The Social Coprocessor Model

That's a good point. Let me try a different one.

Let X be 'I am slightly more committed to this group’s welfare, particularly to that of its weakest members, than most of its members are. If you suffer a serious loss of status/well-being I will still help you in order to display affiliation to this group even though you will no longer be in a position to help me. I am substantially more kind and helpful to the people I like and substantially more vindictive and aggressive towards those I dislike. I am generally stable in who I like. I am much more capable and popular than most members of this group, demand appropriate consideration, and grant appropriate consideration to those more capable than myself. I adhere to simple taboos so that my reputation and health are secure and so that I am unlikely to contaminate the reputations or health of my friends. I currently like you and dislike your enemies but I am somewhat inclined towards ambivalence on regarding whether I like you right now so the pay-off would be very great for you if you were to expend resources pleasing me and get me into the stable 'liking you' region of my possible attitudinal space. Once there, I am likely to make a strong commitment to a friendly attitude towards you rather than wasting cognitive resources checking a predictable parameter among my set of derivative preferences.'

Then, instead of saying my previous suggestion, say something like, 'I would precommit to acting in such a way that X if and only if you would precommit to acting in such a way that you could truthfully say, "X if and only if you would precommit to acting in such a way that you could truthfully say X."'

(Edit: Note, if you haven't already, that the above is just a special case of the decision theory, "I would adhere to rule system R if and only if (You would adhere to R if and only if I would adhere to R)." )

Wouldn't the mere ability to recognize such a symmetric decision theory be strong evidence of X being true?

Why is this being downvoted?

A guess: because everything in quotes in Clippy's comment is a copy and paste of a generic comment it posted a week ago.

I don't actually know myself, though - I upvoted Clippy's comment because I thought it was funny. Copying an earlier comment and asking for feedback on it where it's semi-relevant is exactly in keeping with what I imagine the Clippy character to be.

I think it's the "faking it" part I and many other people find objectionable.

ETA: you edited this post after I replied, so I don't think my original reply makes sense any more....

Wouldn't it just be easier for you to ignore the posts that contain info that you don't personally need or want to know?

How is this different from "if you disagree with me, keep it to yourself"?

See previous comment about signal to noise ratio.

Edit: Practical advice that is appropriate for the majority of people on this site is fine, it doesn't create the noise of confusion and boredom. Akrasia being a good example of appropriate practical advice. As is advice about sleeping, eating, teaching, communicating ideas.

Look at it from the flip side. Should we do make up tips for nerdy girls?

I read Self Made Man a couple years ago, and I highly recommend it. The author is to be commended for such an extensive debiasing project. Vincent found living as a man to have a lot more challenges than she thought. I'll post some excerpts or articles about her that might be interesting for people here.

From here:

I caught one woman's eye and held her gaze for a second, smiling. She returned the smile and looked away. This was signal enough for me, so I stood up, made my way over to their table and asked them whether they wanted to join us for a drink. "No, thanks," one of them said, "we're on our way out in a minute."

Simple enough, right? A brush-off. No biggie. But as I turned away and slumped back across the room toward our table, I felt like the outcast kid in the lunchroom who trips and dumps his tray on the linoleum in front of the whole school.

"Rejection is a staple for guys," said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. "Get used to it." ...

On dates with men I felt physically appraised in a way that I never did by women, and, while this made me more sympathetic to the suspicions women were bringing to their dates with Ned, it had the opposite effect, too. Somehow men's seeming imposition of a superficial standard of beauty felt less intrusive, less harsh, than the character appraisals of women.

The women I met wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space, and at times it made me feel quite small in my costume, like a young man must feel when he's just coming of age and he's suddenly expected to carry the world under his arm like a football. And some women did find Ned too small physically to be attractive. They wanted someone, they said, who could pin them to the bed or, as one woman put it, "someone who can drive the bus". Ned was too willowy for that. I began to understand from the inside why Robert Crumb draws his women so big and his diminutive self begging at their heels or riding them around the room.

Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colours and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it. But I began to feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men - the pressure to be a world-bestriding colossus is an immensely heavy burden to bear, and trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. Expectation, expectation, expectation was the leitmotif of Ned's dating life. ...

Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no.

From here:

Vincent even dabbled in the art of picking up women and agreed to wear a hidden camera for "20/20" during her exploits.

She was quickly reminded that in this arena, it's women who have the power, she said.

