On the coprocessor model itself -- the phenomenon we're trying to explain here is people who are good at analytical thinking but bad at social interaction. I really think there's a tendency around here to automatically identify that pattern with Asperger's, or with being at some point on the "spectrum." It's way more parsimonious to think of it as a result of specialization. If you're kind of good at (or interested in) analytical things, and kind of bad at (or uninterested in) social things, you'll specialize your own brain in that direction. It may even be in your best interest to specialize to some extent, to play to your strengths.
In fact I'd hypothesize that a lot of this specialization happens in early childhood, from rather small chance events like being an early reader, or being nearsighted. It's a little easier and more pleasant to sit still and read than to go out and play, so you start specializing from the age of three or so. Or you're Robert Louis Stevenson and develop a rich inner life directly because of childhood illness.
Children naturally play to their own strengths. They wear their favorite pathways down smooth, and ignore the thornier, more unp...
Why is it most parsimonious to conclude that all variation is due to nurture/experience, rather than a mixture of nature and nurture? Placement on the analytical/social spectrum is probably due to both genetic predisposition and lifetime experience; as I said, one should take advantage of one's neuroplasticity.
Imagine if someone came to lesswrong. He was very interested in winning and knew and applied a decent amount of probability theory. However he was only interested in winning football matches. He'd do articles on picking the optimal side taking into consideration fitness of players, opponents strengths, weather etc Also articles on picking the optimal training regimen to strengthen the right muscles for football and showing the bad heuristics other trainers use to pick training regimens.
Now I'd find it moderately interesting for a bit, despite minimal interest in football, but I'd get bored of it pretty soon, but I think I would be in the minority, People would lack the background knowledge to understand it (e.g. Golden goals, how long a football game lasts etc), they would find it boring. And they would probably voice their confusion and lack of interest, which I in turn would find boring. It would decrease the signal to noise ratio of the website.
I suspect something like that might happen if you use examples from the PUA arena. An example of what happens with a lack of background knowledge can be seen by RichardKenneway's thread. So while mildly interesting it has its bad points in terms of the level of discussion, and if you are somewhat autistic, you are likely to go on about it if at all encouraged! So you won't get encouragement from me.
There is a decent sub population of lesswrong interested in it, it would be ideal for a sub reddit. But spare a thought for those of us that are female or just not that into dating.
Truth is entangled, and who gets to mate with whom is one of the biggest truths in human social interaction -- because mating behavior is very strongly selected by evolution. If you close your mind to the truths about human mating behavior, you'll mess up your entire map of human social interaction.
If we are going to develop rationality to the point where we see an increase in uptake of rational thinking by millions of people, we can't just ignore massively important parts of real-world human behavior.
I have a question, since you seem to know a lot about human sociality. What exactly is wrong with handling the dilemmas you describe by saying to the other humans, "I am slightly more committed to this group’s welfare, particularly to that of its weakest members, than most of its members are. If you suffer a serious loss of status/well-being I will still help you in order to display affiliation to this group even though you will no longer be in a position to help me. I am substantially more kind and helpful to the people I like and substantially more vindictive and aggressive towards those I dislike. I am generally stable in who I like. I am much more capable and popular than most members of this group, demand appropriate consideration, and grant appropriate consideration to those more capable than myself. I adhere to simple taboos so that my reputation and health are secure and so that I am unlikely to contaminate the reputations or health of my friends. I currently like you and dislike your enemies but I am somewhat inclined towards ambivalence on regarding whether I like you right now so the pay-off would be very great for you if you were to expend resources pleasing me and get me into the stable 'liking you' region of my possible attitudinal space. Once there, I am likely to make a strong commitment to a friendly attitude towards you rather than wasting cognitive resources checking a predictable parameter among my set of derivative preferences."?
Saying this explicitly is extremely weak evidence of it being true. In fact, because it sounds pre-prepared, comprehensive and calculated most humans won't believe you. Human courtship rituals are basically ways of signaling all of this but are much harder to fake.
When human females ask "Will you buy me a drink?" they're testing to see if the male does in fact "demand appropriate consideration".
Also, relative status and genetic fitness are extremely important in human coupling decisions and your statement does not sufficiently cover those.
Why is this being downvoted?
A guess: because everything in quotes in Clippy's comment is a copy and paste of a generic comment it posted a week ago.
I don't actually know myself, though - I upvoted Clippy's comment because I thought it was funny. Copying an earlier comment and asking for feedback on it where it's semi-relevant is exactly in keeping with what I imagine the Clippy character to be.
I think it's the "faking it" part I and many other people find objectionable.
This is where you and several other people here make a critical mistake. You view various aspects of human mating behavior exclusively in terms of signaling objective traits, and then you add a moral dimension to it by trying to judge whether these objective traits supposedly being signaled are true or fake.
In reality, however, human social behavior -- and especially mating behavior -- is about much more complex higher-order signaling strategies, which are a product of a long and complicated evolutionary interplay of strategies for signaling, counter-signaling, fake signaling, and fake signaling detection -- as well as the complex game-theoretic questions of what can ultimately be inferred from one's signaled intentions. Nobody has disentangled this whole complicated mess into a complete and coherent theory yet, though some basic principles have been established pretty conclusively, both by the academic evolutionary psychology and by people generalizing informally from practical experiences. However, the key point is that in a species practicing higher-order signaling strategies, signaling abi...
Wei_Dai:
"Practice makes perfect" has a rather different emphasis from Roko's suggestion of "running social interactions in software", which is what I was addressing.
Fair enough, if you're talking only about the initial stage where you're running things purely "in software," before any skill buildup.
But to answer your point, I agree that improvements in social skills from practice can be dramatic, but probably not for everyone, just like not everyone can learn how to program computers. It would be interesting to see some empirical data on how much improvement can be expected, and what the distribution of outcomes is, so people can make more informed choices about how much effort to put into practicing social skills.
From what I've observed in practice, people with normal (and especially above average) intelligence and without extraordinary problems (like e.g. a severe speech disorder) who start at a low social skill level can see significant improvements with fairly modest efforts. In this regard, the situation is much better than with technical or math skills, where you have to acquire a fairly high level of mastery to be able to put them to any...
To put it more clearly, it's not that this domain of human behavior is actually particularly irrational. In reality, it has its well-defined rules, and men who have the knowledge and ability to behave according to these rules are, at least in a libertine society such as ours, awarded with high status in the eyes of others -- and lots of sex, of course, if they choose to employ their abilities in practice. In contrast, men who are particularly bad at it suffer an extreme low status penalty; they are are a target of derision and scorn both privately and in the popular culture. However, what complicates the situation is that this is one of those areas where humans practice extreme hypocrisy, in that you're expected not just to navigate the rules of the game cleverly, but also to pretend that they don't exist, and to discuss the topic openly only with mystical reverence and unrealistic idealizations. Realistic open discussions are perceived as offensive and sacrilegious. It's an enormous bias.
