I agree. Failing to recognize sex differences in attraction (particularly greater female selectiveness and preferences for behavior and personality traits) will sabotage males, and leave females turned off and creeped out.
HughRistik
Karma: 4,948
Like wedrifid, I test as an ENFP on online tests, but if I answer questions like I would have if I hadn’t learned social skills, I come out as an INTP. The INTP profile I mentioned is freakily accurate, and not just in a horoscope type of way.
I think you are laboring under a slight misapprehension about personality research. Myers-Briggs isn’t solid science. The eneagram isn’t solid science.
Your understanding is consistent with mine. Myers-Briggs is really frustrating, because some of its ideas are anecdotally compelling (Introversion vs. Extraversion, Thinking vs. Feeling), while others are esoteric (Judging vs. Perceiving and Sensing vs. Intuition). At least on the types, INTP probably refers to a real phenotype (which is common on LW), but I don’t know if any of the other type combinations are real.
Interestingly, the MBTI seems to almost reduce down to the Big Five according to this study.
Big five personality traits are kind of like that. From what I’ve read, they’re better understood as mostly-orthogonal surface regularities with causal explanations from many different levels and sources rather than as fundamental causally coherent essences. Lots of people seem to expect human traits to coherently cause human behaviors, so it is worth emphasizing how liable such thinking is to produce error.
The way I’ve heard it explained goes something like this: “you don’t like art because you are high in Openness. You are high in Openness because you like art.”
Of course, since the Openness scale has reliability, you can make predictions about how someone would respond to one question from the scale if you know what they would respond to another item. Whether that’s because of one underlying trait, or because of a bunch of converging traits, is an empirical question.
Very well, I concede that there could be more powerful self-aware plays.
It might be possible that flirting is more useful for negotiating short term sexual encounters, but I think there are still applications for long term relationships. For example, flirting can help determine whether your senses of humor are compatible, which could important for a long-term relationship.
Although you might not care much about the information conveyed through flirting, your prospective partners very much might. Flirting will give them a lot of information about your character and social experiences, which they could find useful for determining their desire for a relationship of any length.
All long-term relationships start off being short-term.
The way I experience a distaste in flirting is that it seems annoying and counterproductive to beat around the bush.
I see flirting somewhat differently. Flirting gives an opportunity for both partners to showcase their social skills and gain information about what they each respond to sexually, and what sort of relationship they might have if they were to embark on one. It’s like a mutual interview. Flirting will help your potential female partners determine what kind of guy you are, and if they are into you.
Flirting can often be direct, even though it is implicit rather than explicit. Yet many people find beating around the bush to be useful, because they want more time to assess their potential partner before making a commitment of interest. Personally, I am totally fine with giving a potential partner social information to help her assess her interest in me, rather than trying to get her to make a snap decision before she has sufficient information.
You still might not find flirting enjoyable, but perhaps you can see that it does serve some useful purposes.
And if she does understand then I will not judge her for being obnoxious, just for being obnoxious but ineffective.
Ah, but who says she is being ineffective? That depends on her goals (see my reply to the parent). If her goal is to piss off Bob, and/or make him feel guilty and/or make his start getting apologetic, then she is already doing well. She’s already got him to admit that he has done something wrong without making any explicit accusations (assuming he is being sincere, not sarcastic). Who says her goal is relationship harmony? Some people prefer drama.
Humans were selected for having reproductively successful relationships, but not all successful mating strategies involve harmony.
Why are you not equally cynical about Alice’s motives?
That’s a good question. Here is my cynical analysis of Alice’s potential psychology. I think there is a lot of room to read a power-play on Alice’s part (though that says nothing about whether it is justified or not).
Unfortunately, Silas’ original example is under-specified, so there are many different situations that could lead to it, or potential power plays on both sides. I’m going to make a guess that the scenario (in Silas’ imagination) occurred because of something Bob did or didn’t do that Alice didn’t like.
Alice is fuming, and she very much wants Bob to know. She feels that Bob should know better. That’s why she won’t tell him what it is. She wants him to figure it out for himself, and apologize to her. If he asks what is wrong as if he doesn’t know, and she has to tell him, then she admits that there was ambiguity in the original situation, or lack of knowledge on his part, that completely or partially exculpates him.
Alternatively, she might agree that there are exculpatory factors, but she still want to see if he will now realize what he did wrong and apologize without her having to spell it out for him. This approach might be especially important if he forgot something (maybe their anniversary), and she wants to see how long it will take him to remember.
Another possibility might be that she doesn’t want to tell him what he did wrong because she doesn’t want to look accusatory or nagging. So instead she just blast accusatory nonverbal communication at him until he understands that he is supposed to start admitting guilt.
