I very much agree with siduri’s comment, as well as grouchymusicologist’s below. I don’t know for sure which way the pros and cons of the proposed post go, but I do think it’s important to consider not just the possible benefit to the current “average Less Wrong Reader” but also the other effects Siduri and grouchymusicologist identify—as Siduri says, not attracting women to the community/possibly driving women away, and as grouchymusicologist says, communicating the message “that the typical reader of LW is 20-34 and heterosexual and single and male and we prefer it that way.” I think those effects are real—I would personally feel that LW was just a tiny bit less welcoming with such a post—even if I don’t have a good sense of how to measure them.
I’m torn because I’m sure that lukeprog’s post would probably benefit some members of the LW community. I’ve read enough of the comments about PUA here to recognize that the PUA community is diverse and some of the voices that are most known/infamous outside of the community (e.g., Roissy) are not representative of what a lot of members of the PUA community (and certainly the LW community) study and admire.
I’m also sympathetic that to those PUA members who don’t like the Roissy-type approach, it must be frustrating to be lumped in with him. But, at least from what I can tell, that kind of PUA is all a lot of people casually familiar with the subject know, and so the mere mention of PUA evokes negative feelings for a lot of people. So I fear lukeprog’s post would evoke those feelings and turn people away from LW, even if it also had the more agreeable effect of providing more balanced information to those who stuck past the original negative reaction to “PUA” and read on.
Anyway, lukeprog, if you’re collecting votes, I would have to vote no. At any rate, thank you for asking for input from the community.
“that the typical reader of LW is 20-34 and heterosexual and single and male and we prefer it that way.” I think those effects are real—I would personally feel that LW was just a tiny bit less welcoming with such a post—even if I don’t have a good sense of how to measure them.
This is a very good point, the disclaimer itself hammers home some information that may move the reader to a certain impression of what LW is.
In some ways I prefer not to know too much about the typical LW reader. Especially if I learned their political affiliations it might activate unwarranted biases against them.
You’ve hit some key points here. I’m certain the post would be helpful to lots of Less Wrongers. I’m just as certain it would alienate many female readers, even if the post is not sexist apart from using terms that are usually identified with sexism.
I’d never heard of Roissy, but I do hate being lumped in with Mystery and company. And yet, I understand tha is the public face of PUA.
It’s also annoying that a discussion of basic science of human sexual attraction response could be such a mind-killer merely because it’s framed in terms of PUA. Are people really that bad at focusing on the material? If somebody was reading the exact same material in a book on human sexuality, I doubt it would offend them at all.
But ah, such is humankind!
Which is not to suggest I’ve transcended my humanity, it’s just that, being male and all, this subject doesn’t push my buttons that way.
If you don’t like what happens when you frame your material in terms of PUA, try a different framing. Write a post about the science of attraction, based on published research, and call it a post about the science of attraction. Or write about how social skills can help people be more successful, and portray it as a post about whatever specific social skills you’re discussing. You could even include examples from the romantic/dating domain in your post, or mention that the experiences of pickup artists are a source of some of your information (possibly with a link http://lesswrong.com/lw/298/more_art_less_stink_taking_the_pu_out_of_pua/), but the focus should be on the specific skills or techniques and the ways in which they’re beneficial. If you start the post with a one-paragraph summary, that summary shouldn’t need to devote more than a few words to romance or contain the word “pickup.”
This post proposal that you’ve written encourages people to focus on PUA. It is framed in terms of pickup artistry from the first sentence, it has “seduction” in the title, and it repeatedly mentions things like “how to trick women into bed” and “getting excellent and frequent sex” (even if only to disclaim them). As other commenters have described, the offputting aspects of PUA are front and center, even if you try to distinguish yourself from them. If your version of PUA is about “holistic self-improvement” and not the sleazy stuff, then don’t just tell us that, show it by making your post about that good stuff from the first sentence on.
Sure. I frame it in terms of PUA because that’s where I learned most of those skills from, with a tiny role for Toastmasters. But that’s an accident of personal history.
What do people think of this? The commenters here are correct that a post on social skills, or one on self-presentation, or one on human mating behavior, need not mention PUA or seduction at all. Would such posts be appropriate for Less Wrong?
There have been a number of highly regarded “instrumental rationality” posts about how to effectively achieve one’s goals. These are mostly clustered around productivity (akrasia, et al), but not exclusively. I can’t see why posts about how to effectively socialize would be off-topic.
