I have noticed something similar in art. Artists are supposed to create their art in mysterious ways. If it can be explained, it is not the true art. For example, many people who aspire to write novels are horrified when you suggest to them that they should attend a writing workshop. Even giving them evidence that many successful authors attended workshops at some moment of their career does not remove the visceral opposition to the idea; if you learn the art from others, it is fake; if you use a known mechanism, it is fake.
Together with your example of women not losing status for doing make-up, it seems to me that the problem is not effort per se, but rather effort made publicly. Even the hard-working scientist and CEO are supposed to do their work behind the curtain, mysteriously.
Why is mysterious work high-status, but non-mysterious work low-status?
From instrumental perspective, it would seem that mysterious work is easier to protect again copying. If I do my work in public, my advantage is fragile; anyone could observe me and do the same thing. If you could install a hidden camera on your CEO, maybe you would find out that their everyday work is actually quite simple and you could do it too—but you can’t, and therefore even in the hypothetical case you could do the work, you will never know, and you will never get it.
But socially, this explanation gets it backwards. Yes, the CEO could order the employees to show him all their work, could investigate their processes in detail, could ask them to provide a documentation on all their trade secrets, and their only options would be to obey or to lose their jobs… but the CEO most likely will not do that; at least not for the purpose of copying their trade secrets. When the CEO asks someone to explain themselves, it is usually done to show them who is the boss. Socially, the privacy of your work is not an instrument to get power, but rather a symbol of already having it.
If other people can scrutinize your work and ask you to explain yourself, you are low-status.
If you can close the door and tell everyone to fuck off, you are high-status.
(Hence the popularity of open spaces, from the perspective of management. Hence the popularity of remote work, from the perspective of workers.)
LoLE comes from a community where many thousands of people have put a large effort into testing out and debating ideas.
And they did it publicly. Which explains why they are treated as low-status.
tl;dr—the problem of “public effort” is the lack of privacy (which signals low status), not the effort itself
Thanks for the reply. I think privacy is important and worth analyzing.
But I’m not convinced of your explanation. I have some initial objections.
I view LoLE as related to some other concepts such as reactivity and chasing. Chasing others (like seeking their attention) is low status, and reacting to others (more than they’re reacting to you) is low status. Chasing and reacting are both types of effort. They don’t strike me as privacy related. However, for LoLE only the appearance of effort counts (Chase’s version), so to some approximation that means public effort, so you could connect it to privacy that way.
Some people do lots of publicly visible work. There are Twitch streamers, like Leffen and MajinPhil, who stream a lot of their practice time. (Some other people do stream for a living and stream less or no practice.) Partly I think it’s OK because they get paid to stream. But partly I think it’s OK because they are seen as wanting to do that work – it’s their passion that they enjoy. Similarly I think one could livestream their gym workouts, tennis practice sessions, running training, or similar, and making that public wouldn’t ruin their status. Similarly, Brandon Sanderson (a high status fantasy author) has streamed himself answering fan questions while simultaneously signing books by the hundreds (just stacks of pages that aren’t even in the books yet, not signing finished books for fans), and he’s done this in video rather than audio-only format. So he’s showing the mysterious process of mass producing a bunch of signed books. And I don’t think Sanderson gets significant income from the videos. I also don’t think that Jordan Peterson putting up recordings of doing his job – university lectures – was bad for his status (putting up videos of his lecture prep time might be bad, but the lecturing part is seen as a desirable and impressive activity for him to do, and that desirability seems like the issue to me more than whether it’s public or private). The (perceived) option to have privacy might sometimes matter more than actually having privacy.
I think basically some effort isn’t counted as effort. If you like doing it, it’s not real work. Plus if it’s hidden effort, it usually can’t be entered into evidence in the court of public opinion, so it doesn’t count. But my current understanding is that if 1) it counts as effort/work; and 2) you’re socially allowed to bring it up then it lowers status. I see privacy as an important thing helping control (2) but effort itself, under those two conditions, as the thing seen as undesirable, bad, something you’re presumed to try to avoid (so it’s evidence of failure or lack of power, resources, helpers, etc), etc.
Chasing others (like seeking their attention) is low status, and reacting to others (more than they’re reacting to you) is low status.
The (perceived) option to have privacy might sometimes matter more than actually having privacy.
Yes, and yes.
