There was a lot of "men, you should approach women more" in this one, so I'm gonna rant about it a bit.
I propose a useful rule: if you advise single men to approach women more, you must give a numerical estimate of the rate at which women will accept such an advance. 80%? 20%? 5%? 1%? Put a FUCKING number on it. You can give the number as a function of (other stuff) if you want, or make it conditional on (other stuff), but give some kind of actual number.
You know why? Because I have approached women for dating only a handful of times in my life, and my success rate is zero [1]. Now if someone told me “hmm, outside of any particular context you’re roughly a six, so you should probably expect a success rate around 30%” then I would be like “oh, huh, that’s way higher than I expected and mildly-but-not-implausibly in disagreement with my past experience, I guess I should try a bit more and get some more data”. If someone told me “hmm, outside of any particular context you’re roughly a six, so you should probably expect a success rate around 5%” then I would be like “cool, that’s useful to know, I am not actually going to invest that level of time and/or emotional effort for such a small expected payoff”. If someone told me “hmm, outside of any particular context you’re roughly a six, so you should probably expect a success rate around 70%” then I would be like “I don’t believe that at all, but if I did buy it, I would conclude that I have been doing something very wrong compared to whatever is supposed to work 70% of the time, and I should probably figure out what that is”.
- ^
… other than the specific context of dance events, which account for basically all of my dating success to date; I'm a pretty good dancer. And in a dance context specifically, it's taken very little effort to pick up women, it happens sometimes almost by default.
Oh look, it's the thing I've plausibly done the best research on out of all humans on the planet (if there's something better out there pls link). To summarize:
Using data from six different pickup artists, more here. My experience with ~30 dates from ~1k approaches is that it's hard work that can get results, but if someone has another route they should stick with that.
(The whole post needs to be revamped with a newer analysis written in Squiggle, and is only partially finished, but that specific section is still good.)
You are a gentleman and a scholar, well done.
And if numbers from pickup artists who actually practice this stuff look like 5%-ish, then I'm gonna go ahead and say that "men should approach women more", without qualification, is probably just bad advice in most cases.
EDIT-TO-ADD: A couple clarifications on what that graph shows, for those who didn't click through. First, the numbers shown are for getting a date, not for getting laid (those numbers are in the linked post and are around 1-2%), so this is a relevant baseline even for guys who are not primarily aiming for casual sex. Second, these "approaches" involve ~15 minutes each of chatting, so we're not talking about a zero-effort thing here.
1then I'm gonna go ahead and say that "men should approach women more", without qualification, is probably just bad advice in most cases.
I'm in a pretty different context than you but like, you'll learn more about yourself and others if you do this. More data at zero cost (once you internalise the thing about rejection being fine actually).
Relevant addition: Tappé et al. 2013 find a rate of ~60% "yes" responses for real-world experiments for the question "I have been noticing you around campus. I find you very attractive. Would you go out with me tonight?"
My best guess is that those numbers are inflated, for multiple reasons:
- Experiment was ended upon receiving an answer to the question, i.e. "yes" or "no" or probably "something else"
- This contrasts with the PUA data, which records if women actually show up.
- Experiment was done on randomly selected people, whereas the pickup artist data is on the women the guys were attracted to.
- The experiment was done on a campus, so there was some level of pre-selection present.
My guess would be that the study has a bunch of social desirability thrown in there, possibly also influenced by how startled the women were.
I think it depends a lot on who you’re approaching, in what setting, after how much prior rapport-building.
I’ve gotten together with many women, all of whom I considered very attractive, on the first day I met them, for periods of time ranging from days to months to years. I consider myself to have been a 6 in terms of looks at that time, having been below median income for my city for my entire adult life.
The most important factor, I think, were that I spent a lot of time in settings where the same groups of single people congregate repeatedly for spiritual, intellectual, or recreational purposes. This creates an automatic point of connection and trust, even if you’re meeting someone for the first time.
Almost everyone I have asked out said yes, but this is probably because I tend to feel out their interest and availability before asking them outright. That’s facilitated by the community event, which gives us plenty of time to interact more and more intensely or back off if the interest isn’t there.
1I miss a crucial consideration in the You’re In the Wrong Place part: Successful places for meeting mates in the past (work, school, club...) in the past were not about dating.