Have you never encountered this attitude amongst religious people over atheism? The idea that atheism is an inherently dangerous idea, that merely engaging with it risks infection. That atheism might be a kind of aqua regia for morality, capable of dissolving all that is good and right in the world into some kind of nihilistic nightmare. Even (or perhaps especially) those who think atheism might be true see it as potentially dangerous, that gazing into the abyss may permanently damage the seeker's moral core. This belief, whether implicit or explicit, seems quite common among the religious and I think explains some of the hostility born of fear that is sometimes observed in the reactions to atheism and atheists.
I'm suggesting something similar may underlie some of the reactions to discussions of the below-the-surface game theoretic realities of human social interaction. People fear that if they gaze into that abyss they risk losing or destroying things they value highly, like traditional concepts of love, loyalty or compassion. I think this fear is misguided, and personally prefer the truth be told, though the heavens fall regardless, but I can understand and to some extent sympathize with the sentiment that I think sometimes underlies it.
People fear that if they gaze into that abyss they risk losing or destroying things they value
Yes, and no. My objection to the citation of PUA tactics is motivated by fear that it could lead down the dark path... but not fear that it might be true. Rather, it's fear that something that might be true in one narrow domain might get applied as a general rule in broader domains where it is no longer applicable.
In PUA circles, "winning" is defined by getting laid. So if you go to a meat-market and try your PUA tactics all night long, you may end up getting rejected 50 times, but be successful once, and your brain records that as a "win", cause you didn't go home alone (just like audiences at psychic shows remember the "hits" and forget the "misses"). But does that really tell you that PUA theory correctly describes typical social interaction? No, it just tells you that there is a certain, small minority of people on whom PUA tactics work, but they are a non-representative sample of a non-representative sample.
So when you then take one of these PUA tactics, which isn't even effective on the vast majority of people even in the meat-market pickup ...
Should we do make up tips for nerdy girls?
Sure, why not? If a nerdy girl feels she has learned something about rationality from exploring makeup techniques, I would absolutely be interested to hear about it on LessWrong. If other people don't care about makeup, they don't have to read her posts.
Self Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back-- an account by a lesbian of living as a man in four different male social groups. One of her experiments includes dating women, but I don't remember the details.
I read Self Made Man a couple years ago, and I highly recommend it. The author is to be commended for such an extensive debiasing project. Vincent found living as a man to have a lot more challenges than she thought. I'll post some excerpts or articles about her that might be interesting for people here.
From here:
...I caught one woman's eye and held her gaze for a second, smiling. She returned the smile and looked away. This was signal enough for me, so I stood up, made my way over to their table and asked them whether they wanted to join us for a drink. "No, thanks," one of them said, "we're on our way out in a minute."
Simple enough, right? A brush-off. No biggie. But as I turned away and slumped back across the room toward our table, I felt like the outcast kid in the lunchroom who trips and dumps his tray on the linoleum in front of the whole school.
"Rejection is a staple for guys," said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. "Get used to it." ...
On dates with men I felt physically appraised in a way that I never did by women, and, while this made me more sympathetic to the suspicions women were bringing to thei
What about the other side of the same coin: how can we get neurotypicals to use more of their cognitive resources to solve non-social (e.g., technical) problems? When I look at people who seem to spend almost all of their time and energy playing social games that largely don't matter, I can't help but think "what a waste."
To use myself as an example, I think I'm neurotypical, but lost interest in making friends and socializing in my teenage years due to negative feedback (not "fitting in" after immigrating from China and having different interests from my peers). As a result, I now have a lot more time to think about technical and philosophical problems. And while perhaps not quite GPGPU, I speculate that due to neuroplasticity, some of my neurons that would have gone into running social interactions are now being used for other purposes instead.
What about the other side of the same coin: how can we get neurotypicals to use more of their cognitive resources to solve non-social (e.g., technical) problems
Let's use them to simulate an economy!
Even if you don't like or care about social games, other things you may care about can depend on them, such as:
For social games to truly not matter, you need to have a very narrow preference set where you not only don't care for social games, but you don't need or want anything that can be achieved by them. It would be like not caring about money, and also not caring about anything money can buy you. It's possible to have that preference set; it's just a tall order.
A large amount of doors in neurotypical society are closed to you if you can't play social games at some level. I would speculate that for many people who think they don't care about silly things like social games, those very social games actually do impact other things they care about, and they are either unaware of that impact or in denial about it.
I think social games do matter, just not nearly to the degree that most people seem to think, judging from how they spend their time. I think the explanation for this is that social games mattered much more in the past than they do now, but most people don't realize this yet. And on the other side, there are a lot more opportunities for technical problem solving, which weren't available in the past.
- Not getting bullied or pushed around by other people
I was bullied in school, but eventually graduated, and I don't think anyone tried to push me around after starting work. If they did, I would have complained to my boss or changed jobs. In a less mobile society, if you didn't know how to "handle yourself", you were probably stuck with low status for life.
- Finding mates outside a narrow nerdy minority of people
Being single isn't that bad. I imagine it was a lot worse in the past, where there was much less you could do to entertain yourself.
- Networking
I spent most of my spare time in college writing an open source C++ library, which led to plenty of business and job opportunities. I really doubt that I would have gotten more opportunities if I had spent most of m...
The comments to this post and most of the other literature I've read assumes that the problem with poorly social people is that they're afraid, not sure how to carry out a conversation effectively, or make poor decisions when confronted with social dilemmas.
Anecdotally, my experience isn't like this at all. I'm pretty good, maybe even better than average, at talking to people in one-to-one conversations, at home, at cafes, on the bus, before class, and pretty much any time other than at deliberately social events. But at bars or parties, the constantly shifting conversations of dozens of people trying to all talk to each other at once at a mile a minute, about nothing in particular, in a loud and overstimulating environment completely discombobulates me, and I usually end up either ignored, unable to break into a conversation more than once every few minutes, or just plain bored with having nothing to say but the same small talk everyone else is making.
Maybe I'm atypical of non-social people, but I also give a bit of credence to the possibility that all this "not knowing how to give the right reply in a conversation" stuff is what neurotypical people imagine being bad at ...
just plain bored with having nothing to say but the same small talk everyone else is making.
this is indicative that you are paying attention to the topic/words of the conversation, rather than the sub-communication, which is often the interesting bit for these kinds of conversations. People who can't read social cues and sub-communication typically don't get why others find small talk so "interesting", but this is rather like a radio that sends the carrier wave rather than the signal to the loudspeaker. The topics are just there as a "carrier wave" which is then modulated to encode social signals.
