I think it would be a better test to reverse the PUA recommendations, i.e., teach them things that the PUAs predict would flop
I don’t think that would be a fair test. Techniques that PUAs think would flop, I would probably agree with them in predicting they’d flop—It’s easier to know that something doesn’t work, than that it does work. So they would actually end up at a disadvantage relative to a person with natural confidence and no PUA training.
I would want my control group to be given techniques that are entirely harmless and neutral, or as close to it as is reasonably possible.
I would want my control group to be given techniques that are entirely harmless and neutral, or as close to it as is reasonably possible.
While that would be an interesting test, being entirely harmless and neutral is how to flop, PUAs predict. People don’t want to date people they feel neutral towards; they want to date people they are excited about. Since women are more selective, this principle applies even more to women, and makes for some interesting problem-solving.
Since there a bunch of different taxa in female preferences (yes, my model of the preferences of the female population accounts for significant differences in female preferences in certain dimensions), and these taxa have strong, differing, mutually-exclusive preferences (e.g. the preference to definitely kiss on the first date, vs. the preference to definitely not kiss on the first date), and which preference taxon a woman belongs to in advance is not always reasonably predictable, certain behaviors will have a polarizing response. There is only a certain set of behaviors that is universally attractive to women (e.g. confidence), and outside that set, behaviors that attract one woman might annoy or repulse another (cousin_it’s arm around the waist example falls into this category).
Unfortunately, you can’t always explicitly ask what preference taxon a woman is in; your ability to guess based on either strong or weak cues may be one of her filters. And asking too much about someone else’s preferences can signal that you consider her higher status, which many women may find unattractive. It might also signal that you think something in particular is going to happen, when she hasn’t decided if she wants it to happen yet. Even if a woman could have an explicit discussion of her preferences and not consider your obsequious for doing so, you can’t really know this in advance. And you can’t ask her if she is part of the taxon of women who can discuss their preferences explicitly without docking status points from men for raising the subject; nor can you ask her if she part of the taxon of women who can be asked which taxon of women she is in: the problem is recursive. So the only rational solution is to guess, unless you are comfortable screening out women who can’t have explicit discussions of their preferences early in the interaction. (Though you can help your guessing by starting oblique discussions of preferences, such as talking about relationship history and listening carefully.)
You can’t just avoid polarizing behaviors that women will have either strong positive or negative responses to, because then you risk relegating yourself to the boring guy heap. You are stuck doing an expected value calculation on these polarizing behaviors taking into account the uncertainty of your model of her. If you decide to make a certain move, you hope your calculation was right and you don’t weird her out. And if you decide not to make that move, you hope your calculation was right and you don’t get docked points for not making the move and failing to make a strong enough impression. A lot of guessing is going on here; if your hardware doesn’t steer you down the right path, you need to get better at guessing, which is a job for rationality.
Shorter version of the above: Men need to make strong positive impressions on women to be reliably successful. Many of the behaviors that make strong positive impressions on some types of women make strong negative impressions on other types of women. The result is that men need to engage in high-risk, high-reward behaviors to make strong positive impressions on many types of women, though the risk is substantially mitigateable with experience and knowledge. This leads to some interesting ethical dilemmas. It also leads to some interesting practical consequences, where sometimes it’s better to increase the variance in your attractiveness even at the cost of your average attractiveness to the female population. But now I’m just rambling…
So the only rational solution is to guess, unless you are comfortable screening out women who can’t have explicit discussions of their preferences early in the interaction. (Though you can help your guessing by starting oblique discussions of preferences, such as talking about relationship history and listening carefully.)
….
It also leads to some interesting practical consequences, where sometimes it’s better to increase the variance in your attractiveness even at the cost of your average attractiveness to the female population.
I think you’ve highlighted an important difference between the inside view and outside view of PUA.
Outsiders think that for PUA to be valid, it has to have techniques that work on “most women”. However, for insiders, it simply has to have a set of techniques that work on women they are personally interested in.
