If the feedback is esteem of students in the field, then you’re rewarding the mentor who picks his battles carefully, who can sell what happened on any encounter in a positive and understandable light. The honest mentors and ‘researchers’ who approach a varied population, analyze their performance without upselling, and accrete performance over time(as you’d expect with a real, generic skill) will lose out.
If the feedback is esteem of students in the field, then you’re rewarding the mentor who picks his battles carefully, who can sell what happened on any encounter in a positive and understandable light.
If I may: based on my minimal reading of PUA blogs & essays, I get the impression that picking battles carefully, & spinning losses, is exactly what is valuable about the techniques.
Consider the previously mentioned thesis: the author’s brother was not interested in a goal like ‘increasing, over the population of all females, the success of an approach’ or ‘learning how to pick up any girl’, but rather something like ‘how to get a reasonably attractive girl, period’. If the seduction techniques worked on only one girl in an entire bar (but infallibly), that’d be fine by them.
(I was particularly struck by one PUA who spent at least 2000 words discussing how to differentiate women who might sleep with him that night from ‘princesses’ who would require many dates and gifts before even considering sex.)
Consider the previously mentioned thesis: the author’s brother was not interested in a goal like ‘increasing, over the population of all females, the success of an approach’ or ‘learning how to pick up any girl’, but rather something like ‘how to get a reasonably attractive girl, period’.
Exactly, which is why talking about statistical models in this context is “academic”, in the sense of “interesting to academics, but not particularly relevant to practitioners”. Statistical models from experimental research can certainly inform practical approaches, but sometimes, one has to be “sorry for the Good Lord” in reverse: the theory may be utterly, totally, wrong, and yet still work.
If you want your rationality to protect something, let it protect results rather than “truth”.
If the seduction techniques worked on only one girl in an entire bar (but infallibly), that’d be fine by them.
Well, as long as it was a girl they were interested in! ;-)
But by the same token, the reader of a self-help book is only interested in whether a technique fixes their problem, not a problem or all problems. The bigger picture of truth and generalizability is—rightly and rationally—not their concern.
If you want your rationality to protect something, let it protect results rather than “truth”.
Yuck. Furthermore, yuck.
Don’t get me wrong—results are very important. But getting the model right is the only way to guarantee results. Get the model wrong, and one day you might to do the equivalent of filling your car’s gas tank with acetone.
> (I was particularly struck by one PUA who spent at least 2000 words discussing how to differentiate women who might sleep with him that night from ‘princesses’ who would require many dates and gifts before even considering sex.)
Doesn’t that make the problem worse, though?
If the feedback is esteem of students in the field, then you’re rewarding the mentor who picks his battles carefully, who can sell what happened on any encounter in a positive and understandable light. The honest mentors and ‘researchers’ who approach a varied population, analyze their performance without upselling, and accrete performance over time(as you’d expect with a real, generic skill) will lose out.
If I may: based on my minimal reading of PUA blogs & essays, I get the impression that picking battles carefully, & spinning losses, is exactly what is valuable about the techniques.
Consider the previously mentioned thesis: the author’s brother was not interested in a goal like ‘increasing, over the population of all females, the success of an approach’ or ‘learning how to pick up any girl’, but rather something like ‘how to get a reasonably attractive girl, period’. If the seduction techniques worked on only one girl in an entire bar (but infallibly), that’d be fine by them.
(I was particularly struck by one PUA who spent at least 2000 words discussing how to differentiate women who might sleep with him that night from ‘princesses’ who would require many dates and gifts before even considering sex.)
Exactly, which is why talking about statistical models in this context is “academic”, in the sense of “interesting to academics, but not particularly relevant to practitioners”. Statistical models from experimental research can certainly inform practical approaches, but sometimes, one has to be “sorry for the Good Lord” in reverse: the theory may be utterly, totally, wrong, and yet still work.
If you want your rationality to protect something, let it protect results rather than “truth”.
Well, as long as it was a girl they were interested in! ;-)
But by the same token, the reader of a self-help book is only interested in whether a technique fixes their problem, not a problem or all problems. The bigger picture of truth and generalizability is—rightly and rationally—not their concern.
Yuck. Furthermore, yuck.
Don’t get me wrong—results are very important. But getting the model right is the only way to guarantee results. Get the model wrong, and one day you might to do the equivalent of filling your car’s gas tank with acetone.
> (I was particularly struck by one PUA who spent at least 2000 words discussing how to differentiate women who might sleep with him that night from ‘princesses’ who would require many dates and gifts before even considering sex.)
Do you still have a link?
barfs
His term, not mine. Disgusting as it may be, it conveys his point with exceptional clarity.
That would be the case if the students were buying just the experience of watching the guru. The students expect rather more than that.