Maybe I should move it out of this thread and top-level it or something...
Er....please, not if it’s going to be another thread in which geeks whine about not getting girlfriends and how society is trying to stop them procreating and all the advice is actively harmful and probably intended as such and how even if I spoke to that cute girl she’d just make fun of me and blah blah expletive deleted blah...
how society is trying to stop them procreating and all the advice is actively harmful and probably intended
Imagine a society that put non-trivial effort into helping the type of male HughRistik described in his comment here and in the previous discussion, and that actually updated its advice as it learned what worked and what didn’t. One where you can openly give effective advice about what a man should do to create interest from females without being ridiculed.
Compare it to the present society. Do you see a difference? If so, you are in agreement.
as such and how even if I spoke to that cute girl she’d just make fun of me
Despite the humor in the comic, that is a real danger: men do have “something to lose”, well above and beyond the feeling of rejection: he suddenly becomes a “pervert”, the woman tells others about what a loser he is, etc. I know because I have lived it.
What’s the difference between a romantic act and a pervy one? Whether the woman has decided she likes the guy doing it.
Imagine a society that put non-trivial effort into helping the type of male HughRistik described in his comment here and in the previous discussion, and that actually updated its advice as it learned what worked and what didn’t. One where you can openly give effective advice about what a man should do to create interest from females without being ridiculed.
What about all the PUA stuff? I know nothing more of it than has been discussed here and from looking around their web sites, but it’s been spoken of with approval by some here and on OB. Not that I’m recommending it, I have my own ideas about it which aren’t relevant here, but there it is for the studying. Yes, there are people who say that it’s nasty and manipulative, yadda yadda. What do you care about that? The PUA people don’t. Take it or leave it.
Compare it to the present society. Do you see a difference? If so, you are in agreement.
If “society” doesn’t lay out a red carpet for you it’s deliberately doing you down? Sorry, but it isn’t anyone else’s responsibility to solve your problem. You solve it yourself, or not. Resources are out there, and pretending they aren’t and whining about how if it wasn’t for “society” you’d succeed at this is just an excuse to justify losing.
Despite the humor in the comic, that is a real danger: men do have “something to lose”, well above and beyond the feeling of rejection: he suddenly becomes a “pervert”, the woman tells others about what a loser he is, etc. I know because I have lived it.
And so you believe that any time a man asks a woman out and she declines, he gets labelled a pervert and badmouthed to all her friends. That is actually not how things work in the world outside your head. Offers amicably made and amicably declined happen all the time.
BTW, minor quibble (or major truth, depending on how far you pull on the loose thread): there is no such thing as a feeling of rejection. There is only the fact of being turned down (if it happens), and whatever attitude you decide to take about it.
What about all the PUA stuff? I know nothing more of it than has been discussed here and from looking around their web sites, but it’s been spoken of with approval by some here and on OB. …
Yes, people who could actually use the advice appreciate hearing it. I’m talking about disapproval from society in general. There is no widely-accepted, effective advice that you can openly talk about for how to attract women, like there is for women wanting to attract men. PUA is a recent development that is slowly allowing men to work around this problem, but its effectiveness will always be officially denied in polite company, no matter how much evidence accumulates.
If “society” doesn’t lay out a red carpet for you it’s deliberately doing you down? Sorry, but it isn’t anyone else’s responsiblity to solve your problem. You solve it yourself, or not. Resources are out there, and pretending they aren’t and whining about how if it wasn’t for “society …
Yikes! Putting words into my mouth there? Let’s see, I didn’t claim there are no resources, I didn’t aim to justify any of my personal failings, I didn’t claim that society has to throw out a red carpet for every idea. However, there is a very real problem for men in general, and it’s ridiculous to equate any discussion of that with excuse-making.
For what it’s worth, I am most certainly not retiring to my cave on this issue, and in no sense have I given up. I have, in fact, availed myself of the resources you mentioned. Though I won’t publicly go into much detail, it proved my suspicions right—the course assumed a prerequisite level of implicit social knowledge that I didn’t have. Fortunately, I got a refund and have been developing in that area. As the thread Hugh linked shows, my efforts have led to a date, so I most certainly not taking the attitude you have so rudely ascribed to me.
And so you believe that any time a man asks a woman out and she declines, he gets labelled a pervert and badmouthed to all her friends. That is actually not how things work in the world outside your head. Offers amicably made and amicably declined happen all the time.
Again, putting words into my mouth. I never claimed that this happens every time, I don’t believe it happens every time, and it wasn’t necessary for my point that it happens every time. All that’s necessary is that the risk be too high. If you’ve never had that problem, good for you—you’re a natural, or learned the appropriate protocols from the appropriate people. That’s still no reason to deny the existence of the problem for others.
BTW, minor quibble (or major truth, depending on how far you pull on the loose thread): there is no such thing as a feeling of rejection. There is only the fact of being turned down (if it happens), and whatever attitude you decide to take about it.
Nope, there’s also the change in other people’s behaviors and beliefs about me that result from a failed attempt, which I cannot alter merely by changing my view of how I was turned down; ignoring this fact on the basis of some rugged “I choose my attitude” is simplistic, and ignorant of the relevant factors.
Whoops, misread that and focused on a point that wasn’t there. Thought RK’s comment expressed a sentiment that it did not actually express, or at least expressed only very mildly.
Original comment:
African nations could all develop well-functioning, corruption-free constitutional democracies, if only people took responsibility for their actions.
You see how this attitude is, perhaps, less than constructive? I’m willing to bet that what works for you isn’t working for a lot of other people; a solution existing doesn’t help people who can’t employ that solution. Until employing that solution is a task, and not a problem, there’s progress to be made.
African nations could all develop well-functioning, corruption-free constitutional democracies, if only people took responsibility for their actions.
I don’t accept this analogy. It would take a large number of people acting together to change the African situation. One person acting on their own can do little. But SilasBarta’s desire for an active social life only requires action by him. The problem, as he describes it, is that he does not know what to do, that what he has done so far has failed, sometimes catastrophically. But nobody is stealing women from him. Nobody is preventing him doing whatever it is that will work, should he ever discover what that is (although depending on the scale of past catastrophes, he might have to emigrate to another continent to start over). Nobody is to blame.
