Assuming for the moment that it’s true that a skilled PUA trainer would beat an untrained person at this test, how much of that effect do you think is attributable to simply being more confident vs actually having a more accurate model of human social behavior?
In PUA circles, this question has been addressed very extensively, both theoretically and practically. There is in fact a whole subfield of study there, called “inner game,” which deals with the issues of confidence and self-image. The answer is that yes, unsurprisingly, confidence matters a great deal, but its relative importance in individual PUA’s techniques varies, and it doesn’t explain everything in their success, not even by a long shot.
Generally, regardless of your overall opinion of the people in the PUA scene, and for all their flaws, you definitely underestimate the breadth, intensity, and thoroughness of the debates that take place there. There are of course lots of snake oil salesmen around, but when it comes to the informal, non-commercial discourse in the community at all levels, these folks really are serious about weeding out bullshit and distilling stuff that works.
To be fair, I can’t blame people first encountering this subject to have an initial negative reaction. They don’t know the breadth of what goes on, and that it would take a college-course-worth of knowledge to even begin to have an idea of what it’s really about. What interests me is that they update when exposed to new evidence.
The problem is not only that the topic runs afoul of moralistic biases, but also that it triggers failure in high-quality anti-bullshit heuristics commonly used by math/tech/science-savvy people. When you first hear about it, it’s exactly the kind of thing that will set off a well-calibrated bullshit detector. It promises impossible-seeming results that sound tailored to appeal to naive wishful thinking, and stories about its success sound like they just must be explicable by selection effects, self-delusions, false boasting, etc. So I definitely don’t blame people for excessive skepticism either.
A personal anecdote: I remember when I first came across ASF long ago, when I was around 20. I quickly dismissed it as bullshit, and it didn’t catch my attention again until several years later. In retrospect, this miscalculation should probably be one of my major regrets in life, and not just for failures with women that could have been prevented; it would have likely opened my perspectives on many other issues too, as it actually happened the next time around.
The problem is not only that the topic runs afoul of moralistic biases, but also that it triggers failure in high-quality anti-bullshit heuristics commonly used by math/tech/science-savvy people. When you first hear about it, it’s exactly the kind of thing that will set off a well-calibrated bullshit detector
Very true. To me (and my bullshit detector), it sounds strikingly similar to any number of other self-help programs offered through the ages. In fact, it sounds to me a lot like Scientology—or at least the elevator pitch version that they give to lower level people before they start introducing them to the really strange stuff. And the endorsement you give it in your second paragraph sounds a lot like the way adherents to these kinds of absolutely-for-legal-reasons-definitely-not-a-cults will breathlessly talk about them to outsiders.
Now of course I realize that superficial similarity to snake oil doesn’t actually count as valid evidence. But I do think it’s fair to put PUA into the same reference class with them, and base my priors on that. Would you not agree?
Now of course I realize that superficial similarity to snake oil doesn’t actually count as valid evidence. But I do think it’s fair to put PUA into the same reference class with them, and base my priors on that. Would you not agree?
If you see PUA-like techniques being marketed without any additional knowledge about the matter, then yes, your snake oil/bullshit detector should hit the red end of the scale, and stay that way until some very strong evidence is presented otherwise. Thing is, when it comes to a certain subset of such techniques that pjeby, HughRistik, me, and various others have been discussing, there is actually such strong evidence. You just have to delve into the matter without any fatally blinding biases and see it.
That’s pretty much the point I’ve been hammering on. The problem is not that your prior is low, which it should be. The problem is that an accurate estimate of posteriors is obscured by very severe biases that push them downward.
What evidence? PUAs may use a lot of trial and error in developing their techniques, but do their tests count as valid experimental evidence, or just anecdotes? Where are their control groups? What is their null hypothesis? Was subject selection randomized? Were the data gathered and analyzed by independent parties?
Would you accept this kind of evidence if we were talking about physics? Would you accept this kind of evidence if we were evaluating someone who claimed to have psychic powers?
One of the reasons this topic is of interest to rationalists is that it is an example of an area where rational evidence is available but scientific evidence is in short supply. It is not in general rational to postpone judgment until scientific evidence is available. Learning how to make maximal use of rational evidence without succumbing to the pitfalls of cognitive biases is a topic of much interest to many LWers.
