An honest question—would you find it as objectionable to similarly discuss other areas of interpersonal communication? e.g., I’ve seen a very similar tone and style (and even similar tricks suggested!) used in the context of discussing, for a business, how to make sales and retain customers.
That is to say, is it the manipulative social engineering that bothers you? Or is it specifically that it’s in the area of dating and romantic relationships?
ETA: I notice after posting that Nominull does indeed find objectionable the entire idea of manipulative social engineering.
(Warning: My reactions to this topic have become affected by emotion. This doesn’t change my actual opinions, but it is likely to change how I present them.)
I object to all forms of manipulation. I wish businesses, for example, would purely and simply be honest about the features of their product and compete on those alone. Advertisements annoy me unless they have independent entertainment or social value.
However, I think socially manipulative behavior is especially repulsive in dating/romantic relationships and between (ostensible) friends, because these are supposed to be paradigmatic cases of personal closeness and genuine affection. The closeness and affection seem to me much less than genuine if they’re wrapped up in layers of showmanship. Whether I think retailers will live up to their ad promises or not, at least I don’t operate under the delusion that they value me deeply and individually for my hard-earned personal traits and accomplishments. They want my money.
However, I think socially manipulative behavior is especially repulsive in dating/romantic relationships and between (ostensible) friends, because these are supposed to be paradigmatic cases of personal closeness and genuine affection. The closeness and affection seem to me much less than genuine if they’re wrapped up in layers of showmanship.
When my wife is upset, she likes me to hug her and tell her that things are going to be okay. Am I being a showman if I do that, regardless of how I actually feel in that moment?
If she’s in a funk, and I say something funny or tease her to make her smile, am I being manipulative?
If I go shopping with her, even though I’m not interested in shopping, but because I know if I’m there and I smile and ask questions and be helpful, she’ll be happier, does that make me dishonest?
And if, the first four or five times I did these things, I felt awkward and fake because it “wasn’t really me”, does that make me an evil person?
If you want your wife to be happy, and you do things to make her happy, that’s nothing but genuine. If you had to adjust your automatic instruments for happy-making to suit her preferences, as long as it’s known that you’re doing that, that isn’t dishonest.
If she asks you outright if you are interested in shopping… and you tell her you are… then I am pleased not to be your wife.
But this is me. As I have said, I could easily be an outlier. Maybe I’m the only person in the world who hates being lied to enough to really want this kind of honesty.
If you want your wife to be happy, and you do things to make her happy, that’s nothing but genuine. If you had to adjust your automatic instruments for happy-making to suit her preferences, as long as it’s known that you’re doing that, that isn’t dishonest.
Why does it have to be known that I’m doing that?
(Btw, all three things are things I learned about from the seduction community—specifically, the importance of doing them whether I think they’re “honest” or not.)
If I were your wife, then what I’d want you to do would be to remark at some point while trying to bring me out of a funk, “This wouldn’t have been my first instinct, but it really seems to make you feel better,” or something along those lines. Then, assuming that in this parallel universe I retain my trait of honesty, I could determine whether it makes me feel better by a wide enough margin to be worth the cost and communicate that information.
If I were your wife, then what I’d want you to do would be to remark at some point while trying to bring me out of a funk, “This wouldn’t have been my first instinct, but it really seems to make you feel better,”
My wife prefers I make the appearance into a reality, and is willing to overlook the time in between where I’m still working on making it such. Like me, she prefers an improved relationship to truth-at-all-costs.
Don’t get me wrong—we went through many years of doing it your way, which also used to be my way.
And it really, really sucked.
I had argued for doing things that way, because in one of my first relationships, I was hit with a bombshell when my newly-ex told me that she’d had sex with me because she wanted me to like her, not because she wanted to.
At that point, I went all radical honesty in my relationships, because I never wanted to be responsible for someone else doing something they didn’t like or want, just for my approval. And it made a mess of several years of my relationship with my wife, because we were both unhappy and unsatisfied, because I insisted that we be “honest” in this fashion.
