Since one of the more common criticisms of the PUA scene is that it perpetuates an oversimplified view of relationships wherein women respond exclusively to deterministic social signals, that analogy’s not going to win you much goodwill.
There is a lot of PUA technique that amounts to an artificial means of improving unconscious or semi-conscious social signaling, and that strikes me as fairly inoffensive, but unless I’m one-minding badly here I don’t think that part of the culture is a common target of criticism.
Since one of the more common criticisms of the PUA scene is that it perpetuates an oversimplified view of relationships wherein women respond exclusively to deterministic social signals, that analogy’s not going to win you much goodwill.
No more so than arguments for women using makeup or getting plastic surgery. Do these assume men respond exclusively to a woman’s looks? Not really. It just says, do this, and more and better men will want you than before. Maybe other factors matter, maybe they don’t, but this works, on top of whatever else might work. To the extent that PUA is offensive for insinuating women only care about a few metrics, so too are beauty products offensive.
There is a lot of PUA technique that amounts to an artificial means of improving unconscious or semi-conscious social signaling, and that strikes me as fairly inoffensive, but unless I’m one-minding badly here I don’t think that part of the culture is a common target of criticism.
I’m afraid it is part of the criticism: people have this belief that social interaction should just come naturally and people shouldn’t build models of it to understand it better—so if you’re a non-neurotypical, high IQ male, tough, you “deserve what you get”, and any scientific approach to social interaction that is helpful to such undeserving males constitutes terrorism.
No more so than arguments for women using makeup or getting plastic surgery. Do these assume men respond exclusively to a woman’s looks? Not really. It just says, do this, and more and better men will want you than before. Maybe other factors matter, maybe they don’t, but this works, on top of whatever else might work. To the extent that PUA is offensive for insinuating women only care about a few metrics, so too are beauty products offensive.
Less people are offended by the claim that men care only/disproportionately about physical attractiveness than similar oversimplications of female preferences.
There is a lot of PUA technique that amounts to an artificial means of improving unconscious or semi-conscious social signaling, and that strikes me as fairly inoffensive, but unless I’m one-minding badly here I don’t think that part of the culture is a common target of criticism.
I think certain critics of the PUA culture don’t even notice there are different parts to it, due to the outgroup homogeneity bias—they just notice that certain PUAs say stuff they don’t like, and generalize to PUAs in general. (The same thing happens to feminists.)
The obvious breaking point would be that breast implants, at least, are improving the trait directly rather than improving signaling of said trait. Makeup … depends on whether men care about what you look like underneath, I suppose.
I don’t think there’s a hard line between improving a trait and improving signaling of a trait in the context of dating. For example, I don’t think there’s a hard line between becoming funnier and getting better at signaling funniness, or becoming more social and getting better at signaling sociability.
The strength of the analogy to me is the idea that what is on the surface may not resemble what’s below, and if men have a preference for real breasts over fake breasts for reasons that aren’t related to how they look under clothing, then I think the analogy holds.
I don’t think there’s a hard line between improving a trait and improving signaling of a trait in the context of dating.
Or indeed any other context. Improving the trait itself generally helps with signalling, and people care about the signalling itself to some extent. Nevertheless.
For example, I don’t think there’s a hard line between becoming funnier and getting better at signaling funniness
The primary method of signalling funniness is to just be funny. Becoming funnier by, say, learning jokes would be roughly anonogous to brest implants, I think.
becoming more social and getting better at signaling sociability.
How does one “signal sociability”?
if men have a preference for real breasts over fake breasts for reasons that aren’t related to how they look under clothing, then I think the analogy holds.
If, for example, men were only checking out your breasts in order to guage fertility, then implants that only impacted breast size would indeed be anonogous, and similarly deceptive (bad.)
This may not be a good example, but I’ve found that people who use things other than photos of themselves (e.g. anime characters) as Facebook profile pictures tend to be less sociable, so one way to signal sociability is to use an actual photo of yourself on Facebook.
If people were (even subconsciously) using your Facebook profile picture to gauge your sociability, and you deliberately changed it to signal you were more sociable in order to trick them into choosing you for something, then that would be Wrong, I think, to a degree depending on how much them being right mattered.
So, I think part of being sociable means making people around you more comfortable in your presence, and if tweaking your Facebook profile picture has some part in that (which I think it does), then I don’t see a hard line between that particular signaling decision and an actual increase in your sociability. The traits I signaled out above (being funny and being sociable) both themselves have some signaling component to them, so I think this observation generalizes to any social trait that has signaling components to it.
Tweaking your facebook profile correctly might require some degree of sociability, I suppose. My point was that if you deliberately signal greater sociability than you have, you increase the noise surrounding that signal, increasing the chance that people will choose wrongly (including choosing you over someone more social.) In other words, it is functionally equivalent to lying. and should be treated however you treat lying.
It is generally agreed that some lies, at least, do more good than harm (these are usually known as “white lies”.) However, lying itself is generally not considered morally neutral, for whatever reason (in fact, lying in order to have someone sleep with you who would otherwise have refused is often considered a form of rape.[EDIT: not by me])
lying in order to have someone sleep with you who would otherwise have refused is often considered a form of rape.
This sounds like something that would appeal to those who have been lied to. They get to feel more righteous indignation in their victim-hood. It is less kind to those who have actually been raped through any one of coercion, drugs, violence or abuse of power. Their plight becomes trivialized for the purpose of someone getting a solid dig in against lying (or against people that have been declared liars).
Oh, I personally wouldn’t call it rape. But then, I only count literal coercive unwanted intercourse as rape, with lesser evils that often get bundled up with that as distinct if similar wrongs.
I find this more useful then other, more standard definitions because while obviously discovering you had sex, say, without birth control when you specified that you only wanted it with birth control is traumatic, I suppose, it’s not traumatic in the same way as being forced to have sex with someone at gunpoint.
