I find neuro-linguistic programming endlessly fascinating and would love to see a good article on it at Less Wrong, but what are the odds that it will reference* pickup artists rather than, say, Derren Brown?
One could also reference marketing; there are two NLP-in-advertising blogs out there that I read, for example. (http://nlplanguagepatterns.blogspot.com/ and http://nlpcopywriting.com/). Both are pretty shallow, though, compared to, say, the stuff Frank Kern does. Kern sort of is to other NLP marketers as Brown is to other NLP magicians—i.e., he disclaims any expertise in the subject, but wields it like a master of the craft instead of like a geek fascinated by the subject.
Funny thing that. Your mention of marketing gave me an instant “ick, sleazy” reaction. Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she’s coming from!
Funny thing that. Your mention of marketing gave me an instant “ick, sleazy” reaction. Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she’s coming from!
Be a rationalist and get over it, since it will inhibit your ability to accomplish “real world” goals like getting paid for your work. But more than that, it’ll diminish your quality of life, by requiring you to avoid things that are just a normal part of life.
One reason I’m here is because I used to be the sort of person who got all squicked out by PUA and marketing and whatnot, before I realized that most of my “rationality” was being used in the service of justifying my pre-existing emotional reactions to things.
The thing that really opened my eyes about marketing was understanding that people want experiences, not things, and trying to get them to want what you believe they should want (vs. giving them what they actually want) is not really about being nice to them: it’s just your ego talking.
This insight is equally applicable to marketing and PUA, as in both cases, the objection is, “but people shouldn’t want that”, whatever “that” is. Women “should” want nice guys, and people “should” want products based on their quality, instead of what makes them feel good or enhances their status or sounds more like it’s specific to their goals.
But they don’t. Not even the people who are talking about how it “should” be; they’re just not paying attention to how they actually make buying or mating decisions at the time they’re doing it. (It’s easy to rationalize afterwards.)
When I first started studying marketing, I began paying closer attention to how I made buying decisions, especially in areas where I had incomplete information or was in a hurry, or focused on some goal other than obtaining the best possible product. And I saw that what I’d been reading was true: I did make decisions based on all sorts of stupid little things, like a difference in one word on the box.
Not because I was stupid or being manipulated, but because I was using the best information I had to make a decision.
Meanwhile, I was also instantly filtering out and rejecting other products, because something sent up a red flag or a question in my mind.
So marketing and PUA are both practical arts of not getting filtered, and giving people what they actually want, without injecting your own ideas of that.
I read and view PUA stuff to understand marketing better, because the best of both have one concept in common: it’s called disqualification.
Disqualification means quickly turning off people who are not going to be happy with your product (or person), so as to better turn on the people who will be happy with the product (or person).
This is an inherently polarizing process, though, which is why all the people who aren’t in the market for “Obeying 1 Rule Of Fat Loss” or whatever are gonna get squicked, in the same way that women who aren’t attracted to the confidence of a man who says he has 30 girlfriends and she can only be his if she’s not jealous are going to be squicked by the very idea of it, let alone the actual experience of it.
This is also probably related to the “fandom requires something awful” concept. If you’re not willing to turn people off, you’ll be forced to dilute your signal to the people you actually want to reach.
That doesn’t mean you’re going to be perfect at it, of course. I’d prefer it, for example, if my “signal” were accessible to a few more people at LW than it is (notably EY), and I’ve made some minor tweaks for the LW audience in general. But I’m not going to change it significantly, because the most vocal parts of LW do not always correspond to the parts of LW that enjoy or are informed by what I write… any more than EY is going to change his style to attract religious people, just because Robert Aumann believes in God.
I am extremely leery of rationalism being used as a reason not to feel things.
giving people what they actually want, without injecting your own ideas of that.
I would just like to say that among the things most likely to make me want to scream at someone is when they try to give me what they think I want, or what they would want, or what most people superficially similar to me want, instead of what I tell them I want. In words. Out loud.
I am extremely leery of rationalism being used as a reason not to feel things.
And I’m extremely confused by your reference here to my post, which was an attempt to illustrate the dangers of allowing your thought process to be driven by your emotions, and to illustrate a tool for identifying whether that is happening (i.e., observing somatic markers).
When I say “get over it”, I don’t mean “don’t pay attention to your feeling”, I mean, “pay careful attention to this signal you aren’t thinking or behaving rationally, and do whatever it takes to change your thinking in such a way that the feeling does not arise in the first place.”
That is, when you can think about the subject in question without the somatic marker of “ick”, then you will know you’ve successfully removed whatever cached thought was making you feel that way. The “ick” does not exist in outside reality, it exists solely in your mind and body, and any attempt to justify it as existing in outside reality is prima facie bottom-line reasoning. That is, irrational.