I think that the content of the work matters, too. Like, if I think that university professors are high status, then watching a professor giving lectures is simply watching someone demonstrating high status. (And this is relative to my status, because if I am upper-class and I think of all people doing useful work—including professors—as losers, then watching the professor’s lecture is in my eyes just confirmation of his low status.)
Maybe another important thing is how your work is.… oriented. I mean, are you doing X to impress someone specific (which would signal lower status), or are you doing X to impress people in general but each of them individually is unimportant? A woman doing her make-up, a man in the gym, a professor recording their lesson… is okay if they do it for the “world in general”; but if you learned they are actually doing all this work to impress one specific person, that would kinda devalue it. This is also related to optionality: is the professor required to make the video? is the make-up required for the woman’s job?
By the way, status is not a dichotomy, so it’s like: not having to make any effort > making an effort to impress the world in general > making an effort to impress a specific person. Also, the specific work is associated with some status, but doing that work well is relatively better than doing it poorly. So, publishing your work has two effects: admitting that you do X, and demonstrating that you are competent at X. And the privacy also impacts the perceived competence: can you watch the average lesson recorded by a hidden camera, or only the best examples the professor decided to share?
But my current understanding is that if 1) it counts as effort/work; and 2) you’re socially allowed to bring it up then it lowers status.
Seems correct. “I spend 12 hours a day working on my hobby” sounds cool (unless the hobby is perceived as inherently uncool); “I spend 12 hours a day doing my job” sounds uncool (unless the job is perceived as inherently cool and enjoyable).
Maybe another important thing is how your work is.… oriented. I mean, are you doing X to impress someone specific (which would signal lower status), or are you doing X to impress people in general but each of them individually is unimportant? A woman doing her make-up, a man in the gym, a professor recording their lesson… is okay if they do it for the “world in general”; but if you learned they are actually doing all this work to impress one specific person, that would kinda devalue it. This is also related to optionality: is the professor required to make the video? is the make-up required for the woman’s job?
That makes sense.
You can also orient your work to a group, e.g. a subculture. As long as its a large enough group, this rounds to orienting to the world in general.
Orienting to smaller groups like your high school, workplace or small academic niche (the 20 other high status people who read your papers) is fine from the perspective of people in the group. To outsiders, e.g. college kids, orienting to your high school peers is lame and is due to you being lame enough not yet to have escaped high school. Orienting to a few other top academics in a field could impress many outsiders – it shows membership in an exclusive club (high school lets in losers/everyone and hardly any the current highest status people are in the club).
I think orienting to a single person can be OK if 1) it’s reciprocated; and 2) they are high enough status. E.g. if I started making YouTube videos exclusively to impress Kanye West, that’s bad if he ignores me, but looks good for me if he responds regularly (that’d put me as clearly lower status than him, but still high in society overall). Note that more realistically my videos would also oriented to Kanye fans, not just Kanye personally, and that’s a large enough group for it to be OK.
I didn’t have other immediate, specific comments but I generally view these topics as important and hard to find quality discussion about. Most people aren’t red-pilled and hate PUAs/MRAs/etc or at least aren’t familiar with the knowledge. And then the PUAs/MRAs/etc themselves mostly aren’t philosophers posting on rationalist forums … most of them are more interested in other stuff like getting laid, using their knowledge of social dynamics to gain status, or political activism. So I wanted to end by saying that I’m open to proposals for more, similar discussion if you’re interested.
I find this topic difficult to discuss, because as an (undiagnosed) aspie, I probably miss many obvious things about social behavior, which means that I work with incomplete data. If I find a counter-example to a hypothesis, that’s probably useful, but if the hypothesis sounds plausible to me, that means little, because I can easily overlook quite obvious things.
I am intellectually aware of the taboo against the “PUA/MRA/etc” cluster. My interpretation is that for a man, showing weakness is low-status, and empathy towards low-status men is also low-status, so discussing male-specific problems in empathetic way means burning your social karma like wildfire. (The socially sanctioned way to discuss male-specific problems is to be condescending and give obviously dysfunctional advice, thus enforcing the status quo. Enforcing status quo is obviously the thing high-status people approve of, and that is what ultimately matters, socially.) But I do not feel the taboo viscerally. I hope I gained enough politically-incorrect creds by writing this paragraph to make the following paragraphs not seem like an automatic dismissal of an inconvenient topic.