Sub-communication includes agreement/disagreement (someone agrees with you to signal alliance, disagrees to signal enmity), tone of voice (tone that rises towards the end of the sentence indicates submission, tone that falls towards the end conflict/assertiveness/dominance), body language, who gets to talk most/who listens most. Once you tune your radio in, you may find such occasions more exciting.
Tuning in to the carrier wave in social situations is a common failure mode for smart people, because we feel comfortable assessing factual statements.
Once you tune your radio in, you may find such occasions more exciting.
For me, understanding "what's really going on" in typical social interactions made them even less interesting than when I didn't. At least back then it was a big mystery to be solved. Now I just think, what a big waste of brain cells.
Roko, do you personally find these status and alliance games interesting? Why? I mean, if you play them really well, you'll end up with lots of allies and high status among your friends and acquaintances, but what does that matter in the larger scheme of things? And what do you think of the idea that allies and status were much more important in our EEA (i.e., tribal societies) than today, and as a result we are biased to overestimate their importance?
but what does that matter in the larger scheme of things?
Well, that depends upon your axiology.
If you are concerned with existential risk, then it is worth noting that the movement has an undersupply of "people people", a big gender imbalance and an undersupply of money. (I think that ability to make money is determined, to some extent, by your ability at these social games)
You may feel that status within a social group is an end in itself.
If you are concerned with academic learning, discovering new mathematics/philosophy, then getting better at these social games is probably not so important.
I mean, if you play them really well, you'll end up with lots of allies and high status among your friends and acquaintances, but what does that matter in the larger scheme of things? And what do you think of the idea that allies and status were much more important in our EEA (i.e., tribal societies) than today, and as a result we are biased to overestimate their importance?
Their importance is a function of our values, which came from the EEA and are not so easily changed. Those values, like wanting friendship, community, relationships, and respect, are a part of what make us human.
I actually don't interpret social interactions as "status and alliance games," which is kind of cynical and seems to miss the point. Instead, I try to recognize that people have certain emotional requirements that need to be met in order to gain their trust, friendship, and attraction, and that typical social interactions are about building that type of trust and connection.
Be careful when you notice more diversity in subject matter you're a fan of than in subject matter that you're not. I'm not sure if there's a name for this bias, but there should be.
There's also the fact that video games ... have a freaking rule book, which tells you things that aren't complete fabrications designed to make you fail the game if you're stupid enough to follow them.
I thought for a bit that it would be interesting to have, say, a WWI game where the tutorial teaches you nineteenth-century tactics and then lets you start the game by throwing massed troops against barbed wire, machineguns, and twentieth-century artillery. The slaughter would be epic.
But I don't see why I'm supposed to enjoy it
Because people can tell when you don't, even if they're too polite to mention it.
That's why, btw, "How To Win Friends And Influence People" advises cultivating a genuine interest in people, and PUAs advise more or less the same thing. By becoming a connoisseur of the finer (in the sense of more finely-graded) distinctions between people, and cultivating your curiosity about "what people are like", you gain more enjoyment.
And genuinely enjoying a person's company is the hardest, most expensive signal to fake... which might be why people evolved to value it so much.
I know a couple who embody this principle, btw -- Garin and Vanessa Bader. I met them at a series of marketing workshops, actually. By their second time there, practically everybody would line up to talk to them during breaks. Not because they were presenters or anything, but just because they radiated such enjoyment to everyone they spoke with, that people could hardly help but want to spend more time with them.
The way Vanessa explained it to me, when I interviewed her for one of my own CD products, was that people are so constantly worried about what...
So if I'm with a bunch of people from my class ... and none of us have any major conflict of interest...
If you were a character in a sitcom I was writing, I'd have your dream girl walk in just as you were saying that.
"When many people talk at once I can't distinguish their voices" is a common first symptom of hearing damage. "I can't hear when somebody is whispering" is unusual as first symptom. So I would guess that the answer to your question is yes. And in any case, if you go to an ear doctor they can find out for certain whether or not you have a hearing problem.
The thing that I have been most surprised by is how much NTs like symbols and gestures.
Here are some examples:
Suppose you think your significant other should have a cake on his/her birthday. You are not good at baking. Aspie logic: "It's better to buy a cake from a bakery than to make it myself, since the better the cake tastes the happier they'll be." Of course, the correct answer is that the effort you put into it is what matters (to an NT).
Suppose you are walking through a doorway and you are aware that there is someone about 20 feet behind you. Aspie logic: "If I hold the door for them they will feel obligated to speed up a little, so that I'm not waiting too long. That will just inconvenience them. Plus, it's not hard to open a door. Thus, it's better for them if I let the door close." To the NT, you are just inconsiderate.
Suppose you are sending out invitations to a graduation party. You know that one of your close friends is going to be out of town that weekend. Aspie logic: "There is no reason to send them an invitation, since I already know they can't go. In fact, sending them an invitation might make them feel bad." If your friend is an NT, it's the wrong answer. They want to know they are wanted. Plus, it's always possible their travel plans will get canceled.
In each of these 3 examples the person with AS is actually being considerate, but would not appear that way to an NT.
In each of these 3 examples the person with AS is actually being considerate
I agreed with all of your comment but this: the person with AS is not "being considerate", when "being considerate" is defined to include modeling the likely preferences of the person you are supposedly "considering."
In each case, the "consideration" is considering themselves, in the other person's shoes, falling prey to availability bias.
Personally, I am very torn on the doorway example -- I usually make an effort to hold the door, but am very uncomfortable. I think it will help to remember in future that the availability bias of my own preferences shouldn't rule out being considerate of what the likely preference of the other person is... and to change my SASS rules so that I feel good about holding the door, so it's self-reinforcing.
I have had drinks with friends and friends of friends in bars, pubs and beverage rooms in UK, Canada and US. I am almost 70 years old. I have never asked for a drink, I have never been asked for one. If I saw this happen, I would assume that the asker either wanted to have a favour done for them because they were feeling low or was out of money. I would not suspect that it was some sort of test. I would expect the response to be buying the drink, making a joke about the request or avoiding further conversation (or maybe all of them). I am used to people buying drinks for one another in some situation but not asking for a drink.
In my experience, people are by and large not testing; they have good will towards others; and they like company. This includes Aspergers and NTs. Why start out suspicious?
After a short time, they ask you to buy them a drink.
I have never encountered or heard of this behaviour. I would be rather startled if someone I had just met asked me to buy them a drink. I'd guess they were too poor to get their own (and with all respect to poor people, my interest in pursuing a relationship with them would substantially diminish).
I can understand your explanation, but I would find an opposite explanation just as plausible (they are trying to determine if the cost of a drink is a mere trifle to you, hence buying them one = good).
Is this a culturally specific thing? Where is this action, with this meaning, a standard pattern of behaviour?