If Silas is imagining the same scenario that is evoked in my mind, Alice is not trying to disengage from communicating with Bob all; she is trying to show her displeasure with him, and get him to (a) admit that he is at fault, and possibly also (b) apologize to what he is at fault for without her having to explain it, proving that he has either “learned his lesson” or that he isn’t trying to “play innocent.”
This interpretation leads me to agree with you that Alice is not lying, and that she is using implicit communication, but I think she may be doing it even more than you realize. Note that I take no position about who is in the right or in the wrong.
From Alice’s perspective this is a bit smug. She is thinking “I fucking know it doesn’t sound like that”.
Yes.
But he knows that something is wrong and that she is not saying what—it is reasonable to expect a socially competent person to by now understand that what she really means is something like “I don’t want to talk about it, at least not now.
If Bob has good reasons to expect that she is unhappy with him, then it’s not clear at all that she really doesn’t want to talk about it.
Alice: “NOTHING. EVERYTHING’S FINE.” Bob has clearly figured out Alice is saying something like “I don’t want to talk about it, at least not right now.” He is now assuming he did something wrong and begging to be told what it was. But why is he persisting?
Under the scenario I’m imagining, it’s obvious why he persists. He doesn’t believe that Alice is serious about not wanting to talk, based on the context, body language, and tone of voice. He interprets her communication to mean “I don’t want to talk about the thing you did wrong unless you stop playing innocent about it and start groveling.” That’s why he starts groveling by admitting that he did something wrong… That might satisfy Alice, or she might want him to guess or admit exactly what he did wrong without her having to explain it.
In heated arguments, people often say and do things that they don’t mean, or to test the reaction of the other partner. Alice could be sincere that she doesn’t want to talk, but she could also be testing to see if Bob cares enough to find out what she is unhappy about, or if he will admit full culpability and apologize.
And while communication is extremely important not everything needs to be turned into a huge, dramatic discussion or debate.
Some personality types feel differently.
Alice may know she’ll be over it in a little while but starting a fight would lead to week-long estrangement.
Wait, what makes you think that Alice isn’t trying to start a fight? She could be defending a Schelling Point.
Depending on the nonverbals, her behavior could be an excellent way to start a fight, while pretending that Bob is the one instigating it by pestering her. If she really didn’t want to start a fight, she could either hide her displeasure better, or making it sound absolutely cold and serious that she doesn’t want to talk. The fact that Bob is following up with questions suggests that he thinks she is trying to either start a fight, so he tries to roll over on his belly by asking what he did.
I am not in agreement with TimS that Bob is trying to dominate Alice… I just think he’s being stupid.
This only way Bob is being dominating is if he knowingly did something majorly fucked up or abusive, and is pestering Alice and playing innocent while trying to cope with it. Short of that, there actually may be good contextual reasons for Bob to believe that Alice wants to continue communicating with him, but just wants him to take an apologetic role, or (if they both know she is upset by something other than him) a supportive role. If Alice is using passive-aggressiveness to try to put him into an apologetic and groveling role, then she is the dominating one (of course, whether this is justified depends on context). Unless Bob is obviously in the wrong, then he is being stupid by letting her get away with this power play, which gives her an incentive to get upset in the future any time she wants concessions from him.
Of course, this is only one possible reading of the situation; I just suspect that it’s a bit closer to what Silas intended that most of the other readings.
I think sam0345 may be exaggerating with a projection of −10, but I think he isn’t exaggerating when he suspects that there are examples of academic unreliability that would be unfeasible to discuss on LW, even though I am a bit more optimistic about what LW can handle than Vladimir_M, for instance. It would be a bad mistake to even attempt to collect evidence on some topics.
I’m a psych junkie, and by following certain online debates and reading journals, I’ve run into several topics where peer-review studies that aren’t publicized contradict the public story. With some of these topics, LW has proven itself to not be quite ready for them, though Vladimir_M sometimes dances around them, and I and others have discussed some of the lighter ones. Other topics are not discussable in public at all in any forum where a speaker wants to retain any reputation. In fact, it would be a hazard to others to even mention these topics on LW, given that many people comment here with their real names, and LW would be tarred by even tolerating serious discussion of those findings.
When any group is being sufficiently totalitarian in the name of lofty ideals, I support comparisons to other totalitarian groups, which may include the Nazis and the Soviets (among others). I believe that such comparisons can help us learn from history. Of course, the subject of such comparisons will always be both quantitatively and qualitatively different, but the Nazis and the Soviets provide intersubjective references points for certain political ideas gone wrong.
Of course, it could be more rhetorically pragmatic to swallow these analogies even when accurate depending on the audience.
