Others are involuntarily celibate; perhaps they can’t find or attract suitable mates. This problem can often be solved by learning and practicing social skills.
What ought one do when the problem is not solved by social skills?
I seem to have a tendency to feel extremely inadequate about any skill at which i am not noticeably better than everyone I know about. Due to this quirk of my psychology, I spent a significant portion of my life believing myself to have horrendous social skills. And, for a long time, I attributed my social and sexual failings to that perceived lack of social skill, despite a gradually growing mass of evidence in favor of my social skills being adequate.
(relatively) Recent evidence and experience has now finished falsifying the premise that my social skills are not viable.
Unfortunately, having (a lack of) social skills ruled out as a cause of the problem leaves me, seemingly, without any more low-hanging fruit to pursue. And when even the woman who literally wrote the sequence on self-awareness tells me that she doesn’t know why her interest in dating me suddenly evaporated, I begin to… worry, and that feeling of helplessness starts showing up.
(And this doesn’t even touch the non-trivial problem of meeting suitable mates, which is obviously a prerequisite to attracting anyone.)
Have you tried reading PUA-Game material (and then selectively applying the ethical parts of it)? I could /feel/ my attraction to my OH increasing just by getting him to Game me.
It turns out that making friends and attracting mates requires different sorts of social behaviour. For example, women seeking mates tend to be very status-aware, but you can get on with friends perfectly well without any ability to signal high status. If you felt inadequate very often, that itself could mean you were projecting low status and driving off mates.
Have you tried reading PUA-Game material (and then selectively applying the ethical parts of it)?
I might, if I had any idea where to find said material (rather that just people talking about the material), or how to identify the optimal starting point within the material. (Or anyone to apply it to.)
It depends on what data you need. My general recommendation would be:
“The Blueprint Decoded”—a video about pickup and social skills in general that gives you a greater context, instead of just throwing thousand random details at you. (Buy, or find a torrent.)
Married Man Sex Life—a blog about maintaining attraction in marriage. I recommend reading the older articles (before he published a book) because they seem to have much better signal:noise ratio.
From all the PUA stuff I have seen, these two seem highest-quality to me. The first one is like “the best of PUA”. The second one contains additional information about human chemistry; the author is a nurse. Both of them seem to me ethically OK, but because different people have different degrees of OK-ness, let me add a data point: The author of the second one has a wife who is also reading the blog and commenting on it; and they seem to have a very good relationship. This is also an evidence that the advice is long-term-relationship compatible.
Married Man Sex Life—a blog about maintaining attraction in marriage. I recommend reading the older articles (before he published a book) because they seem to have much better signal:noise ratio.
Thanks for actually providing a link. Being told to “just google it” gets frustrating.
However...
I started at the beginning of the archive, the oldest posts, and I am reading them in order. Granted, I have only yet read a handful of posts, but I can’t imagine a person who thinks like the author writes having a worthwhile life. What he advocates seems so hollow and dishonest that I’ve had a steadily growing sense of disgust since I began reading. Frankly, I think I’d rather be alone forever than relate to people in the way he seems to, because I would feel just as alone either way.
This is an example of the “good” version of PUA material?
I am going to continue reading in case there is useful information, despite my disgust, but I haven’t seen any yet.
The important information from that website, and from PUA materials in general, is that (heterosexual) women have sexual preferences, too. Those preferences were shaped by evolution. The preferred traits would statistically increase reproductive success in ancient environment (which is not necessarily true today).
This should not be a surprise, unless you believe that men are beasts, but women are pure angelic souls that only happen to have a body. (Problem is, that idea is implicitly present in our culture. That does not make it true.) However, many (heterosexual) men either don’t understand women’s preferences, or keep forgetting; simply because those are not their preferences.
Unlike men’s preferences, which are mostly about the shape of the body, women’s preferences are more behavior-based. This is a problem, because a man, despite once having been selected by a women, can simply forget to display the same behavior that made him attractive to her. He will not notice that he is doing something wrong! She will notice that something is wrong (she feels less attracted), but usually can’t pinpoint what! A few months or years later, they have a divorce, and no one really understands what happened. And this happens to maybe 50% of the population, in some cultures.
What exactly is “hollow” about this? Women having sexual preferences? Guess what, evolution does not care about what you decide to label as “hollow”. Would you rather not know about it, and worship your ignorance? That actually is what many men do, but then there are consequences like cheating, divorce, and child support.
What exactly is “dishonest” about fulfilling one’s wife’s sexual preferences? Not more dishonest than a woman applying make-up and dressing nice, to make her husband happy. It’s a role-play to satisfy the instinctual need to mate with a tribal leader from ancient environment, which no longer exists. And unlike many other PUA materials, this one recommends it only to maintain a marriage.
Certainly some of these ideas can offend people; especially people with wrong models of the world. Some people are offended by evolution; some people are offended by reductionism; some people are offended by the idea of husband and wife doing something to make each other happy. Unlike other PUA materials, this one has scientific support; the author explains (in a simplified version, accessible to layman) the effects of dopamine, oxytocine, and testosterone on human body; which is more than typical “just so stories” with evolutionary or pseudo-evolutionary explanations.
If this offends you, then I’m afraid that reality offends you. Sure, that happens to many people, too. In which case I cannot recommend you a better material, except maybe to read something PUA-unrelated but still related to sexuality and evolution, for example some books by Matt Ridley, and come back later when the idea of sexual behavior reductionism stops being so offensive.
Therefore, just as to understand and be successful in your own decision you must be aware of your biases and cognitive quirks, to successfully interact with others you must be aware of theirs. Most biases are shared across the human population, but sexual partner preferences are obviously not. Also, elephants can’t be reasoned with: you correct elephant biases by tricking the elephant. You don’t adjust well for the priming effect by trying to out-reason your instincts. You adjust for the priming effect by making sure you’re primed correctly for achieving your aims.
It’s important therefore to distinguish between tricking the elephant and tricking the rider. Tricking the rider is usually considered unethical, but tricking the elephant can be a case of correcting someone else’s biases for them: the wife thinks (rider, or attachment part of elephant + rationalisation) she should be attracted to the husband, after all she married him, but she (attraction part of elephant) isn’t. There are two ways of resolving that: one the rider decides to leave, or two the husband makes himself more attractive to the elephant.
Beisutsukai unlock Option III at level 25: Get the rider to look down and see the elephant, craft reins for the elephant, and cooperate to steer the elephant.
Also, at level 45, they unlock the legendary Option IV (both riders must have this ability to use successfully): Both riders perform a combo-takedown on the elephants and develop low-maintenance long-term elephant-control plans that guarantees self-perpetuating elephant attraction and automatic steering (e.g. by training the elephants to follow the road/eachother on their own without further direction).
Incidentally, all Beisutsukai unlock Option 0 at level 5: Find a mate that already knows how to ride the elephant in the first place.
I have an elephant riding strategy, it involves throwing rocks at the environment and surrounding elephants to entice/scare it into going the right way. It’s kinda hard work, but elephants don’t really do reins… (How do people actually steer elephants, out of interest?)
(How do people actually steer elephants, out of interest?)
Two methods are anchoring and positive reinforcement. Availability control is also usually very effective. Essentially, the same stuff as for behavior/habit training works best, since as per my best model you’re essentially training a psychological/biological behavior there too. That’s more for “training” elephants though. Direct, in-the-moment steering requires actually training the elephant to respond to steering by whatever reins you craft, in the first place, otherwise it’s very hard and sketchy (and usually, as you say, involves throwing rocks).
I forgot where, but I recall reading a study that concluded that making one kind of sexual stimulus more “present” and reducing the availability/presence of other stimuli would increase the natural response of men to that stimulus later on (with long-term effects) in those subjects. I’m not sure of the specifics anymore, but for “sexual stimulus” think “pictures of mostly-naked ladies in X”, for X being wearing a specific item of clothing, fetish setup, or particular situation/setting.