I think that the emphasis on status here is misplaced. Here's an analogy:
Imagine that you, dear reader, are very smart, and when you get into conversations about intellectual topics, people almost always say "Wow, you're smart," based on superficial indicators, and seem impressed. Now imagine that you meet someone who reacts differently: they take it for granted that you're smart, and actually try to engage with you intellectually, rather than being awed and amazed by your intellect.
Can you see that your reaction might be very different? You might be more likely to like and be interested in talking to this person, intrigued that they weren't so easily won over, and possibly a little motivated to prove your intelligence to them.
That's what's going on in the example with attractive girls, except with looks and sexuality rather than intelligence. It's less of a "Oh wow you have high status" reaction on the girl's part, and more of "Hey, finally someone who isn't a pushover just cause I'm hot. He might actually be fun to talk to." This is communicated all the time with little things like body language, the way you turn to look at someone, the way you stand, and how you speak. It usually isn't as direct as "Will you buy me a drink?"
Yes, I like this analogy between intellectual interaction and social (status) interaction. Both types of interaction have "I'll push you until you stop me" behavior, that would be considered offensive or attacking if it was manifested in the other form of interaction.
A common mode of interaction for intellectuals is to argue for positions that you aren't sure of in order to figure out if they believe in, or even to argue for positions that they don't believe just to play devil's advocate. These debate styles push against people, expecting them to push back, analogous to the social styles of many neurotypical extraverts.
Just as introverts on the autistic spectrum hate it when neurotypical extraverts try to turn everything into a status game, neurotypical extraverts hate it when autistic spectrum introverts try to turn everything into a debate.
In a group of neurotypical extraverts, saying something like "you're such a dork" to someone else is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to handle it and fire back. Likewise, in a group of autistic spectrum introverts, saying something like "you're wrong" is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to be able to handle it, and either defend or concede their position.
Both groups have different norms for showing assertiveness, and an assertiveness display in one group could be considered an attack if it was performed in the other group.
In intellectual circles, it often seems to be considered acceptable to communicate intellectual disagreement in an assertive way, the assumption being that everyone knows that disagreement isn't personal. This communication style jars some intellectuals, and it enjoyed by others. Non-intellectual people universally hate this communication style.
What good does it do to act like you're higher status if you're not? You can't change your face or your income by signaling. Is everybody really so gullible?
Income and looks are only one component of status. Other components are determined by signaling and other forms of implicit communication in actual interactions. So, merely acting like you are high status will go a long way to convince people that you are, as long as you aren't giving off contradictory low status signals also.
One of the reason that people play status games (of which "buy me a drink" often is), is because there is a margin of error in status perception, and poking the other person with a status ploy is a way to confirm or disconfirm your initial impression of their status. If you believe that you are higher status that someone, and you attempt a successful status grab that they submit to, then it confirms that you are higher status.
As I've hypothesized, the way normal people tend to interact (or at least, a typical mode for certain types of extraverts to interact) is to constantly bump up against each other socially in mini-dominance battles and figure out the pecking order by seeing who can away ...
Is everybody really so gullible?
No, people are godshatter , they value signals of status in and of themselves.
I think you're misunderstanding the "refusal." It's not a "No, go away," it's more like "you buy me one first, I'm cuter" said playfully.
I would consider it a test to see if he can handle assertiveness. That is, if he is fun and easy-going.
The above is correct but this part would depend a lot on how the "no" is delivered:
If he said no, I would think she could consider him either not interested in her enough to part with a few dollars (and too cheap to satisfy a small request), or insecure about his status in the company of a woman.
The real status test is about whether he considers his company to be as valuable as hers. If he complies with the request (without any quid pro quo), then he's ceded her the higher social status -- which was what the question was testing (either intentionally or unintentionally), in the common case.
Declining the request, reversing it (you buy me one), or insisting on a quid pro quo, are the only ways to maintain equivalent or higher status in the interaction (absent an ongoing equal relationship wherein the quid pro quo is assumptive). Also, skillfully handling any of these options raises the observer's estimate of your social coprocessor's power rating as well. ;-)
There are a wide variety of context-sensitive ways to decline or redirect such a request, depending on th...
Hang on half a second here. No more than 1% of Americans are autistic. (CDC estimates 1 in 110.) Autism is four times as common among males as females. This whole "NT" vs "non-NT" thing you're talking about is distinguishing 99.75% of women from 0.25%. I think this may be misguided. There are way more women who don't ask to be bought drinks than that.
Personality is a factor, not just attractiveness. Women who are some combination of the following don't engage in testing like this, or are less likely to do so:
Sweet, sensitive, nerdy quiet types of both genders just don't like status games very much, and they tend to be bad at them.
The standard PUA model focuses a lot on women who do engage in testing and status games, because they tend to disproportionately encounter women who play them. This is understandable, but flawed.
I suppose that's true.
My confusion with this whole business is quantitative. The assumption in Roko's drink-buying model is that this is the right way to interact to attract the kind of women his audience would be interested in. That's a statement of probability. It's likely that you'll be going to bars to meet women, it's likely that any women you're interested in engage in shit-testing, it's likely that any women you're interested in respond the way the girls in the Feynman story do. I'm really not sure about that.
There are, as I mentioned, very, very few autistic women. So Roko and Nancy lump in the less attractive women. Fine, in principle. I'm still not convinced that a typical straight male LW reader won't find, in his dating pool, quite a few women who don't behave like the prototypical chick in a PUA parable. I only have anecdotes, of course, but I and most of my female friends and family members don't behave like that. We hit a lot of HughRistic's bullet points. And we've stumbled into our fair share of good relationships.
In other words: I think nerdy women are pretty numerous, far too numerous to be diagnosable autistics, and do just fine on the dating market. And I suspect the typical straight male LW reader wouldn't mind dating one.
The assumption in Roko's drink-buying model is that this is the right way to interact to attract the kind of women his audience would be interested in. That's a statement of probability. It's likely that you'll be going to bars to meet women, it's likely that any women you're interested in engage in shit-testing, it's likely that any women you're interested in respond the way the girls in the Feynman story do. I'm really not sure about that.
Actually, it's a statement of conditional probability, conditioned on a woman asking a man for a drink in such a setting, often as a prelude to having any conversation at all.
(It's not, however, a great example of a cacheable response. Really, the whole point of it as a status/social skill test is that it is hard to fake!)
Anyway, here's the reasoning: if a man is asked for a drink, it may or may not be a test, conscious or unconscious. However, in all possible cases, the man is highly likely to improve the situation by skillfully declining or negotiating a quid pro quo, because the situation is still a signaling opportunity, even if the woman's attraction wouldn't have decreased upon acquiescence. (In other words, you either win, or don't ...
Hauling a heavy box is not at all analogous to the drink example. When a woman asks a man for help with heavy physical work, this puts him in a much better initial position status-wise. She is the weaker party, asking for necessary assistance from his greater physical strength. Helping a weaker party from a position of greater power is a first-rank status-winning move. Therefore, it's best for him to do it cheerfully with a "that's nothing for a man like me" attitude; grumbling and saying "you owe me" is a bad idea since it suggests that he actually finds it hard, rather than an act of negligible difficulty from his superior position.
