It doesn’t. It just refutes your earlier rhetorical conflation of PUA with alternative medicine on the same grounds.
My intent was to show that in the absence of hard evidence PUA has the same epistemic claim on us as any other genre of folklore or folk-psychology, which is to say not much.
At this point, I’m rather tired of you continually reframing my positions to stronger positions, which you can then show are fallacies.
I admit I’m struggling to understand what your positions actually are, since you are asking me questions about my motivations and accusing me of “rhetoric, not reasoning” but not telling me what you believe to be true and why you believe it to be true. Or to put it another way, I don’t believe you have given me much actual signal to work with, and hence there is a very distinct limit to how much relevant signal I can send back to you.
Maybe we should reboot this conversation and start with you telling me what you believe about PUA and why you believe it?
Maybe we should reboot this conversation and start with you telling me what you believe about PUA and why you believe it?
Ok. I’ll hang in here for a bit, since you seem sincere.
Here’s one belief: PUA literature contains a fairly large number of useful, verifiable, observational predictions about the nonverbal aspects of interactions occurring between men and women while they are becoming acquainted and/or attracted.
Why do I believe this? Because their observational predictions match personal experiences I had prior to encountering the PUA literature. This suggests to me that when it comes to concrete behavioral observations, PUAs are reasonably well-calibrated.
For that reason, I view such PUA literature—where and only where it focuses on such concrete behavioral observations—as being relatively high quality sources of raw observational data.
In this, I find PUA literature to be actually better than the majority of general self-help and personal development material, as there is often nowhere near enough in the way of raw data or experiential-level observation in self-help books.
Of course, the limitation on my statements is the precise definition of “PUA literature”, as there’s definitely a selection effect going on. I tend to ignore PUA material that is excessively misogynistic on its face, simply because extracting the underlying raw data is too… tedious, let’s say. ;-) I also tend to ignore stuff that doesn’t seem to have any connection to concrete observations.
So, my definition of “PUA literature” is thus somewhat circular: I believe good stuff is good, having carefully selected which bits to label “good”. ;-)
Another aspect of my possible selection bias is that I don’t actually read PUA literature in order to do PUA!
I read PUA literature because of its relevance to topics such as confidence, fear, perceptions of self-worth, and other more common “self-help” topics that are of interest to me or to my customers. By comparison, PUA literature (again using my self-selected subset) contains much better raw data than traditional self-help books, because it comes from people who’ve relentlessly calibrated their observations against a harder goal than just, say, “feeling confident”.
Here’s one belief: PUA literature contains a fairly large number of useful, verifiable, observational predictions about the nonverbal aspects of interactions occurring between men and women while they are becoming acquainted and/or attracted.
Why do I believe this? Because their observational predictions match personal experiences I had prior to encountering the PUA literature. This suggests to me that when it comes to concrete behavioral observations, PUAs are reasonably well-calibrated.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that there are people who believe they have relentlessly calibrated their observations against reality using high quality sources of raw observational data and that as a result they have a system that lets them win at Roulette. (Barring high-tech means to track the ball’s vector or identifying an unbalanced wheel).
Roulette seems to be an apt comparison because based on the figures someone else quoted or linked to earlier about a celebrated PUAist hitting on 10 000 women and getting 300 of them into bed, the odds of a celebrated PUAist getting laid on a single approach even according to their own claims is not far off the odds of correctly predicting exactly which hole a Roulette ball will land in.
So when these people say “I tried a new approach where I flip flopped, be-bopped, body rocked, negged, nigged, nugged and nogged, then went for the Dutch Rudder and I believe this worked well” unless they tried this on a really large number of women so that they could detect changes in a base rate of 3% success I really don’t think they have any meaningful evidence. Did their success rate go up from 3% to 4% or what, and what are their error bars?
What’s the base rate for people not using PUA techniques anyway? People other than PUAs are presumably getting laid, so it’s got to be non-zero. The closer it is to 3% the less effect PUA techniques are likely to have.
I’ve already heard the response “Look, we don’t get just one bit of data as feedback. We PUAs get all sorts of nuanced feedback about what works and does not”. If that’s so and this feedback is doing some good this should be reflected in your hit rate for getting laid. If picking up women and getting them in to bed is an unfair metric for PUA effectiveness I really think it should be called something other than PUA.
My thinking is that you don’t have enough data to distinguish whether you are in a world where PUA training has a measurable effect, from a world where PUA have an unfalsifiable mythology that allows them to explain their hits and misses to themselves, and a collection of superstitions about what works and does not, but no actual knowledge that separates them in terms of success rate from those who simply scrub up, dress up and ask a bunch of women out.
I want to see that null hypothesis satisfactorily falsified before I allow that there is an elephant in the room.
Notice that nowhere in my post did I say pickup artists get laid, let alone that they get laid more often!
Nowhere did I state anything about their predictions of what behavior works to get laid!
I even explicitly pointed out that the information I’m most interested in obtaining from PUA literature, has notthing to do with getting laid!
So just by talking about the subject of getting laid, you demonstrate a complete failure to address what I actually wrote, vs. what you appear to have imagined I wrote.
So, please re-read what I actually wrote and respond only to what I actually wrote, if you’d like me to continue to engage in this discussion.
Okay. What observable outcomes do you think you can obtain at better-than-base-rate frequencies employing these supposed insights, and why do you think you can obtain them?