But these looser definitions are common, and often have legal force, so it’s worth noting when an act could be classified as rape even if I myself would not do so. I considered adding a disclaimer to the effect that I would not consider it “rape” but decided not to bother, on the basis that we’re not discussing my opinions and there was no point starting an argument over definitions. I see I may have been suffering from the illusion of transparency somewhat.
(in fact, lying in order to have someone sleep with you who would otherwise have refused is often considered a form of rape.)
There is a difference between outright lying and kind-of sort-of lying (a.k.a. “gilding the lily”). For instance, outright lying in order to have someone give you money who would otherwise have refused is usually called “fraud” and nearly universally shunned, whereas gilding the lily in order to have someone give you money who would otherwise have refused is usually called “marketing” and it is said that “advertising is the life of trade”. And what certain PUAs do surely sounds to me much more like marketing than like fraud.
Most people are in favor of punishing advertisements that mislead consumers. Companies—who ideally would use advertisement solely to raise awareness of their product—have a financial incentive to make their ads as persuasive as possible, and so constantly push at the legal boundaries. Advertisement will always be biased, no matter how strict our regulations. But then, what we should do and what should be legal are two different questions.
I know what “tap out” implies, I just wondered what about this conversation prompted it. Are you worried about the political overtones of my last comment?
No. (I don’t have any strong opinion on whether the current legislation on advertising is too lax or too strict, mainly because I don’t know much about how lax or how strict the current legislation on advertising is.) It’s just that if I carried on this discussion I’d be just reinstating points already made elsewhere in this thread with different words or talking nonsense.
Most people seem to think so. I’m not going to bother defending the point here (all I’m trying to do is establish identity) but possible reasons include the claim that humans terminally value knowing the truth and the point that humans share a morality, so providing them with information gives them as good a chance as you of making the right choice based on the evidence (unless you’re superintelligent or they’re mentally subnormal, but what if it’s the opposite?)
That’s a virtually meaningless comment. There are many kinds of lying, and many are socially approved of.
There are also many kinds of stupidity, violence, and other potentially-bad things that are socially approved of. If we grant that social approval is evidence that those kinds are net good, that’s still not very relevant to whether the grandparent is meaningful.
The content / meaning I got from the grandparent is approximately: “Don’t think of facebook tweaking as a free +1 agreeableness potion, think of it as more like (closer in conceptspace) lying and less like traditional costly sociability signaling”. Perfectly valid and meaningful, as far as I can tell.
No judgment from me as to whether that’s good advice, since I don’t know well how facebook profiles tie in to social dynamics and all that, though.
There are also many kinds of stupidity, violence, and other potentially-bad things that are socially approved of. If we grant that social approval is evidence that those kinds are net good, that’s still not very relevant to whether the grandparent is meaningful.
I wasn’t arguing “net good, therefore meaningless”, i was arguing that lying of various kinds is pervasive and
sometimes beneficial, it is far too simplistic to argue “lying degrades the signal, and is therefore bad”.
i was arguing that lying of various kinds is pervasive and sometimes beneficial, (...)
And I argued that this is irrelevant to the claim that you were apparently arguing against.
it is far too simplistic to argue “lying degrades the signal, and is therefore bad”.
I don’t see that claim being made directly, and there’s only a hint of it in connotation. Going further up the comment thread, I can see that MugaSofer apparently believes that having correct information on this is important and that lying is in this case bad, but this is not (as far as I can tell) appealed-to anywhere as argument for the claims in the comment you called “meaningless”.
So I don’t see the two claims as being causally related, and certainly not something of the form quoted above. If this is implied, it is not obvious to me and I would ask for clarification or more explanation, rather than assume it implicitly and argue against (what is then most likely) a strawman.
Lying, in general, is considered Bad. Of course, Bad Things may have benefits that outweigh their Badness, such as telling kids Santa is real or their pet hamster went on holiday. Whether society is right to consider lying itself Bad or these examples as net wins regardless are not the point; the point is that we should treat “false signals” the way we treat lies (as Bad, generally, but if you think lies are inherently good my point still works.) Lying, of course, is simply a verbal “false signal”.
I’ll say it again:both false non-verbal signals and verbal lies are asbsolutely pervasive in some contexts, eg most women wear makeup.There is a syndrome whereby lying degrqades infromation for everybody, and there is another syndrome where everyone exagerates their posiive atttributes, so that honest people end up looking worse than they are since a certain quantity of exageration is expected and compensated for. That applies to facebook. Everyone on FB has exagerated their sociability, and everyone takes that into account.
If everyone is taking it into account, then exaggerating your sociability in your profile is sending an accurate signal, and not doing so will mislead viewers into underestimating your sociability.
Not necessarily. What can happen is that there are two functions that rely on sociability, one of which is relative/zero-sum and the other of which isn’t. So you wind up in situations where, if you overreport your sociability, you send out signals that cause others to correctly gauge your relative sociability but incorrectly overestimate your static sociability, whereas if you don’t overreport, they correctly gauge your static sociability but incorrectly understimate your relative sociability.
Basically, if everyone is exaggerating their signals, you can’t just assume that it gets corrected for if there are any non-zero-sum aspects to the signaled-for trait, since you get a Lake Woebegone Effect.
I was not assuming that the only kind of correction is through zero-sum effects. if all men over-report their heught (to be polite) that is not zero zum, but listeners can still substract the extra inch or whatever.
Peterdjones specifically claimed that people were taking the universal exaggeration into account in their estimations. If he is correct in this, then it’s not deceptive to exaggerate. If he is incorrect, then it is deceptive, which is the hypothetical I was discussing in the first place, so see my comments above.
If people were (even subconsciously) using your Facebook profile picture to gauge your sociability, and you deliberately changed it to signal you were more sociable in order to trick them into choosing you for something, then that would be Wrong, I think, to a degree depending on how much them being right mattered.