I’m willing to bet that what works for you
I have been single for all of my 54 years. Make of that what you will.
Imagine a society that put non-trivial effort into helping the type of male HughRistik described in his comment here and in the previous discussion, and that actually updated its advice as it learned what worked and what didn’t.
One thing I’ll add is that I don’t want people to think from either of our posts that dating is only a problem for shy or interpersonally-challenged straight males.
I was once at a club talking to guy I met who turned out to be gay. He was telling me that he has no idea how to approach new guys at clubs. He said something, “well I could go up and ask if they want a drink, but that feels cheesy… and then what?” Clearly, he is aware of the socially acceptable taskification (buy potential partners drinks), but finds it inadequate and feels lost about what concrete actions to take.
Everyone except naturally adept and popular kids suffer from the norm against taskifying the dating process, or using taskifying to learn how to develop dating skills and attractiveness. Males are just the only population that date from a pool of people who typically (a) are more selective than them, and (b) expect them to be the primary initiator of advances.
It sounds like you’re writing off the Romantic view without properly understanding it. Every day is an adventure! Why ‘taskify’ “attracting mates” when you can just follow your intuition and see where the road takes you? The Romantic view doesn’t specify that if you follow your intuition, then good things will happen. Rather, it suggests that you should follow your intuition—full stop.
Perhaps Romanticism is an easy target on a community devoted to rationalism, but it’s unhelpful to complain that your hammer is not a good screwdriver.
It sounds like you’re writing off the Romantic view without properly understanding it.
Certainly possible. But I think you do a good job of summarizing the view I’m criticizing, and showing why I write it off.
Every day is an adventure! Why ‘taskify’ “attracting mates” when you can just follow your intuition and see where the road takes you? The Romantic view doesn’t specify that if you follow your intuition, then good things will happen. Rather, it suggests that you should follow your intuition—full stop.
Sounds great… unless you are actually trying to solve a problem that your current intuitions are inadequate to solve.
But I kind of agree that Romanticism is being held to the wrong standard: solving real-world problems and gaining empirical and procedural knowledge is not really what Romanticism is for. Which is exactly why it’s so strange to see the attitude that problem-solving in socializing and dating must not violate Romantic ideals at any stage. It’s proponents of this attitude that are trying to turn a hammer into a screwdriver.
Connecting with one’s intuitions and instincts can often be difficult: it can be a problem. Yet this problem can be mitigated through taskification: you can systematically identify factors that are preventing you from acting on your instincts, and remove those factors. See this video advising men to avoid anxious, tentative language when asking women out that masks the intensity of their feelings. The goal of expressing one’s feelings is romantic, but the means involves certain tasks: such as resisting anxiety that might make you uses hedging language that diffuses the chemistry, and instead “claim what’s true” for you with “integrity” and “conviction.”
It sounds like you’re writing off the Romantic view without properly understanding it. Every day is an adventure! Why ‘taskify’ “attracting mates” when you can just follow your intuition and see where the road takes you?
Because following my intuition is the default state, and results in precisely zero romantic relationships.
Why is it so hard to communicate that people giving romantic advice don’t quite understand what situation their audience is in?
If you follow your intuition and good things never happen, it’s time to take the Romantic view and put it on a rocket ship and fire that rocket ship into the Sun.
I have a little “luck” story. My first, and so far only, girlfriend, was a person who my mom saw one day working in a video store. Being concerned with my personal life, she called me and recommended I go to the store to flirt with the girl. I did, and it went pretty well, though I didn’t ask her out. Then I came home and googled her name. Well, it turns out that her first name, alone, (which was on her name tag) identifies her uniquely in the world. (It’s not that weird just looking at it, but still.) And she had a livejournal. Which I read. And she had just broken up with her last boyfriend. After that, e-mailing turned into phone calls and dates and then real dating. I broke up with her after a while—I wasn’t lucky enough to get someone extremely compatible, but I look back on it now and appreciate that we were pretty damn compatible, and in many more ways than could be expected just by updating on a few surface-level signals, which was all I had available at first.
I broke up with her after a while—I wasn’t lucky enough to get someone extremely compatible, but I look back on it now and appreciate that we were pretty damn compatible, and in many more ways than could be expected just by updating on a few surface-level signals, which was all I had available at first.
I would not break up with a woman just because we are not “extremely compatible”. (I might break up with a woman because I met someone else who is more compatible, but that is different. One reason that is different is that I tend to think that it is a lot easier to interest woman # 2 in a relationship if you are still with woman # 1, and part of the reason for that is that a man in a relationship exhibits subtle non-verbal signs that women can pick up on that are very costly or impossible for most men to learn to exhibit at will for the duration of the courtship phase. Or so it seems to me.)
A large challenge for young people is to get to a place where their social connections, income, net worth and general knowledge of the world provides a nice cushion or source of resilience. A significant proportion of young people get stuck along the way to that place of resilience with the result that they never reach the destination or, if they do, they languish for years or decades in poverty, depression, social isolation or in some other form of unpleasantness.
Having a girlfriend or a wife makes a man significantly more resilient. This is because when a woman loves a man, all or almost all of the woman’s “ego skills” (a term used or formerly used by the psychotherapy profession to mean something like what writers on this site mean when they say “instrumental rationality”) are available to the man. In contrast, the ego skills of a doctor, social worker, psychotherapist or such are generally mostly not available to the patient or client even if the patient or client is paying the doctor, psychotherapist or such $100 or $200 an hour (though that would definitely increase the expected rate at which the ego skills transfer). In other words, the rationality, the intelligence, the cognitive skills (particularly those having to do with the mind or with human society) of a person are available to the individual owner of those skills, but not in general to the persons the owner is trying to help—and training, e.g., M.D. programs and Ph. D. programs in clinical psychology generally does not change that very much in my personal experience and in my interpretation of what I have read. But the sexual bond does drastically change that—not always, but in a significant fraction of ordinary relationships. And having the knowledge of a few yares of experience—knowledge about, e.g., which sort of woman is likely to bond strongly to you and how to create and maintain that bond—brings that probability up to at least .7 or .8 if you’re smart enough to follow along on this site.