Outsiders, though, tend to think that the set of “women PUAs are personally interested in” is much more homogeneous than it really is. The women that say, Decker of AMP goes for, are orders of magnitude more introspective than those that say, Mystery goes for. David D seems to like ambitious professional women. Johnny Soporno seems to dig women with depth of emotion who’ll all be a big happy family in his harem. Some gurus seem to like women they can boss around. Juggler seems to value good conversation. (And notice that none of these preferences are, “who I can get to sleep with me tonight”. Even Mystery’s preference for models and strippers is much more about status than it is about sex.)
Granted—these are all superficial personal impressions of mine, based on random bits of information, but it’s helpful to point out that men’s preferences vary just as much as women’s do. PUA is not a single unified field aimed at claiming a uniform set of women for a uniform set of men. It is a set of interlinked and related fields of what works for specific groups of women in specific situations…
Conditioned on the preferences of the men who are interested in them.
That is, successful PUAs intentionally choose (or invent) behaviors and sets of techniques that will screen out women that they are not interested in. And they don’t engage in a search for what technique will work on the woman they’re with—they do what the kind of woman they want would like.
Now, there are certainly schools of thought who think the goal is to figure out whatever woman is in front of them, but my observation of what the people in PUA who seem happy with their life and work say, is that they always effectively talk about being fully themselves, and how this automatically causes one group to gravitate towards them, and the rest to gravitate away.
This has also been my personal experience when I was single and doing “social game” (which as I said, I didn’t know was a thing until much later).
What I’ve also noticed is that many gurus who used to teach mechanical, manipulative game methods have later slid over to this line of thought—specifically, many have said that thinking in terms of “what do I need to do to get this woman to like me” is actually hurting your inner game, because it sets the frame that you are the pursuer and she is the selector, and that this is going to cause her to test you more than if you just were totally open about who you are and what you want in the first place, so there’s no neediness or apprehension for her to probe.
Some people talk about feigning disinterest, but I think that what really works (from my limited experience) is genuine disinterest in people who aren’t what you’re looking for. In some schools, this is talked about as a tactic (i.e. “qualifying” and “disqualifying”), but I think the more mature schools and gurus speak about it as a way of thinking, or a lifestyle.
Anyway, tl;dr version: the success of PUA as a field isn’t predicated on one set of techniques “working” on all taxa of women, it’s predicated on individual PUAs being able to select behaviors that work well with the taxa he wants them to “work” on… and the taxa for which techniques exist is considerably wider than field-outsiders are aware of… leading to difficult communication with insiders, who implicitly understand this variability and don’t get why the outsiders are being so narrowminded.
While that would be an interesting test, being entirely harmless and neutral is how to flop, PUAs predict.
No, you misunderstood what I was saying. I meant that for the purposes of maintaining a valid control group, they be given instructions which neither help nor harm their chances, i.e. have a completely neutral effect on their innate “game” or lack thereof.
I appreciate the idea of this test; my point is that is that it might be hard to set up a group with instructions that have a completely neutral effect on their results. Maybe with a pilot study?
I also choose to use your post as a jumping off point for some rambling of my own.
So they would actually end up at a disadvantage relative to a person with natural confidence and no PUA training.
The problem is that then you’re not cleanly comparing methods any more. Remember: much of PUA is the result of modeling the beliefs and behaviors of “naturally confident” and socially-skillful people. The PUA claim is that these beliefs and behaviors can be taught and learned, not that they have invented something which is different from what people are already capable of doing.
So, if you take “a person with natural confidence”, how do you know they won’t be doing exactly what the PUA will?
By the way, please remember that the test I proposed was befriending and social climbing, not seducing women. The PUA trainer’s relevant experience is strategic manipulation of social groups—something that an individual PUA need not necessarily master in order to get laid. It is the field of strategic social manipulation that has the most relevance to applications outside dating and mating, anyway.
The problem is that then you’re not cleanly comparing methods any more.
I’m not sure I understand why you think so.
So, if you take “a person with natural confidence”, how do you know they won’t be doing exactly what the PUA will?
They might—that’s what I want to test. I’m proposing to take two randomly selected groups, with randomly varying amounts of natural confidence and “game”, and train one group with PUA techniques, the other with equally confidence-building yet counter-theoretical non-PUA techniques (which have been validated, perhaps via a pilot study, to have no effect one way or the other), and see which group improves faster. The test could be either picking up women, or any other non-pickup social game that PUA claims to help with. If it’s true that PUA is an accurate model of how people with natural game operate, then people in each group on the high end of the natural game spectrum should be relatively unchanged, but the geekier subjects should improve more in the PUA group than the control group.