This framing (‘trick’) and the moral prescription is toxic and amounts to demanding people to self sabotage and act incompetent at a critical social skill. People who lack the ability to compartmentalise such beliefs and implement them hypocritically should avoid such moralizing like the plague.
Choosing a profile picture that has positive consequences for you is almost always a good idea.
Completely agreed, though I do often wonder whether following both of your advices (that is, conditioning myself to pick the highest-EV profile picture just because it “feels right” rather than deliberately doing so in order to signal some attribute I think will cause people to behave in some way I want them to) leaves me better or worse off than just following your advice. (In practice it’s mostly moot, since I don’t bother to do the work of fully conditioning myself, but I’m still curious.)
Tangentially, the idea that it’s OK to do something which has a consequence as long as I’m ignorant of that consequence is one of the most pervasive and pernicious moralisms I know of.
Tangentially, the idea that it’s OK to do something which has a consequence as long as I’m ignorant of that consequence is one of the most pervasive and pernicious moralisms I know of.
I agree. In a similar vein I find that I value ‘sincerity’ far, far less than I once did.
In a similar vein I find that I value ‘sincerity’ far, far less than I once did.
Is this of the “sincere intentions” or “sincere goodwill” kind? I’m a bit curious, because I’ve never valued the ‘intentions’ part of sincerity or goodwill or such. However, I’ve always valued the “deploy giant space lazers!” kind of sincere, really-actually-putting-forth-all-effort-and-resources type of actions, and now value them even more since reading the Sequences.
If nothing else, surely “sincere goodwill” is instrumentally valuable? I think “sincere intentions” is tied to virtue ethics, though; you shouldn’t consider some one a Bad Person just because they made a mistake (this is one of the reasons I abandoned virtue ethics.)
I’m not quite sure. I’m inclined to counter that humans are just as likely to have “sincere goodwill” (or even pay tiny costs to display it when convenient) uncorrelated with their actions, intent to get the world to a certain state, or resource / effort allocation to the something to which they have “goodwill” for.
I’ve never observed this kind of “goodwill” in myself to have any sort of positive effect on my actions, their observable results, or my experiences, but faking such goodwill has brought me some positive-E.U. social gains. On the other hand, I’m generally not close to typical human minds, as expected for LW users.
So all things considered, I usually regard “sincere goodwill” as something rather trivial to be overshadowed by other considerations.
All good points. I would argue that all humans (well, all neurotypicals, and most others) have “sincere goodwill”, so clearly it can be overshadowed by their beliefs, say, or cached thoughts. Still, I guess it’s better then if everyone really was out to get you, an a terminal level.
I still value sincerity a lot, but I no longer think that showing your best side in situations where you’re expected to show your best side¹ counts as insincere. See also this Will Newsome comment.
e.g., wearing a suit and speaking standard language in a job interview even though you usually wear jeans and t-shirts and speak dialect outside job interviews, or wearing make-up and high heels when going to a night club where pretty much all people of your gender do that.
It seems to me that dressing/acting informally in a job interview is simply signalling that you don’t care about the interview—so unless you genuinely don’t care (in which case why hire you) then you’re either pretending to be sincere or you’re just really bad at job interviews (which probably includes actually sincere people, at that.)
Tangentially, the idea that it’s OK to do something which has a consequence as long as I’m ignorant of that consequence is one of the most pervasive and pernicious moralisms I know of.
I think that’s a virtue ethics thing, which is why it breaks when you try to use it consequentially.
Alternatively, ” it’s OK to do something which has a consequence as long as I’m ignorant of that consequence”, but it’s Bad to deliberately create such a situation.
I’m sorry, are you saying that the claim that deliberately presenting false evidence in order to introduce noise into a signal, with the expectation that this will raise the chance of a substandard choice (of benefit to you) being made, is not immoral to some extent?
If you’re claiming that humans don’t value the truth, I would like to see some damn evidence; if you’re claiming that false signalling is somehow less deceptive than verbal false signalling (lying) then I would love to see an actual argument in favor of that; and if you’re just attacking me for making moral prescriptions then … what the hell, seriously.
On the other hand, if you’re pointing out that many “signals” are only such from an evolutionary perspective, and humans just like eg like big breasts without knowing why.
I’m sorry, are you saying that the claim that deliberately presenting false evidence in order to introduce noise into a signal, with the expectation that this will raise the chance of a substandard choice (of benefit to you) being made, is not immoral to some extent?
I claim that whatever morally deprecated class the action “put your own face as your profile picture instead of anime because you know it makes you look more sociable” is declared to fall in is a class that contains actions I endorse wholeheartedly. So if the profile changing is ‘murder’, ‘rape’ and ‘pedophilia’ then I endorse ‘murder’, ‘rape’ and ‘pedophilia’ (in at least one context).
Putting something that is not representative into a class of Bad Things doesn’t make the added item Bad, it merely weakens the meaning of the abused word.
OK, since you apparently didn’t understand my question, let me put it another way:
Are you saying lying is not wrong, or that there is some relevant distinction between “lying” and false signals generally? The facebook profile is an extreme example, an extremely minor deception—but if you’re claiming that it isn’t a deception, then please provide a better defenition.
If, on the other hand, you are defending lies, then please bear in mind that I am well aware that acts which are Bad may have their Badness outweighed by consequences that are instrumentally Good—for example, killing someone by diverting a train is Bad, but saving ten people by diverting a train is Good, and the Goodness outweighs the Badness.
It feels like there are three separate issues / claims being debated here:
* Introducing noise into a social signal is generally wrong, because obtaining correct information on people is valuable to making social choices, and because these social choices influence the expected utilities of the various parties involved.
* Choosing an advantageous profile picture most likely introduces noise into this particular signal, because the difficulty of doing so is not correlated with your social skills / what the signal is supposed to tell people about you, given that profile pictures are perceived as such a signal.
* This particular kind of introducing noise into a signal is more akin (closer in conceptspace) to lying verbally than it is akin to directly performing a social skill, for the standard reasons such a claim could be made.
