the assumption that all social activity reduces to fitness strategies is in sharp contrast with reality and lacks evidence;
even allowing for the unreasonable assumption and overlooking the fallacy, the problem remains that apart from some anecdotal evidence, nobody has a clue as to whether PUA works, including people who denounce it. The most that could be concluded, even under the manifestly unreasonable assumptions, is that people who denounce PUA believe that it works, or have anecdotal evidence that it works. However, since it’s reasonably common for people to both denounce PUA and believe that it’s practiced by pathetic unsuccessful creeps, this conclusion is wrong, too.
To be fair, the above commenter only said that this constitutes “weak evidence” in favor of the hypothesis, and deducing mere evidence (as opposed to certainty) by affirming the consequent is correct reasoning. (How strong evidence should be deduced, of course, is another question that depends on the concrete case. But “shokwave” did say “weak.”)
I think that with no further information but only an affirmed consequent, treating it as nontrivial evidence, even “weak”[1], is wrong; you need to say something about alternative hypotheses, even if it’s hand-wavy and vague[2]. This is somewhat of a gray area, to be sure, because the “something about alternative hypothesis” part is often taken to be implicitly understood[3]. But I don’t think it’s implicitly understood in this case that there aren’t other, non-evo-psycho, reasonable explanations of peeps hatin’ on PUA.
[1] I think that “weak” in normal usage implies “nontrivial”, even though theoretically it could be trivial or zero.
[2] “If my theory is correct, the sun will rise tomorrow”.
[3] If a physicist says informally “my theory predicted value X, and measurement confirms”, they might take it as understood and not say that other competing theories predict a different value. But a paper will make it explicit unless it’s already obvious.
When I say ‘weak evidence’, I mean it. If I met one person who had been practicing PUA for six months, and they hadn’t had significantly more sex in those six months than in the previous six months (as judged by some method other than self-reporting; probably by asking the person’s friends or roommates), that would be stronger evidence that PUA doesn’t work.
As I said above, I believe that you’re using the phrase “weak evidence” in a non-standard way, essentially violating Grice’s Maxim of Quantity. When something is as weak as in this case, people don’t call it weak, they call it trivial or negligible or exceedingly weak, or some other term to transmit the idea of just how very weak it is. When people say “weak evidence”, they mean that it’s definitely not strong or conclusive, but there’s nontrivial amount of it, it’s not vanishingly small.
You’re possibly right. I invite you to test your belief by consulting the search for “weak evidence” over LW. This probably sounds snarky, so let me quickly clarify that I don’t mean this in the sense “this search confirms I’m right”. I looked over the results briefly and saw that roughly half of them use further qualifiers like “astonishingly weak”, “very weak”, “extremely weak”and so on, which is consistent with what I’d said. But it’s also possible that many results use vanilla “weak evidence” to refer to what other results call “extremely/incredibly weak” etc., and then you’re right. I looked at a few “vanilla” uses in context and didn’t see that, but I didn’t look at enough.
I think I see different requirements for things working that for things not working.
People getting actively angry about something looks like a (weak) indicator that they are afraid there might be something to it. They do not get angry at 9/11 conspiracists, but laugh about them. They do get angry at the other party.
If you have someone trying to do something and be unsuccessful that tells you even less. I would not see it as indicator of not working. It is just no particular evidence.
But maybe I have the notion of what ‘weak’ means wrong.
If you have someone trying to do something and be unsuccessful that tells you even less. I would not see it as indicator of not working. It is just no particular evidence.
It almost has to be evidence; even if it’s just evidence that the person isn’t doing it right, then you push this case through your prior for how often they do things wrong. Unless your prior is very high, you’re still getting half the impact or more of the evidence. Although you could argue from the selection effect of “correct in your expectations of success” that you’re almost guaranteed to only notice cases where they are doing it wrong, not cases where it doesn’t work (because you don’t expect it to work where it won’t).
A person using the techniques and not having increased success—weak evidence
People hating PUA—trivial evidence
A bunch of people active on a PUA forum having increased success in aggregagate—moderate evidence (would be strong but selection on dependent variable)
But it works as more evidence than people denouncing it.
More evidence than a negative amount? How much is that worth?
Weak evidence! Weak! Weak.
For practical purposes, I regard weak evidence as equivalent to no evidence. It has the value of a penny lying on the road: I do not bother to pick it up. Weak evidence is not worth wasting time on.
More evidence than a negative amount? How much is that worth?
Further up in the thread, I claimed that (in cases like these) people denouncing it is weak evidence in favour.
It has the value of a penny lying on the road: I do not bother to pick it up.
Anecdote: I once refused to pick up a small denomination coin (we don’t have pennies in Australia anymore). A friend did and promptly discovered it was a penny, from 1938, and worth two dollars to collectors.
On practical matters, though, this is a case where training will greatly decrease effort and time to pick up (more so than for pennies). If you track how much time is spent on picking up pennies and put a value on that amount of time, and then how much money in pennies you have picked up, you will probably find it not worth it. I expect this weak-evidence-picking-up will prove worth it—if it even slightly addresses the common human problem of incorrectly assessing or entirely discounting large amounts of small evidence, it comes out positive for me.
Anecdote: I once refused to pick up a small denomination coin (we don’t have pennies in Australia anymore). A friend did and promptly discovered it was a penny, from 1938, and worth two dollars to collectors.
Still not worth it unless you have a personal interest in coins or expect to find or otherwise collect many such coins. (Of course many people would value the experience at more than $2 just for the novelty and the story.)
I expect this weak-evidence-picking-up will prove worth it—if it even slightly addresses the common human problem of incorrectly assessing or entirely discounting large amounts of small evidence, it comes out positive for me.
Can you give some examples of that, i.e. where large amounts of small evidence are being badly used?
This appears to be) an example of an accumulation of weak evidence badly used, but in the opposite direction. (I say “appears”, because I haven’t read the article it references, just that LW posting and its comments.)
Probabilities of multiple events are being multiplied without concern for whether they are independent. And that is the basic practical problem with accumulating weak evidence. Look at the vast amount of evidence for the existence of Santa Claus! Even if each story only offers a microbit of evidence....well, no. The stories are not independent of each other. Collectively they prove no more than a handful of them do.
But I don’t think it’s implicitly understood in this case that there aren’t other, non-evo-psycho, reasonable explanations of peeps hatin’ on PUA
After adapting to, and talking to people about at least 10 different idea packages(*), not including this one I finally noticed how dislike is not actually a statement about the idea package itself, but about its perceived strangeness.
I got negative and even hostile reactions for each of them!
So I assume people do not mentally process everything and then come up with a well reasoned debunk. But they more simply just run a diff(self.current_idea_set,new_idea_set) and if it is to far out reply in the negative.
Peeps hate on everything they don’t already know.
(*) being vegetarian, being atheist, standard skepticism which includes a few applied topics like homeopathy and astrology, economics, some instantiations of liberty/libertarian ideas and more
I understand your frustration, but the PUA case is different: you get lots of people denouncing it who do not as a rule denounce lifestyles very different from their own. Including, for example, some LW members.
BTW, if all the people around me reacted with hostility to unfamiliar ideas, I would, first of all, try to rule out myself as a factor (e.g. maybe I’m annoyingly preachy w/o knowing it?), and if that didn’t clear things up, look for better people. Well, actually, I don’t know if I’d do that, but I’d like to think I would.
I don’t see how it affirms the consequent; could you spell it out logically for me?
My reason for thinking it doesn’t is that I didn’t give a consequent. I gave three premises, all of which I strongly believe are true, and the consequent derived from these (you can find it in lukeprog’s post) is a prediction that pick-up artists will suffer social attacks such as denunciation.
It’s an abductive explanation of the state of the world, to be sure, but it depends on many other premises (evolutionary psychology is an accurate description of the world, other hypotheses are unlikely, etc). At some point you risk rejecting arguments for theories of gravity because they look like affirming the consequent; that is, your theory predicted that the object would fall at a certain rate (9.8 m/s, say) and then the object fell at a certain rate (9.81~ m/s). P therefore Q, Q, P.
I don’t see how it affirms the consequent; could you spell it out logically for me?
Your P->Q is “if PUA works, people will try to denounce PUA”. You affirm Q and deduce P. As I replied to Vladimir_M, this is fallacious unless you invest at least some effort into refuting alternative hypotheses that explain Q. You note it yourself:
(evolutionary psychology is an accurate description of the world, other hypotheses are unlikely, etc)
Now, your astonishingly reductive claim that all social acts are fitness strategies (this claim is not, in fact, part of evolutionary psychology, whose claims are far-ranging but more modest than that) is on the face of it simply wrong; and several other reasons why people might want to denounce PUA are ready at hand. You have your work cut out for you if you wish to give some convincing evidence for the claim, and against the alternative hypotheses; but before either is done at least to some degree your argument, it seems to me, is wholly unsubstantiated.
P.S. And all this doesn’t take into account my third objection above, which would be true even if you were able to support deducing P from Q in your case.
P.P.S. Thank you for the phrase “abductive reasoning”, I didn’t know that name, or that it was well-studied.
Your P->Q is “if PUA works, people will try to denounce PUA”. You affirm Q and deduce P.
Ah, okay. Yes to that, although of course I prefer to call it abductive reasoning. I got the impression you were saying something like “kill the status of anyone more successful” was being affirmed.
Now, your astonishingly reductive claim that all social acts are fitness strategies
Never claimed all, but I didn’t make it clear enough. The social framework can be used for evolutionary fitness; in this sense, it is an arena for mating struggles. And it is used in this way, and regularly.
I’d like to think that this accusation also carries a hint that this is quite an extraordinary claim, and therefore requires extraordinary evidence. At least, that’s the idea I was trying to get across without spelling it out, so as not to appear uncivil.
It really is quite an extraordinarily strong claim, and I’m still using milder language and not saying what I really think about it. It’s much like saying that all social acts are really attempts to sleep with one’s parent of the opposite sex, or that all social acts are actually attempts to get control of the means of production.
There are so many social acts, they are so different in different societies, and so many of them are so obviously shaped by culture and non-universal, that I have never seen any evo-psych theorist try to seriously claim that any and all of them are mating fitness strategies. Typically even the most far-reaching varieties of evo-psych claim that about a wide swath of supposedly universal social behaviors, not all social acts.
I’d like to think that this accusation also carries a hint that this is quite an extraordinary claim, and therefore requires extraordinary evidence.
The hint was overwhelmingly clear. You were saying that your opponent was the one that needed lots of evidence while trying to present your own position as the default.
With respect to this particular premise your claim of ‘extraordinary’ struck me as incredibly naive. That social behaviours reduce to fitness maximising strategies is trivially obvious (and not all that interesting). There are of course going to be exceptions to the rule, humans being far from completely optimised but this claim:
the assumption that all social activity reduces to fitness strategies is in sharp contrast with reality and lacks evidence
… combined with things like:
the problem remains that apart from some anecdotal evidence, nobody has a clue as to whether PUA works
… suggests to me that the ‘reality’ you are appealing to is a purely social reality, not one that is determined by interaction with the world. “Nobody has a clue as to whether PUA works”? What the...? Anyone who has lived among humans with a modicum of introspection would have more than a ‘clue’ that it would work. “Bloody obvious social skills development combined with lots of practice and trial and error’ doesn’t stop being effective just because it gets a TLA applied.
I’m frankly amazed that your refutation wasn’t downvoted to oblivion. It completely misuses the fallacy of ‘affirming the consequent’ and implies a lack of understanding of how Bayesian reasoning works.
Note that I don’t even agree with shockwave’s claim as he specifies it. Your reply is just completely confused and made all the worse by opening with ‘This is a terrible argument’. When you lead with that sort of denunciation (and presumption) the bar gets raised and you really need to follow up with particularly solid reasoning.