Fortunately, we eventually came to our senses and decided to do something about it. Granted, it’s only in recent years that we’ve had the technology that’s allowed us both to start making the necessary changes in ourselves, not only so that we don’t have to pretend, but also so that we don’t care any more if the other person is “just doing that to make me happy”.
Because, as it turns out, doing something to make someone else happy is actually a good thing, as long as the person is happy to be doing it. If I’m happy that she’s happy, then she’s happy I’m shopping with her. ’Nuff said.
There’s an old Dave Barry column I’m trying to find which claimed that if you wanted to advertise to men, you must either show that your product will get them dates with bikini models, or that your product will save them time and money, which they will need, in order to date bikini models. He went on to say that given that the female mind is so much more complicated and nuanced than the male mind, you must convey a much more subtle message in order to advertise to women: you must tell them that, if they buy your product, they will be bikini models.
I think you’re being a little disingenuous… You say you really hate being lied to and you really want the kind of honesty where your husband would not lie to you about enjoying shopping but you also say that too much honesty is tactlessness. It almost sounds like you want complete honesty but only as long as it doesn’t offend.
People tell white lies all the time. They generally do it because they are being ‘tactful’ - they would rather mislead than offend. There’s nothing wrong with that, white lies are a social lubricant. A preference for honesty is fine, even admirable, but if you believe you have a way of being always honest without ever being tactless then I’d love to know it.
I consider tact to be about what topics one brings up and in certain decisions about how to phrase a truth. If you’re talking about X, you can say all and only true things about X without being unnecessarily rude. If you’re not already talking about X (or doing something that implicitly makes X the topic), and it’s not something that’s polite to bring up, there is no need to express truths about it; that isn’t dishonesty, that’s being appropriately topical.
If I were under a mistaken impression about a significant other’s enjoyment of shopping (not that this would be likely to come up, since I don’t care for shopping myself), that would be to no one’s benefit. in a distant possible world where I go out and buy things recreationally, I would prefer to do so with people who actually share that interest and trust me enough to believe me when I say I want honesty. I am not a friendless loner; people who are friendless loners probably should look into that before they start hunting for romantic relationships anyway. If my significant other lied to me and said (s)he liked shopping, I’d take him/her along and be missing out on an opportunity to go shopping with someone who genuinely liked it instead.
All of these hypotheticals have the common thread of having her best interests at heart.
The objection Alicorn is making to the seduction community is that much of their technique is both dishonest and against the interests of the target. The goal is to get a woman really interested, sleep with her, then move on to the next woman, even knowing that this has a good chance of causing net suffering on the women involved. At least, that’s what I understand her objection to be, and it’s something I would also object to.
A comparable (though still imperfect) hypothetical would be that you go shopping with your wife because you know it will make her feel obligated to agree when you propose something that she really doesn’t agree with and that imposes substantial cost or sacrifice on her. You’re manipulating her with the principle goal of advancing your own interests at her expense. Having a moral objection to this seems quite understandable.
On the other hand, using techniques that have proven effective because it makes you better at breaking the ice, when you have reasonably good intentions, seems morally quite justifiable.
Here, let me do you the inestimable service of pasting from the intro...
“In attempting to deconstruct the American cultural climate that has produced the Seduction Community, I examine a few concrete factors: the continuously shifting aspects of men’s culture, the collapse of elaborate courtship rituals, the impact of feminist ideals on popular thought, and the proliferation of the Internet. Although these distinct elements can be identified as causes for the community’s existence, they are also intertwined in a complicated web. By recognizing these distinct aspects, however, I distinguish the motivations behind the formation and
explosion of the Seduction Community. I determine that the community is composed of many elements that are borrowed from America’s cultural past, making it more reflective than revolutionary. I propose that what is unique, however, is the distinct manner in which these various elements have coalesced to form a community of men, bonding through shared experiences and acting together to accomplish similar goals.”
Long story short: the author’s brother couldn’t get a girl, so he joined them; this is her account of the motivation of such people, tied in with an attempt at a comprehensive account (as she notes, the best general overview of the seduction community seems to be Wikipedia!).
Thanks, Gwern. I would add only that the thesis highlights that although prestige in the seduction community depends on having good game, this isn’t the only or even the main thing men get from membership.
