In the comments here we see how LW is segmenting into “pro-truth” and “pro-equality” camps, just as it happened before with pro-PUA and anti-PUA, pro-status and anti-status, etc. I believe all these divisions are correlated and indicate a deeper underlying division within our community. Also I observe that discussions about topics that lie on the “dividing line” generate much more heat than light, and that people who participate in them tend to write their bottom lines in advance.
I’m generally reluctant to shut people up, but here’s a suggestion: if you find yourself touching the “dividing line” topics in a post or comment, think twice whether it’s really necessary. We may wish ourselves to be rational, but it seems we still lack the abstract machinery required to actually update our opinions when talking about these topics. Nothing is to be gained from discussing them until we have the more abstract stuff firmly in place.
My hypothesis is that this is a “realist”/”idealist” divide. Or, to put it another way, one camp is more concerned with being right and the other is more concerned with doing the right thing. (“Right” means two totally different things, here.)
Quality of my post aside (and it really wasn’t very good), I think that’s where the dividing line has been in the comments.
Similarly, I think most people who value PUA here value it because it works, and most people who oppose it do so on ethical or idealistic grounds. Ditto discussions of status.
The reason the arguments between these camps are so unfruitful, then, is that we’re sorting of arguing past each other. We’re using different heuristics to evaluate desirability, and then we’re surprised when we get different results; I’m as guilty of this as anyone.
Here is another example of the way that pragmatism and idealism interact for me, from the world of pickup:
I was brought up with up with the value of gender equality, and with a proscription against dominating women or being a “jerk.”
When I got into pickup and seduction, I encountered the theory that certain masculine behaviors, including social dominance, are a factor in female attraction to men. This theory matched my observation of many women’s behavior.
While I was uncomfortable with the notion of displaying stereotypically masculine behavior (e.g. “hegemonic masculinity” from feminist theory) and acting in a dominant manner towards women, I decided to give it a try. I found that it worked. Yet I still didn’t like certain types of masculine and dominance displays, and the type of interactions they created with women (even while “working” in terms of attraction and not being obviously unethical), so I started experimenting and practicing styles less reliant on dominance.
I found that there were ways of attracting women that worked quite well, and didn’t depend on dominance and a narrow version of masculinity. It just took a bit of practice and creativity, and I needed my other pickup tools to be able to pull it off. Practicing a traditional form of masculinity got me the social experience necessary to figure out ways to drop that sort of masculinity.
In conclusion, I eventually affirmed my value of having equal interactions with women and avoiding dominating them. And I discovered “field tested” ways to attain success with women while adhering to that value, so I confirmed that it wasn’t a silly, pie-in-the-sky ideal.
I call this an empirical approach to selecting and accomplishing a value.
I strongly agree with this. Count me in the camp of believing true things in literally all situations, as I think that the human brain is too biased for any other approach to result, in expectation, in doing the right thing, but also as in the camp of not necessarily sharing truths that might be expected to be harmful.
My hypothesis is that this is a “realist”/”idealist” divide.
I was thinking the same thing, when I insinuated that you were being idealistic ;) Whether this dichotomy makes sense is another question.
Similarly, I think most people who value PUA here value it because it works, and most people who oppose it do so on ethical or idealistic grounds. Ditto discussions of status.
I think this an excellent example of what the disagreements look like superficially. I think what is actually going on is more complex, such as differences of perception of empirical matters (underlying “what works”), and different moral philosophies.
For example, if you have a deontological prescription against acting “inauthentic,” then certain strategies for learning social skills will appear unethical to you. If you are a virtue ethicist, then holding certain sorts of intentions may appear unethical, whereas a consequentialist would look more at the effects of the behavior.
Although I would get pegged on the “realist” side of the divide, I am actually very idealistic. I just (a) revise my values as my empirical understanding of the world changes, and (b) believe that empirical investigation and certain morally controversial behaviors are useful to execute on my values in the real world.
For example, even though intentionally studying status is controversial, I find that social status skills are often useful for creating equality with people. I study power to gain equality. So am I a realist, or an idealist on that subject?
Another aspect of the difference we are seeing may be in this article’s description of “shallowness.”
(Prompted by but completely irrelevant to the recent bump.)
My hypothesis is that this is a “realist”/”idealist” divide.
Come now. This is lesswrong. It is an “idealist”/”idealist” divide with slightly different ideals. :P
One side’s ideal just happens to be “verbal symbols should be used to further epistemic accuracy”. It is very much an ‘ethical or idealistic’ position with all the potential for narrow mindedness that entails.
The evidence that PUA works is largely anecdotal. A lot of people claim that one shouldn’t believe in acupuncture based on anecdotal evidence.
PUA however is a theory that plays well with other reductionist beliefs while acupuncture doesn’t.
I think the following two are open questions:
Given the same amount of approaches, does a guy who has read PUA theories have higher success of getting laid?
If the man has a goal to have a fulfilling long term relationship with an attractive woman, is it benefitial for him to go down the PUA road?
The evidence for the status hypothesis is also relatively weak.
Being reductionist does have nothing to do with being realist. Being reductionist brings you problem when you are faced with a system that’s more complex than your model.
In biology students get taught these days that even when you know all parts of a system you don’t necessarily know what the system does. That reductionism is wrong and that you actually need real evidence for theories such as the status hypothesis.
I think the following two are open questions: Given the same amount of approaches, does a guy who has read PUA theories have higher success of getting laid?
Isn’t one of the benefits of PUA is that your number of actual approaches increases (while single, at least)?
Isn’t one of the benefits of homeopathy that you get to talk to a person who promises you that you will feel better?
If the control for homeopathy is doing nothing that you find that homeopathy works. If you however do a double blind trial you will probably find that homeopathy doesn’t work.
If you truly belief in rationalism and don’t engage in it to signal status, I see no reason to use another standard for judging whether homeopathy is true than for judging whether PUA works.
If you truly belief in rationalism and don’t engage in it to signal status, I see no reason to use another standard for judging whether homeopathy is true than for judging whether PUA works.
Aww, I respect you as a person too! (What were you trying to accomplish with this comment?)