Yes, that’s true. I’ve been phrasing my more recent comments in terms of scientific evidence, because several people I’ve been butting heads with have made assertions about PUA that seemed to imply it had a scientific-level base of supporting evidence.
I’m still not sure though what the rational evidence is that I’m supposed to be updating on. Numerous other self improvement programs make similar claims, based on similar reasoning, and offer similar anecdotal evidence. So I consider such evidence to be equally likely to appear regardless of whether PUA’s claims are true or false, leaving me with nothing but my priors.
What evidence? PUAs may use a lot of trial and error in developing their techniques, but do their tests count as valid experimental evidence, or just anecdotes? Where are their control groups? What is their null hypothesis? Was subject selection randomized? Were the data gathered and analyzed by independent parties?
Well, as I said, if you study the discourse in the PUA community at its best in a non-biased and detached way, desensitized to the language and attitudes you might find instinctively off-putting, you’ll actually find the epistemological standards surprisingly high. But you just have to see that for yourself.
A good comparison for the PUA milieu would be a high-quality community of hobbyist amateurs who engage in some technical work with passion and enthusiasm. In their discussions, they probably won’t apply the same formal standards of discourse and evidence that are used in academic research and corporate R&D, but it’s nevertheless likely that they know what they’re talking about and their body of established knowledge is as reliable as any other—and even though there are no formal qualifications for joining, those bringing bullshit rather than insight will soon be identified and ostracized.
Now, if you don’t know at first sight whether you’re dealing with such an epistemologically healthy community, the first test would be to see how its main body of established knowledge conforms to your own experiences and observations. (In a non-biased way, of course, which is harder when it comes to the PUA stuff than some ordinary technical skill.) In my case, and not just mine, the result was a definite pass. The further test is to observe the actual manner of discourse practiced and its epistemological quality. Again, it’s harder to do when biased reactions to various signals of disrespectability are standing in the way.
Would you accept this kind of evidence if we were talking about physics?
Even in physics, not all evidence comes from reproducible experiments. Sometimes you just have to make the best out of observations gathered at random opportune moments, for example when it comes to unusual astronomical or geophysical events.
Would you accept this kind of evidence if we were evaluating someone who claimed to have psychic powers?
You’re biasing your skepticism way upward now. The correct level of initial skepticism with which to meet the PUA stuff is the skepticism you apply to people claiming to have solved difficult problems in a way consistent with the existing well-established scientific knowledge—not the much higher level appropriate for those whose claims contradict it.
The correct level of initial skepticism with which to meet the PUA stuff is the skepticism you apply to people claiming to have solved difficult problems in a way consistent with the existing well-established scientific knowledge—not the much higher level appropriate for those whose claims contradict it.
That’s a good point—the priors for PUA, though low, are nowhere near as low as for psychic phenomena. But that just means that you need a smaller amount of evidence to overcome those priors—it doesn’t lower the bar for what qualifies as valid evidence.
I think part of my problem is there is no easy way to signal you are a white hat PUA rather than a black hat. If I am interested in honest and long term relationships, I don’t want to be signalling that I have the potential to be manipulative. Especially as the name PUA implies that you are interested in picking up girls in general rather than one lady in particular.
This also applies somewhat to non-sexual relations. If someone studies human interaction to a significant degree, how do I know that they will only use their powers for good? Say in an intellectual field or political for that matter. I’m sure the knowledge is useful for spin doctors and people coaching political leaders in debates.
This comment, in itself, is probably signalling an overly reflective mind on the nature of signalling though.
I think part of my problem is there is no easy way to signal you are a white hat PUA rather than a black hat. If I am interested in honest and long term relationships, I don’t want to be signalling that I have the potential to be manipulative.
That’s unfortunately a problem that women face with men in general, PUA or no PUA. Why do you think the signaling games naturally played by men are any different? The difference is ultimately like between a musical prodigy who learned to play the piano spontaneously as a kid, and a player with a similar level of skill who was however tone-deaf and learned it only much later with lots of painstaking practice. But they’re still playing the same notes.
There is absolutely nothing in the whole PUA arsenal that wouldn’t ultimately represent reverse-engineering of techniques spontaneously applied by various types of natural ladies’ men. There is no extra “manipulation” of any sort added on top of that. Even the most callous, sly, and dishonest PUA techniques ever proposed are essentially the same behavior as that practiced by certain types of naturally occurring dark personality types of men that women often, much as they loathe to admit it, find themselves wildly attracted to. (Google “dark triad,” or see the paper I linked in one of my other comments.)
Especially as the name PUA implies that you are interested in picking up girls in general rather than one lady in particular.
It’s a name that stuck from the old days, which isn’t representative of the whole area any more (and in fact never fully was). The more modern term is “game.”
In the marginal Roissysphere, maybe. I’ve seen many attempt to get away from words like “pickup” or “seduction” though I haven’t seen any consensus on an alternative. The problem is that our culture simply has no value-neutral or positive terms for, uh, how do I put it… systematically investigating how people induce each other to want sex and relationships, and how one can practically make use of that knowledge oneself.
(It took me about four tries to write the part in italics after thinking about this subject for years, and it’s still really clunky. I could have said “understand the mating process and act on that understanding,” but that’s a bit too watered-down. My other best attempt was systematically investigating the process by which people create contexts that raise the chances of other people wanting to have sex and relationships with them, and how one can practically make use of this knowledge oneself. That phrasing is clunkier, but gets rid of the word “induce,” which a bunch of feminists once told me is “mechanical” and “objectifying.”)
“Game” has its own problems, of course. What I like about the term is that it implies that social interaction should be playful and fun. “Game” also highlights certain game-theoretic and competitive aspects of human interaction, but it might risk leading people to overstate those aspects. What I don’t like is the connotation that a game isn’t “serious” (e.g. “you think this is just a game, huh?”) and that PUAs (or critics of PUAs) may believe that “game” involves not taking other people’s feelings and interests seriously.
As I’m sure you know, some gurus (e.g. TylerDurden) have advocated viewing the process of learning pickup like learning a videogame. A similar frame is the “experiment frame,” where you think of yourself as a scientist engaging in social experiments. Such frames can be extremely valuable for beginners who need to protect themselves emotionally during the early stages of the learning process, when most of what they try isn’t going to work. Yet they are a form of emotionally distancing oneself from others; in a minority of people with existing problems, they could inhibit empathy, encourage antisocial behavior, or exacerbate feelings of alienation. In general though, I view the possible harm of such attitudes as mainly affecting the PUA.
I see these frames as training wheels which should soon be discarded once the need for such an emotionally defensive stance is gone. Most socially cool people don’t see other people as part of a video game they are playing, or as subjects in a science experiment they are running (though some Dark Triad naturals do… one favorite quote of mine from an intelligent and extremely badboy natural friend of mine who had no exposure to the seduction community: “I love causation… once you understand it, you can manipulate people”). I still engage in social experiments all the time, but when I go out, I no longer think “I’m gonna run some cool experiments tonight,” I think “I’m gonna hang out with some cool people tonight.”
I have the impression that “game” is used much more widely even as the primary general term, let alone when people talk about specific skill subsets and applications (“phone game,” “day game,” etc.). But I’m sure you’ve seen a much broader sample of all sorts of PUA-related stuff, so I’ll defer to your opinion.
That said, I see game primarily as a way of overcoming the biases and false beliefs held about male-female interactions in the contemporary culture. I would say that by historical standards, our culture is exceptionally bad in this regard. While the prevailing respectable views and popular wisdom on the matters of human pairing and sexual behavior have always been affected by biases in every culture that ever existed, my impression is that ours is exceptionally out of touch with reality when it comes to these issues. This is a special case of what I see as a much broader general trend—namely, that in contrast to hard sciences and technology, which have been making continuous and uninterrupted progress for centuries, in many areas of human interest that are not amenable to a no-nonsense hard-scientific way of filtering truth from bullshit, the dominant views have actually been drifting away from reality and into increasing biases and delusions for quite a while now.
To understand this, it is necessary to be able to completely decouple normative from factual parts in one’s beliefs about human sexual and pairing behaviors—a feat of unbiased thinking that is harder in this matter than almost any other. Once this has been done, however, a curious pattern emerges: modern people perceive the normative beliefs of old times and faraway cultures about pairing and sex as alien, strange, and repulsive, and conclude that this is because their factual beliefs were (or are) deluded and biased. Yet it seems to me that whatever one thinks about the normative part, the prevailing factual beliefs have, in many ways, become more remote from reality in modern times. (The only major exceptions are those that came from pure hard-scientific insight, like e.g. the details of women’s fertility cycle.) This of course also implies that while one can defend the modern norms on deontological grounds, the commonly believed consequentialist arguments in their favor are very seriously flawed.
The PUA insights are to a large degree about overcoming these relatively novel biases, and most PUA acolytes aren’t aware that lots of their newly gained taboo-breaking insight was in fact common knowledge not that long ago. When you look at men who have applied this insight to achieve old-fashioned pleasant monogamous harmony rather than for sarging, like that guy to whose marriage story I linked earlier, it’s impossible not to notice that it’s basically the same way our ancestors used to keep peace in the house.
I think part of my problem is there is no easy way to signal you are a white hat PUA rather than a black hat.
Actually, it’s fairly simple to signal whether you’re a white-hat or black-hat PUA trainer—all you need to do is write your marketing materials for the audience you want. White hats write things that will turn black hats off, and vice versa.
I.e., white hats will talk about direct game, inner game, honesty, respect, relating to women, “relationship game”, and so on. Black hats will talk about banging sluts and wrapping them around your finger with your persuasive and hypnotic powers, and how much of a chump they used to be before they wised up to the conspiracy keeping men down. (Sadly, I’m not exaggerating.)
On the bright side, though, if you’re definitely looking for one hat or the other, they’re not too hard to find.
Most PUA material is somewhere in between though… mostly white-ish hat, with a bit too much tolerance for using false stories and excuses in order to meet people (e.g. “I’m buying a gift for my sister and can I get your opinion on this blah blah”) , even though they’re not endorsing continuing such pretenses past the time required to get into an actual conversation.
It certainly would be nice to be able to screen off the portion of PUA that involves even such minor dishonesty, and have a term that just applied to purely white-hat, deception-free strategies.
I don’t want to be signalling that I have the potential to be manipulative.
Yup. It doesn’t help that a lot of people in the seduction community are so crappy at PR and present their ideas a socially unintelligent way that makes it sound much worse than it actually is.
I don’t have a solution to this problem, except to hope that people will judge me by the way that I treat them, not by the stereotypes triggered by the negative first impression of some of my knowledge sources.
This also applies somewhat to non-sexual relations. If someone studies human interaction to a significant degree, how do I know that they will only use their powers for good?
Again, I agree. I’ve been thinking about the ethics of social influence and persuasion for a while.
It doesn’t help that a lot of people in the seduction community are so crappy at PR and present their ideas a socially unintelligent way
OK, this is, admittedly, a totally cheap shot, but.....… if PUA tactics are so effective, and so generally applicable to the broader world of social interactions beyond just picking up women, then how come they aren’t better at “seducing” people into buying in to their way of thinking?
My hypothesis: because so much stuff in the seduction community is incorrectly sneered at even when neutrally explained, many PUAs stop bothering and revel in the political incorrectness of their private discourse. Hence you see terminology like “lair” for a seduction meetup group. Why bother with PR if you think you will be unfairly demonized either way? That’s not my perspective, but it’s a guess.
kodos96:
In PUA circles, this question has been addressed very extensively, both theoretically and practically. There is in fact a whole subfield of study there, called “inner game,” which deals with the issues of confidence and self-image. The answer is that yes, unsurprisingly, confidence matters a great deal, but its relative importance in individual PUA’s techniques varies, and it doesn’t explain everything in their success, not even by a long shot.
Generally, regardless of your overall opinion of the people in the PUA scene, and for all their flaws, you definitely underestimate the breadth, intensity, and thoroughness of the debates that take place there. There are of course lots of snake oil salesmen around, but when it comes to the informal, non-commercial discourse in the community at all levels, these folks really are serious about weeding out bullshit and distilling stuff that works.
To be fair, I can’t blame people first encountering this subject to have an initial negative reaction. They don’t know the breadth of what goes on, and that it would take a college-course-worth of knowledge to even begin to have an idea of what it’s really about. What interests me is that they update when exposed to new evidence.
The problem is not only that the topic runs afoul of moralistic biases, but also that it triggers failure in high-quality anti-bullshit heuristics commonly used by math/tech/science-savvy people. When you first hear about it, it’s exactly the kind of thing that will set off a well-calibrated bullshit detector. It promises impossible-seeming results that sound tailored to appeal to naive wishful thinking, and stories about its success sound like they just must be explicable by selection effects, self-delusions, false boasting, etc. So I definitely don’t blame people for excessive skepticism either.
A personal anecdote: I remember when I first came across ASF long ago, when I was around 20. I quickly dismissed it as bullshit, and it didn’t catch my attention again until several years later. In retrospect, this miscalculation should probably be one of my major regrets in life, and not just for failures with women that could have been prevented; it would have likely opened my perspectives on many other issues too, as it actually happened the next time around.
Very true. To me (and my bullshit detector), it sounds strikingly similar to any number of other self-help programs offered through the ages. In fact, it sounds to me a lot like Scientology—or at least the elevator pitch version that they give to lower level people before they start introducing them to the really strange stuff. And the endorsement you give it in your second paragraph sounds a lot like the way adherents to these kinds of absolutely-for-legal-reasons-definitely-not-a-cults will breathlessly talk about them to outsiders.
Now of course I realize that superficial similarity to snake oil doesn’t actually count as valid evidence. But I do think it’s fair to put PUA into the same reference class with them, and base my priors on that. Would you not agree?
kodos96:
If you see PUA-like techniques being marketed without any additional knowledge about the matter, then yes, your snake oil/bullshit detector should hit the red end of the scale, and stay that way until some very strong evidence is presented otherwise. Thing is, when it comes to a certain subset of such techniques that pjeby, HughRistik, me, and various others have been discussing, there is actually such strong evidence. You just have to delve into the matter without any fatally blinding biases and see it.
That’s pretty much the point I’ve been hammering on. The problem is not that your prior is low, which it should be. The problem is that an accurate estimate of posteriors is obscured by very severe biases that push them downward.
What evidence? PUAs may use a lot of trial and error in developing their techniques, but do their tests count as valid experimental evidence, or just anecdotes? Where are their control groups? What is their null hypothesis? Was subject selection randomized? Were the data gathered and analyzed by independent parties?
Would you accept this kind of evidence if we were talking about physics? Would you accept this kind of evidence if we were evaluating someone who claimed to have psychic powers?
One of the reasons this topic is of interest to rationalists is that it is an example of an area where rational evidence is available but scientific evidence is in short supply. It is not in general rational to postpone judgment until scientific evidence is available. Learning how to make maximal use of rational evidence without succumbing to the pitfalls of cognitive biases is a topic of much interest to many LWers.
Yes, that’s true. I’ve been phrasing my more recent comments in terms of scientific evidence, because several people I’ve been butting heads with have made assertions about PUA that seemed to imply it had a scientific-level base of supporting evidence.
I’m still not sure though what the rational evidence is that I’m supposed to be updating on. Numerous other self improvement programs make similar claims, based on similar reasoning, and offer similar anecdotal evidence. So I consider such evidence to be equally likely to appear regardless of whether PUA’s claims are true or false, leaving me with nothing but my priors.
kodos96:
Well, as I said, if you study the discourse in the PUA community at its best in a non-biased and detached way, desensitized to the language and attitudes you might find instinctively off-putting, you’ll actually find the epistemological standards surprisingly high. But you just have to see that for yourself.
A good comparison for the PUA milieu would be a high-quality community of hobbyist amateurs who engage in some technical work with passion and enthusiasm. In their discussions, they probably won’t apply the same formal standards of discourse and evidence that are used in academic research and corporate R&D, but it’s nevertheless likely that they know what they’re talking about and their body of established knowledge is as reliable as any other—and even though there are no formal qualifications for joining, those bringing bullshit rather than insight will soon be identified and ostracized.
Now, if you don’t know at first sight whether you’re dealing with such an epistemologically healthy community, the first test would be to see how its main body of established knowledge conforms to your own experiences and observations. (In a non-biased way, of course, which is harder when it comes to the PUA stuff than some ordinary technical skill.) In my case, and not just mine, the result was a definite pass. The further test is to observe the actual manner of discourse practiced and its epistemological quality. Again, it’s harder to do when biased reactions to various signals of disrespectability are standing in the way.
Even in physics, not all evidence comes from reproducible experiments. Sometimes you just have to make the best out of observations gathered at random opportune moments, for example when it comes to unusual astronomical or geophysical events.
You’re biasing your skepticism way upward now. The correct level of initial skepticism with which to meet the PUA stuff is the skepticism you apply to people claiming to have solved difficult problems in a way consistent with the existing well-established scientific knowledge—not the much higher level appropriate for those whose claims contradict it.
That’s a good point—the priors for PUA, though low, are nowhere near as low as for psychic phenomena. But that just means that you need a smaller amount of evidence to overcome those priors—it doesn’t lower the bar for what qualifies as valid evidence.
I think part of my problem is there is no easy way to signal you are a white hat PUA rather than a black hat. If I am interested in honest and long term relationships, I don’t want to be signalling that I have the potential to be manipulative. Especially as the name PUA implies that you are interested in picking up girls in general rather than one lady in particular.
This also applies somewhat to non-sexual relations. If someone studies human interaction to a significant degree, how do I know that they will only use their powers for good? Say in an intellectual field or political for that matter. I’m sure the knowledge is useful for spin doctors and people coaching political leaders in debates.
This comment, in itself, is probably signalling an overly reflective mind on the nature of signalling though.
whpearson:
That’s unfortunately a problem that women face with men in general, PUA or no PUA. Why do you think the signaling games naturally played by men are any different? The difference is ultimately like between a musical prodigy who learned to play the piano spontaneously as a kid, and a player with a similar level of skill who was however tone-deaf and learned it only much later with lots of painstaking practice. But they’re still playing the same notes.
There is absolutely nothing in the whole PUA arsenal that wouldn’t ultimately represent reverse-engineering of techniques spontaneously applied by various types of natural ladies’ men. There is no extra “manipulation” of any sort added on top of that. Even the most callous, sly, and dishonest PUA techniques ever proposed are essentially the same behavior as that practiced by certain types of naturally occurring dark personality types of men that women often, much as they loathe to admit it, find themselves wildly attracted to. (Google “dark triad,” or see the paper I linked in one of my other comments.)
It’s a name that stuck from the old days, which isn’t representative of the whole area any more (and in fact never fully was). The more modern term is “game.”
In the marginal Roissysphere, maybe. I’ve seen many attempt to get away from words like “pickup” or “seduction” though I haven’t seen any consensus on an alternative. The problem is that our culture simply has no value-neutral or positive terms for, uh, how do I put it… systematically investigating how people induce each other to want sex and relationships, and how one can practically make use of that knowledge oneself.
(It took me about four tries to write the part in italics after thinking about this subject for years, and it’s still really clunky. I could have said “understand the mating process and act on that understanding,” but that’s a bit too watered-down. My other best attempt was systematically investigating the process by which people create contexts that raise the chances of other people wanting to have sex and relationships with them, and how one can practically make use of this knowledge oneself. That phrasing is clunkier, but gets rid of the word “induce,” which a bunch of feminists once told me is “mechanical” and “objectifying.”)
“Game” has its own problems, of course. What I like about the term is that it implies that social interaction should be playful and fun. “Game” also highlights certain game-theoretic and competitive aspects of human interaction, but it might risk leading people to overstate those aspects. What I don’t like is the connotation that a game isn’t “serious” (e.g. “you think this is just a game, huh?”) and that PUAs (or critics of PUAs) may believe that “game” involves not taking other people’s feelings and interests seriously.
As I’m sure you know, some gurus (e.g. TylerDurden) have advocated viewing the process of learning pickup like learning a videogame. A similar frame is the “experiment frame,” where you think of yourself as a scientist engaging in social experiments. Such frames can be extremely valuable for beginners who need to protect themselves emotionally during the early stages of the learning process, when most of what they try isn’t going to work. Yet they are a form of emotionally distancing oneself from others; in a minority of people with existing problems, they could inhibit empathy, encourage antisocial behavior, or exacerbate feelings of alienation. In general though, I view the possible harm of such attitudes as mainly affecting the PUA.
I see these frames as training wheels which should soon be discarded once the need for such an emotionally defensive stance is gone. Most socially cool people don’t see other people as part of a video game they are playing, or as subjects in a science experiment they are running (though some Dark Triad naturals do… one favorite quote of mine from an intelligent and extremely badboy natural friend of mine who had no exposure to the seduction community: “I love causation… once you understand it, you can manipulate people”). I still engage in social experiments all the time, but when I go out, I no longer think “I’m gonna run some cool experiments tonight,” I think “I’m gonna hang out with some cool people tonight.”
I have the impression that “game” is used much more widely even as the primary general term, let alone when people talk about specific skill subsets and applications (“phone game,” “day game,” etc.). But I’m sure you’ve seen a much broader sample of all sorts of PUA-related stuff, so I’ll defer to your opinion.
That said, I see game primarily as a way of overcoming the biases and false beliefs held about male-female interactions in the contemporary culture. I would say that by historical standards, our culture is exceptionally bad in this regard. While the prevailing respectable views and popular wisdom on the matters of human pairing and sexual behavior have always been affected by biases in every culture that ever existed, my impression is that ours is exceptionally out of touch with reality when it comes to these issues. This is a special case of what I see as a much broader general trend—namely, that in contrast to hard sciences and technology, which have been making continuous and uninterrupted progress for centuries, in many areas of human interest that are not amenable to a no-nonsense hard-scientific way of filtering truth from bullshit, the dominant views have actually been drifting away from reality and into increasing biases and delusions for quite a while now.
To understand this, it is necessary to be able to completely decouple normative from factual parts in one’s beliefs about human sexual and pairing behaviors—a feat of unbiased thinking that is harder in this matter than almost any other. Once this has been done, however, a curious pattern emerges: modern people perceive the normative beliefs of old times and faraway cultures about pairing and sex as alien, strange, and repulsive, and conclude that this is because their factual beliefs were (or are) deluded and biased. Yet it seems to me that whatever one thinks about the normative part, the prevailing factual beliefs have, in many ways, become more remote from reality in modern times. (The only major exceptions are those that came from pure hard-scientific insight, like e.g. the details of women’s fertility cycle.) This of course also implies that while one can defend the modern norms on deontological grounds, the commonly believed consequentialist arguments in their favor are very seriously flawed.
The PUA insights are to a large degree about overcoming these relatively novel biases, and most PUA acolytes aren’t aware that lots of their newly gained taboo-breaking insight was in fact common knowledge not that long ago. When you look at men who have applied this insight to achieve old-fashioned pleasant monogamous harmony rather than for sarging, like that guy to whose marriage story I linked earlier, it’s impossible not to notice that it’s basically the same way our ancestors used to keep peace in the house.
I don’t. I wouldn’t want to associate myself with naturally skilled playas either.
Actually, it’s fairly simple to signal whether you’re a white-hat or black-hat PUA trainer—all you need to do is write your marketing materials for the audience you want. White hats write things that will turn black hats off, and vice versa.
I.e., white hats will talk about direct game, inner game, honesty, respect, relating to women, “relationship game”, and so on. Black hats will talk about banging sluts and wrapping them around your finger with your persuasive and hypnotic powers, and how much of a chump they used to be before they wised up to the conspiracy keeping men down. (Sadly, I’m not exaggerating.)
On the bright side, though, if you’re definitely looking for one hat or the other, they’re not too hard to find.
Most PUA material is somewhere in between though… mostly white-ish hat, with a bit too much tolerance for using false stories and excuses in order to meet people (e.g. “I’m buying a gift for my sister and can I get your opinion on this blah blah”) , even though they’re not endorsing continuing such pretenses past the time required to get into an actual conversation.
It certainly would be nice to be able to screen off the portion of PUA that involves even such minor dishonesty, and have a term that just applied to purely white-hat, deception-free strategies.
Yup. It doesn’t help that a lot of people in the seduction community are so crappy at PR and present their ideas a socially unintelligent way that makes it sound much worse than it actually is.
I don’t have a solution to this problem, except to hope that people will judge me by the way that I treat them, not by the stereotypes triggered by the negative first impression of some of my knowledge sources.
Again, I agree. I’ve been thinking about the ethics of social influence and persuasion for a while.
OK, this is, admittedly, a totally cheap shot, but.....… if PUA tactics are so effective, and so generally applicable to the broader world of social interactions beyond just picking up women, then how come they aren’t better at “seducing” people into buying in to their way of thinking?
My hypothesis: because so much stuff in the seduction community is incorrectly sneered at even when neutrally explained, many PUAs stop bothering and revel in the political incorrectness of their private discourse. Hence you see terminology like “lair” for a seduction meetup group. Why bother with PR if you think you will be unfairly demonized either way? That’s not my perspective, but it’s a guess.