"In fact, we sit there and we just with one word, 'no,' will crush someone," she said. "We don't have to do the part where you cross the room and you go up to a stranger that you've never met in the middle of a room full of people and say the first words. And those first words are so hard to say without sounding like a cheeseball or sounding like a jerk."

Vincent encountered some pretty cold shoulders in her attempts at the bar, but she did manage to go on about 30 dates with women as "Ned," mostly arranging them on the Internet.

Vincent said the dates were rarely fun and that the pressure of "Ned" having to prove himself was grueling. She was surprised that many women had no interest in a soft, vulnerable man.

"My prejudice was that the ideal man is a woman in a man's body. And I learned, no, that's really not. There are a lot of women out there who really want a manly man, and they want his stoicism," she said.

Honestly, I don't see what you're basing that conclusion on.

I'm surprised that you find the conclusion surprising or controversial. (The conclusion being that some some values survive the "larger scheme of things" argument much better than others.) I know that you wrote earlier:

As for the "larger scheme of things," that's one of those emotionally-appealing sweeping arguments that can be applied to literally anything to make it seem pointless and unworthy of effort.

but I didn't think those words reflected your actual beliefs (I thought you just weren't paying enough attention to what you were writing). Do you really think that people like me, who do not think that literally everything is pointless and unworthy of effort, have just avoided applying the argument to some of our values?

What, according to you, determines which human values survive that argument and which not?

It seems obvious to me that some values (e.g., avoiding great pain) survive the argument by being hardwired to not respond to any arguments, while others (saving humanity so we can develop an intergalactic civilization, or being the first person in an eventually intergalactic civilization to really understand how decisions are supposed to be made) are grand enough that "larger scheme of things" just don't apply. (I'm not totally sure I'm interpreting your question correctly, so let me know if that doesn't answer it.)

Deciding which psychological drives to keep, and which to abandon, is the same as figuring out full formal preference (assuming you have more expressive power than just keeping/abandoning), so there is no heuristic for doing that simpler than full formal preference. This problem isn't just unresolved, it's almost FAI-complete (preference theory, as opposed to efficient implementation).

Still, to me, desire for high status in some small group seems to be the same kind of "crazy" value as scope insensitivity.

Can you expand on this? It isn't logically inconsistent to want to have status...

Oops, fixed.

Taboo judge. They decided whether to say "yes" or "no" to a request, and they (allegedly) didn't enter into some class of cognitive states associated with negative affect or disapproval.

Right - where the specific states involved are the ones that we use to signal lowered status or withdrawal of friendly interaction on the basis of a personal inadequacy or moral failing. In the vernacular, they didn't "look down their noses" on anybody, but instead treated them as if they were worthy of appreciation.

I just went back to listen to parts of the interview again to refresh my memory (it's been three years), and some of the key points Vanessa made were:

• It feels good to experience being approved of, and paid attention to

• It also feels good when you make other people feel good, by approving of and listening to them (which is a big part of why she and Garin do it)

• Both only happen if you're sincere, rather than faking it

• She says she tries to remember that she can learn something from everyone, as a way of evoking a state of genuine interest in herself

• When you proactively project approval towards people before they even do or say anything, they start the conversation relaxed and feeling better -- and attribute this to you.

• People often confuse arrogance and confidence -- they think they have to put on a big show in order to impress people, but really this is just another form of approval seeking.

• She described the more useful attitude as "humble, but not apologetic", i.e., her openness to learn something from anyone, while at the same time not apologizing for her own choices, opinions, or personal boundaries.

These are just quick summaries from a ten-minute excerpt of the full interview, but I think this was the only section where we really talked about approval seeking or the process by which she and Garin "proactively approved of" people before meeting them.

I have a problem here. Filtering implies that some judgement has been made, and the person has been found wanting. It is harmful to advise against filtering, and therefore also harmful to advise against judging.

They decided whether to say "yes" or "no" to a request, and they (allegedly) didn't enter into some class of cognitive states associated with negative affect or disapproval.

Advising people not to judge others is not the same as what you said. My point is only that this constitues bad advice.

Let me sum it up more simply: Telling people not to judge is not an accurate reflection of what they actually do.

I tried to explain why non-judgmentalism is a bad value to uphold. I have nothing to say about Garin and Vanessa, only about the value of the advice proffered.

Yes, I like this analogy between intellectual interaction and social (status) interaction. Both types of interaction have "I'll push you until you stop me" behavior, that would be considered offensive or attacking if it was manifested in the other form of interaction.