While I agree that deceiving people is Bad, I think that
Introducing noise into a social signal is generally wrong, because obtaining correct information on people is valuable to making social choices, and because these social choices influence the expected utilities of the various parties involved.
is way too broad to be useful. Social signals are usually already somewhat noisy to begin with, so avoiding making them a little noisier isn’t always worth the trouble. Politically conservative men tend to have shorter hair, so if I’m a libertarian socialist I shouldn’t get a haircut lest people misjudge my political stance? People with wealthy parents tend to wear more expensive clothes, so if my parents are wealthy I shouldn’t wear cheap clothes lest people underestimate my parents’ income? Scientists tend to be skinny, so if I am a scientist I shouldn’t exercise lest I become too muscular and people underestimate my interest in science? Pale-skinned people tend to be smarter, so if I’m smart I shouldn’t spend time outdoors during the day lest I get a suntan and people underestimate my IQ? That’s preposterous (especially given that if someone I know explicitly asks about my political stance, my parents’ jobs, my job, or my IQ,¹ I’ll answer truthfully). If I don’t know someone, certain things about me are none of their business, and I don’t give a damn about accurately signalling those things to them; and if they misjudge me due to a stereotype and act upon that misjudgement and get screwed over as a result, that serves them right: I hope the next time they actually ask rather than guessing based on superficial appearances. (OTOH, if someone whose opinion I do care about misjudge me due to a stereotype, that’s my fault because I haven’t provided them with enough evidence that the stereotype doesn’t apply to me. And no, that’s not in conflict with what I said earlier, because Postel’s law,² and fault is not a pie.)
Well, to tell the whole story, while “I took an Internet test and it said it’s 135, but, you know, such tests aren’t that reliable” is denotatively true, it has the connotation that I believe the test overestimated my IQ, which in the case of iqtest.dk I’m pretty sure is not the case. The fact is, I have an emotional hang-up against bragging, and I still haven’t found a decent way to overcome that.
I know Postel’s law wasn’t intended to apply to humans, but I still think it’s a good idea.
EDIT: Don’t I ramble a lot when I write at three o’ clock in the morning.
If there is important information contained in said smell (for example, hygiene levels) then masking it would indeed be deceptive. If on the other hand some smells are simply disagreeable on their own, not evidence for disagreeable traits (EDIT: remember, adaptation-executors not fitness-maximizers,) then deodorant is not deceptive.
By that logic, if you know people will judge you from the way you smell, you should never use deodorant.*
* To the extent that there is indeed information contained in the smell as MugaSofer already said, and that making a correct judgment of this information is instrumental and valuable (i.e. “Wrong, I think, to a degree depending on how much them being right mattered.”).
I’ve seen people object to them, but it definitely seems an order of magnitude less than the reaction people have to PUA. Perhaps there are other factors at work here.
The obvious breaking point would be that breast implants, at least, are improving the trait directly rather than improving signaling of said trait.
Human breasts—and in particular their maintaining significant volume even when not needed for feeding offspring—are very much a signal. It conveys information about fertility and health and, since it is significantly involved in intra-sexual selection, also information about the likely ability of prospective daughters and grandaughters to be able to attract quality mates with their breasts. Breasts implants break this signal. We can predict that if breast implants were free and available to all hunter gatherers that such tribes would soon evolve to be less attracted to breasts.
Is there any research on how quickly responses like this decay (e.g. over generations) once the conditions that supported them no longer obtain? Some casual Googling got me nowhere, and I’m curious.
IIRC, pick-up artist Owen Cook AKA “Tyler Durden” in Blueprint Decoded (a PUA seminar that Anna Salomon and Alicorn liked) hypothesized that the reason men today like thinner women than they used to is that, thanks to breast implants, there are now plenty of big-breasted but otherwise very skinny women, whereas back in the day pretty much all women with big breasts had to be plump; but I doubt he was serious.
Is there any research on how quickly responses like this decay (e.g. over generations) once the conditions that supported them no longer obtain? Some casual Googling got me nowhere, and I’m curious.
As far as I know there isn’t research on humans about such significant traits. Especially not the highly unnatural case where the self sustaining momentum aspect is also removed. (If there was merely a change in environment then we would expect the adaptation to take longer because sexual selection for the sake of nothing more than more sexual selection of descendants.)
I know there have been studies on various creatures in labs and observation of the rate of adaptation of traits in wild populations of less-than-human animals. I have little idea how much information that can give us about adaptations in humans and don’t know to what extent human changes have been analyzed.
Evolutionary-cognitive boundary confusion detected. I think there are plenty of men who don’t even know that women with large breasts are more fertile, and even those who do still like large breasts when they aren’t trying to have children. (And anyway, I guess a large part of what counts as sexy is cultural rather than hardwired, given that men in western countries nowadays in average like much skinnier women than men in western countries in the 1950s did.)
EDIT: Of course, not everything is either evolutionary or conscious; some preferences are learned but subconscious. I’ve recently noticed that ceteris paribus a women will look younger to me if she’s wearing a nose piercing than if she isn’t, and I guess that’s because where I live nose piercings are very rare among women born until the 1970s but very common among women born since the 1980s.¹ This is not conscious as I wasn’t even aware of this until recently, but it’s most definitely not evolutionary either.
I’m pretty confident it’s a cohort effect rather than than an age effect, given that I see many more women in their 30s with nose piercings today than a decade ago.
Human breasts—and in particular their maintaining significant volume even when not needed for feeding offspring—are very much a signal.
[...]
Breasts implants break this signal. We can predict that if breast implants were free and available to all hunter gatherers that such tribes would soon evolve to be less attracted to breasts.
I understand there may be some debate about the actual purpose of breasts, which is why I phrased this as a hypothetical, but I think I should make it clear that the evolutionary pressures that led to men preferring breasts are separate to the question of whether men are actually evaluating fertility (or whatever) or simply enjoy large breasts for their own sake.