You were saying that your opponent was the one that needed lots of evidence while trying to present your own position as the default.
No, I didn’t offer any position on how much of human social behavior is fitness strategy and thus didn’t present anything as the default. I pointed out, correctly, that the claim that all social acts are fitness strategies is an extraordinarily strong claim.
There are of course going to be exceptions to the rule
Since my opponent’s argument explicitly deduced that PUA-denunciation is a fitness strategy directly from its being a social act, and nothing else, it brooks no exceptions to the rule. If the rule is not universal, the argument falls through.
“Nobody has a clue as to whether PUA works”? What the...?
It’d be interesting to see a reference to a study, a survey, anything other than anecdotal evidence. Something like this, for example.
“Bloody obvious social skills development combined with lots of practice and trial and error”
Oh, I see. Well, you’re welcome to your definition of PUA, I’m not interested in debating it. If you have any data, do share.
Be very wary when you start thinking of a participant in a conversation as an “opponent”. Discussions are not battles, and the goal is not to win; it is to acquire correct beliefs. And/or to make yourself look good. But if you think of it as a battle, you are more likely to reject true some true statements that seem like evidence against your beliefs, and to accept false ones that seem like evidence for them. The consequences of that may be farther reaching than just the conversation they came up in.
It’d be interesting to see a reference to a study, a survey, anything other than anecdotal evidence.
I’ve been emailing a few researchers a year trying to develop some interest in studies of the effectiveness of pickup. Unfortunately, until science gets off its ass, we can’t get that particular proof.
Until that time, however, I don’t think it’s correct to say that “nobody has a clue” as to whether pickup works. While wedrifid is being a bit prickly, I think he’s basically correct. It’s a bit strange that on the subject of pickup, the burden of proof suddenly rises, and people suddenly throw out types of evidence that they normally find valuable.
There isn’t scientific evidence for the effectiveness of many teachings, yet these teaching are widely regarded as effective. I doubt that your cooking behavior is informed by the ground-breaking study “The Effect of Hot Stoves on Fingers.” There isn’t scientific evidence that, say… waltz lessons are effective, either. Yet I bet that if you wanted to learn to waltz, you would go around the corner to a dance studio. If you doubt the instructors, you may be able to watch them do demos or performances, or see video footage.
We have evidence of a similar sort for the effectiveness of pickup.
I’ve been emailing a few researchers a year trying to develop some interest in studies of the effectiveness of pickup. Unfortunately, until science gets off its ass, we can’t get that particular proof.
As soon as someone finds a way to put it inside a pill and tack on a patent and there will all sorts of research on the subject. It is a shame that will quite possibly lower the quality of evidence.
A problematic complication is that many pickup instructors suddenly start making huge sums of money by teaching pickup, in a way no waltz instructor ever did. Dishonest charlatans are likely to displace good instructors when the money is good (e.g., Tom Brown Jr.’s wild popularity in primitive skills). If there were good pickup instructors once, they may be gone now.
NOTE: I made a mistake in this analysis due to a brain fart. I fixed it and reposted it.
That’s correct. I’m not particularly interested in defending any particular method, just the notion that pickup in general can be lead many guys to greater success.
I agree that there is plenty of dishonesty in workshops, based on reviews I’ve heard. I’m not so confident that the money is good. Let’s do a little accounting (based on eyeballing a few well-known programs):
Typical price of weekend bootcamp: $2000
Student teacher ratio: 2-3 students to 1 teacher
Time: 8 hours per day, total: 24 hours. 8 hours field instruction and demonstration, and the rest would be seminars
Assuming a 3:1 student teacher ratio, each instructor would pull in $6000 for the bootcamp. $6000 / 24 hours work = $250/hour. Except we need to count the plane flight. ($6000 - $200 ticket) / (24 + 4 hour flight) = $207/hr.
That might seem like a good wage, but remember that PUAs can only run bootcamps on weekends. $207/hr * 50 weekends a year = $10,350/year. Even if you jack up the bootcamp rates to $3k (which some companies do), that’s still just $15k a year per instructor.
Dance instructions can make $40k/year in metropolitan areas working multiple days a week. Accomplished dance instructors can run pricey workshops. While probably not as expensive as pickup workshops, they can have a higher student:teacher ratio. Based on a dance workshop I found in my area, guessing at a student:teacher ratio, gives the following:
$200 per person * 8:1 student:teacher ratio / 12 hours over two days = $133/hr… and the instructors don’t have to travel. With a 10:1 student:teacher ratio, it’s about $166/hr.
Pickup instructors obviously can’t make much from bootcamps. Bootcamps just aren’t scalable. You can only work on the weekend, and you have to be doing marketing and lead generation during the week. PUA gurus must make most of their money from ebooks and DVDs, unless they can do some pricier form of coaching. (Of course, dance instructors who are entrepreneurially minded will have instructional DVDs, too.) Or PUA instructors have day jobs during the week, which burns time for building their pickup business.
Running pickup workshops is clearly not a very profitable business. For teaching students live, it’s not obvious by how much pickup instructors out-earn instructors in the performing arts… if at all. Doing in-field instruction is also extremely grueling, and live demonstrations are high pressure. Pickup instructors must demonstrate the techniques every weekend even when jetlagged, sick, or hoarse from shouting. On top of that, their work is stigmatized.
If anything, lack of quality of pickup instruction is more likely because PUA gurus are poorly compensated, rather than because they are well-compensated.
That’s correct. I’m not particularly interested in defending any particular method, just the notion that pickup in general can be lead many guys to greater success.
I agree that there is plenty of dishonesty in workshops, based on reviews I’ve heard. I’m not so confident that the money is good. Let’s do a little accounting (based on eyeballing a few well-known programs):
Typical price of weekend bootcamp: $2000
Student teacher ratio: 2-3 students to 1 teacher
Time: 8 hours per day, total: 24 hours. 8 hours field instruction and demonstration, and the rest would be seminars
Assuming a 3:1 student teacher ratio, each instructor would pull in $6000 for the bootcamp. $6000 / 24 hours work = $250/hour. Except we need to count the plane flight. ($6000 - $200 ticket) / (24 + 4 hour flight) = $207/hr.
PUAs can only run bootcamps on weekends. $5800 * 50 weekends a year = $290,000/year. However, you are traveling virtually every weekend, and you need a marketing machine to fill seats in your destinations in front of you. And you will have no life. Looking at an actual bootcamp schedule, it seems that the workshops are $3k and the lead instructors are only working 5-19 weeks over half a year = 10-38 weeks a year.
$3k 3 students - $300 airfare = $8700 a bootcamp 25 bootcamps a year = $217,500. This figure is a lot more optimistic than my previous flawed analysis.
Dance instructors can make $40k/year in metropolitan areas working multiple days a week, but it might not be fair to compare the average unknown dance instructor in a city to PUAs who are nationally-known through the news, or who had massive internet marketing machines. Accomplished dance instructors can run pricey workshops. While probably not as expensive as pickup workshops, they can have a higher student:teacher ratio. Based on a dance workshop I found in my area, guessing at a student:teacher ratio, gives the following:
$200 per person * 8:1 student:teacher ratio / 12 hours over two days = $133/hr… and the instructors don’t have to travel. With a 10:1 student:teacher ratio, it’s about $166/hr.
For another comparison, Tony Dovolani of Dancing with the Stars runs dance camps for $600 a person. $600 * 10:1 student:teacher ratio = $6000 / instructor. That overlaps with pickup earnings, though I doubt that Dovolani has the business machine to run his dance camp every weekend, considering that it’s much bigger than a pickup workshop. However, if there is a 10:1 student:teacher ratio (reasonable to assume for ballroom dance classes), and considering that he has 10+ instructors working with him, he isn’t spending 6 hours in a row working like a PUA instructor would.
Both dance and pickup bootcamps suffer from scalability problems, especially pickup because a lower student:teacher ratio is necessary. You can only work on the weekend, and you have to be doing marketing and lead generation during the week. Dance instructors can teach private lessons during the week for $60+ an hour. PUA gurus must make most of their money from ebooks and DVDs, unless they can do some pricier form of coaching. (Of course, dance instructors who are entrepreneurially minded will have instructional DVDs, too.) Or PUA instructors have day jobs during the week, which burns time for building their pickup business.
Running pickup workshops is clearly a very profitable business, but it looks like it’s a lot of work and has a lot of overhead. To fill seats for bootcamps each week, you need a massive marketing and lead generation machine. For teaching students live, pickup seems potentially more profitable than dance, but there is overlap, especially for nationally-known instructors of their respective disciplines. If dance instructors had the marketing machines of pickup companies, the gap would be even narrower.
Doing in-field instruction is also extremely grueling, and live demonstrations are high pressure. Pickup instructors must demonstrate the techniques every weekend even when jetlagged, sick, or hoarse from shouting. On top of that, their work is stigmatized.
Now that I’m using the right numbers, it does seem plausible that pickup instructors can make pretty good sums of money if they work hard, build a strong marketing machine, constantly generate leads, and give up half their weeks traveling. The same is true of many businesses. As for dance, nationally-known pickup instructors are probably in a similar income bracket to nationally-known dance instructors, unless I’m missing something.
In both of those industries, there could be a temptation to skimp on giving 1-on-1 instruction live. Pickup instruction also has additional pressure to perform.
remember that PUAs can only run bootcamps on weekends.
That would be the only line I generally disagree with. Teaching PU is a f’ed up thing. But that also depends a bit on how much your own time is worth.
The problem of choosing a teacher looks very similar to sports. You do not want someone who is a good sport himself, but someone who can train you really well. But to choose someone, you would need to already know the stuff that is taught or at least what to look for.
Many reviews are done in the hyped up after glow right after the workshop. Where I would consider it better to see how someone is doing a year or more after such an event—but that seems to not be too helpful for the business.
[edit: corrected a messed up line break in the top line quote]
Huh? Units do not match. If the average weekend bootcamp makes the instructor $6000-$200 = $5800 / weekend, earnings per year should be (up to) $5800 * 50 = $290,000.
In The Game, and in Mystery’s book The Pickup Artist, the PUA instructors are shown living in fabulously-expensive mansions, driving $100,000+ cars; and described as having come into that wealth very suddenly after starting to teach pickup. David DeAngelo is believed to make millions of dollars every year.
You are describing the reference class ‘best selling authors and self publishing education marketers’, not the reference class ‘pickup instructors’. That a field is large enough to support the sale of popular books is hardly evidence against said field.
Since my opponent’s argument explicitly deduced that PUA-denunciation is a fitness strategy directly from its being a social act, and nothing else, it brooks no exceptions to the rule. If the rule is not universal, the argument falls through.
This claim is false. You do not understand how correct reasoning works.
It’d be interesting to see a reference to a study, a survey
So would I. This does not make your claim that “Nobody has a clue as to whether PUA works” a sane claim to make. You do not understand how evidence works and are also conflating the claim “there have not been scientific studies about” with “nobody has a clue about”.
Oh, I see. Well, you’re welcome to your definition of PUA, I’m not interested in debating it. If you have any data, do share.
Was not a definition. It was a reference to several commonly included aspects of the behaviour and declared strategies of actual real world communities. Not something you can use the ‘dismiss as semantics’ tactic on.
I think that is a mistake. There are at least 10.000s of people who ran through all kinds of programs or self studied. Some report and increased success rate, some do not. Some do worse.
How is that just mere anecdotal evidence?
You may not get the specific evidence you ask for. But you get some.
How is that not anecdotal evidence? You don’t have any clear data. First of all, you don’t have any aggregate statistics on those 10.000s of people—you can only ask a few for their personal opinions. Any self-reporting will be naturally biased towards success. Any information put out by a program will be naturally biased towards success. And you have absolutely no idea how many people studied PUA, tried it, didn’t work for them, went on to try something else. You have no data to work with.
