Part of the Sequence: The Science of Winning at Life. Co-authored with Minda Myers and Hugh Ristik. Also see: Polyhacking.
When things fell apart between me (Luke) and my first girlfriend, I decided that kind of relationship wasn't ideal for me.
I didn't like the jealous feelings that had arisen within me. I didn't like the desperate, codependent 'madness' that popular love songs celebrate. I had moral objections to the idea of owning somebody else's sexuality, and to the idea of somebody else owning mine. Some of my culture's scripts for what a man-woman relationship should look like didn't fit my own goals very well.
I needed to design romantic relationships that made sense (decision-theoretically) for me, rather than simply falling into whatever relationship model my culture happened to offer. (The ladies of Sex and the City weren't too good with decision theory, but they certainly invested time figuring out which relationship styles worked for them.) For a while, this new approach led me into a series of short-lived flings. After that, I chose 4 months of contented celibacy. After that, polyamory. After that...
Anyway, the results have been wonderful. Rationality and decision theory work for relationships, too!
We humans compartmentalize by default. Brains don't automatically enforce belief propagation, and aren't configured to do so. Cached thoughts and cached selves can remain even after one has applied the lessons of the core sequences to particular parts of one's life. That's why it helps to explicitly examine what happens when you apply rationality to new areas of your life — from disease to goodness to morality. Today, we apply rationality to relationships.
Relationships Styles
When Minda had her first relationship with a woman, she found that the cultural scripts for heterosexual relationships didn't work for a homosexual relationship style. For example, in heterosexual dating (in the USA) the man is expected to ask for the date, plan the date, and escalate sexual interaction. A woman expects that she will be pursued and not have to approach men, that on a date she should be passive and follow the man's lead, and that she shouldn't initiate sex herself.
In the queer community, Minda quickly found that if she passively waited for a woman to hit on her, she'd be waiting all night! When she met her first girlfriend, Minda had to ask for the date. Minda writes:
On dates, I didn't know if I should pay for the date or hold the door or what I was supposed to do! Each interaction required thought and negotiation that hadn't been necessary before. And this was really kind of neat. We had the opportunity to create a relationship that worked for us and represented us as unique and individual human beings. And when it came to sexual interactions, I found it easy to ask for and engage in exactly what I wanted. And I have since brought these practices into my relationships with men.
But you don't need to have an 'alternative' relationship in order to decide you want to set aside some cultural scripts and design a relationship style that works for you. You can choose relationship styles that work for you now.
With regard to which type(s) of romantic partner(s) you want, there are many possibilities.
No partners:
- Asexuality. Asexuals don't experience sexual attraction. They comprise perhaps 1% of the population,1 and include notables like Paul Erdos, Morrissey, and Janeane Garofalo. There is a network (AVEN) for asexuality awareness and acceptance.
- Celibacy. Celibates feel sexual attraction, but abstain from sex. Some choose to abstain for medical, financial, psychological, or philosophical reasons. Others choose celibacy so they have more time to achieve other goals, as I (Luke) did for a time. Others are involuntarily celibate; perhaps they can't find or attract suitable mates. This problem can often be solved by learning and practicing social skills.
One partner:
- Monogamy. Having one sexual partner at a time is a standard cultural script, and may be over-used due to the status quo bias. Long-term monogamy should not be done on the pretense that attraction and arousal for one's partner won't fade. It will.2 Still, there may be many people for whom monogamy is optimal.
Many partners:
- Singlehood. Singlehood can be a good way to get to know yourself and experience a variety of short-term partners. About 78% of college students have had at least one 'one-night stand', and most such encounters were preceded by alcohol or drug use.3 Indeed, many young people today no longer go on 'dates' to get to know a potential partner. Instead, they meet each other at a social event, 'hook up', and then go on dates (if the hookup went well).4
- Friendship 'with benefits'. Friends are often people you already enjoy and respect, and thus may also make excellent sexual partners. According to one study, 60% of undergraduates have been a 'friend with benefits' for someone at one time.5
- Polyamory.6 In a polyamorous relationship, partners are clear about their freedom to pursue multiple partners. Couples communicate their boundaries and make agreements about what is and isn't allowed. Polyamory often requires partners to de-program jealousy. In my experience, polyamory is much more common in the rationality community than in the general population.
Hugh points out that your limbic system may not agree (at least initially) with your cognitive choice of a relationship style. Some women say they want a long-term relationship but date 'bad boys' who are unlikely to become long-term mates. Someone may think they want polyamorous relationships but find it impossible to leave jealousy behind.7
The Science of Attraction
A key skillset required for having the relationships you want is that of building and maintaining attraction in potential mates.
Guys seeking girls may wonder: Why do girls say they want "nice guys" but date only "jerks"? Girls seeking rationalist guys are at an advantage because the gender ratio lies in their favor, but they still might wonder: What can I do to attract the best mates? Those seeking same-sex partners may wonder how attraction can differ from heterosexual norms.
How do you build and maintain attraction in others? A lot can be learned by trying different things and seeing what works. This is often better than polling people, because people's verbal reports about what attracts them don't always match their actual behavior.8
To get you started, the virtues of scholarship and empiricism will serve you well. Social psychology has a wealth of knowledge to offer on successful relationships.9 For example, here are some things that, according to the latest research, will tend to make people more attracted to you:
- Proximity and familiarity. Study after study shows that we tend to like those who live near us, partly due to availability,10 and partly because repeated exposure to almost anything increases liking.11 A Taiwanese man once demonstrated the power of proximity and repeated exposure when he wrote over 700 letters to his girlfriend, urging her to marry him. She married the mail carrier.12
- Similarity. We tend to like people who are similar to us.13 We like people with faces similar to our own.14 We are even more likely to marry someone with a similar-sounding name.15 Similarity makes attraction endure longer.16 Also, similar people are more likely to react to events the same way, thus reducing the odds of conflict.17
- Physical attractiveness. Both men and women prefer good-looking mates.18 Partly, this is because the halo effect: we automatically assume that more attractive people are also healthier, happier, more sensitive, more successful, and more socially skilled (but not necessarily more honest or compassionate).19 Some of these assumptions are correct: Attractive and well-dressed people are more likely to impress employers and succeed occupationally.20 But isn't beauty relative? Some standards of beauty vary from culture to culture, but many are universal.21 Men generally prefer women who exhibit signs of youth and fertility.22 Women generally prefer men who (1) display possession of abundant resources,23 (2) display high social status,24 (3) exhibit a 'manly' face (large jaw, thick eyebrows, visible beard stubble)25 and physique,26 and (4) are tall.27 Both genders generally prefer (1) agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion,28 (2) 'average' and symmetrical faces with features that are neither unusually small or large,29 (2) large smiles,30 (3) pupil dilation,31 and some other things (more on this later).
- Liking others. Liking someone makes them more attracted to you.32
- Arousing others. Whether aroused by fright, exercise, stand-up comedy, or erotica, we are more likely to be attracted to an attractive person when we are generally aroused than when we are not generally aroused.33 As David Myers writes, "Adrenaline makes the heart grow fonder."34 This may explain why rollercoasters and horror movies are such a popular date night choice.
But this barely scratches the surface of attraction science. In a later post, we'll examine how attraction works in more detail, and draw up a science-supported game plan for building attraction in others.
Attractiveness: Mean and Variance
Remember that increasing your average attractiveness (by appealing to more people) may not be an optimal strategy.
Marketers know that it's often better to sacrifice broad appeal in order for a product to have very strong appeal to a niche market. The Appunto doesn't appeal to most men, but it appeals strongly enough to some men that they are willing to pay the outrageous $200 price for it.
Similarly, you may have the best success in dating if you appeal very strongly to some people, even if this makes you less appealing to most people — that is, if you adopt a niche marketing strategy in the dating world.35
As long as you can find those few people who find you very attractive, it won't matter (for dating) that most people aren't attracted to you. And because one can switch between niche appeal and broad appeal using fashion and behavior, you can simply use clothing and behavior with mainstream appeal during the day (to have general appeal in professional environments) and use alternative clothing and behavior when you're socializing (to have strong appeal to a small subset of people whom you've sought out).
To visualize this point, consider two attraction strategies. Both strategies employ phenomena that are (almost) universally attractive, but the blue strategy aims to maximize the frequency of somewhat positive responses while the red strategy aims to maximize the frequency of highly positive responses. The red strategy (e.g. using mainstream fashion) increases one's mean attractiveness, while the blue strategy (e.g. using alternative fashion) increases one's attractiveness variance. Hugh Ristik offers the following chart:
This goth guy and I (Luke) can illustrate this phenomenon. I aim for mainstream appeal; he wears goth clothing when socializing. My mainstream look turns off almost no one, and is attractive to most women, but doesn't get that many strong reactions right away unless I employ other high-variance strategies.36 In contrast, I would bet the goth guy's alternative look turns off many people and is less attractive to most women than my look is, but has a higher frequency of extremely positive reactions in women.
In one's professional life, it may be better to have broad appeal. But in dating, the goal is to find people who find you extremely attractive. The goth guy sacrifices his mean attractiveness to increase his attractiveness variance (and thus the frequency of very positive responses), and this works well for him in the dating scene.
High-variance strategies like this are a good way to filter for people who are strongly attracted to you, and thus avoid wasting your time with potential mates who only feel lukewarm toward you.
Up next
In future posts we'll develop an action plan for using the science of attraction to create successful romantic relationships. We'll also explain how rationality helps with relationship maintenance37 and relationship satisfaction.
Previous post: The Power of Reinforcement
Notes
1 Bogaert (2004).
2 About half of romantic relationships of all types end within a few years (Sprecher 1994; Kirkpatrick & Davis 1994; Hill et al 1976), and even relationships that last exhibit diminishing attraction and arousal (Aron et al. 2006; Kurdek 2005; Miller et al. 2007). Note that even if attraction and arousal fades, romantic love can exist in long-term closed monogamy and it is associated with relationship satisfaction (Acevedo & Aron, 2009).
3 Paul et al. (2000); Grello et al. (2006).
4 Bogle (2008).
5 Bisson & Levine (2009).
6 Two introductory books on the theory and practice of polyamory are: Easton & Hardy (2009) and Taormino (2008).
7 See work on 'conditional mating strategies' aka 'strategic pluralism' (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000).
8 Sprecher & Felmlee (2008); Eastwick & Finkel (2008). Likewise, there is a difference between what people publicly report as being the cause of a breakup, what they actually think caused a breakup, and what actually caused a breakup (Powell & Fine, 2009). Also see Inferring Our Desires.
9 For overviews of this research, see: Bradbury & Karney (2010); Miller & Perlman (2008); Vangelisti & Perlman (2006); Sprecher et al. (2008); Weiten et al. (2011), chs. 8-12. For a history of personal relationships research, see Perlman & Duck (2006).
10 Goodfriend (2009).
11 This is called the mere exposure effect. See Le (2009); Moreland & Zajonc (1982); Nuttin (1987); Zajonc (1968, 2001); Moreland & Beach (1992). The limits of this effect are explored in Bornstein (1989, 1999); Swap (1977).
12 Steinberg (1993).
13 Zajonc (1998); Devine (1995); Rosenbaum (1986); Surra et al. (2006); Morry (2007, 2009); Peplau & Fingerhut (2007); Ledbetter et al. (2007); Montoya et al. (2008); Simpson & Harris (1994).
14 DeBruine (2002, 2004); Bailenson et al. (2005).
15 Jones et al. (2004).
16 Byrne (1971); Ireland et al. (2011).
17 Gonzaga (2009). For an overview of the research on self-disclosure, see Greene et al. (2006).
18 Langlois et al. (2000); Walster et al. (1966); Feingold (1990); Woll (1986); Belot & Francesconi (2006); Finkel & Eastwick (2008); Neff (2009); Peretti & Abplanalp (2004); Buss et al. (2001); Fehr (2009); Lee et al. (2008); Reis et al. (1980). This is also true for homosexuals: Peplau & Spalding (2000). Even infants prefer attractive faces: Langlois et al. (1987); Langlois et al. (1990); Slater et al. (1998). Note that women report that the physical attractiveness is less important to their mate preferences than it actually is: Sprecher (1989).
