I’m a little surprised to see the issues of LWers interacting with women reduced to “being careful when discussing explicit awareness of social reality” … with a link to PUA stuff.
1) PUA stuff is hardly the only example out there of “explicit awareness of social reality”.
2) It’s quite telling that the implication of the post is that “women don’t like explicit awareness of social reality”, rather than the (more accurate) “women don’t like PUA”.
One way to encourage women to participate in rationalist communities might be to make a conscious effort not to portray us as silly, manipulative, fickle, irrational gold-diggers. Some rationalists do a good job of this … many don’t. And PUAs, rationalist and otherwise, are usually bad at this. (Yes, there are exceptions.)
Is there a more comprehensive resource anywhere on picking up the right side of the bell curve?
edited to add: as long as I’m asking how to pull the long tail, so to speak, how ’bout resources considering the culturally Russian, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, etc.?
How much do you actually communicate with people who are around the middle of the bell curve? In places like LW, people often have a very skewed perspective about the bottom three quartiles.
It’s skewed in several ways, each of which would be a complex topic in its own right. In this particular context, I have the impression that nazgulnarsil’s idea of what the middle of the distribution looks like would correspond more exactly to somewhat higher percentiles.
The first LW post I was ever directed to was so bad (and the comments were waaaay worse) that I didn’t comment, decided never to look at this site again, and had to be convinced by the steady campaigning of a friend.
Of course, feminism (and sexuality) is my pet issue. Note the quote from Alicorn in the “sayeth the girl” post that rhollerith posted:
“I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended.”
Maybe this is more evidence that I’m particularly hard to offend? Not sure.
I spent a while trying to find the first post I was ever directed to, but I couldn’t—sorry.
I found your blog, and I liked it, and it occurred to me that the mode of thinking and expression that’s common in feminist (or kinky, or gender-conscious) circles isn’t unrelated to the LessWrong mode. They’re different languages, but they’re similar in being explicit about social dynamics that are normally implicit, and encouraging people to self-modify their minds and second-guess their own thoughts in a way that provokes a knee-jerk “but that’s unnatural!” reaction in “normal” people. So maybe this is a good blog for feminists.
No, I didn’t comment on the post I’m thinking of. It was overwhelmingly sexist (in comments people made jokes about women being gold-diggers, for example), but it didn’t have to do with BDSM.
I’ve gotten better at “sounding rationalist” since I commented on that “is masochism necessary” post, and I’ve also gotten better at not getting angry. I look back at how I wrote my comment there and I’m a little surprised at myself.
The first LW post I was ever directed to was so bad (and the comments were waaaay worse) that I didn’t comment, decided never to look at this site again, and had to be convinced by the steady campaigning of a friend.
As I said, I spent a while trying to find it, but I couldn’t. I really wish I could find it, because it was a stellar example. After I failed to find it I thought that maybe it was actually a post at OvercomingBias (don’t even get me started on Robin Hanson), but I couldn’t find it when looking for that either. I think I must have deleted the email in a fit of rage.
Nitpick: It had “PUA” in the title, but the formerly-linked article was not about seduction/gender in any way.
I will not make this particular mistake again (is there a term for “Boo Lights”?), but I still think the idea of explicitly practicing high-value social skills in a group is a good one.
The article was about discussing PUA or relevant techniques while avoiding or eliminating the seduction / gender / Dark Arts issue—that is, the phrasing of the link to the post read (to at least a few of us) as “being careful when discussing explicit awareness of social reality” = “don’t talk about the seduction / gender issue” and thus “social reality” = “seduction dark arts”.
Quite possible. And I apologize, I replied (in the grandparent) identifying you as the originator of the current post rather than the linked post. So far as I can tell, you’ve written a fine article, and I’d bet you’re addressing an important need (maybe I’m just being selfish—I’d be ecstatic if nerds were a little more socially aware!). The problem (according to my reading) was in the link to the post—as though the idea were “follow this guy’s lead and don’t discuss dark-arts pick-up techniques—because women don’t like thinking about how things Really Are”.
