If you focus your attention on trying to prevent all kinds of error to happen, you are likely going to act needy and romance won’t work well. A highly optimized process might get a pickup guy laid but it doesn’t produce a real connection.
Good romance is about enjoying the time you spent together instead of optimizing all the actions that you take while you are together to achieve some future goal.
While dancing Salsa or Bachata I can produce pretty strong intimacy fast, by being in the moment. If I however dance really intimately with a woman whom I just meet I often get inside my head and think whether what I’m doing is alright and about the consequences of my actions. That in turn messes up the whole interaction because I’m not acting based what I’m feeling in the moment anymore and that’s going to feel strange to the woman.
Being vulnerable is also important for romance and drawing fault trees doesn’t help you to get into a state when you are vulnerable and can allow yourself to be touched on a emotional level by the other person.
Well, yeah, but I don’t mean “seduction methods”, I mean basic discipline, among which are ethics and forethought. Such as “Don’t cheat on a partner. If you’re going to cheat on a partner anyway, don’t lie to the other partner about having the first partner’s consent. If you’re going to lie to the other partner anyway, for god’s sake don’t leave them drunk and alone together. ” “Don’t do things that you’ll later feel the need to keep secret” also sounds to me like very sound general advice. “Don’t put yourself into a situation in which you’re likely to do something you’ll later regret .” (such as getting intoxicated on whatever, without a sober party you absolutely trust to watch your back).
You know, the relationship equivalent to “never, under any circumstances, point a gun at anything you don’t want dead”, or “don’t even try heroin, and if you’re going to do so anyway, lie on your side, not your back”, or “do not fuck with the IRS”. Or don’t piss on an electric fence. Or even “don’t run with scissors” and “put your seatbelt on” and book your flights in advance and study your materials every day rather than cram for the exam.
You know, basic stuff. Stuff that, if Harry heard you doing, you know he’d think “You EEEEDIOT!” with a consternated voice. Stuff that would make Quirrell think “Humans never fail to live down to my expectations.” That kind of stuff.
Well, yeah, but I don’t mean “seduction methods”, I mean basic discipline, among which are ethics and forethought.
My idea of ethics is different from following a process that avoids errors that make other people dislike you. Act ethically for it’s own sake and not because it’s a technique to influence your partner into staying in a relationship with you.
I think people who act ethically in order to get other people to like them are generally untrustworthy, because you don’t know what they will do when put in a emotional charged situation which they haven’t analysed beforehand. I rather interact with someone with a strongly developed system of ethics even if that system differs from my own.
It’s not a matter of getting people to like you, it’s a matter of preventing people from getting hurt. Lovesickness and heartache are, in my experience, among the worst, most devastating pains the world can offer.
I share your feeling that breakups, and all things related, suck. And I like your idea of coming up with best practices for avoiding as much heartache as possible. But I’m unsure about the practicality here.
It is my experience that love involves high-level risk necessarily, and by it’s nature.
I just saw a Terence Malick flim this past weekend (To the Wonder) and a quote from the movie comes to mind “The one who loves less is the one who is stronger”.
My general thought is that this is opposed to everything of which LW is in favor. That is, love is not a rational move, since it (by a definion I’d accept) requires self-sacrifice for the good of another.
(Note: Not that LWers are selfish, per se. Only that love which chooses another person winning big while you open yourself up to lose hard is antithetical to most of the sentiment I see here.)
My general thought is that this is opposed to everything of which LW is in favor. That is, love is not a rational move, since it (by a definion I’d accept) requires self-sacrifice for the good of another.
Dedicating resources to one thing that you want means that you can’t dedicate them to another thing that you want. Wanting to make someone happy isn’t different from any of the other things that you want.
That is, love is not a rational move, since it (by a definion I’d accept) requires self-sacrifice for the good of another.
Love makes/recognizes another person’s good part of your good, so, depending on the magnitude, it isn’t self-sacrifice to give up some other parts of your good to increase that of your loved one’s.
If love were as simple as this, that would be great.
As Ritalin said:
...it’s a matter of preventing people from getting hurt. Lovesickness and heartache are, in my experience, among the worst, most devastating pains the world can offer.
