However it’s not rational to actually believe they probably work in the absence of proper evidence, as opposed to going along with them for the sake of experiment
The truth of this statement depends heavily on how you unpack “believe”. Brains have more than one way of “believing” things, after all. A person can not “believe” in ghosts, and yet feel scared in a “haunted” house. Or more relevant to the current thread, a person can “believe” they are attractive and worthy and have every right to go up to someone and say “hi”, yet still be unable to do it.
IOW, epistemic and instrumental beliefs are compartmentalized in humans by default… which makes a mockery of the idea that manipulating your instrumental beliefs will somehow stain your epistemic purity.
I’m not against the ethos of going out and trying these things, as long as the testing costs really are low (i.e. you don’t pay good money for them).
Relevant: willingness to spend money to change is correlated with willingness to actually change. That doesn’t mean spending money causes change, of course, I’m just pointing out that a person’s willingness to incur the costs of changing (whatever sort of cost) is strongly correlated with them taking action to change. (See Prochaska, Norcross, et al; whose research and meta-research of a dozen different types of change goals is summarized in the book “Changing For Good”.)
[Originally, I was going to include a bunch of information about my work with personal development clients that reflects the pattern described in the above-mentioned research, but since you appear to prefer research to experience, I’ve decided to skip it.]
Relevant: willingness to spend money to change is correlated with willingness to actually change. That doesn’t mean spending money causes change, of course, I’m just pointing out that a person’s willingness to incur the costs of changing (whatever sort of cost) is strongly correlated with them taking action to change. (See Prochaska, Norcross, et al; whose research and meta-research of a dozen different types of change goals is summarized in the book “Changing For Good”.)
I place a high value on not financially encouraging bad behaviour, and selling non-evidence-based interventions to people who may be desperate, irrational or ill-informed but who don’t deserve to be robbed counts as bad behaviour to me.
There’s a loss of utility beyond the mere loss of cash to myself if I give cash to a scammer, because it feeds the scammer and potentially encourages other scammers to join the market. This is the flip side of the coin that there is a gain in utility when I give cash to a worthwhile charity.
People willing to spend money on attracting a mate have a wide variety of options as to how they spend it, after all. If they are willing to actually change it’s not as if the only way to demonstrate this is to spend money on PUA training rather than clothes, transportation, food, drink, taxi fares and so on.
As I mentioned in the other sub-thread, it’s really tiring to have you continually reframing what I say to make attackable arguments out of it. Unless your sole interest in LessWrong is to score rhetorical points (i.e., trolling), it’s a rather bad idea to keep doing that to people.
Note that the text you quoted from my comment has nothing to do with PUA. It is a portion of my evidence that your professed approach to personal development (i.e., trying things only if they cost nothing) is Not Winning.
On LessWrong, rationality equals winning, not pretending to avoid losing. (Or more bluntly: attempting to signal your intelligence and status by avoiding the low-status work of actually trying things and possibly being mistaken.)
It is better to do something wrong—even repeatedly—and eventually succeed, than to sit on your ass and do nothing. Otherwise, you are less instrumentally rational than any random person who tries things at random until something works.
Meanwhile, any time that you do not spend winning, is time spent losing, no matter how you spin it as some sort of intellectual superiority.
So, on that note, I will now return to activities with a better ROI than continuing this discussion. ;-)
The truth of this statement depends heavily on how you unpack “believe”. Brains have more than one way of “believing” things, after all. A person can not “believe” in ghosts, and yet feel scared in a “haunted” house. Or more relevant to the current thread, a person can “believe” they are attractive and worthy and have every right to go up to someone and say “hi”, yet still be unable to do it.
IOW, epistemic and instrumental beliefs are compartmentalized in humans by default… which makes a mockery of the idea that manipulating your instrumental beliefs will somehow stain your epistemic purity.
Relevant: willingness to spend money to change is correlated with willingness to actually change. That doesn’t mean spending money causes change, of course, I’m just pointing out that a person’s willingness to incur the costs of changing (whatever sort of cost) is strongly correlated with them taking action to change. (See Prochaska, Norcross, et al; whose research and meta-research of a dozen different types of change goals is summarized in the book “Changing For Good”.)
[Originally, I was going to include a bunch of information about my work with personal development clients that reflects the pattern described in the above-mentioned research, but since you appear to prefer research to experience, I’ve decided to skip it.]
I place a high value on not financially encouraging bad behaviour, and selling non-evidence-based interventions to people who may be desperate, irrational or ill-informed but who don’t deserve to be robbed counts as bad behaviour to me.
There’s a loss of utility beyond the mere loss of cash to myself if I give cash to a scammer, because it feeds the scammer and potentially encourages other scammers to join the market. This is the flip side of the coin that there is a gain in utility when I give cash to a worthwhile charity.
People willing to spend money on attracting a mate have a wide variety of options as to how they spend it, after all. If they are willing to actually change it’s not as if the only way to demonstrate this is to spend money on PUA training rather than clothes, transportation, food, drink, taxi fares and so on.
As I mentioned in the other sub-thread, it’s really tiring to have you continually reframing what I say to make attackable arguments out of it. Unless your sole interest in LessWrong is to score rhetorical points (i.e., trolling), it’s a rather bad idea to keep doing that to people.
Note that the text you quoted from my comment has nothing to do with PUA. It is a portion of my evidence that your professed approach to personal development (i.e., trying things only if they cost nothing) is Not Winning.
On LessWrong, rationality equals winning, not pretending to avoid losing. (Or more bluntly: attempting to signal your intelligence and status by avoiding the low-status work of actually trying things and possibly being mistaken.)
It is better to do something wrong—even repeatedly—and eventually succeed, than to sit on your ass and do nothing. Otherwise, you are less instrumentally rational than any random person who tries things at random until something works.
Meanwhile, any time that you do not spend winning, is time spent losing, no matter how you spin it as some sort of intellectual superiority.
So, on that note, I will now return to activities with a better ROI than continuing this discussion. ;-)