It isn’t creepy, but it’s very impersonal so far as relationships are concerned.
I agree with your perception that a lot of pickup discussion seems impersonal in the sense that it discusses commonalities across large groups of women. Why is this? Is it a “bug” in pickup, or a “feature”? In my view, the answer is “both.”
A lot of knowledge in pickup is about the stages of the interaction that occur before you can really get to know someone on a personal level. You have to make a good enough impression for someone to even want to sit down with you and let you get to know them. As a result, it doesn’t work to build models of people completely on-the-fly from the ground up in the middle of interacting with them.
Until you can get to know someone on a personal level, all you have to work with is an impersonal initial model. You start with a set of priors about how someone works based on what reference classes seem appropriate, and you update your beliefs about how they work when you gain new evidence.
Pickup artists have been doing a lot of work trying to figure out the correct priors to approach women with. As you can see from how AMP differs from what you’ve run into before, there is still some disagreement. The choice of reference classes in the explicit discourse of the seduction community sometimes seems a bit clunky. Often, only one reference class is described: “women.” Also, PUAs don’t explicitly talk much about how to update beliefs about women, and what evidence to look for in order to update.
Yet even though PUAs don’t have the most sophisticated set of reference classes or updating process for their beliefs about women, there are plenty of ideas in the seduction community that relate to those skills. “Eliciting values” was a major part of Ross Jeffries NLP-based seduction starting in the late 80s; it involve drawing out a woman’s individual values and beliefs and using those to interaction with her. There is also the notion of “calibration,” the process of adjusting one’s behavior to the individual woman’s personality and responses (which sounds like it depends on some sorts of updating).
Why don’t PUAs have more sophisticated reference classes? One possibility is that PUAs are stuck in stereotypes about women. Another possibility is that their single reference class of “woman” is actually useful enough to attain maps of commonly-encountered types of women that match up to the territory. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive: it’s possible that a singular PUA reference class of “woman” is just powerful enough to allow them to get improvements in results with mainstream heterosexual women, but still lacking with other sorts of women that PUAs don’t encounter so often.
The model that PUAs hold of women shouldn’t be thought of as a set of facts about all women; it should be thought of as a set of strong priors that PUAs have found useful with the sorts of women they encounter most frequently.
Of course, the more divergent a woman is from other women, the more likely it is that a PUA’s set of priors is wrong. But for women with rarer sets of personality traits and preferences, many PUAs just haven’t seen enough of them to have useful models, yet…
...or have they? PUAs are always talking about the importance of “field experience.” My hypothesis is that one of the reasons that field experience is necessary is that it helps guys approach future women with a more accurate set of priors, and update their beliefs faster when they encounter new evidence. Perhaps experienced PUAs do have more sophisticated reference classes and update very fast, but their knowledge is so contextual and subconscious that they haven’t succeeded in putting it into words yet.
In general, PUAs use a certain set of priors for good reasons. What should our priors about their priors be? Well, we know about the potential for bias and ideology to exist in human communities, which should lower our confidence in PUA priors. On the other hand, we know that pickup is extremely popular and successful worldwide, which should raise our confidence in the priors of PUAs.
Nobody else has suggested a more empirically successful set of starting assumptions than PUAs, or articulated a way to attain better priors through more sophisticated reference classes, so they really have the “priors to beat.” Just like it’s hard to know how good a fighter is until someone beats them, it’s hard to know how good PUA knowledge is until someone beats it and can explicitly describe what they are doing. Currently, it’s safe to say that there are people who have beaten the general PUA model of women with a more sophisticated model and better set of reference classes and update process (and who can articulate their knowledge); yet I bet that most of the people who have done so are PUAs, or have some sort of PUA background (like me, for instance).
And yes, it sucks for non-gender-typical women that the best set of priors that men can achieve fails to describe how those women actually work. But when you think about it, the situation is that both gender-atypical women and PUAs are languishing under the statistical tyranny of gender-typical women. It’s not the fault of PUAs that the set of starting assumptions they need to avoid getting burned all the time forces them to be wrong with all sorts of unusual types of women. Unless we can give them a better method of setting priors, like more sophisticated reference classes, we really can’t knock them for using the priors that seem the most appropriate to them.