Just think about diets. Every time you think you may have good evidence about PUA working or not working, think about diets. Many millions of people try them every year. You have mountains of people swearing by this diet or the other. Dozens of studies and research programs are being run all the time (and they dutifully report that almost all the fans of this diet or the other gain their weight back). And they still have no clue if low-carbs is better than low-calories, or maybe they’re both good, or maybe one is better for some people and the other for the others, or whatever. Or maybe they have too many clues all going in the different directions. Do diets work?
And you have absolutely no idea how many people studied PUA, tried it, didn’t work for them, went on to try something else. You have no data to work with
And you have absolutely no idea how many people studied math, tried it, didn’t work for them, went on to try something else. You have no data to work with.
The usefulness of math is not measured by the amount of people who learn it, or the amount of people who fail to grasp its usefulness, but by the results that those who master it get.
It is not that interesting how many people try it and fail, but if it works, when done right.
I find statistical exploration of social issues rather hard. But that might just be my own ignorance on the tool set real scientists have.
But I see that someone who is sucessfull in one area might not be able to actually explain how he does it. He might have mistaken models, or ignore important factors he is not aware of. But at least he shows something is there.
I agree that if you want to know “effect on women if one has mastered the technique” people who do not try or fail to learn PUA techniques are not of interest. One probably has to study the successes of PUAs to get a complete picture on women’s psyche.
However, if you want to know the “expected payoff if one starts to study the technique” the failure rate given a serious time investment is hugely relevant. If I would have known that 90% of the math students fail within the first semester (note: this is not the case), I would not have tried it at all, as I am not in the top 10% of any measure, however I would construct it.
Note: I do not know what success-rate PUAs claim and/or achieve.
Here is my best attempt to catalog the success rate of the guys with pickup background I’ve known in real life. Of course, in some cases I have imperfect information and don’t know how they are doing, in which case I will guess, and my guess will be conservative (e.g. I will assume that they are the same way I last saw them, rather than improving since then). This sample isn’t representative at all, so take it with it a grain of salt, but it will help other people understand some of my priors about the success of pickup.
Me: Started out with social anxiety disorder. 6 months: substantial social skills improvement. 8 months: lost virginity. Next few years: Stuck on a plateau of getting numbers and kisses, but social skills slowly improving. Since then: going in and out of flings and relationships; currently in a relationship. I could give several other success metrics, but it would sound like I’m bragging.
4 other guys: Began with severe social deficits. Now they have no problem dating and go in and out of flings and relationships. One of them started out as 300 lbs and massively insecure, but lost weight, applied himself, and is now massively popular with women, to the point of sometimes refusing sex because he is looking for relationships.
1: Had one relationship before pickup and was struggling after. Hooked up with several women for a year, met one he liked, dated her for a couple years, and married her.
1: Started out with severe social problems and alienation, along with depression. Lost his virginity, but then struggled for multiple years without a single date. However, in the last year, he greatly improved his fashion sense and started going out multiple times a week. He is now quite socially popular, and several women in our social circle are really into him, though he isn’t attracted to them. Women come up to him in clubs and compliment him. He went out with this one girl who was really into him, but he wasn’t interested in a relationship, so he ended things and they are just friends. He recently had a fling with a girl who was in town.
1: I give him a brush of pickup knowledge around the same time he was getting into kink subculture. Butch dominant women started looking at him like a piece of tasty meat, and were lining up to beat him. He said that the pickup stuff helped him keep up conversations when women approached him, even though he was still having trouble approaching. He is in a relationship now.
1: He had pickup background improve his fashion sense and social skills, but he still has difficulties interacting with women. He is mega-cool around guys, but still feels very awkward talking to women he is interested in. He says that pickup is part of what caused the awkwardness (inverse of the previous guy). He isn’t really applying himself to pickup nowadays, and working on his career.
1: Similar story, except he managed to end up in a long-term relationship, which is now over.
1: Similar story, except he isn’t awkward around women, and gets phone numbers. He is very socially popular, but still has difficulties expressing sexuality with women.
4: Guys with some exposure to pickup, mostly through me. They are still struggling and having minimal success, as far as I know. Their difficulties are easily explained within the pickup paradigm, such as fashion issues, posture (the classic computer slouch), and women reading them as extremely “nerdy” and/or emotionally inexpressive. One of them may have Asperger’s syndrome. Some of these guys have gone on some online dates. These guys all have < 1 year experience with pickup.
Here are some interesting results, out of these 15 guys:
5 (33%): Massive sexual success
7 (47%): At least one relationship
5 (33%): Still significant lack of success at sexual contact or dates
6 (40%): Still lack of consistent success at sexual contact or dates currently, but has had some success in those areas after studying pickup
2 (13%): Lack of consistent success, even though they have at least average fashion sense and social skills
15 (100%): Minor social skills improvement
11 (73%): Major social skills improvement
1 (7%): Married
The main variables that appear to correlate with success (order of causation unclear):
Fashion sense, particularly non-nerdy presentation. I doubt this variable fully explains success, but it may gate improvement in other areas.
Social skills and self-confidence
Years of experience (all of the highly successful guys have multiple years of experience, and some had plateaus where they struggled)
For a sample of almost all nerdy guys with social deficits, this distribution of outcomes is probably pretty impressive, relative to the alternative (it’s quite possible that by now, I would have been on a couple dates with a few women and still be a virgin). Only one guy reports pickup exacerbating his struggles.
My limited empirical evidence does suggest that success with women as a function of attractiveness is a step function. There can be periods of rapid improvement, and plateaus of little progress. There is very much a feeling of “leveling up” as things come together.
For instance, whenever I’ve seen a guy hit both above average fashion sense, and above average social skills, the attention he gets from women suddenly jumps. It’s as if female attention is a multiplicative factor of different components of attraction.
The plateaus can be tough, especially if you start out on one. However, improvements in social skills during those times can keep you motivated.
Of course, one of the issues with estimating the effects of pickup knowledge is that none of this is placebo tested. Since PU itself teaches that self-confidence is crucial having a method for meeting women that you believe works should by itself produce positive results- especially for people who were previously too anxious to walk up to a stranger and say hello.
Also, those correlates your reporting are pretty general and 101-level. I’d be a little more suspicious of the efficacy of the more ‘advanced’ routines and techniques in the PUA literature.
Placebo testing would be hilarious. Isn’t that a standard comedy plot? A shy man asks for pickup and courting tips, gets terrible ones, and implements them with disastrous results?
You don’t think every professional pick-up artist/dating coach would say their material works better than placebo?
I realize of course we’re not talking about formal science but we still need to be aware of the limitations of personal anecdotes versus controlled studies. Who cares if it is fair?
You might be interested to know that Style says roughly one out of twenty people who start to learn PUA reach a high level of skill.
I personally agree with Martin however; especially in relation to diets. Diets DO work, they are just difficult to implement, changing your lifestyle often is; that applies to exercise, studying a new language or anything that requires a large time investment before you see payoffs. The math comparison is especially appropriate. In this way PUA is no different from any other self improvement course that you might decide to undertake.
That depends on what you mean by “work”. If your intent is to improve your life through achieving some goal, but the side effects of a strategy cause a net cost in quality of life even if the intermediate goal is achieved, then I’d say that the method doesn’t work.
That’s two ways beside the point. They work by the most reasonable and common definition, and often do so without causing a net cost in quality of life. Even if diets don’t suit a majority of people, they work, unlike reciting the alphabet backwards before you go to sleep.
Furthermore, if a procedure, perfectly applied, yield no significant results with 99% of the population, but clearly is effective upon the remaining 1%, it’s not a sham. It might not be the most efficient procedure if you can’t distinguish who it will work with beforehand, but it still works. Even if diet’s aren’t in such a category, the point that something can be should be accepted, and your argument should be focused on the strongest possible case.
That’s two ways beside the point. They work by the most reasonable and common definition
Bear in mind that a diet only ‘works’ if you actually successfully keep to them in the long term. Only a minority of people stick to diets in the long term. That’s where choosing diets based on convenience and ease of compliance becomes more important than raw effectiveness.
Bear in mind that science only ‘works’ if you actually successfully use it over the long term. Only a minority of people stick to science in the long term. That’s where choosing knowledge-gathering techniques based on convenience and ease of compliance becomes more important than raw effectiveness.
I see your point (which is valid), but mine is that the cost of using a method does not reduce the effectiveness of that method, just the number of people who apply it. One might say that it is too costly to uniformly apply science, diets or PUA, but that’s a different statement than saying that they don’t work.
I thought your reference to conventional ‘works’ was a valid reply to Nancy’s “but maybe it will also make you sad or otherwise have external costs” point. Convention would call that ‘works’ even though naturally it is a cost to consider. (For yet another ‘although’ I expect people who find a diet that works in the mid to long term to also enjoy improved experience in other aspects of life so I don’t think there is much of a balance to be had there at all.)
What I would not agree with is the complete exclusion of psychological considerations from deciding whether a diet ‘works’ or not. For example for a bare minimum ‘diet’ I would argue that “have a breakfast including at least 30g of protein within 30m of waking up” works far more effectively than “eat 10% less”. This is just based on how humans work at a psychological and physiological level.
I actually consider science to be a good analogy to go by and not at all as the ad absurdum imply. ‘Science’ is the application of various traditional rules and limits upon rational thinking that discard all sorts of reasoning that is valid for the purpose of avoiding some of the more drastic human failure modes and biases. By limiting evidence and officially sanctioned persuasion via some formulaic rules it makes it somewhat harder for money, politics and ego to sabotage epistemic progress. (Unfortunately it is still not hard enough).
The math comparison lacks in one important piece: Math is clearly defined, and has standard textbooks. If you ask around for recommendations on how to learn math you get similar responses, and will end up learning similar things—up to a certain degree.
There is only one type of math! In general people agree on what math is, and what not.
PU as well as PD is a very broad, not clearly defined subject, that contains a mash-up of many other topics. It is contradictory. Done by amateurs who generally do not care about scientific results.
You get advice that goes against those transported by the mainstream (which we on LW are somewhat used to in other contexts.) But you also find the statement that the subjects of your interest will generally give you bad advice and do not even know what works for them. As will your peers, your family, potential natural friends, the media, and anyone else who you could possibly ask. That makes for a very bad heuristic in regards to its truthfulness.
And then there is the annoying property of PD advice, that it is not only difficult to actually get, but that it also hurts. Sometimes we carry gaping holes that really hurt our social life, and no one has the guts to tell us, since they are afraid of a bad reaction.
One easy to understand example is trying to tell a colleague or friend that he needs to do something about his smell.
I am not aware of a safe way to navigate this. It would be interesting to see real scientists, or science minded people undertake this exploration. But there are way to many possibilities to have it go wrong.
PU does contain basilisks. So handle with care. And do not believe any one particular source completely.
There is only one type of math! In general people agree on what math is, and what not.
The second sentence here is true, but the first one is false. There is mainstream math, and then there are alternatives. Of course, there are insane crackpot ideas, but there are also alternative forms of mathematics that are studied by serious researchers who earn tenure for it and prove valid theorems. Buzzwords to search for include “intuitionism”, “constructive mathematics”, “predicatvism”, “finitism”, and “nonclassical mathematics” generally.
This mostly only affects things from after the 19th century, however, so nothing significant about the mathematics that most people learn in school. Even going on to more advanced material, there is a very definite mainstream to follow, so this doesn’t really affect your point; this is just a hobby horse of mine.