As you point out, which control you pick is significant, but my point is that what test you pick is significant too. Let’s talk about basketball: you can try and determine how good players are by their free throw percentage, or you can try and determine how good players are by their average points scored per game. You’re suggesting the analog of the first, which seems ludicrous because it ignores many critical skills. If someone is interested primarily in getting laid, it seems that the number they care about is mean time between lays, not percentage success on approaches.
I won’t comment much about your homeopathy example, except to say that even if one considers it relevant it undermines your position. Homeopathy is better than both nothing and harmful treatments (my impression is most people come to PUA from not trying at all or trying ineffectively). Generally, for any homeopathic treatment you could take there is a superior mainstream treatment, but for some no treatment is more effective than placebo (and so you’re just making the decision of whether or not to pay for the benefits of placebo). Likewise, even if the only benefit of PUA is increased confidence, you have to trick yourself into that confidence somehow- and so if PUA boosts confidence PUA increases your chances, even though it did it indirectly.
Edit: Actually, yes, I do agree with Vaniver’s point as explained below: at the time of its invention, homeopathy (i.e., water) frequently gave better results than the actively harmful things many doctors were doing to their patients. That said, I’m not sure the analogy with PUAs is usably solid even in those terms … need to come up with one that might be.
Precision in language: my statement concerning homeopathy is correct, but has debatable relevance. At present, homeopathy underperforms mainstream medicine for nearly everything (like I explicitly mentioned). But I strongly suspect the only reason we’re talking about an alternative medicine that originated 200 years ago is because it predated the germ theory of disease by 70 years.
So, it had at least 70 years of growth as an often superior alternative to mainstream medicine, which was murdering its patients through ignorance.* As well, Avogadro’s number was measured about the same time as the germ theory was put forward by Pasteur, and so for that time homeopathy had as solid a theoretical background as mainstream medicine.
My feeling is that insomuch as PUA should be compared to homeopathy, it should be compared to homeopathy in 1840- the proponents may be totally wrong about why it works and quality data either way is likely scarce, but the paucity of strong alternatives means it’s a good choice.** Heck, it might even be the analog of germ theory instead of the analog of homeopathy.
**Is there anyone else trying a “scientific” approach to relationships? I know there are a number of sexologists, but they seem more descriptive and less practical than PUA. Not to mention they seem more interested in the physical aspects than the tactical/strategic ones.
A reductionist approach to acupuncture—it claims that all the ideas about mystical energy are mistranslations, and explains acupuncture in terms of current biology.
The evidence that PUA works is largely anecdotal. A lot of people claim that one shouldn’t believe in acupuncture based on anecdotal evidence.
There is an implied argument in here that is triggering my bullshit senses. The worst part is that it uses what is a valid consideration (the lamentable lack of research into effective attraction strategies) and uses it as a facade over an untenable analogy and complete neglect of the strength of anecdotal evidence.
The evidence for the status hypothesis is also relatively weak.
Relative to what, exactly? The ‘gravity’ hypothesis? The evidence is overwhelming.
How do you determine the strength of anecdotal evidence to decide that PUA works and acupuncture doesn’t?
I know quite a few people both online and offline who claim that acupuncture has helped them with various issues.
I know people online who claimed that PUA helped them. I know people online who say that they concluded after spending over a year in the PUA community that the field is a scam.
I also know people online who have radically changed their social life without going the PUA road.
The worst part is that it uses what is a valid consideration (the lamentable lack of research into effective attraction strategies)
Whether there should be more research into a theory is a different issue than whether there’s enough evidence to support a theory.
If you don’t take separate them mentally you run into the problem of being overconfident when information is scarce and underconfident when there’s plenty of information.
As a good skeptic it important to know that you simply don’t have enough information to decide certain questions.
Relative to what, exactly? The ‘gravity’ hypothesis? The evidence is overwhelming.
Of course there are some effects when you get approval from other people. I however don’t think that there is peer reviewed research that suggests that the effect is as strong as it gets seen in this community.
As a good skeptic it important to know that you simply don’t have enough information to decide certain questions.
And as an effective homo-hypocritus it is important to recognize when the ‘good skeptic’ role will be a beneficial one to adopt, completely independent on the evidence.
In biology students get taught these days that even when you know all parts of a system you don’t necessarily know what the system does.
This is only true if you have insufficient math/computing ability to simulate the interactions of the system’s parts. For it to be otherwise, either your information would have to actually be incomplete, or magic would have to happen.
Thanks to Heisenberg your information is also always incomplete.
In real life you do have insufficient math/computing ability to simulate the interactions of many systems.
Whether weak reductionism is true doesn’t matter much for this debate.
People who believe in strong reductionism find appeal in Pua theory.
They believe that they have sufficient mental resources and information to calculate complex social interactions in a way that allows them to optimize those interactions.
Because of the belief in strong reductionism they believe in Pua based on anecdotal evidence and don’t believe in acupuncture based on anecdotal evidence.
If there’s a discussion about whether or not we should seek truth—at a site about rationality—that’s a discussion worth having. It’s not a side issue.
Like whpearson, I think we’re not all on one side or another. I’m pro-truth. I’m anti-PUA. I don’t know if I’m pro or anti status—there’s something about this community’s focus on it that unsettles me, but I certainly don’t disapprove of people choosing to do something high-status like become a millionaire.
You’re basically talking about the anti-PC cluster. It’s an interesting phenomenon. We’ve got instinctively and vehemently anti-PC people; we’ve got people trying to edge in the direction of “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t just do whatever we want”; and we’ve got people like me who are sort of on the dividing line, anti-PC in theory but willing to walk away and withdraw association from people who actually spew a lot of hate.
I think it’s an interesting issue because it deals with how we ought best to react to controversy. In the spirit of the comments I made to WrongBot, I don’t think we should fear to go there; I know my rationality isn’t that fragile and I doubt yours is either. (I’ve gotten my knee-jerk emotional responses burned out of me by people much ruder than anyone here.)
I know my rationality isn’t that fragile and I doubt yours is either.
What troubles me is this: your position on the divisive issues is not exactly identical to mine, but I very much doubt that I could sway your position or you could sway mine. Therefore, I’m pretty confident that at least one of us fails at rationality when thinking about these issues. On the other hand, if we were talking about math or computing, I’d be pretty confident that a correct argument would actually be recognized as correct and there would be no room for different “positions”. There is only one truth.
