My view of PUA is distinctly different from yours. It is a much less happy view.
Disclaimer: I’m an ex-PUA; I spent a few years in the game and quit after finding my current 4 year LTR. (nb I use PUA as a catchall abbreviation for both PUA and PU.)
1. Their objections are legitimate PUA at it’s core is a training regime to learn the martial art of social interaction backed up by 10,000 hours of practice. Just like in martial arts, a guy who’s studied for a couple years will beat the shit out of someone who’s never practiced. You might not win every argument / get every girl / impress every person, but you’ll do way better than you should for your weight class.
The people I’ve talked to re: PUA don’t have this nebulous fear of loss of power. They’re afraid of you personally having a metaphorical loaded gun with you at all times, that you’re free to use whenever you want, and there’s no consequence when you use it. That’s scary.
They also don’t want other people going out and getting these social guns, even if it’s a dominant strategy, because a future where everyone employs them is not a future they want to live in. I don’t think their objections are disingenuous at all.
2. PUAs have a demeaning as hell view of women We do. Women are just female apes who respond to super-stimulus that PUAs learn to generate. To be fair, this is literally no different than saying that men are just male apes who respond to super-stimulus that women wear/use. Or that consumers are just apes-with-paper who respond to properly designed pitches. I should note that it’s culturally acceptable to demean against men (or consumers in general) and not women, so that’s why people are surprised by it.
Make no mistake though, it is a demeaning viewpoint. Just because it’s ‘equal’ or ‘correct’ doesn’t mean it can’t be demeaning too.
3. PUA isn’t just a skillset or activity. From HPMOR:
Father had warned Draco over and over that what you sacrificed to Dark rituals couldn’t be regained. But Father hadn’t known that the accursed Muggles had invented rituals that didn’t need wands, rituals you could be tricked into doing without knowing it...
PUA changes you permanently, and not in a way that everyone is comfortable with. I’ve been four years out of the game and I still walk into a room and identify every group, every alpha, every girl that’s DTF, and all the social bonds between them. I may get rustier and rustier with time in identifying IOIs, or how to push-pull, or neg, or any of those mechanical tricks, but I will never forget the models of human interaction that I learned. I will never look at any conversation between two people simply as ‘a conversation’, probably ever again for the rest of my life. I’ll also probably never be completely content or complacent in a relationship again either.
I’m comfortable with that. I’m a rationalist. I’m here because I care more about knowing the truth of things than being happy. Not everyone is like that… heck, most people aren’t like that. It does them (and PUA) a disservice to imply that PUA is simply a tool that you pick up and use.
It changes you and not everyone is ready or okay with that change. Worst of all, most guys don’t know that there will be a sacrifice, and some are unaware of their sacrifice even after it’s been made. (And hell, KJ’s partially make that sacrifice and they don’t even get anything out of it.)
4. As for my view on PUA... PUA is the dark arts. It’s literally everything LessWrong users refer to when we use the term dark arts. It’s all the worst parts of marketing, high pressure sales, magic tricks, and scams rolled into one very potent ball, and perpetually refined by extremely motivated men. There are professional athletes who don’t practice their sport as much as some PUAs practice their own ‘sport’. They don’t do it out of altruism; they do it because it’s thrilling to hunt.
Yeah, you can just use it to be an awesome attractive guy, and I did do that too. But I also did a lot of things I’m not proud of. Scratch that, I did a lot of things I’m totally proud of but I shouldn’t be. PUA is everything that detractors say it is. It is evil, misogynistic, dirty, skeezy, insulting, etc., etc., etc..
On the other hand, Paul Graham has a quote:
If a statement is false, that’s the worst thing you can say about it.
It doesn’t matter if PUA is evil. Or if PUA is insulting. Or if PUA is misogynistic. Or if PUA is dangerous. Because the only thing that matters is that PUA is true. It works. It exists.
I’m going to employ the most effective strategies I can, and when I have kids I’ll teach them too. I will use whatever wins, but I’m under no illusion about the morality of my tactics.
There is no need to sugar coat it so others will find it acceptable. PUA is what it is.
“PU technique works” does not imply “PU theory is true”.
(That statement should not be construed as an argument for PU theory not being true either, by the way)
The people I’ve talked to re: PUA don’t have this nebulous fear of loss of power. They’re afraid of you personally having a metaphorical loaded gun with you at all times, that you’re free to use whenever you want, and there’s no consequence when you use it. That’s scary.
I think that’s really close but not quite on the mark
It’s a memetic hazard of sorts. It presents a set of ideas which are true and encourage one set of behavior, while ignoring a second set of ideas which are also true and, if known, would modulate the first set of behaviors.
By analogy—“The Bell Curve” shows the reader (presumably) true data about population level differences in intelligence. It doesn’t discuss the biological factors that go into creating intelligence. It doesn’t show you the studies which more or less prove that the intelligence differences aren’t genetic (no fault to the author—those studies were published several years later). It presents half the truth, and human biases fill in the blank spaces to conclude that some races are genetically superior.
Racialists took the book and other studies like it, and have decided that obviously racial differences in intelligence exist, and everyone else is deluding themselves.
Technically, they are right—racial differences in intelligence do exist—but we now have good evidence that the differences are not genetic in nature, which really undermines the flavor of “The Bell Curve” even while not proving it “wrong” per se. This is a scenario where a little knowledge was harmful, and the grain of truth it contained made it all the more seductive.