If a man’s prestige in the seduction community depends on his reports of how many women he has seduced, then, in the absence of non-gameable standards of observational evidence, this potentially invalidates everything they have ever concluded about anything.
If a man’s prestige in the seduction community depends on his reports of how many women he has seduced, then, in the absence of non-gameable standards of observational evidence, this potentially invalidates everything they have ever concluded about anything.
As I understand it, gurus usually compete in the field, with students watching. It’s not how many you did pick up in the past, it’s how many can you pick up today, with what degree of elegance/speed, and with how “hot” of girls, as judged by the watching students. Such a rating method may not be objective, and lead to debates over who “won” a showdown, but it keeps them from devolving into complete non-usefulness.
By the way, in-field trainers and coaches are routinely expected to demonstrate for their students in the field, usually when, like Luke with Yoda, the student says that, “but that’s impossible!” (Trainers sometimes remark that this is the most pressure-filled part of their job, not because they need validation from the woman or fear rejection, but because they’ll be embarrassed in front of several students if they can’t show some kind of positive result on cue.)
As I understand it, gurus usually compete in the field, with students watching. It’s not how many you did pick up in the past, it’s how many can you pick up today, with what degree of elegance/speed, and with how “hot” of girls, as judged by the watching students.
Well, yes and no -- not every PUA is a guru. Go on the forums and you’ll see tons of pick-up stories. I’m not a PUA so I have no first-hand knowledge, but I think talking a good game gets eyes and respect.
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.)
I run the website www.theyhatethegame.com—which has been mentioned in this post a few times.
I used to be shy, insecure, lonely and without any girls in my life. After a low point a few years ago, I began reading books on self help, female psychology, evolutionary sexuality and relationship management.
All of this information did NOT turn me into a social robot designed to manipulate people. It DID give me a feeling of safety because I learned that we all share the same human condition—we are all born, we all die, and we are all molded by life in-between. This idea helped to cure my shyness and insecurity because I realized everyone else was just like me.
That feeling prompted a series of extreme social experiments over a period of three months where I determined—through trial and error—how to present myself in a way that provided others with the most pleasurable social experience. I found that by being the sort of person others liked, it would enrich their lives and provide my life with deep relationships that I so badly wanted.
They Hate The Game exists to give men the same tools that I wish I had when I was beating my shyness and insecurity and starting to have lots of fun with girls.
Some of you may view what I do as social manipulation (I accept that you have probably spent more time in libraries reading books on how to determine what is social manipulation and what isnt, so I’ll let you be the judge of that.) but what helps me sleep good at night is knowing that my life is changed—and I have fulfilling relationships with women.
An honest question—would you find it as objectionable to similarly discuss other areas of interpersonal communication? e.g., I’ve seen a very similar tone and style (and even similar tricks suggested!) used in the context of discussing, for a business, how to make sales and retain customers.
That is to say, is it the manipulative social engineering that bothers you? Or is it specifically that it’s in the area of dating and romantic relationships?
ETA: I notice after posting that Nominull does indeed find objectionable the entire idea of manipulative social engineering.
(Warning: My reactions to this topic have become affected by emotion. This doesn’t change my actual opinions, but it is likely to change how I present them.)
I object to all forms of manipulation. I wish businesses, for example, would purely and simply be honest about the features of their product and compete on those alone. Advertisements annoy me unless they have independent entertainment or social value.
However, I think socially manipulative behavior is especially repulsive in dating/romantic relationships and between (ostensible) friends, because these are supposed to be paradigmatic cases of personal closeness and genuine affection. The closeness and affection seem to me much less than genuine if they’re wrapped up in layers of showmanship. Whether I think retailers will live up to their ad promises or not, at least I don’t operate under the delusion that they value me deeply and individually for my hard-earned personal traits and accomplishments. They want my money.
When my wife is upset, she likes me to hug her and tell her that things are going to be okay. Am I being a showman if I do that, regardless of how I actually feel in that moment?
If she’s in a funk, and I say something funny or tease her to make her smile, am I being manipulative?