Yes—and I find that the “Women hate the dark arts because they can’t deal with reality” trope is a very common one (perhaps less common on LW, but common in general). It may be that the OP didn’t intend to imply that, but it may also not be an unreasonable implication to draw given the frequency the argument is made.
For what it’s worth, there were no gender wars to my knowledge while I’ve been a member in the group. Some guys who went to PUA classes, but more in the context of “normal person who wants better luck with women.”
Are rationalists more likely than average men to treat women like silly, fickle, manipulative gold diggers? As far as I can tell, trying to be rational has only given me more reasons to treat women and humans in general better.
Tangentially, I try to avoid treating women differently since the cultural assumptions about how each gender thinks are rarely accurate, and appreciate it when women do the same thing.
You know, I’m honestly not entirely sure whether “waaaaaay on the right of the bell curve” means that “LW does much more than average group of treating people like they are silly”, or that “LW is much better than the average group at not treating people like they are silly”.
Ha! I see I assumed too much and miscommunicated by under-communicating...again.
I meant LW treats people like they are silly, none of their core values are beyond question, their imagined reasons are confabulations, and their real reasons reek of bias, irrationality, and anti-epistemology.
It doesn’t seem at all correct to say “average men treat women like they’re silly, but rationalists don’t do that!”
Sure, rationalists treat men as silly too, which might be what is meant, but I think that part of the statement is literally false.
It doesn’t seem at all correct to say “average men treat women like they’re silly, but rationalists don’t do that!”
So we have a statement of the general form “X does Y, but we don’t.” This is the sort of statement that people are liable to say even when it’s false, so we should heavily discount the weight that we would give to their personal opinion (because it might be biased.) Instead, we should hug the query—gather more evidence (as unfiltered as we can—statistics may be more unbiased than pure anecdote) or display that which has been gathered, instead of ignoring the possibility that the claim is factually true. If the claim is false, the evidence should tell us that as well.
Of course, it depends more on the individuals involved than anything else, but I would say that a non-negligible percentage of rationalists are unwilling to question gender biases (and in fact, many get defensive because they prefer to consider themselves rational and non-sexist, and then in their defensiveness, fail to examine their biases). This is common enough that the geek feminist blog Restructure has a whole post called The Myth Of White Male Geek Rationality:
http://restructure.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/myth-of-white-male-geek-rationality/
Social phenomena exist like anything else and can be analyzed, but how it is discussed matters almost entirely. It is a high-status behavior to make observations about social phenomena, but analysis sends a bad signal.
I don’t think it’s bad to analyze social phenomena. I do think it’s bad to engage in or endorse (unwanted) sexually manipulative behavior. I also think it’s bad to equate distaste for unwanted sexually manipulative behavior with distaste for analysis.
I don’t think it’s bad to analyze social phenomena.
Neither does anyone else. It’s just that if one actually analyses social phenomena instead of consciously or subconsciously taking the opportunity to judge/play ploitics, one pisses off many, many people very quickly.
I do think it’s bad to engage in or endorse (unwanted) sexually manipulative behavior.
I summon HughRistik! But even if I were to accept manipulation as a natural kind, which I don’t, rather than as a continuum with communication and influence, where are you going to draw the line?
I also think it’s bad to equate distaste for unwanted sexually manipulative behavior with distaste for analysis.
PUA is up there with psychology, sales and marketing in the ranks of useful insights into how people actually work. It is unfortunate that there are some desperate misogynists among them, but if one is to denounce it then sales, marketing, PR, they all gotta burn too.
I have a big crush on HughRistik. It is important to note that he is not an accurate representation of PUAs. He is considerably more concerned with ethics, more friendly to feminism, more willing to acknowledge systemic problems in the PUA subculture, and smarter than the vast majority of PUAs. Quotation from one of his writings:
Long post. I hope I’ve managed to express this stuff clearly, I feel like I’m leaving stuff out, but I guess we can get to whatever that is when it comes up.