Similarly—PU theory is “true” in the sense that it captures some useful truths about human behavior, and those grains of truth make it seductive. But it’s dangerous because it doesn’t tell the full story and it encourages human biases to fill in the blank spaces in a bad way.
The cynicism that many PUA’s express is a symptom of the incomplete knowledge. Assuming your relationship goals are at least somewhat aligned to mine (creating mutually fulfilling interactions), if you knew the full story, you wouldn’t even want to use the “dark” techniques within PUA.
Although really, my main objection is that “dark” techniques can cause direct harm to the target. The above concerns about indirect hazards to the user is just a secondary objection.
EDIT: retraction on the race statements. Gwern has convinced me that it is still an open question. The analogy I intended still stands.
We may be talking across from each other by using different terms.
To me PUA is one very simply algorithm: attempt pickup → analyze if it worked → improve pickup routine → goto start. PUA is the treating of relationships and dating as if it was a science or skillset instead of an interaction with individual human being. That’s all there is to PUA. It’s nothing but a learning algorithm used by a human and backed up by the data you collect.
The statement that “PUA is true” means that humans can be modeled in relationships the same way that humans can be modeled economically for economics to be true. The statment “PUA works” means that this algorithm will get you success and it will give you increasing probabilities of success per attempt.
There are some universally adopted techniques and a couple of common models, but that’s to be expected when you’ve got thousands of people all doing the exact same thing repeatedly. In general, I’d say the vast majority of those models and techniques are accurate and efficacious. If you have specific objections to PUA half truths, feel free to throw them out. Saying that PUA is nothing but half truths feels as general as saying that economics is nothing but half truths because it can’t model economic agents perfectly. I need specifics.
As for “dark” techniques, I have no idea to what you refer. The darkness I was talking about in PUA is the the danger of dehumanizing others and treating women as commodities. You stop looking at women as a person and start looking at them as potential lay #32. There are no dark techniques that cause harm to the target; they’re harmed because you have a one night stand and then never call them again (as their best case scenario). The darkness isn’t a side effect; it’s the direct effect. Achieving your goal by any other technique wouldn’t spare them the pain.
It doesn’t show you the studies which more or less prove that the intelligence differences aren’t genetic (no fault to the author—those studies were published several years later).
African Americans are almost all mixed race, so it is possible to look at black IQ as a function of European heritage rather than social white-black categorization. There have been several such studies done, and most of them are finding no significant correlation. Percent of European heritage can be measured via direct genetic methods, via a proxy such as blood groups, or via a family history questionnaire.
What does make a difference in intelligence in socially biracial children is the social racial category of the mother—indicating to me that after you correct for socioeconomic factors much the difference is mostly due to maternal factors in the womb. Unhealthy mothers give birth to low-IQ babies, and this can carry over generations.
Their is also a weak correlation with skin color. I think the fact that outward indicators of ancestry like skin color seem to matter, whereas invisible indicators like alleles and blood type do not matter much clearly points to the “racism” hypothesis.
Here is a review of literature book to get you started if you want to research this yoruself. The preview is free. Begin on page 89, under “Studies that directly Assess Heritability”
I’m going to start a blog this summer and go over this in more detail later. I’ll send a link your way when I do.
There have been several such studies done, and most of them are finding no significant correlation. Percent of European heritage can be measured via direct genetic methods, via a proxy such as blood groups, or via a family history questionnaire.
I was under the impression that no direct genetic measures had been done and that Murray’s attempt to organize such a study had failed to find any support.
Here is a review of literature book to get you started if you want to research this yoruself. The preview is free. Begin on page 89, under “Studies that directly Assess Heritability”
I’m troubled that this is from 1998, drawing on even earlier research; this is prehistoric in terms of direct genetic work. I’m also troubled that the relevant chapter is written by Nisbett, who lost a great deal of credibility with me by endorsing a flagrantly misleading summary of dual n-back research (which of course fit his environmentalist meliorist leanings...). Regardless, in Nisbett’s summary they all sound quite questionable (and elsewhere too), not all positive for the pure environmentalist position, and nothing like what a modern study using sequencing or at least SNPs ought to be able to do.
So to go back to your original comment:
It doesn’t show you the studies which more or less prove that the intelligence differences aren’t genetic (no fault to the author—those studies were published several years later).
I don’t think those studies come anywhere near ‘proving’ anything; and almost everything cited was published before 1994, as a read through your specified chapter and its bibliography shows, so your claim about timing doesn’t seem to be true either.
To be honest I just linked the first review of lit I found, since he mentioned many of the experiments I had on mind. Most of what I said was cached from research I did back in high school, when I took an interest in this question. I was having trouble locating the original articles—I know they are out there because I read them several years ago—so I had to link the review.
Still… You aren’t convinced by the finding that black GIs and white GIs children with white British women had no significant iq gap? It seems you’ve read everything I have on the topic, and the fact that you aren’t convinced by that is making me wonder if I’m missing something...what’s the alternative explanation?
If memory serves, that’s really the one that first convinced me of the environmental conclusion—prior to reading that I was actually slowly edging towards the genetic conclusion, but after reading that I settled on mostly maternal factors in the womb. The only caveat to the GI study is that GI’s need to be above a certain IQ to serve—but unless that threshold was set rather high, I don’t think it would have eliminated the gap.
Still… You aren’t convinced by the finding that black GIs and white GIs children with white British women had no significant iq gap?
You mean the much-debated Eyferth German study?
Well, I’ll put it this way: I’ll agree to believe that that finding proves that the black-white IQ gap has nothing to do with genetics, if you’ll agree to believe that it proves women are genetically inferior to men.