Now of course this is all just hypothetical, since we don’t have the resources to actually run such a rigorous study. So my motivation in trying to negotiate a test protocol like this is really just that here on LW, we should all be in agreement that beliefs require evidence, and we should be able to agree on what that evidence should look like. Until we reach such an agreement, we’re not really having a rational debate.
So, do you think the above protocol would generate valid, update-worthy evidence? If not, why not?
I don’t understand this question. The two experimental groups get different training, and the ones in each group who actually follow the training are doing different things.
Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t understand why you think the two groups would be doing the same thing, even given your assumption that PUA is an accurate model. If PUA is accurate, then the people in the PUA trained group would end up behaving more like naturally socially successful people, and the control group would go on being geeky (or average, or whatever you select the groups to initially be), and hence the two groups’ results would diverge.
Maybe you need to re-read the experimental protocol I suggested.
I’m confused—I thought you wanted to match the PUAs against naturally confident people, which AFAICT wouldn’t be comparing anything.
What I was concerned about is the possibility that the group that was given neutral instruction might disregard the instruction and simply fall back to whatever they already do, which might be something successful.
(Thinking about it a bit more, I have a sneaking suspicion that giving people almost any instruction (whether good, bad, or neutral) may induce a temporary increase in self-consciousness, and a corresponding decrease in performance. But that’s another study altogether!)
I thought you wanted to match the PUAs against naturally confident people
No—initially I said to use geeky, socially unsuccessful subjects, but I later realized that a random sample, including all kinds of people, would work just as well.
What I was concerned about is the possibility that the group that was given neutral instruction might disregard the instruction and simply fall back to whatever they already do
Which wouldn’t be a problem, since they’re supposed to be the control group. Unless of course they lost their confidence boost in the process as well. But as long as they are at least initially convinced their training will be effective (see below), then it wouldn’t invalidate the experiment, since the same effect would apply to the PUA group as well, if PUA turns out to be ineffective.
I have a sneaking suspicion that giving people almost any instruction (whether good, bad, or neutral) may induce a temporary increase in self-consciousness, and a corresponding decrease in performance
Yes, that is a possibility I’d considered, which is why I said you may need to go so far as to fake some tests, undergrad psych experiment style, using actors, to actually convince everyone their newly acquired skills are working.
Because if the two groups are doing the same things, what is it that you’re testing?
THAT’S what we’re testing: whether the two groups are doing the same thing! Your assumption that they are is based on the belief that PUA trains people to do the same things that socially successful people do naturally, which is based on the assumption that PUA theory is an accurate model of human social interactions.… which is the hypothesis that we’re trying to test with this experiment.
the assumption that PUA theory is an accurate model of human social interactions
“PUA theory” is not a single thing. The PUA field contains numerous models of human social interactions, with varying scopes of applicability. For example, high-level theories would include Mystery’s M3 model of the phases of human courtship, and Mehow’s “microloop theory” of value/compliance transactions.
And then, there are straightforward minor models like, “people will be less defensive about engaging with you if they don’t think they’ll be stuck with you”—a rather uncontroversial principle that leads “indirect game” PUAs to “body rock” and give FTCs (“false time constraint”—creating the impression that you will need to leave soon) when approaching groups of people.
This particular idea is applicable to more situations than just that, of course—a couple decades ago when I was in a software company’s booth at some trade shows, we strategically arranged both our booth furniture and our positions within the booth to convey the impression that a person walking in would have equal ease in walking back out, without being pounced on by a lurking sales person and backed into a corner. And Joel Spolsky (of Joel On Software fame) has pointed out that people don’t like to put their data into places where they’re afraid they won’t be able to get it back out of.
Anyway… “PUA Theory” is way too broad, which is why I proposed narrowing the proposed area of testing to “rapidly manipulating social groups to form alliances and accomplish objectively observable goals”. Still pretty broad, and limited to testing the social models of indirect-game schools, but easiest to accomplish in a relatively ethical manner.