In other words, the expected helpfulness of a person in your life can be modeled as the product of the rationality of the person (where “rationality” is defined as the ability to achieve the goals the person is expected to want to achieve multiplied by how much the person really cares about you. And the medical profession, the social-worker profession, the psychotherapy profession and such do not have a lot more control over that second factor than anyone else does.
But you know this already pdf23ds! You wrote a comment on it just today or yesterday. Sex changes that general rule. As soon as a woman starts having sex with you, well, then all of a sudden you are the most wonderful person in the world, or one of them anyways, and what happens to you is some significant fraction as important as what happens to the woman herself (according to her way of assigning importance).
I have gone without the love of a woman for 24 of the 32 years since I left home at the age of 17. (I am 49 now.) So, what I said above is not the usual lazy human after-the-fact justification or rationalization of a decision or a life strategy decided on through other, unspoken means. Also, like you, pdf23ds, I have had some significant handicaps which have caused me to need all the resiliency I can get.
So, pdf23ds, now that you know a little about how I think about these things, could you explain your policy of requiring extreme compatibility and breaking up if that requirement is not met?
OK, another thing. I now remember that a bigger reason than the lack of compatibility that I broke up with my girlfriend was that I had almost no respect for her, possibly quite unfairly (but nevertheless), and I felt that with this asymmetrical situation, staying together was not at all fair to her. I still don’t see how I could possibly have enough respect for a person to not feel this way unless they’re very compatible with me.
I really appreciate your exploring this topic with me. Feel free to continue the conversation by private email.
I have not so far experienced significant difficulty winning women I go on to continue to respect. What most rapidly decreases my respect for a woman (and the same thing goes for all my friends and indeed, if I am not forgetting something, all human being or at least all human being who were raised in the Western tradition) is habitual lying, particularly, lying in order to obtain a personal benefit (fraud in other words) or other violations of basic ethical standards around which there has been widespread agreement (at least in the West) for thousands of years.
The girlfriend of 5 years who just dumped me? More probably than not, she never lied to me. But part of the reason for that is that I would regularly proclaim to her that I have never lied to her in the slightest matter (which was and remains true) and that I expect the same behavior from her to me. If she did lie to me, almost certainly it was in a series of “misdemeanors” or petty matters. I did not observe her to lie to any of her friends as far as I can recall. If she did, it was something small. It is extremely _un_likely that she would ever do serious harm to any of her many friends through fraud or other clear violations of the basic ethical standards. My first girlfriend (of 3 years) I am almost sure never lied to me or cheated me in any way. The government and major corporations? Different story. But never anything “actionable” (anything that could result in her getting sued or prosecuted.) Before my first girlfriend, I considered defrauding the government or a major corporation just as bad as defrauding a person. So that first relationship definitely got me to become more tolerant of that if it is minor. I still think people should treat fraud of major corporations as just as bad as fraud on a individual, but my first relationship got me to face the fact that most people—and most “good” (ethical, worth befriending) people do not see it the way I see it.
This brings up the issue of self-deception because some people are so stained by self-deception that they cannot even tell that they are committing a sophisticated fraud, because their tendency towards self-deception (and to “willful ignorance) is so strong that are just incapable of, e.g., seeing a conflict from the other person’s point of view. By “a conflict” I mean a negative-sum game where the winner is determined by which player is successful in imposing on the people involved (the two players and any third parties like for example the judge in a court case) an interpretation or frame of the facts favorable to themselves. I used to be very intolerant of self-deception or willful ignorance, but lately I have noticed a softening and I intend to continue to soften my intolerance of it because the reason for my historical intolerance might easily have been the fact that I was severely burned by self-deception and willful ignorance in my childhood. So was my latest girlfriend, which is probably one of the things that made us compatible. (“Both our mothers were ostriches,” is how she put it.) But the point that I want the reader to take away is that the experience of being in a relation for 5 years with a women who shared my aversion to self-deception is that I have come to think that I could tolerate more self-deception in my next girlfriend. Well, more precisely, tolerate it but watch what happens, and if I get burned or I see anyone else get burned by the self-deception, then go back to my old level of intolerance. That is, my requirements or “compatibility expectations” have loosened a bit, which I consider a very valuable thing because it increase the set of people I can have deep personal relationships with.
I could go on for a long time, but enough! To summarize, what I need to respect a girlfriend is basically that she adheres to the same standards I expect of anyone else I interact with—except that her adherence and the consistency of that adherence is more important to me that the adherence of, say, someone with whom I am involved in a commercial transaction.
Let’s talk about lying! It is a topic very much like dating, but without dividing people.
You talk about thousands of years of consensus on lying, yet you also talk about learning that most people, even most “good people” disagree with you. I suspect I’m just not parsing something here, but the need for careful parsing seems like a bad sign.
I’d like to hear more about self-deception about lying. I think most people don’t notice most lying that they do, having put it in some other bucket. But that looks to me to be a very different belief than your belief about self-deception. I’d think that only people who want to express righteous indignation about lying (like you) would need to self-deceive.
I wasn’t lucky enough to get someone extremely compatible
could you explain your policy of requiring extreme compatibility and breaking up if that requirement is not met?
I think this is a communication error. I didn’t mean that I require extreme compatibility—my phrasing was perhaps a bit idiomatic or even idiolectic. My very vague and silly guess is that among women in my age range, she was more compatible than about 49⁄50 of the others. And what I’m looking for is more like 1⁄300 or 1⁄400. Is that level of compatibility extreme? Am I being too picky? Well, if I thought that, I would be less picky, obviously, so I give it a .5 chance. As I implied above, my estimate of her compatibility has risen a lot since when I broke up with her.
I would not break up with a woman just because we are not “extremely compatible”. [...] Having a girlfriend or a wife makes a man significantly more resilient. [...] And having the knowledge of a few yares of experience—knowledge about, e.g., which sort of woman is likely to bond strongly to you and how to create and maintain that bond
I would now agree, and regard my breaking up that soon a mistake, though I didn’t ever believe that we had anything long-term. Due to my own issues, the bond was quite asymmetrical, heavier on her side, which is how I could have overlooked its value.
My very vague and silly guess is that among women in my age range, she was more compatible than about 49⁄50 of the others. And what I’m looking for is more like 1⁄300 or 1⁄400.