It’s an adoption study, but that wasn’t what mattered—what mattered was that the mixed race children and the black children raised in white families didn’t show a significant difference.
Also, this—http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289602000806
They found no black-white verbal differences for completely novel words, but significant differences for tasks which require prior word knowledge. Prior knowledge did, however, predict performance within racial groups.
I don’t know about that last one, so I’ll just make a general comment here since you seem to be planning to spend more time on this:
The IQ wars are a rabbit hole you can easily dive down. The literature is vast, spans all sorts of groups, all sorts of designs, from test validities to sampling to statistical regression vs causal inference to forms of bias; every point is hotly debated, the ways in which studies can be validly critiqued are an education in how to read papers and look for how they are weak or make jumps or some of the data just looks wrong, and you’ll learn every technical requirement and premise and methodological limitation because the opponents of that particular result will be sure to bring them up if it’ll at all help their case.
In this respect, it’s a lot like the feuds in biblical criticism over issues like whether Jesus existed, or the long philosophical debate over whether God exists. Similarly there’s an incredible amount of material to cover, by some really smart people (what did geeks do before science and modernity? well, for the most part, they seem to have done theology; consider how much time and effort Newton reportedly spent on alchemy and his own Biblical studies, or the sheer brainpower that must’ve been spent over the centuries in rabbinical studies). You could learn a lot about the ancient world or the incredibly complex chain of transmission of the Bible’s constituents in their endless varieties and how they are put together into a single canonical modern text, or the other countless issues of textual criticism. An awful lot indeed. One could, and people as smart or smarter than you have, lose one’s life in exploring little back-alleys and details.
In other words, these can become forms of nerd sniping.
But having said that, and admiring things like Plantinga’s free will defense, and the subtle logical issues in formulating it and the lack of any really concrete evidence for or against Jesus’s existence, do I take the basic question of God seriously? No. The theists’ rearguard attempts and ever more ingenious explanations and indirect pathways of reasons and touted miracles fundamentally do not add up to an existing whole. The universe does not look anything like a omni- god was involved, a great deal of determined effort has failed to provide any convincing proof, there not being a god is consistent with all the observed processes and animal kingdom and natural events and material world we see, and so on. The persistence of the debate reflects more what motivated cognition can accomplish and the weakness of existing epistemology and debate. No matter how tempting it is to think that you may be able to finally put together the compelling refutation of God’s existence or to demonstrate that Jesus’s divinity was a late addition to his gospel, you won’t make a dent in the debate.
So you should know in advance whether you want to take the red pill and see how far down the rabbit hole you go before you finally give up, or you take the blue pill and be an onlooker as you settle for a high-level overview of the more interesting papers and issues and accept that you will only have that and a general indefensible assessment of the state of play.
My own belief is that as interesting as it is, you should take the blue pill and not adopt any strong position but perhaps (if it doesn’t take too much time) point out the holes of any particularly bad or naive person, the kind who are simply wrong or don’t realize how little they know or how slanted a view they have received from the material they’ve read.
The reason is this: yes, Murray failed to organize the admixture genetic study. It hasn’t happened yet even though it’s far more important than most of the stuff that gets studied in population genetics. I don’t need to explain why this would be the case even if people on the environmentalist side of the IQ wars were confident they were right. But at some point, some researcher will manage it, some group inside or outside the USA will fund it, at some point a large enough genetic database will be cross-referenced against IQ tests and existing racial markers. I don’t know if it’ll be this year, or by 2020, although I would be surprised if there was still nothing by 2030, but it will happen and it will happen relatively soon (for a debate going on for the past century or more). Genome sequencing is simply going to be too cheap for it to not happen. Given this, there’s no reason to invest your life in the topic. It has no practical ramifications for you, and on the intellectual level, no matter how much you read, you’ll always have nagging doubts, so you might as well just wait patiently for the inevitable final word.
The principle in this comment (How to look for things that really are not worth thinking about too much because it is just not worth it) seems universal enough, to be worth a discussion post on its own.
Not really. The many positive correlations of IQ exist regardless of one’s opinions on the exact causes of things like the black-white IQ gap, and those can justify the choice.
If it’s heritable through non-genetic factors, like womb environment (or more unusual genetics like epigenetics), then you could still seek out an intelligent mate to have kids with under the logic that you’ll then have more intelligent kids. Or if it was not heritable, you might do so anyway because you’ll be more compatible with them, or they’ll be more competent at raising kids, or they’ll earn more in the long-run etc.
Or if it was not heritable, you might do so anyway because you’ll be more compatible with them, or they’ll be more competent at raising kids, or they’ll earn more in the long-run etc.
Yes, but it would in principle be a less important factor than if it was heritable. (But the difference is likely so small as to be very unlikely to matter in practice, hence the smiley at the end of my comment.)
Yes, but it would in principle be a less important factor than if it was heritable.
I’m not sure about that. We already observe the correlations and consequences of IQ. They need an explanation, but what needs an explanation is already known; a choice of explanation doesn’t retroactively change the observations to be of a smaller or lesser magnitude, does it? (If Mercury is observed to be 1 degree off predicted by Newton, and we finally choose relativity’s space warping as the explanation, we don’t then go back and say ‘we chose relativity therefore now we know the observations was actually 5 degrees off our predictions!’ The fact remained the same, Mercury didn’t move; it all adds up to normality.) We can say exactly that if your parents have IQ of X points the kid will average complicated-formula IQ points. If the causal factor runs through epigenetics rather than genetics, say, what does that actually change? Since we’re not discussing an exotic intervention with tailored epigenetic viruses or trying out prototype artificial wombs which might affect the actual causal pathway, just picking a mate where whichever causal pathway it is, it is active.
