My Anki decks spits out:

• Take a stance. Take space. Take a breath. Take your time. Keep still. - This projecting self-confidence via posture was the first thing that I can clearly say worked. I use my fencing stance as a base.

• Don't nod often or vigorously.

• Consider your clothing. The color of clothing apparently signals something:

  • Red: ambition or passion. Useful to wake up an audience.

  • Black means you're serious, and won't take no for an answer.

  • Blue: trust. The darker the shade, the deeper the trust it elicits. <-- I prefer this.

  • Gray: quintessential color of neutrality in business and politics.

• Practical Charisma: Before important events warm-up. Free time. Spend time with people supporting your. Positive athmosphere (music).

Recently I tried to apply an exercise from The Charisma Myth to project more benevolence: Imagine the people around you with angel wings and striving to achieve good. It almost always makes me smile so I will definitely continue it as it also improves my spirits. It actually brought back some positive stance which I think declined a bit in the last year(s). Whether I actually do project more benevolence I can't say (yet).

Some observations of my OKC experiences:

A big factor was being in London. I've lived in various other UK towns and cities, and London is the only place OKCupid "worked", in the sense of being a semi-reliable place to obtain a date, with a high rate of turnover in the pool of available matches. By way of comparison, in about 18 months of online dating in Birmingham, (the UK's second-largest city), I went on maybe half a dozen dates.

Age was probably also a salient feature. I was 29-30 at the time, and had a sliding window of 26-32 on ages of prospective matches. I imagine the numbers were probably in my favour as far as site demographics were concerned.

Speaking to other people, I seemed to have enjoyed a large number of 99% matches, even for London. I'd expect to log into my account and see around 15-20 99% matches, which I gather is also unusual. I almost exclusively dated high 90% matches. I didn't engage in any clever strategy for answering questions, though I did answer a lot (> 1000). I do wonder if there are some particularly discriminate questions that most men answer "incorrectly", and I happened to fall on the right side of them.

(My take on the OKCupid matching algorithm is that it's sensitive but not very selective. People who you get on well with will probably be high matches, but people who are high matches won't necessarily be people you get on well with. A disproportionate number of 99% matches were tied to groups in my existing social network.)

I'm pretty sure my comparative advantage on the dating market is a combination of eloquence and dirty-mindedness. There seems to be a large subset of women who I match highly with who really appreciate the ability to subtly encode filth in language. This probably carries well over text-based communications and may account for some of my relative success.

My subjective experience of dating on OKCupid seems to be similar to everyone else, in the "seriously, fuck OKCupid" sense. I would regularly compose thoughtful messages to interesting-sounding women only to get no response, which was disappointing and downheartening. (I do have quite a bit of sympathy for the women on OKCupid in this regard, but that's a whole other essay). This seems to be a fixed experience of being a dude on OKC. I have no idea how much effort I put in compared to other people, or even how to go about quantifying it, but this might be a factor.

Patterns of actually going on dates were very much Feast or Famine. Sometimes I'd go for months without any responses. Sometimes I'd have an elaborate scheduling nightmare. On a couple of occasions I got to second-date territory with two women simultaneously, which was a novel experience for someone who spent his formative years pretending to be mythical creatures and developing strong opinions on which starships were the best. There was a particularly gruelling stretch in early 2012 where I'd just come back from a date and didn't have another one in the calendar, and it felt like I'd gotten out of some sort of debt.

The most sensible approach seemed to be treating the whole process as a way to meet new friends, who happened to be single women who hadn't ruled out sleeping with me. In this regard OKCupid was pretty successful. A little under half of the women I met I maintain some sort of social contact with, even if it's just the occasional bit of banter on Facebook. Eight or so are people I'll actively hit up for social activity, and a couple I'd consider good friends. Romantic outcomes were mixed, but generally positive: a few brief casual affairs, one ongoing long-term relationship and one ongoing intermittent play partner.