Of course, if a woman regularly exploits a man for such favors or makes him spend unreasonable time and effort helping her, that's another story altogether. However, a random request for some small help with a hard physical task nearly always conforms to this pattern of status dynamics.
In contrast, when a woman asks a man to buy her a drink, she is asking him to satisfy a random and capricious whim, not help her as a weaker party from a superior position. Therefore, acceptance carries no positive status signals at all, but instead signals that he is willing to obey her whims for the mere privilege of her company. Compared to the box example, it's like accepting to pay extortion money versus giving to charity. The former is an expression of weakness and submission, the latter a dispensation of benevolence.
Buying drinks can also be seen as someone weaker (financially) asking someone stronger. Considering that men earn more on average than women, and if you are picking up college girls and have a real job that is likely to be even more the case. So I don't see the way that these situations can be easily distinguished that way by someone without much social experience
I have a few meta-rules of thumb in such matters:
Anything can mean anything.
Corollary: Never explain by malice that which is adequately explained by intelligence.
The rules are never what anyone says they are.
The rules may not even be what anyone thinks they are.
Nevertheless, there are rules.
It is your job to learn them, and nobody's job to teach them to you.
All advice, however universally it may be expressed, is correct only in some specific context.
Application of the last to the whole is left as an exercise. :-)
(I'm granting for the sake of the exercise that I'd ask for a drink in the first place, even though in real life I don't consume alcohol.)
Which is precisely why the offered hypothetical is worse than useless in this case.
Bear in mind that in the circumstance being discussed, asking for a drink is like asking someone to hand you $5 -- for no reason at all other than than that you asked, and the fact that they are a male.
To presume that you would react in a certain way, conditional upon first having done something so utterly foreign to you in the first place, is like saying what you'd do if the moon were made of green cheese, only ISTM you'd have a better chance of being right in that case. ;-)
Well, pretend the bar serves something I'd drink. Say I'd get a virgin pina colada. I could imagine asking for one of those. I might also ask girls, if the environment gave me high enough priors on them being bi/gay.
So, your moral compass allows you to use other people's sexual preferences as a money pump?
(And no, that's not a line, although now that I've said it, I suppose it could be reworked into a LW-friendly response to a drink request. Needs more humor, less judgment, though! Hm, maybe "Are you trying to exploit my hardware preferences as a money pump?" A little too double-entrendreish, though. These things are really situational, and not at all suited to cached responses.)
This is a request which is slightly different from a question. Some requests are considered immoral when there is a power or status differential. University lecturers and students provide an example where some requests are widely considered immoral.
The drink provides a context for some sort of interaction; the money doesn't.
Which is precisely why it's a status move: you are placing an implicit pricetag on your continued interaction, and therefore implicitly asserting that your status/value is such that you can demand a payment of tribute for nothing more than the chance of remaining in your good graces.
Whether this were your intention or not, it's the situation the man is placed in, unless he has the cojones (and possibly training) to be able to refuse with impunity.
I haven't mentioned buying a reciprocal drink, but this is largely because I have idiosyncratic neuroses about money, not because it wouldn't occur to me as something appropriate to do.
I've noticed something interesting about your "social processing" in these posts -- your reasoning does not appear to include anything about what other people think or feel; in fact, it barely seems to include them at all! (For example, how would anyone you ask know whether you intend to reciprocate, or not?)
And I would guess that this apparent lack of consequential modeling of others' visceral experience of you, would lead to other sorts of situations in which your NT friends/co-workers find you "weird".
NTs pay lip service to deontological rules, but are mostly consequentialists with respect to their social behavior. As others here have pointed out, one of the key rules of NT social interaction is that everyone must show loyalty to the rules, while not being so clueless as to actually follow them or expect others to do so, when the real rules are about status and its consequences.
IOW, it's insanely irrational to treat NT social interactions as being truly rule-driven. (By wh...
Alicorn:
Can you give a couple examples?
Like in everything else, humans make bad decisions due to biases in matters of mating and pairing too. However, these particular biases are male- and female-specific, and pointing out the latter is easily perceived by women as an affront to their sex, which makes realistic discussion very hard.
But since you're asking, here are some instances of such biases. None of them are universal, but each is held strongly by non-negligible numbers of women and leads them to decisions they later regret. One example is when women overestimate the attractiveness of men they can realistically hope to attract for serious permanent commitment, given the higher attractiveness of men they can attract for temporary relationships and short-term flings without any real commitment on the man's part. Another is when women underestimate the speed with which their looks and reproductive abilities deteriorate with age. Yet another is the refusal to acknowledge that women can be greatly attracted to some very nasty personality types of men, not despite them but because of them (google "dark triad"), which leads some women to entering disastrous relationship...
I find the resentment off-putting too, and as in any other area of human concern, there is indeed a lot of unjustified feeling of entitlement. However, it should be noted that the main reason for the resentment is the rules-hypocrisy. Many men are indeed too clueless to figure out the disconnect between the official attitudes and values that are professed piously in our culture and the actual rules of the status game that it's taboo to discuss openly (so that such discussions are corralled off to disreputable venues like the PUA culture). Can you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what's been going on?
This isn't about blame, it's about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.
Fair enough. However, I would say that women tend to display at least two major biases when they encounter this sort of stuff. (I don't think these biases completely account for the fear and revulsion you mention, but they do mean that it often goes too far.)
First, women often don't take into account that they're observing men's in-clique behavior, which they rarely, if ever, see in real life. Many young men whom they'd perceive as decent, polite, overall good guys (and who indeed are that by any reasonable standards) sometimes spew out stuff that's just as extreme when they loosen up over beers among their male buddies, complete with foul language, frustrated trashing of women who have hurt them, etc. It's just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance, so when they're caught off guard rambling, or when they're writing anonymously on the internet, they tend to come off much worse than they really are.
Second, I understand that women might fear getting involved with a man whose attractive surface hides an angry, frustrated, manipulati...
For me, that story seems awfully depressing. Nothing in the story suggested to me that the man loved his wife or that his wife loved him. Game may have permitted them to have a more harmonious marriage, and evidently better sex, but not a relationship that seemed based on mutual love and respect.
It may be that the marriage was just too flawed to begin with; it's also possible, given that the writer was writing for Roissy's blog, that he consciously left details and color about love out of his narrative. But from what he has actually written, he's not describing the sort of marriage that I would want to be a part of.