“Love” requires that you risk the “devastating pain”, I think. You may hold back, or engage principles that mitigate the heartache you feel when a relationship ends—to an extent this is fine, as recklessness is not good—but the risk or devastating pain is inherent in “love”, as I’d define it.
Of course, if you find a relationship where both parties are always happy and healthy and pinging each other’s fuzzy/utilon meters, then good for you. Life, in my experience, is a bit more dynamic and challenging than that.
I like the idea of coming up with disciplines to protect those who you love from heartache whould things not work out, but love is risky. It just is.
What’s to elaborate? That your partner’s smile seems to be directly connected to endorphins in your bloodstream? That knowing that your smile has the same effect on them makes it twice as potent? That your baby’s first laugh or step makes all the sleepless nights to fade away? That your dog happily wagging its tail when you come home cheers you up after a hard day? “The ultimate incentive to cooperate” seems like an apt decision-theoretic description of what evolution wrought.
“The ultimate incentive to cooperate” seems like an apt decision-theoretic description of what evolution wrought.
It’s actually considerably more than just incentive to cooperate. Valuing the welfare/happiness of another above your own leads to many things other than game-theoretic cooperation.
You can follow the ethical principle of always telling the truth, you can also follow the principle of telling white lies whenever that will make the other person feel better.
If you are consistent and the other person can expect you to follow your principles they won’t ask you for opinion if the truth will hurt them and you have the policy to always tell the truth.
If you don’t have principles and sometimes tell the truth and sometimes tell white lies, it’s however much harder for the other person to interact with you to avoid getting hurt.
When driving and there are pedestrians who want to cross the street, you have two valid choices. Stop and let them pass the street before you or continue driving with your speed.
When I started taking driving lessons I got the idea of going the middle way of driving slower. That was stupid. It doesn’t provide the pedestrians with valid information that they can use to adapt their behavior towards myself.
Hurt feelings often come from people expecting something which doesn’t happen. If you follow some codex of ethics and the other person understands which codex of ethics you follow, they won’t be in much emotional pain if you act in according with that codex because they can expect you to do so.
it’s a matter of preventing people from getting hurt.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don’t think that focusing on preventing other people from getting hurt is good for a loving relationship.
In the past I also found it very condescending when other people thought that they should make the decisions about risk getting hurt for me. Give me all the information that I need to make a decision but in the end it’s my own decision if I want to risk getting hurt.
Here we have another principle: “Have ethics and morals, and be consistent about following them, so that people know what to expect, and don’t feel betrayed, cheated, or disappointed.”.
In the past I also found it very condensing when other people thought that they should make the decisions about risk getting hurt for me. Give me all the information that I need to make a decision but in the end it’s my own decision if I want to risk getting hurt.
Here we have another principle: “Have ethics and morals, and be consistent about following them, so that people know what to expect, and don’t feel betrayed, cheated, or disappointed.”.
That’s not the kind of principle that you create as a result of Fault Tree Analysis.
Then you might want to edit this too: “that they should make the decisions about risk getting hurt for me.” The syntax is ambiguous.
I see you have that Classic Liberal mentality of “Do not protect me from my own stupidity, give me all the relevant information and let me make my informed decisions as a responsible adult”. Problem is,
it is possible that the other person is unwilling to share all the relevant info with you (privacy, information hazard, shame, cowardice, dishonesty) or even unable (they don’t know or they can’t properly put it into words)
Even in possession of all relevant information, you may find yourself making the wrong decisions because you’re not quite in your right mind. I don’t know about you, but when I am high on sexual arousal I can barely even talk.
It’s not about protecting others from their stupidity, but from your own.
I see you have that Classic Liberal mentality of “Do not protect me from my own stupidity, give me all the relevant information and let me make my informed decisions as a responsible adult”
I do share those sentiments but they don’t fully describe my position I’m not focused on the mental stuff.
Even in possession of all relevant information, you may find yourself making the wrong decisions because you’re not quite in your right mind. I don’t know about you, but when I am high on sexual arousal I can barely even talk.