Most studies I’ve found regarding such things seem to be crafted exclusively around men, so it’s pretty hard to find good “official” scientific data for women in that regard. Most of the data apparently comes from PUA material, unfortunately.
the author explains (in a simplified version, accessible to layman) the effects of dopamine, oxytocine, and testosterone on human body; which is more than typical “just so stories” with evolutionary or pseudo-evolutionary explanations.
Indeed, it is pseudo-endocrinology instead. (I usually take these with the same grain of alt I take the other ‘layman science’ explanations.)
The important information from that website, and from PUA materials in general, is that (heterosexual) women have sexual preferences, too. Those preferences were shaped by evolution. The preferred traits would statistically increase reproductive success in ancient environment (which is not necessarily true today).
Who would have thought?
This should not be a surprise, unless you believe that men are beasts, but women are pure angelic souls that only happen to have a body. (Problem is, that idea is implicitly present in our culture. That does not make it true.)
Which culture? I suppose that this misconception might be present in cultures where women are considered little more than chattel, but if you live in a culture where women freely choose their partners, you would have to be stupid or delusional to think they don’t have sexual preferences.
Unlike other PUA materials, this one has scientific support; the author explains (in a simplified version, accessible to layman) the effects of dopamine, oxytocine, and testosterone on human body; which is more than typical “just so stories” with evolutionary or pseudo-evolutionary explanations.
Actually, it looks like pseudoscience. Just throwing in the names of a few neurotransmitters and hormones doesn’t make a claim scientifically supported.
I suppose that this misconception might be present in cultures where women are considered little more than chattel, but if you live in a culture where women freely choose their partners, you would have to be stupid or delusional to think they don’t have sexual preferences.
The idea of individual female sexual preferences is OK, as long as they remain mysterious.
The outrage starts at the moment when someone suggests that they are statistically predictable, and gives specific examples. This is quickly labeled as “offensive to women”. And in some sense, the label is correct—being unpredictable is higher status than being predictable. On the other hand, there is no harm in saying that male sexual preferences are statistically predictable.
I suggest a thought experiment—imagine starting a discussion in LW Open Thread about which female sexual preferences are most frequent, and what is the easiest way to trigger them. Then, watch the downvotes and offended complaints. (This is just a thought experiment, don’t do it really.) The topic is probably instrumentally important to majority of LW readers, yet it will never get the same space as e.g. a rational toothpaste choice. So there is some kind of a taboo, isn’t it?
I’m under the impression that hypergamy is common knowledge, but I suppose that it may be politically incorrect to discuss it in public in certain subcultures.
Other aspects of female sexual preferences, like social intelligence, athletic physique, masculine facial bone structure, deep voice, etc. are also well known and not so controversial to discuss.
LW might not be the best place for such an experiment, even as a thought experiment. I think this should actually be experimented in some other, “general-population” forum, perhaps with a control test in a different one replacing “female” with “male” for comparison framing. It would still obviously not be study-material, but it certainly sounds fun.
Um, wow. Clearly you’ve pattern-matched to something completely different than the objection I was trying to convey. I’m so not in any way offended by sexual behavior reductionism.
To me, the author of MMSL only seems to care about creating something that looks like an intimate relationship from the outside. And he’s other-optimizing; very egregiously so. My revulsion stems from my belief that I wouldn’t be any happier living the way he advocates than I am now. I want something that feels like an intimate relationship from the inside, and the sort of relationship he depicts as ideal wouldn’t.
That’s what I mean by hollow.
I also doubt I could ever feel safe with someone with whom, to use the metaphor, appealing to the elephant is more effective than appealing to the rider, but he seems to live in an isolated bubble where he only interacts with other riders through the intermediary of their elephants, which I would find just as lonely as my current life of no interaction at all.
I’m totally with you there, in that it wouldn’t be any fun to be in a relationship with someone who wasn’t aware of this stuff.
You have to be aware though that sometimes appealing to the elephant IS more effective than appealing to the rider. It is not possible to consciously reason myself into being turned on. I am /not/ in conscious control of my hormone emitters. I need my environment to influence them for me. Even if I’m consciously aware that you’re a great guy and super smart and all that, if you don’t press my elephant buttons, so to speak, being in a relationship with you just isn’t any fun. Placating the elephant isn’t a terminal value for sufficiently awake people, but for most people it’s an important instrumental value.
Also, the impression he usually gives is not that he interacts with only his wife’s elephant, just that his rider-rider interaction is fine and he never struggled with it. He also occasionally gives advice for female riders regarding male elephants.
Also, take it from me that this stuff adds to rather than detracts from intimate relationships. From the inside. (If it helps you believe me, this is what Athol’s wife thinks.)
No you aren’t. You’re saying something entirely different—a mix of orthogonal points and contradictory ones—but using the form “I’m with you there” because it is typically an amazingly effective tool for leading around and getting along with metaphorical elephants.
It is not possible to consciously reason myself into being turned on.
Impossible is such a strong term. I’d suggest possible but completely unrealistically implausible, possibly take years of unnatural mental training and being ultimately far less satisfying than just finding a mate that is actually attractive.
Would it be offensive to claim that I’m a woman and I can’t help doing that, re your first comment? (The “it wasn’t me it was my elephant!” defence?) I’ve subtly edited the phrasing so it’s less objectionable.
And I suppose Buddhists have meditated their way into their reptilian-level hardware before. Though I’m not sure it’d be worth a lifetime of meditation training just so I can think myself into releasing testosterone and oestrogen and dopamine ;) Instrumental and terminal values and all that.
Though if I could release dopamine at will then it’s the wireheading discussion all over again...
Would it be offensive to claim that I’m a woman and I can’t help doing that, re your first comment?
I imagine some women may conceivably be offended by the stereotyping.
I’ve subtly edited the phrasing so it’s less objectionable.
I wouldn’t have said “objectionable” so much as “fascinating example of exactly the kind of influence technique either a PUA or business social skills adviser may recommend”.
Though I’m not sure it’d be worth a lifetime of meditation training just so I can think myself into releasing testosterone and oestrogen and dopamine ;)
Especially since any one of those things can be injected far more simply routinely. Purely mental wireheading tactics are just terribly inefficient these days!
You’re letting your elephant loose on this stuff? And it actually moves? Darn.
Mine’s just been standing there munching on some rationality leaves all along, completely uninterested. It’s more annoyed about the rider jumping in excitement on its back, if anything.
Letting my elephant loose? I don’t know about you, but my elephant is almost always loose. I just try to pay attention to what it does, because, well, isn’t that the point of this site?
This conversation is making my elephant very confused… Based on interpreting my reactions, did I just get negged?
Analyzing...
...Not in the pure sense of “negative compliment”. Because, well, I seem to have neglected the ‘compliment’ part. Let’s see… You have beautiful eyelashes… Are they real?
Nevertheless, the style of interaction could be used in a similar social role to the neg—that is, demonstrating playfulness, arrogance and a willingness to assert themselves higher in status (at least for the purpose of that one social transaction.)
To a certain extent there is the reverse of a neg. Surface level cavalier contradiction which nevertheless serves to overall lend support to your position. In particular the replies in the grandparent could be replaced with “Not to me.”, “Oh, no, I didn’t want to imply that you were being objectionable and using that strategy is OK.” and “You are totally right.” respectively without changing the object level meaning drastically. Yet that would have conveyed an entirely invalid connotations of supplication and wishy-washy backtracking. Complimentary-contradiction and then flippant elaboration avoids that frame.
In summary: No, but with that style of interaction adding negs would be overkill!
Frankly, I think I’d rather be alone forever than relate to people in the way he seems to, because I would feel just as alone either way.
If that is what you really want then by all means go ahead. To the external observer that just looks like someone sitting in the corner sulking because the universe doesn’t give them what they want.
Isn’t that a false dilemma? That’s just one relative comparison, which is meant to illustrate just how much he dislikes that particular option by visibly placing and signalling it as even lower than something else generally understood as being a net negative option.