Thank you for clarifying what you mean by extreme compatability. I did not misinterpret what you meant.
Consider all the women between 22 and 60 in the eastern part of Marin County, California. Note the extremely broad defintion of “my age range.” (Again I’m 49) Not all the single women, but all the women, single and looking, single and not looking or married. My next girlfriend will come from this set with probability .9 or more unless I move, which is very unlikely. (Of course she is more likely to come from the subset of those not now married.)
Now (using Pearl’s language for causal models) do surgery on my model of reality so that I am already in a sexual relationship with one of these women picked at random. Do additional surgery so that she and I already know each other at least as well as couples usually do. Acquiring this knowledge is very time consuming and entails costs like dinners and entrance fees to cultural events. Note that this second bit of surgery allows me to consider the merits of the woman picked at random without regard to whether those cost (again, mostly my time and attention but also entrance fees, etc) are better spent on a different woman.
Marin County is among the top 3 most affluent counties in California. Demographics similar to Silicon Valley, but replace the nerdy component with earthy-crunchy and new-age components. Probably .1 (10%) of these women work out with weights regularly and a significant fraction employ personal trainers to help them keep in shape. (An ordinary trip to the supermarket is often a very distracting and very vivid experience for me )
There is a higher than .5 probability that I would choose to stay in the relationship until she dumped me or 36 months have gone by. The only reason the 36 months is in there is so that I do not have to consider the effects on my attractiveness to women (and consequently, my dating options) of a significant change in my circumstances.
The most likely reason I would choose to dump the woman is that her thinking is significantly distorted by some ideology, and I consider progressive political beliefs an ideology—in fact, it is IMHO the most common ideology in these parts. Or maybe what I am reacting to is just a high amount of the Big Five personality trait agreeableness. (I am quite low in agreeableness.) Speaking of Big Five, I am an extreme introvert, so strong extraversion is probably something else that would drastically lower the probability that I would choose to try to keep the relationship going as long as possible (inside this 36-month interval that defines our current universe of discourse). I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
Would I prefer that she has read all of Eliezer’s writing on the art of human rationality? Of course.
But I would be delighted, overjoyed, elated if she just knew the correct definition of “sexual selection” or understood that the poor people in the England of Charles Dickens were in fact materially better off than almost any other poor population at that time or at any previous time in history. (Define “poor population” as the first seven deciles of individuals distributed by material welfare in some natural category of people, e.g., residents of a nation state or linguistic community.) In other words, delighted, etc, if she had enough rationality, basic knowledge of things like the timing of the Industrial Revolution, and curiosity to seek out the hard numerical data which contradicts and overrides the fictional evidence of dramatizations on PBS of Charles Dickens novels. I just ended a 5-year relationship with a woman who did not know these 2 things. (She dumped me.)
I think it’s pretty relevant that the pool I was talking about was in rural northeast Texas. I’d say the selectivity would be much smaller in a liberal metro like Austin (where I now live). I’m not even including things like being even familiar with the words “transhumanism” or “rationalism”. My standards are even less than you talk about having. (Which is why selectivity numbers suck as a way of communicating about this subject.)
Additionally, I’m on the verge of resigning myself to the possibility of remaining single indefinitely. This definitely has the effect of raising my standards.
The above analysis neglects IQ. One of my girlfriends was definitely above one standard deviation above the mean in IQ and the other 2 were probably above that line. The math of the normal distribution is such that only 16% of the population is above one s.d. above the mean. (The mean IQ in Marin County is probably higher than the national mean, but I am using the population here, not the national population, as my standard of reference for thinking about IQ.) One s.d. above the mean BTW is defined as an IQ of 115.
So multiply the .5 figure in my original comment by .16 or so, pushing us down to 1⁄12 of the women in the set defined above. And since it took me several hours to realize I had overlooked such a crucial factor (.16 -- that’s 2.6 bits of entropy!) there are probably other factors I’ve overlooked, so push the figure down some more.
The reason IQ has 2.6 bits or so of “importance” is that (again) the usefulness of the girlfriend is roughly the ability of the girlfriend to achieve goals and make good decisions in her own life multiplied by “caring”, and that first factor is very heavily reliant on IQ—more so than for example income is reliant on IQ IMHO.
And now my attention is caught by that second factor in the equation usefulness_to_me == rationality * caring: how much she really cares about me relative to how much she cares about herself. One of my girlfriend was above .5 on that measure, another probably above it or approaching it. (The third was below .1 -- definitely below .15 -- and I only got involved with her because she was very nearby and conveniently at hand during a time in my life when for me to have to travel even a few miles to get together probably would have been a dealbreaker. And she was spontaneous and childlike and fun and pretty.)
Knowing that prospective girlfriends who pull above .5 on the caring measure are available, I probably will not settle for one who does not (unless there is some countervailing consideration, but let us forget about that possibility and hope it all comes out in the wash). So that adds another requirement for my next girlfriend, and I would say that out the set of women defined above, .25 meet this latest requirement given of course that I could win the women, which in most case I cannot. (It would be higher if I were pursuing a more conventional life path. For certain life paths that women identify with or approve of, like doctoring, say, that number might go as high as .4. Nonremunerative blogging about the far future, not so much.) (“Win the woman” by the way is polite language for “persuade the woman to have sex with me and to keep having sex with me or at the very least spending a large fraction of her time with me and promising not to have sex or even seriously discuss having sex with anyone else. The reason it is defined that way is that those condition are almost always necessary for the caring factor to approach anything like .5) OK, so now the figure—the “compatability quotient” we might call it—is down to 1⁄48, and (like I said above) there are probably factors I have not taken into account yet.
In all this multiplying (.5 times .16 times .25) by the way I have been remembering to search my model of reality for reasons to expect a significant conditional dependence of one factor on a different one, but I have not found anything really worth reporting or taking into account.
Hey, pdf23ds, please speak up if you do not welcome attempts by me to help you, and I will shut right up, but could it be that the reason you feel the need for such a high level of compatability is that you consider it necessary for you to understand her and for her to understand you sufficiently well? Women are quite different than you and I! They are from a different planet! (Not really, of course, but it is an apt metaphor.) But I think I understood my girlfriends well enough to steer the future into quite wonderful territory even though they’re from another planet. The best roads to understanding are the study of evolutionary psychology and simple experience being in a relationship. (Again I have 8 years.)
