Only by an extremely strict definition of “guarantee” could this be construed as contravening any individual lady’s autonomy.
You actually hint at this:
You can do things that can make you statistically more likely to succeed, but in the end, when you have consensual social interactions, the other person could always rebuff you.
Sure, but the guarantee was never about individuals in the first place!
Consider each interaction a Bernoulli trial. If (pre-self help), the poor dude always strikes out [P(success) ~ 0], he will never have a successful interaction (however that’s defined) unless he performs an enormous number of trials, which his poor self esteem won’t allow. Say we raise his probability of success (through hypnotherapy and positive self-talk coaching), to 0.01. If our gentleman is so revved up that he then goes out and talks to 1000 women (performs 1000 trials), there’s a >99.99% chance he’ll have at least one success.
If this situation is typical, it would seem like an unreasonably restrictive use of language to balk the word “guarantee”. Individuals always have unique characteristics, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make statements about averages.
My point was about literal guarantees, and men who believe them. There are very stupid people in this world. It’s easy to assume them away, but they do actually exist. George Sodini, I suspect, was a stupid man—or, at least, deeply unrealistic. He had the Charles Guiteau attitude: fiercely convinced that he was owed something that would never have been likely. Being that unrealistic is dangerous to oneself and others.
I would guess that LW doesn’t harbor so much of that, but I feel obligated to make these kinds of disclaimers because I do see people here who don’t take social conventions for granted and who don’t pick up cues very naturally.
To get back to the main issue, I think it’s basically good to get better at picking up women, and even more generally good to build social/networking/charisma ability. I’m just inclined to be very careful about handing too much of an ideology to people who are high-risk for doing bad things with it.
The biggest problem with what I’ve seen of PUA and PUA converts is that it is very hard to distinguish these two affects.
Your typical shy guy poor dude, doesn’t actually approach women with an actual trial very often. Sometimes it almost never happens.
Suppose the successful PUA can pickup 2-3% of intentional targets. They are probably targeting people everytime they are in a social situation that involves meeting new people. Perhaps this involves dozens of contacts a week, or even hundreds if they are the sort who is looking for a constant stream of one-nighters.
On the other hand, your typical poor dude may only make 1-2 intentional targets a month, if that. I was never a PUA. I developed enough social skills on my own to make a marked difference in my outlook a few years before Lewis Depayne showed up on usenet pushing Ross Jeffries stuff, which was laughable.
But I was definitely a poor dude before then. I attended a college for two years with 70% women, that a friend of mine described in retrospect as a “pussy paradise” without ever having any kind of romantic or sexual relationship. In retrospect, some of the rare targets of my attention were begging me to make a move in ways that I failed to notice. But in two years, I probably made actual attempts to hookup or date at most 9-10 women/girls, and in none of those cases did I ever make a move that demanded either rejection or acceptance. Because I was so, so sure that I would be rejected that I couldn’t face the prospect. Is it any surprise that my success rate was 0%?
Even after my awakening, I maintained a relatively low frequency of attempts, but my ratio of hookups to serious attempts is far better than 3%, more like 50-60%.
My going hypothesis is that the mere act of getting guys to specifically attempt to approach women they are attracted to, and then attempt to seduce those who inspire their further interest and verify their success is enough to turn the average loser into someone who will be reasonably successful with women.
I didn’t actually need any dark arts to go from a big ‘loser’ to somebody who, in the right social context (not a typical bar scene), has around a 50⁄50 shot to hook up with almost anybody who is looking and interests me. I just had to realize that sex is not something women have and men want to take from them, and that I am not hideous and unattractive.
Now, I’ve come to realize that I’m probably more attractive than average, naturally, and it was my combination of weak social skills and brutal social experience of growing up that warped my mental map about this until I was in my mid-20s. I don’t actually believe that most guys would have the results that I do. But I’m hardly some kind of Super-Adonis. I’m fat, and don’t pay a whole lot of attention to my appearance beyond being clean (tend to wear non-descript preppy business casual nearly everywhere I go because it’s comfortable). I’m pretty sure I’d get negative numbers on Roissy’s stupid SMV test.
Say we raise his probability of success, to 0.01. If our gentleman is so revved up that he then goes out and talks to 1000 women (performs 1000 trials), there’s a >99.99% chance he’ll have at least one success.
The (fatal) flaw in your argument is that you multiplied probabilities without checking your model of reality for any obvious reasons to believe that the probabilities might be significantly dependent on each other.
In other words, if all we know about a man is that he is trying to mate, is the probability that he will succeed with woman #900 given that he struck out with #1 through #899 really the same as the probability that he will succeed with woman #1?