I don't see any necessary contradiction between Roko and SarahC's perspectives in determining an optimal dating strategy for men with LW-reader phenotypes that doesn't rely on luck.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology not correctly described by the standard PUA model? Yes. Should these guys go outside that model to understand these women? Yes.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology that is correctly described by the standard PUA model, in part or in whole? Yes. Would these guys benefit from attaining knowledge of neurotypical social behaviors (from PUAs or elsewhere) to be able to date these women, instead of arbitrarily cutting them out of their dating pool? Yes.
I take an empirical approach to romantic success. Being able to date many kinds of people gives you a lot of options. Sometimes, you can't know whether you would be compatible with a certain type of person until you try dating someone like that. Saying "but I don't want anyone like that anyway" about people out of one's reach because of a lack of common social skills is a failure mode. Yet if you attain the skills to date someone like that, and you find it doesn't work, then you know that you are not merely the fox calling the grapes sour in Aesop's fable.
Yeah, that's the thing. I'm all for learning helpful skills. Bar game might be a helpful skill; I've seen enough positive testimonials to make me believe it. And certainly it's a failure mode to do the sour grapes thing. (I've tried dating outside my comfort zone; it's quite possible.)
PUA is a model, though, and people who like it sometimes overstate its applicability. The other thing to keep in mind is that there's a tension between learning new skills and playing to your strengths. Sometimes it's in your best interest to do the latter.
Umm. The purpose of dating is to find someone you're compatible with. "Expanding your dating pool" to include personality types you don't like defeats the whole point.
Unless your current idea of what personality types you're compatible with is too limited, or your judgment of other personality types that makes you not like them is prejudiced. The purpose of dating is also to find out what types of people you are compatible with empirically. See also my response to SarahC.
"Doesn't play culturally-common status games socially-inexperienced people don't know how to handle" is not a reasonable way for nerdy people to determine compatibility with potential mates (or friends). The filter is too broad, and it will exclude people they might actually be compatible with if they understood status games better and how to handle them.
A big part of the reason that nerdy people don't like status games is because they don't understand the psychology behind them, and consequently give the other person an unfairly negative assessment. Since they aren't accustomed to status games, their hackles may go up, particularly if the status ploy triggers issues for them, like memories of past bullying by higher status people. Yet once one attains some understanding of status games and skill at playing them, then the hackles no longer go up, and there is no reas...
A woman asks a man for a drink at a bar.
The PUA theory explains this in terms of a status interaction. The woman is testing, 'is this man so low status he feels compelled or obligated to buy me a drink?'
I am wary of explanations based on status interactions. It is the kind of explanation that can explain anything and therefore nothing. Also, I am skeptical based on my sense of the woman's subsequent disappointment and embarrassment if the man says no directly -- this is not a test where the level 1 correct answer is 'no'.
Alternatively, there's the simplistic evolutionary explanation, that I present here as what I would use to explain the phenomenon to a true human-outsider. Asking a man for a drink at a bar covertly or overtly, and in general men buying drinks for women, is the first step in a courtship ritual in which the man is to display that he is a provider. Raising children is a big investment and a family will be successful if the man and the woman together provide for the family. The woman's investment is largely guaranteed by other mechanisms, so it is the male's investment that must be tested and assured.
When a woman asks a man for a drink, this is the modern equivalent...
This is what I mean by status theories can explain anything: if buying the drink for the girl on average results in a good outcome, you could say that buying a drink on average raises your status in her point of view. If not buying the drink for the girl on average results in a good outcome, you could say that not buying a drink on average raises your status in her point of view. In either case, you assume rather than establish that higher status corresponds to the more successful outcome.
How do you know if "status" is a real thing if you can't measure it directly but only infer it from successful outcomes? The problem is that maybe higher status is redefined in each case as getting the good outcome, in which case "status" is just the property-of-resulting-in-successful-outcomes. Even if status is some external objective thing, if we don't know how to objectively measure whether it has increased or not, this is missing in theories based on predicting what happens if it's increased or not.
Later edit: I thought about it a little longer and my true argument isn't that good outcomes aren't correlated with higher status, I suspect they are. It's that the theory is missing where you predict which things will raise status and which will lower status. If not buying the drink helps, you deduce that this raised your status. But why should it have been raised? This last part is just filling in the blanks.
In European bars or nightclubs, if (relatively) attractive girls ask strangers for drinks or dishes, then it typically means they are doing it professionally.
There is even a special phrase "consume girl" meaning that the girl's job is to lure clueless customers into buying expensive drinks for them for a cut of the profit. The surest sign of being a "consume girl" is that they typically don't consume what they ask for.
It's all about money, and has nothing to do with social games, whatsoever. They are not spoiled brats, but trained for this job.
I am not sure how common is this "profession" in the US, but in Europe it's relatively common.
I don’t like to go meta, but this comment and its upvotes (4 at the time I write) are among the more disturbing thing I’ve seen on this site. I have to assume that they reflect voters’ appreciation for a real-life story of a woman asking a man to buy a drink, rather than approval of the use of violence to express displeasure over someone else’s behavior and perceived morality in a social situation.
I’m also surprised that you’re telling this story without expressing any apparent remorse about your behavior, but I guess the upvotes show that you read the LW crowd better than I do.
Would people just let a man grabbing a woman and spanking her happen?
He didn't say "grabbing", and in context, I'd guess that by "spanking" he meant a single swat to the buttocks.
The story is so far off from my priors of how people behave that I think the possibility that it isn't true should be considered.
It says more that you don't get out much, or aren't very observant when you do. I don't get out much, and never got out much, even during the brief few years when I was both single and of age, and such a story as this one is so utterly mundane and commonplace in its elements as to seem scarcely worthy of comment in the first place.
Most guys that protest such behavior from women make some other form of scene than swatting, of course, and most simply whine to their buddies or suffer in silence rather than make a scene at all. But apart from that, it's an utterly ordinary story, and observable many, many times a night in any "meet market" where the women go to dance and drink, funded by deluded potential suitors.
Other people (that I have talked to) seem to be divided on whether it was a good thing to do or not.
[Note: this is going to sound at first like PUA advice, but is actually about general differences between the socially-typical and atypical in the sending and receiving of "status play" signals, using the current situation as an example.]
I don't know about "good", but for it to be "useful" you would've needed to do it first. (E.g. Her: "Buy me a drink" You: "Sure, now bend over." Her: "What?" "I said bend over, I'm going to spank your spoiled [add playful invective to taste].")
Of course, that won't work if you are actually offended. You have to be genuinely amused, and clearly speaking so as to amuse yourself, rather than being argumentative, judgmental, condescending, critical, or any other such thing.
This is a common failure mode for those of us with low-powered or faulty social coprocessors -- we take offense to things that more-normal individuals interpret as playful status competition, and resist taking similar actions because we interpret them as things that we would only do if we were angry.
In a way, ...
pjeby:
The jerks, on the other hand, like to bait cats, because we're easy to provoke a reaction from. (Most of the "dogs" just frown at the asshole and get on with their day, so the jerk doesn't get any fun.)