I might make decisions that bring me emotional pain, but then I’ll learn worthwhile lessons.
it is possible that the other person is unwilling to share all the relevant info with you (privacy, information hazard, shame, cowardice, dishonesty) or even unable (they don’t know or they can’t properly put it into words)
I think it’s very useful to learn nonviolent communication to express your emotional needs to give the other person the information he needs.
I however wouldn’t say that everyone has to learn nonviolent communication because it’s not the only model that works.
So, principles instead of methods. Like this? I’m not sure universal, empirically-validated game exists. With one relationship, it isn’t usually as simple as ‘this caused this’. With multiple, you might be able to pick out correlations and hypothesize causation. The best you can do is gather everyone’s stories, create theories, test them, see what sticks, and then use blog/forum archives to write handbooks for people seeking general relationship advice. This has obviously been done many times, focusing on sex, long term relationship, marriage, family, and religious family.
I don’t think it makes any sense to model a relationship as “a system with subsystem and component failures”. Doing so successfully would probably be human-level AI-complete.
The closer you follow the letter of these commandments, the easier you will find and keep real, true unconditional love and happiness in your life.
That’s just sickening. Also, it’s a list of attitudes, ways to manipulate your lover into being obsessed with you, mostly by exploiting the addictive effect of “unreliable reward”.
I’m surprised that as a “longtime PUA student” you haven’t come across that before, and even more surprised that you’d describe it like that, unless you recently had a huge change of heart regarding PUA/game stuff.
Regardless of ethics, I think something like what I linked would work better for most people (for creating a good, hurt-free relationship) than an overly-complicated fault tree analysis. (I’m still confused about the practicality of such a tree, can you give a small example?)
And my change of heart over PUA was a long and painful disillusion after the original discovery. I’m not a Pachinko machine; if I have to keep my partner addicted, obsessed, and insecure, it hurts me. When I have to refrain from showering my beloved with affection and kindness, it tears me apart. The kind of shit PUA suggest is something I am incapable of doing with someone I truly care about. And as for someone I don’t care about, those do not make it to my bed. I only f—k when I I give a f—k. I tried the alternative, and it found it disgusting and hollow.
if I have to keep my partner addicted, obsessed, and insecure, it hurts me.
You should note that PUA does not advocate this, at least not necessarily. There is an extremely broad spectrum between “trying to keep your partner insecure and obsessed with you” and “boring them to death until they up and leave you for someone else”. Many of the posts on Chateau Heartiste seem to be written in an over-the-top way for the sake of stirring up controversy; he is far from being representative of all of seduction/‘PUA’.
All I ever see of PUA is around this tone. The art as it is commonly understood and practised is a method to pick up chicks and get laid, not an ethos to build satisfying, durable relationships. If you compare it to actual martial arts, I see a lot of Krav Maga and very little Aikido.
That sounds great, I’ll give it a good look. And Sturgeon’s Law applies to literary genres; if it applies to socio-political movements, then we have a problem. We certainly can’t judge, say, the Catholic Church or the Objectivist movement by their 1% of most virtuous fellows.
if it applies to socio-political movements, then we have a problem. We certainly can’t judge, say, the Catholic Church or the Objectivist movement by their 1% of most virtuous fellows.
If you ask an average Catholic to to explain you some things about their religion, and if you ask a Pope, you will find a lot of differences. You may also find Catholic theologists saing that Pope is actually not a Catholic.
This is not merely a criticism of Catholicism… this is what happens when you have a sufficiently large movement. It happens to other religions, it happens to policial movements, it happens everywhere. I guess even Ayn Rand couldn’t prevent it. This is what humans do.
We might ask what is the true Catholicism? But that’s assuming that words have a meaning on their own, instead of merely being labels attached to meanings, inconsistently by different people. If you would look at people’s beliefs as points in the belief-space, you could empirically find a few clusters: there would be current version of the official belief (or a few competing versions) that only educated theologists know, schisms and heresies, various kinds of folk interpretations, etc. That’s the territory. It’s your choice whether you apply the label “true Catholicism” to the opinion of the current Pope, or to the most popular folk version. Either way, someone will insist that you are using the label incorrectly.