19 Eagly et al. (1991); Feingold (1992a); Hatfield & Sprecher (1986); Smith et al. (1999); Dion et al. (1972).
20 Cash & Janda (1984); Langlois et al. (2000); Solomon (1987).
21 Cunningham et al. (1995); Cross & Cross (1971); Jackson (1992); Jones (1996); Thakerar & Iwawaki (1979).
22 Men certainly prefer youth (Buss 1989a; Kenrick & Keefe 1992; Kenrick et al. 1996; Ben Hamida et al. 1998). Signs of fertility that men prefer include clear and smooth skin (Sugiyama 2005; Singh & Bronstad 1997; Fink & Neave 2005; Fink et al. 2008; Ford & Beach 1951; Symons 1995), facial femininity (Cunningham 2009; Gangestad & Scheyd 2005; Schaefer et al. 2006; Rhodes 2006), long legs (Fielding et al. 2008; Sorokowski & Pawlowski 2008; Bertamini & Bennett 2009; Swami et al. 2006), and a low waist-to-hip ratio (Singh 1993, 2000; Singh & Young 1995; Jasienska et al. 2004; Singh & Randall 2007; Connolly et al 2000; Furnham et al 1997; Franzoi & Herzog 1987; Grabe & Samson 2010). Even men blind from birth prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio (Karremans et al. 2010).
23 Buss et al. (1990); Buss & Schmitt (1993); Khallad (2005); Gottschall et al. (2003); Gottschall et al. (2004); Kenrick et al. (1990); Gustavsson & Johnsson (2008); Wiederman (1993); Badahdah & Tiemann (2005); Marlowe (2004); Fisman et al. (2006); Asendorpf et al. (2010); Bokek-Cohen et al. (2007); Pettay et al. (2007); Goode (1996).
24 Feingold (1990, 1992b).
25 Cunningham (2009); Cunningham et al. (1990).
26 Singh (1995); Martins et al. (2007).
27 Lynn & Shurgot (1984); Ellis (1992); Gregor (1985); Kurzban & Weeden (2005); Swami & Furnham (2008). In contrast, men prefer women who are about 4.5 inches shorter than themselves: Gillis & Avis (1980).
28 Figueredo et al. (2006).
29 Langlois & Roggman (1990); Rhodes et al. (1999); Singh (1995); Thornhill & Gangestad (1994, 1999). We may have evolved to be attracted to symmetrical faces because they predict physical and mental health (Thornhill & Moller, 1997).
30 Cunningham (2009).
31 Cunningham (2009).
32 This is called reciprocal liking. See Curtis & Miller (1986); Aron et al (2006); Berscheid & Walster (1978); Smith & Caprariello (2009); Backman & Secord (1959).
33 Carducci et al. (1978); Dermer & Pszczynski (1978); White & Knight (1984); Dutton & Aron (1974).
34 Myers (2010), p. 710.
35 One example of a high-variance strategy for heterosexual men in the dating context is a bold opening line like "You look familiar. Have we had sex?" Most women will be turned off by such a line, but those who react positively are (by selection and/or by the confidence of the opening line) usually very attracted.
36 In business, this is often said as "not everyone is your customer": 1, 2, 3.
37 For discussions of relationship maintenance in general, see: Ballard-Reisch & Wiegel (1999); Dinda & Baxter (1987); Haas & Stafford (1998).
References
Acevedo & Aron (2009). Does a long-term relationship kill romantic love? Review of General Psychology, 13: 59-65.
Aron, Fisher, & Strong (2006). Romantic love. In Vangelisti & Perlman (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships. Cambridge University Press.
Asendorpf, Penke, & Back (2010). From dating to mating and relating: Predictors of initial and long-term outcomes of speed dating in a community sample. European Journal of Personality.
Backman & Secord (1959). The effect of perceived liking on interpersonal attraction. Human Relations, 12: 379-384.
Badahdah & Tiemann (2005). Mate selection criteria among Muslims living in America. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26: 432-440.
Bailenson, Iyengar, & Yee (2005). Facial identity capture and presidential candidate preference. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the International Communication Association.
Ballard-Reisch & Wiegel (1999). Communication processes in marital commitment: An integrative approach. In Adams & Jones (eds.), Handbook of interpersonal commitment and relationship stability (pp. 407-424). Plenum.
Belot & Francesconi (2006). Can anyone be 'the one'? Evidence on mate selection from speed dating. Centre for Economic Policy Research.
Ben Hamida, Mineka, & Bailey (1998). Sex differences in perceived controllability of mate value: An evolutionary perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75: 953–966.
Berscheid & Walster (1978). Interpersonal Attraction. Addison-Wesley.
Bertamini & Bennett (2009). The effect of leg length on perceived attractiveness of simplified stimuli. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 3: 233-250.
Bogaert (2004). Asexuality: Prevalence and associated factors in a national probability sample. Journal of Sex Research, 41: 279-287.
Bogle (2008). Hooking Up: Sex, dating, and relationships on campus. New York University Press.
Bokek-Cohen, Peres, & Kanazawa (2007). Rational choice and evolutionary psychology as explanations for mate selectivity. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 2: 42-55.
Bornstein (1989). Exposure and affect: Overview and meta-analysis of research, 1968-1987. Psychological Bulletin, 106: 265-289.
Bornstein (1999). Source amnesia, misattribution, and the power of unconscious perceptions and memories. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 16: 155-178.
Bradbury & Karney (2010). Intimate Relationships. W.W. Norton & Company.
Buss (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses testing in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12: 1-49.
Buss & Schmitt (1993). Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review, 100: 204-232.
Buss, Abbott, Angleitner, Asherian, Biaggio, et al. (1990). International preferences in selecting mates: A study of 37 cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 21: 5-47.
Buss, Shackelford, Kirkpatrick, & Larsen (2001). A half century of mate preeferences: The cultural evolution of values. Journal of Marriage and Family, 63: 291-503.
Byrne (1971). The Attraction Paradigm. Academic Press.
Carducci, Cosby, & Ward (1978). Sexual arousal and interpersonal evaluations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14: 449-457.
Cash & Janda (1984). The eye of the beholder. Psychology Today, November: 46-52.
Connolly, Mealey, & Slaughter (2000). The development of waist-to-hip ratio preferences. Perspectives in Human Biology, 5: 19-29.
Cross & Cross (1971). Age, sex, race, and the perception of facial beauty. Developmental Psychology, 5: 433-439.
Cunningham, Roberts, Wu, Barbee, & Druen (1995). "Their ideas of beauty are, on the whole, the same as ours": Consistency and variability in the cross-cultural perception of female attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68: 261-279.
Cunningham (2009). Physical Attractiveness, Defining Characteristics. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 3 (pp. 1237-1242). Sage Reference.
Curtis & Miller (1986). Believing another likes or dislikes you: Behaviors making the beliefs come true. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51: 284-290.
DeBruine (2002). Facial resemblance enhances trust. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 269: 1307-1312.
DeBruine (2004). Facial resemblance increases the attractiveness of same-sex faces more than other-sex faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 271: 2085-2090.
Dermer & Pszczynski (1978). Effects of erotica upon men's loving and liking responses for women they love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36: 1302-1309.
Devine (1995). Prejudice and outgroup perception. In Teser (ed.), Advanced Social Psychology. McGraw-Hill.
Dinda & Baxter (1987). Strategies for maintaining and repairing marital relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 4: 143-158.
Dion, Berscheid, & Walster (1972). What is beautiful is good. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24: 285-290.
Dutton & Aron (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30: 510-517.
Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Kennedy (1991). What is beautiful is good, but...: A meta-analytic review of research on the physical attractiveness stereotype. Psychological Bulletin, 110: 109-128.
Easton & Hardy (2009). The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures, 2nd edition. The Celestial Arts.
Eastwick & Finkel (2008). Sex differences in mate preferences revisited: Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94: 245-264.
Eldridge (2009). Conflict patterns. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of human relationships: Vol. 1 (pp. 307-310). Sage Reference.
Ellis (1992). The evolution of sexual attraction: Evaluative mechanisms in women. In Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 267-288). Oxford University Press.
Fehr (2009). Friendship formation and development. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 1 (pp. 706-10). Sage Reference.
Feingold (1990). Gender differences in effects of physical attractiveness on romantic attraction: A comparison across five research paradigms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59: 981-993.
Feingold (1992a). Good-looking people are not what we think. Psychological Bulletin, 111: 304-341.
Feingold (1992b). Gender differences in mate selection preferences: A test of the parental investment model. Psychological Bulletin, 116: 429-256.
Figueredo, Sefcek, & Jones (2006). The ideal romantic partner personality. Personality and Individual Differences, 41: 431-441.
Fielding, Scholling, Adab, Cheng, Lao et al. (2008). Are longer legs associated with enhanced fertility in Chinese women? Evolution and Human Behavior, 29: 434-443.
Fink & Neave (2005). The biology of facial beauty. Internal Journal of Cosmetic Science, 27: 317-325.
Fink, Matts, Klingenberg, Kuntze, Weege, & Grammar (2008). Visual attention to variation in female skin color distribution. Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology, 7: 155-161.
Finkel & Eastwick (2008). Speed-dating. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17: 193-197.
Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica, & Simonson (2006). Gender differences in mate selection: Evidence from a speed dating experiment. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121: 673-697.
Ford & Beach (1951). Patterns of Sexual Behavior. Harper & Row.
Franzoi & Herzog (1987). Judging personal attractiveness: What body aspects do we use? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 13: 19-33.
Furnham, Tan, & McManus (1997). Waist-to-hip ratio and preferences for body shape: A replication and extension. Personality and Individual Differences, 22: 539-549.
Gangestad & Simpson (2000). The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23: 573-644.
Gangestad & Scheyd (2005). The evolution of human physical attractiveness. Annual Review of Anthropology, 34: 523-548.
Gillis & Avis (1980).
Gonzaga (2009). Similarity in ongoing relationships. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 3 (pp. 1496-1499). Sage Reference.
Goode (1996). Gender and courtship entitlement: Responses to personal ads. Sex Roles, 34: 141-169.
Goodfriend (2009). Proximity and attraction. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 3 (pp. 1297-1299). Sage Reference.
Gottschall, Berkey, Cawson, Drown, Fleischner, et al. (2003). Patterns of characterization in folktales across geographic regions and levels of cultural complexity: Literature as a neglected source of quantitative data. Human Nature, 14: 365-382.
Gottschall, Martin, Quish, & Rea (2004). Sex differences in mate choice criteria are reflected in folktales from around the world and in historical European literature. Evolution and Human Behavior, 25: 102-112.
Grabe & Samson (2010). Sexual Cues Emanating From the Anchorette Chair: Implications for Perceived Professionalism, Fitness for Beat, and Memory for News. Communication Research, December 14.
Greene, Derlega, Mathews (2006). Self-disclosure in personal relationships. In Vangelisti & Perlman (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships (pp. 409-428). Cambridge University Press.
Gregor (1985). Anxious Pleasures: The sexual lives of an Amazonian people. University of Chicago Press.
Grello, Welsh, & Harper (2006). No strings attached: The nature of casual sex in college students. Journal of Sex Research, 43: 255-267.
Gustavsson & Johnsson (2008). Mixed support for sexual selection theories of mate preferences in the Swedish population. Evolutionary Psychology, 6: 454-470.
Haas & Stafford (1998). An initial examination of maintenance behaviors in gay and lesbian relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 15: 846-855.
Hatfield & Sprecher (1986). Mirror, mirror... The importance of looks in everyday life. State University of New York Press.
Hill, Rubin, & Peplau (1976). Breakups before marriage: The end of 103 affairs. Journal of Social Issues, 32: 147-168.
Ireland, Slatcher, Eastwick, Scissors, Finkel, & Pennebaker (2011). Language style matching predicts relationship initiation and stability. Psychological Science, 22: 39-44.
Jackson (1992). Physical appearance and gender: Sociobiological and sociocultural perspectives. State University of New York Press.
Jasienska, Ziomkiewicz, Ellison, Lipson, & Thune (2004). Large breasts and narrow waists indicate high reproductive potential in women. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B, 271: 1213-1217.