Basically: “I’ve considered this, but so far found that it was even worse than other options I’ve already considered, so I’ll keep looking”—is what I understand as the main point behind the wording he used.
Please imagine I inserted “would rather” in appropriate places in the grandparent so that the token relativity is duly represented in the declared observations of the typical observer.
I didn’t really look at much of MMSL either, but I did notice an encouraging sign: the author’s wife is listed as a coauthor and adds occasional remarks to the posts, which if nothing else suggests that she reads them. This puts an upper bound on how dishonest it can possibly be.
This puts an upper bound on how dishonest it can possibly be.
Yes, it requires that two people be lying about something for their mutual benefit, instead of just one. Two people is practically a conspiracy!
(We need to use another term for where the actual upper bound doesn’t change that much at all but the probability of a moderate amount of deception is present is reduced.)
I was assuming that “hollow and dishonest” referred to the author being hollow and dishonest to his wife. And in fact I don’t think this can be done very effectively when you document your hollowness and dishonesty on a blog your wife reads.
MMSL is my personal source and what I had in mind as something that worked when I recommended just googling it. Most Game material sounds weird without being able to put the ideas into practise, which is why I recommended you search for material more applicable to you: I was able to get instant feedback on ideas by getting or prompting my OH or myself (depending on material) to try them.
I don’t recommend the start of MMSL though, it sounds cynical because it is; that part is mainly aimed at men who are married to wives who aren’t attracted to them, who really need to do something drastic if they want to keep their relationships. I’m not actually sure I’d recommend the blog at all to someone not in a long term relationship; in terms of referring to the science of attraction it doesn’t do much different from sites like Hooking Up Smart, which afaics is information of a similar quality aimed at a different audience (college students, in this case). I’m sure there are more sites of a similar quality out there. (Look for references to Helen Fisher), whose research is most commonly cited).
Apologies if the google advice isn’t useful, looks like I failed to avoid other-optimising after all! (I usually take a “just google it” approach to these things myself.)
ETA: if you’re having ethical “disgust” responses, it may help to keep firmly in mind the elephant/rider (in the usual LW
language) or hamster/agent distinction. Manipulation is done from the rider to the other party’s elephant. This can be done with or without the other rider’s permission, and the ethics of the action where done without permission may well depend on how much the other rider is in control of their own elephant. In the specific case advocated by the opening posts of MMSL, the wife who says things like “I love you but I’m not in love with you” or cheats on their husband without knowing why, has an actively harmful elephant, whose rider is unaware of how to control the elephant, or worse, vehemently denying the existence of the elephant. In cases like this, calling out directly to the elephant may well be an ethical course of action. (“recognising the rider-elephant distinction” translates to “taking the red pill”; the more misogynistic sites assume that females aren’t capable of this, but these sites can still have useful advice in terms of elephant-control.)
Thanks for the insights. This is shining more light on just what it is I’m looking for in a relationship, too, which should help me greatly in improving the shape of my sweet-spot-in-personspace.
There are torrents of it. Someone linked a torrent of a bunch of books by some famous PUA a while back, I found it fairly interesting, but “what was true wasn’t new.” It may be helpful in building your confidence to actually go out and try things, which is the hard part but also rather key.
Where to find said material: I’m going to steer clear of other-optimising here, and suggest what I did (rather than link you to my favourites), which involved basically google, then a breadth-first (affiliated links and commenters with their own blogs will help) search of blogs that seem relevant by sampling critical posts, then reading the most useful blogs in depth from the start chronologically, skipping material that seems irrelevant to you. Since I’m female, I ranked reading material by looking for posts that described their model of women and seeing which applied best. You’ll have to decide which posts to look for by your own selection criteria, though I suggest checking any of: the posts that the site owner chooses to highlight, posts that describe the type of relationship the author wants/has/caters for, posts which echo strongly with your personal situation, or just random posts.
Similar principles apply for forums and general websites, though it makes the breadth-first search harder.
I’d be happy to help if you tell me the specifics, either via messaging or replying, since I had to read a lot of material to get to where I am.
As for people to apply it to (assuming heterosexual male), you can try making more female friends by actually going to social activities and clubs/meetups. You can also test the theory by going to places where women go to be approached by strange men, such as bars and clubs if you live near a busy area. You’re unlikely to find the type of girl you’ll want long-term there, but it can be useful for experimenting theory and confidence-building.
If you’re wary of experimenting in person, and are relatively good at applying a general theory to a new situation, I think the principles of Game should also apply well to dating sites, so you may want to give those a go: it’s a very low-cost way of experimenting, and you also might find someone you like!
And when even the woman who literally wrote the sequence on self-awareness tells me that she doesn’t know why her interest in dating me suddenly evaporated
I did not say that. I looked at the chatlog to be sure, and I did not say that.
I have a hack which usually gets such points across efficiently, though:
“How did you—that’s exactly, completely what I was thinking! You’re totally right!
...(short pause)...
Now put that in parenthesis, and put a minus sign in front. You’ll see what I mean.”
I’d also add that the whining itself could not possibly have caused the rejection, since you’d have some kind of causal loop.
I agree on the implied denotation that such a general attitude, if applied in other circumstances, would be detrimental. I disagree about the also-implicit conclusion that EphemeralNight does use that attitude in general. Nothing in particular seems to indicate that this person is prone to whining about rejection in general. We’ve only seen one single instance of some person kicking the soda machine, without knowing about their brother that just got arrested and the 5K$ debt they just learned about—to reuse an old example.
(And this doesn’t even touch the non-trivial problem of meeting suitable mates, which is obviously a prerequisite to attracting anyone.)
This is my primary problem. “Meeting people that I can interact well with, regardless of the mate-suitability criterion” is a fairly/relatively trivial (and different) problem, but all my approaches to meeting people generate massive amounts of noise-results, such that finding a combo-match of (person-I-could-find-suitable) + (person-that-could-find-me-suitable) + (meeting-said-person) + (sufficient-common-knowledge-barrier) statistically becomes very hard. For each of the above “suitable mate met” events, I would have to generate tens of thousands of “person met” events.
Considering the amount of time required to generate these events, and the relative resulting chance of a payoff, it becomes trivially obvious that my time is better spent otherwise (such as reducing the noise through learning better event-generation behaviors) since it computes to rather low expected value.
If p(X would be a suitable mate|you met X) is actually around 10^-4, then maybe trying to lower your standards (if you can manage to do that) might help.
Well, widening / loosening the “margin” or distribution of suitability criteria is indeed one of the valid approaches, but one this is still only part of the equation for the problem AFAICT.
Yes, currently, to my model, that P() really is in that ballpark. I’m currently hitting (with P>.98) way off my current “sweet spot in personspace”, with few hits ever getting closer to it and forming a cloud around a completely different area, so my best WAG pretty much give those numbers when trying to project how many I’d have to meet to expect at least one statistical outlier to hit the margin. Making said sweet spot larger is something that would indeed help a lot, but doing so without reducing the total expected payoff of this whole calculation is also non-trivial, for reasons I hope are obvious.
I strongly suspect that my current noise is in no small part due to my current approaches / general behaviors. There’s at bare flat minimum 1 in 50 people (assuming IQ stats are any indication) with sufficient reasoning ability for me to find them very interesting, of those at least 1 in 3 is using that ability in a way that I probably wouldn’t perceive as noise (so I’d probably notice quickly enough), my preferences / personspace “sweet spot” check would eliminate around (WAG: intuitions from personspace stuff) 80-95% of those remaining.
Which means that, by those numbers and assumptions, around 1 in 750 to 1 in 3000 would be a valid match if I were meeting persons according to a uniform personspace probability distribution and breaking the sufficient-common-knowledge barrier in a proportionally uniform manner over persons met. The clear difference indicates that I’m probably doing something wrong, so the most efficient way I know of solving the problem is to find what I’m doing wrong and fix it first, not just meeting more people.
IMO, 1 in 750 is not a particularly constraining margin, especially if you consider that under ideal circumstances you should do the reverse of what I’m doing and actually be concentrating your hits around your sweet spot, not some other place far away from it.