And I should have mentioned “experimental mathematics”, which is really different! This term can be interpreted in weak and strong ways; the former, in which experiments are a preliminary to proof, is normal, but the latter, in which massive computer-generated experimental results are accepted as a substitute for proof when proof seems unlikely, is different. The key point is that most true theorems that we can understand have no proofs that we can understand, a fact that can itself be proved (at least if if you use length of the text as a proxy for whether we can understand it).
Then message me. The concept of a PU basilisk seems unlikely to me but still somewhat intriguing. The closest things I can imagine are in the form of disillusionment with ideals.
It would be interesting to have a collection of basilisks somewhere, like an ammo dump for a mimetic war.
Absolutely! Maybe not on lesswrong, that might make some people cry. But I’d love to have a list somewhere else. And this can be considered an open request to send any basilisk spotted in the wild to me personally for examination.
I’ve yet to see a basilisk that was remotely intimidating to me. And would like to be able to further improve my resistance to exposure to new ‘basilisks’ while they are framed as basilisks so I am even less likely to be vulnerable to them in the wild.
A superintelligence would almost certainly be able to construct sentences that could hack my brain and damage it. Some humans could if they were able to put me in a suitable social or physical environment and ensure ongoing exposure (and environment and exposure are far more important than the abstract concepts conveyed). But things like “Roko’s Basilisk” are just cute. You can tame them and keep them as pets. :)
Being careful not to criticise what was sent to me (and by so doing discourage others) I don’t think what I was sent fits the term ‘basilisk’. Instead I got some well thought out considerations and potential pitfalls that people may fall into along a PUA journey. In fact I think people would appreciate them being spoken publicly. Rather than “things that will kill you just by looking at them” they are things that you are better off looking at so you can avoid falling into them. Obviously the exceptional case is the pessimistic person who is looking for excuses not to try—which is not an uncommon mindset.
I would not repost them here (that would be discourteous) but I suggest that if the author did post his thoughts publicly they would be well received (ie. would get an 8+karma rating if the comment was not buried too deeply to gain exposure.)
I violently agree with all of this. Have you seen any basilisk-like ideas besides roko’s? Roko’s at least looks like a real basilisk until you think about it. Everything else I’ve seen doesn’t come close to living up to the name.
‘Violent agreement’ seems to have been adopted for use in situations in which the participants have been arguing aggressively only to discover that they agree on the substantive issues. For a term that hasn’t been hijacked as jargon I go with “vehemently”. It has a more visceral feel to it too. :)
Have you seen any basilisk-like ideas besides roko’s? Roko’s at least looks like a real basilisk until you think about it. Everything else I’ve seen doesn’t come close to living up to the name.
Roko’s is the most interesting I’ve seen too. Although for some people a combination of Pascal’s Wager and certain religious doctrines about children not being held accountable for their beliefs until a certain age would do it. Once again it is the ability to apply abstract reasoning while at the same time the naivety and weakness in following the rational conclusion correctly that would cause the problem.
Anyone have a really solid working definition for ‘basilisk’ as we use it here?
Although for some people a combination of Pascal’s Wager and certain religious doctrines about children not being held accountable for their beliefs until a certain age would do it.
Am I supposed to be able to see it from just this? Assuming it’s not the kind of thing that would hurt LW posters can you explain? Otherwise, pm it?
One interesting idea is that it seems plausible to create basilisks that only effect your memetic/cognitively different enemies- perhaps the only way to avoid the harm of the basilisk is to deconvert from your religion/ideology. A basilisk that only worked on, say, religious fundamentalists would be a really powerful weapon (I’m not suggesting that the basilisk be capable of killing anyone, necessarily).
Am I supposed to be able to see it from just this? Assuming it’s not the kind of thing that would hurt LW posters can you explain?
Pascal’s Wager → Accept popular religion (Disclaimer: I did label these people naive and with an inability to take reasoning all the way to a sane conclusion. Nevertheless, it works on some intelligent people better than on some unintelligent people.)
There exist popular religious doctrines that God will send young children to heaven regardless because they are too young to have been able to do the conversion thing. I think the “Age Of Accountability” concept may be related.
If a child is not likely to convert to the ‘True’ religion in adulthood then they are (believed to be) likely to go to Hell instead of Heaven if they grow up.
Such a child would go to Heaven if murdered while young but Hell if they grow up.
Such a child would be better off in they are murdered.
A quick google on “do young children go to hell?” led me to this, excerpt:
Therefore, we have been given a specific example in the Old Testament of an infant who died and would live forever in heaven. And Jesus Christ Himself, in the New Testament, stated that little children retain the qualities that make a person eligible to inherit the kingdom of God. We see, then, that infants and small children that die are in a safe state, and will live eternally in heaven.
With such clear statements from the Bible about the eternal destiny of dead infants and small children, why have religious people mistakenly taught that babies go to hell when they die?
(The scripture quotes in question were totally reaching by the way. But that’s the whole point of theology.)
That is over-broad unfortunately. The concept needs to be distinguished from “ugly truths” where the disutility comes from an emotional reaction to how far from ideal the world is.
Do we include concepts selected to elicit a maximal emotional response? Such as particularly Funny Jokes or things so sad that they would drive most people to suicide? They do seem to be a different concept but still deserve a similar title. (If not basilisk then at least cockatrice or one of the Gorgons).
Am I supposed to be able to see it from just this? Assuming it’s not the kind of thing that would hurt LW posters can you explain? Otherwise, pm it?
I think I know what wedrifid is getting at, but I don’t think Pascal’s Wager would do it. Pascal’s Wager argues that one should act as if one believes in God because the costs are low and the potential benefits (Heaven) are high.
But in order to get to the particular failure state at which I think wedrifid is hinting, you can’t just be betting on God—you have to be absolutely certain that Heaven exists and that its joys outweigh on every axis everything that Earth has to offer. Most people, no matter what they say, are not that certain, which is why we don’t routinely slaughter infants in order to ensure their blameless souls entry into Heaven. (Similar logic has been invoked to rationalize murders—such as innocent deaths at witch trials—but in these cases, as a justification pasted on after the fact rather than an honest motive towards murder.)
But in order to get to the particular failure state at which I think wedrifid is hinting, you can’t just be betting on God—you have to be absolutely certain that Heaven exists
No, absolute certainty is definitely not required. The cost is increased so a proportionate increase in probability*payoff is required. But this is still all dwarfed by the arbitrarily large payoffs inherent in religious questions. The whole point of ‘afterlife’ focussed doctrine is to encourage the flock to discount all ‘earthly’ matters as trivial compared to eternal questions.
Most people, no matter what they say, are not that certain, which is why we don’t routinely slaughter infants in order to ensure their blameless souls entry into Heaven.
No, that would not be a rational reason to refrain from the slaughter. The difference between 90% sure and absolutely certain isn’t really much of a big deal when you have the chance of flipping the sign bit of an arbitrarily large disulility payoff (Hell). A 0.05% hunch would be more than enough.
Rational agents that really have arbitrarily large utility payoffs floating around in their utility function will inevitably do things that look insane to us.
No, absolute certainty is definitely not required. The cost is increased so a proportionate increase in probability*payoff is required.
Right, but now you’ve left the standard formulation of Pascal’s Wager. The original Pascal’s Wager includes the stipulation that one loses nothing by behaving as if God were real. To get to a point where you’re willing to kill kids, obviously you have to go a lot further—you must be ready to incur substantial costs as a consequence of belief.
One interesting idea is that it seems plausible to create basilisks that only effect your memetic/cognitively different enemies
I am sure that this is possible, but wonder why it has not been done yet—or at least appeared on my radar. Might be one of the more darker arts, and a very interesting one!
No. It would be better to first develop defenses against them. Basilisks seem to only affect people of a certain mental capacity able to understand and process them. If you look up the Charles Langan interview, or his writings, or this Ted/Unabomba guy you see how really bright people can go wrong.
I would hate LW to contribute to that.
I want LWers and myself to not only have a realistic view of reality, but also be able to life in it and be happy and productive.
I’m not sure how you develop defenses to Basilisks without know what they are. Unless we get lucky and there is a fully general countermeasure.
I was just talking about collecting them though- it’s another question entirely whether or not the list should be public. One doesn’t usually leave ammo dumps unlocked.
If you tell wedrifid privately, then you have to promise to tell me.
I have a few minor basilisks (not from PU alone, but from combining PU with psychometrics or feminism). Nothing so bad that I think it would make people want to ban me, but it might be disconcerting and depressing for many people, and some of it I’m still thinking through.
The usefulness of math is not measured by the amount of people who learn it, or the amount of people who fail to grasp its usefulness, but by the results that those who master it get.
Where “those who master it” is defined by “the intersection of people who tried it, and people who get good results”.
Anatoly’s observations are spot on, whereas MartinB’s ignore the problems with self-selection bias, and could also be used as a defense of psychotherapy, ouija boards, and picking lottery numbers from fortune cookies.
More importantly, we don’t even have evidence that pickup artist techniques work for anyone! All we have are testimonials from people highly-incentivized to make them. Is there any factual evidence that David DeAngelo, Neil Strauss, or any of these PUAs actually have slept with many beautiful women?
It would be hard to provide such evidence—but that doesn’t mean we can just trust them.
More importantly, we don’t even have evidence that pickup artist techniques work for anyone! All we have are testimonials from people highly-incentivized to make them. Is there any factual evidence that David DeAngelo, Neil Strauss, or any of these PUAs actually have slept with many beautiful women?
Yes. Video evidence and an overwhelming abundance of eyewitness reports. Including reports from women who they have dated. All of this is evidence that someone could assert is faked or engineered by some ingenious plot with payed actors and widespread bribes. Technically.
Anatoly’s observations are spot on, whereas MartinB’s ignore the problems with self-selection bias, and could also be used as a defense of psychotherapy, ouija boards, and picking lottery numbers from fortune cookies.
If we are going to throw about insulting analogies for rhetorical effect then a more appropriate one would be “moon landing”.
Oh I should add, that it does not mean that the people who achieve success know how they do it. Just that.
I noticed how in many cases successful people not only have a hard time explaining how the are successful, but honestly have a mistaken view about it.
Unconscious competence.
I’ve seen much more mockery of PUA than denunciation, mostly with the sort of attitude one sees displayed towards, say, furries (who are a prototypically unthreatening group.) But perhaps this depends on the corner of the internet you’re from.
Mockery is mostly for attack. I’m not sure how the mode of attack matters.
It’s true that most people don’t seem genuinely disturbed by the existence of furries, though. And it must be true that some people mock PUA without feeling threatened, or even without intending to raise their status or lower PUAers’. And in particular cases, for we do love to laugh at those who overreach (are more confident of their status than we think they can justify).
that some people mock PUA without feeling threatened, or even without intending to raise their status or lower PUAers’.
Mockery of another group without intending to raise one’s own status? That only seems possible if we include lack of self awareness in evaluating ‘intent’. Isn’t that just Human Behavior 101?
I have to disagree with the principle, even if the conclusion is correct. I could argue similarly that atheists denounce god because it’s a successful paradigm, and therefore threatening, and so it must be true.
God paradigms are not related to evolutionary fitness the way pick-up artistry is. Atheists do not denounce God because it is a successful paradigm (they denounce it because it’s wrong, its popularity or success only determines the scale or intensity of denouncement). “And so it must be true” is not a correct paraphrase of “weak evidence that it works”.
You could argue it. You couldn’t win the argument.
You asserted your prior belief that denunciation is a social act of reducing the status of things viewed as more successful, and therefore concluded that people’s denunciation of PUA is “weak evidence” that it works.
As I can tell the implicit reasoning goes “People denounce things they see as successful; people denounce X; therefore people probably see X as successful; things people see as successful probably work; therefore X probably works.”
The same line of reasoning can apply to any X that people denounce. Davidmanheim applied it to religion, which is denounced by atheists.