OTOH, if you wanted to test certain “inner game” theories (like the “AMP holarchy”), you could probably create a much simpler experiment, having guys just go up and introduce themselves to a wide variety of women, and then have the women complete questionnaires about the men they met, rating them on various perceived qualities such as trustworthiness, masculinity, overall attractiveness, how much of a connection they felt, etc..
(The AMP model effectively claims that they can substantially improve a man’s ratings on qualities like these. And since they do this by using actual women to give the ratings, this seems at least somewhat plausible. The main question being asked by such a test would be, how universal are those ratings? Which actually would be an interesting question in its own right...)
I don’t think that would be a fair test. Techniques that PUAs think would flop, I would probably agree with them in predicting they’d flop—It’s easier to know that something doesn’t work, than that it does work. So they would actually end up at a disadvantage relative to a person with natural confidence and no PUA training.
I would want my control group to be given techniques that are entirely harmless and neutral, or as close to it as is reasonably possible.
While that would be an interesting test, being entirely harmless and neutral is how to flop, PUAs predict. People don’t want to date people they feel neutral towards; they want to date people they are excited about. Since women are more selective, this principle applies even more to women, and makes for some interesting problem-solving.
Since there a bunch of different taxa in female preferences (yes, my model of the preferences of the female population accounts for significant differences in female preferences in certain dimensions), and these taxa have strong, differing, mutually-exclusive preferences (e.g. the preference to definitely kiss on the first date, vs. the preference to definitely not kiss on the first date), and which preference taxon a woman belongs to in advance is not always reasonably predictable, certain behaviors will have a polarizing response. There is only a certain set of behaviors that is universally attractive to women (e.g. confidence), and outside that set, behaviors that attract one woman might annoy or repulse another (cousin_it’s arm around the waist example falls into this category).
Unfortunately, you can’t always explicitly ask what preference taxon a woman is in; your ability to guess based on either strong or weak cues may be one of her filters. And asking too much about someone else’s preferences can signal that you consider her higher status, which many women may find unattractive. It might also signal that you think something in particular is going to happen, when she hasn’t decided if she wants it to happen yet. Even if a woman could have an explicit discussion of her preferences and not consider your obsequious for doing so, you can’t really know this in advance. And you can’t ask her if she is part of the taxon of women who can discuss their preferences explicitly without docking status points from men for raising the subject; nor can you ask her if she part of the taxon of women who can be asked which taxon of women she is in: the problem is recursive. So the only rational solution is to guess, unless you are comfortable screening out women who can’t have explicit discussions of their preferences early in the interaction. (Though you can help your guessing by starting oblique discussions of preferences, such as talking about relationship history and listening carefully.)
You can’t just avoid polarizing behaviors that women will have either strong positive or negative responses to, because then you risk relegating yourself to the boring guy heap. You are stuck doing an expected value calculation on these polarizing behaviors taking into account the uncertainty of your model of her. If you decide to make a certain move, you hope your calculation was right and you don’t weird her out. And if you decide not to make that move, you hope your calculation was right and you don’t get docked points for not making the move and failing to make a strong enough impression. A lot of guessing is going on here; if your hardware doesn’t steer you down the right path, you need to get better at guessing, which is a job for rationality.
Shorter version of the above: Men need to make strong positive impressions on women to be reliably successful. Many of the behaviors that make strong positive impressions on some types of women make strong negative impressions on other types of women. The result is that men need to engage in high-risk, high-reward behaviors to make strong positive impressions on many types of women, though the risk is substantially mitigateable with experience and knowledge. This leads to some interesting ethical dilemmas. It also leads to some interesting practical consequences, where sometimes it’s better to increase the variance in your attractiveness even at the cost of your average attractiveness to the female population. But now I’m just rambling…
I think you’ve highlighted an important difference between the inside view and outside view of PUA.
Outsiders think that for PUA to be valid, it has to have techniques that work on “most women”. However, for insiders, it simply has to have a set of techniques that work on women they are personally interested in.
Outsiders, though, tend to think that the set of “women PUAs are personally interested in” is much more homogeneous than it really is. The women that say, Decker of AMP goes for, are orders of magnitude more introspective than those that say, Mystery goes for. David D seems to like ambitious professional women. Johnny Soporno seems to dig women with depth of emotion who’ll all be a big happy family in his harem. Some gurus seem to like women they can boss around. Juggler seems to value good conversation. (And notice that none of these preferences are, “who I can get to sleep with me tonight”. Even Mystery’s preference for models and strippers is much more about status than it is about sex.)