Also, I dislike the term “lowering your standards”. The imagery puts person on a scale basically equivalent to transforming personspace into a Me.perceivedValue(X) function that outputs the scalar distance between Me.perceivedPSLoc(X) and Me.sweetSpotCenter. It gives exactly zero information about the other components of the equation. It also gives very little information on the measurement unit of the scalar.
Unfortunately, even living in a very student-dense city and deliberately targeting locales near universities doesn’t seem to have quite the effect I was hoping for. Things are not helped by the fact that French, the main language of 2⁄3 of the population here, distinctly lacks key words and concepts that seem necessary for bayesianism. The word “evidence”, for example, has no French equivalents to my knowledge—even the French wikipedia page on Bayes’ Theorem struggles with this.
As I’ve said, I’m most likely doing a lot of things wrong, because even going to places near university campus(es) (which I’d go to anyway, since they’re otherwise still the places I’d prefer going to) gives these results. I’m also going with the assumption that the actual odds for people I am meeting there are much higher than 1⁄50 for the intelligence criterion, but calculating flat minimum ratios for an IQ level I’m certain is high enough seemed like a more appropriate conservative figure.
It’s the way it looks and feels from here too—I seem to be a rare exception in considering reason, logic and knowledge to have any value (besides the obvious monetary value of “knowledge” of things related to a business) among native French speakers here.
Campaigns to “preserve language and culture” and keep forcing children to go to only French schools and study only in French make me cringe constantly.
That’s kinda spurious reasoning. By that standard, people who speak languages where evidentiality is considered so relevant it’s marked grammatically (like Turkish, or Apache, or Yukaghir) should on average be much more rational than people who don’t. Appeal to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is usually a quick ticket to confusion.
I did not mean to imply an appeal to Sapir-Whorf concepts. Disregarding every other factor, I do seem to be a rare exception among native French speakers in this culture. Whether I would also be a rare exception, a less rare exception, or an even more rare exception in some other language or some other culture, is a different matter, which is itself worth examining in its own separate right for its own reasons.
Other than that, I agree that what you’ve said does follow, and to the best of my knowledge isn’t currently supported by any public research and only has sporadic anecdotal evidence.
My objection to teaching only French is that it’s a well-known fact that knowing multiple languages helps immensely with various aspects of cognition and intelligence, and learning multiple languages during childhood has been shown to be an overwhelming net positive. It follows that forcing children to learn only one language has a net negative impact. This fact is perceived, agreed, and then waived by appeal to consequence: “If children learn English, they will only speak English [because all regional neighbors do], so less and less people will speak French, so our culture will die!”
Well, you’ve got to consider complicating factors, which makes this hard to measure. Those other countries aren’t very affluent compared to the USA and their educational system is probably worse, plus they don’t have access to the institutional infrastructure of knowledge like we do. Also, measuring rationality seems hard, etc. there’s tons of problems that always pop up when we try to evaluate things like this.
I mean, I think you’d probably be mostly right and that there’s not much difference in rationality between different language users, but for other reasons than the apparent average rationality of certain language-users.
The word “evidence”, for example, has no French equivalents to my knowledge
It has no terribly good Italian equivalent either, but this doesn’t make it hard to talk in a Bayesian way: you just say stuff like “it’s likely that X, given that Y”. (In particular, ISTM that—among the kind of people usually I hang with at least—“folk probability” resembles Bayesianism much more than frequentism, and most people who use frequentist statistics only give lip service to it without being actually convinced it makes all that sense.)
There’s at bare flat minimum 1 in 50 people (assuming IQ stats are any indication) with sufficient reasoning ability for me to find them very interesting
Maybe part of the problem is you go around saying things like that.
Or, to put it in this particular context: I don’t go around saying things like that. This is a discussion about relationships and attraction, and the things I say here are (or so I perceive them to be) very relevant to the subject at hand. You’ve seen me once say something like that, in a place where saying things like that is both appropriate and productive, and you deduce that I always go around saying things like that to random people I’ve just met before I even know them? I’d be very afraid if I were a suspect in a murder investigation led by you.
You also seem to have misinterpreted just what it is that “that” was saying. To put it in other words that might be less prone to “pompous elitist” pattern-matching, I’m basically saying that there’s a statistical guarantee that I’d be very interested in maintaining an intellectual discourse (and hopefully long-term relationship of some kind, even as acquaintances) with, given enough time to talk with and get to know them, at least one out of every fifty people out there. Even more than that in practice, since there will be many people who are interesting despite not being Mensa material. That sentence just puts a lower boundary on the amount of people I could find very interesting.
I apologize. Even if my comment had had a small probability of being helpful, I should have stated it differently, and I did jump to more conclusions than was warranted.
I didn’t mean to imply a misinterpretation, though. If you did go around saying things like that, the pattern-matching would be the whole problem. If you actually believed something to the effect of “people with IQ less than X are not worth knowing”, that might also be an obstacle, but at a later stage of relationship-forming. In any case, that appears to be irrelevant.
I seem to have a tendency to feel extremely inadequate about any skill at which i am not noticeably better than everyone I know about.
I believe that this is a serious problem in itself. It’s probably undercutting your quality of life in many ways,
In particular, it’s probably on your mind when you’re in relationships, distracting you from what’s actually going on between you and the other person.
Cognitive behavioral therapy might help. It goes into detail about undercutting that sort of belief.
More generally, I believe that the crucial thing is to believe that it’s safe to be on your own side. Getting to that belief can be amazingly difficult (believing that you shouldn’t be on your own side is probably the result of gut-level fear from repeated attacks), but it’s worth the trouble.
By “annoyance” I assume you mean you still have the feeling but work around it?
In that case, it may be a problem in ways you’re not aware of. Other people, prospective mates especially, can pick up on that feeling in tricky subtle ways and react to it.
Ask someone who knows you and has seen you interacting with women to give you honest feedback. Such feedback will help you spot the actual causes of your inability to attract suitable mates more than anything anyone could tell you here.
When I ask that, the answer is usually “I have no idea, you are not ugly nor unpleasant nor stupid after all” or “You just haven’t found the right one yet.”
(Oh, and the people who give me the former answer are almost invariably already taken, or otherwise not looking for a relationship at the moment.)
Well… I though I had, but now that I think about that… (OTOH, I usually ask that when we’re both drunk, so that—I’d expect—there are fewer filters in place than usual.)
I’ve also created an account on whatiswrongwithme.com and share it on Facebook once in a while—promising I won’t get offended no matter what I read, but I didn’t get much feedback there either.
You may consider offering money in exchange for good feedback. A while ago, I agreed to pay a friend of mine $5 per individual piece of feedback that I judged to be sufficiently valuable. I learned a lot about myself as a result.
Actually, if you find the comment on this page (among the thousands) about useless studies (I recall it being highly upvoted), in a lot of people self-reporting is highly inaccurate. I suspect this is mostly either via automatic face-saving or via only reporting conscious reactions when unconscious ones are equally important.
I recommend either asking friends who both understand how the conscious/unconscious division works for them, and are willing to be brutally honest (actually if they have both these qualities they don’t need to be a friend, just anyone willing to talk to you will do), or if no such person is available, form hypotheses yourself and get evidence by changing your behaviour and observing the responses, rather than asking outright.
First, accumulate 117 acquaintances who would trust you to relay an unimportant piece of information accurately, and four true friends who would trust you to provide support in a situation which unexpectedly became violent.
What ought one do when the problem is not solved by social skills?
You look at:
“I seem to have a tendency to feel extremely inadequate”
″ I begin to… worry, and that feeling of helplessness starts showing up.”
The “social skills” referred to when considering mating potential are somewhat specific and include particular emphasis on displaying confidence, particularly sexual confidence. Google “dating inner game” and you’ll have an overabundance of resources explaining what signals you need to send and giving tips on how to change yourself so that you are the kind of person who sends those signals more.