I understand there may be some debate about the actual purpose of breasts, which is why I phrased this as a hypothetical
What you did was make the following rather direct claim:
The obvious breaking point would be that breast implants, at least, are improving the trait directly rather than improving signaling of said trait.
There in fact isn’t a clear breaking point between (some) PUA skills and breast implants. In the same way that breasts can be declared to be “an actual trait that is desired” as well as “a signal about other traits” the ability to perform social acts that combine dominance, humor, rapport and charm can be declared to be “an actual trait that is desired” as well as “a signal about other traits”.
Of course there are differences between the two, and further differences between breast implants and makeup but the ‘breaking point’ most certainly isn’t clear!
I understand there may be some debate about the actual purpose of breasts, which is why I phrased this as a hypothetical
What you did was make the following rather direct claim:
The obvious breaking point would be that breast implants, at least, are improving the trait directly rather than improving signaling of said trait.
[...]
Of course there are differences between the two, and further differences between breast implants and makeup but the ‘breaking point’ most certainly isn’t clear!
I guess I did phrase that too strongly, but adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers.
the ability to perform social acts that combine dominance, humor, rapport and charm can be declared to be “an actual trait that is desired” as well as “a signal about other traits”.
Well, yes. As I said here, some traits may be (un)desirable in themselves as well as signalling other (un)desirable traits. The benefit of your signal could outweigh the harm of what you’re countersignalling. My point stands.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of having to refrain myself from entering Someone-Is-Wrong-On-The-Internet! mode and posting a poorly-thought-out response.
Think of PUA as makeup/breast implants for men. Does this make it less or more offensive? In what ways does the analogy break down?
Since one of the more common criticisms of the PUA scene is that it perpetuates an oversimplified view of relationships wherein women respond exclusively to deterministic social signals, that analogy’s not going to win you much goodwill.
There is a lot of PUA technique that amounts to an artificial means of improving unconscious or semi-conscious social signaling, and that strikes me as fairly inoffensive, but unless I’m one-minding badly here I don’t think that part of the culture is a common target of criticism.
No more so than arguments for women using makeup or getting plastic surgery. Do these assume men respond exclusively to a woman’s looks? Not really. It just says, do this, and more and better men will want you than before. Maybe other factors matter, maybe they don’t, but this works, on top of whatever else might work. To the extent that PUA is offensive for insinuating women only care about a few metrics, so too are beauty products offensive.
I’m afraid it is part of the criticism: people have this belief that social interaction should just come naturally and people shouldn’t build models of it to understand it better—so if you’re a non-neurotypical, high IQ male, tough, you “deserve what you get”, and any scientific approach to social interaction that is helpful to such undeserving males constitutes terrorism.
Less people are offended by the claim that men care only/disproportionately about physical attractiveness than similar oversimplications of female preferences.
I think certain critics of the PUA culture don’t even notice there are different parts to it, due to the outgroup homogeneity bias—they just notice that certain PUAs say stuff they don’t like, and generalize to PUAs in general. (The same thing happens to feminists.)
The obvious breaking point would be that breast implants, at least, are improving the trait directly rather than improving signaling of said trait. Makeup … depends on whether men care about what you look like underneath, I suppose.
I don’t think there’s a hard line between improving a trait and improving signaling of a trait in the context of dating. For example, I don’t think there’s a hard line between becoming funnier and getting better at signaling funniness, or becoming more social and getting better at signaling sociability.
The strength of the analogy to me is the idea that what is on the surface may not resemble what’s below, and if men have a preference for real breasts over fake breasts for reasons that aren’t related to how they look under clothing, then I think the analogy holds.
Or indeed any other context. Improving the trait itself generally helps with signalling, and people care about the signalling itself to some extent. Nevertheless.
The primary method of signalling funniness is to just be funny. Becoming funnier by, say, learning jokes would be roughly anonogous to brest implants, I think.
How does one “signal sociability”?
If, for example, men were only checking out your breasts in order to guage fertility, then implants that only impacted breast size would indeed be anonogous, and similarly deceptive (bad.)
This may not be a good example, but I’ve found that people who use things other than photos of themselves (e.g. anime characters) as Facebook profile pictures tend to be less sociable, so one way to signal sociability is to use an actual photo of yourself on Facebook.
Using a picture of yourself and other people would signal even more sociability.
If people were (even subconsciously) using your Facebook profile picture to gauge your sociability, and you deliberately changed it to signal you were more sociable in order to trick them into choosing you for something, then that would be Wrong, I think, to a degree depending on how much them being right mattered.
So, I think part of being sociable means making people around you more comfortable in your presence, and if tweaking your Facebook profile picture has some part in that (which I think it does), then I don’t see a hard line between that particular signaling decision and an actual increase in your sociability. The traits I signaled out above (being funny and being sociable) both themselves have some signaling component to them, so I think this observation generalizes to any social trait that has signaling components to it.
Tweaking your facebook profile correctly might require some degree of sociability, I suppose. My point was that if you deliberately signal greater sociability than you have, you increase the noise surrounding that signal, increasing the chance that people will choose wrongly (including choosing you over someone more social.) In other words, it is functionally equivalent to lying. and should be treated however you treat lying.
You present a compelling argument in favor of lying.
It is generally agreed that some lies, at least, do more good than harm (these are usually known as “white lies”.) However, lying itself is generally not considered morally neutral, for whatever reason (in fact, lying in order to have someone sleep with you who would otherwise have refused is often considered a form of rape.[EDIT: not by me])
This sounds like something that would appeal to those who have been lied to. They get to feel more righteous indignation in their victim-hood. It is less kind to those who have actually been raped through any one of coercion, drugs, violence or abuse of power. Their plight becomes trivialized for the purpose of someone getting a solid dig in against lying (or against people that have been declared liars).
