My knowledge of PUA is almost entirely from the comments here, too. Part of what gets on my nerves about it is that it seems to have a model of relationships in which people are in them solely because of status and fertility markers. There’s nothing I can see about people actually liking each other (or, for that matter, disliking each other), or not being completely fungible if a better deal comes along.
There’s that bit where Harry explains Lily’s choice completely in terms of status issues—this suggests that PUA/evolutionary psychology at least seems like a plausible set of theories to you. It’s possible that I’m conflating them as having more in common than they actually do.
It gets to me that Hermione seems to be thinking in terms of herself and Harry having a Relationship rather than focusing on what they actually are to each other—I think she’d have better sense. Or maybe I just hope she would.
It’s interesting that I’ve gotten upvoted and a couple of positive comments for my complaints about the most recent chapter, while still getting information which suggests that Hermione is generally seen as more plausible than I see her. I tentatively suggest that my suspension of disbelief is broken, while other people are seeing some specific implausibilities that don’t bother them nearly as much.
One suggestion about the Ravenclaw girls’ vote—they may well be voting for the most entertaining drama for themselves rather than what’s best for Hermione. This may have already occurred to you, considering that so many of them wanted to catch Harry.
In their case, more of them should have generalized from one example.
It gets to me that Hermione seems to be thinking in terms of herself and Harry having a Relationship rather than focusing on what they actually are to each other—I think she’d have better sense. Or maybe I just hope she would.
Here maybe I see (but also generalising from one example) why people like your comments but don’t qutie agree with you. This is definitely what I’d expect from a 12-year old, at least in the society that I grew up in, which should be similar to Hermione’s. (Come to think of it, this reminds me of my sibling at that age, although not myself.) But it’s not what I would have hoped.
Harry, Hermione and Draco are supposed to be exceptional, so a wish that Hermione be a bit less typical for her age in the area of emotional maturity is understandable. But I do think we tend to forget that these kids aren’t supposed to act exactly like adults, either, and judge them too harshly. Perfection is boring in a story.
There’s that bit where Harry explains Lily’s choice completely in terms of status issues—this suggests that PUA/evolutionary psychology at least seems like a plausible set of theories to you. It’s possible that I’m conflating them as having more in common than they actually do.
As I understand it, there are at least three separate things there: actual scientific evolutionary psychology; pop ev-psych, which is generally used as convenient rationalization for sexism and (less frequently) racism; and PUA, which is less science than engineering, but which comes with certain theories about why it works. I suspect that distinguishing the three properly probably requires a certain level of familiarity with the first one.
There’s nothing I can see about people actually liking each other (or, for that matter, disliking each other), or not being completely fungible if a better deal comes along.
The fact that status influences our behaviours does not make them any less real. Nor does the fact that there are good evolutionarily explainable reasons for loyalty mean that loyalty is any less noble.
I see that you made a claim that I didn’t address, but I think you also missed what I was saying.
I haven’t seen people who are into PUA make an explicit claim that there’s nothing to relationships but status and fertility signaling. What I do see is talk about relationships as though there’s nothing else. All I know about you folks is what you write, or at least how your text looks to me.
What I do see is talk about relationships as though there’s nothing else [to relationships but status and fertility signaling].
I believe I’ve pointed this out before, but at least some “PUA” training emphasizes personal development, emotional connection, and trust as the foundation for interaction and relationships. (The word “status” is not mentioned once on that page, and if I recall correctly, it is not mentioned in any of the videos being sold there either.)
I believe I’ve pointed this out before, but at least some “PUA” training emphasizes personal development, emotional connection, and trust as the foundation for interaction and relationships. (The word “status” is not mentioned once on that page, and if I recall correctly, it is not mentioned in any of the videos being sold there either.)
Thanks for the link. I haven’t seen that program before. I always enjoy absorbing things on ‘Inner Game’, essentially because the insights are usually applicable to life in general, completely aside from anything to do with mating.
Come to think of it the lessons are remarkably similar to those found in Alicorn’s Luminosity that I’ve just been reading. I would go as far as to recommend Luminosity to people interested in gaining “PUA” kinds of qualities. The ability for self awareness and reflection, mastery over and cooperation with ones own emotions, the ability to know and actively seek ones own goals and the ability to empathise with how others are thinking are attractive traits regardless of gender and core features of ‘inner game’.
Come to think of it the lessons are remarkably similar to those found in Alicorn’s Luminosity that I’ve just been reading. I would go as far as to recommend Luminosity to people interested in gaining “PUA” kinds of qualities.
Amusingly, I’m trying to portray Edward as a little awkwardly unluminous whenever I can do it without screwing up the plot.