Your reply was that religion is different, because religion also belongs to the class of wrong beliefs. But that doesn’t mean your earlier argument doesn’t apply, it merely means that other arguments apply as well. If your argument is evidence for PUA, it’s evidence for any denounced X.
As you said initially, it’s weak evidence. I agree. In fact, I’d say it’s negligible evidence, in both cases.
This was not part of my reasoning. It was specifically an evo-psych-style argument; people denounce things they see as increasing the evolutionary fitness of an opponent. The principle in question is Kill the status of anyone more successful than you, which is also why creationists trying to make science look bad (instead of finding evidence for their beliefs) is weak evidence that science more successful at explaining the world, and in full generality it is the principle behind ad hominem attacks.
Denunciation is a social act. The social framework is an evolutionary fitness mating arena. Kill the status of anyone more successful than you.
This principle is strong enough for me to treat denunciation of PUA as weak evidence that it works.
This is a terrible argument:
it affirms the consequent;
the assumption that all social activity reduces to fitness strategies is in sharp contrast with reality and lacks evidence;
even allowing for the unreasonable assumption and overlooking the fallacy, the problem remains that apart from some anecdotal evidence, nobody has a clue as to whether PUA works, including people who denounce it. The most that could be concluded, even under the manifestly unreasonable assumptions, is that people who denounce PUA believe that it works, or have anecdotal evidence that it works. However, since it’s reasonably common for people to both denounce PUA and believe that it’s practiced by pathetic unsuccessful creeps, this conclusion is wrong, too.
To be fair, the above commenter only said that this constitutes “weak evidence” in favor of the hypothesis, and deducing mere evidence (as opposed to certainty) by affirming the consequent is correct reasoning. (How strong evidence should be deduced, of course, is another question that depends on the concrete case. But “shokwave” did say “weak.”)
I think that with no further information but only an affirmed consequent, treating it as nontrivial evidence, even “weak”[1], is wrong; you need to say something about alternative hypotheses, even if it’s hand-wavy and vague[2]. This is somewhat of a gray area, to be sure, because the “something about alternative hypothesis” part is often taken to be implicitly understood[3]. But I don’t think it’s implicitly understood in this case that there aren’t other, non-evo-psycho, reasonable explanations of peeps hatin’ on PUA.
[1] I think that “weak” in normal usage implies “nontrivial”, even though theoretically it could be trivial or zero.
[2] “If my theory is correct, the sun will rise tomorrow”.
[3] If a physicist says informally “my theory predicted value X, and measurement confirms”, they might take it as understood and not say that other competing theories predict a different value. But a paper will make it explicit unless it’s already obvious.
When I say ‘weak evidence’, I mean it. If I met one person who had been practicing PUA for six months, and they hadn’t had significantly more sex in those six months than in the previous six months (as judged by some method other than self-reporting; probably by asking the person’s friends or roommates), that would be stronger evidence that PUA doesn’t work.
As I said above, I believe that you’re using the phrase “weak evidence” in a non-standard way, essentially violating Grice’s Maxim of Quantity. When something is as weak as in this case, people don’t call it weak, they call it trivial or negligible or exceedingly weak, or some other term to transmit the idea of just how very weak it is. When people say “weak evidence”, they mean that it’s definitely not strong or conclusive, but there’s nontrivial amount of it, it’s not vanishingly small.
I do not believe it is non-standard for LessWrong. I admit I’m guilty of tailoring my posts to fit the LessWrong-specific audience.
You’re possibly right. I invite you to test your belief by consulting the search for “weak evidence” over LW. This probably sounds snarky, so let me quickly clarify that I don’t mean this in the sense “this search confirms I’m right”. I looked over the results briefly and saw that roughly half of them use further qualifiers like “astonishingly weak”, “very weak”, “extremely weak”and so on, which is consistent with what I’d said. But it’s also possible that many results use vanilla “weak evidence” to refer to what other results call “extremely/incredibly weak” etc., and then you’re right. I looked at a few “vanilla” uses in context and didn’t see that, but I didn’t look at enough.
I think you find more people for who it does not work, than for whom it works. But I doubt this works as evidence that it does not work.
There are many factors that influence success. One would be doing it wrong.
Not much, no. But it works as more evidence than people denouncing it. Weak evidence! Weak! Weak.
I think I see different requirements for things working that for things not working.
People getting actively angry about something looks like a (weak) indicator that they are afraid there might be something to it. They do not get angry at 9/11 conspiracists, but laugh about them. They do get angry at the other party.
If you have someone trying to do something and be unsuccessful that tells you even less. I would not see it as indicator of not working. It is just no particular evidence.
But maybe I have the notion of what ‘weak’ means wrong.
It almost has to be evidence; even if it’s just evidence that the person isn’t doing it right, then you push this case through your prior for how often they do things wrong. Unless your prior is very high, you’re still getting half the impact or more of the evidence. Although you could argue from the selection effect of “correct in your expectations of success” that you’re almost guaranteed to only notice cases where they are doing it wrong, not cases where it doesn’t work (because you don’t expect it to work where it won’t).
My take -
A person using the techniques and not having increased success—weak evidence
People hating PUA—trivial evidence
A bunch of people active on a PUA forum having increased success in aggregagate—moderate evidence (would be strong but selection on dependent variable)
More evidence than a negative amount? How much is that worth?
For practical purposes, I regard weak evidence as equivalent to no evidence. It has the value of a penny lying on the road: I do not bother to pick it up. Weak evidence is not worth wasting time on.
Further up in the thread, I claimed that (in cases like these) people denouncing it is weak evidence in favour.
Anecdote: I once refused to pick up a small denomination coin (we don’t have pennies in Australia anymore). A friend did and promptly discovered it was a penny, from 1938, and worth two dollars to collectors.
On practical matters, though, this is a case where training will greatly decrease effort and time to pick up (more so than for pennies). If you track how much time is spent on picking up pennies and put a value on that amount of time, and then how much money in pennies you have picked up, you will probably find it not worth it. I expect this weak-evidence-picking-up will prove worth it—if it even slightly addresses the common human problem of incorrectly assessing or entirely discounting large amounts of small evidence, it comes out positive for me.
Still not worth it unless you have a personal interest in coins or expect to find or otherwise collect many such coins. (Of course many people would value the experience at more than $2 just for the novelty and the story.)
Can you give some examples of that, i.e. where large amounts of small evidence are being badly used?
This appears to be) an example of an accumulation of weak evidence badly used, but in the opposite direction. (I say “appears”, because I haven’t read the article it references, just that LW posting and its comments.)
Probabilities of multiple events are being multiplied without concern for whether they are independent. And that is the basic practical problem with accumulating weak evidence. Look at the vast amount of evidence for the existence of Santa Claus! Even if each story only offers a microbit of evidence....well, no. The stories are not independent of each other. Collectively they prove no more than a handful of them do.
After adapting to, and talking to people about at least 10 different idea packages(*), not including this one I finally noticed how dislike is not actually a statement about the idea package itself, but about its perceived strangeness. I got negative and even hostile reactions for each of them! So I assume people do not mentally process everything and then come up with a well reasoned debunk. But they more simply just run a diff(self.current_idea_set,new_idea_set) and if it is to far out reply in the negative.
Peeps hate on everything they don’t already know.
(*) being vegetarian, being atheist, standard skepticism which includes a few applied topics like homeopathy and astrology, economics, some instantiations of liberty/libertarian ideas and more
[Edit: \_ as recommended in the comment below]
Need to escape the underscores.
diff(self.current_idea_set,new_idea_set)
I understand your frustration, but the PUA case is different: you get lots of people denouncing it who do not as a rule denounce lifestyles very different from their own. Including, for example, some LW members.
BTW, if all the people around me reacted with hostility to unfamiliar ideas, I would, first of all, try to rule out myself as a factor (e.g. maybe I’m annoyingly preachy w/o knowing it?), and if that didn’t clear things up, look for better people. Well, actually, I don’t know if I’d do that, but I’d like to think I would.
I don’t see how it affirms the consequent; could you spell it out logically for me?
My reason for thinking it doesn’t is that I didn’t give a consequent. I gave three premises, all of which I strongly believe are true, and the consequent derived from these (you can find it in lukeprog’s post) is a prediction that pick-up artists will suffer social attacks such as denunciation.
It’s an abductive explanation of the state of the world, to be sure, but it depends on many other premises (evolutionary psychology is an accurate description of the world, other hypotheses are unlikely, etc). At some point you risk rejecting arguments for theories of gravity because they look like affirming the consequent; that is, your theory predicted that the object would fall at a certain rate (9.8 m/s, say) and then the object fell at a certain rate (9.81~ m/s). P therefore Q, Q, P.
Your P->Q is “if PUA works, people will try to denounce PUA”. You affirm Q and deduce P. As I replied to Vladimir_M, this is fallacious unless you invest at least some effort into refuting alternative hypotheses that explain Q. You note it yourself:
Now, your astonishingly reductive claim that all social acts are fitness strategies (this claim is not, in fact, part of evolutionary psychology, whose claims are far-ranging but more modest than that) is on the face of it simply wrong; and several other reasons why people might want to denounce PUA are ready at hand. You have your work cut out for you if you wish to give some convincing evidence for the claim, and against the alternative hypotheses; but before either is done at least to some degree your argument, it seems to me, is wholly unsubstantiated.
P.S. And all this doesn’t take into account my third objection above, which would be true even if you were able to support deducing P from Q in your case.
P.P.S. Thank you for the phrase “abductive reasoning”, I didn’t know that name, or that it was well-studied.
Ah, okay. Yes to that, although of course I prefer to call it abductive reasoning. I got the impression you were saying something like “kill the status of anyone more successful” was being affirmed.
Never claimed all, but I didn’t make it clear enough. The social framework can be used for evolutionary fitness; in this sense, it is an arena for mating struggles. And it is used in this way, and regularly.
“Lacks evidence” is a handy accusation, isn’t it? So is tu quoque.
(I don’t believe the accusation of ‘lacks evidence’ in this context means much more than ’I disapprove of your belief”.)
I’d like to think that this accusation also carries a hint that this is quite an extraordinary claim, and therefore requires extraordinary evidence. At least, that’s the idea I was trying to get across without spelling it out, so as not to appear uncivil.
It really is quite an extraordinarily strong claim, and I’m still using milder language and not saying what I really think about it. It’s much like saying that all social acts are really attempts to sleep with one’s parent of the opposite sex, or that all social acts are actually attempts to get control of the means of production.
There are so many social acts, they are so different in different societies, and so many of them are so obviously shaped by culture and non-universal, that I have never seen any evo-psych theorist try to seriously claim that any and all of them are mating fitness strategies. Typically even the most far-reaching varieties of evo-psych claim that about a wide swath of supposedly universal social behaviors, not all social acts.
The hint was overwhelmingly clear. You were saying that your opponent was the one that needed lots of evidence while trying to present your own position as the default.
With respect to this particular premise your claim of ‘extraordinary’ struck me as incredibly naive. That social behaviours reduce to fitness maximising strategies is trivially obvious (and not all that interesting). There are of course going to be exceptions to the rule, humans being far from completely optimised but this claim:
… combined with things like:
… suggests to me that the ‘reality’ you are appealing to is a purely social reality, not one that is determined by interaction with the world. “Nobody has a clue as to whether PUA works”? What the...? Anyone who has lived among humans with a modicum of introspection would have more than a ‘clue’ that it would work. “Bloody obvious social skills development combined with lots of practice and trial and error’ doesn’t stop being effective just because it gets a TLA applied.
I’m frankly amazed that your refutation wasn’t downvoted to oblivion. It completely misuses the fallacy of ‘affirming the consequent’ and implies a lack of understanding of how Bayesian reasoning works.