Somehow I got the impression it was about quite the opposite.
It said that your emotions control your thought process. It didn’t say that was a good thing, it said it was a fact.
Emotions are powerful tools, and should not be undervalued.
Nor are they to be used inappropriately. Negative emotions in lasting doses are likely harmful to your health, as well as to your rationality. Depressed people aren’t thinking rationally.
I’ve noticed several instances of “that’s so gross and low-class” signaling at LW, and agonized over whether it was worth pointing out (that it’s signaling). I don’t claim that the internal gross-out feeling is affected; I have had similar reactions all by myself, especially to pumped-up motivational speak on e.g. pjeby’s site.
I’ve decided it’s still a valid signal, so I won’t be bitching about it when I see it, and I’ll continue to express disgust at trashy (even if effective) persuasion (I’m so sophisticated!), but I’ll try to moderate my actual feelings of revulsion, so (I hope) I can evaluate the content more accurately.
Relevant post. There is a huge difference between marketing communications which is the garden-variety sort of marketing you’re talking about, and marketing research, which is about giving people the things they’ll want to buy. (And not just what they say they want to buy, but what they’ll actually put cash down for).
To me the topics of PUA, marketing and self-help feel interrelated. Not just because it’s all applied rationality, but because it’s all about goal-directed tweaking of human wetware. Which is precisely the icky problem.
As a kid I invented and devoutly followed a strict moral injunction against any form of self-manipulation—what’s today called self-help—and against lying. As an adult I have relaxed both those requirements, but instead explicitly invented and have followed for years an equally strict injunction against manipulating other people (like in Games People Play). The only PUA techniques I ever adopted were about loss of fear and increase of self-esteem; I shied away from anything that smelled even vaguely manipulative. (I have grossly neglected the skillz over the last two years and will soon start practicing from scratch again, under the same restrictions.)
The morality of hacking minds is still unclear to me, but it feels worse if it’s done consciously. Not every means of reaching the goal is okay… even if it does no visible harm. According to my life experience, explicit mind-hacking harms the hacker.
(This will be my first post on the current flamewar, which I’ve been hesitant to post on, for obvious reasons.)
Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she’s coming from!
If that’s where she’s coming from, it’s a horribly wrong reason to exclude discussion of it. Whether or not PUA techniques repulse you, whether or not you’d be receptive to them, whether or not you intend to use them...
You do need to understand why such counterintuitive methods work, to the extent that they do in fact work. Otherwise, you have a huge hole in your understanding of social psychology, and are setting yourself up to Lose, whether your are a man or a woman.
For what it’s worth, I also get a negative physical reaction from PUA discussion, though for very different reasons. I would describe it as a combination of hopelessness at my own ignorance, and refusal to accept that it could be true. In fact, the first time I’d heard about PUAs, someone referenced a related Feyman anecdote, and I rushed to look it up, and after I read it, I felt really, really, unexplainably miserable, almost giving up all hope. By itself, that almost made me fly into a rage.
But rather than ask to be shielded from this mental pain, I save the threads devoted to them, so I can process them at a later time, once I’ve built up the courage.
To avoid discussion of the topic on the grounds that it makes some people, even most people, feel icky, is to go against everything this site stands for.
You do need to understand why such counterintuitive methods work, to the extent that they do in fact work.
Agreed, but there’s a world of difference between a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is actively interested in applying them, and a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is interested in learning more about “the enemy”.
In much the same way, there would be a world of difference between a post that gave advice on how best to convert people to Christianity, or to market the latest designer piece of crap, and a post that documented commonly used conversion or marketing techniques for the purposes of understanding how people can come to believe silly things or buy stupid products.
I accept that, in the interest of good communication, people can do a better job with their tone and emphasis when they make PUA posts.
The danger, however, is buying into this idea that you have to adhere to some vague feminist concern that can only result in good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases. While there are valid feminist concerns about objectification, this kafkaesque hypervigilance simply serves to enforce a very self-limiting mindset in posters.
It wussifies them, in other words. I believe that has been my experience, having resolved at an early age to be supersensitive to offending women. I’ve certainly avoided it, but it’s not very conducive to leaving copies of me in the next generation.
Feminist concerns are vague and the only possible result of thinking about them is “good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases”?
I guess I can see how, if you don’t understand the relevant feminist concerns, then they will seem vague, and that the effect of not really knowing what it is you’re supposed to avoid could be quite frustrating. But I tend to think that vagueness, like probability, is in the mind, rather than being a property of the concerns themselves. If you do understand and appreciate such concerns, then it’s usually not very difficult to avoid offending people—and even if you do end up accidentally offending someone, it’s easy enough to just apologise after the fact, without it opening yet another front in the gender wars.