Granted—these are all superficial personal impressions of mine, based on random bits of information, but it’s helpful to point out that men’s preferences vary just as much as women’s do. PUA is not a single unified field aimed at claiming a uniform set of women for a uniform set of men. It is a set of interlinked and related fields of what works for specific groups of women in specific situations…
Conditioned on the preferences of the men who are interested in them.
That is, successful PUAs intentionally choose (or invent) behaviors and sets of techniques that will screen out women that they are not interested in. And they don’t engage in a search for what technique will work on the woman they’re with—they do what the kind of woman they want would like.
Now, there are certainly schools of thought who think the goal is to figure out whatever woman is in front of them, but my observation of what the people in PUA who seem happy with their life and work say, is that they always effectively talk about being fully themselves, and how this automatically causes one group to gravitate towards them, and the rest to gravitate away.
This has also been my personal experience when I was single and doing “social game” (which as I said, I didn’t know was a thing until much later).
What I’ve also noticed is that many gurus who used to teach mechanical, manipulative game methods have later slid over to this line of thought—specifically, many have said that thinking in terms of “what do I need to do to get this woman to like me” is actually hurting your inner game, because it sets the frame that you are the pursuer and she is the selector, and that this is going to cause her to test you more than if you just were totally open about who you are and what you want in the first place, so there’s no neediness or apprehension for her to probe.
Some people talk about feigning disinterest, but I think that what really works (from my limited experience) is genuine disinterest in people who aren’t what you’re looking for. In some schools, this is talked about as a tactic (i.e. “qualifying” and “disqualifying”), but I think the more mature schools and gurus speak about it as a way of thinking, or a lifestyle.
Anyway, tl;dr version: the success of PUA as a field isn’t predicated on one set of techniques “working” on all taxa of women, it’s predicated on individual PUAs being able to select behaviors that work well with the taxa he wants them to “work” on… and the taxa for which techniques exist is considerably wider than field-outsiders are aware of… leading to difficult communication with insiders, who implicitly understand this variability and don’t get why the outsiders are being so narrowminded.
No, you misunderstood what I was saying. I meant that for the purposes of maintaining a valid control group, they be given instructions which neither help nor harm their chances, i.e. have a completely neutral effect on their innate “game” or lack thereof.
I appreciate the idea of this test; my point is that is that it might be hard to set up a group with instructions that have a completely neutral effect on their results. Maybe with a pilot study?
I also choose to use your post as a jumping off point for some rambling of my own.
What are we testing for? Whether there’s a placebo effect in believing you have good instructions?
If yes, it seems obvious there is one—especially in a domain where confidence is highly correlated with positive results.
Hmmmmmm.… is anyone here on LW experienced at writing grant proposals? ;)
The problem is that then you’re not cleanly comparing methods any more. Remember: much of PUA is the result of modeling the beliefs and behaviors of “naturally confident” and socially-skillful people. The PUA claim is that these beliefs and behaviors can be taught and learned, not that they have invented something which is different from what people are already capable of doing.
So, if you take “a person with natural confidence”, how do you know they won’t be doing exactly what the PUA will?
By the way, please remember that the test I proposed was befriending and social climbing, not seducing women. The PUA trainer’s relevant experience is strategic manipulation of social groups—something that an individual PUA need not necessarily master in order to get laid. It is the field of strategic social manipulation that has the most relevance to applications outside dating and mating, anyway.
I’m not sure I understand why you think so.
They might—that’s what I want to test. I’m proposing to take two randomly selected groups, with randomly varying amounts of natural confidence and “game”, and train one group with PUA techniques, the other with equally confidence-building yet counter-theoretical non-PUA techniques (which have been validated, perhaps via a pilot study, to have no effect one way or the other), and see which group improves faster. The test could be either picking up women, or any other non-pickup social game that PUA claims to help with. If it’s true that PUA is an accurate model of how people with natural game operate, then people in each group on the high end of the natural game spectrum should be relatively unchanged, but the geekier subjects should improve more in the PUA group than the control group.