This reminds me of the People’s Republic of Tyranny Trope (TV Tropes warning).
All sorts of self-interest, repression, and tribalism gets justified by the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality. It seems that a large amount of aggression has been promoting by groups styling themselves as anti-oppression movements. I recently wrote an article about the modern notion of “social justice”, which is beginning to show similar sorts of newspeak, in my view.
I think it’s a matter of Schelling Points. For many people, their self-interest will gradually increase in an interaction with you in subtle ways (e.g. being late for things, being flaky on plans, being dramatic/insecure/tactless, etc...). They will slowly try to structure the interaction around their needs, until they run into a boundary set by you. I think this sort of behavior is totally normal for many personality types, male or female. I think the only types of people who don’t do this kind of thing are some types of high-IQ nerds, introverts, and people with very high Agreeableness and/or low assertiveness.
The tough part is that all these boundary-pushing behaviors start off small, and are generally unintentional, so it can be hard to figure out the right time to put your foot down without feeling like a jerk.
I’ve seen some such discussions get quite bad but I’ve seen others where apparently calm rational discussion took place.
That’s my experience, too. I have seen progress being made in some of the discussions about gender, even though they can be frustrating. But perhaps I’m focusing on the exchanges that I was involved in.
PUA/Feminism are inherently somewhat political, especially when they are viewed as opposites.
Arguably, they aren’t opposites, because they have significant overlap on certain dimensions. I’ve argued that a lot of pickup techniques are actually compatible with feminist values.
Then there are folks who criticize both feminism and pickup for being overly pandering to women:
http://lifestylejourney.blogspot.com/2010/02/pua-scam.html
PUA theory takes the extreme position that men are usually to blame for lack of success with women. This of course complements the (radical) feminist view that men are inadequate. So PUAs are basically sympathizers with the feminist view that men are intrinsically lacking. And one side effect of this is that it translates into a somewhat hostile view that PUAs have towards “normal” guys, referring to them as “AFC” (Average Frustrated Chump).
Basically, game is all about YOU getting positive reinforcement from shitty women. Game is all about being an excellent dog, so that your master (bad women) throw you a bone for a well done job. You perform the trick, you get the cookie.
When I see gamers bragging about how they can trigger certain responses from women at will, I imagine dogs bragging that they can trigger sympathy from their master. I imagine a dog bragging to another dog “You know, I have this special expression I do, and the master always tears up when I do it and gives me a cookie! I control him, muahahah!”
Game teaches you how to overcome bad-women’s games and manipulations, instead of punishing them. Even if you do “succeed” in passing shitty behavior (assuming “game” is better than placebo) – what did you actually gain?! Didn’t you just positively reinforce that same shitty behavior in those types of women?
So what does game do? It just makes you a better pussy-beggar. It teaches you how to better do what shitty-women want you to do. It teaches you to reward bitchiness by dancing better to the song she sings.
If I was reading the thought experiment correctly, the aliens are only allowed to let people die and then eat them. So the aliens wouldn’t be causing any patients to die who wouldn’t have died anyway. If the aliens were allowed to eat humans before they died, then that would change the whole example and make consequentialists even more pessimistic.
Then I have an “easy” patch: let the entity that does the spotting and killing be incorruptible and infallible. Like, an AI, an army of robots, or something. With that, I don’t see any obvious flaw beyond the fact that, with this level of technology, there are very probably better alternatives than transplantation. But the idea of creating a machine for the explicit purpose of killing people might be even more creepy than the police state we’re vaguely familiar with.
I suspect that the space of killer organ-transplanting AIs programmed by humans has far many more negative outcomes than positive ones. Even if we stipulate that the AI is incorruptible and infallible, there are still potential negative consequences:
People still have an incentive to sabotage their own health and to not get tested (see wedrifid’s argument)
People would live in fear of getting randomly killed, even if the chance was small
Allowing an AI to be built that can kill people might be a bad precedent
Allowing the practice of killing innocent people might be a bad precedent
You could get rid of the self-sabotage and fear if you make the AI a secret. But a world where people can make secret AIs to kill innocents without any kind of consent or vote still seems like a bad place.
But the idea of creating a machine for the explicit purpose of killing people might be even more creepy than the police state we’re vaguely familiar with.
Part of the reason it’s creepy is because, just like a police state, the outcome is probably going to be bad in the vast majority of cases.
(a) Let the aliens that happen to visit us cure cancer, except for 1 random patient out of 100, that they will let die, then eat.
This is an interesting case. My initial reaction was to let the aliens care cancer and eat 1⁄100 cancer patients (after they died). Yet as I thought about it more, and why people might find the scenario creepy, I became more and more worried.
