Your point about agreeableness is well taken, so I looked up his reference, Figueredo et al. (2006).
First, keep in mind he’s using agreeableness in the OCEAN sense, not in the sense of “a person who always agrees to everything”. So it’s not diametrically opposed to PUA belief, although I agree there’s still a problem that has to be explained.
That brings us to the reference. Figueredo’s study itself found no impact of agreeableness, but in the introduction, it cites eight previous studies that it said found “extraversion, openness, and agreeableness are reliably correlated with mating success”. I looked up one of these studies, and it was on the success of long-term marital relationships, which is a whole different kettle of fish than the PUA’s usual focus. So depending on the other seven studies I didn’t have the energy to look up, they could both be right. It would have been nice if Luke had qualified that in his post, but really the fault was on Figueredo and not him.
Other than that, I would honestly like to hear what advice of Luke’s you consider misleading. Again aside from the “Mean and Variance” section, it all seems pretty well referenced and backed up.
I would consider the article misleading in the sense that “Women like alpha males, men like beautiful women” is the central truth of dating, in the same sense that evolution is the central truth of biology.
A creationist pamphlet which briefly mentioned a watered-down version of evolution—such as “microevolution”- in small print on page 7 is seriously misleading a student. Likewise, this article briefly mentions status, but then gives a lot of contradictory tips about being “agreeable” and “liking her”, both of which are low-status behaviours, all in amongst a morass of irrelevant, non-field-tested nonsense.
Academics who write papers on dating “science” are simply not in the same kind of tight feedback relationship with reality that pickup artists are, so they produce a collection of half truths and irrelevant effects, as well as missing out the most important aspects of the game. So the fact that he has referenced this stuff is pretty useless. Far better to take a look at what others who have tried stuff have found. The PU community can be thought of as a giant social psychology experiment, except without the arbitrary restrictions of academic science. Mystery is rumoured to have done 10,000 cold approaches and sexed 200-300 women. All the way from meet to penis-in-vagina, with a sample size of 10,000. Then multiply that by all the hundreds of highly successful PU artists. Compare that to a social science experiment which has a small sample size (~30) and only looks at one aspect of relationships and dating, and probably looks at correlations rather than causation.
By the way, props for actually pursuing these references. It is a shame that this is hard and tiring to do.
Your point about agreeableness is well taken, so I looked up his reference, Figueredo et al. (2006).
First, keep in mind he’s using agreeableness in the OCEAN sense, not in the sense of “a person who always agrees to everything”. So it’s not diametrically opposed to PUA belief, although I agree there’s still a problem that has to be explained.
That brings us to the reference. Figueredo’s study itself found no impact of agreeableness, but in the introduction, it cites eight previous studies that it said found “extraversion, openness, and agreeableness are reliably correlated with mating success”. I looked up one of these studies, and it was on the success of long-term marital relationships, which is a whole different kettle of fish than the PUA’s usual focus. So depending on the other seven studies I didn’t have the energy to look up, they could both be right. It would have been nice if Luke had qualified that in his post, but really the fault was on Figueredo and not him.
Other than that, I would honestly like to hear what advice of Luke’s you consider misleading. Again aside from the “Mean and Variance” section, it all seems pretty well referenced and backed up.
I would consider the article misleading in the sense that “Women like alpha males, men like beautiful women” is the central truth of dating, in the same sense that evolution is the central truth of biology.
A creationist pamphlet which briefly mentioned a watered-down version of evolution—such as “microevolution”- in small print on page 7 is seriously misleading a student. Likewise, this article briefly mentions status, but then gives a lot of contradictory tips about being “agreeable” and “liking her”, both of which are low-status behaviours, all in amongst a morass of irrelevant, non-field-tested nonsense.
Academics who write papers on dating “science” are simply not in the same kind of tight feedback relationship with reality that pickup artists are, so they produce a collection of half truths and irrelevant effects, as well as missing out the most important aspects of the game. So the fact that he has referenced this stuff is pretty useless. Far better to take a look at what others who have tried stuff have found. The PU community can be thought of as a giant social psychology experiment, except without the arbitrary restrictions of academic science. Mystery is rumoured to have done 10,000 cold approaches and sexed 200-300 women. All the way from meet to penis-in-vagina, with a sample size of 10,000. Then multiply that by all the hundreds of highly successful PU artists. Compare that to a social science experiment which has a small sample size (~30) and only looks at one aspect of relationships and dating, and probably looks at correlations rather than causation. By the way, props for actually pursuing these references. It is a shame that this is hard and tiring to do.