(I spent yesterday watching PGM videos so I’m wondering how to formulate this as a Bayesian network and d-separation problem… Hm.)
Pretty much. This falls out of the heritability research. One parent with IQ X, another with IQ Y, a known heritability of Z%, keep the environment constant, and some formulas later you have your probability distribution for the kid’s IQ.
I currently believe that “there is insufficient evidence to show that the differences are genetic” but as you can probably tell from my unintentional misuse of the word “prove”, I also currently “alieve” the positive claim that “the differences aren’t genetic”. Said alief has decreased, since you just falsified some of the studies on which it was pinned and have clearly gone further down this rabbit hole than I.
If you remove the word “prove” from the original statement though—I still do think that people who make the positive claim that the differences are genetic with high confidence are overlooking a lot of important findings.
Given this, there’s no reason to invest your life in the topic.
Well, I want to start a blog which talks about philosophy and science-y stuff that I happen to know in a fun, informative, and well cited way—more or less similar to the kind of thing you’ve got going. I already spend a lot of time researching things that have no impact on my life because it’s fun, and I might as well find a way to make something productive out of it.
This topic is one of the topics i know more than the average person about, and my plan was to collate the stuff I’d already read in high school and make a summary of it. Relatively speaking, I’m not really that interested in this topic anymore, although people on lw expressing strong opinions on the matter has made me ponder it again.
I first took an interest in this topic in high school because I used to enjoy knocking down people’s arguments using evidence, and this happened to be one of my targets (not to worry—I don’t do that anymore. I’m three whole years wiser now and my prefrontal cortex is growing as we speak!). Also, I am a racial minority, which added to the intrigue slightly—not that the data have any effect on me personally, but when I was younger I felt a bit more group affiliation than I do now.
Edit: By the way, you probably know this, but the asian model minority effects apply to african immigrants too. Just thought I’d mention that because you mention asian model minorities influencing you on your link.
(Sociology was my larger interest—the interest in racial differences appeared as a smaller subcomponent, as a possible explanatory factor for sociological trends. I’ve since concluded that even if racial differences exist, they aren’t necessary to explain the trends.)
Well, I want to start a blog which talks about philosophy and science-y stuff that I happen to know in a fun, informative, and well cited way—more or less similar to the kind of thing you’ve got going. I already spend a lot of time researching things that have no impact on my life because it’s fun, and I might as well find a way to make something productive out of it. This topic is one of the topics i know more than the average person about, and my plan was to collate the stuff I’d already read in high school and make a summary of it. Relatively speaking, I’m not really that interested in this topic anymore, although people on lw expressing strong opinions on the matter has made me ponder it again.
Yes, but are you sure you really want to discuss it in any detail? I hope you don’t take this as too insulting, but I think my comments have pointed out that you don’t have a great command of the IQ literature; if you try to discuss it, you may embarrass yourself when someone refutes you—or much worse, leave your readers with the impression they understand the subject better than they do. (Think of all the people who read Gould’s Mismeasure of Man or Shalizi’s “g, a Statistical Myth” and went away convinced that now they understand the topic, g has been debunked by an expert, and probably anyone who brings it up is either sadly ignorant or some sort of a racist/fascist/eugenicist.)
Edit: By the way, you probably know this, but the asian model minority effects apply to african immigrants too. Just thought I’d mention that because you mention asian model minorities influencing you on your link.
I knew that African immigrants had high IQs but as far as I had read that was a selection effect; I hadn’t heard anything about their subsequent success or failure (either in the rest of their lives or of their descendants). It would be interesting if they did as well as East Asian immigrants.
I’m not insulted because I do see that the concern is coming from a good place, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to let fear of embarrassment be a factor in my behavior. There is nothing embarrassing about having been wrong about a complex topic—If someone refutes me I can just retract my statements, and I would have learned something in the process, which would be a gain. If I was concerned about the social costs of being wrong, I’d never say anything...plus, being concerned about the social consts of being wrong tends to make a person unwilling to admit when it has happened, which is yet worse.
As for the second concern...that’s a valid one. However, I wouldn’t generalize too much from offhand comments I’ve made in an online forum on a thread discussing a completely tangential topic (PUA). On a forum, I feel relatively free to make uncited claims and to write things without putting too much thought into them—it’s just a fun activity, and something I have to actively avoid sinking time into. If this thread was specifically about race and IQ, or if I was making a new post, I might have been more careful, but with the setting as it is I considered this a casual side conversation between us rather than a platform in which I’m responsible for people’s learning. If I was writing with the purpose of informing someone (rather than having an entertaining discussion, as we are now) I would be much more scrupulous about what I write. Of course, you have no reason to believe that this is true, so you are still correct to caution me about misleading people.
I knew that African immigrants had high IQs but as far as I had read that was a selection effect;
It is due to a selection effect. But the same applies to any group of immigrants, so there is no reason to be particularly impressed by asian “model minorities”—they are “model” because they are immigrants. I think the general trend for descendants is that the second generation is the most highly educated, and then there is a steady downwards trend for all immigrant groups except European immigrants.
If you want to look at immigrants who have not undergone selection effects, look at refugees. Asian immigrants from Laos, Cambodia, etc… end up with an even worse socioeconomic lot than US-born African Americans.