The independence assumption is implicit in my calling them Bernoulli trials, but you are correct that this may not be valid. Still, the general point stands. Good catch!
Only by an extremely strict definition of “guarantee” could this be construed as contravening any individual lady’s autonomy.
You actually hint at this:
Sure, but the guarantee was never about individuals in the first place!
Consider each interaction a Bernoulli trial. If (pre-self help), the poor dude always strikes out [P(success) ~ 0], he will never have a successful interaction (however that’s defined) unless he performs an enormous number of trials, which his poor self esteem won’t allow. Say we raise his probability of success (through hypnotherapy and positive self-talk coaching), to 0.01. If our gentleman is so revved up that he then goes out and talks to 1000 women (performs 1000 trials), there’s a >99.99% chance he’ll have at least one success.
If this situation is typical, it would seem like an unreasonably restrictive use of language to balk the word “guarantee”. Individuals always have unique characteristics, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make statements about averages.
Of course.
My point was about literal guarantees, and men who believe them. There are very stupid people in this world. It’s easy to assume them away, but they do actually exist. George Sodini, I suspect, was a stupid man—or, at least, deeply unrealistic. He had the Charles Guiteau attitude: fiercely convinced that he was owed something that would never have been likely. Being that unrealistic is dangerous to oneself and others.
I would guess that LW doesn’t harbor so much of that, but I feel obligated to make these kinds of disclaimers because I do see people here who don’t take social conventions for granted and who don’t pick up cues very naturally.
To get back to the main issue, I think it’s basically good to get better at picking up women, and even more generally good to build social/networking/charisma ability. I’m just inclined to be very careful about handing too much of an ideology to people who are high-risk for doing bad things with it.
Gotcha, agreed!
The biggest problem with what I’ve seen of PUA and PUA converts is that it is very hard to distinguish these two affects.
Your typical shy guy poor dude, doesn’t actually approach women with an actual trial very often. Sometimes it almost never happens.
Suppose the successful PUA can pickup 2-3% of intentional targets. They are probably targeting people everytime they are in a social situation that involves meeting new people. Perhaps this involves dozens of contacts a week, or even hundreds if they are the sort who is looking for a constant stream of one-nighters.
On the other hand, your typical poor dude may only make 1-2 intentional targets a month, if that. I was never a PUA. I developed enough social skills on my own to make a marked difference in my outlook a few years before Lewis Depayne showed up on usenet pushing Ross Jeffries stuff, which was laughable.
But I was definitely a poor dude before then. I attended a college for two years with 70% women, that a friend of mine described in retrospect as a “pussy paradise” without ever having any kind of romantic or sexual relationship. In retrospect, some of the rare targets of my attention were begging me to make a move in ways that I failed to notice. But in two years, I probably made actual attempts to hookup or date at most 9-10 women/girls, and in none of those cases did I ever make a move that demanded either rejection or acceptance. Because I was so, so sure that I would be rejected that I couldn’t face the prospect. Is it any surprise that my success rate was 0%?
Even after my awakening, I maintained a relatively low frequency of attempts, but my ratio of hookups to serious attempts is far better than 3%, more like 50-60%.
My going hypothesis is that the mere act of getting guys to specifically attempt to approach women they are attracted to, and then attempt to seduce those who inspire their further interest and verify their success is enough to turn the average loser into someone who will be reasonably successful with women.
I didn’t actually need any dark arts to go from a big ‘loser’ to somebody who, in the right social context (not a typical bar scene), has around a 50⁄50 shot to hook up with almost anybody who is looking and interests me. I just had to realize that sex is not something women have and men want to take from them, and that I am not hideous and unattractive.
Now, I’ve come to realize that I’m probably more attractive than average, naturally, and it was my combination of weak social skills and brutal social experience of growing up that warped my mental map about this until I was in my mid-20s. I don’t actually believe that most guys would have the results that I do. But I’m hardly some kind of Super-Adonis. I’m fat, and don’t pay a whole lot of attention to my appearance beyond being clean (tend to wear non-descript preppy business casual nearly everywhere I go because it’s comfortable). I’m pretty sure I’d get negative numbers on Roissy’s stupid SMV test.
The (fatal) flaw in your argument is that you multiplied probabilities without checking your model of reality for any obvious reasons to believe that the probabilities might be significantly dependent on each other.
In other words, if all we know about a man is that he is trying to mate, is the probability that he will succeed with woman #900 given that he struck out with #1 through #899 really the same as the probability that he will succeed with woman #1?
The general point still holds. P(at least one success) can be very large even if P(nth attempt succeeds) is small, for all n.
The independence assumption is implicit in my calling them Bernoulli trials, but you are correct that this may not be valid. Still, the general point stands. Good catch!