Maybe this means that the feminists among us need to do a better job of communicating the concerns, but it would also be nice if attempts to do so didn’t result in (IMHO pretty ridiculous) accusations of “kafkaesque hypervigilance”.
P.S. If trying to understand others’ perspectives and attempting not to unnecessarily offend them means that I’m a wuss, then I’ll wear the badge proudly. I can’t speak for anyone else, but certainly hasn’t affected my ability to leave copies of me in the next generation.
But the thing is, we’re interested in the truth. What you or anyone else will use it for is their own business. Our goal is not to filter out topics which could potentially enable marketers to sell more crap or something.
But the thing is, we’re interested in the truth. What you or anyone else will use it for is their own business.
Interesting, I don’t agree with this at all. Perhaps it comes down to a difference between those of us who are most interested in truth, and those of us who are most interested in winning.
Insofar as anyone’s utility function has a term for people-not-being-converted-to-Christianity, people-not-buying-loads-of-crap-they-don’t-need, or people-not-treating-members-of-whatever-gender-they-happen-to-be-attracted-to-as-sexual-trophies, what others do with knowledge is their business. Which is not to say that they should somehow censor people who advocate such things; but I wouldn’t expect them to sit idly by and pretend that they think these goals are all fine and dandy either.
I agree, but on the other hand, how important is the topic? We can rationally decide to lose the topic here on this ground: not everyone posting or reading has achieved perfect equanimity, but we can help them develop that quality more effectively by tricking them into thinking that we already have it (the illusion would be shattered in the type of failures elicited by each discussion of the sensitive topic).
An absolute prohibition would be ridiculous, though.
[Cousin It writes] Your mention of marketing gave me an instant “ick, sleazy” reaction. Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she’s coming from!
Huh?!? Seriously, marketing seems sleezy to you but PUA doesn’t? To each his own I guess.
Cousin It lives in Moscow, where people tend to have a different take on free-market institutions such as speculators, middlemen and (as now appears likely) marketing.
One could also reference marketing; there are two NLP-in-advertising blogs out there that I read, for example. (http://nlplanguagepatterns.blogspot.com/ and http://nlpcopywriting.com/). Both are pretty shallow, though, compared to, say, the stuff Frank Kern does. Kern sort of is to other NLP marketers as Brown is to other NLP magicians—i.e., he disclaims any expertise in the subject, but wields it like a master of the craft instead of like a geek fascinated by the subject.
Funny thing that. Your mention of marketing gave me an instant “ick, sleazy” reaction. Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she’s coming from!
Be a rationalist and get over it, since it will inhibit your ability to accomplish “real world” goals like getting paid for your work. But more than that, it’ll diminish your quality of life, by requiring you to avoid things that are just a normal part of life.
One reason I’m here is because I used to be the sort of person who got all squicked out by PUA and marketing and whatnot, before I realized that most of my “rationality” was being used in the service of justifying my pre-existing emotional reactions to things.
The thing that really opened my eyes about marketing was understanding that people want experiences, not things, and trying to get them to want what you believe they should want (vs. giving them what they actually want) is not really about being nice to them: it’s just your ego talking.
This insight is equally applicable to marketing and PUA, as in both cases, the objection is, “but people shouldn’t want that”, whatever “that” is. Women “should” want nice guys, and people “should” want products based on their quality, instead of what makes them feel good or enhances their status or sounds more like it’s specific to their goals.
But they don’t. Not even the people who are talking about how it “should” be; they’re just not paying attention to how they actually make buying or mating decisions at the time they’re doing it. (It’s easy to rationalize afterwards.)
When I first started studying marketing, I began paying closer attention to how I made buying decisions, especially in areas where I had incomplete information or was in a hurry, or focused on some goal other than obtaining the best possible product. And I saw that what I’d been reading was true: I did make decisions based on all sorts of stupid little things, like a difference in one word on the box.
Not because I was stupid or being manipulated, but because I was using the best information I had to make a decision.
Meanwhile, I was also instantly filtering out and rejecting other products, because something sent up a red flag or a question in my mind.
So marketing and PUA are both practical arts of not getting filtered, and giving people what they actually want, without injecting your own ideas of that.
I read and view PUA stuff to understand marketing better, because the best of both have one concept in common: it’s called disqualification.
Disqualification means quickly turning off people who are not going to be happy with your product (or person), so as to better turn on the people who will be happy with the product (or person).
