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beoShaffer comments on Open Thread, June 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I am doing a study on pick-up artistry. Currently I'm doing exploratory work to develop/find an abbreviated pick-up curriculum and operationalize pick-up success. I've been able to find some pretty good online resources*, but would appreciate any suggestions for further places to look. As this is undergraduate research I'm on a pretty nonexistent budget, so free stuff is greatly preferred. That said I can drop some out of pocket cash if necessary. If anyone with pick-up experience can talk to me, especially to give feedback on the completed materials that would be great.
*Seduction Chronicles and Attractology have been particularly useful
If you will need to convince a professor to someday give you a passing grade on this work I hope you are taking into account that most professors would consider what you are doing to be evil. Never, ever describe this kind of work on any type of graduate school application. Trust me, I know a lot about this kind of thing.
I'd be curious to hear more about the details of that episode.
I wrote up what happened for Forbes.. I later found out that it was Smith's President not its Board of Trustees that finally decided to give me tenure.
Huh. I knew that academia had a liberal bias, but I didn't know it was quite that bad.
The professor who will be grading this has actively encouraged this research topic and multiple other professors at my school have expressed approval, with none expressing disapproval.
Impressive. What school?
Knox College
Your article describes the consequences of being perceived as "right-wing" on American campuses. Is pick-up considered "right wing"? Or is your point more generally that students do not have as much freedom of speech on campus as they think?
I'm specifically curious about the claim that most professors would consider what you are doing to be evil. Is that based on personal experience with this issue?
Racism, sexism and homophobia are the three primary evils for politically correct professors. From what I've read of pick-up (i.e. Roissy's blog) it is in part predicated on a negative view of women's intelligence, standards and ethics making it indeed sexist.
See this to get a feel for how feminist react to criticisms of women. Truth is not considered a defense for this kind of "sexism". (A professor suggested I should not be teaching at Smith College because during a panel discussion on free speech I said Summers was probably correct.)
I've never discussed pick-up with another professor but systematically manipulative women into having sex by convincing them that you are something that you are not (alpha) would be considered by many feminist, I suspect, as form of non-consensual sex.
How comes they describe that in terms of 'convincing them that you are something you are not' rather than 'becoming something you didn't use to be'? Do they think people have an XML tag attached that reads 'beta' or something, independent of how they behave and interact? To me, the idea of convincingly faking being alpha makes as much sense as that of convincingly faking being fluent in English, and sounds like something a generalization of the anti-zombie principle would dismiss as utterly meaningless.
The given "something" is a package consisting of many parts. Some of them are easy to detect, some of them are difficult to detect. In real life there seems to be a significant correlation between the former and the latter, so people detect the former to predict the whole package.
After understanding this algorithm, other people learn the former parts, with intention to give a false impression that they have the whole package. The whole topic is difficult to discuss, because most package-detectors have a taboo against speaking about the package (especially admitting that they want it), and most package-fakers do not want to admit they actually don't have the whole package.
Thus we end with very vague discussions about whether it is immoral to do ...some unspecifed things... in order to create an impression of ...something unspecified... when ...something unspecified... is missing; usually rendered as "you should be yourself, because pretending otherwise is creepy". Which means: "I am scared of you hacking my decision heuristics, so I would like to punish you socially."
What is it that is difficult to detect in a person and still people care about potential partners having it? Income? (But I don't get the impression that the typical PUA is poverty-stricken, and I can't think of reasons for people to care about that in very-short-term relationships, which AFAIK are those most PUAs are after.) Lack of STDs? (But, if anything, I'd expect that to anticorrelate with alpha behaviour.) Penis size? (But why would that correlate with behaviour at all?)
I guess it is how the person will behave in the future, and in exceptional situations. We can predict it based on person's behavior here and now, unless that behavior is faked to confuse our algorithms.
Humans are not automatically strategic and nature is not antropomorphic, but if I tried to translate the nature's concerns for "I want an alpha male", it would be: "I want to be sure my partner will be able to protect me and our children in case of conflict."
