As far as I know, there's not pickup literature for the folk dance scene.

Yes, in a general way, I find confidence and social competence attractive in any environment. But at least consciously, my strategy was to look for nerdy boys who weren't overconfident - because desperate boys would value me more. Devotion alone doesn't make for a good relationship, so the trick was to find one who was both devoted and interesting. (And a folk dancer.)

The women I ask about this are not even remotely close to being a representative sample of all women. They're the kind of women whom a shy and somewhat geeky guy knows and talks about psychology with.

This is why I find pickup theory so incomprehensible. It all seems to be aimed at people looking for sex in bars. I don't know anyone who does this (at least to my knowledge), so I have no mental model for how it works. I'm pretty sure the methods advocated would not work on me or most people I know, but I trust pickup artists to be right about how it works on people who hang out in bars.

The people I know who think of themselves as "bad with computers" are generally worried that they are going to destroy hardware, software, or data files if they make a mistake. They know enough to know that, in the abstract, they really can do severe damage with a few button pushes, but they don't know precisely where the danger areas lie. It's an area in which people have a strong incentive to pretend to know very little so they can more easily convince knowledgeable friends and relatives to help them.

My mother is one such person, and one thing that has helped her a lot was for me to set up an admin account on her laptop and to explain how she should always use her non-admin account, but the admin account would pop up when she needs those privileges. It's a flag for her that, if she doesn't get asked for her admin password, the most harm she can do is delete files, and even those might be recoverable.

I think it would be because it's a "brown spider" more than a "big spider", i.e. "brown" would be more important/more permanent/more "fundamental" in describing it than "big".

That would explain why you would say a "sad little boy" and "short sad song" ("little boy" and "sad song" being "closer" descriptions of the object in question than if the order was reversed).

I'm not sure that's the full story though (the explanations on grammar we come up with are often wrong ), and don't know the "proper" linguistic explanation.

When you manipulate a person's distressed emotional state to convince them into an action, even when that action is a positive one (sponsoring a child) there is always the potential that the person who was manipulated will later realize the manipulation.

Essentially - If he had convinced the crying woman to sponsor the child she very well have felt better on an ongoing and permanent basis (a positive result for everyone involved), however there is also the potential that at some later date she would have realized the manipulation.

My understanding of being manipulated is that the later realization has a highly negative outcome - I.E. making the woman more depressed than she was before the manipulation, more likely to believe that all people are manipulators (less trusting), etc.

Whenever you piggy-back a distressed emotional state to manipulate a person into an action you risk breaking that person (Causing them to stop trusting people).

Count me in as well - I've gained a great deal of useful knowledge from the PUA community despite having found it while in a fine, and still ongoing, long term relationship.

For a smart person it is relatively easy to take PUA advice and gain utility for non pick-up activities.

Any new education method will show increases in student test scores if people believe it results in increases in student test scores, because only interested parents will sign up for that method.

For example, Freakonomics tells the story of high school students in Chicago who participated in a lottery for the chance to switch schools. The students who were reassigned to new schools were more likely to graduate; but the students who applied for the lottery but lost did just as well. The explanation given is that the students (or parents) who care about education will attempt to switch to a better school, but the "better" school won't confer an advantage.

Cullen, Jacob, and Levitt. "The Impact of School Choice on Student Outcomes: An Analysis of the Chicago Public Schools". J. Public Econ. 200?.

Cullen, Jacob, and Levitt. "The Effect of School Choice on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries". National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, 2003.

Definitely in agreement with Pirsig's Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Also in non-fiction - Both Rand novels - Fountainhead AND Atlas Shrugged

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

Robert A. Heinlein