That shouldn’t be too hard. He was somewhat of a dolt to begin with if I recall. You can get away with that when you are pretty, tall, brooding and have super powers!
I liked how you conveyed the introduction of Mike by the way. Both with Mike’s clear lack of luminosity and in how his awkwardness impacted Bella.
The problem, as I see it, is that even that link still doesn’t have any hint of wanting to be with a particular woman because of her individual qualities. It’s more like “here are the traits any woman wants’ and “apply those traits and women will want you and you won’t go off-balance around them”. It isn’t creepy, but it’s very impersonal so far as relationships are concerned.
It was interesting—and new to me (you may have mentioned it, though)-- that in this version, the crucial thing wasn’t status markers, it was moment-by-moment connection.
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.
The problem, as I see it, is that even that link still doesn’t have any hint of wanting to be with a particular woman because of her individual qualities.
Hm. I guess you missed the part where fully one-third of the program being sold is devoted exclusively to cultivating curiosity about, and appreciation for “her individual qualities.” ;-)
That being said, from a marketing perspective, there’s no need to discuss what qualities the reader is looking for, since those will be distinct to the individual reader. Instead, the copy assumes only that they be women that the reader wants to have a deeper connection with.
(I’m not sure about the testimonials on that page, but I have seen others on the site from men who purchased some of this company’s programs in order to improve their connection with a girlfriend or spouse.)
An important piece of background info, by the way. The number one question received by PUA trainers, or asked on PUA forums, etc. is, “How can I get that one girl I like?” (followed by, “How can I get back that girl I like that I blew it with?”)
What guys actually want, and what they like to signal to other guys that they want, aren’t always the same thing. ;-)
One reason, btw, that PUA marketing often emphasizes ability to attract multiple women, has nothing to do with how many women the average man actually wants! One of my mentors in direct marketing once explained to me that the reason you want to make the boldest, most over-the-top claims that you can still support/prove, is because the average person reads the claim and thinks, “wow, if it’ll do that, then for [my much smaller need/want] it ought to work easily!”
In other words, bold or exaggerated marketing claims are not made because the average reader needs the result shown, but rather, because they give the reader something to discount back down to the level of the reader’s own requirements!
If you look at most effective (i.e mostly direct) marketing, you’ll see this principle being used all over the place… for example, most of us do not need to glue ourselves to a girder via a hard hat, yet Krazy Glue nonetheless used that as a product demonstration. The intention is for the viewer to infer, “if it’ll do that, then it should be good enough for what I need.”
It was interesting—and new to me (you may have mentioned it, though)-- that in this version, the crucial thing wasn’t status markers, it was moment-by-moment connection.
There is some (minor) overlap between theories, in the sense that you could say the qualities that AMP are teaching are status markers of a sort. But I think it’s actually more likely to be the other way around: i.e. that it’s these qualities themselves (presence, appreciation, and integrity) that are evolutionarily desirable/attractive and lead to having status, rather than status leading to having these qualities, or these qualities being status signals.
That being said, from a marketing perspective, there’s no need to discuss what qualities the reader is looking for, since those will be distinct to the individual reader.
Right. There is only so much that PUA materials can even say about individual women. Dealing with individual women and taking into account her personal characteristics is the job of the PUA, not of the PUA teacher. All the teacher can do is give the PUA a set of tools, and give the PUA the task of customizing those tools and figuring out which tools apply to which women.
One reason, btw, that PUA marketing often emphasizes ability to attract multiple women, has nothing to do with how many women the average man actually wants!
That’s a good point. I think it’s true for other reasons, also. A lot of men would like to have a relationship with women of a similar level of looks and intelligence, yet those women are out of reach. To be able to have a relationship, these men need more choices in women.
Dating multiple women may or may not be the goal, but the right goal to aspire to is to have a high enough level of attractiveness that multiple women will want to date you, even if you only want a long-term relationship with one woman. If you want to date women with multiple men after them, then you need to be the sort of guy who has multiple women after you. More choices in women gives you more relationship prospects.
An important piece of background info, by the way. The number one question received by PUA trainers, or asked on PUA forums, etc. is, “How can I get that one girl I like?” (followed by, “How can I get back that girl I like that I blew it with?”)
For men who are unsuccessful with women, “How can I get that one girl I like?” is sort of the wrong question. It’s like someone who’s never played the violin asking “how do I play the Brahms violin concerto?” or someone with no startup experience asking “how do I get acquired by Google?” The mistake in these questions is trying to solve a certain problem before having an understanding of the fundamentals involved in solving problems of that type.