Oh, I personally wouldn’t call it rape. But then, I only count literal coercive unwanted intercourse as rape, with lesser evils that often get bundled up with that as distinct if similar wrongs.
I find this more useful then other, more standard definitions because while obviously discovering you had sex, say, without birth control when you specified that you only wanted it with birth control is traumatic, I suppose, it’s not traumatic in the same way as being forced to have sex with someone at gunpoint.
But these looser definitions are common, and often have legal force, so it’s worth noting when an act could be classified as rape even if I myself would not do so. I considered adding a disclaimer to the effect that I would not consider it “rape” but decided not to bother, on the basis that we’re not discussing my opinions and there was no point starting an argument over definitions. I see I may have been suffering from the illusion of transparency somewhat.
There is a difference between outright lying and kind-of sort-of lying (a.k.a. “gilding the lily”). For instance, outright lying in order to have someone give you money who would otherwise have refused is usually called “fraud” and nearly universally shunned, whereas gilding the lily in order to have someone give you money who would otherwise have refused is usually called “marketing” and it is said that “advertising is the life of trade”. And what certain PUAs do surely sounds to me much more like marketing than like fraud.
Most people are in favor of punishing advertisements that mislead consumers. Companies—who ideally would use advertisement solely to raise awareness of their product—have a financial incentive to make their ads as persuasive as possible, and so constantly push at the legal boundaries. Advertisement will always be biased, no matter how strict our regulations. But then, what we should do and what should be legal are two different questions.
I guess I’d better tap out now.
… may I ask why?
I don’t think I have much else to say, short of mind-killing myself, which I kind-of would rather not do.
I know what “tap out” implies, I just wondered what about this conversation prompted it. Are you worried about the political overtones of my last comment?
No. (I don’t have any strong opinion on whether the current legislation on advertising is too lax or too strict, mainly because I don’t know much about how lax or how strict the current legislation on advertising is.) It’s just that if I carried on this discussion I’d be just reinstating points already made elsewhere in this thread with different words or talking nonsense.
Ah, OK. Thanks for explaining.
...and lying is Wrong?
Most people seem to think so. I’m not going to bother defending the point here (all I’m trying to do is establish identity) but possible reasons include the claim that humans terminally value knowing the truth and the point that humans share a morality, so providing them with information gives them as good a chance as you of making the right choice based on the evidence (unless you’re superintelligent or they’re mentally subnormal, but what if it’s the opposite?)
OK. If you’re not going to bother defending the point, I won’t further pursue it.
That’s a virtually meaningless comment. There are many kinds of lying, and many are socially approved of.
There are also many kinds of stupidity, violence, and other potentially-bad things that are socially approved of. If we grant that social approval is evidence that those kinds are net good, that’s still not very relevant to whether the grandparent is meaningful.
The content / meaning I got from the grandparent is approximately: “Don’t think of facebook tweaking as a free +1 agreeableness potion, think of it as more like (closer in conceptspace) lying and less like traditional costly sociability signaling”. Perfectly valid and meaningful, as far as I can tell.
No judgment from me as to whether that’s good advice, since I don’t know well how facebook profiles tie in to social dynamics and all that, though.
I wasn’t arguing “net good, therefore meaningless”, i was arguing that lying of various kinds is pervasive and sometimes beneficial, it is far too simplistic to argue “lying degrades the signal, and is therefore bad”.
And I argued that this is irrelevant to the claim that you were apparently arguing against.
I don’t see that claim being made directly, and there’s only a hint of it in connotation. Going further up the comment thread, I can see that MugaSofer apparently believes that having correct information on this is important and that lying is in this case bad, but this is not (as far as I can tell) appealed-to anywhere as argument for the claims in the comment you called “meaningless”.
So I don’t see the two claims as being causally related, and certainly not something of the form quoted above. If this is implied, it is not obvious to me and I would ask for clarification or more explanation, rather than assume it implicitly and argue against (what is then most likely) a strawman.
Lying, in general, is considered Bad. Of course, Bad Things may have benefits that outweigh their Badness, such as telling kids Santa is real or their pet hamster went on holiday. Whether society is right to consider lying itself Bad or these examples as net wins regardless are not the point; the point is that we should treat “false signals” the way we treat lies (as Bad, generally, but if you think lies are inherently good my point still works.) Lying, of course, is simply a verbal “false signal”.
I’ll say it again:both false non-verbal signals and verbal lies are asbsolutely pervasive in some contexts, eg most women wear makeup.There is a syndrome whereby lying degrqades infromation for everybody, and there is another syndrome where everyone exagerates their posiive atttributes, so that honest people end up looking worse than they are since a certain quantity of exageration is expected and compensated for. That applies to facebook. Everyone on FB has exagerated their sociability, and everyone takes that into account.
If everyone is taking it into account, then exaggerating your sociability in your profile is sending an accurate signal, and not doing so will mislead viewers into underestimating your sociability.
Not necessarily. What can happen is that there are two functions that rely on sociability, one of which is relative/zero-sum and the other of which isn’t. So you wind up in situations where, if you overreport your sociability, you send out signals that cause others to correctly gauge your relative sociability but incorrectly overestimate your static sociability, whereas if you don’t overreport, they correctly gauge your static sociability but incorrectly understimate your relative sociability.
Basically, if everyone is exaggerating their signals, you can’t just assume that it gets corrected for if there are any non-zero-sum aspects to the signaled-for trait, since you get a Lake Woebegone Effect.
I was not assuming that the only kind of correction is through zero-sum effects. if all men over-report their heught (to be polite) that is not zero zum, but listeners can still substract the extra inch or whatever.
Peterdjones specifically claimed that people were taking the universal exaggeration into account in their estimations. If he is correct in this, then it’s not deceptive to exaggerate. If he is incorrect, then it is deceptive, which is the hypothetical I was discussing in the first place, so see my comments above.