So now, if you're a "cat", you learn that only jerks do these things.
Your cat/dog analogy is very good, but this requires some extra elaboration.
As you say, in regular socializing, this "cat-baiting" behavior is characteristic of jerks and bullies; regular people will typically leave "cats" alone rather than provoke them. However, in male-female interactions in which the woman deems (consciously or not) that the man might have some potential mating value but requires additional assessment, or if she perceives that the man is actively trying to win her favors, she'll typically engage in some "cat-baiting" to test him for undesirable "catlike" traits.
There's nothing surprising there once you really understand what's going on; it's simply a regular way of assessing a potential partner's fitness. Sometimes this "cat-baiting" will be subtle and entirely unremarkable to the man, but sometimes it has the form ...
Thank you, that was a very helpful explanation for me. It's posts like these that make me thankful you contribute here, even as we've had our differences in the past.
Reading it, I thnk I can interpret a past experience in a new light, in which I was, long ago, asked to leave a large NT-dominated club, for (what seemed like) kafkaesque reasons which were criticisms of my behavior they couldn't rationally justify. In particular, how I was told that far more people had a negative reaction to me than I had ever interacted with. I had heard third-hand (though from a trusted source) that it was because someone passed around a false, serious accusation that they never told me about.
But looking back, the explanation that there was a dog/cat expectation barrier makes a lot of sense of the way they treated me, which was not just vicious, but bizarre. (I think that NTs would agree that some my treatment was wrong, even from an NT perspective, but believe that the my reaction to it escalated the conflict, drawing out my different behavior.)
PS: Whoever voted the parent down, I request an explanation.
Other people (that I have talked to) seem to be divided on whether it was a good thing to do or not.
It sure was one hell of a low status signal. The worst possible way you can fail a shit test is to get visibly hurt and angry.
As for whether she deserved it, well, if you want to work in the kitchen, better be prepared to stand the heat. Expecting women you hit on to follow the same norms of behavior as your regular buddies and colleagues, and then getting angry when they don't, is like getting into a boxing match and then complaining you've been assaulted.
I still don’t understand how she “deserved” to have you escalate the encounter with a “hard” physical spanking; nor do I understand how, if you spanked her in a joking context, you would consider it punishment or “some measure of revenge.” From what you’ve said, it doesn’t seem like you were on sufficiently friendly terms with her that the spanking was in fact treated as teasing/joking action; you previously stated that she was not amused by the spanking, her brother threatened you, and you apologized.
I’m certainly not trying to say that her behavior wasn’t worthy of serious disapproval and verbal disparagement. But responding to her poor behavior with physical actions rather than words seems at least equally inappropriate.
This is spot-on. That's exactly how I do it, although I seem to have a good coprocessor for emotional empathy (tuned towards the opposite gender, no less), which does help tremendously; I only have to do social in software and while I'm rather bad at it, the empathy compensates for that and makes people more forgiving for miscalculations.
Consequently I tend not to like and avoid my own gender, because the empathy processor fails there and what's left is pure awkwardness.
That, or I'm just rationalizing over competition anxiety.
(EDIT: BTW, I got 32 on the t...
It seems this post bundled together the CPU vs. GPU theory regarding the AS vs. NT mindset, with a set of techniques on how to improve social skills. The techniques however - and in a sense this is a credit to the poster - are useful to anyone who wants to improve their social skills, regardless of whether the cause of their lack of skill is:
1) High IQ
2) Introversion
3) Social Inexperience
4) AS
5)
A combination of several of these factors might be the cause of social awkwardness. It's possible to place too much importance on looking for a root cause. The i...
for example height (can be modified by higher shoes - a trick that women have cottoned on to, but men are totally missing out on.
As pointed out in several of the comments on that post, women do not wear high heels primarily to increase their height but rather to change their posture, gait and apparent leg length.
I've completely taken myself off of the dating market; I have nothing of value to offer anyone. :(
In addition to "Find a community" I would recommend identifying people who behave as you would like to (whatever that may be) and trying to spend time with them. This lets you leverage the specialized hardware our brains contain for imitating others. In my experience it's much easier to copy an example of desirable behaviour than to construct it from a description or from EP first principles, particularly if the natural imitation mechanism is "overclocked" by conscious observation and noting of the behaviour one wishes to imitate.
When you edit your post, there's a button that shows a green horizontal bar. Click that to insert a section break in your post. Only what's before the break will show up on "NEW".
There are also some reliable proxies of fitness that are no longer reliable, for example height (can be modified by higher shoes - a trick that women have cottoned on to, but men are totally missing out on).
Not entirely, although there does seem to be some shame attached to doing this.
I do much the same thing by wearing hiking boots everywhere. They're waterproof, well-insulated for cold weather, and also increase my height more than sneakers.
the "totally missing out" link goes to the wrong place... should go here: http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/why-not-fake-height/
A somewhat related research, posted today on physorg:
http://www.physorg.com/news193408573.html
the original paper is at
http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010670
The authors establish a parallel between the dopamine-system of highly creative people and schizophrenics. (Although, it's hard to tell from the paper whether these parallels are incidental, causes or consequences of similar brain mechanics.)
It's really fascinating to me how someone with a list of Asperger's symptoms can so readily describe a lot of elements in my psychological life.
I have noticed for a long time that I tend to think about all sorts of things other people don't, and that I am just totally confused about other people's emotional responses.
There are also some reliable proxies of fitness that are no longer reliable, for example height (can be modified by higher shoes - a trick that women have cottoned on to, but men are totally missing out on).
Well, maybe not totally :-)
relevant article in the New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_page?currentPage=all
Anthony Robbins is OK if you take his book/videos as a kind of pep-talk, but Eckhard Tolle? I suffered through the deeply neo-religious, anti-rationalist The Power of Now. I would not recommend that to anybody.
There are also some reliable proxies of fitness that are no longer reliable, for example height (can be modified by higher shoes - a trick that women have cottoned on to, but men are totally missing out on).
Huh. When I see a woman much taller than usual for her gender, I quasi-automatically look at her feet, and quasi-automatically like her less if she's wearing high shoes and like her more if she isn't.
the "buy me a drink" problem: you approach an attractive NT person who you might like as a future partner. After a short time, they ask you to buy them a drink. The logical answer to this question is "what kind of drink would you like?", because in most social situations where you want to build up a positive relationship with a person, it is best to comply with their requests; not creating explicit conflict is usually a safe heuristic. But this is the wrong answer in this context, and you can store in your cache of counter-intuitive answers.
Warning: Some posters may regard this advice as an act of terrorism (in moral equivalence if not by that label).
The example that came to mind for me was, "''Sup?" which I used to hate with a passion, but I later parsed into a fairly complex, ritualistic phrase somewhere in the range of:
"Non-specific greetings to you. If we are both continuing on our paths, I expect similar non-specific greetings in return and indicate a slight preference toward the revelation of any bite-size knowledge you feel is important regarding your current activities or news that you feel I would be particularly interested in.
