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It seems like in the best case, PUA would be kind of like makeup. Lots of male attraction cues are visual, so they can be gamed when women wear makeup, do their hair, or wear an attractive outfit. Lots of female attraction cues are behavioral, so they can be gamed by acting or becoming more confident and interesting.
As one Metafilter user put it:
Do you have ethical problems with any of 1-4?
Ed. - It's possible that when HughRistik said "not all PUA advice is like Roissy's", he meant "the PUA stuff we're discussing on Less Wrong is Roissy-type stuff, and not all PUA stuff is like that".
I'm actually at the point when I think it is impossible to give men useful advice to improve their sex lives and relationships because of the social dynamics that arise in nearly all societies. Actually good advice aiming to optimize the life outcomes of the men who are given it has never been discussed in public spaces and considered reputable.
Same can naturally be said of advice for women. I think most modern dating advice both for men and women is anti-knowledge in that the more of it you follow the more miserable you will end up being. I would say follow your instincts but that doesn't work either in our society since they are broken.
I'd go with “keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel”, i.e.¹ use the evidence that you see to update your model of the world,² and your model of the world to decide which possible behaviours would be most likely to achieve your goals. This applies to any goal whatsoever (not just dating), and ought to be obvious to LW readers, but people may tend to forget this in certain contexts due to ugh fields.
This is probably not what Jim Morrison meant by that, but still.
Note that the world also includes you. Noticing what this fact implies is left as an exercise for the reader.
I endorse this advice. Note however some consider this in itself unethical when it comes to interpersonal relations. I have no clue why.
I think I may have just figured out why. Think about the evolutionary purpose of niceness. Thinking about the nice vs. candid argument here, I suspect the purpose of niceness is to provide a credible precommitment to cooperate with someone in the future by sabotaging one's own reasoning in such a way that will make one overestimate the value of cooperating with the other person.
Hmm, yeah. Causal decision theory doesn't work right in several-player games and you shouldn't defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, but that was one of the things I alluded to in Footnote 2; “would” in my comment was intended to be interpreted as explained in Good and Real.
Advice about how to look better seems trivially useful and reputable... Overall, I find your claim that the intersection of palatable dating advice and useful dating advice is empty extremely implausible. What else would Clarisse Thorn's "ethical PUA advice" be?
At the very least there should be some reasonably effective advice that's only minimally unpalatable or whatever, like become a really good guitarist and impress girls with your guitar skillz.
Regarding PUA and evolutionary psychology: I don't see how a self-selected population that's under the influence of alcohol, and has been living with all kinds of weird modern norms and technology, has all that much in common with the EEA.
Good point that I hadn't thought of. And also, most mating in the EEA would be with people that you'd had and expect to have extended interactions with-- this is probably very different from trying to pick up strangers.
If all PUA said was those 4 things, it wouldn't be interesting or controversial, so I think it's pretty ridiculous to respond to a conversation about PUA mentioning the parts few people would disagree with. Trickery, lies, insults, treating people as things, these are the sorts of problems people have with PUA.
This sounds reasonable until you actually think about the four points mentioned in Near mode. Consider:
What does approaching lots of women actually look like if done in a logistically sound way? How does this relate to social norms? How does this relate to how feminists would like social norms to be?
Observe what actually confident humans do to signal their confidence. Just do.
Observe what is actually considered entertaining in a club envrionment that most PUA is designed to work in.
You know most of the things considered disreputable that PUAs advocate are precisely the result of first observing how points one to three actually work in our society and then optimizing to mimic this.
Only dressing and grooming well is probably not inherently controversial and even then pick up artists are mocked for their attempts to reverse engineer fashion that signals what they want to signal.
I recommend Clarisse Thorn's Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser-- PUA is a divergent group of subcultures.