What makes it impersonal from my perspective is not their priors, more that doing well at relationships is all about getting women to like you.
People who are bad at relationships are probably also bad at picking the right kind of girl for them. So they might well get into relationships that are damaging financially and emotionally. E.g. don’t pick a clingy woman if you need to be away for long periods of time for work.
What makes it impersonal from my perspective is not their priors, more that doing well at relationships is all about getting women to like you.
Doing well at relationships is about getting people to like you… right? Thinking of how best to fulfill other people’s criteria isn’t always the best way to think about dating from the inside (sometimes it’s better to display what you want and let people come to you); nevertheless, being successful at relationships is about fulfilling the criteria of people you want relationships with. Am I not understanding your post?
being successful at relationships is about fulfilling the criteria of people you want relationships with.
If the “people you want” is the same as the “people that would be good for you” then yes. If you are unskilled in relationships then they are less likely to be the same and it is possible to get into relationships that aren’t good for you. In this case being good at relationships is about knowing how to extract yourself from the situation with minimum drama.
From a casual exposure PUA don’t seem to care much or give advice about long term relationships. But a lot of men do. And the AMP stuff was explictly aimed at people interested in one partner.
At no point in this discussion has anyone specified that we are talking only about relationships that a PUA is interested in.
Oh I know that PUA don’t care about long term relationships.
Yes they do. You are attacking an entire culture of straw.
People who are bad at relationships are probably also bad at picking the right kind of girl for them. So they might well get into relationships that are damaging financially and emotionally. E.g. don’t pick a clingy woman if you need to be away for long periods of time for work.
People practising PUA methods tend to improve their ability to navigate personal relationships in those areas too. It is the sort of thing that is often covered or responded to by trainers and tends to go hand in hand with the concept of ‘inner game’.
Oh I know that PUA don’t care about long term relationships.
Yes they do. You are attacking an entire culture of straw.
Okay that may have been an unfairly broad brush.
It seems to be a tiny fraction of what this forum talks about. And from what I can read it is after the fact questions/advice rather than how to pick the woman with the right personality to start with.
Well, the relationships forum with it’s 9k posts is about a tenth the size of the general questions forum, and about a third the size of the approaching/opening forum.
Yes, there are some cynical ideas about relationships in the community, and there is plenty of support for men who just want to play the field for now. And actually, considering that many men in the seduction community have either very little experience with women or are recovering from a bad breakup, it may be smart to wait a while before jumping into a long-term relationship with the first women who is nice to them. PUAs are interested in relationships, but they want to achieve a skillset so they have choices and don’t feel like they are settling for someone. As soon as PUAs get some skill and choices, they suddenly become a lot more selective. And the fact is that for most men, the space of women they are attracted to is much larger than the space of women who they are also interested in a relationship with.
I think a big reason for the disparity is that men who are learning how to be successful with women spend orders of magnitude more time “stuck” on problems in the early stages of interaction. It’s the same reason that people playing arcade games spend most of their time in the lower levels of the game. (Yes, I did just compare women to an arcade game. But I really do think it’s a good analogy for both men and women dating new partners, because so many processes follow a linear progression. I wonder what level “marriage” is?)
And from what I can read it is after the fact questions/advice rather than how to pick the woman with the right personality to start with.
PUAs do talk about this. It’s called “screening.” The sex guru David Shade notably emphasizes dating women with high self-esteem and methods of testing for it.
Doing a search on mASF pulls up about 800 posts with screening in the title. Here are a few that I found interesting:
Screening is in the category of “things that outsiders don’t think PUAs care about based on their initial impression, but which PUAs actually do talk about have a rich literature on, even if perhaps they should be talking about those topics more or in different ways.”