Note that I don’t even agree with shockwave’s claim as he specifies it. Your reply is just completely confused and made all the worse by opening with ‘This is a terrible argument’. When you lead with that sort of denunciation (and presumption) the bar gets raised and you really need to follow up with particularly solid reasoning.
No, I didn’t offer any position on how much of human social behavior is fitness strategy and thus didn’t present anything as the default. I pointed out, correctly, that the claim that all social acts are fitness strategies is an extraordinarily strong claim.
Since my opponent’s argument explicitly deduced that PUA-denunciation is a fitness strategy directly from its being a social act, and nothing else, it brooks no exceptions to the rule. If the rule is not universal, the argument falls through.
It’d be interesting to see a reference to a study, a survey, anything other than anecdotal evidence. Something like this, for example.
Oh, I see. Well, you’re welcome to your definition of PUA, I’m not interested in debating it. If you have any data, do share.
Be very wary when you start thinking of a participant in a conversation as an “opponent”. Discussions are not battles, and the goal is not to win; it is to acquire correct beliefs. And/or to make yourself look good. But if you think of it as a battle, you are more likely to reject true some true statements that seem like evidence against your beliefs, and to accept false ones that seem like evidence for them. The consequences of that may be farther reaching than just the conversation they came up in.
I kind of picked up the term from the comment I was replying to; but you are right, I shouldn’t have. Thanks.
I’ve been emailing a few researchers a year trying to develop some interest in studies of the effectiveness of pickup. Unfortunately, until science gets off its ass, we can’t get that particular proof.
Until that time, however, I don’t think it’s correct to say that “nobody has a clue” as to whether pickup works. While wedrifid is being a bit prickly, I think he’s basically correct. It’s a bit strange that on the subject of pickup, the burden of proof suddenly rises, and people suddenly throw out types of evidence that they normally find valuable.
There isn’t scientific evidence for the effectiveness of many teachings, yet these teaching are widely regarded as effective. I doubt that your cooking behavior is informed by the ground-breaking study “The Effect of Hot Stoves on Fingers.” There isn’t scientific evidence that, say… waltz lessons are effective, either. Yet I bet that if you wanted to learn to waltz, you would go around the corner to a dance studio. If you doubt the instructors, you may be able to watch them do demos or performances, or see video footage.
We have evidence of a similar sort for the effectiveness of pickup.
As soon as someone finds a way to put it inside a pill and tack on a patent and there will all sorts of research on the subject. It is a shame that will quite possibly lower the quality of evidence.
A problematic complication is that many pickup instructors suddenly start making huge sums of money by teaching pickup, in a way no waltz instructor ever did. Dishonest charlatans are likely to displace good instructors when the money is good (e.g., Tom Brown Jr.’s wild popularity in primitive skills). If there were good pickup instructors once, they may be gone now.
NOTE: I made a mistake in this analysis due to a brain fart. I fixed it and reposted it.
That’s correct. I’m not particularly interested in defending any particular method, just the notion that pickup in general can be lead many guys to greater success.
I agree that there is plenty of dishonesty in workshops, based on reviews I’ve heard. I’m not so confident that the money is good. Let’s do a little accounting (based on eyeballing a few well-known programs):
Typical price of weekend bootcamp: $2000
Student teacher ratio: 2-3 students to 1 teacher
Time: 8 hours per day, total: 24 hours. 8 hours field instruction and demonstration, and the rest would be seminars
Assuming a 3:1 student teacher ratio, each instructor would pull in $6000 for the bootcamp. $6000 / 24 hours work = $250/hour. Except we need to count the plane flight. ($6000 - $200 ticket) / (24 + 4 hour flight) = $207/hr.
That might seem like a good wage, but remember that PUAs can only run bootcamps on weekends. $207/hr * 50 weekends a year = $10,350/year. Even if you jack up the bootcamp rates to $3k (which some companies do), that’s still just $15k a year per instructor.
Dance instructions can make $40k/year in metropolitan areas working multiple days a week. Accomplished dance instructors can run pricey workshops. While probably not as expensive as pickup workshops, they can have a higher student:teacher ratio. Based on a dance workshop I found in my area, guessing at a student:teacher ratio, gives the following:
$200 per person * 8:1 student:teacher ratio / 12 hours over two days = $133/hr… and the instructors don’t have to travel. With a 10:1 student:teacher ratio, it’s about $166/hr.
Pickup instructors obviously can’t make much from bootcamps. Bootcamps just aren’t scalable. You can only work on the weekend, and you have to be doing marketing and lead generation during the week. PUA gurus must make most of their money from ebooks and DVDs, unless they can do some pricier form of coaching. (Of course, dance instructors who are entrepreneurially minded will have instructional DVDs, too.) Or PUA instructors have day jobs during the week, which burns time for building their pickup business.
Running pickup workshops is clearly not a very profitable business. For teaching students live, it’s not obvious by how much pickup instructors out-earn instructors in the performing arts… if at all. Doing in-field instruction is also extremely grueling, and live demonstrations are high pressure. Pickup instructors must demonstrate the techniques every weekend even when jetlagged, sick, or hoarse from shouting. On top of that, their work is stigmatized.
If anything, lack of quality of pickup instruction is more likely because PUA gurus are poorly compensated, rather than because they are well-compensated.
So… you wanna be a pickup guru?
That’s correct. I’m not particularly interested in defending any particular method, just the notion that pickup in general can be lead many guys to greater success.
I agree that there is plenty of dishonesty in workshops, based on reviews I’ve heard. I’m not so confident that the money is good. Let’s do a little accounting (based on eyeballing a few well-known programs):
Typical price of weekend bootcamp: $2000
Student teacher ratio: 2-3 students to 1 teacher
Time: 8 hours per day, total: 24 hours. 8 hours field instruction and demonstration, and the rest would be seminars
Assuming a 3:1 student teacher ratio, each instructor would pull in $6000 for the bootcamp. $6000 / 24 hours work = $250/hour. Except we need to count the plane flight. ($6000 - $200 ticket) / (24 + 4 hour flight) = $207/hr.
PUAs can only run bootcamps on weekends. $5800 * 50 weekends a year = $290,000/year. However, you are traveling virtually every weekend, and you need a marketing machine to fill seats in your destinations in front of you. And you will have no life. Looking at an actual bootcamp schedule, it seems that the workshops are $3k and the lead instructors are only working 5-19 weeks over half a year = 10-38 weeks a year.
$3k 3 students - $300 airfare = $8700 a bootcamp 25 bootcamps a year = $217,500. This figure is a lot more optimistic than my previous flawed analysis.
Dance instructors can make $40k/year in metropolitan areas working multiple days a week, but it might not be fair to compare the average unknown dance instructor in a city to PUAs who are nationally-known through the news, or who had massive internet marketing machines. Accomplished dance instructors can run pricey workshops. While probably not as expensive as pickup workshops, they can have a higher student:teacher ratio. Based on a dance workshop I found in my area, guessing at a student:teacher ratio, gives the following:
$200 per person * 8:1 student:teacher ratio / 12 hours over two days = $133/hr… and the instructors don’t have to travel. With a 10:1 student:teacher ratio, it’s about $166/hr.
For another comparison, Tony Dovolani of Dancing with the Stars runs dance camps for $600 a person. $600 * 10:1 student:teacher ratio = $6000 / instructor. That overlaps with pickup earnings, though I doubt that Dovolani has the business machine to run his dance camp every weekend, considering that it’s much bigger than a pickup workshop. However, if there is a 10:1 student:teacher ratio (reasonable to assume for ballroom dance classes), and considering that he has 10+ instructors working with him, he isn’t spending 6 hours in a row working like a PUA instructor would.
Both dance and pickup bootcamps suffer from scalability problems, especially pickup because a lower student:teacher ratio is necessary. You can only work on the weekend, and you have to be doing marketing and lead generation during the week. Dance instructors can teach private lessons during the week for $60+ an hour. PUA gurus must make most of their money from ebooks and DVDs, unless they can do some pricier form of coaching. (Of course, dance instructors who are entrepreneurially minded will have instructional DVDs, too.) Or PUA instructors have day jobs during the week, which burns time for building their pickup business.
Running pickup workshops is clearly a very profitable business, but it looks like it’s a lot of work and has a lot of overhead. To fill seats for bootcamps each week, you need a massive marketing and lead generation machine. For teaching students live, pickup seems potentially more profitable than dance, but there is overlap, especially for nationally-known instructors of their respective disciplines. If dance instructors had the marketing machines of pickup companies, the gap would be even narrower.
Doing in-field instruction is also extremely grueling, and live demonstrations are high pressure. Pickup instructors must demonstrate the techniques every weekend even when jetlagged, sick, or hoarse from shouting. On top of that, their work is stigmatized.
Now that I’m using the right numbers, it does seem plausible that pickup instructors can make pretty good sums of money if they work hard, build a strong marketing machine, constantly generate leads, and give up half their weeks traveling. The same is true of many businesses. As for dance, nationally-known pickup instructors are probably in a similar income bracket to nationally-known dance instructors, unless I’m missing something.
In both of those industries, there could be a temptation to skimp on giving 1-on-1 instruction live. Pickup instruction also has additional pressure to perform.
So… you wanna be a pickup guru?
That would be the only line I generally disagree with. Teaching PU is a f’ed up thing. But that also depends a bit on how much your own time is worth.
The problem of choosing a teacher looks very similar to sports. You do not want someone who is a good sport himself, but someone who can train you really well. But to choose someone, you would need to already know the stuff that is taught or at least what to look for.
Many reviews are done in the hyped up after glow right after the workshop. Where I would consider it better to see how someone is doing a year or more after such an event—but that seems to not be too helpful for the business. [edit: corrected a messed up line break in the top line quote]
Huh? Units do not match. If the average weekend bootcamp makes the instructor $6000-$200 = $5800 / weekend, earnings per year should be (up to) $5800 * 50 = $290,000.
Oops, I changed the analysis in the middle. I’ll go back and re-do it.
In The Game, and in Mystery’s book The Pickup Artist, the PUA instructors are shown living in fabulously-expensive mansions, driving $100,000+ cars; and described as having come into that wealth very suddenly after starting to teach pickup. David DeAngelo is believed to make millions of dollars every year.
Do not model your expectations of an art after its teachers. Especially not after the top crowd of those.
You are describing the reference class ‘best selling authors and self publishing education marketers’, not the reference class ‘pickup instructors’. That a field is large enough to support the sale of popular books is hardly evidence against said field.
This claim is false. You do not understand how correct reasoning works.
So would I. This does not make your claim that “Nobody has a clue as to whether PUA works” a sane claim to make. You do not understand how evidence works and are also conflating the claim “there have not been scientific studies about” with “nobody has a clue about”.
Was not a definition. It was a reference to several commonly included aspects of the behaviour and declared strategies of actual real world communities. Not something you can use the ‘dismiss as semantics’ tactic on.
Not helpful.
I think that is a mistake. There are at least 10.000s of people who ran through all kinds of programs or self studied. Some report and increased success rate, some do not. Some do worse. How is that just mere anecdotal evidence?
You may not get the specific evidence you ask for. But you get some.
How is that not anecdotal evidence? You don’t have any clear data. First of all, you don’t have any aggregate statistics on those 10.000s of people—you can only ask a few for their personal opinions. Any self-reporting will be naturally biased towards success. Any information put out by a program will be naturally biased towards success. And you have absolutely no idea how many people studied PUA, tried it, didn’t work for them, went on to try something else. You have no data to work with.