Jones (1996). Physical attractiveness and the theory of sexual selection. University of Michigan Press.
Jones, Pelham, Carvallo, & Mirenberg (2004). How do I love thee? Let me count the Js: Implicit egotism and interpersonal attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87: 665-683.
Karremans, Frankenhuis, & Arons (2010). Blind men prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31: 182-186.
Kenrick, Sadalla, Groth, & Trost (1990). Evolution, traits, and the stages of human courtship: Qualifying the parental investment model. Journal of Personality, 58: 97-116.
Kenrick, Keefe, Gabrielidis, & Cornelius (1996). Adolescents' age preferences for dating partners: Support for an evolutionary model of life-history strategies. Child Development, 67: 1499-1511.
Kenrick & Keefe (1992). Age preferences in mates reflect sex differences in reproductive strategies. Behaivoral and Brain Sciences, 15: 75-133.
Khallad (2005). Mate selection in Jordan: Effects of sex, socio-economic status, and culture. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 22: 155-168.
Kirkpatrick & Davis (1994). Attachment style, gender, and relationship stability: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66: 502-512.
Kurdek (2005). What do we know about gay and lesbian couples? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14: 251-254.
Kurzban & Weeden (2005). HurryDate: Mate preferences in action. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26: 227-244.
Langlois & Roggman (1990). Attractive faces are only average. Psychological Science, 1: 115-121.
Langlois, Roggman, & Reiser-Danner (1990). Infants' differential social responses to attractive and unattractive faces. Developmental Psychology, 26: 153-159.
Langlois, Roggman, Casey, Ritter, Riser-Danner, & Jenkins (1987). Infant preferences for attractive faces: Rudiments of a stereotype? Developmental Psychology, 23: 363-369.
Langlois, Kalakanis, Rubenstein, Larson, Hallam, & Smoot (2000). Maxims or myths of beauty? A meta-analysis and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 126: 390-423.
Le (2009). Familiarity principle of attraction. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 1 (pp. 596-597). Sage Reference.
Ledbetter, Griffin, & Sparks (2007). Forecasting 'friends forever': A longitudinal investigation of sustained closeness between friends. Personal Relationships, 14: 343-350.
Lee, Loewenstein, Ariely, Hong, & Young (2008). If I'm not hot, are you hot or not? Physical-attractiveness evaluations and dating preferences as a function of one's own attractiveness. Psychological Science, 19: 669-577.
Lynn & Shurgot (1984). Responses to lonely hearts advertisements: Effects of reported physical attractiveness, physique, and coloration. Personal and Social Psychology Bulletin, 10: 349-357.
Marlowe (2004). Mate preferences among Hadza hunter-gatherers. Human Nature, 4: 365-376.
Martins, Tiggermann, & Kirkbride (2007). Those speedos become them: The role of self-objectification in gay and heterosexual men's body image. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33: 634-647.
Miller & Perlman (2008). Intimate Relationships, 5th edition. McGraw-Hill.
Montoya, Horton, & Kirchner (2008). Is actual similarity necessary for attraction? A meta-analysis of actual and perceived similarity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25: 889-922.
Moreland & Beach (1992). Exposure effects in the classroom: The development of affinity among students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 28: 255-276.
Moreland & Zajonc (1982). Exposure effects in person perception: Familiarity, similarity, and attraction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18: 395-415.
Morry (2007). The attraction-similarity hypothesis among cross-sex friends: Relationship satisfactions, perceived similarities, and self-serving perception. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 24: 117-138.
Morry (2009). Similarity principle in attraction. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 3 (pp. 1500-1504.
Myers (2010). Psychology, 9th edition. Worth Publishers.
Neff (2009). Physical attractiveness, role in relationships. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 3 (pp. 1242-1245). Sage Reference.
Nuttin (1987). Affective consequences of mere ownership: The name letter effect in twelve European languages. European Journal of Social Psychology, 17: 381-402.
Paul, Wenzel, & Harvey (2000). 'Hookups': Characteristics and correlates of college students' spontaneous and anonymous sexual experiences. Journal of Sex Research, 37: 76-88.
Peplau & Fingerhut (2007). The close relationships of lesbians and gay men. Annual Review of Psychology, 58: 405-424.
Peplau & Spalding (2000). The close relationships of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. In Hendrick & Hendrick (eds.), Close relationships: A Sourcebook. Sage.
Peretti & Abplanalp (2004). Chemistry in the college dating process: Structure and function. Social Behavior and Personality, 32: 147-154.
Perlman & Duck (2006). The seven seas of the study of personal relationships: From “the thousand islands” to interconnected waterways. In Vangelisti & Perlman (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships (pp. 11-34). Cambridge University Press.
Pettay, Helle, Jokela, & Lummaa (2007). Natural selection on female life-history traits in relation to socio-economic class in pre-industrial human populations. Plos ONE, July: 1-9.
Powell & Fine (2009). Dissolution of relationships, causes. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships: Vol. 1 (pp. 436-440). Sage Reference.
Reis, Nezlek, & Wheeler (1980). Physical attractiveness in social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38: 604-617.
Rhodes, Sumich, & Byatt (1999). Are average facial configurations attractive only because of their symmetry? Psychological Science, 10: 52-58.
Rhodes (2006). The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty. Annual Review of Psychology, 57: 199-226.
Rosenbaum (1986). The repulsion hypothesis: On the nondevelopment of relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51: 1156-1166.
Schaefer, Fink, Grammar, Mitteroecker, Gunz, & Bookstein (2006). Female appearance: Facial and bodily attractiveness as shape. Psychology Science, 48: 187-205.
Simpson & Harris (1994). Interpersonal attraction. In Weber & Harvey (eds.), Perspective on close relationships (pp. 45-66). Allyn & Bacon.
Singh (1993). Adaptive significance of waist-to-hip ratio and female physical attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65: 293-307.
Singh (1995). Female health, attractiveness, and desirability for relationships: Role of breast asymmetry and waist-to-hip ratio. Ethology and Sociobiology, 16: 465-481.
Singh (2000). Waist-to-hip ratio: An indicator of female mate value. International Research Center for Japanese Studies, International Symposium 16: 79-99.
Singh & Bronstad (1997). Sex differences in the anatomical locations of human body scarification and tattooing as a function of pathogen prevalence. Evolution and Human Behavior, 18: 403-416.
Singh & Young (1995). Body weight, waist-to-hip ratio, breasts, and hips: Role in judgments of female attractiveness and desirability for relationships. Ethology and Sociobiology, 16: 483-507.
Singh & Randall (2007). Beauty is in the eye of the plastic surgeon: Waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and women's attractiveness. Personality and Individual Differences, 43: 329-340.
Slater, Von der Schulenburg, Brown, Badenoch, Butterworth, Parsons, & Samuels (1998). Newborn infants prefer attractive faces. Infant Behavior and Development, 21: 345-354.
Smith & Caprariello (2009). Liking. In Reis & Sprecher (eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, Vol. 2 (pp. 978-982). Sage Reference.
Smith, McIntosh, & Bazzini (1999). Are the beautiful good in Hollywood? An investigation of the beauty-and-goodness stereotype on film. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 21: 69-80.
Solomon (1987). Standard issue. Psychology Today, November: 30-31.
Sorokowski & Pawlowski (2008). Adaptive preferences for leg length in a potential partner. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29: 86-91.
Sprecher (1989). The importance to males and females of physical attractiveness, earning potential, and expressiveness in initial attraction. Sex Roles, 21: 591-607.
Sprecher (1994). Two studies on the breakup of dating and relationships. Personal Relationships, 1: 199-222.
Sprecher, Wenzel, & Harvey, eds. (2008). Handbook of Relationship Initiation. Psychology Press.
Steinberg (1993). Astonishing love stories (from an earlier United Press International report). Games, February: 47.
Sugiyama (2005). Physical attractiveness in adaptationist perspective. In Buss (ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 292-342). Wiley.
Surra, Gray, Boettcher, Cottle, & West (2006). From Courtship to Universal Properties: Research on Dating and Mate Selection, 1950 to 2003. In Vangelisti & Perlman (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships. Cambridge University Press.
Swami, Einon, & Furnham (2006). The leg-to-body ratio as a human aesthetic criterion. Body Image, 3: 317-323.
Swami & Furnham (2008).
Swap (1977). Interpersonal Attraction and Repeated Exposure to Rewarders and Punishers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3: 248–251.
Symons (1995). Beauty is in the adaptations of the beholder: The evolutionary psychology of human female sexual attractiveness. In Abramson & Pinkerton (eds.), Sexual nature, sexual culture (pp. 80-118). University of Chicago Press.
Taormino (2008). Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. Cleis Press.
Thakerar & Iwawaki (1979). Cross-cultural comparisons in interpersonal attraction of females toward males. Journal of Social Psychology, 108: 121-122.
Thornhill & Gangestad (1994). Human fluctuating asymmetry and sexual behavior. Psychological Science, 5: 292-302.
Thornhill & Gangestad (1999). The scent of symmetry: A human sex pheromone that signals fitness? Evolution and Human Behavior, 20: 175-201.
Thornhill & Moller (1997). The relative importance of size and asymmetry in sexual selection. Behavioral Ecology, 9: 546-551.
Vangelisti & Perlman (2006). The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships. Cambridge University Press.
Walster, Aronson, Abrahams, & Rottman (1966). Importance of physical attractiveness in dating behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4: 508-516.
Weiten, Dunn, & Hammer (2011). Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century, 10th edition. Wadsworth Publishing.
White & Knight (1984). Misattribution of arousal and attraction: Effects of salience of explanations for arousal. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 20: 55-64.
Wiederman (1993). Evolved gender differences in mate preferences: Evidence from personal advertisements. Ethology and Sociobiology, 14: 331-352.
Woll (1986). So many to choose from: Decision strategies in videodating. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 3: 43-52.
Zajonc (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9: 1-27.
Zajonc (1998). Emotions. In Gilbert, Fiske, & Lindzey (eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology, 4th edition. McGraw Hill.
Zajonc (2001). Mere exposure: A gateway to the subliminal. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10: 224-228.
How on Earth do you come up with this stuff?
First you misrepresent the statements of this woman, whose name I don't even want to mention in such an ugly context in a public discussion. Rather than claiming that the problematic beliefs are a matter of consensus, she expressed a mere lack of certainty that the opposite is the case, and this takes only a few seconds to check by googling. Making incorrect attributions to people in public on such a sensitive topic and under their real names is, at best, callously irresponsible.
Then you go on and say that I have "said the same things openly," thus dragging me into this controversy, about which I have said nothing at all in this thread -- and about which I have never written anything here, to the best of my recollection, that would make this characterization correct under any reasonable interpretation. That this nonsense has been upvoted has lowered my opinion of LW more than probably anything else I ever saw here before.
And then people wonder why I may be reluctant to speak openly on controversial matters.
What?! Most asexuals experience romantic attraction. Some asexuals are aromantic, but that's not the same thing.
Oops fixed thanks.
I should just have my own shortcut for that. OFT or something. :)
I think the causation may be going the other way: it's that men who are willing to rape are more likely to enjoy rape jokes, not that men who read rape jokes thereby become more willing to rape.
Another theory I've heard (although not one relevant to this particular study, except maybe in an ecological sense) is that rape jokes signal to predators that non-predatory men aren't going to socially punish them.
Do you mean negative interpretations in general, or that particular sort of negative interpretation?
I would think ill of someone who told blonde jokes, especially if they told a bunch of them. To my mind, anyone who gives a lot of time to blonde jokes is probably making themselves less able to see intelligence in blonde women. I haven't tested this belief, I'm just going on plausibility.
I find that claim bewildering because the partnered men I know aren't jerks. It could be that I'm filtering for non-jerkness, but my tentative alternate theory is that the maybe the most conspicuously attractive women prefer jerks, and the men who resent the pattern aren't noticing most women. Or possibly a preference for jerks really is common in "girls"-- not children, but women below some level of maturity (age 25? 30? whatever it takes to get tired of being mistreated?), and some men are imprinted on what they saw in high school.
For those of you who believe that women prefer jerks, what sort of behavior do you actually mean? What proportion of women are you talking about? Is there academic research to back this up? What have you seen in your social circle?
