Social skills—this skills are incredibly important for actually getting anything done in the real world. The biggest issue I see with discussing this topic is that it will inevitably lead to discussion of PUA. This will force us to either censor the conversation or to have people put off from Less Wrong by this. In particular, it could cause less women to contribute to this site.
I vaguely remember a comment made by Vladimir_M, citing PUA as ‘the elephant in the room’. I’d imagine there’s some variant of Godwin’s law in which someone will eventually say ‘hey, why does nobody care about the elephant in the room?‘, so maybe the question should be ‘Are we fully prepared and able to debunk PUA beliefs?’.
Second, beliefs are true or false individually; if you put a large set of beliefs (I am not ever sure what exactly qualifies as a “PUA belief” these days) in one package, and try to reject the whole package (or accept it), you will almost certainly acquire some false beliefs.
Third, framing the statements as somehow belonging to an outgroup already removes rationality from the debate. (Also, what happens if some belief is shared, for example, by both evolutionary psychologists and PUAs? Do these also get dismissed as “PUA beliefs”? What if PUAs also believe that 2+2=4? Because I suspect many of them do.)
Do we really need to take the whole package in? If we have (n) beliefs, some number of them might be useful, some of them would be less effective than advertised, and some could be useless if not harmful.
PUA comes from a bunch of nerds trying to tackle the problem of how to “systematically win” in the interaction with females. Mostly with relatively little contact to prior art and little experience in existing frameworks for building skills in human interaction.
At the start most of the PUA framework was created by discussions on an online forum.
Those basic underlying factors lead to a lot of problems that PUA does have. They are also present on LessWrong and not easily debunked.
At the beginning, the community at least tried to be experiment-driven, but after it became more popular, it gradually became adsense-driven. The more outrage, the more money, regardless of whether the advice actually works for anyone. (If there even is an advice, instead of mere bragging, preferably unverifiable.)
Also, people are mostly unable to tell a difference between “X made me successful” and “I am a successful person that happened to write an article about X”. So instead of advice that helps unattractive guys get a date, it became a list of things attractive guys can do and still get laid. Not the same thing.
But generally, it seems to me there is a repeating pattern—there is an official socially accepted narrative which contains a few blind spots and outright falsehoods. Then come people who point out the falsity, and gain a following. Gradually the group develops its own narrative, also full of blind spots and falsehoods. Until at some moment someone successfuly points out a mistake in the new narrative, and then the history repeats again.
At the beginning, the community at least tried to be experiment-driven, but after it became more popular, it gradually became adsense-driven.
I don’t think most of the successful PUA memes win because of adsence optimization. Most of the ebooks and videos many PUA community folk consumes is pirated.
Money get’s made by building a reputation and then charging high prices for bootcamps.
Eban Pegan might have made more money with selling Double Your Dating with adsence but he’s not the most popular guy within the PUA community.
Social skills—this skills are incredibly important for actually getting anything done in the real world. The biggest issue I see with discussing this topic is that it will inevitably lead to discussion of PUA. This will force us to either censor the conversation or to have people put off from Less Wrong by this. In particular, it could cause less women to contribute to this site.
I vaguely remember a comment made by Vladimir_M, citing PUA as ‘the elephant in the room’. I’d imagine there’s some variant of Godwin’s law in which someone will eventually say ‘hey, why does nobody care about the elephant in the room?‘, so maybe the question should be ‘Are we fully prepared and able to debunk PUA beliefs?’.
No, it definitely shouldn’t be.
First, you already have the bottom line written.
Second, beliefs are true or false individually; if you put a large set of beliefs (I am not ever sure what exactly qualifies as a “PUA belief” these days) in one package, and try to reject the whole package (or accept it), you will almost certainly acquire some false beliefs.
Third, framing the statements as somehow belonging to an outgroup already removes rationality from the debate. (Also, what happens if some belief is shared, for example, by both evolutionary psychologists and PUAs? Do these also get dismissed as “PUA beliefs”? What if PUAs also believe that 2+2=4? Because I suspect many of them do.)
Do we really need to take the whole package in? If we have (n) beliefs, some number of them might be useful, some of them would be less effective than advertised, and some could be useless if not harmful.
Sure, there are at least two ways how to go stupid about this.
One of them is saying “here is a package that contains at least one true statement, I am going to adopt it as a whole”.
Other is hearing a statement in isolation and saying “hey, this statement is a part of this package, and we reject that package as a whole, right?”
PUA comes from a bunch of nerds trying to tackle the problem of how to “systematically win” in the interaction with females. Mostly with relatively little contact to prior art and little experience in existing frameworks for building skills in human interaction.
At the start most of the PUA framework was created by discussions on an online forum.
Those basic underlying factors lead to a lot of problems that PUA does have. They are also present on LessWrong and not easily debunked.
At the beginning, the community at least tried to be experiment-driven, but after it became more popular, it gradually became adsense-driven. The more outrage, the more money, regardless of whether the advice actually works for anyone. (If there even is an advice, instead of mere bragging, preferably unverifiable.)
Also, people are mostly unable to tell a difference between “X made me successful” and “I am a successful person that happened to write an article about X”. So instead of advice that helps unattractive guys get a date, it became a list of things attractive guys can do and still get laid. Not the same thing.
But generally, it seems to me there is a repeating pattern—there is an official socially accepted narrative which contains a few blind spots and outright falsehoods. Then come people who point out the falsity, and gain a following. Gradually the group develops its own narrative, also full of blind spots and falsehoods. Until at some moment someone successfuly points out a mistake in the new narrative, and then the history repeats again.
I don’t think most of the successful PUA memes win because of adsence optimization. Most of the ebooks and videos many PUA community folk consumes is pirated.
Money get’s made by building a reputation and then charging high prices for bootcamps.
Eban Pegan might have made more money with selling Double Your Dating with adsence but he’s not the most popular guy within the PUA community.
Not /inevitably/. And, worse case, we could censor only the mindkilled parts of a discussion.