As I said earlier I think that if PUA insights cannot be cashed out in a demonstrable improvement in the one statistic which you would think would matter most to them, rate of getting laid, then there is grounds to question whether these supposed insights are of any use to anyone.
But if you would prefer to use some other metric I’m willing to look at the evidence.
My intent was to show that in the absence of hard evidence PUA has the same epistemic claim on us as any other genre of folklore or folk-psychology, which is to say not much.
I admit I’m struggling to understand what your positions actually are, since you are asking me questions about my motivations and accusing me of “rhetoric, not reasoning” but not telling me what you believe to be true and why you believe it to be true. Or to put it another way, I don’t believe you have given me much actual signal to work with, and hence there is a very distinct limit to how much relevant signal I can send back to you.
Maybe we should reboot this conversation and start with you telling me what you believe about PUA and why you believe it?
Ok. I’ll hang in here for a bit, since you seem sincere.
Here’s one belief: PUA literature contains a fairly large number of useful, verifiable, observational predictions about the nonverbal aspects of interactions occurring between men and women while they are becoming acquainted and/or attracted.
Why do I believe this? Because their observational predictions match personal experiences I had prior to encountering the PUA literature. This suggests to me that when it comes to concrete behavioral observations, PUAs are reasonably well-calibrated.
For that reason, I view such PUA literature—where and only where it focuses on such concrete behavioral observations—as being relatively high quality sources of raw observational data.
In this, I find PUA literature to be actually better than the majority of general self-help and personal development material, as there is often nowhere near enough in the way of raw data or experiential-level observation in self-help books.
Of course, the limitation on my statements is the precise definition of “PUA literature”, as there’s definitely a selection effect going on. I tend to ignore PUA material that is excessively misogynistic on its face, simply because extracting the underlying raw data is too… tedious, let’s say. ;-) I also tend to ignore stuff that doesn’t seem to have any connection to concrete observations.
So, my definition of “PUA literature” is thus somewhat circular: I believe good stuff is good, having carefully selected which bits to label “good”. ;-)
Another aspect of my possible selection bias is that I don’t actually read PUA literature in order to do PUA!
I read PUA literature because of its relevance to topics such as confidence, fear, perceptions of self-worth, and other more common “self-help” topics that are of interest to me or to my customers. By comparison, PUA literature (again using my self-selected subset) contains much better raw data than traditional self-help books, because it comes from people who’ve relentlessly calibrated their observations against a harder goal than just, say, “feeling confident”.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that there are people who believe they have relentlessly calibrated their observations against reality using high quality sources of raw observational data and that as a result they have a system that lets them win at Roulette. (Barring high-tech means to track the ball’s vector or identifying an unbalanced wheel).
Roulette seems to be an apt comparison because based on the figures someone else quoted or linked to earlier about a celebrated PUAist hitting on 10 000 women and getting 300 of them into bed, the odds of a celebrated PUAist getting laid on a single approach even according to their own claims is not far off the odds of correctly predicting exactly which hole a Roulette ball will land in.
So when these people say “I tried a new approach where I flip flopped, be-bopped, body rocked, negged, nigged, nugged and nogged, then went for the Dutch Rudder and I believe this worked well” unless they tried this on a really large number of women so that they could detect changes in a base rate of 3% success I really don’t think they have any meaningful evidence. Did their success rate go up from 3% to 4% or what, and what are their error bars?
What’s the base rate for people not using PUA techniques anyway? People other than PUAs are presumably getting laid, so it’s got to be non-zero. The closer it is to 3% the less effect PUA techniques are likely to have.
I’ve already heard the response “Look, we don’t get just one bit of data as feedback. We PUAs get all sorts of nuanced feedback about what works and does not”. If that’s so and this feedback is doing some good this should be reflected in your hit rate for getting laid. If picking up women and getting them in to bed is an unfair metric for PUA effectiveness I really think it should be called something other than PUA.
My thinking is that you don’t have enough data to distinguish whether you are in a world where PUA training has a measurable effect, from a world where PUA have an unfalsifiable mythology that allows them to explain their hits and misses to themselves, and a collection of superstitions about what works and does not, but no actual knowledge that separates them in terms of success rate from those who simply scrub up, dress up and ask a bunch of women out.
I want to see that null hypothesis satisfactorily falsified before I allow that there is an elephant in the room.
Once again, you are misstating my claims.
Notice that nowhere in my post did I say pickup artists get laid, let alone that they get laid more often!
Nowhere did I state anything about their predictions of what behavior works to get laid!
I even explicitly pointed out that the information I’m most interested in obtaining from PUA literature, has notthing to do with getting laid!
So just by talking about the subject of getting laid, you demonstrate a complete failure to address what I actually wrote, vs. what you appear to have imagined I wrote.
So, please re-read what I actually wrote and respond only to what I actually wrote, if you’d like me to continue to engage in this discussion.
Okay. What observable outcomes do you think you can obtain at better-than-base-rate frequencies employing these supposed insights, and why do you think you can obtain them?
As I said earlier I think that if PUA insights cannot be cashed out in a demonstrable improvement in the one statistic which you would think would matter most to them, rate of getting laid, then there is grounds to question whether these supposed insights are of any use to anyone.
But if you would prefer to use some other metric I’m willing to look at the evidence.