Women are quite different than you and I! They are from a different planet!
This is called “othering”. It is not nice. Certain amounts may be required for accuracy, but this much is uncalled for.
Edit: If you think something is wrong with my identification and/or evaluation of othering, I’d be interested to hear it. I brought it up because the parent commenter has mentioned wishing to speak more sensitively in the past.
Voters: since I explicitly asked Alicorn to point out objectifying language to me, and that sort of thing, it pains me that her doing what I asked is currently costing her 3 karma. Yeah, I think some of the writers who favor terms like “objectifying language” and “othering” are silly and counterproductive, but Alicorn strikes me as quite sensible and a good person to teach me concepts that will help me get along better with people high the Big Five personality trait agreeableness.
In the process of trying to rewrite what I said, I realized that I had no insight into pdf23ds’s reasons for adopting the (1/300 to 1⁄400) compatability target, so I should have kept silent.
(I would have deleted my comment, but now it is the subject of responses.)
Moved to top level post
Er....please, not if it’s going to be another thread in which geeks whine about not getting girlfriends and how society is trying to stop them procreating and all the advice is actively harmful and probably intended as such and how even if I spoke to that cute girl she’d just make fun of me and blah blah expletive deleted blah...
Maybe there should be a geek dating and discussion site, but I’d rather such a thing was independent from LessWrong.
The fact that people might write replies that aren’t worth reading is not an argument against posting.
HughRistik’s comment, though, and now a top-level post, is already well down the road I described.
Imagine a society that put non-trivial effort into helping the type of male HughRistik described in his comment here and in the previous discussion, and that actually updated its advice as it learned what worked and what didn’t. One where you can openly give effective advice about what a man should do to create interest from females without being ridiculed.
Compare it to the present society. Do you see a difference? If so, you are in agreement.
Despite the humor in the comic, that is a real danger: men do have “something to lose”, well above and beyond the feeling of rejection: he suddenly becomes a “pervert”, the woman tells others about what a loser he is, etc. I know because I have lived it.
What’s the difference between a romantic act and a pervy one? Whether the woman has decided she likes the guy doing it.
What about all the PUA stuff? I know nothing more of it than has been discussed here and from looking around their web sites, but it’s been spoken of with approval by some here and on OB. Not that I’m recommending it, I have my own ideas about it which aren’t relevant here, but there it is for the studying. Yes, there are people who say that it’s nasty and manipulative, yadda yadda. What do you care about that? The PUA people don’t. Take it or leave it.
If “society” doesn’t lay out a red carpet for you it’s deliberately doing you down? Sorry, but it isn’t anyone else’s responsibility to solve your problem. You solve it yourself, or not. Resources are out there, and pretending they aren’t and whining about how if it wasn’t for “society” you’d succeed at this is just an excuse to justify losing.
And so you believe that any time a man asks a woman out and she declines, he gets labelled a pervert and badmouthed to all her friends. That is actually not how things work in the world outside your head. Offers amicably made and amicably declined happen all the time.
BTW, minor quibble (or major truth, depending on how far you pull on the loose thread): there is no such thing as a feeling of rejection. There is only the fact of being turned down (if it happens), and whatever attitude you decide to take about it.
Yes, people who could actually use the advice appreciate hearing it. I’m talking about disapproval from society in general. There is no widely-accepted, effective advice that you can openly talk about for how to attract women, like there is for women wanting to attract men. PUA is a recent development that is slowly allowing men to work around this problem, but its effectiveness will always be officially denied in polite company, no matter how much evidence accumulates.
Yikes! Putting words into my mouth there? Let’s see, I didn’t claim there are no resources, I didn’t aim to justify any of my personal failings, I didn’t claim that society has to throw out a red carpet for every idea. However, there is a very real problem for men in general, and it’s ridiculous to equate any discussion of that with excuse-making.
For what it’s worth, I am most certainly not retiring to my cave on this issue, and in no sense have I given up. I have, in fact, availed myself of the resources you mentioned. Though I won’t publicly go into much detail, it proved my suspicions right—the course assumed a prerequisite level of implicit social knowledge that I didn’t have. Fortunately, I got a refund and have been developing in that area. As the thread Hugh linked shows, my efforts have led to a date, so I most certainly not taking the attitude you have so rudely ascribed to me.
Again, putting words into my mouth. I never claimed that this happens every time, I don’t believe it happens every time, and it wasn’t necessary for my point that it happens every time. All that’s necessary is that the risk be too high. If you’ve never had that problem, good for you—you’re a natural, or learned the appropriate protocols from the appropriate people. That’s still no reason to deny the existence of the problem for others.
Nope, there’s also the change in other people’s behaviors and beliefs about me that result from a failed attempt, which I cannot alter merely by changing my view of how I was turned down; ignoring this fact on the basis of some rugged “I choose my attitude” is simplistic, and ignorant of the relevant factors.
This, from OB seems particularly relevant.
Whoops, misread that and focused on a point that wasn’t there. Thought RK’s comment expressed a sentiment that it did not actually express, or at least expressed only very mildly.
Original comment:
African nations could all develop well-functioning, corruption-free constitutional democracies, if only people took responsibility for their actions.
You see how this attitude is, perhaps, less than constructive? I’m willing to bet that what works for you isn’t working for a lot of other people; a solution existing doesn’t help people who can’t employ that solution. Until employing that solution is a task, and not a problem, there’s progress to be made.
I don’t accept this analogy. It would take a large number of people acting together to change the African situation. One person acting on their own can do little. But SilasBarta’s desire for an active social life only requires action by him. The problem, as he describes it, is that he does not know what to do, that what he has done so far has failed, sometimes catastrophically. But nobody is stealing women from him. Nobody is preventing him doing whatever it is that will work, should he ever discover what that is (although depending on the scale of past catastrophes, he might have to emigrate to another continent to start over). Nobody is to blame.
I have been single for all of my 54 years. Make of that what you will.
One thing I’ll add is that I don’t want people to think from either of our posts that dating is only a problem for shy or interpersonally-challenged straight males.