We have had some big successes already. (For example, most people here know better than be confused by talk of “free will”.) I don’t think the anti-PC issue can be resolved by the drawn-out positional war we’re waging, because it isn’t actually making anyone change their opinions. It’s just a barrage of rationalizations from all sides. We need more insight. We need a breakthrough, or maybe several, that would point out the obviously correct way to think about anti-PC issues.
I don’t think using this name is a good idea. It has strong political connotations. And while I’m sure many here aren’t aware of them or are willing to ignore them, I fear this may not be true:
I think it actually is a value difference, just like Blueberry said.
I do not want to participate in nastiness (loosely defined). It’s related to my inclination not to engage in malicious gossip. (Folks who know me personally consider it almost weird how uncomfortable I am with bashing people, singly or in groups.) It’s not my business to stop other people from doing it, but I just don’t want it as part of my life, because it’s corrosive and makes me unhappy.
To refine my own position a little bit—I’m happy to consider anti-PC issues as matters of fact, but I don’t like them connotationally, because I don’t like speaking ill of people when I can help it. For example, in a conversation with a friend: he says, “Don’t you know blacks have a higher crime rate than whites?” I say, “Sure, that’s true. But what do you want from me? You want me to say how much I hate my black neighbors? What do you want me to say?”
I don’t think that’s an issue that argument can dissuade me from; it’s my own preference.
This discussion prompted a connection in my mind that startled me a lot. Let’s put it in the open.
We’ve been discussing the moral status of identical copies. I gave a partial reductio sometime ago, but wasn’t really satisfied. Now consider this: what about the welfare of your imperfect copies? Do UDT-like considerations make it provably rational to care more about creatures that share random features with you? Note that I say UDT-like considerations, not evolutionary considerations. Evolution doesn’t explain professional solidarity or feminism because neither relies on heritable traits. Ganging up looks more like a Schelling coordination game, where you benefit from seeking allies based on some random quality as long as they also get the idea of allying with you based on same quality. And it might work better if the quality is hard to change, like sex or race. Anyone willing to work out the math is welcome to do so...
your position on the divisive issues is not exactly identical to mine, but I very much doubt that I could sway your position or you could sway mine. Therefore, I’m pretty confident that at least one of us fails at rationality when thinking about these issues. On the other hand, if we were talking about math or computing, I’d be pretty confident that a correct argument would actually be recognized as correct and there would be no room for different “positions”. There is only one truth.
But there are many different values. If we can’t sway each other’s positions, that points to a value difference.
“Value difference” is often used as a cop-out. How did our terminal values come to be so different, anyway? If I’m extremely selfish and you’re extremely selfish, we will likely have very different values, but if we are both altruistic, our values are combinations of values of all the other people in the world, so they should be pretty similar. For example, if I think society should be organized like an anthill and you think it should be organized like a pool of sharks (to borrow Ken Binmore’s example), this is a factual disagreement about what would make everyone better off, not a value disagreement.
Maybe it’s a political correctness principal component, but it seems to me that ideas about status should not be aligned with that component. If PUA had not been mentioned, and we were just discussing Johnstone, then I think those who are ignorant of PUA, whether pro- or anti-PC, would have less extreme reactions and often completely different ones.
If people’s opinions on one issue are polarizing their opinions on another, without agreement that they’re logically related, something is probably going wrong and this is a cost to discussing the first issue. Also, cousin it talked about the issues creating “camps.” That’s probably the mediating problem.
Like whpearson, I think we’re not all on one side or another. I’m pro-truth. I’m anti-PUA. I don’t know if I’m pro or anti status
I am presently amused by imagining forum members declaring themselves “anti-truth”.
Though I guess there is a spectrum from sticking to discovering and exposing widely applicable truths no matter what, some kind of Straussian stance where only the enlightened elites can be allowed access to dangerous truths and the general populace is to be fed noble lies, and then on to even less coherent spheres of willful obscurantism and outright anti-intellectualism, where it seems that nobody is encouraged to pursue some topics.
For some reason though, people who either explicitly believe that noble lies are necessary or have internalized a culture where they are built-in never seem to claim to be anti-truth.
I think there are divisions within the community, but I am not sure about the correlations. Or at least they don’t fit me.
I’m pro discussion of status, I liked red paper clip theory for an example. I’m anti acquiring high status for myself and anti people telling me I should be pro that. I’m anti-pua advice, pro the occasional well backed up psychological research with PUA style flavour (finding out what women really find attractive, why the common advice is wrong etc).
I’m pretty much pro-truth, I don’t think words can influence me that much (if they could I would be far more mainstream). I’m less sure about situations, if I was more status/money maximising for a while to earn money to donate to FHI etc, then I would worry that I would get sucked into the high status decadent consumer lifestyle and forget about my long term concerns.
Edit: Actually, I’ve just thought of a possible reason for the division you note.
If you are dominant or want to become dominant you do not want to be swayed by the words of others. So ideas are less likely to be dangerous to you or your values. If you are less-dominant you may be more susceptible to the ideas that are floating around in society as, evolutionarily, you would want to be part of whatever movement is forming so you are part of the ingroup.
I think my social coprocessor is probably broken in some weird way, so I may be an outlier.
There’s no social coprocessor, we evolved a giant cerebral cortex to do social processing, but some people refuse to use it for that because they can’t use it in its native mode while they are also emulating a general intelligence on the same hardware.
I was being brief (and imprecise) in my self-assessment as that wasn’t the main point of the comment. I didn’t even mean broken in the sense that other might have meant it, i.e. Aspergers.
I just don’t enjoy social conversation much normally. I can do it such that the other person enjoys it somewhat. An example, I was chatting to a cute dancer last night (at someone’s 30th so I was obliged to), and she invited me to watch her latest dance. I declined because I wasn’t into her (or into watching dance). She was nice and pretty, nothing wrong with her, but I just don’t tend to seek marginal connections with people because they don’t do much for me. Historically the people I connect with have seem to have been people that have challenged me or can make me think in odd directions.
This I understand is an unusual way to pick people to associate with, so I think something in the way I process social signals is different from the norm. This is what I meant.
I know what’s going on. You think of yourself and others as collections of thoughts and ideas. Since most people don’t have interesting thoughts or ideas, you think they aren’t interesting. OTOH, it’s possible to adopt, temporarily and in a manner which automatically reverses itself, the criteria for assigning interest that the person you are associating with uses. When you do that, everyone turns out to be interesting and likable.