Just think about diets. Every time you think you may have good evidence about PUA working or not working, think about diets. Many millions of people try them every year. You have mountains of people swearing by this diet or the other. Dozens of studies and research programs are being run all the time (and they dutifully report that almost all the fans of this diet or the other gain their weight back). And they still have no clue if low-carbs is better than low-calories, or maybe they’re both good, or maybe one is better for some people and the other for the others, or whatever. Or maybe they have too many clues all going in the different directions. Do diets work?
And you have absolutely no idea how many people studied math, tried it, didn’t work for them, went on to try something else. You have no data to work with.
The usefulness of math is not measured by the amount of people who learn it, or the amount of people who fail to grasp its usefulness, but by the results that those who master it get.
It is not that interesting how many people try it and fail, but if it works, when done right.
I find statistical exploration of social issues rather hard. But that might just be my own ignorance on the tool set real scientists have.
But I see that someone who is sucessfull in one area might not be able to actually explain how he does it. He might have mistaken models, or ignore important factors he is not aware of. But at least he shows something is there.
I agree that if you want to know “effect on women if one has mastered the technique” people who do not try or fail to learn PUA techniques are not of interest. One probably has to study the successes of PUAs to get a complete picture on women’s psyche.
However, if you want to know the “expected payoff if one starts to study the technique” the failure rate given a serious time investment is hugely relevant. If I would have known that 90% of the math students fail within the first semester (note: this is not the case), I would not have tried it at all, as I am not in the top 10% of any measure, however I would construct it.
Note: I do not know what success-rate PUAs claim and/or achieve.
Here is my best attempt to catalog the success rate of the guys with pickup background I’ve known in real life. Of course, in some cases I have imperfect information and don’t know how they are doing, in which case I will guess, and my guess will be conservative (e.g. I will assume that they are the same way I last saw them, rather than improving since then). This sample isn’t representative at all, so take it with it a grain of salt, but it will help other people understand some of my priors about the success of pickup.
Me: Started out with social anxiety disorder. 6 months: substantial social skills improvement. 8 months: lost virginity. Next few years: Stuck on a plateau of getting numbers and kisses, but social skills slowly improving. Since then: going in and out of flings and relationships; currently in a relationship. I could give several other success metrics, but it would sound like I’m bragging.
4 other guys: Began with severe social deficits. Now they have no problem dating and go in and out of flings and relationships. One of them started out as 300 lbs and massively insecure, but lost weight, applied himself, and is now massively popular with women, to the point of sometimes refusing sex because he is looking for relationships.
1: Had one relationship before pickup and was struggling after. Hooked up with several women for a year, met one he liked, dated her for a couple years, and married her.
1: Started out with severe social problems and alienation, along with depression. Lost his virginity, but then struggled for multiple years without a single date. However, in the last year, he greatly improved his fashion sense and started going out multiple times a week. He is now quite socially popular, and several women in our social circle are really into him, though he isn’t attracted to them. Women come up to him in clubs and compliment him. He went out with this one girl who was really into him, but he wasn’t interested in a relationship, so he ended things and they are just friends. He recently had a fling with a girl who was in town.
1: I give him a brush of pickup knowledge around the same time he was getting into kink subculture. Butch dominant women started looking at him like a piece of tasty meat, and were lining up to beat him. He said that the pickup stuff helped him keep up conversations when women approached him, even though he was still having trouble approaching. He is in a relationship now.
1: He had pickup background improve his fashion sense and social skills, but he still has difficulties interacting with women. He is mega-cool around guys, but still feels very awkward talking to women he is interested in. He says that pickup is part of what caused the awkwardness (inverse of the previous guy). He isn’t really applying himself to pickup nowadays, and working on his career.
1: Similar story, except he managed to end up in a long-term relationship, which is now over.
1: Similar story, except he isn’t awkward around women, and gets phone numbers. He is very socially popular, but still has difficulties expressing sexuality with women.
4: Guys with some exposure to pickup, mostly through me. They are still struggling and having minimal success, as far as I know. Their difficulties are easily explained within the pickup paradigm, such as fashion issues, posture (the classic computer slouch), and women reading them as extremely “nerdy” and/or emotionally inexpressive. One of them may have Asperger’s syndrome. Some of these guys have gone on some online dates. These guys all have < 1 year experience with pickup.
Here are some interesting results, out of these 15 guys:
5 (33%): Massive sexual success
7 (47%): At least one relationship
5 (33%): Still significant lack of success at sexual contact or dates
6 (40%): Still lack of consistent success at sexual contact or dates currently, but has had some success in those areas after studying pickup
2 (13%): Lack of consistent success, even though they have at least average fashion sense and social skills
15 (100%): Minor social skills improvement
11 (73%): Major social skills improvement
1 (7%): Married
The main variables that appear to correlate with success (order of causation unclear):
Fashion sense, particularly non-nerdy presentation. I doubt this variable fully explains success, but it may gate improvement in other areas.
Social skills and self-confidence
Years of experience (all of the highly successful guys have multiple years of experience, and some had plateaus where they struggled)
For a sample of almost all nerdy guys with social deficits, this distribution of outcomes is probably pretty impressive, relative to the alternative (it’s quite possible that by now, I would have been on a couple dates with a few women and still be a virgin). Only one guy reports pickup exacerbating his struggles.
My limited empirical evidence does suggest that success with women as a function of attractiveness is a step function. There can be periods of rapid improvement, and plateaus of little progress. There is very much a feeling of “leveling up” as things come together.
For instance, whenever I’ve seen a guy hit both above average fashion sense, and above average social skills, the attention he gets from women suddenly jumps. It’s as if female attention is a multiplicative factor of different components of attraction.
The plateaus can be tough, especially if you start out on one. However, improvements in social skills during those times can keep you motivated.
Of course, one of the issues with estimating the effects of pickup knowledge is that none of this is placebo tested. Since PU itself teaches that self-confidence is crucial having a method for meeting women that you believe works should by itself produce positive results- especially for people who were previously too anxious to walk up to a stranger and say hello.
Also, those correlates your reporting are pretty general and 101-level. I’d be a little more suspicious of the efficacy of the more ‘advanced’ routines and techniques in the PUA literature.
(Though as usual I pretty much agree with you)
You know, I have this great cure for scurvy. But I cannot tell you about it, since it has not been properly double blind tested yet.
I have a great cure for the flu. Take some Muscovy Duck offal and dilute it to 1 part in 100^200 with water.
Did it work on the one guy you tried it on?
Yup! Only took like 3 days with bed rest!
Placebo testing would be hilarious. Isn’t that a standard comedy plot? A shy man asks for pickup and courting tips, gets terrible ones, and implements them with disastrous results?
Not safe for work.
Medicine holds itself to the standard “do better than placebo”. I am not sure if it is fair to hold PUA to the same standard.
You don’t think every professional pick-up artist/dating coach would say their material works better than placebo?
I realize of course we’re not talking about formal science but we still need to be aware of the limitations of personal anecdotes versus controlled studies. Who cares if it is fair?
You might be interested to know that Style says roughly one out of twenty people who start to learn PUA reach a high level of skill.
I personally agree with Martin however; especially in relation to diets. Diets DO work, they are just difficult to implement, changing your lifestyle often is; that applies to exercise, studying a new language or anything that requires a large time investment before you see payoffs. The math comparison is especially appropriate. In this way PUA is no different from any other self improvement course that you might decide to undertake.
That depends on what you mean by “work”. If your intent is to improve your life through achieving some goal, but the side effects of a strategy cause a net cost in quality of life even if the intermediate goal is achieved, then I’d say that the method doesn’t work.
That’s two ways beside the point. They work by the most reasonable and common definition, and often do so without causing a net cost in quality of life. Even if diets don’t suit a majority of people, they work, unlike reciting the alphabet backwards before you go to sleep.
Furthermore, if a procedure, perfectly applied, yield no significant results with 99% of the population, but clearly is effective upon the remaining 1%, it’s not a sham. It might not be the most efficient procedure if you can’t distinguish who it will work with beforehand, but it still works. Even if diet’s aren’t in such a category, the point that something can be should be accepted, and your argument should be focused on the strongest possible case.
Bear in mind that a diet only ‘works’ if you actually successfully keep to them in the long term. Only a minority of people stick to diets in the long term. That’s where choosing diets based on convenience and ease of compliance becomes more important than raw effectiveness.
Bear in mind that science only ‘works’ if you actually successfully use it over the long term. Only a minority of people stick to science in the long term. That’s where choosing knowledge-gathering techniques based on convenience and ease of compliance becomes more important than raw effectiveness.
I see your point (which is valid), but mine is that the cost of using a method does not reduce the effectiveness of that method, just the number of people who apply it. One might say that it is too costly to uniformly apply science, diets or PUA, but that’s a different statement than saying that they don’t work.
I thought your reference to conventional ‘works’ was a valid reply to Nancy’s “but maybe it will also make you sad or otherwise have external costs” point. Convention would call that ‘works’ even though naturally it is a cost to consider. (For yet another ‘although’ I expect people who find a diet that works in the mid to long term to also enjoy improved experience in other aspects of life so I don’t think there is much of a balance to be had there at all.)
What I would not agree with is the complete exclusion of psychological considerations from deciding whether a diet ‘works’ or not. For example for a bare minimum ‘diet’ I would argue that “have a breakfast including at least 30g of protein within 30m of waking up” works far more effectively than “eat 10% less”. This is just based on how humans work at a psychological and physiological level.
I actually consider science to be a good analogy to go by and not at all as the ad absurdum imply. ‘Science’ is the application of various traditional rules and limits upon rational thinking that discard all sorts of reasoning that is valid for the purpose of avoiding some of the more drastic human failure modes and biases. By limiting evidence and officially sanctioned persuasion via some formulaic rules it makes it somewhat harder for money, politics and ego to sabotage epistemic progress. (Unfortunately it is still not hard enough).
What if your intent is to lose weight? You’re pre-defining “work” for the benefit of your argument.
A good place to deconstruct my own argument.
The math comparison lacks in one important piece: Math is clearly defined, and has standard textbooks. If you ask around for recommendations on how to learn math you get similar responses, and will end up learning similar things—up to a certain degree. There is only one type of math! In general people agree on what math is, and what not.
PU as well as PD is a very broad, not clearly defined subject, that contains a mash-up of many other topics. It is contradictory. Done by amateurs who generally do not care about scientific results. You get advice that goes against those transported by the mainstream (which we on LW are somewhat used to in other contexts.) But you also find the statement that the subjects of your interest will generally give you bad advice and do not even know what works for them. As will your peers, your family, potential natural friends, the media, and anyone else who you could possibly ask. That makes for a very bad heuristic in regards to its truthfulness.
And then there is the annoying property of PD advice, that it is not only difficult to actually get, but that it also hurts. Sometimes we carry gaping holes that really hurt our social life, and no one has the guts to tell us, since they are afraid of a bad reaction.
One easy to understand example is trying to tell a colleague or friend that he needs to do something about his smell.
I am not aware of a safe way to navigate this. It would be interesting to see real scientists, or science minded people undertake this exploration. But there are way to many possibilities to have it go wrong.
PU does contain basilisks. So handle with care. And do not believe any one particular source completely.
The second sentence here is true, but the first one is false. There is mainstream math, and then there are alternatives. Of course, there are insane crackpot ideas, but there are also alternative forms of mathematics that are studied by serious researchers who earn tenure for it and prove valid theorems. Buzzwords to search for include “intuitionism”, “constructive mathematics”, “predicatvism”, “finitism”, and “nonclassical mathematics” generally.
This mostly only affects things from after the 19th century, however, so nothing significant about the mathematics that most people learn in school. Even going on to more advanced material, there is a very definite mainstream to follow, so this doesn’t really affect your point; this is just a hobby horse of mine.
And Though shall get a geek point for it. I was kind of waiting for someone to point this out.