I think the maximal controvery reduction with minimal hamming distance would be replacing “don’t” with “doesn’t.” The average Pick Up Artist likely cares deeply about the direction of his eventual long term relationship; but Pick Up Artistry is focused on successfully starting relationships to a much greater extent than continuing or ending them.
I agree with your perception that a lot of pickup discussion seems impersonal in the sense that it discusses commonalities across large groups of women. Why is this? Is it a “bug” in pickup, or a “feature”? In my view, the answer is “both.”
A lot of knowledge in pickup is about the stages of the interaction that occur before you can really get to know someone on a personal level. You have to make a good enough impression for someone to even want to sit down with you and let you get to know them. As a result, it doesn’t work to build models of people completely on-the-fly from the ground up in the middle of interacting with them.
Until you can get to know someone on a personal level, all you have to work with is an impersonal initial model. You start with a set of priors about how someone works based on what reference classes seem appropriate, and you update your beliefs about how they work when you gain new evidence.
Pickup artists have been doing a lot of work trying to figure out the correct priors to approach women with. As you can see from how AMP differs from what you’ve run into before, there is still some disagreement. The choice of reference classes in the explicit discourse of the seduction community sometimes seems a bit clunky. Often, only one reference class is described: “women.” Also, PUAs don’t explicitly talk much about how to update beliefs about women, and what evidence to look for in order to update.
Yet even though PUAs don’t have the most sophisticated set of reference classes or updating process for their beliefs about women, there are plenty of ideas in the seduction community that relate to those skills. “Eliciting values” was a major part of Ross Jeffries NLP-based seduction starting in the late 80s; it involve drawing out a woman’s individual values and beliefs and using those to interaction with her. There is also the notion of “calibration,” the process of adjusting one’s behavior to the individual woman’s personality and responses (which sounds like it depends on some sorts of updating).
Why don’t PUAs have more sophisticated reference classes? One possibility is that PUAs are stuck in stereotypes about women. Another possibility is that their single reference class of “woman” is actually useful enough to attain maps of commonly-encountered types of women that match up to the territory. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive: it’s possible that a singular PUA reference class of “woman” is just powerful enough to allow them to get improvements in results with mainstream heterosexual women, but still lacking with other sorts of women that PUAs don’t encounter so often.
The model that PUAs hold of women shouldn’t be thought of as a set of facts about all women; it should be thought of as a set of strong priors that PUAs have found useful with the sorts of women they encounter most frequently.
Of course, the more divergent a woman is from other women, the more likely it is that a PUA’s set of priors is wrong. But for women with rarer sets of personality traits and preferences, many PUAs just haven’t seen enough of them to have useful models, yet…
...or have they? PUAs are always talking about the importance of “field experience.” My hypothesis is that one of the reasons that field experience is necessary is that it helps guys approach future women with a more accurate set of priors, and update their beliefs faster when they encounter new evidence. Perhaps experienced PUAs do have more sophisticated reference classes and update very fast, but their knowledge is so contextual and subconscious that they haven’t succeeded in putting it into words yet.
In general, PUAs use a certain set of priors for good reasons. What should our priors about their priors be? Well, we know about the potential for bias and ideology to exist in human communities, which should lower our confidence in PUA priors. On the other hand, we know that pickup is extremely popular and successful worldwide, which should raise our confidence in the priors of PUAs.
Nobody else has suggested a more empirically successful set of starting assumptions than PUAs, or articulated a way to attain better priors through more sophisticated reference classes, so they really have the “priors to beat.” Just like it’s hard to know how good a fighter is until someone beats them, it’s hard to know how good PUA knowledge is until someone beats it and can explicitly describe what they are doing. Currently, it’s safe to say that there are people who have beaten the general PUA model of women with a more sophisticated model and better set of reference classes and update process (and who can articulate their knowledge); yet I bet that most of the people who have done so are PUAs, or have some sort of PUA background (like me, for instance).