I don’t think it’s bad to analyze social phenomena.
Neither does anyone else. It’s just that if one actually analyses social phenomena instead of consciously or subconsciously taking the opportunity to judge/play ploitics, one pisses off many, many people very quickly.
… What I am saying is, I will not become angry if someone “actually analyses social phenomena”. I do not think it is bad. That is not the issue.
I do think it’s bad to engage in or endorse (unwanted) sexually manipulative behavior.
I summon HughRistik! But even if I were to accept manipulation as a natural kind, which I don’t, rather than as a continuum with communication and influence, where are you going to draw the line?
This seems disingenuous. It looks like you’re saying, essentially, “Ah, but nothing has inherent meaning!”. Are you unable to understand the concept of “manipulation” in non-technical terms?
(As an aside: following the pattern “Even if I thought X were an A rather than a B, something something,” typically one treats X as an A rather than a B.)
I also think it’s bad to equate distaste for unwanted sexually manipulative behavior with distaste for analysis.
PUA is up there with psychology, sales and marketing in the ranks of useful insights into how people actually work. It is unfortunate that there are some desperate misogynists among them, but if one is to denounce it then sales, marketing, PR, they all gotta burn too.
As I understand it, people did not on the whole have a problem with the PUA discussion because some pick-up artists are misogynists, but rather because of the parts of the discussion that weren’t analysis but were instead themselves casually misogynistic or exclusionary or clueless or whatever. Like, for example, “with women, you have to pretend that they don’t have cheat codes (unlike with us tough-minded rational men)”, or “bayes tells us we should all bang hot chicks”.
It’s partially a PR thing, but PR isn’t just waving your hands about in a mystical pattern to calm people down—it’s also about effectively communicating. You don’t want the most rational response to your comments to be “this person rejects sexual equality”, for example.
This seems disingenuous. It looks like you’re saying, essentially, “Ah, but nothing
has inherent meaning!”. Are you unable to understand the concept of “manipulation”
in non-technical terms?
I think it is useful to compare/contrast the terms manipulation and influence. Barry Cotter did talk about a “continuum of influence”, and I think this is the point that you’re missing. Between two people, if one person is far more influential in their relationship than the other, then we call it manipulative. But there is an area in the middle of the continuum where their influence on each other isn’t one-sided.
I don’t know a whole lot about the whole PUA thing, but of the things I’ve read here and there online, one interesting point is that sexual attraction isn’t this innate thing that you either have or don’t have. So yeah, you can influence other people by presenting yourself in a more appealing way. But this shouldn’t be seen as “manipulation”, unless you’re doing something underhanded.
But if we’re going to exaggerate all influence by calling it manipulation, then we have an extremely inhibited view of society. A society where members didn’t influence each other could hardly be considered a society at all.
Certainly, I agree with this. But there are prominent pickup techniques that are manipulative and undesirable—you know, stuff like undermining someone’s self-esteem. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m using “manipulative” to refer to these “bad influences” or, if you prefer, “Dark Arts”.
Edit: Or, in other words, I’m not exaggerating all influence by calling it manipulation—I’m using the word to refer to basically the same thing you are (“influence other people by… doing something underhanded”).
This seems disingenuous. It looks like you’re saying, essentially, “Ah, but nothing has inherent meaning!”. Are you unable to understand the concept of “manipulation” in non-technical terms?
I understand the non-technical meaning of manipulation. It’s when someone uses private information, or a power/skill imbalance to bring about a result that would not have occured given equality of capabilities. I don’t see how you can avoid it without forbidding interaction between agents who are not of implausibly rare equalcapability.
Like, for example, “with women, you have to pretend that they don’t have cheat codes (unlike with us tough-minded rational men)”, or “bayes tells us we should all bang hot chicks”.
That’s an attitude I can get behind. Everyone has cheat codes. You may not have access to cheat codes for someone, if so this is weak evidence they have cheat codes for you, stronger evidence that either they are at least at your level or they are playing a different game.