I believe this is a source of many hopeless arguments about politics. For any political label X, you get many people self-identifying as X, with many different beliefs, sometimes contradictory. Now are the “true X” the most educated of them, or the most numerous ones, or those most visible in media? How about those who are very educated, but controversial within the group; how much weight to we assign to their opinions? How about those who try to follow their leaders, but misunderstand what the leaders are trying to say; is their true belief what the leaders believe, or the most frequent misinterpretation of the leaders? -- And in real life, most people will use “what most of my neighbors who self-identify as X seem to say”, which is a different answer for different people.
Should alchemists be considered part of the same group as chemists? Today most of us would say “no”, but what if we lived when chemistry was new? Etc.
I am not a theologist, and I only met one Sedevacationist in an internet forum and he didn’t seem quite sane to me, so I don’t know how much his opinions are official. He said something like “the Pope has implicitly excommunicated himself by...” I don’t remember what exactly was the reason, but probably because of the alleged heresy.
(Makes some sense to me. I mean, if you are serious about a religion and serious about the religious hierarchy, because you believe that the bishops are literally the messengers of God and the whole Church is the God’s living body on Earth, or something like this, then… being a heretic, not being a Pope, but still pretending to be a Pope… that seems like an insanely serious offence. It’s a religious equivalent of falsely pretending to be a King.)
Even if it genuinely made the object of your love happier?
The essence of all persuasion, manipulation, whatever you call it, is giving others what they want; sometimes knowing what they want better than they themselves.
If they are as cold and calculatingly manipulative as you imply, most people who do PUA would almost definitely have no problem being kind, committing and caring towards women if that worked, i.e. made women happy to be with you.
In one sense, a con-man who sells you a fake medicine to treat a serious affliction is “giving you what you want”. After all, you willingly paid for the medicine, and — not knowing that it is fake, and expecting it is a real cure — you believe that you are better off than before the exchange. You feel better having bought it; in the moment, you are glad to have bought it.
But in another sense, he is not “giving you what you want”, because your goal in buying the medicine was to get a cure for the affliction, and fake medicine won’t do that. Once you find out that you have been defrauded, you are not glad any more, but probably angry or indignant at being deceived. Not very many people would react to discovering that they have been cheated, by fondly recalling how nice it felt to believe that they would be cured.
If you focus your attention on trying to prevent all kinds of error to happen, you are likely going to act needy and romance won’t work well. A highly optimized process might get a pickup guy laid but it doesn’t produce a real connection.
Good romance is about enjoying the time you spent together instead of optimizing all the actions that you take while you are together to achieve some future goal.
While dancing Salsa or Bachata I can produce pretty strong intimacy fast, by being in the moment. If I however dance really intimately with a woman whom I just meet I often get inside my head and think whether what I’m doing is alright and about the consequences of my actions. That in turn messes up the whole interaction because I’m not acting based what I’m feeling in the moment anymore and that’s going to feel strange to the woman.
Being vulnerable is also important for romance and drawing fault trees doesn’t help you to get into a state when you are vulnerable and can allow yourself to be touched on a emotional level by the other person.
Well, yeah, but I don’t mean “seduction methods”, I mean basic discipline, among which are ethics and forethought. Such as “Don’t cheat on a partner. If you’re going to cheat on a partner anyway, don’t lie to the other partner about having the first partner’s consent. If you’re going to lie to the other partner anyway, for god’s sake don’t leave them drunk and alone together. ” “Don’t do things that you’ll later feel the need to keep secret” also sounds to me like very sound general advice. “Don’t put yourself into a situation in which you’re likely to do something you’ll later regret .” (such as getting intoxicated on whatever, without a sober party you absolutely trust to watch your back).
You know, the relationship equivalent to “never, under any circumstances, point a gun at anything you don’t want dead”, or “don’t even try heroin, and if you’re going to do so anyway, lie on your side, not your back”, or “do not fuck with the IRS”. Or don’t piss on an electric fence. Or even “don’t run with scissors” and “put your seatbelt on” and book your flights in advance and study your materials every day rather than cram for the exam.
You know, basic stuff. Stuff that, if Harry heard you doing, you know he’d think “You EEEEDIOT!” with a consternated voice. Stuff that would make Quirrell think “Humans never fail to live down to my expectations.” That kind of stuff.