This is a terrible debate and you should all feel bad for having it. Now let me join in.
The research on this topic is split into "completely useless" and "mostly useless". In the former category we have studies that, with a straight face, purport to show that women like nice guys by asking women to self-report on their preferences. To illuminate just how silly this is, consider the mirror case of asking men "So, do you like witty charming girls with good personalities, or supermodels with big breasts?" When this was actually done, men rated "physical attractiveness" only their 22nd most important criterion for a mate - number one was "sincerity", and number nineteen was "good manners". And yet there are no websites where you can spend $9.95 per month to stream videos of well-mannered girls asking men to please pass the salad fork, and there are no spinster apartments full of broken-hearted supermodels who just didn't have enough sincerity. So self-reports are right out.
Other-reports may be slightly less silly. Herold and Milhausen, 1999, found that 56% of university women believed that women in general were more likely to ... (read more)
After talking to a couple of people about this, I should qualify/partially-retract the original comment.
Some people have suggested to me that the best metaphor a man can use to understand how women think about "nice guys" isn't an ugly duckling woman who gets turned down by the men she likes, but a grossly obese woman who never showers or shaves her legs, and who goes around complaining loudly to everyone she knows that men are all vapid pigs who are only interested in looks.
I would find this person annoying, and although I hope I would be kind enough not to lash out against her in quite the terms I mentioned above, I would understand the motivations of someone who did, instead of having to classify him as having some sort of weird Martian brain design that makes him a moral monster.
The obesity metaphor is especially relevant. Since there are people out there who think becoming skinny is as easy as "just eat less food", I can imagine people who think becoming socially assertive really is as easy as "just talk to people and be more confident".
For people who honestly believe those things, and there seem to be a lot of them, the obese woman and the socially awkward man would reduce to the case of the woman who never showered but constantly complained about how superficial men were to reject her over her smell - annoying and without any redeeming value.
That would seem to apply better if at least some (but not all) of the significant elements of gross obesity and bad hygiene were rewarded with approval and reinforced with verbal exhortations for a significant proportion of the woman's lives. So basically the metaphor is a crock. Mind you the insult would quite possibly do the recipient good to hear anyway unless they happen to be the kind of person who will reject advice that is clearly wrong without first reconstructing what the advice should have been, minus the part that is obviously nonsense.
This is taking the unfortunate/entitled/nice/beta/shibboleth-of-your-choice males' complaint too far at face value - i.e., that they are sexually unsuccessful on account of being kind and prosocial.
People are really bad at measuring their own levels of altruism, which is hardly surprising. Those in this cluster of peoplespace are worse than average at reading social cues and others' assessments of them, and are apt to interpret "nice" and its congnates as "particularly kind and proscial," instead of what it usually means, which is "boring, but not actively offensive enough to merit an explicitly negative description." (Consider what it usually means when you describe your mother's watercolors or the like as "nice," sans any emphatic phrasing.) Likewise, we halo bad predicates onto those whom we resent - "jerk" is the male equivalent of "slut," in this sense.
What's creepy about this group is precisely the entitled attitude on display - that they deserve to enjoy sexual relations with those on whom they crush merely for being around them and not actively offending, or indeed in some cases for doing what in other contexts wou... (read more)
I used to believe this, but after doing some research, and further experience, I changed my mind.
First, the available research doesn't show a disadvantage of altruism, agreeableness, and prosocial tendencies for men.
I used to experience agreeableness and altruism as disadvantages. Now I experience agreeableness as sometimes a big advantage, and sometimes a moderate disadvantage. Altruism is neutral, as long as I can suppress it to normal population levels (I have excessive altruistic tendencies).
Hypotheses that reconcile this data and anecdata:
- Prosocial tendencies are orthogonal to attractiveness
- Prosocial tendencies have a non-linear relationships to attractiveness (e.g. it's good to be average, or maybe even a bit above average, but any higher or lower is a disadvantage
- The relationship between prosocial tendencies and attractiveness is moderated by another variable. For instance, perhaps prosocial tendencies are an advantage for extraverted men, but a disadvantage for introverts
... (read more)For what it's worth, my reflex before reading a bunch of stuff here was closer to hearing "socially awkward man who can't manage to attract women" was closer to thinking of various annoying men who have hung around me, who I find unattractive (sometimes at the skin-crawling level [1]), but who never cross a line to the point where I feel justified in telling them to go away. This can go on for years. It is no fun.
After reading these discussions, I conclude that my preconception was a case of availability bias (possibly amplified by a desire to not know how painful things are), and so I use a more abstract category.
[1] To repeat something from a previous discussion, this isn't about being physically afraid. If I were, I'd be handling things differently. It also turned out to my surprise, that at least some men have never had the experience of that sort of revulsion. It seems to me that it's not quite the same as not wanting to be around someone who just about everyone would think was overtly ugly, though women frequently agree (independently, I think) about some men being uncomfortable to be around.
It wouldn't surprise me if there are specific elements of body language or facial expression which cause that sort of revulsion, but I don't know what they are.
My understanding is that it is an instinct intended to protect you from threats to your reproductive success, not threats to your survival. ie. I expect it to tend to encourage behaviors that will prevent pregnancy to losers more so than behaviors that prevent losers from killing you.
Having a 'repulsion/creepiness' response to supplement an 'attraction' response seems like something to expect as an early, basic optimization. Something that would begin to be optimized before even bothering with things like human level intelligence.
From what I understand of the philosophy a personal development program based on PUA would be expected and intended to reduce the amount that the guy is placed in the 'ignored' category while actually increasing the 'actively avoided' category. Because being ignored is useless (and 'no fun') while being actively avoided actually just saves time. Bell curves and blue and red charts apply.
There tends to be some lessons on how to reduce 'creepiness' in general because obviously being creepy in general is going to be a hindrance to the intended goals.
My brief searching for 'creepiness research' didn't turn up much either. But to be honest I don't really know where to look. :)
The obvious conclusion from these premises: If you had the belief that "This could go on for years and is no fun" is a valid justification for telling someone to go away then your life would contain less 'no fun'.
Relevant: the Dark Triad and short-term mating.
Unfortunately I can't provide sources at the moment (Luke probably can), but I have seen research both sociological and anthropological showing that women and female higher primates in general have a tendency to try to mate with multiple dominate highly masculine males, sometimes secretly, while they tend to have long term pairings with less dominate, less masculine males. The theory is that the genes of the more masculine men lead to more fecund offspring, while the parenting of the less masculine men leads to higher offspring survival. In society this works out to women dating more masculine men (and testosterone is of course linked to the aggressiveness and risk taking we associate with "bad boys") prior to marriage, and then marrying less masculine men (nice guys). And if they cheat, they tend to cheat with "bad boys" and have their "nice guys" raise those kids.
EDIT: For pure anecdote, I am a nice guy (I think) who always complained about the "bad boy" thing, and now I am raising a step-daughter from my wife's youthful short term relationship with a guy everyone would still call a "bad boy." My wife is winning at natural selection! As is that jerk :(
If it makes you feel better all sorts of unpleasant people are currently winning at natural selection (no offence intended to any LWer with many children or your wife).
I have a hard time understanding how this would make anyone feel better.
Suffering is often ameliorated somewhat by knowing you are not alone in your situation.
Awkward news from the world of science: Women with less-masculine husbands or boyfriends are more likely to lust after other men during the fertile part of their cycle than women partnered with butch guys.
Roughly speaking you seem to be describing the norm for a lot of historical civilisations that I'm familiar with. The consequences for siring bastard children by bad boys is far lower now than it often has been.
Seems most plausible to me.
I have had several friends who went to bars to meet women, and then were disappointed that the only women they met were the ones who enjoyed going to bars.
People think/do strange things.
An accurate analysis of this issue would require unpacking the cluster of traits implied by the word "jerk," and then dividing them into several categories:
Traits that are indeed actively attractive to women, or some subset thereof.
Traits that are neutral per se, but have a positive correlation with others that are attractive, or negative correlation with others that are unattractive.
Traits that are unattractive, but easily overshadowed by other less obvious (or less mentionable) traits, which produces striking but misleading examples where it looks like the "jerk" traits are in fact the attractive ones.
This is further complicated by the fact that behaviors and attitudes seemingly identical to a side-observer (especially a male one) can in fact be perceived radically differently depending on subtle details, or even just on the context. This makes it easy to answer accurate observations with jeering and purported reductio ad absurdum in a rhetorically effective way.
This question further complicates th... (read more)
Here's a couple more:
Traits that are neutral or unattractive, but help people in their mating interaction during one-on-one interaction with a potential partner (e.g. initiation or receptiveness).
Traits that are neutral or unattractive, but help people compete with others of their same gender
In sexual selection, there is a difference between intersexual choice, and intrasexual competition. "Women go for jerks" or "nice guys finish last" might not be a primarily a claim about the traits that women are attracted to; rather, it could be a claim about the traits necessary to initiate with women and compete with other men. All this stuff partially overlap... (read more)
IOW the reason jerks are more successful might be that they cockblock other guys. It makes perfect sense to me and, in retrospect, I'm surprised that it took so long for someone to hypothesise this.
I wish you'd just spit out whatever unPC stuff you thinks going on, even if it was rot13'd or only PM'd to people who volunteered to read it out of curiosity.
A few bullet-points on what I see as the likely contributing factors to the "women prefer jerks" meme:
Romantic relationships often expose you to the worst of what people are capable of, and often end in unpleasant circumstances. If you ask someone about their most recent ex, they'll probably have more nasty stories than nice ones to tell about them.
If the competition for the object of my affections is charming and confident, I'm going to say he's manipulative and arrogant.
Making poor decisions about people you're attracted to, and systematically overlooking your partner's negative qualities, are well-established behaviour patterns in both sexes.
Romantic underdogs feel like they bend over backwards to be noticed by women, whereas romantically successful men seem by comparison to put in relatively little work to achieve the same goal. This perceived effort is conflated with caring or worthiness.
It strikes me that the nice-guy/jerk idiom has an analogue in the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. I was going to comment on how I'd never seen mention of this in any of the numerous feminist treatments of "nice guy syndrome" I've seen, but a cursory Google suggests it's not a new idea.
Whatever age it takes to get past peak attractiveness and fertility.
I remember as an high school kid PUA seemed sensible. (I had a nerdy straight male friend into it, and no personal interest since if I wanted to get laid I could use boobies.) I mostly took home "People, especially women, dig confidence, and will chase rather than be chased. 'Bitches ain't shit' is therefore a desirable mindset.".
And then just today I looked into it again, starting with the Dating market value test for women. I had trouble believing it was serious. Not because I'm supposed to want sex with hot women and nothing else, but because their idea of "hot women" isn't hot at all. Why would I ever want that?
I get that liking androgyny and brains and being neutral to fat and small breasts are rather idiosyncratic traits. But what kind of guy wants a girl just old enough to legally consent who never swears, dresses sexy and fashionable without actually caring about it, same for sports, and has the exact three kinds of sex they show in cookie-cutter porn? That's not a person. That's what you get if you ask RealDoll's research department for a toy that reconciles your horror of sluts with your hatred of prudes.
...also, the hot photo is supposed to be the one on the left, right?
That's because it's a "blue line" test. At the beginning, it explicitly points out it's orienting on averages, and defining market value in terms of breadth of appeal. It doesn't mean lots of people will like a high scorer, it means lots of people won't rule out the high scorer.
In other words, the person who scores perfectly on this test will probably not be hideously offensive to anyone -- which means they don't get ruled out early in the selection process. But a low score just means they're more likely to need a "red line" strategy, aiming at strong appeal to a narrower audience, at the cost of turning more people off. (i.e., emphasizing one's supposed "defects" would attract people who like those qualities, while turning away more of those who don't)
(Ugh. I can't believe I'm defending that misogynist a*hole, but I don't see anything wrong with the test itself, just the conclusions/connotations being drawn from it.)
I will respect properly written articles on almost any subject. Not these.
One thing I demand from authors claiming to be supported by "science" is that they won't make me stop thinking in mid read. The articles behind these links do not respect the reader's opinion. Instead of making you think, they seek to shock, trump and convince. I've seen this style and these patterns before in articles about climate denial, xenophobia and religious fundamentalists. (Seriously, a lifestyle article is not a valid citation.)