As I pointed out to Nancy, developing a model of people from the ground-up, on-the-fly every time you interact with someone is not scalable. Trying to give a woman a personalized experience that way is usually going to give her a crappy experience because you spend most of the time blundering around out of a misplaced fear of being “impersonal” or “stereotyping” (because heuristically, the search space of possible behaviors is much larger than the space of attractive behaviors). Instead, start with a framework of priors based on any similarity you can see between her and other women you’ve interacted with in the past, and update them on-the-fly by watching for feedback; that’s the real way to create a personalized experience for a woman in a way that actually works.
The reality is that most of the time in social interaction, other people who meet you probably make up their mind about you before you have much chance to get to know them as a person and update your beliefs about them very much. As a result, your process for making a good first impression cannot be dependent on having very much personalized knowledge. If you do, you will just be way too slow. People aren’t going to still for several hours and tell you their life stories, listen to yours, and only then decide their impression of you.
While I do think it’s very important that PUAs update their beliefs about individual women during interactions with them, it’s absolutely correct for them to begin by applying “impersonal” knowledge about large groups of women. PUAs have the right idea, even if their updating and references classes aren’t as sophisticated as they could be.
An important piece of background info, by the way. The number one question received by PUA trainers, or asked on PUA forums, etc. is, “How can I get that one girl I like?” (followed by, “How can I get back that girl I like that I blew it with?”)
Which explains the number one answer in at least some of those circles: GFTOW! (And the number one moral—quit being so goddam needy!)
I see that you made a claim that I didn’t address, but I think you also missed what I was saying.
I was making almost the opposite point. You addressed a claim that I wouldn’t make and I was distancing myself from it!
I haven’t seen people who are into PUA make an explicit claim that there’s nothing to relationships but status and fertility signaling. What I do see is talk about relationships as though there’s nothing else. All I know about you folks is what you write, or at least how your text looks to me.
“You folks”? I am not and have never been a PUA of any kind! You are welcome to your stereotypes but please exclude me from them. :)
Do you remember where you saw writing that gives you this impression? I’ve seen PUAs talk a lot about status and fertility signals underlying relationships. I don’t think that the consensus is that “there’s nothing else,” but I’ve seen some PUAs write stuff that could give that impression, such as Mystery.
I don’t think that the consensus is that “there’s nothing else,” but I’ve seen some PUAs write stuff that could give that impression, such as Mystery.
Even Mystery gives some air time to things other than status and fertility signals. He discusses the creation of individual identities targeted to a smaller reference group of the kind of women you hope to attract. Mind you, even then he makes it quite clear that he “doesn’t give a @#$% who you are underneath, just what identity you are going to construct and convey.”
Even Mystery gives some air time to things other than status and fertility signals. He discusses the creation of individual identities targeted to a smaller reference group of the kind of women you hope to attract.
Yes, and he also talks about “love” all the time. He considers love to “pair-bonding,” but it’s definitely more than status and fertility.
He discusses the creation of individual identities targeted to a smaller reference group of the kind of women you hope to attract. Mind you, even then he makes it quite clear that he “doesn’t give a @#$% who you are underneath, just what identity you are going to construct and convey.”
It’s true that he doesn’t talk much about whether the identities you display should be genuine or not. I think he would agree that it’s better if they are genuine. And since he is so big on outer game, he may feel that if you can make a consistent display of a certain identity, you will grow to fill whatever big boots you are walking around in. In my experience, that’s actually true. As I’ve argued here before, if you can get a bunch of people to think that you are really cool without any significant factual lies, then you are that cool.
I know nothing about PUA except what I read in other people’s blog comments, and this part honestly leaves me baffled. Wha? Amplify please?
My knowledge of PUA is almost entirely from the comments here, too. Part of what gets on my nerves about it is that it seems to have a model of relationships in which people are in them solely because of status and fertility markers. There’s nothing I can see about people actually liking each other (or, for that matter, disliking each other), or not being completely fungible if a better deal comes along.
There’s that bit where Harry explains Lily’s choice completely in terms of status issues—this suggests that PUA/evolutionary psychology at least seems like a plausible set of theories to you. It’s possible that I’m conflating them as having more in common than they actually do.
It gets to me that Hermione seems to be thinking in terms of herself and Harry having a Relationship rather than focusing on what they actually are to each other—I think she’d have better sense. Or maybe I just hope she would.
It’s interesting that I’ve gotten upvoted and a couple of positive comments for my complaints about the most recent chapter, while still getting information which suggests that Hermione is generally seen as more plausible than I see her. I tentatively suggest that my suspension of disbelief is broken, while other people are seeing some specific implausibilities that don’t bother them nearly as much.