My idea of ethics is different from following a process that avoids errors that make other people dislike you. Act ethically for it’s own sake and not because it’s a technique to influence your partner into staying in a relationship with you.
I think people who act ethically in order to get other people to like them are generally untrustworthy, because you don’t know what they will do when put in a emotional charged situation which they haven’t analysed beforehand. I rather interact with someone with a strongly developed system of ethics even if that system differs from my own.
It’s not a matter of getting people to like you, it’s a matter of preventing people from getting hurt. Lovesickness and heartache are, in my experience, among the worst, most devastating pains the world can offer.
I share your feeling that breakups, and all things related, suck. And I like your idea of coming up with best practices for avoiding as much heartache as possible. But I’m unsure about the practicality here.
It is my experience that love involves high-level risk necessarily, and by it’s nature.
I just saw a Terence Malick flim this past weekend (To the Wonder) and a quote from the movie comes to mind “The one who loves less is the one who is stronger”.
My general thought is that this is opposed to everything of which LW is in favor. That is, love is not a rational move, since it (by a definion I’d accept) requires self-sacrifice for the good of another.
(Note: Not that LWers are selfish, per se. Only that love which chooses another person winning big while you open yourself up to lose hard is antithetical to most of the sentiment I see here.)
Dedicating resources to one thing that you want means that you can’t dedicate them to another thing that you want. Wanting to make someone happy isn’t different from any of the other things that you want.
Love makes/recognizes another person’s good part of your good, so, depending on the magnitude, it isn’t self-sacrifice to give up some other parts of your good to increase that of your loved one’s.
If love were as simple as this, that would be great.
As Ritalin said:
“Love” requires that you risk the “devastating pain”, I think. You may hold back, or engage principles that mitigate the heartache you feel when a relationship ends—to an extent this is fine, as recklessness is not good—but the risk or devastating pain is inherent in “love”, as I’d define it.
Of course, if you find a relationship where both parties are always happy and healthy and pinging each other’s fuzzy/utilon meters, then good for you. Life, in my experience, is a bit more dynamic and challenging than that.
I like the idea of coming up with disciplines to protect those who you love from heartache whould things not work out, but love is risky. It just is.
Love makes the other’s welfare a win state. It is the ultimate incentive to cooperate.
Would you be willing to elaborate?
What’s to elaborate? That your partner’s smile seems to be directly connected to endorphins in your bloodstream? That knowing that your smile has the same effect on them makes it twice as potent? That your baby’s first laugh or step makes all the sleepless nights to fade away? That your dog happily wagging its tail when you come home cheers you up after a hard day? “The ultimate incentive to cooperate” seems like an apt decision-theoretic description of what evolution wrought.
It’s actually considerably more than just incentive to cooperate. Valuing the welfare/happiness of another above your own leads to many things other than game-theoretic cooperation.
I’d like to hear more of what you have to say about that.
Love (and consequences) is a very wide topic :-) Do you have anything particular in mind?
You can follow the ethical principle of always telling the truth, you can also follow the principle of telling white lies whenever that will make the other person feel better.
If you are consistent and the other person can expect you to follow your principles they won’t ask you for opinion if the truth will hurt them and you have the policy to always tell the truth.
If you don’t have principles and sometimes tell the truth and sometimes tell white lies, it’s however much harder for the other person to interact with you to avoid getting hurt.
When driving and there are pedestrians who want to cross the street, you have two valid choices. Stop and let them pass the street before you or continue driving with your speed. When I started taking driving lessons I got the idea of going the middle way of driving slower. That was stupid. It doesn’t provide the pedestrians with valid information that they can use to adapt their behavior towards myself.
Hurt feelings often come from people expecting something which doesn’t happen. If you follow some codex of ethics and the other person understands which codex of ethics you follow, they won’t be in much emotional pain if you act in according with that codex because they can expect you to do so.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don’t think that focusing on preventing other people from getting hurt is good for a loving relationship.
In the past I also found it very condescending when other people thought that they should make the decisions about risk getting hurt for me. Give me all the information that I need to make a decision but in the end it’s my own decision if I want to risk getting hurt.
Here we have another principle: “Have ethics and morals, and be consistent about following them, so that people know what to expect, and don’t feel betrayed, cheated, or disappointed.”.