This framing (‘trick’) and the moral prescription is toxic and amounts to demanding people to self sabotage and act incompetent at a critical social skill. People who lack the ability to compartmentalise such beliefs and implement them hypocritically should avoid such moralizing like the plague.
Choosing a profile picture that has positive consequences for you is almost always a good idea.
Completely agreed, though I do often wonder whether following both of your advices (that is, conditioning myself to pick the highest-EV profile picture just because it “feels right” rather than deliberately doing so in order to signal some attribute I think will cause people to behave in some way I want them to) leaves me better or worse off than just following your advice. (In practice it’s mostly moot, since I don’t bother to do the work of fully conditioning myself, but I’m still curious.)
Tangentially, the idea that it’s OK to do something which has a consequence as long as I’m ignorant of that consequence is one of the most pervasive and pernicious moralisms I know of.
I agree. In a similar vein I find that I value ‘sincerity’ far, far less than I once did.
Is this of the “sincere intentions” or “sincere goodwill” kind? I’m a bit curious, because I’ve never valued the ‘intentions’ part of sincerity or goodwill or such. However, I’ve always valued the “deploy giant space lazers!” kind of sincere, really-actually-putting-forth-all-effort-and-resources type of actions, and now value them even more since reading the Sequences.
If nothing else, surely “sincere goodwill” is instrumentally valuable? I think “sincere intentions” is tied to virtue ethics, though; you shouldn’t consider some one a Bad Person just because they made a mistake (this is one of the reasons I abandoned virtue ethics.)
I’m not quite sure. I’m inclined to counter that humans are just as likely to have “sincere goodwill” (or even pay tiny costs to display it when convenient) uncorrelated with their actions, intent to get the world to a certain state, or resource / effort allocation to the something to which they have “goodwill” for.
I’ve never observed this kind of “goodwill” in myself to have any sort of positive effect on my actions, their observable results, or my experiences, but faking such goodwill has brought me some positive-E.U. social gains. On the other hand, I’m generally not close to typical human minds, as expected for LW users.
So all things considered, I usually regard “sincere goodwill” as something rather trivial to be overshadowed by other considerations.
All good points. I would argue that all humans (well, all neurotypicals, and most others) have “sincere goodwill”, so clearly it can be overshadowed by their beliefs, say, or cached thoughts. Still, I guess it’s better then if everyone really was out to get you, an a terminal level.
I still value sincerity a lot, but I no longer think that showing your best side in situations where you’re expected to show your best side¹ counts as insincere. See also this Will Newsome comment.
e.g., wearing a suit and speaking standard language in a job interview even though you usually wear jeans and t-shirts and speak dialect outside job interviews, or wearing make-up and high heels when going to a night club where pretty much all people of your gender do that.
It seems to me that dressing/acting informally in a job interview is simply signalling that you don’t care about the interview—so unless you genuinely don’t care (in which case why hire you) then you’re either pretending to be sincere or you’re just really bad at job interviews (which probably includes actually sincere people, at that.)
I think you misparsed my comment. I said that being formal is not insincere; I didn’t say anything on whether being informal would be.
Oh, I know. I was agreeing with you, and pointing out that it’s arguably more sincere than being informal.
I think that’s a virtue ethics thing, which is why it breaks when you try to use it consequentially.
Alternatively, ” it’s OK to do something which has a consequence as long as I’m ignorant of that consequence”, but it’s Bad to deliberately create such a situation.
I’m sorry, are you saying that the claim that deliberately presenting false evidence in order to introduce noise into a signal, with the expectation that this will raise the chance of a substandard choice (of benefit to you) being made, is not immoral to some extent?
If you’re claiming that humans don’t value the truth, I would like to see some damn evidence; if you’re claiming that false signalling is somehow less deceptive than verbal false signalling (lying) then I would love to see an actual argument in favor of that; and if you’re just attacking me for making moral prescriptions then … what the hell, seriously.
On the other hand, if you’re pointing out that many “signals” are only such from an evolutionary perspective, and humans just like eg like big breasts without knowing why.
I claim that whatever morally deprecated class the action “put your own face as your profile picture instead of anime because you know it makes you look more sociable” is declared to fall in is a class that contains actions I endorse wholeheartedly. So if the profile changing is ‘murder’, ‘rape’ and ‘pedophilia’ then I endorse ‘murder’, ‘rape’ and ‘pedophilia’ (in at least one context).
Putting something that is not representative into a class of Bad Things doesn’t make the added item Bad, it merely weakens the meaning of the abused word.
OK, since you apparently didn’t understand my question, let me put it another way:
Are you saying lying is not wrong, or that there is some relevant distinction between “lying” and false signals generally? The facebook profile is an extreme example, an extremely minor deception—but if you’re claiming that it isn’t a deception, then please provide a better defenition.
If, on the other hand, you are defending lies, then please bear in mind that I am well aware that acts which are Bad may have their Badness outweighed by consequences that are instrumentally Good—for example, killing someone by diverting a train is Bad, but saving ten people by diverting a train is Good, and the Goodness outweighs the Badness.
It feels like there are three separate issues / claims being debated here:
* Introducing noise into a social signal is generally wrong, because obtaining correct information on people is valuable to making social choices, and because these social choices influence the expected utilities of the various parties involved.
* Choosing an advantageous profile picture most likely introduces noise into this particular signal, because the difficulty of doing so is not correlated with your social skills / what the signal is supposed to tell people about you, given that profile pictures are perceived as such a signal.
* This particular kind of introducing noise into a signal is more akin (closer in conceptspace) to lying verbally than it is akin to directly performing a social skill, for the standard reasons such a claim could be made.