As I have said a few times before: Dating apps are broken because of misaligned incentives (see more in the link).
I think the best dating apps are not "dating" apps - you can't have plausible deniability if the app has "dating" in the name. But every community or forum app automatically becomes a dating app because people can observe many potential mates and interact with them. If you want to build an app where people date successfully, you
- may not call it that!
- you need to offer a way to find communities that share some interests (and hopefully locality) and
- there should be a path to getting closer incrementally (though this is optional - if people meet in person, there will be ways for that to happen organically.
Of course, this will fail if there is only one gender in each forum, but there may be a plausible deniable way to balance gender at least somewhat.
Previously: #1, #2, #3, #4.
Since we all know that dating apps are terrible, the wise person seeks to meet prospective dates in other ways, ideally in the physical world.
Alas, this has gotten more difficult. Dating apps and shifting norms mean it is considered less appropriate, and riskier, to approach strangers, especially with romantic intent, or to even ask people you know out on a date, which has a fat tail of life changing positive consequences.
People especially men are increasingly more afraid of rejection and other negative consequences, including a potential long tail of large negative consequences. Also people’s skills at doing this aren’t developing, which both decreases chances of success and increases risk. So a lot of this edition is about tackling those basic questions, especially risk, rejection and fear.
There’s also the question of how to be more hot and know roughly how hot you are, and what other traits also help your chances. And there’s the question of selection. You want to go after the targets worth going after, especially good particular matches.
Table of Contents
You’re Single Because Hello Human Resources
Not all approaches and opens are wanted, which is fine given the risk versus reward. Also it’s worth noting that this is actually a remarkably small amount of not being attracted to the approacher?
Remember, these are exclusively unwanted approaches.
Presumably, in the wanted approaches, the women was indeed attracted.
This still leaves the ‘there were other problems but you were sufficiently attractive that I disregarded them’ problem. Not getting any bonus points is already enough to make things tricky, you’ll need otherwise stronger circumstances. It does seem clear that men are far too worried about being insufficiently attractive to do approaches.
You’re Single Because You Don’t Meet Anyone’s Standards
You have to notice the perks for them to count, which is tough on dating apps if the dump stat is too visible, but mostly yeah, and I think it’s true for everyone. Each person will usually have some particular actual dealbreaker-level requirements or at least very expensive places to miss, plus some things really do override everything else, but mostly everything is trade-offs.
You’re Single Because You Don’t Know How to Open
I have no idea if Approach Academy is any good, and doubtless there are lots of free resources out there too. Either way, it’s an important skill to have, and if you are single, don’t want to be single and don’t have the skill it’s worth learning.
If you’re literally not trying at all, that’s definitely not going to work. Alas, from what I can tell Alexander is correct here, in that even the very spaces where the You Had One Job was ‘actually approach women’ are increasingly coming out firmly against the one thing that ever works, and moving from an agentic narrative where you can make it work to an anti-agentic one where you shouldn’t try.
As in, in order to open, you need to be there at all, and that’s the 80% for showing up.
You’re Single Because You Never Open
Yet, despite knowing that fortune favors the bold, many continue not to ever try.
Implies? Flat out tells you. Or you flat out telling him. Do better.
Indeed, we seem to keep hearing stories like this reasonably often? It’s not this easy, but also it can be a lot easier than people think.
You’re Single Because You Don’t Know How to Flirt
Many such cases. When single, and it’s safe and appropriate, always be flirting.
That might actually be correct, if you’re good at noticing subtle pushback, at least within the realm of the deniable and until they clearly know you’re flirting. If they can’t tell you’re flirting, then you kind of aren’t flirting yet, so you’re probably fine to escalate a bit, repeat until they notice.
Online makes it even trickier, what even is flirting? It turns out Lolita’s likes here were on Instagram, where I am led to believe this is indeed how this works, whereas on Twitter the odds this is what is happening are lower – but yeah, DM her anyway if you’re interested.
The dance matters. Ideally you want to do the minimum required to get an escalation in response, where that escalation will filter for further interest and skill. I would certainly try to do that first. But if it doesn’t work, and this wasn’t a marginal situation? Time to escalate anyway.
The deniability is not only key to the system working and enabling you to make moves you wouldn’t otherwise be able to make. It’s also fun, at least for many women.