The difficult thing about learning “how people function” is that, simply said, everyone lives in a bubble. Not only is the bubble shaped by our social class, profession, hobbies, but even by our beliefs, including our beliefs about “how people function”. Which is, from epistemic perspective, a really fucked up situation. Like, for whatever reason, you create a hypothesis “most X are Y”; then you instinctively start noticing the X who are Y, and avoiding and filtering out of your perception the X who are not Y; then at the end of the day you collect all data your observed and conclude that, really, almost all X are Y. It doesn’t always work like this, sometimes something pierces your bubble painfully enough to notice, but it happens often. And it’s not just about your perception; if you believe that all X are Y, sometimes the X who are not Y will avoid you; so even if you later improve your attention, you still get filtered data. I don’t want to go full postmodern here, but this stuff really is crazy.
So I wonder how much of the “PUA/MRA/etc” knowledge is really about the world in general, and how much is a description of their own bubble. Do the PUAs really have a good model of an average human, or just a good model of a drunk woman who came to a nightclub wanting to get laid? Do the MRAs generalize from their own bitter divorce a bit too much? How many edgy hypotheses are selected for their edginess rather than because they model the reality well? Also, most wannabe PUAs suck at being PUAs, which makes their models even less useful. The entire community is selecting for people who have some kinds of problems with social interaction, which on one hand allows them to have a lot of unique insights, but on the other hand probably creates a lot of common blind spots. Maybe it’s a community where the blind are trying to lead the blind, and the one-eyed are the kings. And the whole business of “selling the advice that will transform your life” actively selects for Dark Arts.
So… it’s complicated. I would like to learn from people who are guided neither by social taboos nor by edginess. And I am not sure if I could contribute much beyond an occassional sanity check. Furthermore, I think it is important to actually go out and interact with real people; and I don’t even follow my own advice here. (The COVID-19 situation provides unique problems but also unique opportunities. If people socialize in smaller groups, outside, and don’t touch each other, it means less sensory overload. When the entire world is weird, any individual weirdness becomes less visible.) I am completely serious here: good theory is useful, but practice is irreplaceable; and I think my most serious mistake is lack of practice.
Sometimes I even wonder whether I overestimate how much the grass is greener on the other side. Like, I know a few attractive and popular people, who got divorced recently, which in my set of values constitutes a serious fail, especially when it happens to people who probably did not suffer by lack of options. Apparently, just like intelligence, social skills are also a tool many use to defeat themselves.
Do the PUAs really have a good model of an average human, or just a good model of a drunk woman who came to a nightclub wanting to get laid?
PUAs have evidence of efficacy. The best is hidden camera footage. The best footage that I’m aware of, in terms of confidence the girls aren’t actors, is Mystery’s VH1 show and the Cajun on Keys to the VIP. I believe RSD doesn’t use actors either and they have a lot of footage. I know some others have been caught faking footage.
My trusted friend bootcamped with Mystery and provided me with eyewitness accounts similar to various video footage. My friend also learned and used PUA successfully, experienced it working for him in varied situations … and avoids talking about PUA in public. He also observed other high profile PUAs in action IRL.
Some PUAs do daygame and other venues, not just nightclubs/parties. They have found the same general social principles apply, but adjustments are needed like lower energy approaches. Mystery, who learned nightclub style PUA initially, taught daygame on at least one episode of his TV show and his students quickly had some success.
PUAs have also demonstrated they’re effective at dealing with males. They can approach mixed-gender sets and befriend or tool the males. They’ve also shown effectiveness at befriending females who aren’t their target. Also standard PUA training advice is to approach 100 people on the street and talk with them. Learning how to have smalltalk conversations with anyone helps people be better PUAs, and also people who get good at PUA become more successful at those street conversations than they used to be.
I think these PUA Field Reports are mostly real stories, not lies. Narrator bias/misunderstandings and minor exaggerations are common. I think they’re overall more reliable than posts on r/relationships or r/AmITheAsshole, which I think also do provide useful evidence about what the world is like.
There are also notable points of convergence, e.g. Feynman told a story (“You Just Ask Them?” in Surely You’re Joking) in which he got some PUA type advice and found it immediately effective (after his previous failures), both in a bar setting and later with a “nice” girl in another setting.
everyone lives in a bubble
I generally agree but I also think there are some major areas of overlap between different subcultures. I think some principles apply pretty broadly, e.g. LoLE applies in the business world, in academia, in high school popularity contests, and for macho posturing like in the Top Gun movie. My beliefs about this use lots of evidence from varied sources (you can observe people doing social dynamics ~everywhere) but also do use significant interpretation and analysis of that evidence. There are also patterns in the conclusions I’ve observed other people reach and how e.g. their conclusion re PUA correlates with my opinion on whether they are a high quality thinker (which I judged on other topics first). I know someone with different philosophical views could reach different conclusions from the same data set. My basic answer to that is that I study rationality, I write about my ideas, and I’m publicly open to debate. If anyone knows a better method for getting accurate beliefs please tell me. I would also be happy pay for useful critical feedback if I knew any good way to arrange it.