You don’t want the most rational response to your comments to be “this person rejects sexual equality”, for example.
I reject one interpretation of that statement. I’m a gender egalitarian but I do not believe men and women have an equal distribution of capabilities or interests
.
This seems disingenuous. It looks like you’re saying, essentially, “Ah, but nothing has inherent meaning!”. Are you unable to understand the concept of “manipulation” in non-technical terms?
I understand the non-technical meaning of manipulation. It’s when someone uses private information, or a power/skill imbalance to bring about a result that would not have occured given equality of capabilities. I don’t see how you can avoid it without forbidding interaction between agents who are not of implausibly rare equalcapability.
There is a reply to the grandparent leading to a brief discussion on the intended meaning. Does it solve your objection?
Like, for example, “with women, you have to pretend that they don’t have cheat codes (unlike with us tough-minded rational men)”, or “bayes tells us we should all bang hot chicks”.
That’s an attitude I can get behind. Everyone has cheat codes. You may not have access to cheat codes for someone, if so this is weak evidence they have cheat codes for you, stronger evidence that either they are at least at your level or they are playing a different game.
Which is an attitude you can get behind? “With women, you have to pretend that they don’t have cheat codes (unlike with us tough-minded rational men)”? I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. Did you understand my assertion?
You don’t want the most rational response to your comments to be “this person rejects sexual equality”, for example.
I reject one interpretation of that statement. I’m a gender egalitarian but I do not believe men and women have an equal distribution of capabilities or interests .
Okay, this is a reasonable position and I’m sure you’re aware of its caveats. But can you clarify—in context, do you believe that my analysis accurately reflects your beliefs?
I’m interested in other frameworks for approaching social interactions in a experimentally-verified manner, but the closest thing I can think of is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Could you list some, with links to information?
This sequence, and particularly point 3 in this recent article, are probably a start (although “experimentally-validated” sets the bar rather high).
Depending on what exactly you aspire to do (be less awkward at parties, take over the world, etc.), I would think that you would probably be after very different resources. What are you after?
I agree—different resources are necessary for different questions. I personally tend to read sociology papers whenever I can get my grubby little paws on them. Note that I have a feminist bent, so I tend to look for feminist-leaning resources. For example, I recently read this fascinating study:
http://das.sagepub.com/content/10/3/293.short
I’m a little surprised to see the issues of LWers interacting with women reduced to “being careful when discussing explicit awareness of social reality” … with a link to PUA stuff.
1) PUA stuff is hardly the only example out there of “explicit awareness of social reality”.
2) It’s quite telling that the implication of the post is that “women don’t like explicit awareness of social reality”, rather than the (more accurate) “women don’t like PUA”.
One way to encourage women to participate in rationalist communities might be to make a conscious effort not to portray us as silly, manipulative, fickle, irrational gold-diggers. Some rationalists do a good job of this … many don’t. And PUAs, rationalist and otherwise, are usually bad at this. (Yes, there are exceptions.)
PUA stuff targets the middle of the bell curve. Of course it looks silly to intelligent people.
This. Pickup at the right of the bell curve looks a bit different. It involves more puns, for instance.
Pickup at the right end of the bell curve looks like this:
“If I were to ask you out, would your answer to that question be the same as the answer to this one?”
(Disclaimer: I didn’t make it up. I saw it somewhere else on this site, long time ago.)
looks silly to me. ;)
Smullyan invented this “coercive logic” in “The Riddle of Scheherazade”.
Pretty sure this is much, much older than that.
And you know you’ve got a winner when the pickup-ee grins and answers with no hesitation, “Maybe.”
I’d guess that this is just indicative that being at the right end of the bell curve works on those who are also at the right end of the bell curve.
FYI—puns and wit work as a pick-up line… only if they’re your puns and wit… not if you’re just parroting somebody else’s idea of what “should work”.
Is there a more comprehensive resource anywhere on picking up the right side of the bell curve?
edited to add: as long as I’m asking how to pull the long tail, so to speak, how ’bout resources considering the culturally Russian, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, etc.?