I'm not saying the author has not done his fair share of reading. I'm saying he should stop waving the "this is science"-sign with one hand and be clubbing down his readers with the other.
I don't take Roissy all that seriously but have read quite a bit of his stuff. I've never understood him as comparing women's value as people, but rather their sexual value or dating value from the perspective of the (sort of) median man.
The sexual value is something determined by "the sexual marketplace". Sure some people like the less likeable, but they are pretty rare and thus on average the person with these traits will need to be less picky, since she/he runs into those interested in them less often.
Yep, I can understand that. though his phraseology is very clearly as though it is an inherent value of her worth as a (sexual) person... which is what I found so unappetising.
I also disagree with his valuation. I know from... well knowing 40 YO women (and older), that they do indeed suffer from diminished sexual appeal - but certainly nowhere near zero. 40YOlds get it on all the time... therefore his valuation is wrong. It is limited by his own personal perspective - and that of the average young-ish man who is himself high up on the "sexual appeal" rating.
I can definitely understand that for a man who can "get anybody" - that they would try almost exclusively for younger women, and that therefore an older woman would hold no sex appeal for them... but for anybody not an alpha male... (especially 40-50YO average men), a 40YO woman would still hold some interest.
Her "value" on the marketplace is not zero.
I upvoted your original comment but I disfavored this statement because it sounded like arguing against something by saying something other than "it isn't true".
If someone tells me "Japanese-Americans have average IQs 70 points higher than Korean-Americans," I don't have to try and refute that by saying "that's racist," because I have available the refutation "that's false". When I want to disfavor or shun a true idea that's unpopular, and can't say "that's false," I will have to say something else, such as "that's racist". Observers should notice when I do that, and estimate depending on the context how likely I was to respond with a negation like that had it been available.
Um, for many people (e.g. me) , it is hard to stomach at all, and I'm a het male, the sort of entity he is nominally writing for. The reason for this is simple: at a certain point style does reflect substance, and moreover, Sapir-Worf issues come into play.
Sometimes the persona comes across as fake and bizarre. Take this article on frame control. It's completely reasonable, and meshes well with what you'd read here or in books on social skills. Then he lazily throws in
and continues talking about framing, having reminded his readership that bitches be crazy. Maybe the equivalents reminders on LW ("Remember, humans don't operate in a logical universe; we abide by our biased emotions first and foremost") and social skills books ("Remember, humans don't operate in a logical universe; we abide by our emotions first and foremost, and that makes us wonderful beings because rationality means Spock") sound as artificial when you're not used to them?
Now, admittedly I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence in this area, but I've seen some, and I couldn't name a single woman I know personally who has ever, in my presence or by report that I've heard, gone for a jerk.
Perhaps this behavior is less common among women who would rather have a 15% chance of $1,000,000 than a certainty of $500 (because most random women I've tested choose the certain $500, but every single woman in our community that I've asked, regardless of math level or wealth level or economic literacy or their performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test, takes the 15% chance of $1M.)
Or maybe "jerk" is being used in some sense other than what I associate it with, i.e., wearing motorcycle jackets, rather than not caring about who else you hurt.
I could name a fair number (in the "doesn't care about hurting others" sense, not the "wears motorcycle jackets" sense,) but none of them have been girls or women I would want to date me instead.
I suspect that the perceived trend owes a lot to a horns effect that guys build up around other guys who're dating girls they want to be dating.
Keep in mind that utility isn't linear in money.
No, but I doubt it's so non-linear for most people that it remotely justifies such a choice.
If someone e.g. urgently needs a life-saving surgery that requires 500$, then they may be justified to choose a certainty of $500 over a 15% probability of a million dollars. But outside such made-up scenarios, I very seriously doubt it.
(Caveats: Small N, college-age subjects, and WEIRD) Believe it or not, someone actually tried to test the jerk theory empirically and found support for it
Hat tip: Eric Barker.
Another caveat is surrogate behavior-- what's tested is which photographs women chose, not which men.
It's occurring to me that part of what annoys me about the "women prefer jerks" meme is the implication that women are distinctively irrational. There are men who chose women who mistreat them, sometimes one such woman after another, but I've never heard anyone say "men prefer bitches".
Just on the notion level, but I've wondered whether some women (especially young women) choose bad news men for the same reason that some men (especially young men) ride motorcycles-- risk and excitement. From what I've heard, one of the reasons women chose difficult men is the hope of being able to change them.
Another possibility is availability bias-- the stereotype is the woman who spends years complaining about the awful men in her life to a patient male friend who's wondering why she never chooses him. Women who are happy with their relationships aren't going to do as nearly as much complaining about them, and probably aren't going to be talking in comparable detail about how good the relationship is.
There, now you have. According to the Amazon Best Sellers Rank, it is currently ranked #560 overall in the Books category, #1 in Dating , #2 in Mate Seeking, and #4 in Love & Romance. Surely the idea isn't unheard of.
Partially this is because men are less often the one whose preference is at the center of the relationship (the standard cultural trope is a man pursues a woman, attempting to make her prefer him) and so there is less scrutiny of men's preference by both parties, and much more scrutiny of women's preference by men (in order to understand better how to make a woman prefer him).
Partially this is also because male attraction is determined less strongly by personality, and the "bitch/jerk" adjective is about personality.
Isn't there a stereotype whereby men prefer women who play by The Rules, which apparently consist of guidelines for emotional manipulation? That counts as bitchy in my book.
Also, can someone explain the "patient male friend" part of stereotype? I think it's one of these cases:
On a tangential note, if a man said to a woman that he wanted to slap her as a reaction to some offensive statement she made, would you consider it acceptable?
Mind you, I have no problem in principle with social norms that set different boundaries for the behavior of men and women. (In particular, if someone wants men's threats of violence to women, even humorous and hyperbolic ones, to be judged more harshly than vice versa, I certainly find it a defensible position.) I just find it funny to see egalitarians who profess principled opposition to such norms caught in inconsistencies, like for example here, where very few (if any) of them would react to your statement with the same visceral horror and outrage as if the sexes were reversed.
I'm glad to hear that the two of you share a sense of humor, but the relevant comparison would be how you'd feel if a strange man mentioned slapping you in response to something you said, whether in the context of a public debate such as here or elsewhere. I would be surprised if you would be willing to take that nonchalantly. And even if you are an exception in this regard, there is no denying that the usual standards of discourse are highly asymmetric here, since there is no way that a similar statement by a man to a woman would not have caused firestorms of outrage.
Now, as I explained, I have no problem with this standard in principle. I am not expressing any condemnation of your words or attitudes. I am just using this opportunity to highlight the apparent contradiction with the general principle held by the contemporary respectable opinion that sex-asymmetric social norms are morally dubious, or worse -- and not because I wish to score a petty rhetorical point, but because I believe that if adequately considered, it would open some very important and general questions.
I think VM is quite open about the fact that his secret beliefs are low status. I've been wondering for a while, but I haven't been able to think of examples of ideas so reviled that they warrant secrecy besides "redneck ideas." I think it's interesting that you similarly lack examples. Maybe this is the only source of reviled beliefs, or maybe it's a US blind-spot.
Well, beliefs don't even need to be in the "reviled" category for one to conclude that it might be prudent not to express them openly. One might simply conclude that they're apt to break down the discourse, as has indeed happened on LW many times with statements that might be controversial, but fall short of "reviled" in the broader society.
Also, I think you're applying some popular but grossly inaccurate heuristics here. I can easily think of several beliefs that: (1) are squarely in the "reviled" category in today's respectable discourse in Western societies, (2) have been held by a large number of people historically, or are still held by a large number of people worldwide, and (3) are practically nonexistent, or exceptionally rare, among the segment of the U.S. population that can be labeled "rednecks" by any reasonable definition. (For beliefs that make sense only given some cultural background, I mean "exceptionally" relative to other local cultures that provide this background.)
In any case, think about the following. For any human society in history about which you have some reasonably accurate picture, except the present ... (read more)
I don't have any objection to bestiality. Having sex with animals seems like a less harmful thing to do to an animal than killing it and eating it. I also don't object to other people who are consenting adults ignoring taboos regarding incest so long as they ensure that negative reproductive outcomes are avoided. For that matter cannibalism is fine by me as long as murder isn't involved (although I suggest avoiding the brain). Human sacrifice is a big no no though!
"Sex between adults and young teenagers, as long as there is no obvious coercion involved, is not nearly as harmful as generally supposed" is definitely something that you can't say - and the fact that you can't say it has been demonstrated experimentally.
It's very bad to have a single word that many people will interpret as "being attracted to people you can't have sex with, and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma", and many other people interpret as "raping particularly vulnerable people".
No disagreement on that, though I suspect that even if everybody understood the first meaning, it would still be reviled.
(I know a (non-practicing) pedophile who attempted to "reclaim the word" by outing himself and distancing himself from child molesters. It - unsurprisingly - still didn't go well for him).
This guy is a hero. Okay, not a very effective hero, but still.
The rhetorical sleight of hand here is that "prejudice" is used with an ambivalent meaning. On the one hand, this word is used for any application of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people, which are deemed to be immoral according to a certain ideological view. On the other hand, it is supposed to refer to the use of conditional probabilities about people that are inaccurate due to biases caused by ignorance or malice. Now, it is logically possible that the latter category just happens to subsume the former -- but the real world, of course, is never so convenient.
And if the latter category does not ... (read more)
What do you think happened to Stephanie Grace - don't you think a private email sent to a few friends has affected her career prospects ? James Watson and Lawrence Summers also got lynched for their opinions.
I don't think anybody risks getting sued or arrested, but they can have their careers harmed.
Having certain topics discussed too openly on Lesswrong could result in several unfortunate things happening.
It could make certain potential rationalists be deterred from participating in the community.
It could attract the attention of certain contrarians who are less-than-rational and, for various reasons, should not necessarily be considered potential rationalists.
Most importantly, from the standpoint of the Singularity Institute (or, at least, what I think is its standpoint), it could increase the probability of human extinction by harming the SI's reputation.
Further comments by you may be deleted without warning or notice. Please leave Less Wrong.
Please go away. You've earned yourself -262 Karma points in the last 30 days; you should take the hint.
(Relevant post.)
This comment might not be popular on a quick knee-jerk level, but it's worth getting out there for accuracy.
Under "Many partners" you've got Singlehood, Friendship 'with benefits', Polyamory.
You're missing one of the most common historical kinds of relationships - monogamous commitment from woman to man, man taking care of multiple households in a committed way.
The first Tokugawa Shogun, for instance -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Ieyasu#Ieyasu_as_a_person
16 children with 11 wives and concubines.
King Ts'ao Ts'ao of Wei -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_Cao#Family
Muhammad -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad#Wives_and_children
It's not a Western tradition. The West has a strong romantic/platonic love ideal, that moves into monogamy under Christianity, and some non-monogamy later built on some mix of liberalism, enlightenment values, and humanism.
But still, it's been a very common family/dating/relationship through history. It still persists, though it doesn't get much media coverage.
Current Sheik of Dubai -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_bin_Rashid_Al_Maktoum#Personal_life_and_education
Current Prime Minister of Italy -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Be... (read more)
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/?single_page=true
I quite liked the post, I only have one niggle:
"For example, in heterosexual dating the man is expected to ask for the date, plan the date, and escalate sexual interaction. A woman expects that she will be pursued and not have to approach men, that on a date she should be passive and follow the man's lead, and that she shouldn't initiate sex herself."
this is an extremely US-centric view of dating culture.
In Aus, women do not expect men to pay for dates, and while the bias is still weighted towards the men being more likely to ask woman out or to initiate sexual advancement... it's not the expectation.
It's only one data point, but most of my BFs I pursued, rather than the other way around - and most of my girl-friends have similar stories.
The plans for the Death Ray are already out there. The two possible discussions are, first, whether it's ethical to kill someone with a Death Ray.