In a one-shot negotiation, it would make sense on consequentialist grounds to accept their deal. The 1% of patients that the aliens eat won’t have a change in outcome: they would have died of cancer anyway. Yet, as usual with these thought experiments designed to test consequentialism, the answer changes when you consider the full range of possible consequences.
This question hinges on why the aliens want to eat humans. If the aliens had some good reason why they need to eat humans to cure them, then that might be OK (like ingesting cancerous humans will let them figure out how to stop all the different types of cancer). Yet there are many ways that allowing aliens to get their hands on human specimens might be a bad idea. Maybe they could clone us, or engineer pathogens.
Then there is the aspect of aliens eating human bodies. That’s creepy for a good reason. Letting aliens gain a taste for human flesh might be a bad idea. It might be a Schelling Point that we shouldn’t let them cross.
For a consequentialist to accept the aliens deal, there must be strong evidence for most of the following:
This is a one-shot deal
The aliens will leave after and never be seen again
Letting aliens access human specimens won’t have other negative consequences down the line
Letting aliens eat human bodies won’t tempt them to want to eat more human bodies, which could lead to other negative consequences
The aliens will follow through on their side of the deal
The aliens aren’t lying, wrong, or confused about anything, and we understand their psychology well enough to judge the above
The amount of evidence necessary to establish these conditions would be astronomical, and it would take probably decades of cooperation with these particular aliens.
Likewise, the burden of evidence for showing that killer doctors and killer doctorbot AIs provide a net benefit is also astronomically high. In the absence of that evidence being provided, it’s hard for a consequentialist to not get creeped out by the plausibility of negative outcomes.
This doesn’t fix the problem; it only changes the location. Giving your national medical association the power of citizens’ life and death is almost as bad as giving it to the government.
People won’t be afraid in hospitals, instead they’ll be afraid in their homes. They will have an incentive to try to hide from anyone who might be a doctor, or to kill them preemptively.
This policy would be a declaration of war between doctors and citizens. I can’t see the consequences going well.
As far as I can tell, this would have no bad effects beyond the obvious one of killing the people involved—it wouldn’t make people less likely to go to hospitals or anything
No, but it would make them afraid to go outside, or at least within the vicinity of police. This law might encourage people to walk around with weapons to deter police from nabbing them, and/or to fight back. People would be afraid to get genetic screening lest they make their organs a target. They would be afraid to go to police stations to report crimes lest they come out minus a kidney.
People with good organs would start bribing the police to defer their harvesting, and corruption would become rampant. Law and order would break down.
This sounds like an excellent plot for a science fiction movie about a dystopia, which indicates that it fails on consequentialist grounds unless our utility function is so warped that we are willing to create a police state to give organ transplants.
That’s the hypothesis that OkCupid advanced: game-theoretically, it makes sense to go for people you are strongly into who other people aren’t into. But there’s a problem with this hypothesis: it could turn out to be true, but right now, it’s sort of silly.
It’s unnecessary. Look at some normal distributions, and it’s easy to see that having a high variance of attractiveness is sufficient to explain high positive responses (that motivate 5-ratings and messaging) and highly negative responses (that motivate 1-ratings). Let’s say you message a woman with high variance (lots of 5s, lots of 1s) who you consider a five. Maybe that’s because for you, she isn’t actually a 5, she’s a 6! But the scale only goes to 5 inducing a ceiling effect. You are going for her because you are really, really into her (for the same reasons that other guys are really, really not into her), not because you anticipate less competition.
There is no evidence that people are thinking of that sort of game theory. It’s possible, but if men really cared so much about minimizing competition, you’d think they would message women they found 3s and 4s more often.
If you think someone is a 5, even due to high variance traits that other guys hate, you don’t necessarily realize that other guys hate those traits (typical mind fallacy). Instead, you may assume that other guys would be into her just as much as you, which undermines the notion that you are trying to get the women that other guys won’t pursue. This hypothesis gives men too much credit predicting the psychology of other men, and calculating the average appeal of a woman across the whole male population. For instance, I can’t figure out what the guys who give flower-hair-girl a 1-rating are smoking.
Assortive mating. If you message a woman with tattoos and piercings (to use the example in the article), is that because you are thinking “aha! tats and piercings will turn off other guys, so I’ll have her all to myself,” or “wow, I really like that she has tattoos and piercings, and she is probably going to like my tattoos and piercings, too!” This hypothesis isn’t really supported or necessary either, but it helps why men don’t treat all 5s (from their perspective) equally. If someone has tribal markers, it explains why you might both find them a 5 a message them, while you are less likely to message another woman you rate a 5 without tribal markers, and why other guys from other tribes can’t stand women with the affiliations you like.