Retracted. I had written some brutally honest advice but realized after reading a bit more that you know a lot of people on here in person, so I’ll PM instead.
What ought one do when the problem is not solved by social skills?
I seem to have a tendency to feel extremely inadequate about any skill at which i am not noticeably better than everyone I know about. Due to this quirk of my psychology, I spent a significant portion of my life believing myself to have horrendous social skills. And, for a long time, I attributed my social and sexual failings to that perceived lack of social skill, despite a gradually growing mass of evidence in favor of my social skills being adequate.
(relatively) Recent evidence and experience has now finished falsifying the premise that my social skills are not viable.
Unfortunately, having (a lack of) social skills ruled out as a cause of the problem leaves me, seemingly, without any more low-hanging fruit to pursue. And when even the woman who literally wrote the sequence on self-awareness tells me that she doesn’t know why her interest in dating me suddenly evaporated, I begin to… worry, and that feeling of helplessness starts showing up.
(And this doesn’t even touch the non-trivial problem of meeting suitable mates, which is obviously a prerequisite to attracting anyone.)
Have you tried reading PUA-Game material (and then selectively applying the ethical parts of it)? I could /feel/ my attraction to my OH increasing just by getting him to Game me.
It turns out that making friends and attracting mates requires different sorts of social behaviour. For example, women seeking mates tend to be very status-aware, but you can get on with friends perfectly well without any ability to signal high status. If you felt inadequate very often, that itself could mean you were projecting low status and driving off mates.
I might, if I had any idea where to find said material (rather that just people talking about the material), or how to identify the optimal starting point within the material. (Or anyone to apply it to.)
It depends on what data you need. My general recommendation would be:
“The Blueprint Decoded”—a video about pickup and social skills in general that gives you a greater context, instead of just throwing thousand random details at you. (Buy, or find a torrent.)
Married Man Sex Life—a blog about maintaining attraction in marriage. I recommend reading the older articles (before he published a book) because they seem to have much better signal:noise ratio.
From all the PUA stuff I have seen, these two seem highest-quality to me. The first one is like “the best of PUA”. The second one contains additional information about human chemistry; the author is a nurse. Both of them seem to me ethically OK, but because different people have different degrees of OK-ness, let me add a data point: The author of the second one has a wife who is also reading the blog and commenting on it; and they seem to have a very good relationship. This is also an evidence that the advice is long-term-relationship compatible.
Thanks for actually providing a link. Being told to “just google it” gets frustrating.
However...
I started at the beginning of the archive, the oldest posts, and I am reading them in order. Granted, I have only yet read a handful of posts, but I can’t imagine a person who thinks like the author writes having a worthwhile life. What he advocates seems so hollow and dishonest that I’ve had a steadily growing sense of disgust since I began reading. Frankly, I think I’d rather be alone forever than relate to people in the way he seems to, because I would feel just as alone either way.
This is an example of the “good” version of PUA material?
I am going to continue reading in case there is useful information, despite my disgust, but I haven’t seen any yet.
Be specific. Taboo “hollow”. Taboo “dishonest”.
The important information from that website, and from PUA materials in general, is that (heterosexual) women have sexual preferences, too. Those preferences were shaped by evolution. The preferred traits would statistically increase reproductive success in ancient environment (which is not necessarily true today).
This should not be a surprise, unless you believe that men are beasts, but women are pure angelic souls that only happen to have a body. (Problem is, that idea is implicitly present in our culture. That does not make it true.) However, many (heterosexual) men either don’t understand women’s preferences, or keep forgetting; simply because those are not their preferences.
Unlike men’s preferences, which are mostly about the shape of the body, women’s preferences are more behavior-based. This is a problem, because a man, despite once having been selected by a women, can simply forget to display the same behavior that made him attractive to her. He will not notice that he is doing something wrong! She will notice that something is wrong (she feels less attracted), but usually can’t pinpoint what! A few months or years later, they have a divorce, and no one really understands what happened. And this happens to maybe 50% of the population, in some cultures.
What exactly is “hollow” about this? Women having sexual preferences? Guess what, evolution does not care about what you decide to label as “hollow”. Would you rather not know about it, and worship your ignorance? That actually is what many men do, but then there are consequences like cheating, divorce, and child support.
What exactly is “dishonest” about fulfilling one’s wife’s sexual preferences? Not more dishonest than a woman applying make-up and dressing nice, to make her husband happy. It’s a role-play to satisfy the instinctual need to mate with a tribal leader from ancient environment, which no longer exists. And unlike many other PUA materials, this one recommends it only to maintain a marriage.
Certainly some of these ideas can offend people; especially people with wrong models of the world. Some people are offended by evolution; some people are offended by reductionism; some people are offended by the idea of husband and wife doing something to make each other happy. Unlike other PUA materials, this one has scientific support; the author explains (in a simplified version, accessible to layman) the effects of dopamine, oxytocine, and testosterone on human body; which is more than typical “just so stories” with evolutionary or pseudo-evolutionary explanations.
If this offends you, then I’m afraid that reality offends you. Sure, that happens to many people, too. In which case I cannot recommend you a better material, except maybe to read something PUA-unrelated but still related to sexuality and evolution, for example some books by Matt Ridley, and come back later when the idea of sexual behavior reductionism stops being so offensive.
Translation into usual Less Wrong language:
Men and women all have elephants and riders. While female riders are not intrinsically different from male riders, female elephants have lots of differences to male elephants, which is expected if the elephant is the animal hardware/operating system that we are run on.
Therefore, just as to understand and be successful in your own decision you must be aware of your biases and cognitive quirks, to successfully interact with others you must be aware of theirs. Most biases are shared across the human population, but sexual partner preferences are obviously not. Also, elephants can’t be reasoned with: you correct elephant biases by tricking the elephant. You don’t adjust well for the priming effect by trying to out-reason your instincts. You adjust for the priming effect by making sure you’re primed correctly for achieving your aims.
It’s important therefore to distinguish between tricking the elephant and tricking the rider. Tricking the rider is usually considered unethical, but tricking the elephant can be a case of correcting someone else’s biases for them: the wife thinks (rider, or attachment part of elephant + rationalisation) she should be attracted to the husband, after all she married him, but she (attraction part of elephant) isn’t. There are two ways of resolving that: one the rider decides to leave, or two the husband makes himself more attractive to the elephant.
My wife really didn’t appreciate this when I explained it to her. Can’t work out what went wrong in that conversation...
Beisutsukai unlock Option III at level 25: Get the rider to look down and see the elephant, craft reins for the elephant, and cooperate to steer the elephant.
Also, at level 45, they unlock the legendary Option IV (both riders must have this ability to use successfully): Both riders perform a combo-takedown on the elephants and develop low-maintenance long-term elephant-control plans that guarantees self-perpetuating elephant attraction and automatic steering (e.g. by training the elephants to follow the road/eachother on their own without further direction).
Incidentally, all Beisutsukai unlock Option 0 at level 5: Find a mate that already knows how to ride the elephant in the first place.
I have an elephant riding strategy, it involves throwing rocks at the environment and surrounding elephants to entice/scare it into going the right way. It’s kinda hard work, but elephants don’t really do reins… (How do people actually steer elephants, out of interest?)
Two methods are anchoring and positive reinforcement. Availability control is also usually very effective. Essentially, the same stuff as for behavior/habit training works best, since as per my best model you’re essentially training a psychological/biological behavior there too. That’s more for “training” elephants though. Direct, in-the-moment steering requires actually training the elephant to respond to steering by whatever reins you craft, in the first place, otherwise it’s very hard and sketchy (and usually, as you say, involves throwing rocks).
I forgot where, but I recall reading a study that concluded that making one kind of sexual stimulus more “present” and reducing the availability/presence of other stimuli would increase the natural response of men to that stimulus later on (with long-term effects) in those subjects. I’m not sure of the specifics anymore, but for “sexual stimulus” think “pictures of mostly-naked ladies in X”, for X being wearing a specific item of clothing, fetish setup, or particular situation/setting.