Also, it’s essential. As in, you try to think of a counterexample, and you fail:
As confirmed by Claude, there’s still plenty of plausible deniability there, and full uncertainty on how far you intend to go with it. Ambiguity and plausible deniability between ‘harmless fun’ flirting versus ‘actually going somewhere’ flirting is a large part of the deniability, and also the core mechanism.
Periodically we rediscover the classic tricks, which is half of what TikTok is good for. In this case, something called ‘sticky eyes,’ where you make eye contact until they make eye contact back, then act like you’re caught and look away. Then look at them, and this time when they match don’t look away, and often they’ll walk right to you.
You’re Single Because You Won’t Wear the Fucking Hat
I do not believe any of this below is how any of this worked in literal detail, but…
The stupid fucking hat was successful for Mystery in particular, as it played into the rest of what he was doing, leading interactions down predictable paths he trained for in various ways, and that he figured out how to steer in the ways he wanted.
But also, yes, it was his willingness to wear the stupid fucking hat, if that’s what it took to make all that work. That doesn’t mean you should go out and wear your own literal stupid fucking hat, but… be willing, as needed, to wear the metaphorical stupid fucking hat. If that’s what it takes.
You’re Single Because You Don’t Focus On The People You Want
Not quite. You should be exactly as weird as you are. Being intentionally extra weird would backfire. But yes, you mostly want to avoid hiding your weird once you are finished ‘getting reps.’
Should you put your small painted war figurines in your profile? One woman says no but many men say yes.
If you’re looking to maximize total opportunities, you definitely don’t put things like painted war figurines in your photo.
However they offer positive selection to the extent you consider the relevant selection positive, so it depends, and a balance must be struck. I would only include them if I really, really cared about war figurines.
Teach the debate: Andrew Rettek versus Razib Khan on letting your interest flags fly. Should you worry about most of the attractive women losing interest if you talk about space exploration, abstruse philosophy and existential risk? Only to the extent you’d be interested in them despite knowing they react that way. So gain, ideally, once you’ve got your reps in, no.
As usual, if you’re still on the steep part of the dating learning curve, one must first ‘get the reps’ before it wise to overly narrow one’s focus.
You can also make other life choices to increase your chances. If you are a furry, you might do well to go into nuclear engineering, if that otherwise interests you? At some point the doom loop cannot be stopped, might as well go with it.
Eneasz Brodski suggests to straight men: Look for a woman who likes men. As in, a woman who says outright that by default men are good and cool people to be around. He says this is rare, and thus not all that actionable. I think it’s not that rare.
I would say that the specific positive version could be hard to act on, but the generalized negative version seems like fine advice across the board and highly actionable. If someone actively dislikes people in your key reference classes, whichever reference classes those might be, then probably don’t date them. The more of your reference classes they actively like by default, the better.
The same principles are true for women seeking men, and the same is true for physical goals. You should care relatively little about general appeal, and care more about appeal to those you find appealing as long term partners.
In particular, the men like Antues who actively mock anyone who disagrees on this? Turning them off actively is not a bug. It’s a feature.
The original thread has much other advice, also of the standard variety. I would modify Mason’s note slightly, do not waste time on the chance someone else will change what they want. But of course there are other ways for time to be well spent.
On the flip side:
Girl explains why she does not like ‘extreme gym guy’ bodies, she wants the mechanic with real muscles in natural settings.
This is an easy one.
You’re Single Because You Choose the Wrong Hobbies
Choose your fighter.
I think Vers is right about this. Reading is attractive in theory.
In practice, it is not unattractive. But that is a different thing. You need to have a hook that is attractive in practice.
Reading can and does help with that. Reading leads to knowledge and skills and being interesting, which are themselves attractive. You want to be readmaxing. But that, too, is a different thing.
When 98.2% of women said reading was ‘attractive’ in a binary choice, that was answering the wrong question. Associating with reading simply is not exciting. It does not offer a joint experience or a good time. It won’t work.
Whereas the other top activities represent skills and demonstrations of value and joint activities. So they’re great for this.
The flip side are the actively unattractive hobbies. Reading is not unattractive, it will almost never actively cost you points, but Magic, anime and crypto definitely will be highly unattractive and turn off a large percentage of women, if you force them to deal with those things front and center. If you don’t center them, my guess is they are like reading, they don’t end up counting much for or against you then.