After a recent event where I encountered someone I'd been on an OKCupid date with way back in 2011, but didn't remember where I knew them from, I went to the effort of listing every date I could remember to make sure it didn't happen again. This was surprisingly difficult. The number currently stands at thirty women, but there could easily be a couple I don't remember. Prior to making the list, I somehow had the idea that I'd been on quite a few "bad dates", but looking over them, there was only one I'd describe as bad, and a few I'd describe as so-so. The dates themselves were overwhelmingly positive, but I think the overall process can be quite draining.

I think I'm out of observations for now.

Filled in the form a moment ago.

Hello :) I'll be arriving in London next week! Looking forward to meeting and learning from the communities I encounter. Feel free to contact me for meet ups, the possibility of free CfAR classes or even just to share a meal or drink. I'm fleshing out my itinerary during the next few days so please do email me and let me know if you'd like to connect or if there's some LW (or other) to attend.

So far, I intend to be in the UK, Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland over the next 3 weeks.

Email: Cat@appliedrationality.org

If you want your terminal to greet you with rationality quotes, I created a new fortunes file: https://github.com/Huluk/rationality-fortunes Use with "unix fortune" for your operating system.

Argh - just had a little twinge when I saw that you were born in 1989. You're the same age as me, but have done so much more!

Congratulations on reaching your goals. Reading this has reminded me that I ought to do the same.

I am female, 25, extroverted, and living in Boston. I started out mostly introverted, and gradually became more extroverted over the years, especially after moving in to the Boston rationalist house (Citadel) a few months ago.

I have been in a variety of living situations: 1) family, 2) husband and mother in law, 3) husband and math camp friends, 4) just husband, 5) by myself and visiting husband in NYC, 6) LW friends and visiting husband in NYC (current). Out of all these, the experiences of living with friends were the happiest and most interesting by far, especially the rationalist house (it will be even better when my husband finishes up his job in NYC and moves to Citadel).

I find the rationalist house to be a near-optimal living situation in terms of the default social environment and the influences that I am routinely exposed to. We have social norms of being curious, rewarding each other for doing good things (and a "gem economy" for this purpose), discussing personal topics, asking for advice and feedback, expanding comfort zones, making predictions (using CFAR-style prediction markets), sharing activities, etc. The house is also a Schelling point for local rationalists to visit and for out of towners to stay (we have a guest room), which increases the frequency and variety of interesting conversations even further. To use Viliam_Bur's terminology, Citadel is a combination of a feelings-oriented community and an outcome-oriented community. We run LW meetups, weekly rationality sessions (e.g. goal factoring) as well as random group activities (e.g. dancing and hiking); there is a general growth mindset besides just hanging out and having fun.

I have not experienced any particular inconveniences from living with a large number of people. On the contrary, in a house of six, economies of scale start to kick in - we have a distribution of chore assignments, a weekly cleaning service, and occasional communal dinners, so the household runs very smoothly. The downsides of living there have mostly taken the form of not doing quite enough reading and going to sleep too late, but I'm counting on Beeminder to help me with that :). I feel like I have grown a lot since I moved here - I started writing and goal factoring regularly and giving presentations at meetups, stopped being a lurker on LW, etc. I'm aware that I'm somewhat overexcited and biased about Citadel, given that it's a new development, and the long term effects on our lives remain to be seen. That said, I would still highly recommend to try living with local LWers if you have the chance.

What kind of activities are you planning?

This is up to the individual - what scares one person, someone else does habitually.

When I did this at the May CFAR workshop, things I did included singing in the toilets, complimenting someone's shoes, asking for a free croissant, and letting someone try to sell me some skincare stuff. I'm struggling to remember what other people did, but one person struck up conversations with strangers, and one of the instructors managed to get a massage circle going.

During the discussion beforehand, people will be able to come up with ideas of things they want to do.

I'm intrigued by this – comfort zone expansion strikes me as a very good idea, if done carefully; I'm thinking of things like Rejection Therapy, 'daygame' (making conversation/flirting with strangers in daytime settings, taking care not to become a harasser) and just generally being social.