This is an inherently polarizing process, though, which is why all the people who aren’t in the market for “Obeying 1 Rule Of Fat Loss” or whatever are gonna get squicked, in the same way that women who aren’t attracted to the confidence of a man who says he has 30 girlfriends and she can only be his if she’s not jealous are going to be squicked by the very idea of it, let alone the actual experience of it.
This is also probably related to the “fandom requires something awful” concept. If you’re not willing to turn people off, you’ll be forced to dilute your signal to the people you actually want to reach.
That doesn’t mean you’re going to be perfect at it, of course. I’d prefer it, for example, if my “signal” were accessible to a few more people at LW than it is (notably EY), and I’ve made some minor tweaks for the LW audience in general. But I’m not going to change it significantly, because the most vocal parts of LW do not always correspond to the parts of LW that enjoy or are informed by what I write… any more than EY is going to change his style to attract religious people, just because Robert Aumann believes in God.
I am extremely leery of rationalism being used as a reason not to feel things.
I would just like to say that among the things most likely to make me want to scream at someone is when they try to give me what they think I want, or what they would want, or what most people superficially similar to me want, instead of what I tell them I want. In words. Out loud.
And I’m extremely confused by your reference here to my post, which was an attempt to illustrate the dangers of allowing your thought process to be driven by your emotions, and to illustrate a tool for identifying whether that is happening (i.e., observing somatic markers).
When I say “get over it”, I don’t mean “don’t pay attention to your feeling”, I mean, “pay careful attention to this signal you aren’t thinking or behaving rationally, and do whatever it takes to change your thinking in such a way that the feeling does not arise in the first place.”
That is, when you can think about the subject in question without the somatic marker of “ick”, then you will know you’ve successfully removed whatever cached thought was making you feel that way. The “ick” does not exist in outside reality, it exists solely in your mind and body, and any attempt to justify it as existing in outside reality is prima facie bottom-line reasoning. That is, irrational.
Wow. That post was particularly hard to read, but somehow I got the impression it was about quite the opposite.
Emotions are powerful tools, and should not be undervalued.
It said that your emotions control your thought process. It didn’t say that was a good thing, it said it was a fact.
Nor are they to be used inappropriately. Negative emotions in lasting doses are likely harmful to your health, as well as to your rationality. Depressed people aren’t thinking rationally.
I’ve noticed several instances of “that’s so gross and low-class” signaling at LW, and agonized over whether it was worth pointing out (that it’s signaling). I don’t claim that the internal gross-out feeling is affected; I have had similar reactions all by myself, especially to pumped-up motivational speak on e.g. pjeby’s site.
I’ve decided it’s still a valid signal, so I won’t be bitching about it when I see it, and I’ll continue to express disgust at trashy (even if effective) persuasion (I’m so sophisticated!), but I’ll try to moderate my actual feelings of revulsion, so (I hope) I can evaluate the content more accurately.
Relevant post. There is a huge difference between marketing communications which is the garden-variety sort of marketing you’re talking about, and marketing research, which is about giving people the things they’ll want to buy. (And not just what they say they want to buy, but what they’ll actually put cash down for).
Neither of which is, of course, the same thing as what they’ll actually enjoy the most.
This… merits a response.
To me the topics of PUA, marketing and self-help feel interrelated. Not just because it’s all applied rationality, but because it’s all about goal-directed tweaking of human wetware. Which is precisely the icky problem.
As a kid I invented and devoutly followed a strict moral injunction against any form of self-manipulation—what’s today called self-help—and against lying. As an adult I have relaxed both those requirements, but instead explicitly invented and have followed for years an equally strict injunction against manipulating other people (like in Games People Play). The only PUA techniques I ever adopted were about loss of fear and increase of self-esteem; I shied away from anything that smelled even vaguely manipulative. (I have grossly neglected the skillz over the last two years and will soon start practicing from scratch again, under the same restrictions.)
The morality of hacking minds is still unclear to me, but it feels worse if it’s done consciously. Not every means of reaching the goal is okay… even if it does no visible harm. According to my life experience, explicit mind-hacking harms the hacker.
(This will be my first post on the current flamewar, which I’ve been hesitant to post on, for obvious reasons.)
If that’s where she’s coming from, it’s a horribly wrong reason to exclude discussion of it. Whether or not PUA techniques repulse you, whether or not you’d be receptive to them, whether or not you intend to use them...
You do need to understand why such counterintuitive methods work, to the extent that they do in fact work. Otherwise, you have a huge hole in your understanding of social psychology, and are setting yourself up to Lose, whether your are a man or a woman.