The second discussion asks whether the effectiveness of the Death Ray (compared to just punching someone) can be attributed to the placebo effect. Or maybe the Death Ray only works on the sort of people that evil villains want to kill, but when it comes time to protagonists, our opponents are mostly invulnerable to Death Rays. It's also possible that the Death Ray doesn't really work better than chance, but it gives villains the confidence to step up and shoot someone who's about to have a heart attack, anyway. Then again, maybe a lot of people prefer to be shot with Death Rays and it's hypocritical to say that the tried-and-true method of punching someone to death is better just because it doesn't involve any mechanical devices...
This doesn't mark it as a natural explanation. By the same pattern, I don't have a tail because I'm not a kangaroo.
I would like to propose that any post immediately become locked once its number of comments reaches 1337.
Having read every single one of the 1337 comments, I have concluded that there is nothing to be gained from any further comments that might be added, and that the above solution should be applied immediately so as not to waste anyone else's time or karma.
If the subject was "How to stick your dick in people" then rape would come into it. But it isn't. If you are going to rape people then you don't need PUA. It'd be kind of redundant. That this kind of disingenuous argument is tolerated in this context (parent was +1 when I encountered it, not -10) is why I am not against tabooing all related subject matter unilaterally. If people can get away with this something is wrong.
What on earth are you talking about? That's approximately the opposite of the kind of belief that is useful for a PUA. Which illustrates the problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by 'ethics'. It is roughly speaking an excuse for people who are completely ill informed to throw opinions around that are based on an almost entirely fictional reality.
I have a very hard time imagining this working. Women and men of high social status have very effective ways of getting rid of people that fall short of sex. Also constant "nagging" signals horrible things about you in pure fitness terms, it much reduces one's attractiveness, I can't see why this would be rewarded with sex.
Sex with a woman might happen in spite of nagging, not because of it.
Seriously, stop feeding the troll. I am downvoting replies to sam0345's comments, and encourage others to do so as well.
So basically this series will try to do this but systematically avoid any PUA references and trying to find ways to find some relevance to a few extra groups of people (besides heterosexual males) in order to avoid mind killing?
Partially yes. Some PUA concepts are really neatly formulated, a fraction of LWers are familiar with them and at the end of the day the original synthesis was done by the PUA community, having a bottom line partially written by X, then searching for academic papers to help write up stuff to fill the void once X is cut out is an easy way to stumble rationality-wise once or twice along the way, and thus is bad practice, but mostly I was just curious.
Generally I think avoiding mindkillers is a good thing for the community in my mind, and the comment section of this discussion is better than I expected, so perhaps the comment is coming of harsher than intended.
It was mean more in a "oh I see what you did there, am I right?" way.
I think your comment was quite appropriate. Even under the best imaginable scenario, these articles and their follow-up discussions will suffer from at least two problems.
First, there is the conspicuous omission of any references to the PUA elephant in the room. The body of insight developed by this particular sort of people, whatever its faults, is of supreme practical importance for anyone who wants to formulate practical advice in this area. Without referencing it explicitly, one can either ignore it altogether and thus inevitably talk nonsense, or pretend to speak based solely on official academic literature, which is disingenuous and unfair in its failure to attribute credit (and also misleading for those who would like to pursue their own research in the matter). It's as if someone wanted to talk about electronics but insisted that the only legitimate references should be from pure academic quantum theory, and the nuts-and-bolts work of tech entrepreneurs and ind... (read more)
And this was the reason why, I didn't expect a direct response to the original question, from any of the authors. But as well as your opinions stated here resonate with my own, I feel I do need to play the devil's (who is a thoroughly socialized chap) advocate:
People still realized when sex was talked about. And some information was distributed in this way.
While obviously this is not necessarily a stable situation, besides the euphemism treadmill people do eventually shorten the useful inference gaps. Indeed I would argue that cycles form around these sorts of things, perhaps 19th century Victorian society with its anomalous attitude to discussing sexuality is an example of such a spiral and I think in the 20th century there are also to be found potential examples of such spirals in some places.
... (read more)Actually, I'd say there's a whole lot of strongly misleading information, and the situation is much worse than in most other areas of life. For example, in the conventional wisdom about job hunting there is certainly a lot of trite and suboptimal information, and truly great advice is always a matter of insider information to which few people are privy -- but there is nothing like, say, the respectable opinion telling you that it's best to show up for the job interview drunk and puke on the interviewer's desk. Whereas in dating and inter-sex relations in general, a lot of the respectable opinion, if taken at face value, advises equivalently bad acts of self-sabotage.
Now, a body of advice whose quality is a mixed bag may be on the net either good or bad. If you're given ten tips about driving, nine of which will make you a somewhat better driver but one of which will vastly increase your probability of getting killed in an accident, we'd probably agree that the "some information... (read more)
The reason that convention is difficult to use here is that the taking of offense all goes one way. If one says "Because it is mind-killing, I will not speak of the temporal order, quantity, and relative amount of coercion involved in all property dispossessions in the Middle East since 1800," one does not thereby share much about one's opinion.
If one says "Because it is mind killing, I will not discuss the relationship between sexual attractiveness and time for men and women," it may be that one believes that they are the same, or that there isn't a steep fall for anyone, or whatever, and merely doesn't want to provoke people into speaking of a counterargument. But usually not.
Only one side takes offense regarding this issue, so to say that one's opinions are offensive, and especially the degree to which they are, is to reveal them. People are neither motivated to, nor good at, using the same language for "I will not share my opinion because people will take offense," and "I will not share my opinion because the way some people discuss the topic is offensive." In both cases, people take the opportunity to signal and communicate rather than maintain an ambiguous neutral convention to end conversations.
I, for one, find obscurantist posts hinting that there are unspoken-because-unpalatable-to-the-mainstream truths to be far more irritating than posts explicitly saying things that I personally find distasteful. The former leaves the dissident view just amorphous enough to be impossible to subject to scrutiny. Given that, even in cases where the mainstream view is wrong, the implied dissident view may also be wrong in some important regard, the obscurantism is highly suboptimal.
I haven't been downvoting for this phenomenon so far, but I'm going to start doing so if it keeps happening.
To whoever is upvoting this, it seems like you must be taking one of the following positions:
Could you guys clarify?
I upvoted Prismatic, and I'm taking this position: 4. It may or may not be safe to post certain views on Less Wrong, but whatever they are, I precommit that I will not be part of a blowup over them. If your views are justified, I will update on them, and if they are not, I will calmly state my objections, but I will not punish you for dissent. If other people punish you unfairly for dissent, I will punish them. I would rather you post your dissenting views than hide them, and I will support you for doing so.
If enough of Less Wrong takes this position, eventually position 1. will be correct. I hope to bring about this state of affairs.
Isn't is possible that Prismattic's comment could be receiving so many upvotes because other people also find comments of the sort described irritating and are embracing the opportunity to signal that irritation? Like Prismattic, I don't generally downvote comments on this basis alone. But I'm definitely tired of seeing the types of comments described, especially in those instances when, at least to my eyes, the commenters seem to be affecting a certain world-weary sorrow and wisdom while hinting at the profound truths that could be freely discussed but for -alas!- the terrible tyranny of modern social norms. But because the commenters are hiding the exact substance of their own views, there's no basis on which to judge whether these views are, as Prismattic suggests, actually more correct than the mainstream view, or perhaps equally or even more wrong in some different direction.
I'd prefer social norms be violated. Asserting that a proposition is wrong without explaining why one has reached that conclusion or presenting an alternative is not a behavior that is generally viewed as beneficial in any other context on Lesswrong.
ETA: I also see the widespread use on Lesswrong of "politically correct" as an attribution that prima facie proves something is wrong to be problematic. Society functions on polite fictions, but that does not mean that everything that is polite is inherently false.
Do you upvote people that do?
I have mostly grown tired of making comments where I mention a contrarian position. I get asked to explain myself; it sometimes leads to an argument, and I put a lot of work into comments that often end up at negative karma. I suspect those threads add to LW, but the feedback I'm getting is that they don't.
It sounds, then, as though you should be talking to the people punishing norm violations, not to the people responding rationally to such punishment.
This does not answer my question. You claim that a situation in which information X and Y is made available constitutes "obscurantism" relative to the situation where only information X is provided. Now you say that you would prefer that not just X and Y, but also information Z be provided. That's fair enough, but it doesn't explain why (X and Y) is worse than just (X), if (X and Y and Z) is better than just (X and Y). What is this definition of "obscurantism," according to which the level of obscurantism can rise with the amount of information about one's beliefs that one makes available?
I still consider myself relatively new here, only been around for a year -- but in that year I haven't seen any actual fact presented in LessWrong that's enflamed spirits one tenth as much as the obscure half-hints by trolls like sam and his "I can't say things, because you politically correct morons will downvote me into oblivion, but be sure that my arguments would be crushing, if I was allowed to make them, which I'm not, therefore I'm not making them" style of debate.
The "obscurantism" that Prismatic is talking about isn't yet as bad as that, but it has that same flavour, to a lesser degree. This sort of thing is... annoying -- hinting at evidence, but refusing to provide it -- and blaming this obscurity at the hypothetical actions by people who haven't actually done them yet.
If the issue is e.g. whether science seems to indicate that the statistical distribution of physical and intellectual characteristic isn't identical across racially-defined subgroups of the human race, or across genders, or across whatever, then it can be discussed politely, if the participants actually seek a polite discussion, instead of just finding the most insulting way possible t... (read more)
You are presenting the situation as if such hints were coming out of the blue in discussions of unrelated topics. In reality, however, I have seen (or given) such hints only in situations where a problematic topic has already been opened and discussed by others. In such situations, the commenter giving the hint is faced with a very unpleasant choice, where each option has very serious downsides. It seems to me that the optimal choice in some situations is to announce clearly that the topic is in fact deeply problematic, and there is no way to have a no-holds-barred rational discussion about it that wouldn't offend some sensibilities. (And thus even if it doesn't break down the discourse here, it would make the forum look bad to the outside world.)
At the very least, this can have the beneficial effect of lowering people's confidence in the biased conclusions of the existing discussion, thus making their beliefs more accurate, even in a purely reactive way. However, you seem to deny that this choice could ever be optimal. Yet I really don't see how you can write off the possibility that both alternatives ... (read more)
This.
I really really don't want such discussion to be very prominent, because they attract the wrong contrarian cluster. But I don't want LW loosing ground rationality wise with debates that are based on some silly premises, especially ones that are continually reinforced by new arrivals and happy death spirals!
Attracting the wrong people, and alienating some of the "right" people is a bigger concern to me than the reputation of the site as a whole (though that counts too). Another concern is that hot-button issues might eat up the conversations and get too important (they are not issues I care that much about debating here).
The current compromise of avoiding some hot-button issue, and having some controversial things buried in comment threads or couched in indirect academese seems reasonable enough to me.
I agree with this. But I wish to emphasise:
Some of us look at the state of LW and fear that punishment of this appropriate behaviour is slowly escalating, while evaporative cooling is eliminating the rewards.
I concur with this diagnosis -- and I would add that the process has already led to some huge happy death spirals of a sort that would not be allowed to develop, say, a year an a half ago when I first started commenting here. In some cases, the situation has become so bad that attacking these death spirals head-on is no longer feasible without looking like a quarrelsome and disruptive troll.
I am really curious how you can demonstrate equivalence between a question that follows the pattern "Why is (X) the case?" and a question that follows the pattern "Is (Y) the case?" -- even if (Y) is arguably equivalent to (X), only phrased in more polite language.
As far as I see, the first one asks for the explanation of something that is presumed to be an established fact, while the second one expresses uncertainty about whether (arguably) the same fact is true. How on Earth can these two be said to have "the same content" and be "compatible with the same presuppositions"?
However, you are quite right that these two questions have the same potential for offensiveness, in that outside a few quirky places like LW, neither the polite phrasing nor the expression of uncertainty will get you off the hook, contrary to what Aris Katsaris seems to believe.
Surely that's a hyperbole. Now, I know lots of people would be offended by both questions, but I doubt most people would be equally offended by both, and plenty of people would be offended by one but not the other. As a woman who doesn't suck at math, I am down to discuss the first question, but the second one makes me want to slap you.