I know what’s going on. You think of yourself and others as collections of thoughts and ideas. Since most people don’t have interesting thoughts or ideas, you think they aren’t interesting
That wasn’t my working hypothesis. Mine was that I have different language capabilities and that those affect what social situations I find easy and enjoyable (and so the different people I chose to associate with). For example I can quite happily rattle off some surreal story with someone or I enjoy helping someone plan or design something. I find it hard to narrate stories about my life or remember interesting tidbits about the world that aren’t in my interest right at the moment.
OTOH, it’s possible to adopt, temporarily and in a manner which automatically reverses itself, the criteria for assigning interest that the person you are associating with uses. When you do that, everyone turns out to be interesting and likable.
Oh I can find many things interesting for a brief time, e.g. where the best place to be a dancer is (London is better than Europe) or how the some school kids were playing up today. Just subconsciously my brain knows it doesn’t want lots of that sort of information or social interaction so sends signals that I do not want to have long term friendships with these sorts of people.
Can you expand that thought, and the process? Doesn’t adopting the other person’s criteria constitute a kind of “self-deception” if you happen to dislike/disapprove his/her criteria?
I mean that even if, despite your dislikes, you sympathize with the paths that led to that person’s motivations, if reading a book happens to be a truly more interesting activity at that moment, and is an actionable alternative, I don’t see how connecting with the person could be a better choice.
Unless… you find something very enjoyable in this process itself that doesn’t depend much on the person. I remember your comment about “liking people’s territories instead of their maps” — it seems to be related here. Is it?
Do you ever just associate with people you find attractive at first sight? (I can’t tell if you’re referring to a strip club, or what kind of dancer you mean.)
You may find Prof. Richard Wiseman’s research on what makes people “lucky” interesting: his research has found advantages to seeking marginal connections with people you meet.
Do you mean sexually attractive? Or just interesting looking? I’ll initiate conversation with interesting looking people (that may or may not be sexually attractive).
By dancer I just meant someone who does modern dance, she was a friend of a friend (I have some odd friends by this websites standard I think).
Oh I know I should develop more marginal connections. It simply feels false to do so though, that I am doing so in the hopes of exploiting them, rather than finding them particularly interesting in their own right. I would rather not be cultivated in that fashion.
some people refuse to use it for that because they can’t use it in its native mode while they are also emulating a general intelligence on the same hardware.
I’m not sure I understand. By ‘emulating a general intelligence’, do you mean consciously thinking through every action? My understanding is that people can develop social processing skills by consciously practicing unnatural habits until they become natural.
No-one consciously thinks through every action. I mean thinking at all rather than paying total attention to the other person and letting your actions happen. If you feel that ‘you’ are doing something, you aren’t running the brain in its native mode, your running an emulation. It’s hard to figure out how to do this from a verbal description, but if it happens you will recognize what I’m talking about and it doesn’t require any practice of anything unnatural.
My understanding is that people can develop social processing skills by consciously practicing unnatural habits until they become natural.
This is correct; at least some people can do this. For someone reason, there is a cultural bias that makes believe that this approach doesn’t work, because so many people seem to believe that it doesn’t without evidence. These people are wrong; this view has already been falsified by many people.
Many people learn many different disciplines through the four stages of competence (unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence), in sports and the arts.
Conversation isn’t a special exception. Though it may be different from those domains by requiring more specialized mental hardware. Consciously practicing “unnatural” social habits happens to be a good way to jump start that hardware if it is dormant.
Someone without this hardware may not be able to learn how to emulate naturally social people through consciously trying to emulate them. Yet I bet that most people with social difficulties short of Asperger’s aren’t missing the relevant hardware; they just don’t know how to use it out of social inexperience, such as from spending their formative years being isolated and bullied for being slightly different.
I disagree. I think there is the functional equivalent of a “social-co-processor”, what I see as the fundamental trade-off along the autism spectrum, the trading of a “theory of mind” (necessary for good and nuanced communication with neurotypically developing individuals and a “theory of reality”, (necessary for good ability at tool making and tool using).
Because the maternal pelvis is limited in size, the infant brain is limited at birth (still ~1% of women die per childbirth (in the wild) due to cephalopelvic disproportion). The “best” time to program the fundamental neuroanatomy of the brain is in utero, during the first trimester when the fundamental neuroanatomy of the brain is developing and when the epigenetic programming of all the neurons in the brain is occurring.
The two fundamental human traits, language and tool making and tool using both require a large brain with substantial plasticity over the individual’s lifetime. But other than that they are pretty much orthogonal. I suspect there has been evolutionary pressure to optimize the neuroanatomy of the human infant brain at birth so as to optimize the neurological tasks that brain is likely to need to do over that individual’s lifetime.
If you are dominant or want to become dominant you do not want to be swayed by the words of others. So ideas are less likely to be dangerous to you or your values. If you are less-dominant you may be more susceptible to the ideas that are floating around in society as, evolutionarily, you would want to be part of whatever movement is forming so you are part of the ingroup.
Another possibility is that we are seeing some other personality differences in openness and or agreeableness. People who are higher in openness and/or lower in agreeableness might be more interested in ideas that are judged politically incorrect, or antisocial.
People who are higher in openness and/or lower in agreeableness might be more interested in ideas that are judged politically incorrect, or antisocial.
The division might correlate with where people land on the various axis’s of the neurodiversity spectrum.
I’m anti-pua advice, pro the occasional well backed up psychological research with PUA style flavour (finding out what women really find attractive, why the common advice is wrong etc).
I think this is just another way of saying “I’m pro- good advice about dating and anti- bad advice about dating.” I would consider the research you’re discussing a form of PUA/dating advice.
In other words, there are other uses than trying to pick up girls for knowing what, on average, women like in a man. These include, but are not limited to,
Judging the likely ability of politicians to influence women
Being able to match make between friends
Writing realistic plots in fiction
Not being suprised when your friends are attracted to certain people
If you’re an altruist (on the ‘idealist’ side of WrongBot’s distinction), you’d probably consider making women you know happier to be the biggest advantage.
