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RichardKennaway comments on Open Thread, May 25 - May 31, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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However attractive, well dressed, confidant you are, you still need to know how to actually approach someone.
A problem is that any attempt to improve attractiveness will lead some people to declare that you are evil or otherwise defective. Its not just PUA stuff, this is far more general: if a guy lifts, that makes him a 'dickhead' according to members of my peer group, while a woman not shaving her armpits makes her strong & empowered (does a man not shaving his face make him empowered?). Conversely, some people believe that not taking care of your appearance makes you a slob.
Then there's the problem that confidence is key. You need to be 110% confident of everything you say, and to truly believe this, you need to internalise it. The problem is then that it spills over into other aspects of life, and you become very badly credence calibrated, potentially leading to serious mistakes because you can't admit that you might be wrong. When you are in a group containing more than one 'alpha male' it becomes impossible to get anything done, even something as simple as choosing a pub to go to, because one alpha male decides to go to one pub, the other decides to go to a different pub, and because they are alpha, they don't ask anyone else what they want, and so everyone ends up at a different pub.
In fact, its possible that LW rationality is training people to have bad social skills. "How to change your mind" might just be how to look like a weak-willed person who won't stick to their guns, or if you change your mind about politics, it makes you a traitor.
But if you have too little confidence, you can get stuck in a loop where:
low confidence -> little romantic success -> low confidence -> little romantic success ...
Screw them.
To whom? Screw them.
You can't please everyone and trying to is a waste of far more than just time.
Yes, but it is pissing against the wind of a huge part of human biology where status withing the tribe is all-important. Don't expect this to be easy.
You worry about that all-important status when you fear losing it.
Want to win? Then focus on winning, not on not-losing. You need to if you want to be seen as high-status, anyway. Fear of loss is low-status, so is worrying about what others think.
Navigate the minefield, sure. But do it from a position of strength, not of weakness.
Of course. There are two relevant terms that I learned in another language, one way to translate them would be to "seek success" or "avoid failure". Seeking success is pursuing your dream job, avoiding failure is fearing you will not be able to pay bills so accepting any job. Seeking success is far better, but if you are not blessed with sky high testosterone and are thus timid and not driven, you cannot really do much more than avoiding failure. It is not exactly a choice you can make, it is more about what you are. Of course you can try to slowly change what you are i.e. work on developing courage. Wanting to win is in itself a keyword used by the success oriented, who believe they can be / can do better than others. The failure-avoidant want to not prove worse than others, and thus seek to lose, not win. It takes a really lot of working on courage to go from one to another and it is not clear what methods develop this kind of courage best.
Maybe this (courage or self-confidence methods) would deserve a top level.
I applaud this attitude, and I think the first step should be for people to get enough self-confidence to say "screw them"!
Where will the self-confidence come from? I prefer the Nike slogan: "Just do it."