(Of course, by declaring myself a woman who doesn't suck at math, I have already proven my own nonexistence, so my opinion can, no doubt, safely be ignored.;) )
Is it ok to threaten (or declare the desire to do) physical violence upon someone if you don't get your way simply because you are a woman? Careful which stereotypes you support. You don't usually get "heh. Female violence is harmless and cute!" without a whole lot of paternalism bundled in.
That's uncalled-for. I am not asking either question. It's okay if you're offended by one but not the other.
Again, I care about this because I want to be able to talk about why so few of my colleagues are female, and why they feel so weird about it, and what can be done about it — without gratuitously offending people.
A invitation based mailing list of a group of high karma non-ideological LWers seems the better route.
A site devoted to discussing impolite but probable ideas will well... disappoint very quickly. Have you ever seen the comment section of a major news site?
Yes, that's another way in which it just doesn't look like a good idea. When you're organizing people in a way that has a secret society vibe, chances are you're doing something either really childish or really dangerous.
Come now LWers don't make more of this proposal than there is.
I didn't perceive a secret society vibe at all in what amounts to a bunch of people having a topic restricted private correspondence.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn't be comfortable posting in public. Private correspondences as well as physical meetings restricted to friends or colleagues have been a staple of intellectual life for centuries and are nothing to be a priori discouraged. In effect nearly every LW meet up is a private affair, since people don't seem to be recording them. Privacy matters in order to preserve the signal to noise ration (technical mailing lists) and so that people feel more comfortable saying things that can be taken out of context as well as be somewhat protected from ideological or religious persecution.
Also quite frankly lots of the people in such a mailing list have probably written on such ideas in some digital format or another before, either corresponding with friends, commenting in a shady on-line community or just writing out some notes for their own use.
Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.
This thread certainly hasn't made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster -- and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual -- who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic ("openly," at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.
In the period roughly from 2006 until 2009, there was a flourishing scene of a number of loosely connected contrarian blogs with excellent comment sections. This includes the early years of Roissy's blog. (Curiously, the golden age of Overcoming Bias also occurred within this time period, although I don't count it as a part of this scene.)
All of these blogs, however, have shut down or gone completely downhill since then (or, at best, become nearly abandoned), and I can't think of anything remotely comparable nowadays. I can also only speculate on what lucky confluence led to their brief flourishing and whether all such places on the internet are doomed to a fairly quick decay and disintegration. I can certainly think of some plausible reasons why this might be so.
I'm inclined to think that unusual goodness in social groups is very fragile, partly because it takes people being unhabitual so that there's freshness to the interactions.
I can believe that this is more fragile online than in person-- a happy family has more incentives and more kinds of interaction to help maintain itself.
My own pet hypothesis is that after blogs became a popular and mainstream phenomenon sometime around the early-to-mid-oughts, there was a huge outburst of enthusiasm by a lot of smart contrarians with interesting ideas, who though this would be a new medium capable of breaking the monopoly on significant and respectable public discourse held by the mainstream media and academia. This enthusiasm was naive and misguided for a number of reasons that now seem obvious in retrospect, and faced with reality it petered out fairly quickly. But while it lasted, it resulted in some very interesting output.
The point I was making is that "mindkillers", under its original definition, refers to political content in general. If someone writes about male-female relations and excludes "politically offensive" material, this does not mean that their article has no political content. It just means that it is the mainstream political line!
In the Soviet Union, Mendelism might have been considered indecent. On the Soviet rationalist forum, Lysenkoist articles might have a caveat attached that political indecency is omitted. Nonetheless it is hardly fair to say that the Mendelism is a mindkiller and Lysenkoism is not in this context - the label "mindkilling" properly applies to the subject of heredity in general, given that it is politically controversial in this scenario.
Likewise if there is political sensitivity involved in the subject of male-female relations, then the subject in general is a mindkiller. The mainstream line is no less "mindkilling" than the dissenting position - it just happens to enjoy hegemony.
The distinction is that mindkilling argument can be avoided if dissent from the mai... (read more)
Ah I finally clearly see your objection now. I misused the term "mindkiller" in a way that suggested that the "indecent" explanation was the mindkilling one rather than the field or subject itself.
Indeed something like this could happen if people where not careful with the usage.
Yes you are right, a different formulation needs to be found otherwise my arguments for why such a situation might be better than pure taboo is mostly invalid in the long run.
I wanted something like: "This is as far as I will go in this contribution on the subject on LessWrong for the sake of the community, but it is by no means the full rationalist approach, if anyone wants to discuss this in private or research it on their own and I would in fact encourage this/there is nothing wrong with that. This subject is pretty mindkilling and so these precautions are needed."
Women's motives are generally purer than men's. Women are much more often good mothers than men are good fathers. Women are nearly always more interested in committed relationships than just sex with the most attractive male. Women should be held much less accountable for their criminal and unscrupulous actions than men. Women are always the victims never the abusers. Women do not lie about rape. Women are overwhelmingly sexually attracted to virtuous men (noticeable echo's of Calvinism in this). A woman's complaints and grievances are generally reasonable, while a man's are generally not. Women's sexual instincts are benign to society while men's sexual instincts are malign. Women are more altruistic and fair than men. ect.
Most of this is obviously bunk and most of this is also obviously implicitly accepted though it may be denied.
And Sam, I don't think I will get down voted for stating this.
Yes, "lynch" is hyperbole, probably unnecessary ("vilified" seems a bit weak. You might want to tell off these websites for incorrect use of the term "lynching").
You spend a lot of time addressing the issue of Race and IQ; I am mostly concerned of how Stephanie Grace was treated for what was a quite reasonable private email. In an ancestor comment you wrote:
To me, it's very clear "what": what happened to Stephanie Grace. It's unlikely, but a small chance of having your career ruined is not a risk most people are willing to take. Those chances increase if one of the people involved becomes somewhat famous, or if some well meaning anti-racist (or other) activist takes interest in the discussion. Nobody wants a Google search of their name return a hate page on the first page of results.
What surprises me the most is that you find this unclear, that you don't understand how that can be a concern for somebody.
Some people she didn't know said she was a bad person, and then her life went on. She got the job she was intending to get, and hardly anyone will remember the 'scandal'.
Recent story mentioning her
Yes - "her hamster" is an interesting way of saying "women aren't rational, they just rationalise everything away".
it's an unfalsifiable proposition. Have you had a look at the list of things that he says women say? Yep - they could indeed be rationalisations... or they could in fact be the truth... how can you tell the difference? well - you can't. That's because this, as I said, is a fully-general counterargument.
No matter what his (as he says) "screechy feminist kvetches" about... he can just say "that's just a rationalisation" and not think any further or take it into account. he never has to update on anything a woman says to him ever. Also, i note that he seem to think that female rationalisation is a totally different species to male rationalisation... and doesn't even mention instances of the latter.
As to "boners don't lie" - this is demonstrably untrue any time somebody is turned on by a picture. There are no doubt objective criteria which have high correlation with the average male's likely attraction to a woman. Studies into facial symmetry, smooth complexion etc etc have clearly shown this. yes, you can compare averag... (read more)
Again, where did I say that it was "gross"?
I said it would make it harder for the woman to get dates with men, but is that really in doubt? Do you need me to find statistics showing that (American) men in general rate women who don't shave their legs as less attractive? And I was using it as an example of something that shouldn't matter, but does.
You don't get to say that because 90% of people who used it in the context you did would be using it seriously, and because accusing someone of being a bad person for being sexist is more of a trigger point than accusing someone of having a bad debate.
How does your original description not cover the Stephanie Grace case?
It's clear to me that Stephanie Grace should have been aware that even if in her environment people think like her, voicing a belief that doesn't reflect well upon blacks is dangerous. No, she won't be censored or sued, but her prospects will take a sharp turn downwards. She should have been afraid, and maybe angry about what might happen to her if she dared speak honestly, even in a private email.
And yet, you seem to think that she had nothing to be afraid of, and that her being afraid or angry would have been kind of silly and stupid on her behalf (or at least, that's the impression I get from the way you write).
(Note that I'm not saying this is the main reason sensitive topics should be avoided on LessWrong. There are better reasons to avoid those topics.)
Eh? That term means "cat" to me.
EDIT: In fact, wedrifid's meaning has a different etymology from either yours or mine.
Not to speak for lessdazed, but what I understood them to be saying is that when I argue against a proposition P solely by pointing to the consequences of believing P, I am implicitly asserting the truth of P. I would agree with that.
I would say further that it's best not to implicitly assert the truth of false propositions, given a choice.
It follows that it's better for me to say "P is false, and also has bad consequences" than to say "P has bad consequences."
NOT discussing the moral implications here, but I saw this study and found it relevant. One of the arguments re: PUA is that there have been no scientific studies as to whether it works or not. Apparently, that isnt true. Here is a link to an article about a study that shows that a light non-sexual touch (what the PUA folks would call "kino") ups the chances that a woman will give you her phone number.
The relevant part is #7 "Touch for a Date". Excerpt:
I can't access the full text of the actual study, but maybe some of the university students here can read and summarize.
By giving us no reason to think that you're capable of non-motivated cognition.
I voted you down for saying "Also, you're a bad person for saying a woman who doesn't shave her legs is gross" when I never said anything of the sort. Maybe you misunderstood the term "grossly obese" (which uses 'gross' in the sense of 'large')? I don't know.
Even if I had said that, there would have to be a nicer way to correct it.
Oversimplified to the extent that it is basically not true.
"Deliberately faking social signals"? But, but, that barely makes any sense. They are signals. You give the best ones you can. Everybody else knows that you are trying to give the best signals that you can and so can make conclusions about your ability to send signals and also what other signals you will most likely give to them and others in the future. That is more or less what socializing is. I suppose blatant lies in a context where lying isn't appropriate and elaborate creation of false high status identities could be qualify - but in those case I would probably use a more specific description.
A third would be "could the majority of humans have a romantic relationship without dominance-seeking behavior?" and the fourth : "would most people find romantic relationships anywhere near as satisfying without dominance-seeking behavior?" (My money is on the "No"s.)
Not unless sex slaves are able to divorce you and take most of your stuff if you piss them off.
The ability to terminate a contract at will means that the other party can coerce you to the extent that you value the continuation of the contract more than they do. Calling a marriage contract with a rather unusual "always willing to have sex" clause sex slavery is a massive insult to sex slaves.
Within the limits of how efficiently of how divorce is set up in the contract, effectively the contract in question is actually equivalent to "have sex with me enough or the relationship is over". Basically that is how relationships work implicitly anyway. You just aren't supposed to talk about it that overtly (because that almost never works.) Basically the arrangement sounds a whole lot worse than it is because we aren't used to thinking about relationships in terms that fully account for all our game theoretic options.
For rationality's sake, people.
I think you probably should have used the conditional: "would make me want to slap you".
Probably, but then I would have missed out on the surreal experience of getting jumped all over for admitting that I am offended by a statement that was intended as an example of something offensive, in a thread about how impossible it is to have a conversation about these things without getting jumped all over. It's been great so far!
Don't want to be rude, but are you American?
Its always fascinating to me how American minds rush so quickly to race with any mention of appearance (and indeed often any topic whatsoever), from the outside it seems like a society wide obsession.
I'm hoping that people here have gotten enough stronger that my rather non-contentious handling of this subject doesn't lead to a blow-up. So far, it hasn't.
Trouble is, blow-ups are in fact the less bad failure mode in discussions of this sort. A much less bad one.
If it is indeed the case that, as you suggest, spelling out the truth on these topics requires breaking strong taboos, then there's a third failure mode, where LessWrongers actually succeed at spelling out the taboo truth, and this causes the site to be pegged as a hate site and lose influence on the cold-button topics that actually matter.
If it's a choice between 1) don't talk about these issues and risk forgoing some minor novel insights on a topic that affects most people's life decisions only very indirectly, 2) talk about these issues in an inoffensive way and risk creating a false consensus of the kind you describe, 3) talk about these issues in an offensive way and risk becoming a hate site (as well as presumably having more blowups), I really would much rather choose 1.
If you're mistaken and we can be both non-taboo and accurate, then wanting to have the discussion becomes more reasonable. But many people don't seem to think you're mistaken, and I don't understand why these people aren't helping me root for option 1.
I remember we once had a disagreement about this, but in the meantime I have moved closer to your view.