Business is a good source of separate evidence about social dynamics because there are a bunch of books and other materials about the social dynamics of negotiating raises, hiring interviews, promotions, office politics, leadership, managing others, being a boss, sales, marketing, advertising, changing organizations from the bottom-up (passing on ideas to your boss, boss’s boss and even the CEO), etc. I’ve read a fair amount of that stuff but it’s not my main field (which is epistemology/rationality).
There are also non-PUA/MGTOW/etc relationship books with major convergence with PUA, e.g. The Passion Paradox (which has apparently been renamed The Passion Trap). I understand that to be a mainstream book:
About the Author
Dr. Dean C. Delis is a clinical psychologist, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, and a staff psychologist at the San Diego V.A. Medical Center. He has more than 100 professional publications and has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology and American Board of Clinical Neuropsychology.
The main idea of the book is similar to LoLE. Quoting my notes from 2005 (I think this is before I was familiar with PUA): “The main idea of the passion paradox is that the person who wants the relationship less is in control and secure, and therefore cares about the relationship less, while the one who wants it more is more needy and insecure. And that being in these roles can make people act worse, thus reinforcing the problems.”. I was not convinced by this at the time and also wrote: “I think passion paradox dynamics could happen sometimes, but that they need not, and that trying to analyse all relationships that way will often be misleading.” Now I have a much more AWALT view.
The entire community is selecting for people who have some kinds of problems with social interaction
I agree the PUA community is self-selected to mostly be non-naturals, especially the instructors, though there are a few exceptions. In other words, they do tend to attract nerdy types who have to explicitly learn about social rules.
Sometimes I even wonder whether I overestimate how much the grass is greener on the other side.
My considered opinion is that it’s not, and that blue pillers are broadly unhappy (to be fair, so are red pillers). I don’t think being good at social dynamics (via study or “naturally” (aka via early childhood study)) makes people happy. I think doing social dynamics effectively clashes with rationality and being less rational has all sorts of downstream negative consequences. (Some social dynamics is OK to do, I’m not advocating zero, but I think it’s pretty limited.)
I don’t think high status correlates well with happiness. Both for ultra high status like celebs, which causes various problems, and also for high status that doesn’t get you so much public attention.
I think rationality correlates with happiness better. I would expect to be wrong about that if I was wrong about which self-identified rational people are not actually rational (I try to spot fakers and bad thinking).
I think the people with the best chance to be happy are content and secure with their social status. In other words, they aren’t actively trying to climb higher socially and they don’t have to put much effort into maintaining their current social status. The point is that they aren’t putting much effort into social dynamics and focus most of their energy on other stuff.
I am intellectually aware of the taboo against the “PUA/MRA/etc” cluster.
I too am intellectual aware of that but don’t intuitively feel it. I also refuse to care and have publicly associated my real name with lower status stuff than PUA. I have gotten repeated feedback (sometimes quite strongly worded) about how my PUA ideas alienate people, including from a few long time fans, but I haven’t stopped talking about it.
[Edit for clarity: I mostly mean hostile feedback from alienated people, not feedback from people worrying I’ll alienate others.]
I would like to learn from people who are guided neither by social taboos nor by edginess. And I am not sure if I could contribute much beyond an occassional sanity check.
I’d be happy to have you at my discussion forums. My community started in 1994, (not entirely) coincidentally the same year as alt.seduction.fast. The community is fairly oriented around the work of David Deutsch (the previous community leader and my mentor) and myself, as well as other thinkers that Deutsch or I like. A broad variety of topics are welcome (~anything that rationality can be applied to).
As I said, my main problem is lack of practice, not theory. I will skim your forum, but probably that’s it. Too bad geography doesn’t allow the option of hanging out together, debating theory and practicing it.
There is also a book called The Passion Paradox; is there a chance you have read both and confused them? (Or maybe existence of another book with the same name was the reason for renaming.)