Most of the women I’m friends with are in relationships with men that aren’t me :) So me being maximally attractive to them may not make them happier. I would need more research on how to have the correct amount of attractiveness in platonic relationships.
Sure women like the attention of a very attractive man, but it could lead to jealousy (why is attractive man speaking to X and not me), unrequited lust and .strife in their existing relationships.
Perhaps a research on what women find creepy, and not doing that, would be more useful for making women happier in general.
Edit: There is also the problem that if you become more attractive you might make your male friends less happy as they get less attention. Raising the general attractiveness of your male social group is another possibility, but one that would require quite an oddly rational group.
I agree that these politically charged issues are probably not a very good thing for the community, and that we should be extra cautious when engaging them.
Not sure. I was anti-status, anti-PUA, pro-equality until age 22 or so, and then changed my opinions on all these issues at around the same time (took a couple years). So maybe there is a common cause, but I have absolutely no idea what that cause could be.
My relevant life excerpt is similar to yours. The first two changed because of increased understanding of how humans coordinate and act socially. Not sure if there is a link to the third.
In the comments here we see how LW is segmenting into “pro-truth” and “pro-equality” camps, just as it happened before with pro-PUA and anti-PUA, pro-status and anti-status, etc. I believe all these divisions are correlated and indicate a deeper underlying division within our community. Also I observe that discussions about topics that lie on the “dividing line” generate much more heat than light, and that people who participate in them tend to write their bottom lines in advance.
I’m generally reluctant to shut people up, but here’s a suggestion: if you find yourself touching the “dividing line” topics in a post or comment, think twice whether it’s really necessary. We may wish ourselves to be rational, but it seems we still lack the abstract machinery required to actually update our opinions when talking about these topics. Nothing is to be gained from discussing them until we have the more abstract stuff firmly in place.
My hypothesis is that this is a “realist”/”idealist” divide. Or, to put it another way, one camp is more concerned with being right and the other is more concerned with doing the right thing. (“Right” means two totally different things, here.)
Quality of my post aside (and it really wasn’t very good), I think that’s where the dividing line has been in the comments.
Similarly, I think most people who value PUA here value it because it works, and most people who oppose it do so on ethical or idealistic grounds. Ditto discussions of status.
The reason the arguments between these camps are so unfruitful, then, is that we’re sorting of arguing past each other. We’re using different heuristics to evaluate desirability, and then we’re surprised when we get different results; I’m as guilty of this as anyone.
Here is another example of the way that pragmatism and idealism interact for me, from the world of pickup:
I was brought up with up with the value of gender equality, and with a proscription against dominating women or being a “jerk.”
When I got into pickup and seduction, I encountered the theory that certain masculine behaviors, including social dominance, are a factor in female attraction to men. This theory matched my observation of many women’s behavior.
While I was uncomfortable with the notion of displaying stereotypically masculine behavior (e.g. “hegemonic masculinity” from feminist theory) and acting in a dominant manner towards women, I decided to give it a try. I found that it worked. Yet I still didn’t like certain types of masculine and dominance displays, and the type of interactions they created with women (even while “working” in terms of attraction and not being obviously unethical), so I started experimenting and practicing styles less reliant on dominance.
I found that there were ways of attracting women that worked quite well, and didn’t depend on dominance and a narrow version of masculinity. It just took a bit of practice and creativity, and I needed my other pickup tools to be able to pull it off. Practicing a traditional form of masculinity got me the social experience necessary to figure out ways to drop that sort of masculinity.
In conclusion, I eventually affirmed my value of having equal interactions with women and avoiding dominating them. And I discovered “field tested” ways to attain success with women while adhering to that value, so I confirmed that it wasn’t a silly, pie-in-the-sky ideal.
I call this an empirical approach to selecting and accomplishing a value.
I strongly agree with this. Count me in the camp of believing true things in literally all situations, as I think that the human brain is too biased for any other approach to result, in expectation, in doing the right thing, but also as in the camp of not necessarily sharing truths that might be expected to be harmful.
I was thinking the same thing, when I insinuated that you were being idealistic ;) Whether this dichotomy makes sense is another question.
I think this an excellent example of what the disagreements look like superficially. I think what is actually going on is more complex, such as differences of perception of empirical matters (underlying “what works”), and different moral philosophies.
For example, if you have a deontological prescription against acting “inauthentic,” then certain strategies for learning social skills will appear unethical to you. If you are a virtue ethicist, then holding certain sorts of intentions may appear unethical, whereas a consequentialist would look more at the effects of the behavior.
Although I would get pegged on the “realist” side of the divide, I am actually very idealistic. I just (a) revise my values as my empirical understanding of the world changes, and (b) believe that empirical investigation and certain morally controversial behaviors are useful to execute on my values in the real world.
For example, even though intentionally studying status is controversial, I find that social status skills are often useful for creating equality with people. I study power to gain equality. So am I a realist, or an idealist on that subject?
Another aspect of the difference we are seeing may be in this article’s description of “shallowness.”
(Prompted by but completely irrelevant to the recent bump.)
Come now. This is lesswrong. It is an “idealist”/”idealist” divide with slightly different ideals. :P
One side’s ideal just happens to be “verbal symbols should be used to further epistemic accuracy”. It is very much an ‘ethical or idealistic’ position with all the potential for narrow mindedness that entails.
The evidence that PUA works is largely anecdotal. A lot of people claim that one shouldn’t believe in acupuncture based on anecdotal evidence.
PUA however is a theory that plays well with other reductionist beliefs while acupuncture doesn’t.
I think the following two are open questions: Given the same amount of approaches, does a guy who has read PUA theories have higher success of getting laid?
If the man has a goal to have a fulfilling long term relationship with an attractive woman, is it benefitial for him to go down the PUA road?
The evidence for the status hypothesis is also relatively weak.
Being reductionist does have nothing to do with being realist. Being reductionist brings you problem when you are faced with a system that’s more complex than your model. In biology students get taught these days that even when you know all parts of a system you don’t necessarily know what the system does. That reductionism is wrong and that you actually need real evidence for theories such as the status hypothesis.
Isn’t one of the benefits of PUA is that your number of actual approaches increases (while single, at least)?
Isn’t one of the benefits of homeopathy that you get to talk to a person who promises you that you will feel better? If the control for homeopathy is doing nothing that you find that homeopathy works. If you however do a double blind trial you will probably find that homeopathy doesn’t work.