In my forays with talking to strangers—an ongoing experiment!—I've found that Londoners are actually mostly very friendly, just with a veneer of coldness that needs breaking. I suspect this is true for people in most big cities, and is an adaptation to avoid the usual array of charity muggers, panhandlers and the like they encounter on an hourly basis.

What kind of activities are you planning?

First of all, as other people have said, if you are heavily overweight, then working out and becoming not-fat is easily the most important thing you can do.

Anyway, I am sort of trying to do the same thing you are and here's what I've found.

After physical appearance, the lowest hanging fruit seems to be in the confidence/status/how you carry yourself/body language/power/assertiveness area, a cluster that you might call "swag" for lack of a better term. I think women don't care about physical appearance quite as much as men do when it comes to attraction, and care about swag much more than men do.

The lowest hanging fruit in the broader category of swag seem to me to be the following:

• Smiling
• Making strong eye contact
• Standing/sitting up straight

In particular, I'm trying to adopt the habits of a) looking women strongly in the eye and letting her be the one to break away most of the time, and b) briefly making eye contact with and smiling at all the girls I pass in the hallway or on the street or whatever. For the former, something that's helped me is practicing making eye contact while wearing sunglasses - this way you can make yourself comfortable with the feeling of staring into a person's eyes while appeasing the part of your brain that tells you "no, don't do that, they'll find out your secrets!" Then when you take the sunglasses off, the habit lingers and the fear is gone a little.

Learning body language is also a big one. GoBodyLanguage has a free online course that takes about an hour or two and yields large benefits. Adopting confident body language can make you both feel more confident and get other people to perceive you as such. The main confident gestures I remember to do are a) err on the side of taking up more space when I'm sitting down, b) keep my hands to my side and not as a barrier over my body, c) not stroke my arm, face, or neck when I feel nervous, and d) stick my thumbs out when I put my hands in my pockets.

An area that I need to work on is voice. I say "um," and "like" and stammer a lot, which I think displays lack of confidence. Speaking too quickly also displays lack of confidence. And apparently there are vocal exercises you can do to make your voice deeper and more masculine, which I have yet to look into.

Another big thing is "non-reaction seeking behavior". Essentially this is not giving off little signs that you care about how you are being perceived in a social interaction. Examples of reaction seeking behavior include looking around after you tell a joke to see if people laugh, or visibly fluctuating in your mood based on how you are being received in the social interaction. This is really hard and is something I need to work on.

Having good social skills in general seems to also be important. Having high status with your male friends is said to be a big turn-on for evolutionary reasons, and having close female friends is said to be a big turn-on because it shows that women trust you. So if having male friends is good and having female friends is good, this seems to generalize to "make friends". I don't know if this describes you, but if you go on something like r/foreveralone, you can find a lot of men with no friends and no romantic partners who are much more immediately concerned with the latter than the former (probably because their biology isn't constantly reminding them every day that they need to make friends). This seems like the wrong order to do things in, considering that having friends is at the very least as valuable to one's happiness as having a romantic partner. But if you already have a sufficient amount of friends then you can disregard this.

If you suffer from social anxiety, get a good cognitive behavioral therapy self-help book. This is what I plan on doing. It took me a really long time to realize that I have social anxiety because I always assumed that if you had it, it meant that you were one of those people who has panic attacks when you have to talk to the cashier at the grocery store. If you get irrationally nervous in social situations to the point where it causes you difficulty in your life, I think that you could benefit from self-help in this area. There are also specific forms of social anxiety that only revolve around romance and don't appear in non-sexual settings.

I feel like you should also have some idea of what you're going to say and do to attempt to attract a women before you actually go and talk to her. If women are an impenetrable mystery to you, then maybe try reading some PUA stuff, but make sure to take it with a grain of salt because some of it is weird and wrong. (I actually have written a long post meditating on this stuff that I'll be posting in a few days on LW Discussion, so look out for that. :P)

If you need resources, I recommend Post Masculine and The Dating Specialist.

Good luck! :)