How much do you actually communicate with people who are around the middle of the bell curve? In places like LW, people often have a very skewed perspective about the bottom three quartiles.
My experience is that intelligent people overestimate the abilities of people around the middle.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-realize.html
Skewed which way?
It’s skewed in several ways, each of which would be a complex topic in its own right. In this particular context, I have the impression that nazgulnarsil’s idea of what the middle of the distribution looks like would correspond more exactly to somewhat higher percentiles.
I actually had not noticed that LWers alienated women in any way. And yes, I am female. And maybe not very observant.
Also relatively new here. You may have missed the big blow-ups.
I would be interested to see these...are they still on the site?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/134/sayeth_the_girl/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/13j/of_exclusionary_speech_and_gender_politics/
There are many more but I do not want to continue to dig them up.
The first LW post I was ever directed to was so bad (and the comments were waaaay worse) that I didn’t comment, decided never to look at this site again, and had to be convinced by the steady campaigning of a friend.
Of course, feminism (and sexuality) is my pet issue. Note the quote from Alicorn in the “sayeth the girl” post that rhollerith posted: “I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended.”
Maybe this is more evidence that I’m particularly hard to offend? Not sure.
I spent a while trying to find the first post I was ever directed to, but I couldn’t—sorry.
I found your blog, and I liked it, and it occurred to me that the mode of thinking and expression that’s common in feminist (or kinky, or gender-conscious) circles isn’t unrelated to the LessWrong mode. They’re different languages, but they’re similar in being explicit about social dynamics that are normally implicit, and encouraging people to self-modify their minds and second-guess their own thoughts in a way that provokes a knee-jerk “but that’s unnatural!” reaction in “normal” people. So maybe this is a good blog for feminists.
Was this the post?
No, I didn’t comment on the post I’m thinking of. It was overwhelmingly sexist (in comments people made jokes about women being gold-diggers, for example), but it didn’t have to do with BDSM.
I’ve gotten better at “sounding rationalist” since I commented on that “is masochism necessary” post, and I’ve also gotten better at not getting angry. I look back at how I wrote my comment there and I’m a little surprised at myself.
Do you remember what post that was?
As I said, I spent a while trying to find it, but I couldn’t. I really wish I could find it, because it was a stellar example. After I failed to find it I thought that maybe it was actually a post at OvercomingBias (don’t even get me started on Robin Hanson), but I couldn’t find it when looking for that either. I think I must have deleted the email in a fit of rage.
My own vague recollection of this event says it was a Hanson post on the original OB.
Oh, oops, I didn’t even notice that last line, or didn’t notice it was talking about the same thing. Sorry.
Nitpick: It had “PUA” in the title, but the formerly-linked article was not about seduction/gender in any way.
I will not make this particular mistake again (is there a term for “Boo Lights”?), but I still think the idea of explicitly practicing high-value social skills in a group is a good one.
The article was about discussing PUA or relevant techniques while avoiding or eliminating the seduction / gender / Dark Arts issue—that is, the phrasing of the link to the post read (to at least a few of us) as “being careful when discussing explicit awareness of social reality” = “don’t talk about the seduction / gender issue” and thus “social reality” = “seduction dark arts”.
That is now the 3rd different reading of that sentence that I’ve heard, so I feel justified in having asked what it meant.
Quite possible. And I apologize, I replied (in the grandparent) identifying you as the originator of the current post rather than the linked post. So far as I can tell, you’ve written a fine article, and I’d bet you’re addressing an important need (maybe I’m just being selfish—I’d be ecstatic if nerds were a little more socially aware!). The problem (according to my reading) was in the link to the post—as though the idea were “follow this guy’s lead and don’t discuss dark-arts pick-up techniques—because women don’t like thinking about how things Really Are”.
Yes—and I find that the “Women hate the dark arts because they can’t deal with reality” trope is a very common one (perhaps less common on LW, but common in general). It may be that the OP didn’t intend to imply that, but it may also not be an unreasonable implication to draw given the frequency the argument is made.