Speaking of PUA celebrities, Neil Strauss (approximately my age) is divorced after having one child. I have a happy family with two kids. Of course, different people optimize for different things, and sex is mostly not used for reproduction, but it still feels weird when I am more successful in family life and reproductively than a famous expert on sex and relationships. I mean, the main reason I became interested in PUA decades ago was fear that I might not be able to… well, have the type of life I have now… and somehow Neil Strauss, the famous PUA, does not (despite having many great skills that I don’t have). This is related to the “overestimating the greener grass on the other side”. I guess my only remaining hero is Athol Kay.
But of course there are also other reasons to expand social skills, such as increasing my income, or increasing my impact on the world.
I read the older, now-renamed book that I linked. The newer one has different authors. I saw it when searching and confirmed the right author for the one I read by searching old emails.
I have noticed something similar in art. Artists are supposed to create their art in mysterious ways. If it can be explained, it is not the true art. For example, many people who aspire to write novels are horrified when you suggest to them that they should attend a writing workshop. Even giving them evidence that many successful authors attended workshops at some moment of their career does not remove the visceral opposition to the idea; if you learn the art from others, it is fake; if you use a known mechanism, it is fake.
Together with your example of women not losing status for doing make-up, it seems to me that the problem is not effort per se, but rather effort made publicly. Even the hard-working scientist and CEO are supposed to do their work behind the curtain, mysteriously.
Why is mysterious work high-status, but non-mysterious work low-status?
From instrumental perspective, it would seem that mysterious work is easier to protect again copying. If I do my work in public, my advantage is fragile; anyone could observe me and do the same thing. If you could install a hidden camera on your CEO, maybe you would find out that their everyday work is actually quite simple and you could do it too—but you can’t, and therefore even in the hypothetical case you could do the work, you will never know, and you will never get it.
But socially, this explanation gets it backwards. Yes, the CEO could order the employees to show him all their work, could investigate their processes in detail, could ask them to provide a documentation on all their trade secrets, and their only options would be to obey or to lose their jobs… but the CEO most likely will not do that; at least not for the purpose of copying their trade secrets. When the CEO asks someone to explain themselves, it is usually done to show them who is the boss. Socially, the privacy of your work is not an instrument to get power, but rather a symbol of already having it.
If other people can scrutinize your work and ask you to explain yourself, you are low-status.
If you can close the door and tell everyone to fuck off, you are high-status.
(Hence the popularity of open spaces, from the perspective of management. Hence the popularity of remote work, from the perspective of workers.)
And they did it publicly. Which explains why they are treated as low-status.
tl;dr—the problem of “public effort” is the lack of privacy (which signals low status), not the effort itself
Thanks for the reply. I think privacy is important and worth analyzing.
But I’m not convinced of your explanation. I have some initial objections.
I view LoLE as related to some other concepts such as reactivity and chasing. Chasing others (like seeking their attention) is low status, and reacting to others (more than they’re reacting to you) is low status. Chasing and reacting are both types of effort. They don’t strike me as privacy related. However, for LoLE only the appearance of effort counts (Chase’s version), so to some approximation that means public effort, so you could connect it to privacy that way.
Some people do lots of publicly visible work. There are Twitch streamers, like Leffen and MajinPhil, who stream a lot of their practice time. (Some other people do stream for a living and stream less or no practice.) Partly I think it’s OK because they get paid to stream. But partly I think it’s OK because they are seen as wanting to do that work – it’s their passion that they enjoy. Similarly I think one could livestream their gym workouts, tennis practice sessions, running training, or similar, and making that public wouldn’t ruin their status. Similarly, Brandon Sanderson (a high status fantasy author) has streamed himself answering fan questions while simultaneously signing books by the hundreds (just stacks of pages that aren’t even in the books yet, not signing finished books for fans), and he’s done this in video rather than audio-only format. So he’s showing the mysterious process of mass producing a bunch of signed books. And I don’t think Sanderson gets significant income from the videos. I also don’t think that Jordan Peterson putting up recordings of doing his job – university lectures – was bad for his status (putting up videos of his lecture prep time might be bad, but the lecturing part is seen as a desirable and impressive activity for him to do, and that desirability seems like the issue to me more than whether it’s public or private). The (perceived) option to have privacy might sometimes matter more than actually having privacy.