While I agree that deceiving people is Bad, I think that
is way too broad to be useful. Social signals are usually already somewhat noisy to begin with, so avoiding making them a little noisier isn’t always worth the trouble. Politically conservative men tend to have shorter hair, so if I’m a libertarian socialist I shouldn’t get a haircut lest people misjudge my political stance? People with wealthy parents tend to wear more expensive clothes, so if my parents are wealthy I shouldn’t wear cheap clothes lest people underestimate my parents’ income? Scientists tend to be skinny, so if I am a scientist I shouldn’t exercise lest I become too muscular and people underestimate my interest in science? Pale-skinned people tend to be smarter, so if I’m smart I shouldn’t spend time outdoors during the day lest I get a suntan and people underestimate my IQ? That’s preposterous (especially given that if someone I know explicitly asks about my political stance, my parents’ jobs, my job, or my IQ,¹ I’ll answer truthfully). If I don’t know someone, certain things about me are none of their business, and I don’t give a damn about accurately signalling those things to them; and if they misjudge me due to a stereotype and act upon that misjudgement and get screwed over as a result, that serves them right: I hope the next time they actually ask rather than guessing based on superficial appearances. (OTOH, if someone whose opinion I do care about misjudge me due to a stereotype, that’s my fault because I haven’t provided them with enough evidence that the stereotype doesn’t apply to me. And no, that’s not in conflict with what I said earlier, because Postel’s law,² and fault is not a pie.)
Well, to tell the whole story, while “I took an Internet test and it said it’s 135, but, you know, such tests aren’t that reliable” is denotatively true, it has the connotation that I believe the test overestimated my IQ, which in the case of iqtest.dk I’m pretty sure is not the case. The fact is, I have an emotional hang-up against bragging, and I still haven’t found a decent way to overcome that.
I know Postel’s law wasn’t intended to apply to humans, but I still think it’s a good idea.
EDIT: Don’t I ramble a lot when I write at three o’ clock in the morning.
By that logic, if you know people will judge you from the way you smell, you should never use deodorant.
If there is important information contained in said smell (for example, hygiene levels) then masking it would indeed be deceptive. If on the other hand some smells are simply disagreeable on their own, not evidence for disagreeable traits (EDIT: remember, adaptation-executors not fitness-maximizers,) then deodorant is not deceptive.
* To the extent that there is indeed information contained in the smell as MugaSofer already said, and that making a correct judgment of this information is instrumental and valuable (i.e. “Wrong, I think, to a degree depending on how much them being right mattered.”).
Okay, make that push-up bras. ISTM that people object to them waaay less often than they object to PUAs.
I’ve seen people object to them, but it definitely seems an order of magnitude less than the reaction people have to PUA. Perhaps there are other factors at work here.
Human breasts—and in particular their maintaining significant volume even when not needed for feeding offspring—are very much a signal. It conveys information about fertility and health and, since it is significantly involved in intra-sexual selection, also information about the likely ability of prospective daughters and grandaughters to be able to attract quality mates with their breasts. Breasts implants break this signal. We can predict that if breast implants were free and available to all hunter gatherers that such tribes would soon evolve to be less attracted to breasts.
Is there any research on how quickly responses like this decay (e.g. over generations) once the conditions that supported them no longer obtain? Some casual Googling got me nowhere, and I’m curious.
IIRC, pick-up artist Owen Cook AKA “Tyler Durden” in Blueprint Decoded (a PUA seminar that Anna Salomon and Alicorn liked) hypothesized that the reason men today like thinner women than they used to is that, thanks to breast implants, there are now plenty of big-breasted but otherwise very skinny women, whereas back in the day pretty much all women with big breasts had to be plump; but I doubt he was serious.
As far as I know there isn’t research on humans about such significant traits. Especially not the highly unnatural case where the self sustaining momentum aspect is also removed. (If there was merely a change in environment then we would expect the adaptation to take longer because sexual selection for the sake of nothing more than more sexual selection of descendants.)
I know there have been studies on various creatures in labs and observation of the rate of adaptation of traits in wild populations of less-than-human animals. I have little idea how much information that can give us about adaptations in humans and don’t know to what extent human changes have been analyzed.
Evolutionary-cognitive boundary confusion detected. I think there are plenty of men who don’t even know that women with large breasts are more fertile, and even those who do still like large breasts when they aren’t trying to have children. (And anyway, I guess a large part of what counts as sexy is cultural rather than hardwired, given that men in western countries nowadays in average like much skinnier women than men in western countries in the 1950s did.)
EDIT: Of course, not everything is either evolutionary or conscious; some preferences are learned but subconscious. I’ve recently noticed that ceteris paribus a women will look younger to me if she’s wearing a nose piercing than if she isn’t, and I guess that’s because where I live nose piercings are very rare among women born until the 1970s but very common among women born since the 1980s.¹ This is not conscious as I wasn’t even aware of this until recently, but it’s most definitely not evolutionary either.
I’m pretty confident it’s a cohort effect rather than than an age effect, given that I see many more women in their 30s with nose piercings today than a decade ago.
False positive. But I’ve tired of this subject and will not go over it again.
I understand there may be some debate about the actual purpose of breasts, which is why I phrased this as a hypothetical, but I think I should make it clear that the evolutionary pressures that led to men preferring breasts are separate to the question of whether men are actually evaluating fertility (or whatever) or simply enjoy large breasts for their own sake.
What you did was make the following rather direct claim:
There in fact isn’t a clear breaking point between (some) PUA skills and breast implants. In the same way that breasts can be declared to be “an actual trait that is desired” as well as “a signal about other traits” the ability to perform social acts that combine dominance, humor, rapport and charm can be declared to be “an actual trait that is desired” as well as “a signal about other traits”.
Of course there are differences between the two, and further differences between breast implants and makeup but the ‘breaking point’ most certainly isn’t clear!
I guess I did phrase that too strongly, but adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers.
Well, yes. As I said here, some traits may be (un)desirable in themselves as well as signalling other (un)desirable traits. The benefit of your signal could outweigh the harm of what you’re countersignalling. My point stands.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of having to refrain myself from entering Someone-Is-Wrong-On-The-Internet! mode and posting a poorly-thought-out response.