And yes, it sucks for non-gender-typical women that the best set of priors that men can achieve fails to describe how those women actually work. But when you think about it, the situation is that both gender-atypical women and PUAs are languishing under the statistical tyranny of gender-typical women. It’s not the fault of PUAs that the set of starting assumptions they need to avoid getting burned all the time forces them to be wrong with all sorts of unusual types of women. Unless we can give them a better method of setting priors, like more sophisticated reference classes, we really can’t knock them for using the priors that seem the most appropriate to them.
Update: See also my response to pjeby.
Do you have any thoughts about how PUAs should develop their priors better?
What makes it impersonal from my perspective is not their priors, more that doing well at relationships is all about getting women to like you.
People who are bad at relationships are probably also bad at picking the right kind of girl for them. So they might well get into relationships that are damaging financially and emotionally. E.g. don’t pick a clingy woman if you need to be away for long periods of time for work.
Doing well at relationships is about getting people to like you… right? Thinking of how best to fulfill other people’s criteria isn’t always the best way to think about dating from the inside (sometimes it’s better to display what you want and let people come to you); nevertheless, being successful at relationships is about fulfilling the criteria of people you want relationships with. Am I not understanding your post?
If the “people you want” is the same as the “people that would be good for you” then yes. If you are unskilled in relationships then they are less likely to be the same and it is possible to get into relationships that aren’t good for you. In this case being good at relationships is about knowing how to extract yourself from the situation with minimum drama.
You seem to have the influence and values of that culture approximately backwards.
Edited due to overbroad statement.
From a casual exposure PUA don’t seem to care much or give advice about long term relationships. But a lot of men do. And the AMP stuff was explictly aimed at people interested in one partner.
At no point in this discussion has anyone specified that we are talking only about relationships that a PUA is interested in.
Yes they do. You are attacking an entire culture of straw.
People practising PUA methods tend to improve their ability to navigate personal relationships in those areas too. It is the sort of thing that is often covered or responded to by trainers and tends to go hand in hand with the concept of ‘inner game’.
Okay that may have been an unfairly broad brush.
It seems to be a tiny fraction of what this forum talks about. And from what I can read it is after the fact questions/advice rather than how to pick the woman with the right personality to start with.
Well, the relationships forum with it’s 9k posts is about a tenth the size of the general questions forum, and about a third the size of the approaching/opening forum.
Yes, there are some cynical ideas about relationships in the community, and there is plenty of support for men who just want to play the field for now. And actually, considering that many men in the seduction community have either very little experience with women or are recovering from a bad breakup, it may be smart to wait a while before jumping into a long-term relationship with the first women who is nice to them. PUAs are interested in relationships, but they want to achieve a skillset so they have choices and don’t feel like they are settling for someone. As soon as PUAs get some skill and choices, they suddenly become a lot more selective. And the fact is that for most men, the space of women they are attracted to is much larger than the space of women who they are also interested in a relationship with.
I think a big reason for the disparity is that men who are learning how to be successful with women spend orders of magnitude more time “stuck” on problems in the early stages of interaction. It’s the same reason that people playing arcade games spend most of their time in the lower levels of the game. (Yes, I did just compare women to an arcade game. But I really do think it’s a good analogy for both men and women dating new partners, because so many processes follow a linear progression. I wonder what level “marriage” is?)
PUAs do talk about this. It’s called “screening.” The sex guru David Shade notably emphasizes dating women with high self-esteem and methods of testing for it.
Doing a search on mASF pulls up about 800 posts with screening in the title. Here are a few that I found interesting:
Screen for long-term
Screen self-esteem for relationships
The screening thread
The dangers of not screening
Screening out the unworthies
Screening is in the category of “things that outsiders don’t think PUAs care about based on their initial impression, but which PUAs actually do talk about have a rich literature on, even if perhaps they should be talking about those topics more or in different ways.”
I think the maximal controvery reduction with minimal hamming distance would be replacing “don’t” with “doesn’t.” The average Pick Up Artist likely cares deeply about the direction of his eventual long term relationship; but Pick Up Artistry is focused on successfully starting relationships to a much greater extent than continuing or ending them.