I think basically some effort isn’t counted as effort. If you like doing it, it’s not real work. Plus if it’s hidden effort, it usually can’t be entered into evidence in the court of public opinion, so it doesn’t count. But my current understanding is that if 1) it counts as effort/work; and 2) you’re socially allowed to bring it up then it lowers status. I see privacy as an important thing helping control (2) but effort itself, under those two conditions, as the thing seen as undesirable, bad, something you’re presumed to try to avoid (so it’s evidence of failure or lack of power, resources, helpers, etc), etc.
Yes, and yes.
I think that the content of the work matters, too. Like, if I think that university professors are high status, then watching a professor giving lectures is simply watching someone demonstrating high status. (And this is relative to my status, because if I am upper-class and I think of all people doing useful work—including professors—as losers, then watching the professor’s lecture is in my eyes just confirmation of his low status.)
Maybe another important thing is how your work is.… oriented. I mean, are you doing X to impress someone specific (which would signal lower status), or are you doing X to impress people in general but each of them individually is unimportant? A woman doing her make-up, a man in the gym, a professor recording their lesson… is okay if they do it for the “world in general”; but if you learned they are actually doing all this work to impress one specific person, that would kinda devalue it. This is also related to optionality: is the professor required to make the video? is the make-up required for the woman’s job?
By the way, status is not a dichotomy, so it’s like: not having to make any effort > making an effort to impress the world in general > making an effort to impress a specific person. Also, the specific work is associated with some status, but doing that work well is relatively better than doing it poorly. So, publishing your work has two effects: admitting that you do X, and demonstrating that you are competent at X. And the privacy also impacts the perceived competence: can you watch the average lesson recorded by a hidden camera, or only the best examples the professor decided to share?
Seems correct. “I spend 12 hours a day working on my hobby” sounds cool (unless the hobby is perceived as inherently uncool); “I spend 12 hours a day doing my job” sounds uncool (unless the job is perceived as inherently cool and enjoyable).
That makes sense.
You can also orient your work to a group, e.g. a subculture. As long as its a large enough group, this rounds to orienting to the world in general.
Orienting to smaller groups like your high school, workplace or small academic niche (the 20 other high status people who read your papers) is fine from the perspective of people in the group. To outsiders, e.g. college kids, orienting to your high school peers is lame and is due to you being lame enough not yet to have escaped high school. Orienting to a few other top academics in a field could impress many outsiders – it shows membership in an exclusive club (high school lets in losers/everyone and hardly any the current highest status people are in the club).
I think orienting to a single person can be OK if 1) it’s reciprocated; and 2) they are high enough status. E.g. if I started making YouTube videos exclusively to impress Kanye West, that’s bad if he ignores me, but looks good for me if he responds regularly (that’d put me as clearly lower status than him, but still high in society overall). Note that more realistically my videos would also oriented to Kanye fans, not just Kanye personally, and that’s a large enough group for it to be OK.
I didn’t have other immediate, specific comments but I generally view these topics as important and hard to find quality discussion about. Most people aren’t red-pilled and hate PUAs/MRAs/etc or at least aren’t familiar with the knowledge. And then the PUAs/MRAs/etc themselves mostly aren’t philosophers posting on rationalist forums … most of them are more interested in other stuff like getting laid, using their knowledge of social dynamics to gain status, or political activism. So I wanted to end by saying that I’m open to proposals for more, similar discussion if you’re interested.
I find this topic difficult to discuss, because as an (undiagnosed) aspie, I probably miss many obvious things about social behavior, which means that I work with incomplete data. If I find a counter-example to a hypothesis, that’s probably useful, but if the hypothesis sounds plausible to me, that means little, because I can easily overlook quite obvious things.
I am intellectually aware of the taboo against the “PUA/MRA/etc” cluster. My interpretation is that for a man, showing weakness is low-status, and empathy towards low-status men is also low-status, so discussing male-specific problems in empathetic way means burning your social karma like wildfire. (The socially sanctioned way to discuss male-specific problems is to be condescending and give obviously dysfunctional advice, thus enforcing the status quo. Enforcing status quo is obviously the thing high-status people approve of, and that is what ultimately matters, socially.) But I do not feel the taboo viscerally. I hope I gained enough politically-incorrect creds by writing this paragraph to make the following paragraphs not seem like an automatic dismissal of an inconvenient topic.