Condensing?!
That’s not the kind of principle that you create as a result of Fault Tree Analysis.
Ah, good! Someone who actually knows about this! Well, help me out here; we do have a causation tree, yes?
“Inconsistent Behavour → Broken Expectations → Pereption of Defection”.
Probably intended to be “condescending”.
Yes. I edited.
Then you might want to edit this too: “that they should make the decisions about risk getting hurt for me.” The syntax is ambiguous.
I see you have that Classic Liberal mentality of “Do not protect me from my own stupidity, give me all the relevant information and let me make my informed decisions as a responsible adult”. Problem is,
it is possible that the other person is unwilling to share all the relevant info with you (privacy, information hazard, shame, cowardice, dishonesty) or even unable (they don’t know or they can’t properly put it into words)
Even in possession of all relevant information, you may find yourself making the wrong decisions because you’re not quite in your right mind. I don’t know about you, but when I am high on sexual arousal I can barely even talk.
It’s not about protecting others from their stupidity, but from your own.
I suggest that it is probably counterproductive to make this a debate about identity rather than about issues.
I do share those sentiments but they don’t fully describe my position I’m not focused on the mental stuff.
I might make decisions that bring me emotional pain, but then I’ll learn worthwhile lessons.
I think it’s very useful to learn nonviolent communication to express your emotional needs to give the other person the information he needs.
I however wouldn’t say that everyone has to learn nonviolent communication because it’s not the only model that works.
So, principles instead of methods. Like this? I’m not sure universal, empirically-validated game exists. With one relationship, it isn’t usually as simple as ‘this caused this’. With multiple, you might be able to pick out correlations and hypothesize causation. The best you can do is gather everyone’s stories, create theories, test them, see what sticks, and then use blog/forum archives to write handbooks for people seeking general relationship advice. This has obviously been done many times, focusing on sex, long term relationship, marriage, family, and religious family.
I don’t think it makes any sense to model a relationship as “a system with subsystem and component failures”. Doing so successfully would probably be human-level AI-complete.
That’s just sickening. Also, it’s a list of attitudes, ways to manipulate your lover into being obsessed with you, mostly by exploiting the addictive effect of “unreliable reward”.
I’m surprised that as a “longtime PUA student” you haven’t come across that before, and even more surprised that you’d describe it like that, unless you recently had a huge change of heart regarding PUA/game stuff.
Regardless of ethics, I think something like what I linked would work better for most people (for creating a good, hurt-free relationship) than an overly-complicated fault tree analysis. (I’m still confused about the practicality of such a tree, can you give a small example?)
I already did; look at the whole thread.
And my change of heart over PUA was a long and painful disillusion after the original discovery. I’m not a Pachinko machine; if I have to keep my partner addicted, obsessed, and insecure, it hurts me. When I have to refrain from showering my beloved with affection and kindness, it tears me apart. The kind of shit PUA suggest is something I am incapable of doing with someone I truly care about. And as for someone I don’t care about, those do not make it to my bed. I only f—k when I I give a f—k. I tried the alternative, and it found it disgusting and hollow.
You should note that PUA does not advocate this, at least not necessarily. There is an extremely broad spectrum between “trying to keep your partner insecure and obsessed with you” and “boring them to death until they up and leave you for someone else”. Many of the posts on Chateau Heartiste seem to be written in an over-the-top way for the sake of stirring up controversy; he is far from being representative of all of seduction/‘PUA’.
All I ever see of PUA is around this tone. The art as it is commonly understood and practised is a method to pick up chicks and get laid, not an ethos to build satisfying, durable relationships. If you compare it to actual martial arts, I see a lot of Krav Maga and very little Aikido.
There are probably some parts you have missed.
Also, remember the Sturgeon’s law.
That sounds great, I’ll give it a good look. And Sturgeon’s Law applies to literary genres; if it applies to socio-political movements, then we have a problem. We certainly can’t judge, say, the Catholic Church or the Objectivist movement by their 1% of most virtuous fellows.
If you ask an average Catholic to to explain you some things about their religion, and if you ask a Pope, you will find a lot of differences. You may also find Catholic theologists saing that Pope is actually not a Catholic.