That said, there is enough reflexive “Dark Arts” rejection around here that you might get more community support if you turn it around and frame it as how to best resist the techniques that other people might use to effectively socialize with you, and instead remain isolated and uninfluenced.
That said, there is enough reflexive “Dark Arts” rejection around here
Well the posts that deal directly with the darkarts don’t get anywhere near this negative a reaction. As such I believe the issue is not dark arts per se but rather that they are discussed in a way that by implication lowers the status of women.
The two questions to ask yourself are 1) whether your post can avoid the bad stuff involving PUA which is offputting to so many people, and 2) whether your post will have enough good stuff to be interesting/useful/relevant.
Most of the criticisms and “nay” votes here have been about question #1. If you can successfully avoid that minefield we can move on to question 2. I think there could be a lot of interest (and even if there isn’t, it’s not a big deal). Posts on social skills or self-presentation fit with LW themes of instrumental rationality & self-improvement (as seen in the akrasia posts). They could also fit the theme of self-awareness (as seen in the Luminosity sequence) - in this case, being aware of the impression that you make on other people and the impact that your behavior has on the interaction. There has also been (highly upvoted) expressed interest in social-skills-related content, both in the comments here and in the More Art, Less Stink post.
If you want, you could post a one paragraph summary of a possible post to get feedback on whether people are interested. You could also try asking yourself questions like “Would people outside of the target PUA demographic of young men find this post interesting & relevant?” and “Is this post relevant to many different domains of life, not just dating?”
it has “seduction” in the title, and it repeatedly mentions things like “how to trick women into bed” and “getting excellent and frequent sex”
I understand the objection to these sorts of language, but in the case of the first example, what exactly should be used instead? What is the value-neutral term for “seduction?” Unfortunately, I’m not sure we have one.
When you are attempting to seduce someone, what is it exactly that you want to get them to do? How can you tell when you’ve succeeded?
“Get them to have sex with me whether they want to or not” is an answer with different implications than “reduce the obstacles that impede them from acting on their desire to have sex with me” or “encourage them to act on their own desires in general” or “create a desire in them to have sex with me” or etc.
Admittedly, not all of those are value-neutral either. If the thing being talked about is negatively or positively valued, it makes sense that the word used is as well… to eliminate that by blurring the connection between word and referent does not improve communication.
It’s also annoying that a discussion of basic science of human sexual attraction response could be such a mind-killer merely because it’s framed in terms of PUA.
Perhaps you could refocus your proposal in this direction? If you’re interested in writing it, a review of the experimental work on the psychology underlying human mating behaviors, both male and female, would be more broadly useful and should be better received than giving dating advice to a subset of the community. It would be entirely in line with the Less Wrong theme of understanding human motivation as it actually is, no different to the discussion of biases and heuristics, or status and signaling. I couldn’t say the same about a how-to guide for manipulating women, and I’m glad you decided not to pursue it.
Are people really that bad at focusing on the material? If somebody was reading the exact same material in a book on human sexuality, I doubt it would offend them at all.
Many people are sufficiently bad at focusing on material that they would be offended even then.
The whole nice guy vs. nice guy(tm) debate is rather interesting in itself, I feel that many critiques of gender relations (feminist and otherwise) seem like low hanging fruit for rationality and should be discussed more here when not interfering with the primary objective. I mostly agree with the article you linked too (I’ve read similar texts on the phenomena from a female perspective in the past).
However let me just point out that game does make such nice guys (tm) genuinely nicer even if they don’t see it as such. I’m not sure how relevant this is to a debate about PUA, especially since there is overlaps between the PUA concept of a average frustrated chump and a nice guy(tm). There is even overlap in the kind of criticism and arguments both groups use against the demographic.
To explain what I mean let me just comment a few examples of the top of my head. From the wiki entry you link to:
Some aspects are due to the different socialisation of men and women:
that women are culturally trained to be gentle when rejecting men sexually, and that “you’d be a great boyfriend for someone else” and “you’re like a brother to me” may be signals that the woman knows of the attraction and is trying to gently let the man down and encourage him to find other people he is attracted to, rather than callous obliviousness
I have yet to see a example where any PUA system has advised against interpreting such a statement as anything but a polite statement of disinterest on the part of a woman.
Or:
A corollary to these criticisms are that no one owes you love or sex. Loneliness and unfufilled desires are tragic and painful but feminists argue that consent is the only ethical relationship underpinning, and that requiring mutual consent for relationships and for sex will mean that some people do not get their romantic or sexual desires fulfilled at any given time.