Now of course this is all just hypothetical, since we don’t have the resources to actually run such a rigorous study. So my motivation in trying to negotiate a test protocol like this is really just that here on LW, we should all be in agreement that beliefs require evidence, and we should be able to agree on what that evidence should look like. Until we reach such an agreement, we’re not really having a rational debate.
So, do you think the above protocol would generate valid, update-worthy evidence? If not, why not?
Because if the two groups are doing the same things, what is it that you’re testing?
I don’t understand this question. The two experimental groups get different training, and the ones in each group who actually follow the training are doing different things.
Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t understand why you think the two groups would be doing the same thing, even given your assumption that PUA is an accurate model. If PUA is accurate, then the people in the PUA trained group would end up behaving more like naturally socially successful people, and the control group would go on being geeky (or average, or whatever you select the groups to initially be), and hence the two groups’ results would diverge.
Maybe you need to re-read the experimental protocol I suggested.
I’m confused—I thought you wanted to match the PUAs against naturally confident people, which AFAICT wouldn’t be comparing anything.
What I was concerned about is the possibility that the group that was given neutral instruction might disregard the instruction and simply fall back to whatever they already do, which might be something successful.
(Thinking about it a bit more, I have a sneaking suspicion that giving people almost any instruction (whether good, bad, or neutral) may induce a temporary increase in self-consciousness, and a corresponding decrease in performance. But that’s another study altogether!)
No—initially I said to use geeky, socially unsuccessful subjects, but I later realized that a random sample, including all kinds of people, would work just as well.
Which wouldn’t be a problem, since they’re supposed to be the control group. Unless of course they lost their confidence boost in the process as well. But as long as they are at least initially convinced their training will be effective (see below), then it wouldn’t invalidate the experiment, since the same effect would apply to the PUA group as well, if PUA turns out to be ineffective.
Yes, that is a possibility I’d considered, which is why I said you may need to go so far as to fake some tests, undergrad psych experiment style, using actors, to actually convince everyone their newly acquired skills are working.
THAT’S what we’re testing: whether the two groups are doing the same thing! Your assumption that they are is based on the belief that PUA trains people to do the same things that socially successful people do naturally, which is based on the assumption that PUA theory is an accurate model of human social interactions.… which is the hypothesis that we’re trying to test with this experiment.
“PUA theory” is not a single thing. The PUA field contains numerous models of human social interactions, with varying scopes of applicability. For example, high-level theories would include Mystery’s M3 model of the phases of human courtship, and Mehow’s “microloop theory” of value/compliance transactions.
And then, there are straightforward minor models like, “people will be less defensive about engaging with you if they don’t think they’ll be stuck with you”—a rather uncontroversial principle that leads “indirect game” PUAs to “body rock” and give FTCs (“false time constraint”—creating the impression that you will need to leave soon) when approaching groups of people.
This particular idea is applicable to more situations than just that, of course—a couple decades ago when I was in a software company’s booth at some trade shows, we strategically arranged both our booth furniture and our positions within the booth to convey the impression that a person walking in would have equal ease in walking back out, without being pounced on by a lurking sales person and backed into a corner. And Joel Spolsky (of Joel On Software fame) has pointed out that people don’t like to put their data into places where they’re afraid they won’t be able to get it back out of.
Anyway… “PUA Theory” is way too broad, which is why I proposed narrowing the proposed area of testing to “rapidly manipulating social groups to form alliances and accomplish objectively observable goals”. Still pretty broad, and limited to testing the social models of indirect-game schools, but easiest to accomplish in a relatively ethical manner.
OTOH, if you wanted to test certain “inner game” theories (like the “AMP holarchy”), you could probably create a much simpler experiment, having guys just go up and introduce themselves to a wide variety of women, and then have the women complete questionnaires about the men they met, rating them on various perceived qualities such as trustworthiness, masculinity, overall attractiveness, how much of a connection they felt, etc..
(The AMP model effectively claims that they can substantially improve a man’s ratings on qualities like these. And since they do this by using actual women to give the ratings, this seems at least somewhat plausible. The main question being asked by such a test would be, how universal are those ratings? Which actually would be an interesting question in its own right...)