One suggestion about the Ravenclaw girls’ vote—they may well be voting for the most entertaining drama for themselves rather than what’s best for Hermione. This may have already occurred to you, considering that so many of them wanted to catch Harry.
In their case, more of them should have generalized from one example.
Here maybe I see (but also generalising from one example) why people like your comments but don’t qutie agree with you. This is definitely what I’d expect from a 12-year old, at least in the society that I grew up in, which should be similar to Hermione’s. (Come to think of it, this reminds me of my sibling at that age, although not myself.) But it’s not what I would have hoped.
Harry, Hermione and Draco are supposed to be exceptional, so a wish that Hermione be a bit less typical for her age in the area of emotional maturity is understandable. But I do think we tend to forget that these kids aren’t supposed to act exactly like adults, either, and judge them too harshly. Perfection is boring in a story.
As I understand it, there are at least three separate things there: actual scientific evolutionary psychology; pop ev-psych, which is generally used as convenient rationalization for sexism and (less frequently) racism; and PUA, which is less science than engineering, but which comes with certain theories about why it works. I suspect that distinguishing the three properly probably requires a certain level of familiarity with the first one.
The fact that status influences our behaviours does not make them any less real. Nor does the fact that there are good evolutionarily explainable reasons for loyalty mean that loyalty is any less noble.
I agree that status influences our behavior. I don’t agree that status is the only thing going on.
If you replaced “I don’t agree that” with “I don’t believe that” then it would avoid a misleading implication. ;)
I see that you made a claim that I didn’t address, but I think you also missed what I was saying.
I haven’t seen people who are into PUA make an explicit claim that there’s nothing to relationships but status and fertility signaling. What I do see is talk about relationships as though there’s nothing else. All I know about you folks is what you write, or at least how your text looks to me.
I believe I’ve pointed this out before, but at least some “PUA” training emphasizes personal development, emotional connection, and trust as the foundation for interaction and relationships. (The word “status” is not mentioned once on that page, and if I recall correctly, it is not mentioned in any of the videos being sold there either.)
Thanks for the link. I haven’t seen that program before. I always enjoy absorbing things on ‘Inner Game’, essentially because the insights are usually applicable to life in general, completely aside from anything to do with mating.
Come to think of it the lessons are remarkably similar to those found in Alicorn’s Luminosity that I’ve just been reading. I would go as far as to recommend Luminosity to people interested in gaining “PUA” kinds of qualities. The ability for self awareness and reflection, mastery over and cooperation with ones own emotions, the ability to know and actively seek ones own goals and the ability to empathise with how others are thinking are attractive traits regardless of gender and core features of ‘inner game’.
Amusingly, I’m trying to portray Edward as a little awkwardly unluminous whenever I can do it without screwing up the plot.
That shouldn’t be too hard. He was somewhat of a dolt to begin with if I recall. You can get away with that when you are pretty, tall, brooding and have super powers!
I liked how you conveyed the introduction of Mike by the way. Both with Mike’s clear lack of luminosity and in how his awkwardness impacted Bella.
You have, and thanks for the link.
The problem, as I see it, is that even that link still doesn’t have any hint of wanting to be with a particular woman because of her individual qualities. It’s more like “here are the traits any woman wants’ and “apply those traits and women will want you and you won’t go off-balance around them”. It isn’t creepy, but it’s very impersonal so far as relationships are concerned.
It was interesting—and new to me (you may have mentioned it, though)-- that in this version, the crucial thing wasn’t status markers, it was moment-by-moment connection.
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.
Hm. I guess you missed the part where fully one-third of the program being sold is devoted exclusively to cultivating curiosity about, and appreciation for “her individual qualities.” ;-)
That being said, from a marketing perspective, there’s no need to discuss what qualities the reader is looking for, since those will be distinct to the individual reader. Instead, the copy assumes only that they be women that the reader wants to have a deeper connection with.
(I’m not sure about the testimonials on that page, but I have seen others on the site from men who purchased some of this company’s programs in order to improve their connection with a girlfriend or spouse.)
An important piece of background info, by the way. The number one question received by PUA trainers, or asked on PUA forums, etc. is, “How can I get that one girl I like?” (followed by, “How can I get back that girl I like that I blew it with?”)
What guys actually want, and what they like to signal to other guys that they want, aren’t always the same thing. ;-)
One reason, btw, that PUA marketing often emphasizes ability to attract multiple women, has nothing to do with how many women the average man actually wants! One of my mentors in direct marketing once explained to me that the reason you want to make the boldest, most over-the-top claims that you can still support/prove, is because the average person reads the claim and thinks, “wow, if it’ll do that, then for [my much smaller need/want] it ought to work easily!”