If you truly belief in rationalism and don’t engage in it to signal status, I see no reason to use another standard for judging whether homeopathy is true than for judging whether PUA works.
Aww, I respect you as a person too! (What were you trying to accomplish with this comment?)
As you point out, which control you pick is significant, but my point is that what test you pick is significant too. Let’s talk about basketball: you can try and determine how good players are by their free throw percentage, or you can try and determine how good players are by their average points scored per game. You’re suggesting the analog of the first, which seems ludicrous because it ignores many critical skills. If someone is interested primarily in getting laid, it seems that the number they care about is mean time between lays, not percentage success on approaches.
I won’t comment much about your homeopathy example, except to say that even if one considers it relevant it undermines your position. Homeopathy is better than both nothing and harmful treatments (my impression is most people come to PUA from not trying at all or trying ineffectively). Generally, for any homeopathic treatment you could take there is a superior mainstream treatment, but for some no treatment is more effective than placebo (and so you’re just making the decision of whether or not to pay for the benefits of placebo). Likewise, even if the only benefit of PUA is increased confidence, you have to trick yourself into that confidence somehow- and so if PUA boosts confidence PUA increases your chances, even though it did it indirectly.
Your statement concerning homeopathy turns out not to be correct. In practice, homeopathy is harmful because it replaces effective treatments in the patients’ minds and It soaks up medical funding.
Edit: Actually, yes, I do agree with Vaniver’s point as explained below: at the time of its invention, homeopathy (i.e., water) frequently gave better results than the actively harmful things many doctors were doing to their patients. That said, I’m not sure the analogy with PUAs is usably solid even in those terms … need to come up with one that might be.
Precision in language: my statement concerning homeopathy is correct, but has debatable relevance. At present, homeopathy underperforms mainstream medicine for nearly everything (like I explicitly mentioned). But I strongly suspect the only reason we’re talking about an alternative medicine that originated 200 years ago is because it predated the germ theory of disease by 70 years.
So, it had at least 70 years of growth as an often superior alternative to mainstream medicine, which was murdering its patients through ignorance.* As well, Avogadro’s number was measured about the same time as the germ theory was put forward by Pasteur, and so for that time homeopathy had as solid a theoretical background as mainstream medicine.
My feeling is that insomuch as PUA should be compared to homeopathy, it should be compared to homeopathy in 1840- the proponents may be totally wrong about why it works and quality data either way is likely scarce, but the paucity of strong alternatives means it’s a good choice.** Heck, it might even be the analog of germ theory instead of the analog of homeopathy.
*The story of Ignaz Semmelweis ought not be forgot.
**Is there anyone else trying a “scientific” approach to relationships? I know there are a number of sexologists, but they seem more descriptive and less practical than PUA. Not to mention they seem more interested in the physical aspects than the tactical/strategic ones.
A reductionist approach to acupuncture—it claims that all the ideas about mystical energy are mistranslations, and explains acupuncture in terms of current biology.
There is an implied argument in here that is triggering my bullshit senses. The worst part is that it uses what is a valid consideration (the lamentable lack of research into effective attraction strategies) and uses it as a facade over an untenable analogy and complete neglect of the strength of anecdotal evidence.
Relative to what, exactly? The ‘gravity’ hypothesis? The evidence is overwhelming.
How do you determine the strength of anecdotal evidence to decide that PUA works and acupuncture doesn’t? I know quite a few people both online and offline who claim that acupuncture has helped them with various issues.
I know people online who claimed that PUA helped them. I know people online who say that they concluded after spending over a year in the PUA community that the field is a scam. I also know people online who have radically changed their social life without going the PUA road.
As a good skeptic it important to know that you simply don’t have enough information to decide certain questions.
And as an effective homo-hypocritus it is important to recognize when the ‘good skeptic’ role will be a beneficial one to adopt, completely independent on the evidence.
This is only true if you have insufficient math/computing ability to simulate the interactions of the system’s parts. For it to be otherwise, either your information would have to actually be incomplete, or magic would have to happen.
Thanks to Heisenberg your information is also always incomplete. In real life you do have insufficient math/computing ability to simulate the interactions of many systems.
Whether weak reductionism is true doesn’t matter much for this debate. People who believe in strong reductionism find appeal in Pua theory.
They believe that they have sufficient mental resources and information to calculate complex social interactions in a way that allows them to optimize those interactions.
Because of the belief in strong reductionism they believe in Pua based on anecdotal evidence and don’t believe in acupuncture based on anecdotal evidence.
If there’s a discussion about whether or not we should seek truth—at a site about rationality—that’s a discussion worth having. It’s not a side issue.
Like whpearson, I think we’re not all on one side or another. I’m pro-truth. I’m anti-PUA. I don’t know if I’m pro or anti status—there’s something about this community’s focus on it that unsettles me, but I certainly don’t disapprove of people choosing to do something high-status like become a millionaire.
You’re basically talking about the anti-PC cluster. It’s an interesting phenomenon. We’ve got instinctively and vehemently anti-PC people; we’ve got people trying to edge in the direction of “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t just do whatever we want”; and we’ve got people like me who are sort of on the dividing line, anti-PC in theory but willing to walk away and withdraw association from people who actually spew a lot of hate.
I think it’s an interesting issue because it deals with how we ought best to react to controversy. In the spirit of the comments I made to WrongBot, I don’t think we should fear to go there; I know my rationality isn’t that fragile and I doubt yours is either. (I’ve gotten my knee-jerk emotional responses burned out of me by people much ruder than anyone here.)
Anti-PC? Good name, I will use it.
What troubles me is this: your position on the divisive issues is not exactly identical to mine, but I very much doubt that I could sway your position or you could sway mine. Therefore, I’m pretty confident that at least one of us fails at rationality when thinking about these issues. On the other hand, if we were talking about math or computing, I’d be pretty confident that a correct argument would actually be recognized as correct and there would be no room for different “positions”. There is only one truth.
We have had some big successes already. (For example, most people here know better than be confused by talk of “free will”.) I don’t think the anti-PC issue can be resolved by the drawn-out positional war we’re waging, because it isn’t actually making anyone change their opinions. It’s just a barrage of rationalizations from all sides. We need more insight. We need a breakthrough, or maybe several, that would point out the obviously correct way to think about anti-PC issues.