The difficult thing about learning “how people function” is that, simply said, everyone lives in a bubble. Not only is the bubble shaped by our social class, profession, hobbies, but even by our beliefs, including our beliefs about “how people function”. Which is, from epistemic perspective, a really fucked up situation. Like, for whatever reason, you create a hypothesis “most X are Y”; then you instinctively start noticing the X who are Y, and avoiding and filtering out of your perception the X who are not Y; then at the end of the day you collect all data your observed and conclude that, really, almost all X are Y. It doesn’t always work like this, sometimes something pierces your bubble painfully enough to notice, but it happens often. And it’s not just about your perception; if you believe that all X are Y, sometimes the X who are not Y will avoid you; so even if you later improve your attention, you still get filtered data. I don’t want to go full postmodern here, but this stuff really is crazy.
So I wonder how much of the “PUA/MRA/etc” knowledge is really about the world in general, and how much is a description of their own bubble. Do the PUAs really have a good model of an average human, or just a good model of a drunk woman who came to a nightclub wanting to get laid? Do the MRAs generalize from their own bitter divorce a bit too much? How many edgy hypotheses are selected for their edginess rather than because they model the reality well? Also, most wannabe PUAs suck at being PUAs, which makes their models even less useful. The entire community is selecting for people who have some kinds of problems with social interaction, which on one hand allows them to have a lot of unique insights, but on the other hand probably creates a lot of common blind spots. Maybe it’s a community where the blind are trying to lead the blind, and the one-eyed are the kings. And the whole business of “selling the advice that will transform your life” actively selects for Dark Arts.
So… it’s complicated. I would like to learn from people who are guided neither by social taboos nor by edginess. And I am not sure if I could contribute much beyond an occassional sanity check. Furthermore, I think it is important to actually go out and interact with real people; and I don’t even follow my own advice here. (The COVID-19 situation provides unique problems but also unique opportunities. If people socialize in smaller groups, outside, and don’t touch each other, it means less sensory overload. When the entire world is weird, any individual weirdness becomes less visible.) I am completely serious here: good theory is useful, but practice is irreplaceable; and I think my most serious mistake is lack of practice.
Sometimes I even wonder whether I overestimate how much the grass is greener on the other side. Like, I know a few attractive and popular people, who got divorced recently, which in my set of values constitutes a serious fail, especially when it happens to people who probably did not suffer by lack of options. Apparently, just like intelligence, social skills are also a tool many use to defeat themselves.
PUAs have evidence of efficacy. The best is hidden camera footage. The best footage that I’m aware of, in terms of confidence the girls aren’t actors, is Mystery’s VH1 show and the Cajun on Keys to the VIP. I believe RSD doesn’t use actors either and they have a lot of footage. I know some others have been caught faking footage.
My trusted friend bootcamped with Mystery and provided me with eyewitness accounts similar to various video footage. My friend also learned and used PUA successfully, experienced it working for him in varied situations … and avoids talking about PUA in public. He also observed other high profile PUAs in action IRL.
Some PUAs do daygame and other venues, not just nightclubs/parties. They have found the same general social principles apply, but adjustments are needed like lower energy approaches. Mystery, who learned nightclub style PUA initially, taught daygame on at least one episode of his TV show and his students quickly had some success.
PUAs have also demonstrated they’re effective at dealing with males. They can approach mixed-gender sets and befriend or tool the males. They’ve also shown effectiveness at befriending females who aren’t their target. Also standard PUA training advice is to approach 100 people on the street and talk with them. Learning how to have smalltalk conversations with anyone helps people be better PUAs, and also people who get good at PUA become more successful at those street conversations than they used to be.
I think these PUA Field Reports are mostly real stories, not lies. Narrator bias/misunderstandings and minor exaggerations are common. I think they’re overall more reliable than posts on r/relationships or r/AmITheAsshole, which I think also do provide useful evidence about what the world is like.
There are also notable points of convergence, e.g. Feynman told a story (“You Just Ask Them?” in Surely You’re Joking) in which he got some PUA type advice and found it immediately effective (after his previous failures), both in a bar setting and later with a “nice” girl in another setting.
I generally agree but I also think there are some major areas of overlap between different subcultures. I think some principles apply pretty broadly, e.g. LoLE applies in the business world, in academia, in high school popularity contests, and for macho posturing like in the Top Gun movie. My beliefs about this use lots of evidence from varied sources (you can observe people doing social dynamics ~everywhere) but also do use significant interpretation and analysis of that evidence. There are also patterns in the conclusions I’ve observed other people reach and how e.g. their conclusion re PUA correlates with my opinion on whether they are a high quality thinker (which I judged on other topics first). I know someone with different philosophical views could reach different conclusions from the same data set. My basic answer to that is that I study rationality, I write about my ideas, and I’m publicly open to debate. If anyone knows a better method for getting accurate beliefs please tell me. I would also be happy pay for useful critical feedback if I knew any good way to arrange it.