Is this really a view incompatible with PUA? There is s a culture in the PUA community where about any sense of bitterness and entitlement on the part of men who don’t achieve success in their pursuit of sex is derided. The whole mindset that women are the one making the wrong choice is itself anathema to the basic principle of finding what women reward and value and becoming more like that.
Even Roissy in DC who is far from a pretty picture is clearly in line with this: “No one owes you sex or love. Deal with it and stop bitching.”
Men’s Rights activists have formulated long lists of criticism of PUA and many even actively shun it because they claim that PUA is all about men conforming to female desires in behaviour far more than women conform to male desires of behaviour and proclaimed the whole thing gynocentric.
I very much agree with siduri’s comment, as well as grouchymusicologist’s below. I don’t know for sure which way the pros and cons of the proposed post go, but I do think it’s important to consider not just the possible benefit to the current “average Less Wrong Reader” but also the other effects Siduri and grouchymusicologist identify—as Siduri says, not attracting women to the community/possibly driving women away, and as grouchymusicologist says, communicating the message “that the typical reader of LW is 20-34 and heterosexual and single and male and we prefer it that way.” I think those effects are real—I would personally feel that LW was just a tiny bit less welcoming with such a post—even if I don’t have a good sense of how to measure them.
I’m torn because I’m sure that lukeprog’s post would probably benefit some members of the LW community. I’ve read enough of the comments about PUA here to recognize that the PUA community is diverse and some of the voices that are most known/infamous outside of the community (e.g., Roissy) are not representative of what a lot of members of the PUA community (and certainly the LW community) study and admire.
I’m also sympathetic that to those PUA members who don’t like the Roissy-type approach, it must be frustrating to be lumped in with him. But, at least from what I can tell, that kind of PUA is all a lot of people casually familiar with the subject know, and so the mere mention of PUA evokes negative feelings for a lot of people. So I fear lukeprog’s post would evoke those feelings and turn people away from LW, even if it also had the more agreeable effect of providing more balanced information to those who stuck past the original negative reaction to “PUA” and read on.
Anyway, lukeprog, if you’re collecting votes, I would have to vote no. At any rate, thank you for asking for input from the community.
This is a very good point, the disclaimer itself hammers home some information that may move the reader to a certain impression of what LW is.
In some ways I prefer not to know too much about the typical LW reader. Especially if I learned their political affiliations it might activate unwarranted biases against them.
You’ve hit some key points here. I’m certain the post would be helpful to lots of Less Wrongers. I’m just as certain it would alienate many female readers, even if the post is not sexist apart from using terms that are usually identified with sexism.
I’d never heard of Roissy, but I do hate being lumped in with Mystery and company. And yet, I understand tha is the public face of PUA.
It’s also annoying that a discussion of basic science of human sexual attraction response could be such a mind-killer merely because it’s framed in terms of PUA. Are people really that bad at focusing on the material? If somebody was reading the exact same material in a book on human sexuality, I doubt it would offend them at all.
But ah, such is humankind!
Which is not to suggest I’ve transcended my humanity, it’s just that, being male and all, this subject doesn’t push my buttons that way.
If you don’t like what happens when you frame your material in terms of PUA, try a different framing. Write a post about the science of attraction, based on published research, and call it a post about the science of attraction. Or write about how social skills can help people be more successful, and portray it as a post about whatever specific social skills you’re discussing. You could even include examples from the romantic/dating domain in your post, or mention that the experiences of pickup artists are a source of some of your information (possibly with a link http://lesswrong.com/lw/298/more_art_less_stink_taking_the_pu_out_of_pua/), but the focus should be on the specific skills or techniques and the ways in which they’re beneficial. If you start the post with a one-paragraph summary, that summary shouldn’t need to devote more than a few words to romance or contain the word “pickup.”
This post proposal that you’ve written encourages people to focus on PUA. It is framed in terms of pickup artistry from the first sentence, it has “seduction” in the title, and it repeatedly mentions things like “how to trick women into bed” and “getting excellent and frequent sex” (even if only to disclaim them). As other commenters have described, the offputting aspects of PUA are front and center, even if you try to distinguish yourself from them. If your version of PUA is about “holistic self-improvement” and not the sleazy stuff, then don’t just tell us that, show it by making your post about that good stuff from the first sentence on.
Sure. I frame it in terms of PUA because that’s where I learned most of those skills from, with a tiny role for Toastmasters. But that’s an accident of personal history.
What do people think of this? The commenters here are correct that a post on social skills, or one on self-presentation, or one on human mating behavior, need not mention PUA or seduction at all. Would such posts be appropriate for Less Wrong?
