Slytherin 2.0, after its triumphant remake following Draco's enlightenment!
The skills in question have appeal across the Houses:
Draco smiled. "Father has, um, a rather refined sense of humor, but he does understand making friends. He understands it very well. In fact he made me repeat that before I went to bed every night for the last month, 'I will make friends at Hogwarts.' When I explained everything to him and he saw that's what I was doing, he not only apologized to me but bought me an ice-cream."
Harry's jaw dropped. "You managed to spin that into an ice-cream?" Draco nodded, looking every bit as smug as the feat deserved. "Well, father knew what I was doing, of course, but he's the one who taught me how to do it, and if I grin the right way while I'm doing it, that makes it a father-son thing and then he has to buy me an ice-cream or I'll give him this sort of sad look, like I think I must have disappointed him."
Harry eyed Draco calculatingly, sensing the presence of another master. "You've gotten lessons on how to manipulate people?"
"For as far back as I can remember," Draco said proudly. "Father bought me tutors."
"Wow," Harry said. Reading Robert Cialdini's Influence: Science and Practice probably didn't stack up very high compared to that (though it was still one heck of a book). "Your dad is almost as awesome as my dad."
I've studied pickup for many years, and I can confirm that in areas of life aside from mating. I have skills in about half the items in Scott Adams' list that I wouldn't have if I hadn't studied pickup.
PUA ought to be a special case of a more general skill set, and it's being wasted.
Many PUAs are already applying the pickup framework to be successful in other areas of their life; as you observe, PUAs talk about this all the time. Yet while I think it's useful to take the mating component out of pickup, the mating component may actually a big part of how PUAs develop skills in non-mating areas.
If you are a beginning PUA, then you have a lot of areas that you need improvement in. You will probably need to work on your voice, fix your body language, get over shyness, become a lot more confident, and improve your fashion sense. Most normal self-improvement focuses on any one of those areas as its entire goal.
It may be that a big part of what makes pickup work for self development is that you are focusing on improvement in so many areas at the same time that tie together and mutually reinforce each other, and you do it all in service of a greater superordinate goal of mating.
Many...
Right on. To summarize: PUAs succeed because they have something to protect (or rather conquer). The same reason Eliezer succeeded in inventing something new in the Sequences - he had a big external goal (AI) that was more important than intellectual pleasure. (Incidentally, the same goal motivated many people to create many wonderful things, e.g. Lisp.) Here's a quote from his post that could just as well have come from a creepy lonely man setting out to invent PUA:
...beginning with a desperate need to succeed. No one masters the Way until more than their life is at stake. More than their comfort, more even than their pride.
Well said!
I like how you phrase the "superordinate goals" bit. It captures two potential problems that I had considered:
PUA's have outcomes ("closes"), which makes it possible to do tests and measure success. What are our outcomes?
Motivational power of sex might be necessary and irreplaceable.
I'm still not sure if these are surmountable, but I think it's worth trying.
I really like the idea of your project, but I'd like you to talk a bit more about the ideas in the seduction community that you think will be most relevant (I have some ideas, which I will share at some point).
I'll share my thoughts soon, but someone like you probably has more insight. I have far from comprehensive knowledge of the seduction community's efforts.
Looking forward to hearing more, I'm really encouraged by the quality of the comments so far!
Scott's recommendations seem in-line with a lot of the training upper-class sorts used to get as a matter of course, even in schools (as I understand it, 'nobility' and the uber-rich still get it). It seems like it's about time this sort of thing is getting to the masses.
It seems like the discussion taking place on Lw is not out-of-line, as it seems to relate to an important aspect of instrumental rationality, so long as most of the discussion is coming from a solid empirical foundation.
It could fork off Lw if someone wants to provide the hosting. If so, a name like "Less Socially Wrong" or "Less Awkward" seems called-for.
One of the first things you should learn in a Less Awkward class is that the name "Less Awkward" contains 2 words, both of which have negative associations, and thus is a poor choice of name.
(I like it, though.)
"Overcoming bias" has one negative word in conflict with one very strong positive word. "Less Wrong" is two negative words. But this is not a bad thing - Robin would like everyone to read Overcoming Bias, but I don't know if EY wants everyone to read LW. You could use an emotionally-unattractive name as a filter, to keep out less-rational people.
The problem with a lot of personal development stuff is that people read it but never really change their behavior.
PUA has the advantage of making the way you practice relatively straightforward. You go to a club and approach girls. If you do dozens of approaches per week, sooner or later you will develop skills.
