That not only isn’t the kind of love I’m interested in achieving, it bears no resemblance to the kind of love I’m interested in achieving.
I bet if you squint a little, they would look a lot alike, actually.
Why do you think you’re special? Why are you taking the inside view? Do you think humans in general don’t want people to fall in love with them if they have to work on them to bring it about? This talk of “the way it is supposed to work” strikes me as irrational; you are looking at what “ought” to be, what you want to be, and ignoring what actually is.
I don’t know what humans in general want, but I don’t think I’m completely alone—an illustrative cartoon—in wanting affection that is genuine in the way I describe. But maybe I’m a rare specimen? If you’re content to have relationships where you and others model each other on a web of carefully selected half-truths, I’m not exactly going to parasail in and demand that you stop like a spandex-clad vigilante for truth and transparency. You simply won’t have anything, in having that relationship, that I have an inclination to value, promote, or normatively endorse.
Also, I don’t see how the link is relevant. The article is about deadlines and cost estimates and there’s nothing apparently applicable to this topic.
The article is about the dangers of considering yourself a rare specimen, the talk of deadlines and cost estimates is just for concreteness.
That’s a really good cartoon, by the way, because it can make two people on the opposite sides of an argument each think it supports their own point. To me it seems like the construction of the third robot was just as wrongheaded as the first two, and that the scientist has a fundamental confusion about the nature of love stemming from romanticism. But clearly you see it differently.
I considered it illustrative not because of the third robot, but because of the second one. It had—ostensibly—freedom, but circumstances were manipulated by the scientist so it would love the scientist. The resulting love is not valuable. Seduction is a subtler circumstance manipulation than that, but otherwise similar-looking.
Seduction is a subtler circumstance manipulation than that, but otherwise similar-looking.
90% of what guys want from the seduction community is the ability to confidently approach a woman and start a conversation, so that they have a chance to get to know each other, and find out if they want to do something more. As some put it, “I’m looking for the One, but I don’t know what I would say when I meet her.”
Yeah, there’s maybe 10% who, like Sirducer, just want to get laid, and are looking for a formula to do that. I have the impression, though, that quite a few of those guys end up raising their standards, when they realize that it’s just as empty as you’re saying.
Read e.g. Neil Strauss’ book, “The Game”—it ends with him being really glad that he found a woman his more-manipulative tricks didn’t work on… and yet, he never would have had the confidence to even talk to her in the first place if he hadn’t already had so much successful experience with comparably intimidating women (in terms of looks, intelligence, strong personalities, etc.)
To put it another way, actually being confident, caring, and knowing ways to please women (in and out of the bedroom) is not a trick. But for many people, the only way to get there is to first learn tricks. If they have to wait until they can do it without any tricks, they will never be able to start.
And that would be a terrible shame, for an awful lot of men and women.
There is a dramatic difference between learning tricks to increase confidence/social success and then not sleeping with anyone under false pretense (via honesty or just ending the game three-quarters of the way through), and learning tricks to increase confidence/social success and then proceeding to use them to get poorly-informed women to have sex. I assume it’s possible to do the first thing.
Yep. Actually, from one trainer’s blog, I get the impression there’s a paradox, though.
The trainer tells a student: go over there and get blown out (rejected). Say whatever you have to say to get those women to reject you. Paradox: the set opens, the student gets attraction, because he’s absolutely at ease, not caring about the outcome. The more outrageously he speaks and acts, the more the women perceive him as a confident guy who’s just being playful with them.
Now, the trainer says, “okay, you see how well it works when you’re confident? Now go over there and talk to those other women and do the same thing...” Student gets blown out, because now he cares.
So, it’s not quite that simple. When the entire point of the exercise is to be confident taking things all the way to the end of the process, bailing out becomes an excuse not to face the fear of the next step. And if somebody bails at LMR—the last possible moment before sex occurs—then the woman is going to be just as disappointed, if not more, than if the guy went all the way.
i.e., if you get to LMR, you already got somebody to go home with you or vice versa, and it’s very likely the case that she did so, already wanting to have sex with you!
I guess what I’m getting at, is that a premature ending can be more deceitful/hurtful than going all the way, if the entire subtext was that the woman wanted to get laid and the guy was providing her with excuses.