Basically, the problem is that the idea of a general forum that attempts to apply no-holds-barred rational thinking to all sorts of sundry topics is unworkable. It will either lead to people questioning all kinds of high-status ideological beliefs and purveyors of official truth, thus giving the forum a wacky extremist reputation (and inevitably generating a lot of ugly quarrels in the process) -- or it will converge towards ersatz "rationality" that incorporates all the biases inherent to the contemporary respectable high-status beliefs and institutions as its integral part. What is needed to salvage the situation is a clear sta... (read more)
"Indeed, most young people today no longer go on 'dates' to get to know a potential partner. Instead, they meet each other at a social event, 'hook up', and then go on dates (if the hookup went well).4"
Can you provide more back up on the "most" here? I tried to find more information, and while I could only locate reviews of the Bogle book online, none of them even mentioned any numbers. However they did make it sound like Bogle did not get a representative sample of "young people today." If there is not sufficient empirical back up to say " most," you might instead say "many" or "a growing portion."
As far as anonymity goes Vladimir_M isn't really really up there. Enough comments to earn 7k karma gives away rather a lot of information. And I wasn't aware Vladimir_M was a pseudonym.
Writing stuff you don't want associated with you on the internet is a terrible idea.
This is starting to remind me of what happened to nutritional advice in the 1980s:
In nutrition "complex carbohydrates good! fats bad!" was widely promulgated
In dating "niceness/agreeableness good! alpha behavior bad!" was widely promulgated
in about the same time frame - and looks like it was comparably bad advice...
Lukeprog, you have produced exactly that which we have been warned against: an article and a paradigm which has all the appearances and dressings of rationality (lots of citations, links to articles on decision theory, rationalist lingo), but which spectacularly fails to actually pursue the truth.
Vladimir_M puts it better than I could:
he continues:
... (read more)Thank you for the positive mention, but I'm afraid I disagree with your model of me. Luke is a far braver man than I to even enter this minefield; I won't condemn him for not dancing a merry jig on top of it too.
Luke originally tried to write an article referring to PUA. People told him this was controversial, not just among ignorant people but among long-time readers of this site, that it had always led to unpleasant flame wars in the past, and that it was making us look bad "abroad".
Now he seems to be writing more or less the same thing, but communicating it in a less offensive way. I don't fault him for leaving anything out yet because it's only been one post in a series. I don't think anything he wrote is actually false (well, I have issues with the 'Mean and Variance' section, but he retracted the meat of that). And I think he made the right decision in trying to pitch it to a wider audience.
He's not entering a minefield so much as dragging it back to his village.
Your point about agreeableness is well taken, so I looked up his reference, Figueredo et al. (2006).
First, keep in mind he's using agreeableness in the OCEAN sense, not in the sense of "a person who always agrees to everything". So it's not diametrically opposed to PUA belief, although I agree there's still a problem that has to be explained.
That brings us to the reference. Figueredo's study itself found no impact of agreeableness, but in the introduction, it cites eight previous studies that it said found "extraversion, openness, and agreeableness are reliably correlated with mating success". I looked up one of these studies, and it was on the success of long-term marital relationships, which is a whole different kettle of fish than the PUA's usual focus. So depending on the other seven studies I didn't have the energy to look up, they could both be right. It would have been nice if Luke had qualified that in his post, but really the fault was on Figueredo and not him.
Other than that, I would honestly like to hear what advice of Luke's you consider misleading. Again aside from the "Mean and Variance" section, it all seems pretty well referenced and backed up.
They write stuff on their version of ArXiv (called pick-up forums) then they go out and try it, and if it works repeatably it is incorporated into PU-lore.
What definition of science did you have in mind that this doesn't fit?
There are a significant number of methodological problems with their evidence-gathering.
PUAs don't change just one variable at a time, nor do they keep strict track of what they change and when so they can do a multivariate regression analysis. Instead they change lots of variables at once. A PUA would advocate that a "beta" change their clothes, scent, social environment(s), social signalling strategies and so forth all at once and see if their sexual success rate changed. However if this works you don't know which changes did what.
The people doing the observation are the same people conducting the experiment which is obviously incompatible with proper blinding.
The people reporting the data stand to gain social status in the PUA hierarchy if they report success, and hence have an incentive to misreport their actual data. When a PUA reports that they successfully obtained coitus on one out of six attempts using a given methodology it is reasonable to suspect that some such reports come from people who actually took sixteen attempts, or from people who failed to obtain coitus given sixteen attempts and went home to angrily masturbate and then post on a PUA forum that they ... (read more)
Not something you have shown (or something that appears remotely credible).
Not much better and also not a particularly good reason to exclude an information source from an analysis. (An example of a good reason would be "people say a bunch of prejudicial nonsense for all sorts of reasons and everybody concerned ends up finding it really, really annoying").
.... (wall of references at the end).... I am mystified by this. How the how the heck do you even skim all of that? I think it's awesome to have all these references, but can somebody enlighten me as to how one can do this?
I would presume that most papers will include a number of references to sources that the authors have only briefly skimmed, only read the abstract, or not actually read at all.
I saw an article somewhere (I wish I'd remembere where) about a widely-read paper making a mistake when it cited one of its sources, claiming that the source said something which it didn't. A number of later papers by other authors then repeated this mistaken claim, presumably because their authors didn't bother checking whether the prestigious paper was correct in its cite.
I'm about .90 confident that Luke hasn't actually read all of his cites in entirety.
Correct. You win some Bayes points.
This isn't really true. To give the most prominent example, Holocaust denial is heavily suppressed in Western societies, in many even with criminal penalties, although its falsity is not in any doubt whatsoever outside of the small fringe scene of people who espouse it. (And indeed, it really doesn't stand up even to the most basic scrutiny.) For most beliefs that the respectable opinion regards as deserving of suppression, respectable people are similarly convinced in their falsity with equal confidence, regardless of how much truth there might actually be in them.
Now, sometimes it does happen that certain claims are clearly true but at the same time so inflammatory and ideologically unacceptable that respectable people simply cannot bring themselves to admit it, even when the alternative requires a staggering level of doublethink and rationalization. In these situations, contrarians who provoke them by waving the obvious and incontrovertible evidence in front of their eyes will induce a special kind of rage. But these are fairly exceptional situations.
If you find something that works for the past please let me know. That would be awesome. Kind of like timer-turner hack for relationships. You wouldn't have to guess which relationships would work, you would just automatically select a relationship that would work by virtue of all the counterfactual bad relationships being pre-empted by the techniques that work for the past!
Or, like with many life lessons, by having good friends, role models and mentors. They help you notice that you're making a silly mistake when you've been making it for an order of weeks not an order of years!
Please don't use the word "rationality" or "rational" simply as a buzzword or applause light.
Actually, general criticism of democracy isn't such a big problem. It can make you look wacky and eccentric, but it's unlikely to get you categorized among the truly evil people who must be consistently fought and ostracized by all decent persons. There are even some respectable academic and scholarly ways to trash democracy, most notably the public choice theory.
Criticisms of democracy are really dangerous only when they touch (directly or by clear implication) on some of the central great taboos. Of course, respectable scholars who take aim at democracy would never dare touch any of these with a ten foot pole, which necessarily takes most teeth out of their criticism.
I think criticism of democracy goes over less well if you have something specific that you want to replace it with.
That is true, but you get into truly dangerous territory once you drop the implicit assumption that your criticism applies to democracy in all places and times, and start analyzing what exactly correlates with it functioning better or worse.
Freudian slip?
Actually it is introgression that is an excellent reason to mix if you want to maximise genetic fitness (because of kin selection effects if your group gets some new genes), you just don't need a whole lot of mixing to acheive it.
And hybrid vigour is a reason in its favour if you want to just make people with neat traits, while outbreeding depression is a reason against.
The effects I mention as colourfully illustrated by Oligopsony change the overall effect of mixing. Under different selective pressures (which may well be caused by dominant cultural preference for visible phenotype!) group A and B may mix at about the same rate in all universes, yet in one universe group A may be 80% of the population (with a few introgressed genes from B) several generations later, while under a different set of pressures it may be 5% of the population, and an AB hybrid could be anything from 1% to 90%. Indeed mixing would not nesecarilly be created equal, it is perfectly possible that 400 years later, even if marriage between the groups was symmetrical 95% of Y chromosomes are variants that group B possessed and 80% of the mDNA is that which was possessed by A. It is even possible that group A... (read more)
I would if he asked. Until then I can't be sure he wants to know.
The notion that there is information to be gained by categorizing things after they are fully described is useless from a utilitarian perspective.
For example, if we know exactly what the process of waterboarding is, and how unpleasant it is, the answer to the question "Is waterboarding really torture," tells us nothing about the morality of doing it. At least that question might have some relevance when posed to presidential candidates, since "torture" is a legal category and saying "Yes, it is torture," might imply an obligat... (read more)
I would say you missed his point. The description was meant to be analogous to the sort of men who're held up as having entitlement complexes. If she doesn't meet many men's preferences, her dating prospects are going to be slim, and she can try... (read more)
There are many more submissive men than there are dominant women. On top of that, in the poly community I seem to have noticed a pattern where dominant women end up primaries with even more dominant men (with both taking more submissive people as secondaries, etc).
So the prospects for a submissive male can be slim.
I would have voted it down were it not for the rest of the paragraph cited, which basically comes down to "anecdotes are Bayesian evidence, but with caveats related to the base rate, and not always positive evidence". Which is, as best I can tell, correct. In isolation, the opening sentence does seem to incorrectly imply that anecdotes don't count at all, and so I'd have phrased it differently if I was trying to make the same point, but a false start isn't enough for a downvote if the full post is well-argued and not obviously wrong.
Even if that were true (and I don't think that's anywhere near the case), you keep dropping out the critical meta-level for actual human beings to achieve instrumental results: i.e., motivation.
That is, even if "a change of clothes, a little grooming, and asking a bunch of women out" were actually the best possible approach, it'... (read more)
It's hard not to take something personally when the pronoun in the direct object is "you".
For the purposes of anyone reading: When someone makes a list of two dozen supposed "rules", then they must also offer a method to prioritize between them -- or their claims become unfalsifiable and "not even wrong", since by cherrypicking rules, one can then explain anything.
E.g. sam says people are not allowed to "criticize blacks, women, homosexuals" -- and yet at other times he accuses people of only being allowed to praise Romney (a white man), but attack Cain (a black man) and Palin (a woman). To explain this he can appl... (read more)
It's perfectly fine, for me at least, but I prefer moral objections to be specified more clearly than "I do not agree", which seem more appropriate for the disputing of factual statements. I discuss this in further detail in a comment of mine above.
I don't know if this sort of information is wanted, but your post keeps setting off my sarcasm detector.
Belief propagation is an exact computation that brains can't be expected to perform (or even represent a problem statement for). Pointing to (absence of) it as an explanation for compartmentalization feels rather arbitrary (similarly with the reference to decision theory).
This might come out a little harsh, but...
whining about having been rejected, in public, in front of the woman who rejected you, is not exactly a turn on, I suppose.
Not that I think it would save this thread at this point, but I suggest that you and everyone you are arguing with here would benefit from dropping the question of "Are some PUA tactics rape" and sticking to the question "Are some PUA tactics wrong". This conversation has totally derailed (if it hadn't already) on semantic issues about rape. You can argue that obtaining sex by deception or bullying is immoral regardless of whether or not it is rape.
This is not an accurate statement of the law in common-law jurisdictions, nor, I suspect, of the law in most other Western countries. With some narrow exceptions -- such as impersonating the victim's husband, performing sexual acts under a false pretense of medical treatment, or failing to disclose a sexually transmitted disease -- enticing people into sex by false pretenses is us... (read more)
I have purposefully stayed out of the PUA discussion so far, but as it is still going on and no one seems to have taken a macro view, I am going to just this once give some of my opinion on it:
I think that the vast majority of people on this site want a general egalitarianism between the sexes. I’m not saying that I think men and women are completely equal in all ways, but rather that I think that women making 80 cents to the dollar is bad. Males growing up being taught to be ashamed to talk about feelings (especially in cases like PTSD or suicide) is bad... (read more)