All of amplemaple's Comments + Replies

Do you have any evidence that happy people fall in love slower than happy people. So far I have only noticed a slight inverse relationship where crisis retard my romance response. All attempts to slow the response by having more friends failed (although being happier is nice for other reasons). Past attempts at PHTG have often succeeded.

If you believe that I fall in love faster than other people because I am “desperate” then all my past relationships should have collapsed when I told the person I liked them. This has not occurred. As long as I wait until t... (read more)

  • Meters-Briggs has a junk, so that’s fine. My past romantic partners have consistent big five profile either.

Sure there are sources of bias. I can’t control for them. But th

  1. No generalizability needed. It just has to work for me and the women I normally date. Who cares if it would work for the “average guy”

  2. I have no reason to assume a small effect size. My current positive rate on dates is 20%. Lots of room for improvement.

  3. The subjectivity isn’t a problem because I’m the analyst and implementer. I don’t need well defined terms like communicating

... (read more)

Good question.

  • on the first date I do lots of flattery, both verbal and tonal
  • On the second date I may say “I like you” or mention that I am seeking a long term partner if asked
  • My body language tends to be more boyfriend
  • I know I want to date someone by the second date. Most women take much longer. I’m uninhibited so my intentions usually show
  • I overshare about myself (1st and 2nd dates)
  • I prefer to send longer/higher effort texts than most guys
  • sometimes I intentionally or unintentionally hide my attraction signals (verbal and body language). My last th
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The main reason I settled on this strategy is the timing of my rejections. Almost all of my rejections come shortly after I make a signal of interest. It could be that women coincidentally smell my terrible BO when I mention I want a long-term patner, but I doubt it. Is that a 99/1 likelihood ratio proof?

No, but I have to start figuring this out somewhere.

2haasn
"It could be that women coincidentally smell my terrible BO when I mention I want a long-term patner, but I doubt it." It could also be that your signal of interest is the catalyst for them deciding to act on their pre-existing feelings of doubt. Perhaps they were already harbouring doubts but didn't voice them until you, essentially, forced them to decide.
1voxelate
What kind of indicators of interest are you making, how are you making them, and when are you making them?

Interesting question Bucky!

I think on a date eye contact is usually a signal of intimacy and interest. If you were in a meeting with your boss you might look at their chin or your shoes as a sign of submission, but people would never do this is in a date. On a date eye contact is more about intimacy, interest, rewarding good convesation, etc. Therefore I expect more eye contact in the successful case.

What else does eye contact signal? It also says something about interest in the topic. I do observe that when people lose interest they look away a lot on da... (read more)

2Bucky
I think that both effects are likely and that this will add noise to the measure. Noise is my main concern about your experiment in general - with only 10 samples in each treatment any effect would have to be large to reliably show up. If you were doing a t-test with p<0.05 then you would need Cohen's d of 1.3 to get a significant result. This would be the equivalent of PHTG having the effect of moving a median date to a 90th percentile date which feels unlikely. Obviously you're being sensible and not being frequentist but the underlying problem is still there - even if PHTG has a decent sized effect the experiment might not show it, or, worse, if PHTG makes things slightly worse it could show up as being good in your experiment. I would suggest that you try to work out a power calculation (even just by setting up your planned calculation and plugging in some fake numbers to see what happens) - if PHTG is slightly harmful to your chances (say 20% decreased chance of getting a second date) what are the odds that the experiment will lead you to accept PHTG?   As an aside, have you read this on putanumonit? It presents an alternative to PHTG which you might find interesting.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction with these! My degree is really frequentist and slow paced, excited to get to work on this analysis.

Clarification on null hypothesis:

The null hypothesis is that there is no difference in effect on the dependent variable from the treatment and control variables. I am not assessing the truth of the null hypothesis because if it is true, then I can pick whichever one I want. If control is better, then picking treatment is negative utility. If treatment is better then picking control is negative utility. If the nul... (read more)

1philip_b
Alright, it seems you do know what a null hypothesis is. Glad I could be of help.

2 and 4 are both things I implemented with great results.

Do you have a good link about mind palaces?

3WrongPlanet
I have read two books which cover the memory palace. One of them was written by Dominic O'Brien and I am pretty sure it was 'How to Develop a Perfect Memory'. It covers awesome memory techniques. Than the other one: https://www.amazon.de/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=a+mind+for+numbers&qid=1603819322&sr=8-1 It was written by Barbara Oakley. It does not goes far into memory palaces I believe (I read them years ago), but it changed the way I think about my memory, therefore it has been a very valuable book. I have not read much more about those topics though (therefore recommendations are always appreciated). The way I build my own palace is quite different though than what I have read:  My palace is made out of places I liked a lot (from real life, video games, ones I came up with etc.). You could say it is made out of two parts: The main memory palace, (for everyday tasks like chores, grocery list etc.) I use it, 'reset' and than I use it again. I had a vague idea on how it should look like and than I quickly sketched it out (just for aiding, it was lots of fun). Than it branches off in many smaller memory palaces, which are only used for a certain thing. There is a place for physics, life plans, Alicorn's techniques from the luminosity sequence, how to write a good essay, rationality tools, reminders, words I want to learn etc. etc. I create those rooms spontaneously and I only rarely throw something out of there: For example if I have found a better mind tool than the previous one.  This works really well for me. Now I just need way more rooms for the calendar project (this and the one with the language learning is from O'Brien's book) -> for every month one road and 'rooms' for every single day (it should be an open place so you can easily look back on how the month went) and I need to use it more for dailies and recipes instead of the old way I memorized things, but

I love so many of your ideas. Kink based dating apps. For me, 50 works okay but cant make up for too little social contact. 41 is great. 2 is good. I tried 1 but it took over my life.