This strategy is calibrated for an ancient environment, so it sometimes fails, but often it works; some traits are also useful now, and even the less useful traits still make impression on other people, so they give a social bonus. (For example higher people earn more on average, even if their height is not necessary for their work.)
Of course there is a difference between what our genes "want" and what we want. I guess a typical human female does not rationally evaluate male's capacity of protecting her in combat, but it's more like unconscious evaluation + halo effect. A male unconsciously evaluated as an alpha male seems superior in almost everything; he will seem at the same time stronger, wiser, more witty, nicer, more skilled, spiritually superior, whatever. A conflicting information will be filtered away. ("He beat the shit out of those people, because they looked at him the wrong way, and he felt the need to protect me. He loves me so much! No, he is not agresssive; he may give that impression, but only because you don't really know him. In fact he is very gentle, he has a good heart and wouldn't wish no harm to anyone. He is just a bit different, because he is such a strong personality. Don't judge him, because you don't know him as much as I do! And he did not really murder that guy in 2004, he was just framed by the corrupt police; he explained me everything, because he trusts me. And by the way the dead guy deserved it.")
Anyway, preference is a preference, you cannot explain it away. (Analogically, if a male prefers females with big breasts, you can't change his preference by explaining that bigger breasts are not necessary to feed children.)
What I meant to ask was what kind of information about someone is hard to detect in a few hours of face-to-face interaction but would still affect someone else's willingness to have a (usually very-short-term) sexual relationship with them, regardless of whatever evolutionary reasons caused such a preference to exist. (So, in your example, the equivalent “men like women with big breasts” would be a valid answer, but the equivalent of “men like women who could produce lots of milk for their children” wouldn't.) And I didn't mean that as a rhetorical question.
(FWIW, and I think I've read this argument before, it would make evolutionary sense for women to have different preferences for one-night stands than for marriage, because if you had to choose between a healthy man and a wealthy one you'd rather your child was raised by the latter but (unbeknownst to him) had half the genes of the former.)
I think humans have general preference for "reals value" as opposed to faking their reward signals (a.k.a. "wireheading"). Of course sometimes we fake the reward signals, because it is pleasant and we are programmed to seek pleasure; but if we did it without restraints, our survival value would go down. So when someone enjoys "fake values" too much, they will get negative social feedback, because by putting themselves in danger they also decrease their value as an ally.
So a part of mechanism that warns women against "fake alpha males" may be a general negative response against "fake values", not necessarily related to specific real risks of having one-night sex on birth control with a fake alpha versus with a real alpha.
Another part could be this: it is good for a woman to have sex with a man whom other women consider attractive. (If the man is unattractive to other women, perhaps he has some negative trait that you did not notice, so it is better to avoid him anyway, because you don't want to risk your child to inherit a negative trait.) On the level of feelings -- not being a woman I can only guess here -- the information, or just a suspicion, that a man is unattractive to other women, probably makes the man less attractive. (It is a perception bias.) Simply said: "women like men liked by other women"; and they honestly like them, not just pretend that they do.
The idea of a "fake alpha male" (a PUA) probably evokes an image of man who was unattractive to women he met yesterday, and who is unattractive even today in moments where he stops playing by the PUA rules and becomes his old self. Therefore he is an unattractive man, who just uses some kind of reality-distortion technique to appear attractive. -- An analogy would be an ugly woman using hypnosis to convince men that she is a supermodel. The near-mode belief in existence of such women would make many men feel very uncomfortable, and they would consider "speed hypnosis" lessons unethical. (For better analogy, let's assume that this "speed hypnosis" cannot be used to break someone's will, only to alter their perceptions.)
Yes, in our DNA.
Our DNA can give different degrees of bias towards different competitive strategies. It doesn't determine status or behavior in a given situation.
I think that was the point.
As a reply to the quoted context the point was James made was false.
I'd guess that, except as far as physical attractiveness is concerned¹, socialization is much much much more relevant than DNA. A clone of Casanova raised in a poor, devoutly religious family in an Islamic country wouldn't become terribly good at picking up girls.
¹And even there, grooming does a lot.