I was once at a club talking to guy I met who turned out to be gay. He was telling me that he has no idea how to approach new guys at clubs. He said something, “well I could go up and ask if they want a drink, but that feels cheesy… and then what?” Clearly, he is aware of the socially acceptable taskification (buy potential partners drinks), but finds it inadequate and feels lost about what concrete actions to take.
Everyone except naturally adept and popular kids suffer from the norm against taskifying the dating process, or using taskifying to learn how to develop dating skills and attractiveness. Males are just the only population that date from a pool of people who typically (a) are more selective than them, and (b) expect them to be the primary initiator of advances.
Or he becomes a “stalker”. I’ve lived that, and it’s not good for anyone.
It sounds like you’re writing off the Romantic view without properly understanding it. Every day is an adventure! Why ‘taskify’ “attracting mates” when you can just follow your intuition and see where the road takes you? The Romantic view doesn’t specify that if you follow your intuition, then good things will happen. Rather, it suggests that you should follow your intuition—full stop.
Perhaps Romanticism is an easy target on a community devoted to rationalism, but it’s unhelpful to complain that your hammer is not a good screwdriver.
Certainly possible. But I think you do a good job of summarizing the view I’m criticizing, and showing why I write it off.
Sounds great… unless you are actually trying to solve a problem that your current intuitions are inadequate to solve.
But I kind of agree that Romanticism is being held to the wrong standard: solving real-world problems and gaining empirical and procedural knowledge is not really what Romanticism is for. Which is exactly why it’s so strange to see the attitude that problem-solving in socializing and dating must not violate Romantic ideals at any stage. It’s proponents of this attitude that are trying to turn a hammer into a screwdriver.
Connecting with one’s intuitions and instincts can often be difficult: it can be a problem. Yet this problem can be mitigated through taskification: you can systematically identify factors that are preventing you from acting on your instincts, and remove those factors. See this video advising men to avoid anxious, tentative language when asking women out that masks the intensity of their feelings. The goal of expressing one’s feelings is romantic, but the means involves certain tasks: such as resisting anxiety that might make you uses hedging language that diffuses the chemistry, and instead “claim what’s true” for you with “integrity” and “conviction.”
I don’t think there’s anything here I disagree with.
The Romantic view is a description of what the process feels like from the inside, by someone to whom it does not feel like anything.
A fish is not the best authority on water.
Because following my intuition is the default state, and results in precisely zero romantic relationships.
Why is it so hard to communicate that people giving romantic advice don’t quite understand what situation their audience is in?
Some adventures don’t go well.
If you follow your intuition and good things never happen, it’s time to take the Romantic view and put it on a rocket ship and fire that rocket ship into the Sun.
Phfft—just what a Realist would say.
And if you do eventually manage to screw things up...looking back and not having anything to say but “I got lucky” is pretty damn disheartening.
I have a little “luck” story. My first, and so far only, girlfriend, was a person who my mom saw one day working in a video store. Being concerned with my personal life, she called me and recommended I go to the store to flirt with the girl. I did, and it went pretty well, though I didn’t ask her out. Then I came home and googled her name. Well, it turns out that her first name, alone, (which was on her name tag) identifies her uniquely in the world. (It’s not that weird just looking at it, but still.) And she had a livejournal. Which I read. And she had just broken up with her last boyfriend. After that, e-mailing turned into phone calls and dates and then real dating. I broke up with her after a while—I wasn’t lucky enough to get someone extremely compatible, but I look back on it now and appreciate that we were pretty damn compatible, and in many more ways than could be expected just by updating on a few surface-level signals, which was all I had available at first.
Your mom is quite the wingman.
That word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Wingmom?
I think “matchmaker” is the traditional term.
pdf23ds writes:
I would not break up with a woman just because we are not “extremely compatible”. (I might break up with a woman because I met someone else who is more compatible, but that is different. One reason that is different is that I tend to think that it is a lot easier to interest woman # 2 in a relationship if you are still with woman # 1, and part of the reason for that is that a man in a relationship exhibits subtle non-verbal signs that women can pick up on that are very costly or impossible for most men to learn to exhibit at will for the duration of the courtship phase. Or so it seems to me.)
A large challenge for young people is to get to a place where their social connections, income, net worth and general knowledge of the world provides a nice cushion or source of resilience. A significant proportion of young people get stuck along the way to that place of resilience with the result that they never reach the destination or, if they do, they languish for years or decades in poverty, depression, social isolation or in some other form of unpleasantness.
Having a girlfriend or a wife makes a man significantly more resilient. This is because when a woman loves a man, all or almost all of the woman’s “ego skills” (a term used or formerly used by the psychotherapy profession to mean something like what writers on this site mean when they say “instrumental rationality”) are available to the man. In contrast, the ego skills of a doctor, social worker, psychotherapist or such are generally mostly not available to the patient or client even if the patient or client is paying the doctor, psychotherapist or such $100 or $200 an hour (though that would definitely increase the expected rate at which the ego skills transfer). In other words, the rationality, the intelligence, the cognitive skills (particularly those having to do with the mind or with human society) of a person are available to the individual owner of those skills, but not in general to the persons the owner is trying to help—and training, e.g., M.D. programs and Ph. D. programs in clinical psychology generally does not change that very much in my personal experience and in my interpretation of what I have read. But the sexual bond does drastically change that—not always, but in a significant fraction of ordinary relationships. And having the knowledge of a few yares of experience—knowledge about, e.g., which sort of woman is likely to bond strongly to you and how to create and maintain that bond—brings that probability up to at least .7 or .8 if you’re smart enough to follow along on this site.
In other words, the expected helpfulness of a person in your life can be modeled as the product of the rationality of the person (where “rationality” is defined as the ability to achieve the goals the person is expected to want to achieve multiplied by how much the person really cares about you. And the medical profession, the social-worker profession, the psychotherapy profession and such do not have a lot more control over that second factor than anyone else does.
But you know this already pdf23ds! You wrote a comment on it just today or yesterday. Sex changes that general rule. As soon as a woman starts having sex with you, well, then all of a sudden you are the most wonderful person in the world, or one of them anyways, and what happens to you is some significant fraction as important as what happens to the woman herself (according to her way of assigning importance).