If I go shopping with her, even though I’m not interested in shopping, but because I know if I’m there and I smile and ask questions and be helpful, she’ll be happier, does that make me dishonest?
And if, the first four or five times I did these things, I felt awkward and fake because it “wasn’t really me”, does that make me an evil person?
If you want your wife to be happy, and you do things to make her happy, that’s nothing but genuine. If you had to adjust your automatic instruments for happy-making to suit her preferences, as long as it’s known that you’re doing that, that isn’t dishonest.
If she asks you outright if you are interested in shopping… and you tell her you are… then I am pleased not to be your wife.
But this is me. As I have said, I could easily be an outlier. Maybe I’m the only person in the world who hates being lied to enough to really want this kind of honesty.
You are not alone!
Why does it have to be known that I’m doing that?
(Btw, all three things are things I learned about from the seduction community—specifically, the importance of doing them whether I think they’re “honest” or not.)
If I were your wife, then what I’d want you to do would be to remark at some point while trying to bring me out of a funk, “This wouldn’t have been my first instinct, but it really seems to make you feel better,” or something along those lines. Then, assuming that in this parallel universe I retain my trait of honesty, I could determine whether it makes me feel better by a wide enough margin to be worth the cost and communicate that information.
My wife prefers I make the appearance into a reality, and is willing to overlook the time in between where I’m still working on making it such. Like me, she prefers an improved relationship to truth-at-all-costs.
Don’t get me wrong—we went through many years of doing it your way, which also used to be my way.
And it really, really sucked.
I had argued for doing things that way, because in one of my first relationships, I was hit with a bombshell when my newly-ex told me that she’d had sex with me because she wanted me to like her, not because she wanted to.
At that point, I went all radical honesty in my relationships, because I never wanted to be responsible for someone else doing something they didn’t like or want, just for my approval. And it made a mess of several years of my relationship with my wife, because we were both unhappy and unsatisfied, because I insisted that we be “honest” in this fashion.
Fortunately, we eventually came to our senses and decided to do something about it. Granted, it’s only in recent years that we’ve had the technology that’s allowed us both to start making the necessary changes in ourselves, not only so that we don’t have to pretend, but also so that we don’t care any more if the other person is “just doing that to make me happy”.
Because, as it turns out, doing something to make someone else happy is actually a good thing, as long as the person is happy to be doing it. If I’m happy that she’s happy, then she’s happy I’m shopping with her. ’Nuff said.
Radical Honesty is a movement of its own. Interestingly one of the selling points seems to be success with women...
I’m afraid that’s going to be a selling point of any movement that’s marketing itself to men, irrespective of whether it’s actually true.
There’s an old Dave Barry column I’m trying to find which claimed that if you wanted to advertise to men, you must either show that your product will get them dates with bikini models, or that your product will save them time and money, which they will need, in order to date bikini models. He went on to say that given that the female mind is so much more complicated and nuanced than the male mind, you must convey a much more subtle message in order to advertise to women: you must tell them that, if they buy your product, they will be bikini models.
I saw that one in The Dilbert Principle. I don’t know where Scott Adams got it from, though.
actually I think you’re completely right.
This approach conflates honesty with tactlessness.
I think you’re being a little disingenuous… You say you really hate being lied to and you really want the kind of honesty where your husband would not lie to you about enjoying shopping but you also say that too much honesty is tactlessness. It almost sounds like you want complete honesty but only as long as it doesn’t offend.
People tell white lies all the time. They generally do it because they are being ‘tactful’ - they would rather mislead than offend. There’s nothing wrong with that, white lies are a social lubricant. A preference for honesty is fine, even admirable, but if you believe you have a way of being always honest without ever being tactless then I’d love to know it.
I consider tact to be about what topics one brings up and in certain decisions about how to phrase a truth. If you’re talking about X, you can say all and only true things about X without being unnecessarily rude. If you’re not already talking about X (or doing something that implicitly makes X the topic), and it’s not something that’s polite to bring up, there is no need to express truths about it; that isn’t dishonesty, that’s being appropriately topical.