Answer by amplemaple80

Problem: I have few friends and am becoming depressed. I have a few roommates but they already have full social lives to fulfil them. The zoom calls at work are not sending my brain signals that I am an accepted member of the clan. Having been isolated like this before, I know I will become increasingly depressed until all my outputs suffer.

  1. Write "Talk to me about anything" on a whiteboard and sit in a public park. Wait for people to approach and talk to me.

  2. Join a crossfit group. People are always talking about it so it must be fulfillling. It's exp

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I would recommend getting your (cis het male) dating advice primarily from women who you know and would like to date, but who already have husbands/boyfriends. Rather than solely from other cis het males on the internet.

Attraction is a subconscious process. If women or men could just introspect and output the attraction function lots of psychologists would be out of a job. Sadly we cannot.

"Respect" in this context means treating your date as an autonomous human with an internal narrative, desires, thoughts, history, and everything else that makes you

... (read more)

I'm glad I could help!

Here's my plan for analyzing the data, let me know what changes your would make.

Bayes rule odds form:

So all I need from the experiment is the ratio of how likely I am to observe this result given H1 vs. given H2. At first I thought calculating that with t-distributions would be trivial, but I'm noticing a problem now. If I have 7 successes in treatment and 3 in control, I can use the t-dist to calculate how often I would observe that in the null. But since the null is d... (read more)

5philip_b
What is your null hypothesis? Nowhere does your post says that. I suspect you don't know what a null hypothesis is. From your post and your comment, I infer that you want to find the probability of "intentionally reducing reactivity and affection for the first three dates will increase attraction in partners". That doesn't work well with bayesian analysis. Instead you should try to get a posterior distribution over the value of how much it increases attraction. I think if you want to do the bayesian data analysis, then one of the simplest ways you could model your situation is as follows. If you PHTG, you achieve sex (or whatever it is you're after, but I'll just say sex for simplicity) with probability p∈(0, 1). If you don't PHTG, you achieve sex with probability q∈(0, 1). Currently, you don't know the values of q and r but you have a prior distribution p(q, r) over them. In this prior p(q, r), q and r are not necessarily independent. On the opposite, I would expect that they correlate (with respect to the prior p(q, r)) very strongly, because if you often achieve sex with one strategy, probably you'll also be able to do that with the other strategy, and if you can't achieve sex with one strategy, probably you can't with the other. Next, you will go and do the experiments (go on dates and randomly choose whether to PHTG). An experiment is like tossing a biased coin. If you are PHTG, you are tossing a coin which lands on heads with probability q. If you are not PHTG, you are tossing a coin which lands on heads with probability r. After n experimental results e1,…,en, you update your distribution over the values q and r: p(q,r∣e1,…,en)=p(e1,…,en∣q,r)p(q,r)p(e1,…,en)=p(e1∣q,r)p(e2∣q,r)…p(en∣q,r)p(q,r)p(e1,…,en) and this is the result you get. I think this models represents your situation fairly well. I don't know what prior p(q, r) you should choose in order to have it fairly close to your actualy beliefs while at the same time making the computation tractable. A

Thanks for the response!

Other than the "teasing her more than I normally do" and "walking in a specific place relative to her" everything in your treatment group could also be called "being a good date."

Sounds like I'm on the right track :)

I would recommend, in your own head, think of it not in terms of "playing hard to get" but in terms of "treating your partner with respect."

"Treating your partner with respect" is a poor heuristic. It includes some great behaviors like listening but also some terrible ones that "put the woman on a pedestal". If y... (read more)

0Ericf
I would recommend getting your (cis het male) dating advice primarily from women who you know and would like to date, but who already have husbands/boyfriends. Rather than solely from other cis het males on the internet. "Respect" in this context means treating your date as an autonomous human with an internal narrative, desires, thoughts, history, and everything else that makes you a unique person. Rather than as an inscrutable piece of software or machinery that you are trying to figure out and/or get to act in a specific way. And the final warning isn't about experimental design, its about not tuning yourself into a paperclip maximizer (especially when what you really want is a staple)

Instead of relying on a toolbag of one-dimensional tactics, my recommended approach is to focus on understanding your partner's mental model of you, and of their relationship with you, and of the relationship they'd want.

That's a bit vague and difficult to enact. I want to get better at "Understanding your partner's mental model of you". That's the point of the AB test. I'm very open to alternative strategies for building this skill. I hope that responding to interest signals with more reactivity and disinterest signal with less reactivity will provide ... (read more)