Most studies I’ve found regarding such things seem to be crafted exclusively around men, so it’s pretty hard to find good “official” scientific data for women in that regard. Most of the data apparently comes from PUA material, unfortunately.
Indeed, it is pseudo-endocrinology instead. (I usually take these with the same grain of alt I take the other ‘layman science’ explanations.)
Who would have thought?
Which culture? I suppose that this misconception might be present in cultures where women are considered little more than chattel, but if you live in a culture where women freely choose their partners, you would have to be stupid or delusional to think they don’t have sexual preferences.
Actually, it looks like pseudoscience. Just throwing in the names of a few neurotransmitters and hormones doesn’t make a claim scientifically supported.
The idea of individual female sexual preferences is OK, as long as they remain mysterious.
The outrage starts at the moment when someone suggests that they are statistically predictable, and gives specific examples. This is quickly labeled as “offensive to women”. And in some sense, the label is correct—being unpredictable is higher status than being predictable. On the other hand, there is no harm in saying that male sexual preferences are statistically predictable.
I suggest a thought experiment—imagine starting a discussion in LW Open Thread about which female sexual preferences are most frequent, and what is the easiest way to trigger them. Then, watch the downvotes and offended complaints. (This is just a thought experiment, don’t do it really.) The topic is probably instrumentally important to majority of LW readers, yet it will never get the same space as e.g. a rational toothpaste choice. So there is some kind of a taboo, isn’t it?
I’m under the impression that hypergamy is common knowledge, but I suppose that it may be politically incorrect to discuss it in public in certain subcultures.
Other aspects of female sexual preferences, like social intelligence, athletic physique, masculine facial bone structure, deep voice, etc. are also well known and not so controversial to discuss.
LW might not be the best place for such an experiment, even as a thought experiment. I think this should actually be experimented in some other, “general-population” forum, perhaps with a control test in a different one replacing “female” with “male” for comparison framing. It would still obviously not be study-material, but it certainly sounds fun.
Um, wow. Clearly you’ve pattern-matched to something completely different than the objection I was trying to convey. I’m so not in any way offended by sexual behavior reductionism.
To me, the author of MMSL only seems to care about creating something that looks like an intimate relationship from the outside. And he’s other-optimizing; very egregiously so. My revulsion stems from my belief that I wouldn’t be any happier living the way he advocates than I am now. I want something that feels like an intimate relationship from the inside, and the sort of relationship he depicts as ideal wouldn’t.
That’s what I mean by hollow.
I also doubt I could ever feel safe with someone with whom, to use the metaphor, appealing to the elephant is more effective than appealing to the rider, but he seems to live in an isolated bubble where he only interacts with other riders through the intermediary of their elephants, which I would find just as lonely as my current life of no interaction at all.
That’s what I mean by dishonest.
I’m totally with you there, in that it wouldn’t be any fun to be in a relationship with someone who wasn’t aware of this stuff.
You have to be aware though that sometimes appealing to the elephant IS more effective than appealing to the rider. It is not possible to consciously reason myself into being turned on. I am /not/ in conscious control of my hormone emitters. I need my environment to influence them for me. Even if I’m consciously aware that you’re a great guy and super smart and all that, if you don’t press my elephant buttons, so to speak, being in a relationship with you just isn’t any fun. Placating the elephant isn’t a terminal value for sufficiently awake people, but for most people it’s an important instrumental value.
Also, the impression he usually gives is not that he interacts with only his wife’s elephant, just that his rider-rider interaction is fine and he never struggled with it. He also occasionally gives advice for female riders regarding male elephants.
Also, take it from me that this stuff adds to rather than detracts from intimate relationships. From the inside. (If it helps you believe me, this is what Athol’s wife thinks.)
No you aren’t. You’re saying something entirely different—a mix of orthogonal points and contradictory ones—but using the form “I’m with you there” because it is typically an amazingly effective tool for leading around and getting along with metaphorical elephants.
Impossible is such a strong term. I’d suggest possible but completely unrealistically implausible, possibly take years of unnatural mental training and being ultimately far less satisfying than just finding a mate that is actually attractive.
Would it be offensive to claim that I’m a woman and I can’t help doing that, re your first comment? (The “it wasn’t me it was my elephant!” defence?) I’ve subtly edited the phrasing so it’s less objectionable.
And I suppose Buddhists have meditated their way into their reptilian-level hardware before. Though I’m not sure it’d be worth a lifetime of meditation training just so I can think myself into releasing testosterone and oestrogen and dopamine ;) Instrumental and terminal values and all that.
Though if I could release dopamine at will then it’s the wireheading discussion all over again...
I imagine some women may conceivably be offended by the stereotyping.
I wouldn’t have said “objectionable” so much as “fascinating example of exactly the kind of influence technique either a PUA or business social skills adviser may recommend”.
Especially since any one of those things can be injected far more simply routinely. Purely mental wireheading tactics are just terribly inefficient these days!
This conversation is making my elephant very confused… Based on interpreting my reactions, did I just get negged? (more power to you if I did)
You’re letting your elephant loose on this stuff? And it actually moves? Darn.
Mine’s just been standing there munching on some rationality leaves all along, completely uninterested. It’s more annoyed about the rider jumping in excitement on its back, if anything.
Letting my elephant loose? I don’t know about you, but my elephant is almost always loose. I just try to pay attention to what it does, because, well, isn’t that the point of this site?
Analyzing...
...Not in the pure sense of “negative compliment”. Because, well, I seem to have neglected the ‘compliment’ part. Let’s see… You have beautiful eyelashes… Are they real?
Nevertheless, the style of interaction could be used in a similar social role to the neg—that is, demonstrating playfulness, arrogance and a willingness to assert themselves higher in status (at least for the purpose of that one social transaction.)
To a certain extent there is the reverse of a neg. Surface level cavalier contradiction which nevertheless serves to overall lend support to your position. In particular the replies in the grandparent could be replaced with “Not to me.”, “Oh, no, I didn’t want to imply that you were being objectionable and using that strategy is OK.” and “You are totally right.” respectively without changing the object level meaning drastically. Yet that would have conveyed an entirely invalid connotations of supplication and wishy-washy backtracking. Complimentary-contradiction and then flippant elaboration avoids that frame.
In summary: No, but with that style of interaction adding negs would be overkill!
...I think I’m just going to leave it at “you are far too good at this”. :P
If that is what you really want then by all means go ahead. To the external observer that just looks like someone sitting in the corner sulking because the universe doesn’t give them what they want.
I.E. If what you want is magic, magic won’t work.
Isn’t that a false dilemma? That’s just one relative comparison, which is meant to illustrate just how much he dislikes that particular option by visibly placing and signalling it as even lower than something else generally understood as being a net negative option.
Basically: “I’ve considered this, but so far found that it was even worse than other options I’ve already considered, so I’ll keep looking”—is what I understand as the main point behind the wording he used.
Please imagine I inserted “would rather” in appropriate places in the grandparent so that the token relativity is duly represented in the declared observations of the typical observer.
I didn’t really look at much of MMSL either, but I did notice an encouraging sign: the author’s wife is listed as a coauthor and adds occasional remarks to the posts, which if nothing else suggests that she reads them. This puts an upper bound on how dishonest it can possibly be.
Yes, it requires that two people be lying about something for their mutual benefit, instead of just one. Two people is practically a conspiracy!
(We need to use another term for where the actual upper bound doesn’t change that much at all but the probability of a moderate amount of deception is present is reduced.)
I was assuming that “hollow and dishonest” referred to the author being hollow and dishonest to his wife. And in fact I don’t think this can be done very effectively when you document your hollowness and dishonesty on a blog your wife reads.
MMSL is my personal source and what I had in mind as something that worked when I recommended just googling it. Most Game material sounds weird without being able to put the ideas into practise, which is why I recommended you search for material more applicable to you: I was able to get instant feedback on ideas by getting or prompting my OH or myself (depending on material) to try them.