If I were under a mistaken impression about a significant other’s enjoyment of shopping (not that this would be likely to come up, since I don’t care for shopping myself), that would be to no one’s benefit. in a distant possible world where I go out and buy things recreationally, I would prefer to do so with people who actually share that interest and trust me enough to believe me when I say I want honesty. I am not a friendless loner; people who are friendless loners probably should look into that before they start hunting for romantic relationships anyway. If my significant other lied to me and said (s)he liked shopping, I’d take him/her along and be missing out on an opportunity to go shopping with someone who genuinely liked it instead.
All of these hypotheticals have the common thread of having her best interests at heart.
The objection Alicorn is making to the seduction community is that much of their technique is both dishonest and against the interests of the target. The goal is to get a woman really interested, sleep with her, then move on to the next woman, even knowing that this has a good chance of causing net suffering on the women involved. At least, that’s what I understand her objection to be, and it’s something I would also object to.
A comparable (though still imperfect) hypothetical would be that you go shopping with your wife because you know it will make her feel obligated to agree when you propose something that she really doesn’t agree with and that imposes substantial cost or sacrifice on her. You’re manipulating her with the principle goal of advancing your own interests at her expense. Having a moral objection to this seems quite understandable.
On the other hand, using techniques that have proven effective because it makes you better at breaking the ice, when you have reasonably good intentions, seems morally quite justifiable.
I recommend Elana Clift’s honors thesis on the subject.
Before I download a PDF, could you say a bit about what is in the thesis and why you recommend it?
Here, let me do you the inestimable service of pasting from the intro...
Long story short: the author’s brother couldn’t get a girl, so he joined them; this is her account of the motivation of such people, tied in with an attempt at a comprehensive account (as she notes, the best general overview of the seduction community seems to be Wikipedia!).
Thanks, Gwern. I would add only that the thesis highlights that although prestige in the seduction community depends on having good game, this isn’t the only or even the main thing men get from membership.
If a man’s prestige in the seduction community depends on his reports of how many women he has seduced, then, in the absence of non-gameable standards of observational evidence, this potentially invalidates everything they have ever concluded about anything.
As I understand it, gurus usually compete in the field, with students watching. It’s not how many you did pick up in the past, it’s how many can you pick up today, with what degree of elegance/speed, and with how “hot” of girls, as judged by the watching students. Such a rating method may not be objective, and lead to debates over who “won” a showdown, but it keeps them from devolving into complete non-usefulness.
By the way, in-field trainers and coaches are routinely expected to demonstrate for their students in the field, usually when, like Luke with Yoda, the student says that, “but that’s impossible!” (Trainers sometimes remark that this is the most pressure-filled part of their job, not because they need validation from the woman or fear rejection, but because they’ll be embarrassed in front of several students if they can’t show some kind of positive result on cue.)
Okay. That works.
Well, yes and no -- not every PUA is a guru. Go on the forums and you’ll see tons of pick-up stories. I’m not a PUA so I have no first-hand knowledge, but I think talking a good game gets eyes and respect.
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.
I run the website www.theyhatethegame.com—which has been mentioned in this post a few times.
I used to be shy, insecure, lonely and without any girls in my life. After a low point a few years ago, I began reading books on self help, female psychology, evolutionary sexuality and relationship management.
All of this information did NOT turn me into a social robot designed to manipulate people. It DID give me a feeling of safety because I learned that we all share the same human condition—we are all born, we all die, and we are all molded by life in-between. This idea helped to cure my shyness and insecurity because I realized everyone else was just like me.
That feeling prompted a series of extreme social experiments over a period of three months where I determined—through trial and error—how to present myself in a way that provided others with the most pleasurable social experience. I found that by being the sort of person others liked, it would enrich their lives and provide my life with deep relationships that I so badly wanted.
They Hate The Game exists to give men the same tools that I wish I had when I was beating my shyness and insecurity and starting to have lots of fun with girls.
Some of you may view what I do as social manipulation (I accept that you have probably spent more time in libraries reading books on how to determine what is social manipulation and what isnt, so I’ll let you be the judge of that.) but what helps me sleep good at night is knowing that my life is changed—and I have fulfilling relationships with women.