There is nothing embarrassing about having been wrong about a complex topic—If someone refutes me I can just retract my statements, and I would have learned something in the process, which would be a gain. If I was concerned about the social costs of being wrong, I’d never say anything...plus, being concerned about the social consts of being wrong tends to make a person unwilling to admit when it has happened, which is yet worse.
Right; there’s issues of confirmation bias, justification bias, and so on. I’m also interested in the possible backfire effect in which weak contrary arguments ‘backfire’ as one then becomes even more convinced of one’s position because one has knocked down the criticism (and what sort of comments would one get on inflammatory topics on one’s blog? generally from uninformed people...)
But the same applies to any group of immigrants, so there is no reason to be particularly impressed by asian “model minorities”—they are “model” because they are immigrants.
I’m more impressed by their greater success in what is, as far as I know, later generations.
My view of PUA is distinctly different from yours. It is a much less happy view. Disclaimer: I’m an ex-PUA; I spent a few years in the game and quit after finding my current 4 year LTR. (nb I use PUA as a catchall abbreviation for both PUA and PU.)
1. Their objections are legitimate
PUA at it’s core is a training regime to learn the martial art of social interaction backed up by 10,000 hours of practice. Just like in martial arts, a guy who’s studied for a couple years will beat the shit out of someone who’s never practiced. You might not win every argument / get every girl / impress every person, but you’ll do way better than you should for your weight class.
The people I’ve talked to re: PUA don’t have this nebulous fear of loss of power. They’re afraid of you personally having a metaphorical loaded gun with you at all times, that you’re free to use whenever you want, and there’s no consequence when you use it. That’s scary.
They also don’t want other people going out and getting these social guns, even if it’s a dominant strategy, because a future where everyone employs them is not a future they want to live in. I don’t think their objections are disingenuous at all.
2. PUAs have a demeaning as hell view of women
We do. Women are just female apes who respond to super-stimulus that PUAs learn to generate. To be fair, this is literally no different than saying that men are just male apes who respond to super-stimulus that women wear/use. Or that consumers are just apes-with-paper who respond to properly designed pitches. I should note that it’s culturally acceptable to demean against men (or consumers in general) and not women, so that’s why people are surprised by it.
Make no mistake though, it is a demeaning viewpoint. Just because it’s ‘equal’ or ‘correct’ doesn’t mean it can’t be demeaning too.
3. PUA isn’t just a skillset or activity.
From HPMOR:
PUA changes you permanently, and not in a way that everyone is comfortable with. I’ve been four years out of the game and I still walk into a room and identify every group, every alpha, every girl that’s DTF, and all the social bonds between them. I may get rustier and rustier with time in identifying IOIs, or how to push-pull, or neg, or any of those mechanical tricks, but I will never forget the models of human interaction that I learned. I will never look at any conversation between two people simply as ‘a conversation’, probably ever again for the rest of my life. I’ll also probably never be completely content or complacent in a relationship again either.
I’m comfortable with that. I’m a rationalist. I’m here because I care more about knowing the truth of things than being happy. Not everyone is like that… heck, most people aren’t like that. It does them (and PUA) a disservice to imply that PUA is simply a tool that you pick up and use.
It changes you and not everyone is ready or okay with that change. Worst of all, most guys don’t know that there will be a sacrifice, and some are unaware of their sacrifice even after it’s been made. (And hell, KJ’s partially make that sacrifice and they don’t even get anything out of it.)
4. As for my view on PUA...
PUA is the dark arts. It’s literally everything LessWrong users refer to when we use the term dark arts. It’s all the worst parts of marketing, high pressure sales, magic tricks, and scams rolled into one very potent ball, and perpetually refined by extremely motivated men. There are professional athletes who don’t practice their sport as much as some PUAs practice their own ‘sport’. They don’t do it out of altruism; they do it because it’s thrilling to hunt.
Yeah, you can just use it to be an awesome attractive guy, and I did do that too. But I also did a lot of things I’m not proud of. Scratch that, I did a lot of things I’m totally proud of but I shouldn’t be. PUA is everything that detractors say it is. It is evil, misogynistic, dirty, skeezy, insulting, etc., etc., etc..
On the other hand, Paul Graham has a quote:
It doesn’t matter if PUA is evil. Or if PUA is insulting. Or if PUA is misogynistic. Or if PUA is dangerous. Because the only thing that matters is that PUA is true. It works. It exists.
I’m going to employ the most effective strategies I can, and when I have kids I’ll teach them too. I will use whatever wins, but I’m under no illusion about the morality of my tactics.
There is no need to sugar coat it so others will find it acceptable.
PUA is what it is.
“PU technique works” does not imply “PU theory is true”. (That statement should not be construed as an argument for PU theory not being true either, by the way)
I think that’s really close but not quite on the mark
It’s a memetic hazard of sorts. It presents a set of ideas which are true and encourage one set of behavior, while ignoring a second set of ideas which are also true and, if known, would modulate the first set of behaviors.
By analogy—“The Bell Curve” shows the reader (presumably) true data about population level differences in intelligence. It doesn’t discuss the biological factors that go into creating intelligence. It doesn’t show you the studies which more or less prove that the intelligence differences aren’t genetic (no fault to the author—those studies were published several years later). It presents half the truth, and human biases fill in the blank spaces to conclude that some races are genetically superior.
Racialists took the book and other studies like it, and have decided that obviously racial differences in intelligence exist, and everyone else is deluding themselves.