I’m really not that familiar with that kind of game, and find it a turnoff, as I prefer women who can be direct about their desires. Doesn’t mean I want to deprive those women of having any outlet at all, just because society’s taught them they’re not supposed to want it or be direct… even less if it’s because of their genes!
Only if your goal really is sex by hook or by crook. Clearly, not having sex will not increase your capacity to just plainly and simply get sex. But if someone finds seduction appealing because they want confidence and social skills, there is no obvious reason they have to take the suggested tricks to the point of actual sex under false pretenses in order to develop them into skills.
Kicking the air in front of someone would be more analogous to practicing your confidence tricks talking to a dressmaker’s dummy, then never actually going out and talking to women.
This talk of “the way it is supposed to work” strikes me as irrational; you are looking at what “ought” to be, what you want to be, and ignoring what actually is.
Why is it irrational to think that the ways things ought to be is different from the way they are?
Why is it irrational to think that the ways things ought to be is different from the way they are?
It’s not, of course. But you should be careful not to mix the two up and, for example, give romantic advice based on how you feel relationships ought to work.
I wasn’t giving romantic advice. I was giving ethical advice, and my personal data point on why the ethical advice won’t necessarily spell romantic doom.
It’s not. What’s irrational is to let your idea of the way things ought to be prevent you from acting in such a way as to achieve your desired goals given the way things actually are
What’s irrational is to let your idea of the way things ought to be prevent you from acting in such a way as to achieve your desired goals given the way things actually are
And if one’s goal is “have a relationship that meets criteria X”, disregarding criteria X only serves to better attain the goal “have a relationship” which isn’t what one actually wanted in the first place.
You seem to be making unwaranted assumptions about other people’s goals.
I don’t think I’m making any assumptions about other people’s goals, I’m just saying that allowing beliefs about the way you’d like the world to be to interfere with success in the actual world is irrational.
In the special case where maintaining your belief is a high priority goal in itself that obviously factors recursively into your decisions in a complicated way. A community of rationalists who give short shrift to religious arguments for god along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t want to live in a world without god’ and that professes a high regard for truth would at least be receptive to the idea that maintaining false beliefs is not a strongly defensible position I would think.
Valuing “a relationship meeting criteria X” is not a belief, it’s a term in a utility function. “People would be better off if their relationships had criteria X” is a belief that may or may not be justified. Determining the latter to be false in the general case does not invalidate the former.
Furthermore, your argument seems to be based on the observation “Most relationships do not meet criteria X” which is true but logically irrelevant to either of the above propositions.
I bet if you squint a little, they would look a lot alike, actually.
Why do you think you’re special? Why are you taking the inside view? Do you think humans in general don’t want people to fall in love with them if they have to work on them to bring it about? This talk of “the way it is supposed to work” strikes me as irrational; you are looking at what “ought” to be, what you want to be, and ignoring what actually is.
I don’t know what humans in general want, but I don’t think I’m completely alone—an illustrative cartoon—in wanting affection that is genuine in the way I describe. But maybe I’m a rare specimen? If you’re content to have relationships where you and others model each other on a web of carefully selected half-truths, I’m not exactly going to parasail in and demand that you stop like a spandex-clad vigilante for truth and transparency. You simply won’t have anything, in having that relationship, that I have an inclination to value, promote, or normatively endorse.
Also, I don’t see how the link is relevant. The article is about deadlines and cost estimates and there’s nothing apparently applicable to this topic.
The article is about the dangers of considering yourself a rare specimen, the talk of deadlines and cost estimates is just for concreteness.
That’s a really good cartoon, by the way, because it can make two people on the opposite sides of an argument each think it supports their own point. To me it seems like the construction of the third robot was just as wrongheaded as the first two, and that the scientist has a fundamental confusion about the nature of love stemming from romanticism. But clearly you see it differently.
I considered it illustrative not because of the third robot, but because of the second one. It had—ostensibly—freedom, but circumstances were manipulated by the scientist so it would love the scientist. The resulting love is not valuable. Seduction is a subtler circumstance manipulation than that, but otherwise similar-looking.
90% of what guys want from the seduction community is the ability to confidently approach a woman and start a conversation, so that they have a chance to get to know each other, and find out if they want to do something more. As some put it, “I’m looking for the One, but I don’t know what I would say when I meet her.”
Yeah, there’s maybe 10% who, like Sirducer, just want to get laid, and are looking for a formula to do that. I have the impression, though, that quite a few of those guys end up raising their standards, when they realize that it’s just as empty as you’re saying.