"If either one of us approached the other and stopped, this indicates anticipation of a slightly longer exchange, and I am querying the reasons for your approach or I am using a handshake protocol to determine if you have the current time-capacity and willingness to engage in a topic I consider interesting or important but for various reasons I do not wish to state outright, though with an equal potential that I am just bored and seeking non-specific social interaction."
Yes, this reminds me of when I finally grasped the usefulness of social protocols. I thought they were terribly stupid wastes of time when I was younger (say, till about age 22). Of course by then I learned what wonderful things network protocols were. Then I read a paper regarding Japanese culture that compared social protocols to network protocols, indicating that they were useful in much the same way. "The scales fell from my eyes" and I felt very stupid for not making the connection before.
It is simply accurate that there is a large group of people, well represented on this site, who consider autistic-oriented, non-PC discussion of dating rituals to be "beyond the pale", and to be universally condemned in the strongest terms, a reaction nearly indistinguishable from their position on terrorism.
I haven't seen any in the comments for this article, but I've seen plenty of comments worrying about it. Maybe you should wait until these people actually show up first?
In any case, the same contempt for PUA, for the wrong reasons, did resurface in this discussion, such as here, and here.
Um, neither of those comments shows contempt for PUA, in my estimation. SarahC expressed confusion, and Alicorn made an observation about a group that merely overlaps the bottom-feeding layer of PUA.
So, yes, I still think you're worrying too much. What's more, I don't think that your protests have ever actually helped the situation - if anything, they create more polarization, and further the impression that you're a low-status male protesting the status quo is unfair to you.
Meanwhile, to the extent that your remarks are successful in scaring off people who'd otherwise participate and maybe get one of their biases overcome or a misconception sorted out, you're doing a disservice to everyone. How do you think people get any greater empathy, except by engaging with their wrong ideas, so they can learn that they're wrong?
So all the ominous saber-rattling isn't helping anyone -- not even you.
kodos96:
What I have seen is that I've made several "You're wrong" comments, and none of the PUAs have responded to their substance ("No you're wrong" doesn't count).
I don't know if you count me among those, given what I've written in this thread, but I have addressed several of the points you made in that comment and elsewhere. In particular, I have pointed out: (1) that the body of expertise in analyzing male-female relations that originated in the PUA community is not limited to picking up girls from self-selected samples in bars and clubs, though some parts of it are; (2) that men successfully use lessons derived from this analysis for achieving and maintaining more permanent and close relationships with women, up to and including marriages; (3) that while some of the techniques recommended by certain PUAs are sly and dishonest, most of these techniques are just about making socially inept men clue onto the regular and normal protocols of human social interaction; and (4) that people are prone to irrationally dismiss insights of this sort as immoral due to the rule-hypocrisy bias. Just click on my name to see my recent posts in which I elaborate on all th...
What I have seen is that I've made several "You're wrong" comments, and none of the PUAs have responded to their substance ("No you're wrong" doesn't count).
What you're wrong about is here:
In PUA circles, "winning" is defined by getting laid.
Many men study PUA with the goal of being "good with women" (includes but is not solely defined by getting laid) or to "find my dream girl", or to impress other men with their game. And even of the ones who do get into it just to get laid, almost invariably find that success to be hollow after a while. (Read Strauss' book "The Game" for one man's personal account of this process.)
Do PUAs use the ability to get laid as an acid test for their techniques? Sure. But all of the ones who are about having more and deeper relationships with women -- even the women they're only going to speak to in the bar for 30 minutes or so before moving on.. will definitely tell you that it's not all about that. Even Mystery, who has one of the most shallow and manipulative PUA systems in existence, doesn't treat simply getting a random lay as being an adequate definition of success. (He calls ...
kodos96:
OK, but I still don't see how you get from there to it being applicable to anything outside the field of male/female mating interactions.
Well, I am a newbie here, but the site is called "Less Wrong," and it's a spin-off, and a self-described "sister site," of another one named "Overcoming Bias." I would say that the comments in this thread, both mine and by others, have amply demonstrated that a great many people -- including many people here -- are wrong about many aspects of this topic, and prone to some very severe and identifiable biases when thinking and talking about it.
Therefore, elucidating this situation seems to me a worthy intellectual pursuit by itself, since, if properly undertaken, it should result in people being less wrong about a topic that is, at the very least, highly relevant in real life, and it should make them identify (and hopefully overcome) certain biases they hold. Furthermore, the identification of these biases could be expected to lead to a more accurate assessment of other issues too, because, considering the undeniably significant role of sexual selection and status signaling in human evolution, biases shaped by them are unlikely to be confined to a small and isolated subset of human thinking and behavior. All this should, I think, fall squarely under the mission statement of improving human rationality.
I hope you'll find that a satisfactory statement of motivation.
The fact that people (e.g. pjeby) have returned to this subject without invoking offense, despite discussing similar content, suggests that the offensive characteristic is not a necessary component of the subject.
FWIW, it has been previously argued that I don't really talk about PUA, but only a bastardized female-friendly version thereof.
I, OTOH, maintain that this is merely a function of using non-misogynistic language and metaphor to describe the same acts, and the fact I don't signal loyalty to men protesting that they're being oppressed by an unjust conspiracy of women and traitorous men .
My personal take: shit yea it's unjust. But I don't see those guys doing anything to fix the injustices on women's side of things (or even really trying to understand them in the first place), instead just proclaiming their own side's values to be superior.
But that's just stupid. If you want to relate to women, you need to... well, relate. I think that both women in general and "dog people" in particular have a few peculiar or irrational values by my "cat-man" lights... but they're still their values.
And if I want to interact with those people, that means honoring t...
Followup to: Do you have High-Functioning Asperger's Syndrome?
LW reader Madbadger uses the metaphor of a GPU and a CPU in a desktop system to think about people with Asperger's Syndrome: general intelligence is like a CPU, being universal but only mediocre at any particular task, whereas the "social coprocessor" brainware in a Neurotypical brain is like a GPU: highly specialized but great at what it does. Neurotypical people are like computers with measly Pentium IV processors, but expensive Radeon HD 4890 GPUs. A High-functioning AS person is an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition - with on-board graphics!
This analogy also covers the spectrum view of social/empathic abilities, you can think about having a weaker social coprocessor than average if you have some of the tendencies of AS but not others. You can even think of your score on the AQ Test as being like the Tom's Hardware Rating of your Coprocessor. (Lower numbers are better!).
If you lack that powerful social coprocessor, what can you do? Well, you'll have to run your social interactions "in software", i.e. explicitly reason through the complex human social game that most people play without ever really understanding. There are several tricks that a High-functioning AS person can use in this situation:
