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.
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.