There have been a number of highly regarded “instrumental rationality” posts about how to effectively achieve one’s goals. These are mostly clustered around productivity (akrasia, et al), but not exclusively. I can’t see why posts about how to effectively socialize would be off-topic.
That said, there is enough reflexive “Dark Arts” rejection around here that you might get more community support if you turn it around and frame it as how to best resist the techniques that other people might use to effectively socialize with you, and instead remain isolated and uninfluenced.
I’d be saddened if that turned out to be true.
Well the posts that deal directly with the dark arts don’t get anywhere near this negative a reaction. As such I believe the issue is not dark arts per se but rather that they are discussed in a way that by implication lowers the status of women.
The two questions to ask yourself are 1) whether your post can avoid the bad stuff involving PUA which is offputting to so many people, and 2) whether your post will have enough good stuff to be interesting/useful/relevant.
Most of the criticisms and “nay” votes here have been about question #1. If you can successfully avoid that minefield we can move on to question 2. I think there could be a lot of interest (and even if there isn’t, it’s not a big deal). Posts on social skills or self-presentation fit with LW themes of instrumental rationality & self-improvement (as seen in the akrasia posts). They could also fit the theme of self-awareness (as seen in the Luminosity sequence) - in this case, being aware of the impression that you make on other people and the impact that your behavior has on the interaction. There has also been (highly upvoted) expressed interest in social-skills-related content, both in the comments here and in the More Art, Less Stink post.
If you want, you could post a one paragraph summary of a possible post to get feedback on whether people are interested. You could also try asking yourself questions like “Would people outside of the target PUA demographic of young men find this post interesting & relevant?” and “Is this post relevant to many different domains of life, not just dating?”
I wouldn’t have any problem with posts like that.
I understand the objection to these sorts of language, but in the case of the first example, what exactly should be used instead? What is the value-neutral term for “seduction?” Unfortunately, I’m not sure we have one.
When you are attempting to seduce someone, what is it exactly that you want to get them to do? How can you tell when you’ve succeeded?
“Get them to have sex with me whether they want to or not” is an answer with different implications than “reduce the obstacles that impede them from acting on their desire to have sex with me” or “encourage them to act on their own desires in general” or “create a desire in them to have sex with me” or etc.
Admittedly, not all of those are value-neutral either. If the thing being talked about is negatively or positively valued, it makes sense that the word used is as well… to eliminate that by blurring the connection between word and referent does not improve communication.
Perhaps you could refocus your proposal in this direction? If you’re interested in writing it, a review of the experimental work on the psychology underlying human mating behaviors, both male and female, would be more broadly useful and should be better received than giving dating advice to a subset of the community. It would be entirely in line with the Less Wrong theme of understanding human motivation as it actually is, no different to the discussion of biases and heuristics, or status and signaling. I couldn’t say the same about a how-to guide for manipulating women, and I’m glad you decided not to pursue it.
Many people are sufficiently bad at focusing on material that they would be offended even then.
The whole nice guy vs. nice guy(tm) debate is rather interesting in itself, I feel that many critiques of gender relations (feminist and otherwise) seem like low hanging fruit for rationality and should be discussed more here when not interfering with the primary objective. I mostly agree with the article you linked too (I’ve read similar texts on the phenomena from a female perspective in the past).
However let me just point out that game does make such nice guys (tm) genuinely nicer even if they don’t see it as such. I’m not sure how relevant this is to a debate about PUA, especially since there is overlaps between the PUA concept of a average frustrated chump and a nice guy(tm). There is even overlap in the kind of criticism and arguments both groups use against the demographic.
To explain what I mean let me just comment a few examples of the top of my head. From the wiki entry you link to:
I have yet to see a example where any PUA system has advised against interpreting such a statement as anything but a polite statement of disinterest on the part of a woman.
Or:
Is this really a view incompatible with PUA? There is s a culture in the PUA community where about any sense of bitterness and entitlement on the part of men who don’t achieve success in their pursuit of sex is derided. The whole mindset that women are the one making the wrong choice is itself anathema to the basic principle of finding what women reward and value and becoming more like that.
Even Roissy in DC who is far from a pretty picture is clearly in line with this: “No one owes you sex or love. Deal with it and stop bitching.”
Men’s Rights activists have formulated long lists of criticism of PUA and many even actively shun it because they claim that PUA is all about men conforming to female desires in behaviour far more than women conform to male desires of behaviour and proclaimed the whole thing gynocentric.