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Dagon comments on Instrumental Rationality Questions Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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How instrumentally rational is following Heartiste's advice?
Like all instrumental rationality, it depends on how it aligns with your terminal goals, and how you feel about conscious action which affects others' unconscious reactions. I'd recommend Cialdini or Carnegie as required reading alongside PUA thinking, so you can understand what parts are general human reactions and what parts are specific to sexualized interactions with a certain type of woman.
I do think that it's likely a true belief that most humans act and react in fairly hardwired ways, and understanding those reactions is beneficial for a whole lot of terminal desires. I don't think that Heartiste (or others in the PUA clique) are focusing on the right things for long-term happiness and shared self-reflective growth with a partner.
The thing I noticed with Heartiste is that he's anti-marriage because it's a two-way street and in his opinion a significant majority of women won't make good wives. In his view there's some sort of paradox where women want to attract commitment but don't put significant effort to make the commitment worthwhile to the man.
I can't say if he's right or not but I can't disagree with some of the things he lists.
It's not as though men are reliably good partners, either.
If there's any good advice for identifying people who are likely to be reliable allies over the long haul (if they're treated decently), I'd like to see it.
Yeah, finding reliably good people is a problem in general.
But there is also this gender-specific part of problem... uhm, remember the OKCupid study about how women rated average men as "below average" on the attractivity scale? (Like an opposite of the Lake Wobegon effect.) So we have all the average women who believe they are looking for a correspondingly average man and can't find one, while in reality they are merely unwilling to settle in their own league.
Maybe Heartiste means something like this, from the opposite side. A woman who is in the man's league will believe she is better than him, and therefore will not put much effort into the commitment, because she is still waiting for the true prince to come for her. (It will take some hard lessons in life to learn what she can realistically expect, but those lessons take time, and Heartiste prefers young women.)
"Reliable allies over the long haul" is pretty much the opposite of looking for a pretty face.
Why? What's the correlation between pretty face and unreliability?
Speaking very generally, a "pretty face" will have an easy time finding a partner. This means that the price of dumping someone will be low for him/her -- s/he can always find a replacement. S/he has incentives to extensively shop for the best deal.
Does that mean that, despite the mixed reaction to my question about Heartiste's advice, it would not be that bad to use said advice on pretty faces?
I don't know enough about Heartiste's advice to have an opinion.
You surely are hoping that's what it means, eh?
No, I'm afraid someone's attractiveness doesn't take them out of the set of people whom it is immoral to emotionally abuse. From an outside perspective, you not getting laid is morally neutral. You reaching into your Jedi mind trick toolbox to get laid at the cost of lowering someone's life quality is very much not morally neutral. Why should she suffer more to get a worse deal? When she could enter a healthy relationship with someone who's attractive and ethical enough not to resort to dirty tricks to get her to stick around? Because it's you offering the deal, and I'm supposed to cheer for your side since I'm talking to you? No, I'm sorry, it doesn't work like that.
I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine, in which he said he didn't care about looking good for women or catering to them in general. Coupled with the fact that he often complained about not being able to get women, the whole situation seemed rather pathetic. Something about a lost license to complain, methinks.
When I look beyond my own grooming habits, the problem seems widespread. By contrast, and this is essential, there are industries upon industries dedicated to enhancing women's appearance, to which they are drawn irresistibly, often well past the point of diminishing returns. If this were an arms race of attractiveness, women won before the race even started. If we are to get even a little closer to the ideal of everybody being paired with someone in their "league", either both genders get preoccupied with enhancing their looks, or neither does. In fact, if we are to factor in the fact that men seem more needy, sexually, they should be the ones trying somewhat harder to look attractive. Remember, in most species ornamentation belongs to the male gender.
Looks matter. Whoever is telling you that the end-all-be-all of male attractiveness is position in a dominance hierarchy is bullshitting you and probably has an appetite for domination higher than is optimal or moral himself.
tl;dr Women's beauty industry has a distorting effect on average attractiveness for each gender, this might explain part of the discrepancy in standards, and men might need to pay more attention to their looks than the cultural standard if they want to "stay competitive".
You need good judgement.
How do you acquire good judgement? Through lots of experience.
How do you acquire lots of experience? Through bad judgement.
X-)
Offer them something you cannot afford. If they reject your offer, they will probably make good allies.
Like an engagement ring? "Oh, you don't want to marry me, that makes you the perfect wife!"
Not quite. A good ally is someone interested in your mutual well-being, and won't accept an offer that costs you more than it benefits them.
There are other ways of testing. That is my preferred approach.
I think it's a mistake to understand this subject as being primarily about persuasion and trying to apply Cialdini. Charisma doesn't come from an attempt to change other people but from doing inner work. If you are too much focused on the other person but not on yourself, you don't grow as well and won't be open to them.
For long-term happiness and shared growth that would be Athol Kay. Read his older stuff or buy his book; since the book was out he writes less interesting stuff just to keep the traffic.
Why do you recommend him?
Because he optimizes for marriage (as opposed to hundreds of one-night stands), and he seems to have a happy marriage, and his wife also contributes to his blog. This should remove most of the objections people have.
I don't see how that's an indication that the advice he gives is good.
Then I have to ask: which one's more hardwired, the bikini or the hijab?
Whatever works better for seduction :-P