Business is a good source of separate evidence about social dynamics because there are a bunch of books and other materials about the social dynamics of negotiating raises, hiring interviews, promotions, office politics, leadership, managing others, being a boss, sales, marketing, advertising, changing organizations from the bottom-up (passing on ideas to your boss, boss’s boss and even the CEO), etc. I’ve read a fair amount of that stuff but it’s not my main field (which is epistemology/rationality).
There are also non-PUA/MGTOW/etc relationship books with major convergence with PUA, e.g. The Passion Paradox (which has apparently been renamed The Passion Trap). I understand that to be a mainstream book:
The main idea of the book is similar to LoLE. Quoting my notes from 2005 (I think this is before I was familiar with PUA): “The main idea of the passion paradox is that the person who wants the relationship less is in control and secure, and therefore cares about the relationship less, while the one who wants it more is more needy and insecure. And that being in these roles can make people act worse, thus reinforcing the problems.”. I was not convinced by this at the time and also wrote: “I think passion paradox dynamics could happen sometimes, but that they need not, and that trying to analyse all relationships that way will often be misleading.” Now I have a much more AWALT view.
I agree the PUA community is self-selected to mostly be non-naturals, especially the instructors, though there are a few exceptions. In other words, they do tend to attract nerdy types who have to explicitly learn about social rules.
My considered opinion is that it’s not, and that blue pillers are broadly unhappy (to be fair, so are red pillers). I don’t think being good at social dynamics (via study or “naturally” (aka via early childhood study)) makes people happy. I think doing social dynamics effectively clashes with rationality and being less rational has all sorts of downstream negative consequences. (Some social dynamics is OK to do, I’m not advocating zero, but I think it’s pretty limited.)
I don’t think high status correlates well with happiness. Both for ultra high status like celebs, which causes various problems, and also for high status that doesn’t get you so much public attention.
I think rationality correlates with happiness better. I would expect to be wrong about that if I was wrong about which self-identified rational people are not actually rational (I try to spot fakers and bad thinking).
I think the people with the best chance to be happy are content and secure with their social status. In other words, they aren’t actively trying to climb higher socially and they don’t have to put much effort into maintaining their current social status. The point is that they aren’t putting much effort into social dynamics and focus most of their energy on other stuff.
I too am intellectual aware of that but don’t intuitively feel it. I also refuse to care and have publicly associated my real name with lower status stuff than PUA. I have gotten repeated feedback (sometimes quite strongly worded) about how my PUA ideas alienate people, including from a few long time fans, but I haven’t stopped talking about it.
[Edit for clarity: I mostly mean hostile feedback from alienated people, not feedback from people worrying I’ll alienate others.]
I’d be happy to have you at my discussion forums. My community started in 1994, (not entirely) coincidentally the same year as alt.seduction.fast. The community is fairly oriented around the work of David Deutsch (the previous community leader and my mentor) and myself, as well as other thinkers that Deutsch or I like. A broad variety of topics are welcome (~anything that rationality can be applied to).
You made a lot of good points.
As I said, my main problem is lack of practice, not theory. I will skim your forum, but probably that’s it. Too bad geography doesn’t allow the option of hanging out together, debating theory and practicing it.
There is also a book called The Passion Paradox; is there a chance you have read both and confused them? (Or maybe existence of another book with the same name was the reason for renaming.)
Speaking of PUA celebrities, Neil Strauss (approximately my age) is divorced after having one child. I have a happy family with two kids. Of course, different people optimize for different things, and sex is mostly not used for reproduction, but it still feels weird when I am more successful in family life and reproductively than a famous expert on sex and relationships. I mean, the main reason I became interested in PUA decades ago was fear that I might not be able to… well, have the type of life I have now… and somehow Neil Strauss, the famous PUA, does not (despite having many great skills that I don’t have). This is related to the “overestimating the greener grass on the other side”. I guess my only remaining hero is Athol Kay.
But of course there are also other reasons to expand social skills, such as increasing my income, or increasing my impact on the world.
Thanks for the debate!
I read the older, now-renamed book that I linked. The newer one has different authors. I saw it when searching and confirmed the right author for the one I read by searching old emails.