It's not complicated to plan to spent time in deliberate practice. It requires some confidence to overcome approach anxiety but you know what you have to do.
If you don't what to do at some step you can go and read a PUA article that explains a method in detail. It's all about removing barriers that stand in the way of deliberate practice.
When it comes to a skill like being good at job interviews than it's a lot harder to create an environment that allows you to spent hours of deliberate practice per week.
A while ago Socrates made an argument against books. The problem with a book is that it tells the same to everyone.
Today with dynamic websites that doesn't have to true anymore. Dynamic websites can show different people different exercises depending on their previous skills. If something isn't quite clear and the lack of clearness stops the user from taking action than t...
i wrote a little bit about looking at pick up artistry as a model for scientific inquiry here:
http://michaelkenny.blogspot.com/2010/09/pickup-artists-and-prussiangerman.html
A quote:
"Pickup artists and the military men of Weimar Germany, and probably before, in Prussia, both seem half nerdy intellectual, half man of action.
"I could see both communities being a good example of what intellectuals should aim for--they should be trying to be practical, as well as being engaged in theory. I guess I'm saying I think intellectuals should be more pragmatic. They can go for this wild theory, and it's super fun to speculate about things, but it's also super fun to test out your ideas and see how they work out."
I'd be in.
You can dismiss the shitstorm associated with the phrase PUA by just calling it social skills or charisma.
Some thoughts and anticipated difficulties:
Should this be a forum, a blog, or a LW-style "community blog"? I think the LW structure might actually be optimal: there are top-level articles (which would contain advice) and long threaded discussions (which would contain personal experiences.)
What do you do about different levels? Some people need what I'd think of as "basic" advice (wear a clean suit to a job interview) and some people want something "advanced" (how can I make people think my ideas are awesome?)
A major challenge, I think, is when you can't tell how you appear to others, or when you get too caught up in the moment to remember to make a good impression. Most social-skills advice is along the lines of "remember to do X, Y, and Z" -- but how do you remember to remember? Someone who has cognitive insights could be very helpful here.
Scott Adams' list is very corporate-focused. We might need to poll people to see how many of us actually need golf, tennis, and management techniques.
Scott Aaronson once began
I could, but every time I've tried to describe this without mentioning PUA people tell me to go to Toastmaster's or take a leadership class. It's the community + field-tests + feedback + iteration that I want. Shitstorm notwithstanding, I think this gets my intention across best. If the PUA part becomes too much of a distraction I might re-label it.
I have my own list topics/problems/thoughts that I cut from this just before posting. I'll bring these up if no one else does.
3 - It better be very focused, with a strong cultural element that says "do this or you are doing nothing", on in-person practice and feedback, otherwise it will just be wankery - "social skills porn" posts that people read and write without ever learning anything. You know, kind of like Less Wrong is rationalist porn :). While I'm sure that lots of people read PUA without practicing it, there is a strong cultural tradition that PUA is all about "the field" and you can't practice it very far without going into "the field". If you don't have that, you are doomed.
I have a long post about this coming up, with a pretty similar viewpoint to yours, just a more general goal, and similar technical requirements, we should talk.
The idea is that intelligent people have a strong tendency to discount motivational platitudes and self-help books, because those sound (and often are) stupid.
There's a book, "59 Seconds" by psychologist Richard Wiseman, which examines a lot of common self-help claims by looking at actual studies. He shows how many are wrong or are actively harmful. However, the book also has quick tidbits of actually productive things one can do that are comparatively minor. People interested in these issues should read the book.
Intelligent people have a strong tendency to discount motivational platitudes and self-help books, because those sound (and often are) stupid.
Actually, the proportion of "actually stupid" to "just sounds stupid" is very, very low. The problem is that what you might call "action skills" and "satisfaction skills" do not operate using the same parts of the brain that "intelligent" (i.e. analytical) people are accustomed to using.
So, if you evaluate a statement using the machinery you're most accustomed to thinking with, the sayings sound stupid, even when they're not also phrased in new-agey or pseudoscientific ways.
I've found that most of my advances in personal development came after I realized that my intellectual bullshit-detectors were filtering out everything that was useful in the self-help field, simply because it wasn't true.
IOW, if you ignore the truthiness of a piece of advice, and simply attempt to adopt the state of mind and mental/physical behaviors given, you will very often find that the stupidest, most nonsensical theories are shielding you from some incredibly useful practical advice.
