then if you "Show what you're feeling; say what you're thinking," you will just end up voicing your insecurity and anxiety. That's usually a bad idea in most dating situations.
(b) If you are a man dating a woman with gender traditional preferences, you must be careful about displaying vulnerability, because some women with those preferences find it unattractive.
Not bad advice (though good luck getting your friends to help you get sexual release). The main problem this advice is that it fails to recognize how badly people's mental health gets trashed by lack of wanted relationships and intimacy.
This is decent advice.
This could be good advice to someone who generally has narrow standards, but to assume that guys who complain that women are attracted to assholes have narrow standards (or go for asshole women) is baseless prejudice.
Good advice.
This advice is horrible for anyone who is expected to initiate sex. Good luck doing that without any sort of goal-directness.
I was going to ask "why not apply the same energy you put toward PUA techniques to enhancing your awareness of easy, real connection?" but then I realized:
1) I don't know how to isolate the qualities of true connection, so it's unfair to ask anyone else to spontaneously know them. Frankly, I could be bullshitting myself.
2) You might still need the PUA stuff to talk to the person once you've become aware of your connection to them.
I see now that it would be as foolish to dismiss the usefulness of PUA techniques as it would be to dismiss the usefulness of this book.
EDIT: I thought about it even more, and I've used PUA techniques a ton! Except that I figured them out myself, through trial and error, and saw them as a means to an end. The end in this case being to obtain necessary interpersonal nutrients. I never forgot, though (if I may abuse the metaphor), that love is real and it's preferable to pickup in the same way a hot, home-cooked meal is preferable to vitamin supplements. I actually bonded over this fact with many of the girls I successfully picked up. We were on the same quest, after all.
EDIT 2: Furthermore, ignoring existing interpersonal theory and making your own mistakes from scratch may also make you better at paying attention to what is actually going on around you. Unlike a martial arts expert who, instead of resolving a conflict peacefully whenever possible, just wants to kick somebody's ass.
A martial artist who is violating the spirit (and pragmatics) that form the core philosophy of most martial arts communities. There is much that can be taken from this analogy.
Yes, but people are inclined to formalism nonetheless.
I'm not sure how formalism relates to the context.
I might be presenting an unfair caricature of how PUAs operate, but it seems to me that by the very virtue of operating within a prescribed formal structure, you're necessarily going to notice some things more than others. And they might be wrong things. And you might stick to form because it's what you have.
If you're constantly engaged because you're trying to develop your own understanding of interpersonal stuff, then you're probably less likely to experience formal blindness.
I understand what you mean by formal now. (Without necessarily agreeing with your prediction of how best to facilitate awareness.)
Let's say you'd never heard of PUArtistry. You're in a bar (or venue of your choice). What are your objectives and how do you meet them?
Right now I don't have any such objectives (and so haven't gone to any bars in a while). You would have to specify what objectives prompted me to go there as part of your counterfactual.
This depends on the aforementioned objectives. For most likely objectives a plan would most likely involve approaching many women, flirting and conversing.
I don't have the faintest idea about how I would do that assuming I had no exposure to bodies of knowledge about how such things work. I suspect very badly. Reinventing the wheel would take huge amounts of effort and be a massive waste of my time.
I'm trying to establish the best way to stay aware of one's authentic needs re: companionship, love, and sex. And how to meet those needs.
Also,
This feels like a gigantic assumption to me.
My impression is that two people who spend enough time together and are physically attracted to one another will tend to eventually have sex. It usually takes a lot of willpower for this not to be the case.
Not if you're the sort of person who doesn't know how ordinary people go about signaling they're amenable to having sex.
It was only in retrospect after a lot of social learning that I became aware of all the times in my past that I easily could have been having sex, but wasn't because I didn't recognize the cues I was supposed to be picking up.
Was sex your goal at the time? How much time did you spend with the person(s) in question? Enough for it to be considered a long-term romantic relationship?
No. This
described my outlook, and still does. I would have been happy to be having sex though.
And it varied; there are simply a number of people, who I spent differing amounts, some quite a lot, of time with, who in retrospect were willing to have sex with me.
Having been in the position of needing good advice, I agree with HughRistik that the advice above is mostly pretty bad unless you're the sort of person who doesn't already need the advice.
(Where 'already' probably fits better a few words earlier.)
It's not for nothing that my post history is full of comments with edit marks next to them. But now if I correct this one, it'll have a pointless comment box hanging off of it. See what you did?
Are you sure it's bad advice? Maybe it's good advice, but not written explicitly enough. And maybe other advice that is written more explicitly isn't as good, but is defaulted to out of (reasonable!) fear of feeling incompetent.
It might have been clearer if I'd distinguished between advice that is bad because it suggests unwise courses of action, and advice that is bad because attempting to follow it is not a feasible way to modify your actions for the better. I think it's bad advice of the sort that doesn't provide enough information to be positive or negative.