And I should have mentioned “experimental mathematics”, which is really different! This term can be interpreted in weak and strong ways; the former, in which experiments are a preliminary to proof, is normal, but the latter, in which massive computer-generated experimental results are accepted as a substitute for proof when proof seems unlikely, is different. The key point is that most true theorems that we can understand have no proofs that we can understand, a fact that can itself be proved (at least if if you use length of the text as a proxy for whether we can understand it).
Oooh, PU basilisks. Where? Show me!
Are you sure you want me to do that on a public forum? I do not want to have my account deleted for posting dangerous stuff.
Then message me. The concept of a PU basilisk seems unlikely to me but still somewhat intriguing. The closest things I can imagine are in the form of disillusionment with ideals.
It would be interesting to have a collection of basilisks somewhere, like an ammo dump for a mimetic war.
Absolutely! Maybe not on lesswrong, that might make some people cry. But I’d love to have a list somewhere else. And this can be considered an open request to send any basilisk spotted in the wild to me personally for examination.
I’ve yet to see a basilisk that was remotely intimidating to me. And would like to be able to further improve my resistance to exposure to new ‘basilisks’ while they are framed as basilisks so I am even less likely to be vulnerable to them in the wild.
A superintelligence would almost certainly be able to construct sentences that could hack my brain and damage it. Some humans could if they were able to put me in a suitable social or physical environment and ensure ongoing exposure (and environment and exposure are far more important than the abstract concepts conveyed). But things like “Roko’s Basilisk” are just cute. You can tame them and keep them as pets. :)
My perspective on this is very similar to yours. If you were sent any interesting PU basilisks, would you please forward them to me?
Being careful not to criticise what was sent to me (and by so doing discourage others) I don’t think what I was sent fits the term ‘basilisk’. Instead I got some well thought out considerations and potential pitfalls that people may fall into along a PUA journey. In fact I think people would appreciate them being spoken publicly. Rather than “things that will kill you just by looking at them” they are things that you are better off looking at so you can avoid falling into them. Obviously the exceptional case is the pessimistic person who is looking for excuses not to try—which is not an uncommon mindset.
I would not repost them here (that would be discourteous) but I suggest that if the author did post his thoughts publicly they would be well received (ie. would get an 8+karma rating if the comment was not buried too deeply to gain exposure.)
I violently agree with all of this. Have you seen any basilisk-like ideas besides roko’s? Roko’s at least looks like a real basilisk until you think about it. Everything else I’ve seen doesn’t come close to living up to the name.
‘Violent agreement’ seems to have been adopted for use in situations in which the participants have been arguing aggressively only to discover that they agree on the substantive issues. For a term that hasn’t been hijacked as jargon I go with “vehemently”. It has a more visceral feel to it too. :)
Roko’s is the most interesting I’ve seen too. Although for some people a combination of Pascal’s Wager and certain religious doctrines about children not being held accountable for their beliefs until a certain age would do it. Once again it is the ability to apply abstract reasoning while at the same time the naivety and weakness in following the rational conclusion correctly that would cause the problem.
Anyone have a really solid working definition for ‘basilisk’ as we use it here?
Am I supposed to be able to see it from just this? Assuming it’s not the kind of thing that would hurt LW posters can you explain? Otherwise, pm it?
One interesting idea is that it seems plausible to create basilisks that only effect your memetic/cognitively different enemies- perhaps the only way to avoid the harm of the basilisk is to deconvert from your religion/ideology. A basilisk that only worked on, say, religious fundamentalists would be a really powerful weapon (I’m not suggesting that the basilisk be capable of killing anyone, necessarily).
Pascal’s Wager → Accept popular religion (Disclaimer: I did label these people naive and with an inability to take reasoning all the way to a sane conclusion. Nevertheless, it works on some intelligent people better than on some unintelligent people.)
There exist popular religious doctrines that God will send young children to heaven regardless because they are too young to have been able to do the conversion thing. I think the “Age Of Accountability” concept may be related.
If a child is not likely to convert to the ‘True’ religion in adulthood then they are (believed to be) likely to go to Hell instead of Heaven if they grow up.
Such a child would go to Heaven if murdered while young but Hell if they grow up.
Such a child would be better off in they are murdered.
Therefore...
A quick google on “do young children go to hell?” led me to this, excerpt:
(The scripture quotes in question were totally reaching by the way. But that’s the whole point of theology.)
Knowledge or concepts, the comprehension of which will cause one significant disulitly.
That is over-broad unfortunately. The concept needs to be distinguished from “ugly truths” where the disutility comes from an emotional reaction to how far from ideal the world is.
Knowledge or concepts, the comprehension of which may cause substantial damage to one’s instrumental rationality.
Do we include concepts selected to elicit a maximal emotional response? Such as particularly Funny Jokes or things so sad that they would drive most people to suicide? They do seem to be a different concept but still deserve a similar title. (If not basilisk then at least cockatrice or one of the Gorgons).
I think I know what wedrifid is getting at, but I don’t think Pascal’s Wager would do it. Pascal’s Wager argues that one should act as if one believes in God because the costs are low and the potential benefits (Heaven) are high.
But in order to get to the particular failure state at which I think wedrifid is hinting, you can’t just be betting on God—you have to be absolutely certain that Heaven exists and that its joys outweigh on every axis everything that Earth has to offer. Most people, no matter what they say, are not that certain, which is why we don’t routinely slaughter infants in order to ensure their blameless souls entry into Heaven. (Similar logic has been invoked to rationalize murders—such as innocent deaths at witch trials—but in these cases, as a justification pasted on after the fact rather than an honest motive towards murder.)
No, absolute certainty is definitely not required. The cost is increased so a proportionate increase in
probability*payoffis required. But this is still all dwarfed by the arbitrarily large payoffs inherent in religious questions. The whole point of ‘afterlife’ focussed doctrine is to encourage the flock to discount all ‘earthly’ matters as trivial compared to eternal questions.No, that would not be a rational reason to refrain from the slaughter. The difference between 90% sure and absolutely certain isn’t really much of a big deal when you have the chance of flipping the sign bit of an arbitrarily large disulility payoff (Hell). A 0.05% hunch would be more than enough.
Rational agents that really have arbitrarily large utility payoffs floating around in their utility function will inevitably do things that look insane to us.
Right, but now you’ve left the standard formulation of Pascal’s Wager. The original Pascal’s Wager includes the stipulation that one loses nothing by behaving as if God were real. To get to a point where you’re willing to kill kids, obviously you have to go a lot further—you must be ready to incur substantial costs as a consequence of belief.
I am sure that this is possible, but wonder why it has not been done yet—or at least appeared on my radar. Might be one of the more darker arts, and a very interesting one!
Creating basilisks is hard- as evidenced by the fact that we have no recorded instance of one ever existing.
For similar reasons, good bodyguards—the kind that would take a bullet for you—are hard to find. (apologies to Magic: The Gathering)
Or: the only basilisks that are easy to create are those that directly disable the host’s ability to spread them.
Is it time to link to Monty Python yet?
No. It would be better to first develop defenses against them. Basilisks seem to only affect people of a certain mental capacity able to understand and process them. If you look up the Charles Langan interview, or his writings, or this Ted/Unabomba guy you see how really bright people can go wrong.
I would hate LW to contribute to that.
I want LWers and myself to not only have a realistic view of reality, but also be able to life in it and be happy and productive.
I’m not sure how you develop defenses to Basilisks without know what they are. Unless we get lucky and there is a fully general countermeasure.
I was just talking about collecting them though- it’s another question entirely whether or not the list should be public. One doesn’t usually leave ammo dumps unlocked.
And, probably more importantly, without certain other mental capacities that allow them to handle information appropriately.
If you tell wedrifid privately, then you have to promise to tell me.
I have a few minor basilisks (not from PU alone, but from combining PU with psychometrics or feminism). Nothing so bad that I think it would make people want to ban me, but it might be disconcerting and depressing for many people, and some of it I’m still thinking through.
Did the two annihilate each other, destroying swathes of your cerebral cortex?
Or I’ll tell you. :)
Where “those who master it” is defined by “the intersection of people who tried it, and people who get good results”.
Anatoly’s observations are spot on, whereas MartinB’s ignore the problems with self-selection bias, and could also be used as a defense of psychotherapy, ouija boards, and picking lottery numbers from fortune cookies.
More importantly, we don’t even have evidence that pickup artist techniques work for anyone! All we have are testimonials from people highly-incentivized to make them. Is there any factual evidence that David DeAngelo, Neil Strauss, or any of these PUAs actually have slept with many beautiful women?
It would be hard to provide such evidence—but that doesn’t mean we can just trust them.
Yes. Video evidence and an overwhelming abundance of eyewitness reports. Including reports from women who they have dated. All of this is evidence that someone could assert is faked or engineered by some ingenious plot with payed actors and widespread bribes. Technically.
If we are going to throw about insulting analogies for rhetorical effect then a more appropriate one would be “moon landing”.
Oh I should add, that it does not mean that the people who achieve success know how they do it. Just that.
I noticed how in many cases successful people not only have a hard time explaining how the are successful, but honestly have a mistaken view about it. Unconscious competence.
I’ve seen much more mockery of PUA than denunciation, mostly with the sort of attitude one sees displayed towards, say, furries (who are a prototypically unthreatening group.) But perhaps this depends on the corner of the internet you’re from.
Mockery is mostly for attack. I’m not sure how the mode of attack matters.
It’s true that most people don’t seem genuinely disturbed by the existence of furries, though. And it must be true that some people mock PUA without feeling threatened, or even without intending to raise their status or lower PUAers’. And in particular cases, for we do love to laugh at those who overreach (are more confident of their status than we think they can justify).
Mockery of another group without intending to raise one’s own status? That only seems possible if we include lack of self awareness in evaluating ‘intent’. Isn’t that just Human Behavior 101?
You’re right. I was so struck by that, I almost deleted the clause entirely, instead of weakening it with “intending to”.
I have to disagree with the principle, even if the conclusion is correct. I could argue similarly that atheists denounce god because it’s a successful paradigm, and therefore threatening, and so it must be true.
God paradigms are not related to evolutionary fitness the way pick-up artistry is. Atheists do not denounce God because it is a successful paradigm (they denounce it because it’s wrong, its popularity or success only determines the scale or intensity of denouncement). “And so it must be true” is not a correct paraphrase of “weak evidence that it works”.
You could argue it. You couldn’t win the argument.
I have to side with davidmanheim here.
You asserted your prior belief that denunciation is a social act of reducing the status of things viewed as more successful, and therefore concluded that people’s denunciation of PUA is “weak evidence” that it works.
As I can tell the implicit reasoning goes “People denounce things they see as successful; people denounce X; therefore people probably see X as successful; things people see as successful probably work; therefore X probably works.”
The same line of reasoning can apply to any X that people denounce. Davidmanheim applied it to religion, which is denounced by atheists.
Your reply was that religion is different, because religion also belongs to the class of wrong beliefs. But that doesn’t mean your earlier argument doesn’t apply, it merely means that other arguments apply as well. If your argument is evidence for PUA, it’s evidence for any denounced X.
As you said initially, it’s weak evidence. I agree. In fact, I’d say it’s negligible evidence, in both cases.
This was not part of my reasoning. It was specifically an evo-psych-style argument; people denounce things they see as increasing the evolutionary fitness of an opponent. The principle in question is Kill the status of anyone more successful than you, which is also why creationists trying to make science look bad (instead of finding evidence for their beliefs) is weak evidence that science more successful at explaining the world, and in full generality it is the principle behind ad hominem attacks.
Many females denounce PUA. One can EvPsych explain this, but with a different explanation.
It ain’t evo-psych, but SarahC’s comment is basically the explanation for why women react badly to PUA.