For what it’s worth, there were no gender wars to my knowledge while I’ve been a member in the group. Some guys who went to PUA classes, but more in the context of “normal person who wants better luck with women.”
Are rationalists more likely than average men to treat women like silly, fickle, manipulative gold diggers? As far as I can tell, trying to be rational has only given me more reasons to treat women and humans in general better.
Tangentially, I try to avoid treating women differently since the cultural assumptions about how each gender thinks are rarely accurate, and appreciate it when women do the same thing.
LW is waaaaaay on the right of the bell curve when it comes to groups treating people like they are silly.
You know, I’m honestly not entirely sure whether “waaaaaay on the right of the bell curve” means that “LW does much more than average group of treating people like they are silly”, or that “LW is much better than the average group at not treating people like they are silly”.
Ha! I see I assumed too much and miscommunicated by under-communicating...again.
I meant LW treats people like they are silly, none of their core values are beyond question, their imagined reasons are confabulations, and their real reasons reek of bias, irrationality, and anti-epistemology.
It doesn’t seem at all correct to say “average men treat women like they’re silly, but rationalists don’t do that!”
Sure, rationalists treat men as silly too, which might be what is meant, but I think that part of the statement is literally false.
So we have a statement of the general form “X does Y, but we don’t.” This is the sort of statement that people are liable to say even when it’s false, so we should heavily discount the weight that we would give to their personal opinion (because it might be biased.) Instead, we should hug the query—gather more evidence (as unfiltered as we can—statistics may be more unbiased than pure anecdote) or display that which has been gathered, instead of ignoring the possibility that the claim is factually true. If the claim is false, the evidence should tell us that as well.
Of course, it depends more on the individuals involved than anything else, but I would say that a non-negligible percentage of rationalists are unwilling to question gender biases (and in fact, many get defensive because they prefer to consider themselves rational and non-sexist, and then in their defensiveness, fail to examine their biases). This is common enough that the geek feminist blog Restructure has a whole post called The Myth Of White Male Geek Rationality: http://restructure.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/myth-of-white-male-geek-rationality/
I agree that associating with PUA is distasteful and an immediate fail, and have removed the link from the post. The link is here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/298/more_art_less_stink_taking_the_pu_out_of_pua
Social phenomena exist like anything else and can be analyzed, but how it is discussed matters almost entirely. It is a high-status behavior to make observations about social phenomena, but analysis sends a bad signal.
I don’t think it’s bad to analyze social phenomena. I do think it’s bad to engage in or endorse (unwanted) sexually manipulative behavior. I also think it’s bad to equate distaste for unwanted sexually manipulative behavior with distaste for analysis.
Neither does anyone else. It’s just that if one actually analyses social phenomena instead of consciously or subconsciously taking the opportunity to judge/play ploitics, one pisses off many, many people very quickly.
I summon HughRistik! But even if I were to accept manipulation as a natural kind, which I don’t, rather than as a continuum with communication and influence, where are you going to draw the line?
PUA is up there with psychology, sales and marketing in the ranks of useful insights into how people actually work. It is unfortunate that there are some desperate misogynists among them, but if one is to denounce it then sales, marketing, PR, they all gotta burn too.
I have a big crush on HughRistik. It is important to note that he is not an accurate representation of PUAs. He is considerably more concerned with ethics, more friendly to feminism, more willing to acknowledge systemic problems in the PUA subculture, and smarter than the vast majority of PUAs. Quotation from one of his writings:
“There are a lot of problems with the seduction community that feminists correctly observe, including misogyny, cynicism towards relationships, and a few tactics that are bad for consent.” from: http://feministcritics.nfshost.com/blog/about/seduction-communitypickup-artists/
(edited for grammar)
Long post. I hope I’ve managed to express this stuff clearly, I feel like I’m leaving stuff out, but I guess we can get to whatever that is when it comes up.
… What I am saying is, I will not become angry if someone “actually analyses social phenomena”. I do not think it is bad. That is not the issue.