Of course, there will be some women that does find almost any hobby attractive, and the positive selection as noted above is palpable. But you only get so many such filters, so choose carefully which ones you deploy. It’s not strictly limit one, but it’s close.
JD Vance gave up Magic: the Gathering because girls weren’t into it. I notice how much I dislike that reaction, but I understand it. It’s a real cost, so how much was he into casting a paper version of Yawgmoth’s Bargain, when he could instead get the same experience going to Yale Law School?
You’re Single Because You Friend Zone People
Liv Boeree points out that one place women can look for a good man is in their friend group, where you might already have some known-to-be-good men in your friend zone. And she can say that, because that this is how she met Igor. So she advises to make sure to take a second look at those guys at some point.
I’d add to that ‘because only you can make that move, they mostly can’t.’
We alas lack a good mechanism whereby people can attempt to be ‘unfriendzoned,’ or indicate their interest in being unfriendzoned, without risking destroying the friendship. There are obvious possible coordination mechanisms (e.g. to ensure that only reciprocal interest is revealed) but no way to get others to implement them. The rationalists have tried to fix this at least once, but I think that faded away even there.
You’re Single Because You Won’t Go the Extra Mile
Here’s a very different strategy, from Bryan Caplan, that we have discussed in prior episodes. Why would you, a man, even look for her, a woman, in America? Your hand in marriage is a green card easily worth six figures and you’re going to waste that on someone who already lives here? When you could instead be (in relative terms) instantly super high status to boot?
His answer is adverse selection. You have to worry the woman does not actually like you. He does not discuss strategies to minimize this risk, such as avoiding services for women actively seeking such arrangements.
You want to seek the women who are not actively seeking for you to seek them. Tricky.
The other obvious problems are logistics and cultural compatibility. And also, as one commenter warns, how you look to her from afar might not be a good prediction of how you look to her once she arrives.
I think the important problems are entirely practical issues of logistics, cultural distance and adverse selection. Those are big problems, and reason most people should choose different strategies.
You’re Single Because You’re Overly Afraid of Highly Unlikely Consequences
‘Could’ backfire massively and ruin your life or career is not ‘could plausibly’ or ‘is likely to’ but if you don’t know that, it will have the same impact on your decisions.
My understanding is that sufficiently far in the past, asking was actually deadly. You risked violence, including deadly violence, or exile. You indeed had to be very careful.
Then there was a period where you were much more free to do whatever you wanted. You really could view the downside mostly as ‘you get slapped,’ which is fine even if the odds are substantially worse than above.
Now things have swung back somewhat. The tail risk is small but it’s there. And the reports are among the sufficiently young that many think trying to date people you actually know Just Isn’t Done, except of course when it is anyway.
I also presume, given other conditions, that we are now trending back down on the risks-other-than-rejection of asking front.
Partly of course it is a skill issue.
The rejection part sucks, too, of course. But you can try to have it suck less?
You’re Single Because You’re Too Afraid of Rejection
One of the most important dating skills is learning to handle and not fear rejection.
The replies are full of ‘at least she was honest and did not ghost you.’
Being unusually averse to rejection, as Robin Hanson reports here, really sucks and is something one should work to change, as it is highly destructive of opportunity, and the aversion mostly lacks grounding in or correlation to any consequences beyond the pain of the rejection.
You know what actually feels great?
When you ask, and you get turned down, and you realize you played correctly and that there’s no actual price to getting a no except that you can’t directly try again.
Nothing was lost, since they weren’t into you anyway. Indeed you got valuable experience and information, and you helped conquer your fears and build good habits.
That includes looking back afterwards. Indeed, I’m actively happy, looking back, with the shots I did take, that missed, as opposed to the 100% of shots that I didn’t take. Many of those, I do regret.
Such a strange question to have to even ask, when you think about it: Is having to reject others even worse? Some people actually say it is?
It’s not the common sentiment, but it’s there.
If you reject someone in the swiping stage, and you feel evil about it, don’t. It’s unfortunate that you need to be doing this rather than the algorithm handling it, but it’s no different than being at the club with 100 other people and ignoring most of them. You’re being fooled by having the choices be one at a time and highlighted.
Of course so many people are lonely at one time. There are so many people.