I have gone without the love of a woman for 24 of the 32 years since I left home at the age of 17. (I am 49 now.) So, what I said above is not the usual lazy human after-the-fact justification or rationalization of a decision or a life strategy decided on through other, unspoken means. Also, like you, pdf23ds, I have had some significant handicaps which have caused me to need all the resiliency I can get.
So, pdf23ds, now that you know a little about how I think about these things, could you explain your policy of requiring extreme compatibility and breaking up if that requirement is not met?
OK, another thing. I now remember that a bigger reason than the lack of compatibility that I broke up with my girlfriend was that I had almost no respect for her, possibly quite unfairly (but nevertheless), and I felt that with this asymmetrical situation, staying together was not at all fair to her. I still don’t see how I could possibly have enough respect for a person to not feel this way unless they’re very compatible with me.
I really appreciate your exploring this topic with me. Feel free to continue the conversation by private email.
I have not so far experienced significant difficulty winning women I go on to continue to respect. What most rapidly decreases my respect for a woman (and the same thing goes for all my friends and indeed, if I am not forgetting something, all human being or at least all human being who were raised in the Western tradition) is habitual lying, particularly, lying in order to obtain a personal benefit (fraud in other words) or other violations of basic ethical standards around which there has been widespread agreement (at least in the West) for thousands of years.
The girlfriend of 5 years who just dumped me? More probably than not, she never lied to me. But part of the reason for that is that I would regularly proclaim to her that I have never lied to her in the slightest matter (which was and remains true) and that I expect the same behavior from her to me. If she did lie to me, almost certainly it was in a series of “misdemeanors” or petty matters. I did not observe her to lie to any of her friends as far as I can recall. If she did, it was something small. It is extremely _un_likely that she would ever do serious harm to any of her many friends through fraud or other clear violations of the basic ethical standards. My first girlfriend (of 3 years) I am almost sure never lied to me or cheated me in any way. The government and major corporations? Different story. But never anything “actionable” (anything that could result in her getting sued or prosecuted.) Before my first girlfriend, I considered defrauding the government or a major corporation just as bad as defrauding a person. So that first relationship definitely got me to become more tolerant of that if it is minor. I still think people should treat fraud of major corporations as just as bad as fraud on a individual, but my first relationship got me to face the fact that most people—and most “good” (ethical, worth befriending) people do not see it the way I see it.
This brings up the issue of self-deception because some people are so stained by self-deception that they cannot even tell that they are committing a sophisticated fraud, because their tendency towards self-deception (and to “willful ignorance) is so strong that are just incapable of, e.g., seeing a conflict from the other person’s point of view. By “a conflict” I mean a negative-sum game where the winner is determined by which player is successful in imposing on the people involved (the two players and any third parties like for example the judge in a court case) an interpretation or frame of the facts favorable to themselves. I used to be very intolerant of self-deception or willful ignorance, but lately I have noticed a softening and I intend to continue to soften my intolerance of it because the reason for my historical intolerance might easily have been the fact that I was severely burned by self-deception and willful ignorance in my childhood. So was my latest girlfriend, which is probably one of the things that made us compatible. (“Both our mothers were ostriches,” is how she put it.) But the point that I want the reader to take away is that the experience of being in a relation for 5 years with a women who shared my aversion to self-deception is that I have come to think that I could tolerate more self-deception in my next girlfriend. Well, more precisely, tolerate it but watch what happens, and if I get burned or I see anyone else get burned by the self-deception, then go back to my old level of intolerance. That is, my requirements or “compatibility expectations” have loosened a bit, which I consider a very valuable thing because it increase the set of people I can have deep personal relationships with.
I could go on for a long time, but enough! To summarize, what I need to respect a girlfriend is basically that she adheres to the same standards I expect of anyone else I interact with—except that her adherence and the consistency of that adherence is more important to me that the adherence of, say, someone with whom I am involved in a commercial transaction.
Let’s talk about lying! It is a topic very much like dating, but without dividing people.
You talk about thousands of years of consensus on lying, yet you also talk about learning that most people, even most “good people” disagree with you. I suspect I’m just not parsing something here, but the need for careful parsing seems like a bad sign.
I’d like to hear more about self-deception about lying. I think most people don’t notice most lying that they do, having put it in some other bucket. But that looks to me to be a very different belief than your belief about self-deception. I’d think that only people who want to express righteous indignation about lying (like you) would need to self-deceive.
Hmm, long comment. Let me start at the end.
I think this is a communication error. I didn’t mean that I require extreme compatibility—my phrasing was perhaps a bit idiomatic or even idiolectic. My very vague and silly guess is that among women in my age range, she was more compatible than about 49⁄50 of the others. And what I’m looking for is more like 1⁄300 or 1⁄400. Is that level of compatibility extreme? Am I being too picky? Well, if I thought that, I would be less picky, obviously, so I give it a .5 chance. As I implied above, my estimate of her compatibility has risen a lot since when I broke up with her.
I would now agree, and regard my breaking up that soon a mistake, though I didn’t ever believe that we had anything long-term. Due to my own issues, the bond was quite asymmetrical, heavier on her side, which is how I could have overlooked its value.
Thank you for clarifying what you mean by extreme compatability. I did not misinterpret what you meant.
Consider all the women between 22 and 60 in the eastern part of Marin County, California. Note the extremely broad defintion of “my age range.” (Again I’m 49) Not all the single women, but all the women, single and looking, single and not looking or married. My next girlfriend will come from this set with probability .9 or more unless I move, which is very unlikely. (Of course she is more likely to come from the subset of those not now married.)
Now (using Pearl’s language for causal models) do surgery on my model of reality so that I am already in a sexual relationship with one of these women picked at random. Do additional surgery so that she and I already know each other at least as well as couples usually do. Acquiring this knowledge is very time consuming and entails costs like dinners and entrance fees to cultural events. Note that this second bit of surgery allows me to consider the merits of the woman picked at random without regard to whether those cost (again, mostly my time and attention but also entrance fees, etc) are better spent on a different woman.
Marin County is among the top 3 most affluent counties in California. Demographics similar to Silicon Valley, but replace the nerdy component with earthy-crunchy and new-age components. Probably .1 (10%) of these women work out with weights regularly and a significant fraction employ personal trainers to help them keep in shape. (An ordinary trip to the supermarket is often a very distracting and very vivid experience for me )
There is a higher than .5 probability that I would choose to stay in the relationship until she dumped me or 36 months have gone by. The only reason the 36 months is in there is so that I do not have to consider the effects on my attractiveness to women (and consequently, my dating options) of a significant change in my circumstances.