I don’t recommend the start of MMSL though, it sounds cynical because it is; that part is mainly aimed at men who are married to wives who aren’t attracted to them, who really need to do something drastic if they want to keep their relationships. I’m not actually sure I’d recommend the blog at all to someone not in a long term relationship; in terms of referring to the science of attraction it doesn’t do much different from sites like Hooking Up Smart, which afaics is information of a similar quality aimed at a different audience (college students, in this case). I’m sure there are more sites of a similar quality out there. (Look for references to Helen Fisher), whose research is most commonly cited).
Apologies if the google advice isn’t useful, looks like I failed to avoid other-optimising after all! (I usually take a “just google it” approach to these things myself.)
ETA: if you’re having ethical “disgust” responses, it may help to keep firmly in mind the elephant/rider (in the usual LW language) or hamster/agent distinction. Manipulation is done from the rider to the other party’s elephant. This can be done with or without the other rider’s permission, and the ethics of the action where done without permission may well depend on how much the other rider is in control of their own elephant. In the specific case advocated by the opening posts of MMSL, the wife who says things like “I love you but I’m not in love with you” or cheats on their husband without knowing why, has an actively harmful elephant, whose rider is unaware of how to control the elephant, or worse, vehemently denying the existence of the elephant. In cases like this, calling out directly to the elephant may well be an ethical course of action. (“recognising the rider-elephant distinction” translates to “taking the red pill”; the more misogynistic sites assume that females aren’t capable of this, but these sites can still have useful advice in terms of elephant-control.)
Thanks for the insights. This is shining more light on just what it is I’m looking for in a relationship, too, which should help me greatly in improving the shape of my sweet-spot-in-personspace.
There are torrents of it. Someone linked a torrent of a bunch of books by some famous PUA a while back, I found it fairly interesting, but “what was true wasn’t new.” It may be helpful in building your confidence to actually go out and try things, which is the hard part but also rather key.
Where to find said material: I’m going to steer clear of other-optimising here, and suggest what I did (rather than link you to my favourites), which involved basically google, then a breadth-first (affiliated links and commenters with their own blogs will help) search of blogs that seem relevant by sampling critical posts, then reading the most useful blogs in depth from the start chronologically, skipping material that seems irrelevant to you. Since I’m female, I ranked reading material by looking for posts that described their model of women and seeing which applied best. You’ll have to decide which posts to look for by your own selection criteria, though I suggest checking any of: the posts that the site owner chooses to highlight, posts that describe the type of relationship the author wants/has/caters for, posts which echo strongly with your personal situation, or just random posts.
Similar principles apply for forums and general websites, though it makes the breadth-first search harder.
I’d be happy to help if you tell me the specifics, either via messaging or replying, since I had to read a lot of material to get to where I am.
As for people to apply it to (assuming heterosexual male), you can try making more female friends by actually going to social activities and clubs/meetups. You can also test the theory by going to places where women go to be approached by strange men, such as bars and clubs if you live near a busy area. You’re unlikely to find the type of girl you’ll want long-term there, but it can be useful for experimenting theory and confidence-building.
If you’re wary of experimenting in person, and are relatively good at applying a general theory to a new situation, I think the principles of Game should also apply well to dating sites, so you may want to give those a go: it’s a very low-cost way of experimenting, and you also might find someone you like!
I did not say that. I looked at the chatlog to be sure, and I did not say that.
I was paraphrasing based on my understanding of that conversation. Apologies if I misunderstood and inadvertently misrepresented you.
This might come out a little harsh, but...
whining about having been rejected, in public, in front of the woman who rejected you, is not exactly a turn on, I suppose.
There aren’t enough italics in the world to sufficiently emphasize how much whining about being rejected was not the intent of my comment.
It may not have been the intent, but that was what it looked like to me also.
Well, it didn’t sound like that to me. (Mmm… Should I start up a karma poll to know how it sounded to other people?)
I have a hack which usually gets such points across efficiently, though:
“How did you—that’s exactly, completely what I was thinking! You’re totally right!
...(short pause)...
Now put that in parenthesis, and put a minus sign in front. You’ll see what I mean.”
I’d also add that the whining itself could not possibly have caused the rejection, since you’d have some kind of causal loop.
I agree on the implied denotation that such a general attitude, if applied in other circumstances, would be detrimental. I disagree about the also-implicit conclusion that EphemeralNight does use that attitude in general. Nothing in particular seems to indicate that this person is prone to whining about rejection in general. We’ve only seen one single instance of some person kicking the soda machine, without knowing about their brother that just got arrested and the 5K$ debt they just learned about—to reuse an old example.
Hopefully she PM’d you her best estimate of her real reason for losing interest.
I would if he asked. Until then I can’t be sure he wants to know.
Aww, too bad he never invoked Crocker’s Rules. That would give you immediate license and confirmation that he does want to know.
Also, he’d probably go batshit insane.
Ask him whether he wants to know?
I would prefer not to do that. (At least not directly. Having this oblique conversation in public is fine.)
This is my primary problem. “Meeting people that I can interact well with, regardless of the mate-suitability criterion” is a fairly/relatively trivial (and different) problem, but all my approaches to meeting people generate massive amounts of noise-results, such that finding a combo-match of (person-I-could-find-suitable) + (person-that-could-find-me-suitable) + (meeting-said-person) + (sufficient-common-knowledge-barrier) statistically becomes very hard. For each of the above “suitable mate met” events, I would have to generate tens of thousands of “person met” events.
Considering the amount of time required to generate these events, and the relative resulting chance of a payoff, it becomes trivially obvious that my time is better spent otherwise (such as reducing the noise through learning better event-generation behaviors) since it computes to rather low expected value.
If p(X would be a suitable mate|you met X) is actually around 10^-4, then maybe trying to lower your standards (if you can manage to do that) might help.
Well, widening / loosening the “margin” or distribution of suitability criteria is indeed one of the valid approaches, but one this is still only part of the equation for the problem AFAICT.
Yes, currently, to my model, that P() really is in that ballpark. I’m currently hitting (with P>.98) way off my current “sweet spot in personspace”, with few hits ever getting closer to it and forming a cloud around a completely different area, so my best WAG pretty much give those numbers when trying to project how many I’d have to meet to expect at least one statistical outlier to hit the margin. Making said sweet spot larger is something that would indeed help a lot, but doing so without reducing the total expected payoff of this whole calculation is also non-trivial, for reasons I hope are obvious.
I strongly suspect that my current noise is in no small part due to my current approaches / general behaviors. There’s at bare flat minimum 1 in 50 people (assuming IQ stats are any indication) with sufficient reasoning ability for me to find them very interesting, of those at least 1 in 3 is using that ability in a way that I probably wouldn’t perceive as noise (so I’d probably notice quickly enough), my preferences / personspace “sweet spot” check would eliminate around (WAG: intuitions from personspace stuff) 80-95% of those remaining.
Which means that, by those numbers and assumptions, around 1 in 750 to 1 in 3000 would be a valid match if I were meeting persons according to a uniform personspace probability distribution and breaking the sufficient-common-knowledge barrier in a proportionally uniform manner over persons met. The clear difference indicates that I’m probably doing something wrong, so the most efficient way I know of solving the problem is to find what I’m doing wrong and fix it first, not just meeting more people.
IMO, 1 in 750 is not a particularly constraining margin, especially if you consider that under ideal circumstances you should do the reverse of what I’m doing and actually be concentrating your hits around your sweet spot, not some other place far away from it.
Also, I dislike the term “lowering your standards”. The imagery puts person on a scale basically equivalent to transforming personspace into a Me.perceivedValue(X) function that outputs the scalar distance between Me.perceivedPSLoc(X) and Me.sweetSpotCenter. It gives exactly zero information about the other components of the equation. It also gives very little information on the measurement unit of the scalar.
1 in 50 people among the whole population has IQ >= 131; in places such as university towns that fraction is likely to be substantially higher.
