A binaural beat converted to mono sounds like a good control. I do plan to test this sometime soon.
gensym
Karma: 39
Seconding methylphenidate for #2, and (specifically) delta-wave-inducing binaural beats for #3.
I’ve heard good things about weed + Adderall for creative production, but never tried it.
I find that marijuana makes me MUCH more internally honest by suppressing flinch responses. YMMV. (Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t help with putting things into effect, but the insight remains, as does the feeling of what it’s like to be / alief that I can survive being honest.)
Anon demonstrates knowledge about illicit drugs. While it seems atypically conservative, I can easily understand concern about being associated with that.
Since SIAI’s selection process includes looking at the applicant’s posting history here, even writers whose user names cannot be correlated with the name they would put on a job application will tend to avoid taking the unpopular-with-SIAI side in the race-IQ debate.
What makes you think “the unpopular-with-SIAI side” exists? Or that it is what you think it is?
The issue about helpless anger at my end seems to be that I’d have to believe I shouldn’t have been hurt when I was mistreated if I could choose whether or not I’m angry.
This sounds really interesting, but I’m afraid I can’t parse it.
More importantly, the good advice you claim women agree with is given side by side with the stuff that’s completely ineffective and countereffective (gifts, admiration, letting her make choices—which by the way does not contradict “knowing what you want”).
Or maybe the really effective thing to do is to know which type of behavior to exhibit when (so much of social skill is about context-sensitivity); all-out dominant behavior is more effective in some cases than all-out the other direction (‘submissive’ seems like the wrong term) or ham-fisted attempts at variation, so advice to adopt all-out dominant behavior, combined with the idea that the other sort of behavior is completely ineffective, persists among men who are less skilled and interested in those cases; and women introspecting on what they want get that they want both but don’t get the context-dependence, or don’t realize it needs to be said.
What if you go around saying “almost everyone, whatever their gender, has poor insight into their preferences and responses”?
To a low-attractive male, any action taken by a high-attractive male is suspect. Thus, an initially low-status PUA is more likely to describe high-status behaviors in negative terms (e.g. “ordering her around”) rather than the terms women would use to describe the behavior they find attractive (“a man who knows what he wants, and isn’t afraid to say it”).
This is a really good point. Think like reality! Behavior that pleases others and benefits yourself is virtuous!
“If you want to appear more attractive to men, show cleavage and arch your back.” --> “Duh, already know that, of course that’s how men are.”
vs.
“If you want to appear more attractive to women, act dominant by ordering her around, thinking of her like a disobedient child, and generally making yourself appear scarce and unavailable.” --> “Shut up!!! Shut up, you F*ING terrorist! Women are NOT like that, you worthless misogynist! You should be RESPECTFUL and DEFERENTIAL and give them lots of gifts. That’s what we want, chauvanist. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go meet my boyfriend, who is such a jerk to me. I hope he’s not late … again.”
I’m sure you can see that exactly one of those pieces of advice is ambiguous, and easily disambiguated as advice to engage in genuinely wrong behavior. I think that some sorts of people, which I would expect to overlap with the sorts of people opposed to pickup, tend to directly leap from a statement being potentially harmful to express, to that statement and its speaker being Bad. (Another example: statements about the basis of intelligence and race/sex correlations, with their genuine usefulness to bigots.) I don’t think that this is entirely incorrect of them, either instrumentally or epistemically — such statements are Bayesian evidence of bad character, for both direct and signaling reasons.
PS: Don’t be so sarcastic.
The people that most object to paternalism are male nerds while the people that (I expect to) most approve of paternalism are conservative religious women.
Why those groups in particular? They are toward those ends, but I think I would have (maybe superficially/naively) said “radical feminists” and “conservative religious men”, respectively. Don’t necessarily disagree, but I’m very curious.
Manipulating a man’s perception of attractiveness in order to secure short-term mating is in a man’s (evolutionary) interest.
Why would men have evolved to have perceptions of attractiveness that don’t track (are more conservative, when not manipulated, than would be in) their evolutionary interest?
Also, I thought we were talking about normative interests, what’s actually good for someone. Why are you bringing up evolutionary interests in the first place?
Also, you conveniently ignored the bit where both manipulations are enjoyed by the recipients. If I weren’t so certain you sincerely believe in your biased perspective, I’d have to conclude you were deliberately trolling at this point.
This. Also the bit where both manipulations affect hardwired judgment mechanisms, of course.
Yes, that post neglects to mention an obvious fact that makes it come off as hysterical and creepy/potentially dangerous. However, the lesser point that sex-‘starved’ people (especially men) are unfortunately Acceptable Targets, even though sexual deprivation can be a significant emotional harm, seems true and important.
(It seems to me that people vary a lot in how much they suffer when sexually deprived, and the typical mind fallacy is rampant in both directions, though probably more problematic coming from the low sufferers. As a low sufferer myself, this is not a personal complaint.)