Read e.g. Neil Strauss’ book, “The Game”—it ends with him being really glad that he found a woman his more-manipulative tricks didn’t work on… and yet, he never would have had the confidence to even talk to her in the first place if he hadn’t already had so much successful experience with comparably intimidating women (in terms of looks, intelligence, strong personalities, etc.)
To put it another way, actually being confident, caring, and knowing ways to please women (in and out of the bedroom) is not a trick. But for many people, the only way to get there is to first learn tricks. If they have to wait until they can do it without any tricks, they will never be able to start.
And that would be a terrible shame, for an awful lot of men and women.
There is a dramatic difference between learning tricks to increase confidence/social success and then not sleeping with anyone under false pretense (via honesty or just ending the game three-quarters of the way through), and learning tricks to increase confidence/social success and then proceeding to use them to get poorly-informed women to have sex. I assume it’s possible to do the first thing.
Yep. Actually, from one trainer’s blog, I get the impression there’s a paradox, though.
The trainer tells a student: go over there and get blown out (rejected). Say whatever you have to say to get those women to reject you. Paradox: the set opens, the student gets attraction, because he’s absolutely at ease, not caring about the outcome. The more outrageously he speaks and acts, the more the women perceive him as a confident guy who’s just being playful with them.
Now, the trainer says, “okay, you see how well it works when you’re confident? Now go over there and talk to those other women and do the same thing...” Student gets blown out, because now he cares.
So, it’s not quite that simple. When the entire point of the exercise is to be confident taking things all the way to the end of the process, bailing out becomes an excuse not to face the fear of the next step. And if somebody bails at LMR—the last possible moment before sex occurs—then the woman is going to be just as disappointed, if not more, than if the guy went all the way.
i.e., if you get to LMR, you already got somebody to go home with you or vice versa, and it’s very likely the case that she did so, already wanting to have sex with you!
I guess what I’m getting at, is that a premature ending can be more deceitful/hurtful than going all the way, if the entire subtext was that the woman wanted to get laid and the guy was providing her with excuses.
I’m really not that familiar with that kind of game, and find it a turnoff, as I prefer women who can be direct about their desires. Doesn’t mean I want to deprive those women of having any outlet at all, just because society’s taught them they’re not supposed to want it or be direct… even less if it’s because of their genes!
That sounds like you are trying to say you can learn karate by kicking the air in front of someone.
Only if your goal really is sex by hook or by crook. Clearly, not having sex will not increase your capacity to just plainly and simply get sex. But if someone finds seduction appealing because they want confidence and social skills, there is no obvious reason they have to take the suggested tricks to the point of actual sex under false pretenses in order to develop them into skills.
Kicking the air in front of someone would be more analogous to practicing your confidence tricks talking to a dressmaker’s dummy, then never actually going out and talking to women.
Why is it irrational to think that the ways things ought to be is different from the way they are?
It’s not, of course. But you should be careful not to mix the two up and, for example, give romantic advice based on how you feel relationships ought to work.
I wasn’t giving romantic advice. I was giving ethical advice, and my personal data point on why the ethical advice won’t necessarily spell romantic doom.
It’s not. What’s irrational is to let your idea of the way things ought to be prevent you from acting in such a way as to achieve your desired goals given the way things actually are
And if one’s goal is “have a relationship that meets criteria X”, disregarding criteria X only serves to better attain the goal “have a relationship” which isn’t what one actually wanted in the first place.
You seem to be making unwaranted assumptions about other people’s goals.
I don’t think I’m making any assumptions about other people’s goals, I’m just saying that allowing beliefs about the way you’d like the world to be to interfere with success in the actual world is irrational.
In the special case where maintaining your belief is a high priority goal in itself that obviously factors recursively into your decisions in a complicated way. A community of rationalists who give short shrift to religious arguments for god along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t want to live in a world without god’ and that professes a high regard for truth would at least be receptive to the idea that maintaining false beliefs is not a strongly defensible position I would think.
Valuing “a relationship meeting criteria X” is not a belief, it’s a term in a utility function. “People would be better off if their relationships had criteria X” is a belief that may or may not be justified. Determining the latter to be false in the general case does not invalidate the former.
Furthermore, your argument seems to be based on the observation “Most relationships do not meet criteria X” which is true but logically irrelevant to either of the above propositions.