For what it’s worth, I also get a negative physical reaction from PUA discussion, though for very different reasons. I would describe it as a combination of hopelessness at my own ignorance, and refusal to accept that it could be true. In fact, the first time I’d heard about PUAs, someone referenced a related Feyman anecdote, and I rushed to look it up, and after I read it, I felt really, really, unexplainably miserable, almost giving up all hope. By itself, that almost made me fly into a rage.
But rather than ask to be shielded from this mental pain, I save the threads devoted to them, so I can process them at a later time, once I’ve built up the courage.
To avoid discussion of the topic on the grounds that it makes some people, even most people, feel icky, is to go against everything this site stands for.
Agreed, but there’s a world of difference between a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is actively interested in applying them, and a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is interested in learning more about “the enemy”.
In much the same way, there would be a world of difference between a post that gave advice on how best to convert people to Christianity, or to market the latest designer piece of crap, and a post that documented commonly used conversion or marketing techniques for the purposes of understanding how people can come to believe silly things or buy stupid products.
I accept that, in the interest of good communication, people can do a better job with their tone and emphasis when they make PUA posts.
The danger, however, is buying into this idea that you have to adhere to some vague feminist concern that can only result in good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases. While there are valid feminist concerns about objectification, this kafkaesque hypervigilance simply serves to enforce a very self-limiting mindset in posters.
It wussifies them, in other words. I believe that has been my experience, having resolved at an early age to be supersensitive to offending women. I’ve certainly avoided it, but it’s not very conducive to leaving copies of me in the next generation.
Feminist concerns are vague and the only possible result of thinking about them is “good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases”?
I guess I can see how, if you don’t understand the relevant feminist concerns, then they will seem vague, and that the effect of not really knowing what it is you’re supposed to avoid could be quite frustrating. But I tend to think that vagueness, like probability, is in the mind, rather than being a property of the concerns themselves. If you do understand and appreciate such concerns, then it’s usually not very difficult to avoid offending people—and even if you do end up accidentally offending someone, it’s easy enough to just apologise after the fact, without it opening yet another front in the gender wars.
Maybe this means that the feminists among us need to do a better job of communicating the concerns, but it would also be nice if attempts to do so didn’t result in (IMHO pretty ridiculous) accusations of “kafkaesque hypervigilance”.
P.S. If trying to understand others’ perspectives and attempting not to unnecessarily offend them means that I’m a wuss, then I’ll wear the badge proudly. I can’t speak for anyone else, but certainly hasn’t affected my ability to leave copies of me in the next generation.
But the thing is, we’re interested in the truth. What you or anyone else will use it for is their own business. Our goal is not to filter out topics which could potentially enable marketers to sell more crap or something.
Interesting, I don’t agree with this at all. Perhaps it comes down to a difference between those of us who are most interested in truth, and those of us who are most interested in winning.
Insofar as anyone’s utility function has a term for people-not-being-converted-to-Christianity, people-not-buying-loads-of-crap-they-don’t-need, or people-not-treating-members-of-whatever-gender-they-happen-to-be-attracted-to-as-sexual-trophies, what others do with knowledge is their business. Which is not to say that they should somehow censor people who advocate such things; but I wouldn’t expect them to sit idly by and pretend that they think these goals are all fine and dandy either.
I find this excessively repugnant.
This “we know what’s best for you”/”for you own good TM” attitude is very disturbing.
“what others do with knowledge is their business.”
Rather, they think it is, but they’re wrong.
I agree, but on the other hand, how important is the topic? We can rationally decide to lose the topic here on this ground: not everyone posting or reading has achieved perfect equanimity, but we can help them develop that quality more effectively by tricking them into thinking that we already have it (the illusion would be shattered in the type of failures elicited by each discussion of the sensitive topic).
An absolute prohibition would be ridiculous, though.
Huh?!? Seriously, marketing seems sleezy to you but PUA doesn’t? To each his own I guess.
I really agree with pjeby below though.
Cousin It lives in Moscow, where people tend to have a different take on free-market institutions such as speculators, middlemen and (as now appears likely) marketing.
Nah, I like free markets. My negative impression is more of an intellectual aversion to the output of Western marketing gurus like Seth Godin.
Cousin It has “an intellectual aversion to the output of Western marketing gurus like Seth Godin”.
Godin seems pretty icky to me too. Paul Hawken’s book Growing a Business had some nice insights into marketing.
I recently unsubsribed from Godin’s feed after a sequence of particularly atrocious posts.
clientk writes about marketing, but in a pleasant and often insightful manner.
I’m not even sure what relevant difference there is, the fundamental character of both seem pretty much identical to me.
I’m curious why you have such different reactions to the two.