Technically, they are right—racial differences in intelligence do exist—but we now have good evidence that the differences are not genetic in nature, which really undermines the flavor of “The Bell Curve” even while not proving it “wrong” per se. This is a scenario where a little knowledge was harmful, and the grain of truth it contained made it all the more seductive.
Similarly—PU theory is “true” in the sense that it captures some useful truths about human behavior, and those grains of truth make it seductive. But it’s dangerous because it doesn’t tell the full story and it encourages human biases to fill in the blank spaces in a bad way.
The cynicism that many PUA’s express is a symptom of the incomplete knowledge. Assuming your relationship goals are at least somewhat aligned to mine (creating mutually fulfilling interactions), if you knew the full story, you wouldn’t even want to use the “dark” techniques within PUA.
Although really, my main objection is that “dark” techniques can cause direct harm to the target. The above concerns about indirect hazards to the user is just a secondary objection.
EDIT: retraction on the race statements. Gwern has convinced me that it is still an open question. The analogy I intended still stands.
We may be talking across from each other by using different terms.
To me PUA is one very simply algorithm: attempt pickup → analyze if it worked → improve pickup routine → goto start. PUA is the treating of relationships and dating as if it was a science or skillset instead of an interaction with individual human being. That’s all there is to PUA. It’s nothing but a learning algorithm used by a human and backed up by the data you collect.
The statement that “PUA is true” means that humans can be modeled in relationships the same way that humans can be modeled economically for economics to be true. The statment “PUA works” means that this algorithm will get you success and it will give you increasing probabilities of success per attempt.
There are some universally adopted techniques and a couple of common models, but that’s to be expected when you’ve got thousands of people all doing the exact same thing repeatedly. In general, I’d say the vast majority of those models and techniques are accurate and efficacious. If you have specific objections to PUA half truths, feel free to throw them out. Saying that PUA is nothing but half truths feels as general as saying that economics is nothing but half truths because it can’t model economic agents perfectly. I need specifics.
As for “dark” techniques, I have no idea to what you refer. The darkness I was talking about in PUA is the the danger of dehumanizing others and treating women as commodities. You stop looking at women as a person and start looking at them as potential lay #32. There are no dark techniques that cause harm to the target; they’re harmed because you have a one night stand and then never call them again (as their best case scenario). The darkness isn’t a side effect; it’s the direct effect. Achieving your goal by any other technique wouldn’t spare them the pain.
You’re right. I’m referring to PUA as in this memeplex
That’s a list of lingo the people who do that use. I’m missing your objections, unless you just hate lingo.
It’s the conclusions that people draw,as opposed to the general experimental method that you outlined
What studies are those?
African Americans are almost all mixed race, so it is possible to look at black IQ as a function of European heritage rather than social white-black categorization. There have been several such studies done, and most of them are finding no significant correlation. Percent of European heritage can be measured via direct genetic methods, via a proxy such as blood groups, or via a family history questionnaire.
What does make a difference in intelligence in socially biracial children is the social racial category of the mother—indicating to me that after you correct for socioeconomic factors much the difference is mostly due to maternal factors in the womb. Unhealthy mothers give birth to low-IQ babies, and this can carry over generations.
Their is also a weak correlation with skin color. I think the fact that outward indicators of ancestry like skin color seem to matter, whereas invisible indicators like alleles and blood type do not matter much clearly points to the “racism” hypothesis.
Here is a review of literature book to get you started if you want to research this yoruself. The preview is free. Begin on page 89, under “Studies that directly Assess Heritability”
I’m going to start a blog this summer and go over this in more detail later. I’ll send a link your way when I do.
I was under the impression that no direct genetic measures had been done and that Murray’s attempt to organize such a study had failed to find any support.
I’m troubled that this is from 1998, drawing on even earlier research; this is prehistoric in terms of direct genetic work. I’m also troubled that the relevant chapter is written by Nisbett, who lost a great deal of credibility with me by endorsing a flagrantly misleading summary of dual n-back research (which of course fit his environmentalist meliorist leanings...). Regardless, in Nisbett’s summary they all sound quite questionable (and elsewhere too), not all positive for the pure environmentalist position, and nothing like what a modern study using sequencing or at least SNPs ought to be able to do.
So to go back to your original comment:
I don’t think those studies come anywhere near ‘proving’ anything; and almost everything cited was published before 1994, as a read through your specified chapter and its bibliography shows, so your claim about timing doesn’t seem to be true either.
To be honest I just linked the first review of lit I found, since he mentioned many of the experiments I had on mind. Most of what I said was cached from research I did back in high school, when I took an interest in this question. I was having trouble locating the original articles—I know they are out there because I read them several years ago—so I had to link the review.
Still… You aren’t convinced by the finding that black GIs and white GIs children with white British women had no significant iq gap? It seems you’ve read everything I have on the topic, and the fact that you aren’t convinced by that is making me wonder if I’m missing something...what’s the alternative explanation?
If memory serves, that’s really the one that first convinced me of the environmental conclusion—prior to reading that I was actually slowly edging towards the genetic conclusion, but after reading that I settled on mostly maternal factors in the womb. The only caveat to the GI study is that GI’s need to be above a certain IQ to serve—but unless that threshold was set rather high, I don’t think it would have eliminated the gap.
You mean the much-debated Eyferth German study?
Well, I’ll put it this way: I’ll agree to believe that that finding proves that the black-white IQ gap has nothing to do with genetics, if you’ll agree to believe that it proves women are genetically inferior to men.
I see… I’ve retracted my statement, then—i was too confident, now I’m unsure again.