This seems disingenuous. It looks like you’re saying, essentially, “Ah, but nothing has inherent meaning!”. Are you unable to understand the concept of “manipulation” in non-technical terms?
(As an aside: following the pattern “Even if I thought X were an A rather than a B, something something,” typically one treats X as an A rather than a B.)
As I understand it, people did not on the whole have a problem with the PUA discussion because some pick-up artists are misogynists, but rather because of the parts of the discussion that weren’t analysis but were instead themselves casually misogynistic or exclusionary or clueless or whatever. Like, for example, “with women, you have to pretend that they don’t have cheat codes (unlike with us tough-minded rational men)”, or “bayes tells us we should all bang hot chicks”.
It’s partially a PR thing, but PR isn’t just waving your hands about in a mystical pattern to calm people down—it’s also about effectively communicating. You don’t want the most rational response to your comments to be “this person rejects sexual equality”, for example.
I think it is useful to compare/contrast the terms manipulation and influence. Barry Cotter did talk about a “continuum of influence”, and I think this is the point that you’re missing. Between two people, if one person is far more influential in their relationship than the other, then we call it manipulative. But there is an area in the middle of the continuum where their influence on each other isn’t one-sided.
I don’t know a whole lot about the whole PUA thing, but of the things I’ve read here and there online, one interesting point is that sexual attraction isn’t this innate thing that you either have or don’t have. So yeah, you can influence other people by presenting yourself in a more appealing way. But this shouldn’t be seen as “manipulation”, unless you’re doing something underhanded.
But if we’re going to exaggerate all influence by calling it manipulation, then we have an extremely inhibited view of society. A society where members didn’t influence each other could hardly be considered a society at all.
Certainly, I agree with this. But there are prominent pickup techniques that are manipulative and undesirable—you know, stuff like undermining someone’s self-esteem. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m using “manipulative” to refer to these “bad influences” or, if you prefer, “Dark Arts”.
Edit: Or, in other words, I’m not exaggerating all influence by calling it manipulation—I’m using the word to refer to basically the same thing you are (“influence other people by… doing something underhanded”).
I understand the non-technical meaning of manipulation. It’s when someone uses private information, or a power/skill imbalance to bring about a result that would not have occured given equality of capabilities. I don’t see how you can avoid it without forbidding interaction between agents who are not of implausibly rare equalcapability.
That’s an attitude I can get behind. Everyone has cheat codes. You may not have access to cheat codes for someone, if so this is weak evidence they have cheat codes for you, stronger evidence that either they are at least at your level or they are playing a different game.
I reject one interpretation of that statement. I’m a gender egalitarian but I do not believe men and women have an equal distribution of capabilities or interests .
There is a reply to the grandparent leading to a brief discussion on the intended meaning. Does it solve your objection?
Which is an attitude you can get behind? “With women, you have to pretend that they don’t have cheat codes (unlike with us tough-minded rational men)”? I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. Did you understand my assertion?
Okay, this is a reasonable position and I’m sure you’re aware of its caveats. But can you clarify—in context, do you believe that my analysis accurately reflects your beliefs?
I’m interested in other frameworks for approaching social interactions in a experimentally-verified manner, but the closest thing I can think of is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Could you list some, with links to information?
IMO Dale Carnegie is a pretty good base.
This sequence, and particularly point 3 in this recent article, are probably a start (although “experimentally-validated” sets the bar rather high).
Depending on what exactly you aspire to do (be less awkward at parties, take over the world, etc.), I would think that you would probably be after very different resources. What are you after?
I agree—different resources are necessary for different questions. I personally tend to read sociology papers whenever I can get my grubby little paws on them. Note that I have a feminist bent, so I tend to look for feminist-leaning resources. For example, I recently read this fascinating study: http://das.sagepub.com/content/10/3/293.short
I had the same reaction. The link seems… snide. Probably wasn’t meant that way, but I’m not sure how it was meant.
Fix deployed.
Cheers!