This is not merely a criticism of Catholicism… this is what happens when you have a sufficiently large movement. It happens to other religions, it happens to policial movements, it happens everywhere. I guess even Ayn Rand couldn’t prevent it. This is what humans do.
We might ask what is the true Catholicism? But that’s assuming that words have a meaning on their own, instead of merely being labels attached to meanings, inconsistently by different people. If you would look at people’s beliefs as points in the belief-space, you could empirically find a few clusters: there would be current version of the official belief (or a few competing versions) that only educated theologists know, schisms and heresies, various kinds of folk interpretations, etc. That’s the territory. It’s your choice whether you apply the label “true Catholicism” to the opinion of the current Pope, or to the most popular folk version. Either way, someone will insist that you are using the label incorrectly.
I believe this is a source of many hopeless arguments about politics. For any political label X, you get many people self-identifying as X, with many different beliefs, sometimes contradictory. Now are the “true X” the most educated of them, or the most numerous ones, or those most visible in media? How about those who are very educated, but controversial within the group; how much weight to we assign to their opinions? How about those who try to follow their leaders, but misunderstand what the leaders are trying to say; is their true belief what the leaders believe, or the most frequent misinterpretation of the leaders? -- And in real life, most people will use “what most of my neighbors who self-identify as X seem to say”, which is a different answer for different people.
Should alchemists be considered part of the same group as chemists? Today most of us would say “no”, but what if we lived when chemistry was new? Etc.
Sedevacationists believe that the Pope is a heretic. Is that the same thing as not being a Catholic?
I am not a theologist, and I only met one Sedevacationist in an internet forum and he didn’t seem quite sane to me, so I don’t know how much his opinions are official. He said something like “the Pope has implicitly excommunicated himself by...” I don’t remember what exactly was the reason, but probably because of the alleged heresy.
(Makes some sense to me. I mean, if you are serious about a religion and serious about the religious hierarchy, because you believe that the bishops are literally the messengers of God and the whole Church is the God’s living body on Earth, or something like this, then… being a heretic, not being a Pope, but still pretending to be a Pope… that seems like an insanely serious offence. It’s a religious equivalent of falsely pretending to be a King.)
I’ve read the thread. I mean an example of one of the trees, drawn out in whatever software that is.
That website is a PUA website, so probably not what Ritalin is looking for.
More importantly, I couldn’t follow that advice if I tried. I don’t think it’s even possible to do that if you’re actually in love with someone.
Even if it genuinely made the object of your love happier?
The essence of all persuasion, manipulation, whatever you call it, is giving others what they want; sometimes knowing what they want better than they themselves.
If they are as cold and calculatingly manipulative as you imply, most people who do PUA would almost definitely have no problem being kind, committing and caring towards women if that worked, i.e. made women happy to be with you.
Not at all. Consider the standard FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) -- it is manipulation, it is clearly not giving the subject what it wants.
This seems like a dictionary dispute.
In one sense, a con-man who sells you a fake medicine to treat a serious affliction is “giving you what you want”. After all, you willingly paid for the medicine, and — not knowing that it is fake, and expecting it is a real cure — you believe that you are better off than before the exchange. You feel better having bought it; in the moment, you are glad to have bought it.
But in another sense, he is not “giving you what you want”, because your goal in buying the medicine was to get a cure for the affliction, and fake medicine won’t do that. Once you find out that you have been defrauded, you are not glad any more, but probably angry or indignant at being deceived. Not very many people would react to discovering that they have been cheated, by fondly recalling how nice it felt to believe that they would be cured.
No, I don’t think this is a meaningful sense of “what you want”. In the same way giving your wallet to an armed robber is “what you want”, too.
I agree; I wouldn’t use the word that way — but that notion of “want” would explain the way miekw is using it above.
Do you think that it’s completely implausible that someone would want to experience those emotions too?
I’m not claiming you’ll have much success giving only those, but the wider the range of emotions you can incite, the better.
The claim that most would want this is more extreme and more difficult to find evidence for. I have no evidence beyond my own experience.
It’s plausible, I guess, but that’s not what actually happens in 99% cases of manipulation through FUD.