I don’t think using this name is a good idea. It has strong political connotations. And while I’m sure many here aren’t aware of them or are willing to ignore them, I fear this may not be true:
For potential new readers and posters
Once the “camps” are firmly established.
I think it actually is a value difference, just like Blueberry said.
I do not want to participate in nastiness (loosely defined). It’s related to my inclination not to engage in malicious gossip. (Folks who know me personally consider it almost weird how uncomfortable I am with bashing people, singly or in groups.) It’s not my business to stop other people from doing it, but I just don’t want it as part of my life, because it’s corrosive and makes me unhappy.
To refine my own position a little bit—I’m happy to consider anti-PC issues as matters of fact, but I don’t like them connotationally, because I don’t like speaking ill of people when I can help it. For example, in a conversation with a friend: he says, “Don’t you know blacks have a higher crime rate than whites?” I say, “Sure, that’s true. But what do you want from me? You want me to say how much I hate my black neighbors? What do you want me to say?”
I don’t think that’s an issue that argument can dissuade me from; it’s my own preference.
This discussion prompted a connection in my mind that startled me a lot. Let’s put it in the open.
We’ve been discussing the moral status of identical copies. I gave a partial reductio sometime ago, but wasn’t really satisfied. Now consider this: what about the welfare of your imperfect copies? Do UDT-like considerations make it provably rational to care more about creatures that share random features with you? Note that I say UDT-like considerations, not evolutionary considerations. Evolution doesn’t explain professional solidarity or feminism because neither relies on heritable traits. Ganging up looks more like a Schelling coordination game, where you benefit from seeking allies based on some random quality as long as they also get the idea of allying with you based on same quality. And it might work better if the quality is hard to change, like sex or race. Anyone willing to work out the math is welcome to do so...
Asserting group inequalities means speaking more ill of one group of people but less ill of another, so doesn’t that cancel out?
I’m not talking about empirical claims, I’m talking about affect. I have zero problem with talking about group inequalities, in themselves.
But there are many different values. If we can’t sway each other’s positions, that points to a value difference.
If only it was always so. Value is hard to see, so easy to rationalize.
“Value difference” is often used as a cop-out. How did our terminal values come to be so different, anyway? If I’m extremely selfish and you’re extremely selfish, we will likely have very different values, but if we are both altruistic, our values are combinations of values of all the other people in the world, so they should be pretty similar. For example, if I think society should be organized like an anthill and you think it should be organized like a pool of sharks (to borrow Ken Binmore’s example), this is a factual disagreement about what would make everyone better off, not a value disagreement.
Maybe it’s a political correctness principal component, but it seems to me that ideas about status should not be aligned with that component. If PUA had not been mentioned, and we were just discussing Johnstone, then I think those who are ignorant of PUA, whether pro- or anti-PC, would have less extreme reactions and often completely different ones.
If people’s opinions on one issue are polarizing their opinions on another, without agreement that they’re logically related, something is probably going wrong and this is a cost to discussing the first issue. Also, cousin it talked about the issues creating “camps.” That’s probably the mediating problem.
I am presently amused by imagining forum members declaring themselves “anti-truth”.
Though I guess there is a spectrum from sticking to discovering and exposing widely applicable truths no matter what, some kind of Straussian stance where only the enlightened elites can be allowed access to dangerous truths and the general populace is to be fed noble lies, and then on to even less coherent spheres of willful obscurantism and outright anti-intellectualism, where it seems that nobody is encouraged to pursue some topics.
For some reason though, people who either explicitly believe that noble lies are necessary or have internalized a culture where they are built-in never seem to claim to be anti-truth.
I think there are divisions within the community, but I am not sure about the correlations. Or at least they don’t fit me.
I’m pro discussion of status, I liked red paper clip theory for an example. I’m anti acquiring high status for myself and anti people telling me I should be pro that. I’m anti-pua advice, pro the occasional well backed up psychological research with PUA style flavour (finding out what women really find attractive, why the common advice is wrong etc).
I’m pretty much pro-truth, I don’t think words can influence me that much (if they could I would be far more mainstream). I’m less sure about situations, if I was more status/money maximising for a while to earn money to donate to FHI etc, then I would worry that I would get sucked into the high status decadent consumer lifestyle and forget about my long term concerns.
Edit: Actually, I’ve just thought of a possible reason for the division you note.
If you are dominant or want to become dominant you do not want to be swayed by the words of others. So ideas are less likely to be dangerous to you or your values. If you are less-dominant you may be more susceptible to the ideas that are floating around in society as, evolutionarily, you would want to be part of whatever movement is forming so you are part of the ingroup.
I think my social coprocessor is probably broken in some weird way, so I may be an outlier.
There’s no social coprocessor, we evolved a giant cerebral cortex to do social processing, but some people refuse to use it for that because they can’t use it in its native mode while they are also emulating a general intelligence on the same hardware.
I was being brief (and imprecise) in my self-assessment as that wasn’t the main point of the comment. I didn’t even mean broken in the sense that other might have meant it, i.e. Aspergers.
I just don’t enjoy social conversation much normally. I can do it such that the other person enjoys it somewhat. An example, I was chatting to a cute dancer last night (at someone’s 30th so I was obliged to), and she invited me to watch her latest dance. I declined because I wasn’t into her (or into watching dance). She was nice and pretty, nothing wrong with her, but I just don’t tend to seek marginal connections with people because they don’t do much for me. Historically the people I connect with have seem to have been people that have challenged me or can make me think in odd directions.
This I understand is an unusual way to pick people to associate with, so I think something in the way I process social signals is different from the norm. This is what I meant.
I know what’s going on. You think of yourself and others as collections of thoughts and ideas. Since most people don’t have interesting thoughts or ideas, you think they aren’t interesting. OTOH, it’s possible to adopt, temporarily and in a manner which automatically reverses itself, the criteria for assigning interest that the person you are associating with uses. When you do that, everyone turns out to be interesting and likable.
That wasn’t my working hypothesis. Mine was that I have different language capabilities and that those affect what social situations I find easy and enjoyable (and so the different people I chose to associate with). For example I can quite happily rattle off some surreal story with someone or I enjoy helping someone plan or design something. I find it hard to narrate stories about my life or remember interesting tidbits about the world that aren’t in my interest right at the moment.