The most likely reason I would choose to dump the woman is that her thinking is significantly distorted by some ideology, and I consider progressive political beliefs an ideology—in fact, it is IMHO the most common ideology in these parts.
Or maybe what I am reacting to is just a high amount of the Big Five personality trait agreeableness. (I am quite low in agreeableness.) Speaking of Big Five, I am an extreme introvert, so strong extraversion is probably something else that would drastically lower the probability that I would choose to try to keep the relationship going as long as possible (inside this 36-month interval that defines our current universe of discourse). I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
Would I prefer that she has read all of Eliezer’s writing on the art of human rationality? Of course.
But I would be delighted, overjoyed, elated if she just knew the correct definition of “sexual selection” or understood that the poor people in the England of Charles Dickens were in fact materially better off than almost any other poor population at that time or at any previous time in history. (Define “poor population” as the first seven deciles of individuals distributed by material welfare in some natural category of people, e.g., residents of a nation state or linguistic community.) In other words, delighted, etc, if she had enough rationality, basic knowledge of things like the timing of the Industrial Revolution, and curiosity to seek out the hard numerical data which contradicts and overrides the fictional evidence of dramatizations on PBS of Charles Dickens novels. I just ended a 5-year relationship with a woman who did not know these 2 things. (She dumped me.)
I think it’s pretty relevant that the pool I was talking about was in rural northeast Texas. I’d say the selectivity would be much smaller in a liberal metro like Austin (where I now live). I’m not even including things like being even familiar with the words “transhumanism” or “rationalism”. My standards are even less than you talk about having. (Which is why selectivity numbers suck as a way of communicating about this subject.)
Additionally, I’m on the verge of resigning myself to the possibility of remaining single indefinitely. This definitely has the effect of raising my standards.
The above analysis neglects IQ. One of my girlfriends was definitely above one standard deviation above the mean in IQ and the other 2 were probably above that line. The math of the normal distribution is such that only 16% of the population is above one s.d. above the mean. (The mean IQ in Marin County is probably higher than the national mean, but I am using the population here, not the national population, as my standard of reference for thinking about IQ.) One s.d. above the mean BTW is defined as an IQ of 115.
So multiply the .5 figure in my original comment by .16 or so, pushing us down to 1⁄12 of the women in the set defined above. And since it took me several hours to realize I had overlooked such a crucial factor (.16 -- that’s 2.6 bits of entropy!) there are probably other factors I’ve overlooked, so push the figure down some more.
The reason IQ has 2.6 bits or so of “importance” is that (again) the usefulness of the girlfriend is roughly the ability of the girlfriend to achieve goals and make good decisions in her own life multiplied by “caring”, and that first factor is very heavily reliant on IQ—more so than for example income is reliant on IQ IMHO.
And now my attention is caught by that second factor in the equation usefulness_to_me == rationality * caring: how much she really cares about me relative to how much she cares about herself. One of my girlfriend was above .5 on that measure, another probably above it or approaching it. (The third was below .1 -- definitely below .15 -- and I only got involved with her because she was very nearby and conveniently at hand during a time in my life when for me to have to travel even a few miles to get together probably would have been a dealbreaker. And she was spontaneous and childlike and fun and pretty.)
Knowing that prospective girlfriends who pull above .5 on the caring measure are available, I probably will not settle for one who does not (unless there is some countervailing consideration, but let us forget about that possibility and hope it all comes out in the wash). So that adds another requirement for my next girlfriend, and I would say that out the set of women defined above, .25 meet this latest requirement given of course that I could win the women, which in most case I cannot. (It would be higher if I were pursuing a more conventional life path. For certain life paths that women identify with or approve of, like doctoring, say, that number might go as high as .4. Nonremunerative blogging about the far future, not so much.) (“Win the woman” by the way is polite language for “persuade the woman to have sex with me and to keep having sex with me or at the very least spending a large fraction of her time with me and promising not to have sex or even seriously discuss having sex with anyone else. The reason it is defined that way is that those condition are almost always necessary for the caring factor to approach anything like .5) OK, so now the figure—the “compatability quotient” we might call it—is down to 1⁄48, and (like I said above) there are probably factors I have not taken into account yet.
In all this multiplying (.5 times .16 times .25) by the way I have been remembering to search my model of reality for reasons to expect a significant conditional dependence of one factor on a different one, but I have not found anything really worth reporting or taking into account.
Hey, pdf23ds, please speak up if you do not welcome attempts by me to help you, and I will shut right up, but could it be that the reason you feel the need for such a high level of compatability is that you consider it necessary for you to understand her and for her to understand you sufficiently well? Women are quite different than you and I! They are from a different planet! (Not really, of course, but it is an apt metaphor.) But I think I understood my girlfriends well enough to steer the future into quite wonderful territory even though they’re from another planet. The best roads to understanding are the study of evolutionary psychology and simple experience being in a relationship. (Again I have 8 years.)
This is called “othering”. It is not nice. Certain amounts may be required for accuracy, but this much is uncalled for.
Edit: If you think something is wrong with my identification and/or evaluation of othering, I’d be interested to hear it. I brought it up because the parent commenter has mentioned wishing to speak more sensitively in the past.
Voters: since I explicitly asked Alicorn to point out objectifying language to me, and that sort of thing, it pains me that her doing what I asked is currently costing her 3 karma. Yeah, I think some of the writers who favor terms like “objectifying language” and “othering” are silly and counterproductive, but Alicorn strikes me as quite sensible and a good person to teach me concepts that will help me get along better with people high the Big Five personality trait agreeableness.
In the process of trying to rewrite what I said, I realized that I had no insight into pdf23ds’s reasons for adopting the (1/300 to 1⁄400) compatability target, so I should have kept silent.
(I would have deleted my comment, but now it is the subject of responses.)
I think you should.
Trim the first bit and that sounds like a good idea!
Indeed, I know I would be more likely to actually read a thoughtful post than a funny chatlog post on the subject.