This article played a role in convincing me as well -
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ339204&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ339204
It’s an adoption study, but that wasn’t what mattered—what mattered was that the mixed race children and the black children raised in white families didn’t show a significant difference.
Also, this—http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289602000806 They found no black-white verbal differences for completely novel words, but significant differences for tasks which require prior word knowledge. Prior knowledge did, however, predict performance within racial groups.
comments?
I don’t know about that last one, so I’ll just make a general comment here since you seem to be planning to spend more time on this:
The IQ wars are a rabbit hole you can easily dive down. The literature is vast, spans all sorts of groups, all sorts of designs, from test validities to sampling to statistical regression vs causal inference to forms of bias; every point is hotly debated, the ways in which studies can be validly critiqued are an education in how to read papers and look for how they are weak or make jumps or some of the data just looks wrong, and you’ll learn every technical requirement and premise and methodological limitation because the opponents of that particular result will be sure to bring them up if it’ll at all help their case.
In this respect, it’s a lot like the feuds in biblical criticism over issues like whether Jesus existed, or the long philosophical debate over whether God exists. Similarly there’s an incredible amount of material to cover, by some really smart people (what did geeks do before science and modernity? well, for the most part, they seem to have done theology; consider how much time and effort Newton reportedly spent on alchemy and his own Biblical studies, or the sheer brainpower that must’ve been spent over the centuries in rabbinical studies). You could learn a lot about the ancient world or the incredibly complex chain of transmission of the Bible’s constituents in their endless varieties and how they are put together into a single canonical modern text, or the other countless issues of textual criticism. An awful lot indeed. One could, and people as smart or smarter than you have, lose one’s life in exploring little back-alleys and details.
In other words, these can become forms of nerd sniping.
But having said that, and admiring things like Plantinga’s free will defense, and the subtle logical issues in formulating it and the lack of any really concrete evidence for or against Jesus’s existence, do I take the basic question of God seriously? No. The theists’ rearguard attempts and ever more ingenious explanations and indirect pathways of reasons and touted miracles fundamentally do not add up to an existing whole. The universe does not look anything like a omni- god was involved, a great deal of determined effort has failed to provide any convincing proof, there not being a god is consistent with all the observed processes and animal kingdom and natural events and material world we see, and so on. The persistence of the debate reflects more what motivated cognition can accomplish and the weakness of existing epistemology and debate. No matter how tempting it is to think that you may be able to finally put together the compelling refutation of God’s existence or to demonstrate that Jesus’s divinity was a late addition to his gospel, you won’t make a dent in the debate.
So you should know in advance whether you want to take the red pill and see how far down the rabbit hole you go before you finally give up, or you take the blue pill and be an onlooker as you settle for a high-level overview of the more interesting papers and issues and accept that you will only have that and a general indefensible assessment of the state of play.
My own belief is that as interesting as it is, you should take the blue pill and not adopt any strong position but perhaps (if it doesn’t take too much time) point out the holes of any particularly bad or naive person, the kind who are simply wrong or don’t realize how little they know or how slanted a view they have received from the material they’ve read.
The reason is this: yes, Murray failed to organize the admixture genetic study. It hasn’t happened yet even though it’s far more important than most of the stuff that gets studied in population genetics. I don’t need to explain why this would be the case even if people on the environmentalist side of the IQ wars were confident they were right. But at some point, some researcher will manage it, some group inside or outside the USA will fund it, at some point a large enough genetic database will be cross-referenced against IQ tests and existing racial markers. I don’t know if it’ll be this year, or by 2020, although I would be surprised if there was still nothing by 2030, but it will happen and it will happen relatively soon (for a debate going on for the past century or more). Genome sequencing is simply going to be too cheap for it to not happen. Given this, there’s no reason to invest your life in the topic. It has no practical ramifications for you, and on the intellectual level, no matter how much you read, you’ll always have nagging doubts, so you might as well just wait patiently for the inevitable final word.
The principle in this comment (How to look for things that really are not worth thinking about too much because it is just not worth it) seems universal enough, to be worth a discussion post on its own.
I think it’s probably too obvious to anyone who has read other posts like on value of information.
Well, what about the choice of whom to have children with? :-)
Not really. The many positive correlations of IQ exist regardless of one’s opinions on the exact causes of things like the black-white IQ gap, and those can justify the choice.
If it’s heritable through non-genetic factors, like womb environment (or more unusual genetics like epigenetics), then you could still seek out an intelligent mate to have kids with under the logic that you’ll then have more intelligent kids. Or if it was not heritable, you might do so anyway because you’ll be more compatible with them, or they’ll be more competent at raising kids, or they’ll earn more in the long-run etc.
Yes, but it would in principle be a less important factor than if it was heritable. (But the difference is likely so small as to be very unlikely to matter in practice, hence the smiley at the end of my comment.)
I’m not sure about that. We already observe the correlations and consequences of IQ. They need an explanation, but what needs an explanation is already known; a choice of explanation doesn’t retroactively change the observations to be of a smaller or lesser magnitude, does it? (If Mercury is observed to be 1 degree off predicted by Newton, and we finally choose relativity’s space warping as the explanation, we don’t then go back and say ‘we chose relativity therefore now we know the observations was actually 5 degrees off our predictions!’ The fact remained the same, Mercury didn’t move; it all adds up to normality.) We can say exactly that if your parents have IQ of X points the kid will average complicated-formula IQ points. If the causal factor runs through epigenetics rather than genetics, say, what does that actually change? Since we’re not discussing an exotic intervention with tailored epigenetic viruses or trying out prototype artificial wombs which might affect the actual causal pathway, just picking a mate where whichever causal pathway it is, it is active.