Oh I can find many things interesting for a brief time, e.g. where the best place to be a dancer is (London is better than Europe) or how the some school kids were playing up today. Just subconsciously my brain knows it doesn’t want lots of that sort of information or social interaction so sends signals that I do not want to have long term friendships with these sorts of people.
Hi, Michael.
Can you expand that thought, and the process? Doesn’t adopting the other person’s criteria constitute a kind of “self-deception” if you happen to dislike/disapprove his/her criteria?
I mean that even if, despite your dislikes, you sympathize with the paths that led to that person’s motivations, if reading a book happens to be a truly more interesting activity at that moment, and is an actionable alternative, I don’t see how connecting with the person could be a better choice.
Unless… you find something very enjoyable in this process itself that doesn’t depend much on the person. I remember your comment about “liking people’s territories instead of their maps” — it seems to be related here. Is it?
Do you ever just associate with people you find attractive at first sight? (I can’t tell if you’re referring to a strip club, or what kind of dancer you mean.)
You may find Prof. Richard Wiseman’s research on what makes people “lucky” interesting: his research has found advantages to seeking marginal connections with people you meet.
Do you mean sexually attractive? Or just interesting looking? I’ll initiate conversation with interesting looking people (that may or may not be sexually attractive).
By dancer I just meant someone who does modern dance, she was a friend of a friend (I have some odd friends by this websites standard I think).
Oh I know I should develop more marginal connections. It simply feels false to do so though, that I am doing so in the hopes of exploiting them, rather than finding them particularly interesting in their own right. I would rather not be cultivated in that fashion.
I meant sexually attractive (you described the dancer as “cute” and “pretty”). Though I guess either would work.
I’m not sure I understand. By ‘emulating a general intelligence’, do you mean consciously thinking through every action? My understanding is that people can develop social processing skills by consciously practicing unnatural habits until they become natural.
No-one consciously thinks through every action. I mean thinking at all rather than paying total attention to the other person and letting your actions happen. If you feel that ‘you’ are doing something, you aren’t running the brain in its native mode, your running an emulation. It’s hard to figure out how to do this from a verbal description, but if it happens you will recognize what I’m talking about and it doesn’t require any practice of anything unnatural.
This is correct; at least some people can do this. For someone reason, there is a cultural bias that makes believe that this approach doesn’t work, because so many people seem to believe that it doesn’t without evidence. These people are wrong; this view has already been falsified by many people.
Many people learn many different disciplines through the four stages of competence (unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence), in sports and the arts.
Conversation isn’t a special exception. Though it may be different from those domains by requiring more specialized mental hardware. Consciously practicing “unnatural” social habits happens to be a good way to jump start that hardware if it is dormant.
Someone without this hardware may not be able to learn how to emulate naturally social people through consciously trying to emulate them. Yet I bet that most people with social difficulties short of Asperger’s aren’t missing the relevant hardware; they just don’t know how to use it out of social inexperience, such as from spending their formative years being isolated and bullied for being slightly different.
I disagree. I think there is the functional equivalent of a “social-co-processor”, what I see as the fundamental trade-off along the autism spectrum, the trading of a “theory of mind” (necessary for good and nuanced communication with neurotypically developing individuals and a “theory of reality”, (necessary for good ability at tool making and tool using).
http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2008/10/theory-of-mind-vs-theory-of-reality.html
Because the maternal pelvis is limited in size, the infant brain is limited at birth (still ~1% of women die per childbirth (in the wild) due to cephalopelvic disproportion). The “best” time to program the fundamental neuroanatomy of the brain is in utero, during the first trimester when the fundamental neuroanatomy of the brain is developing and when the epigenetic programming of all the neurons in the brain is occurring.
The two fundamental human traits, language and tool making and tool using both require a large brain with substantial plasticity over the individual’s lifetime. But other than that they are pretty much orthogonal. I suspect there has been evolutionary pressure to optimize the neuroanatomy of the human infant brain at birth so as to optimize the neurological tasks that brain is likely to need to do over that individual’s lifetime.
Another possibility is that we are seeing some other personality differences in openness and or agreeableness. People who are higher in openness and/or lower in agreeableness might be more interested in ideas that are judged politically incorrect, or antisocial.
The division might correlate with where people land on the various axis’s of the neurodiversity spectrum.
I think this is just another way of saying “I’m pro- good advice about dating and anti- bad advice about dating.” I would consider the research you’re discussing a form of PUA/dating advice.
Are newtons laws billiard ball prediction advice?
In other words, there are other uses than trying to pick up girls for knowing what, on average, women like in a man. These include, but are not limited to,
Judging the likely ability of politicians to influence women
Being able to match make between friends
Writing realistic plots in fiction
Not being suprised when your friends are attracted to certain people
If you’re an altruist (on the ‘idealist’ side of WrongBot’s distinction), you’d probably consider making women you know happier to be the biggest advantage.
Most of the women I’m friends with are in relationships with men that aren’t me :) So me being maximally attractive to them may not make them happier. I would need more research on how to have the correct amount of attractiveness in platonic relationships.
Sure women like the attention of a very attractive man, but it could lead to jealousy (why is attractive man speaking to X and not me), unrequited lust and .strife in their existing relationships.
Perhaps a research on what women find creepy, and not doing that, would be more useful for making women happier in general.
Edit: There is also the problem that if you become more attractive you might make your male friends less happy as they get less attention. Raising the general attractiveness of your male social group is another possibility, but one that would require quite an oddly rational group.
I agree that these politically charged issues are probably not a very good thing for the community, and that we should be extra cautious when engaging them.
Any hypotheses about the common factor?
Not sure. I was anti-status, anti-PUA, pro-equality until age 22 or so, and then changed my opinions on all these issues at around the same time (took a couple years). So maybe there is a common cause, but I have absolutely no idea what that cause could be.
del
Reduced attachment to explicit verbal norms?
My relevant life excerpt is similar to yours. The first two changed because of increased understanding of how humans coordinate and act socially. Not sure if there is a link to the third.
It’s called “growing up.”
I wouldn’t call it that, climbing the metacontrarian ladder seems to describe it much better.