In other words, bold or exaggerated marketing claims are not made because the average reader needs the result shown, but rather, because they give the reader something to discount back down to the level of the reader’s own requirements!
If you look at most effective (i.e mostly direct) marketing, you’ll see this principle being used all over the place… for example, most of us do not need to glue ourselves to a girder via a hard hat, yet Krazy Glue nonetheless used that as a product demonstration. The intention is for the viewer to infer, “if it’ll do that, then it should be good enough for what I need.”
There is some (minor) overlap between theories, in the sense that you could say the qualities that AMP are teaching are status markers of a sort. But I think it’s actually more likely to be the other way around: i.e. that it’s these qualities themselves (presence, appreciation, and integrity) that are evolutionarily desirable/attractive and lead to having status, rather than status leading to having these qualities, or these qualities being status signals.
Right. There is only so much that PUA materials can even say about individual women. Dealing with individual women and taking into account her personal characteristics is the job of the PUA, not of the PUA teacher. All the teacher can do is give the PUA a set of tools, and give the PUA the task of customizing those tools and figuring out which tools apply to which women.
That’s a good point. I think it’s true for other reasons, also. A lot of men would like to have a relationship with women of a similar level of looks and intelligence, yet those women are out of reach. To be able to have a relationship, these men need more choices in women.
Dating multiple women may or may not be the goal, but the right goal to aspire to is to have a high enough level of attractiveness that multiple women will want to date you, even if you only want a long-term relationship with one woman. If you want to date women with multiple men after them, then you need to be the sort of guy who has multiple women after you. More choices in women gives you more relationship prospects.
For men who are unsuccessful with women, “How can I get that one girl I like?” is sort of the wrong question. It’s like someone who’s never played the violin asking “how do I play the Brahms violin concerto?” or someone with no startup experience asking “how do I get acquired by Google?” The mistake in these questions is trying to solve a certain problem before having an understanding of the fundamentals involved in solving problems of that type.
As I pointed out to Nancy, developing a model of people from the ground-up, on-the-fly every time you interact with someone is not scalable. Trying to give a woman a personalized experience that way is usually going to give her a crappy experience because you spend most of the time blundering around out of a misplaced fear of being “impersonal” or “stereotyping” (because heuristically, the search space of possible behaviors is much larger than the space of attractive behaviors). Instead, start with a framework of priors based on any similarity you can see between her and other women you’ve interacted with in the past, and update them on-the-fly by watching for feedback; that’s the real way to create a personalized experience for a woman in a way that actually works.
The reality is that most of the time in social interaction, other people who meet you probably make up their mind about you before you have much chance to get to know them as a person and update your beliefs about them very much. As a result, your process for making a good first impression cannot be dependent on having very much personalized knowledge. If you do, you will just be way too slow. People aren’t going to still for several hours and tell you their life stories, listen to yours, and only then decide their impression of you.
While I do think it’s very important that PUAs update their beliefs about individual women during interactions with them, it’s absolutely correct for them to begin by applying “impersonal” knowledge about large groups of women. PUAs have the right idea, even if their updating and references classes aren’t as sophisticated as they could be.
Not to mention anchoring the consumer’s perception of actual quality.
Which explains the number one answer in at least some of those circles: GFTOW! (And the number one moral—quit being so goddam needy!)
I was making almost the opposite point. You addressed a claim that I wouldn’t make and I was distancing myself from it!
“You folks”? I am not and have never been a PUA of any kind! You are welcome to your stereotypes but please exclude me from them. :)
Do you remember where you saw writing that gives you this impression? I’ve seen PUAs talk a lot about status and fertility signals underlying relationships. I don’t think that the consensus is that “there’s nothing else,” but I’ve seen some PUAs write stuff that could give that impression, such as Mystery.
Even Mystery gives some air time to things other than status and fertility signals. He discusses the creation of individual identities targeted to a smaller reference group of the kind of women you hope to attract. Mind you, even then he makes it quite clear that he “doesn’t give a @#$% who you are underneath, just what identity you are going to construct and convey.”
Yes, and he also talks about “love” all the time. He considers love to “pair-bonding,” but it’s definitely more than status and fertility.
It’s true that he doesn’t talk much about whether the identities you display should be genuine or not. I think he would agree that it’s better if they are genuine. And since he is so big on outer game, he may feel that if you can make a consistent display of a certain identity, you will grow to fill whatever big boots you are walking around in. In my experience, that’s actually true. As I’ve argued here before, if you can get a bunch of people to think that you are really cool without any significant factual lies, then you are that cool.