(I spent yesterday watching PGM videos so I’m wondering how to formulate this as a Bayesian network and d-separation problem… Hm.)
Do we?
Pretty much. This falls out of the heritability research. One parent with IQ X, another with IQ Y, a known heritability of Z%, keep the environment constant, and some formulas later you have your probability distribution for the kid’s IQ.
Okay—in that case, I agree that if we already know the value of Z then why exactly it has that value isn’t relevant.
I currently believe that “there is insufficient evidence to show that the differences are genetic” but as you can probably tell from my unintentional misuse of the word “prove”, I also currently “alieve” the positive claim that “the differences aren’t genetic”. Said alief has decreased, since you just falsified some of the studies on which it was pinned and have clearly gone further down this rabbit hole than I.
If you remove the word “prove” from the original statement though—I still do think that people who make the positive claim that the differences are genetic with high confidence are overlooking a lot of important findings.
Well, I want to start a blog which talks about philosophy and science-y stuff that I happen to know in a fun, informative, and well cited way—more or less similar to the kind of thing you’ve got going. I already spend a lot of time researching things that have no impact on my life because it’s fun, and I might as well find a way to make something productive out of it.
This topic is one of the topics i know more than the average person about, and my plan was to collate the stuff I’d already read in high school and make a summary of it. Relatively speaking, I’m not really that interested in this topic anymore, although people on lw expressing strong opinions on the matter has made me ponder it again.
I first took an interest in this topic in high school because I used to enjoy knocking down people’s arguments using evidence, and this happened to be one of my targets (not to worry—I don’t do that anymore. I’m three whole years wiser now and my prefrontal cortex is growing as we speak!). Also, I am a racial minority, which added to the intrigue slightly—not that the data have any effect on me personally, but when I was younger I felt a bit more group affiliation than I do now.
Edit: By the way, you probably know this, but the asian model minority effects apply to african immigrants too. Just thought I’d mention that because you mention asian model minorities influencing you on your link. (Sociology was my larger interest—the interest in racial differences appeared as a smaller subcomponent, as a possible explanatory factor for sociological trends. I’ve since concluded that even if racial differences exist, they aren’t necessary to explain the trends.)
Yes, but are you sure you really want to discuss it in any detail? I hope you don’t take this as too insulting, but I think my comments have pointed out that you don’t have a great command of the IQ literature; if you try to discuss it, you may embarrass yourself when someone refutes you—or much worse, leave your readers with the impression they understand the subject better than they do. (Think of all the people who read Gould’s Mismeasure of Man or Shalizi’s “g, a Statistical Myth” and went away convinced that now they understand the topic, g has been debunked by an expert, and probably anyone who brings it up is either sadly ignorant or some sort of a racist/fascist/eugenicist.)
I knew that African immigrants had high IQs but as far as I had read that was a selection effect; I hadn’t heard anything about their subsequent success or failure (either in the rest of their lives or of their descendants). It would be interesting if they did as well as East Asian immigrants.
I’m not insulted because I do see that the concern is coming from a good place, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to let fear of embarrassment be a factor in my behavior. There is nothing embarrassing about having been wrong about a complex topic—If someone refutes me I can just retract my statements, and I would have learned something in the process, which would be a gain. If I was concerned about the social costs of being wrong, I’d never say anything...plus, being concerned about the social consts of being wrong tends to make a person unwilling to admit when it has happened, which is yet worse.
As for the second concern...that’s a valid one. However, I wouldn’t generalize too much from offhand comments I’ve made in an online forum on a thread discussing a completely tangential topic (PUA). On a forum, I feel relatively free to make uncited claims and to write things without putting too much thought into them—it’s just a fun activity, and something I have to actively avoid sinking time into. If this thread was specifically about race and IQ, or if I was making a new post, I might have been more careful, but with the setting as it is I considered this a casual side conversation between us rather than a platform in which I’m responsible for people’s learning. If I was writing with the purpose of informing someone (rather than having an entertaining discussion, as we are now) I would be much more scrupulous about what I write. Of course, you have no reason to believe that this is true, so you are still correct to caution me about misleading people.
It is due to a selection effect. But the same applies to any group of immigrants, so there is no reason to be particularly impressed by asian “model minorities”—they are “model” because they are immigrants. I think the general trend for descendants is that the second generation is the most highly educated, and then there is a steady downwards trend for all immigrant groups except European immigrants.
If you want to look at immigrants who have not undergone selection effects, look at refugees. Asian immigrants from Laos, Cambodia, etc… end up with an even worse socioeconomic lot than US-born African Americans.
This guy talks about stuff like this—http://www.asian-nation.org/immigrant-stats.shtml
Right; there’s issues of confirmation bias, justification bias, and so on. I’m also interested in the possible backfire effect in which weak contrary arguments ‘backfire’ as one then becomes even more convinced of one’s position because one has knocked down the criticism (and what sort of comments would one get on inflammatory topics on one’s blog? generally from uninformed people...)
I’m more impressed by their greater success in what is, as far as I know, later generations.
So does reading about evolutionary psychology. The same is true for certain history books.
No doubt, and I wouldn’t give up my knowledge of either one for the world.
Then again if I lived in a magical world, I’d probably be the guy to do half a dozen dark rituals as soon as I’m given a wand.
You’re seriously going to just tease us and leave it at that? Which history books??
Everything you do changes who you are.
Corollary: Every decision you make is a decision about who you want to be.
Added to my quotes file.