I was once told "Believe in yourself" -- yes, in those words -- by a person I respect.
Knowing him, I know he must mean something genuine by it: there's some kind of behavior that he figured out how to do that he thinks would help me. But how the hell do you "believe in yourself"? That phrase is opaque to me.
That's sort of what I'm getting at. It's not that I'm a condescending asshole who always thinks advice-givers are stupid. In fact, I know this particular guy is very bright. It's just that you'd need to phrase it some other way before I'd understand "Oh! That's what he means! I'll just do that now!"
But how the hell do you "believe in yourself"? That phrase is opaque to me.
I take it to mean something like "The time for a lucid appraisal of your own abilities is prior to action, not in the middle of it. Once you find yourself engaged in real-time application of some skill or other, act as if your mastery of that skill isn't at issue at all, rather than let yourself be distracted by assessments of the likelihood of failure, because they are likely to be self-fulfilling prophecies."
You can see why people prefer the short version.
But how the hell do you "believe in yourself"?
Morendil's given one meaning that's useful; another one is, "assume that you'll be able to handle the (likely) worst-case results of your actions, so that your decision making isn't paralyzed by implicit fears."
Btw, I used to think that doing these sorts of translations were all that was needed for self-help to be usable by geeks, but that's not actually the case: being able to understand a piece of advice (like this one or Morendil's variant) is not at all the same as being able to implement it.
In practical terms, the advice I've just given usually requires one to let go of many existing beliefs or fears, while the one Morendil gave is a skill that requires practice, and may also require letting go of the same beliefs or fears. In neither case is the mere understanding remotely sufficient to accomplish anything except a feeling of having insight. ;-)
(Btw, in general, when self-help advice says to "believe" in something, it actually means refraining from disbelief, i.e., you do not have to convince yourself of something that isn't true, but merely refrain from questioning it, just like one doesn't ques...
...which means what someone really needs to write is something that presents all the true/useful parts without a bullshit theory behind them? Even if that means just saying "I have no idea why this works but it does"?
FWIW, PJ Eby has attempted to do this, somewhat:
I myself would like to be part of such a community. But I wouldn't like colleges to offer courses in it, because it seems to be a negative-sum game. What would the world look like now if we had a million graduates of such a curricula in the US? I suspect most people taking the courses would do so in order to go into marketing or politics, and thus reduce the signal-to-noise ratio when choosing products or politicians even more.
How can you disavow Dark Arts? This is the Dark Arts.
I am skeptical that we can win without the Dark Arts.
There are lots of people out there with bad goals and wrong beliefs and powerful skills at persuading and manipulating people to take on those beliefs and help those goals. Like marketers and politicians. If we want resources for our goals, and to spread our beliefs, we need to learn the techniques of persuasion and memetics.
This isn't a video game, the world doesn't care about Light and Dark, and it isn't set up so that the good guys can win. Those who employ the best techniques for achieving their goals are more likely to achieve their goals. In a world where good people refuse to learn how to persuade others and gain power, the world will be ruled by bad people. That's how it is now, and I'm sick of it.
I'm Gray and proud of it. Shades of gray matter - a lot - but White is for losers.
Sure; but you're not addressing the question, which is: Would teaching a whole lot of randomly-chosen people how to manipulate other people be good on balance? Especially considering the selection bias: What sort of people are more likely to sign up for the course?
I acknowledge that this appears to be on the Dark Side of the Arts Spectrum, but I'd like to keep it as light a gray as possible.
I just want to be effective at something that is important to achieving my goals. I'll do good with my powers, honest!
This wins the award for "comment I'd think was Clippy's if I had the anti-kibitzer turned on".
How can you disavow Dark Arts? This is the Dark Arts.
I think two ideas from the field of security are relevant here.
1) In order to design good security, one must be willing and able to think like a criminal.
2) Security through obscurity generally doesn't work.
Applied to the current discussion this suggests that:
Also, maybe if more people understood the methods by which politicians and marketers manipulated them, they'd be less taken in by them.
Sure, on average it's negative sum. But I have to guess that society as a whole suffers greatly from having many (most?) of its technically skilled citizens at the low end of the social-ability spectrum. The question would be whether you could design a set of institutions in this area which could have a net positive benefit on society. (Probably not something I'll solve on a Saturday afternoon...)
If I ever start a real organization of supervillains we're going to dress up as LARPers and meet in the woods. No one will ever suspect....
Paperclips shouldn't "close" in the sense of the metal wire forming a closed curve; they should be open curves.