Yes, it would seem so.
Unfortunately, even living in a very student-dense city and deliberately targeting locales near universities doesn’t seem to have quite the effect I was hoping for. Things are not helped by the fact that French, the main language of 2⁄3 of the population here, distinctly lacks key words and concepts that seem necessary for bayesianism. The word “evidence”, for example, has no French equivalents to my knowledge—even the French wikipedia page on Bayes’ Theorem struggles with this.
As I’ve said, I’m most likely doing a lot of things wrong, because even going to places near university campus(es) (which I’d go to anyway, since they’re otherwise still the places I’d prefer going to) gives these results. I’m also going with the assumption that the actual odds for people I am meeting there are much higher than 1⁄50 for the intelligence criterion, but calculating flat minimum ratios for an IQ level I’m certain is high enough seemed like a more appropriate conservative figure.
Oh, that explains why Quebecois seem to think and behave in such silly ways :). At least it’s the way it looks from the other end of the country.
It’s the way it looks and feels from here too—I seem to be a rare exception in considering reason, logic and knowledge to have any value (besides the obvious monetary value of “knowledge” of things related to a business) among native French speakers here.
Campaigns to “preserve language and culture” and keep forcing children to go to only French schools and study only in French make me cringe constantly.
That’s kinda spurious reasoning. By that standard, people who speak languages where evidentiality is considered so relevant it’s marked grammatically (like Turkish, or Apache, or Yukaghir) should on average be much more rational than people who don’t. Appeal to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is usually a quick ticket to confusion.
I did not mean to imply an appeal to Sapir-Whorf concepts. Disregarding every other factor, I do seem to be a rare exception among native French speakers in this culture. Whether I would also be a rare exception, a less rare exception, or an even more rare exception in some other language or some other culture, is a different matter, which is itself worth examining in its own separate right for its own reasons.
Other than that, I agree that what you’ve said does follow, and to the best of my knowledge isn’t currently supported by any public research and only has sporadic anecdotal evidence.
My objection to teaching only French is that it’s a well-known fact that knowing multiple languages helps immensely with various aspects of cognition and intelligence, and learning multiple languages during childhood has been shown to be an overwhelming net positive. It follows that forcing children to learn only one language has a net negative impact. This fact is perceived, agreed, and then waived by appeal to consequence: “If children learn English, they will only speak English [because all regional neighbors do], so less and less people will speak French, so our culture will die!”
And that’s what really makes me cringe.
Well, you’ve got to consider complicating factors, which makes this hard to measure. Those other countries aren’t very affluent compared to the USA and their educational system is probably worse, plus they don’t have access to the institutional infrastructure of knowledge like we do. Also, measuring rationality seems hard, etc. there’s tons of problems that always pop up when we try to evaluate things like this.
I mean, I think you’d probably be mostly right and that there’s not much difference in rationality between different language users, but for other reasons than the apparent average rationality of certain language-users.
It has no terribly good Italian equivalent either, but this doesn’t make it hard to talk in a Bayesian way: you just say stuff like “it’s likely that X, given that Y”. (In particular, ISTM that—among the kind of people usually I hang with at least—“folk probability” resembles Bayesianism much more than frequentism, and most people who use frequentist statistics only give lip service to it without being actually convinced it makes all that sense.)
Maybe part of the problem is you go around saying things like that.
Maybe I should refer you to this other comment I made on this topic.
Or, to put it in this particular context: I don’t go around saying things like that. This is a discussion about relationships and attraction, and the things I say here are (or so I perceive them to be) very relevant to the subject at hand. You’ve seen me once say something like that, in a place where saying things like that is both appropriate and productive, and you deduce that I always go around saying things like that to random people I’ve just met before I even know them? I’d be very afraid if I were a suspect in a murder investigation led by you.
You also seem to have misinterpreted just what it is that “that” was saying. To put it in other words that might be less prone to “pompous elitist” pattern-matching, I’m basically saying that there’s a statistical guarantee that I’d be very interested in maintaining an intellectual discourse (and hopefully long-term relationship of some kind, even as acquaintances) with, given enough time to talk with and get to know them, at least one out of every fifty people out there. Even more than that in practice, since there will be many people who are interesting despite not being Mensa material. That sentence just puts a lower boundary on the amount of people I could find very interesting.
I apologize. Even if my comment had had a small probability of being helpful, I should have stated it differently, and I did jump to more conclusions than was warranted.
I didn’t mean to imply a misinterpretation, though. If you did go around saying things like that, the pattern-matching would be the whole problem. If you actually believed something to the effect of “people with IQ less than X are not worth knowing”, that might also be an obstacle, but at a later stage of relationship-forming. In any case, that appears to be irrelevant.
You meant to say “despite not being”?
Yes, thanks for catching that. Fixed.
I believe that this is a serious problem in itself. It’s probably undercutting your quality of life in many ways,
In particular, it’s probably on your mind when you’re in relationships, distracting you from what’s actually going on between you and the other person.
Cognitive behavioral therapy might help. It goes into detail about undercutting that sort of belief.
More generally, I believe that the crucial thing is to believe that it’s safe to be on your own side. Getting to that belief can be amazingly difficult (believing that you shouldn’t be on your own side is probably the result of gut-level fear from repeated attacks), but it’s worth the trouble.
I only mentioned that to explain the origin of a false belief. It is not currently a problem for me, just an annoyance.
By “annoyance” I assume you mean you still have the feeling but work around it?
In that case, it may be a problem in ways you’re not aware of. Other people, prospective mates especially, can pick up on that feeling in tricky subtle ways and react to it.
Ok—sorry for unneccesary advice.
Ask someone who knows you and has seen you interacting with women to give you honest feedback. Such feedback will help you spot the actual causes of your inability to attract suitable mates more than anything anyone could tell you here.
When I ask that, the answer is usually “I have no idea, you are not ugly nor unpleasant nor stupid after all” or “You just haven’t found the right one yet.”
(Oh, and the people who give me the former answer are almost invariably already taken, or otherwise not looking for a relationship at the moment.)
When you approached these people, did you make it clear that you were looking for honest feedback, however painful it might be?
Well… I though I had, but now that I think about that… (OTOH, I usually ask that when we’re both drunk, so that—I’d expect—there are fewer filters in place than usual.)
I’ve also created an account on whatiswrongwithme.com and share it on Facebook once in a while—promising I won’t get offended no matter what I read, but I didn’t get much feedback there either.
You may consider offering money in exchange for good feedback. A while ago, I agreed to pay a friend of mine $5 per individual piece of feedback that I judged to be sufficiently valuable. I learned a lot about myself as a result.
That had never occurred to me. Maybe I’ll try that some day.
Actually, if you find the comment on this page (among the thousands) about useless studies (I recall it being highly upvoted), in a lot of people self-reporting is highly inaccurate. I suspect this is mostly either via automatic face-saving or via only reporting conscious reactions when unconscious ones are equally important.
I recommend either asking friends who both understand how the conscious/unconscious division works for them, and are willing to be brutally honest (actually if they have both these qualities they don’t need to be a friend, just anyone willing to talk to you will do), or if no such person is available, form hypotheses yourself and get evidence by changing your behaviour and observing the responses, rather than asking outright.
There is no such person.
Then I think you might benefit from improving your social skills after all.
First, accumulate 117 acquaintances who would trust you to relay an unimportant piece of information accurately, and four true friends who would trust you to provide support in a situation which unexpectedly became violent.
You look at:
“I seem to have a tendency to feel extremely inadequate”
″ I begin to… worry, and that feeling of helplessness starts showing up.”
The “social skills” referred to when considering mating potential are somewhat specific and include particular emphasis on displaying confidence, particularly sexual confidence. Google “dating inner game” and you’ll have an overabundance of resources explaining what signals you need to send and giving tips on how to change yourself so that you are the kind of person who sends those signals more.
Retracted. I had written some brutally honest advice but realized after reading a bit more that you know a lot of people on here in person, so I’ll PM instead.