If you reject someone after a match, then that is like actually rejecting them, so yes treat them like a real person with actual feelings, but everyone involved signed up for this, and stringing things along when you don’t want to be there or keep talking to them is not better. If you can’t get there with someone, tell them that, and send them home.
Anything else is cruel, not kind.
Of all the lessons of The Bachelor, this might be the biggest one, to not string people along, you see this on various similar shows. The candidates who are rejected early mostly shrug. Some are hit hard, but not that hard. The farther along they go, the worse it gets, also much time is wasted.
Same goes in real life. If you know you must reject, mostly the sooner and clearer the better, with the least interaction beforehand. It will suck less, for both of you.
I do admit that sometimes the person you reject does not make it easy on you, including those who don’t accept it.
Yes, of course having to tell people no sucks. Having to dump someone sucks a lot.
But it’s still way better than getting dumped when you didn’t want to be.
You’re Single Because You’re Paralyzed by Fear
Yep. Normal good things are scary. You have to do them anyway.
You’re Single Cause You’re Not Hot Enough
The other stuff matters, but hey, it couldn’t hurt.
Here is a chart of how men and women said they viewed various beauty strategies. Full article here.
I mostly believe this list. My guess is ‘dye your hair blonde’ is underrated, because they are asking in a context where you know and are thinking about the fact that the color is fake and that you’re ‘being fooled,’ which is not real world conditions, and I predict what is likely a smaller similar miscalibration for breast implants.
You’re Single Because You Can’t Tell How Hot You Look
Women were highly unsuccessful in attempting to pick photos to look hotter.
Women were also highly unsuccessful at knowing how hot men would think they are.
Here is the full post. One way to make people less biased is to ask them how they compare to others of the same gender, another is to ask people who is in their league.
The more unattractive you were, the more ‘delusional’ you were, as in your estimate was too high by a higher margin. I don’t buy Aella’s explanation for this, though, because I don’t think you need it – this result is kind of mathematically inevitable, once you accept everyone is overestimating.
And wow, loss aversion is a thing here:
And also, people say they’d pay more to be 6/10 than 10/10, I presume they’re confused.
Only paying $12k for a permanent extra point of attractiveness, were it for sale, is insane. Go into debt if you have to, as they say. You’ll get it back plus extra purely in higher earnings from lookism on the job. If you can do it multiple times, keep hitting that button (and if they let you go above 10, do that and then go to Hollywood!).
At $94k the trade stops being obvious for those on the lower end of the income spectrum, but if you can afford it this still seems like quite the steal, as many times as they’ll sell it to you.
(I’d be a little scared to know what happens beyond 10, but you bet that if it was for sale I would find out.)
You’re Single Because You Have the Wrong Hairstyle
Aella runs the ‘which AI faces are hot according to the opposite gender’ test with male faces, and reports the results. Male average ratings for AI-generated female faces clustered around 5.5 then fell off sharply with a slightly longer left than right tail, whereas female ratings of male AI faces averaged about 4.7 and had a longer right tail that died suddenly.
The patterns as you go from 1 up to 9 on the normalized hotness scale are very clear, especially at the top, where there is clearly one top look. Can you pull it off?
You’re Single Because You’re In the Wrong Place
The main story of San Francisco is that it is a rough place all around, with only 39% god mode, versus 46% for those in neither NYC nor SF. The men are 9% less likely to report ‘god mode’ and the women are 6% less likely, which is within the margin of error here. Whereas New York has 55% god mode, which is much better than 46%, and a major slant towards men.
You’re Single Because You Didn’t Hire a Matchmaker
Note that this is a stable equilibrium, because in their system one partner must pay but not both for a match to occur:
It makes sense that men are more likely to pay for such a service, knowing that women won’t pay for it, and also that they have more ability to pay and can feel less bad about doing so. They have to pay.
It then makes sense that women are more likely to be willing to sign up for free, since many men already paid. And indeed, you could argue that they’re better off not paying. Who wants to match with the guys who signed up for Keeper… for free?
Thus the ultimate version of the guy picking up the check.
And as a result, the women greatly outnumber the men, because it’s a lot more attractive to sign up for free. Which in turn makes it more attractive for men to pay.
You’re Single So Here’s the Lighter Side
Some very bad pickup lines.
Another swing and a miss.
A bold move.
Finally a version you can trust.