A common mode of interaction for intellectuals is to argue for positions that you aren't sure of in order to figure out if they believe in, or even to argue for positions that they don't believe just to play devil's advocate. These debate styles push against people, expecting them to push back, analogous to the social styles of many neurotypical extraverts.

Just as introverts on the autistic spectrum hate it when neurotypical extraverts try to turn everything into a status game, neurotypical extraverts hate it when autistic spectrum introverts try to turn everything into a debate.

In a group of neurotypical extraverts, saying something like "you're such a dork" to someone else is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to handle it and fire back. Likewise, in a group of autistic spectrum introverts, saying something like "you're wrong" is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to be able to handle it, and either defend or concede their position.

Both groups have different norms for showing assertiveness, and an assertiveness display in one group could be considered an attack if it was performed in the other group.

Who are you talking about as the "asshole" in this scenario?

The guy who says "no" when, in the middle of flirting, a girl asks for a drink. This just doesn't happen IRL unless the guy is intentionally trying to shut down the interaction.

This particular example is taken from the world of pick-up, which has been tested more extensively than you can imagine.

On a very narrow and self-selecting sample, i.e. people who show up at bars and clubs with the express intention of getting "picked up"

That's why I said statusvalue - i.e. something that is a combination of their overall status and their value to you.

I would call that simply value. If their status matters to me, it is part of their value to me; if it does not, it is irrelevant.

This particular example is taken from the world of pick-up, which has been tested more extensively than you can imagine.

Tested by you? Ok, maybe that's too personal a question, but I'm aware in general terms of the PUA stuff, and I have only a limited interest in soup of the soup.

Thank you.

They will expect you to negotiate yourself, by either submitting, or attempting to fight back; what they won't be able to understand is someone who doesn't even participate in this sort of negotiation in the first place.

Yep. And depending on the way you opt out of the negotiation, you may be perceived as either very low self-esteem, or as an arrogant bastard.

The latter category (which I personally have been categorized as a lot) tends to happen when you assume that all people are supposed to be equal, dammit, and refuse to give ground to anything that isn't Right with a capital R. This results in the problem of causing others to have to lose face when you win... and people don't like it.

(Later in life, I've realized that it generally works better to arrange things so that other people can receive status strokes by siding with you, and they then tend to return the strokes.)

So, for example, extraverts (people for whom an extraverted perspective is their "home base") typically interact by putting something on the table for others to react to, whether they like it or not.

Introverts (people for whom an introverted perspective is their "home base") typically interact by first asking permission to enter another person's space. You view each person as trying to understand and practice the good in his own way, and this process is not something to interfere with lightly.

I've heard this before, but framed as 'Ask Culture meets Guess Culture'.

To people like us, neurotypical socially-dominant extraverts will seem annoying with their constant status grabs. But they aren't necessarily trying to be jerks, they are just interacting the only way they know how. They are attempting to negotiate with you, they just begin the negotiation by driving a hard bargain.

Yeah this is a good analysis. Important for more rational/AS people is to realize that more emotion-driven NTs run their social interaction in hardware ==> they do things like little status grabs almost without thinking about it.

The assumption in Roko's drink-buying model is that this is the right way to interact to attract the kind of women his audience would be interested in. That's a statement of probability. It's likely that you'll be going to bars to meet women, it's likely that any women you're interested in engage in shit-testing, it's likely that any women you're interested in respond the way the girls in the Feynman story do. I'm really not sure about that.

Actually, it's a statement of conditional probability, conditioned on a woman asking a man for a drink in such a setting, often as a prelude to having any conversation at all.

(It's not, however, a great example of a cacheable response. Really, the whole point of it as a status/social skill test is that it is hard to fake!)

Anyway, here's the reasoning: if a man is asked for a drink, it may or may not be a test, conscious or unconscious. However, in all possible cases, the man is highly likely to improve the situation by skillfully declining or negotiating a quid pro quo, because the situation is still a signaling opportunity, even if the woman's attraction wouldn't have decreased upon acquiescence. (In other words, you either win, or don't lose - a positive expected outcome over multiple trials.)

For example, let's say it's one of those "nerdy women" -- she is not fishing for a drink, not consciously testing, and (probably) not unconsciously testing, but maybe has been taught that this is how you signal openness to being courted, or just doesn't think about it at all.

Well, in that particular case, it's an opportunity for a signal like, "Not a feminist, huh?" -- probably leading to a thought-provoking conversation about feminism, chivalry, and the impact of social trends on dating behaviors...

A conversation that wouldn't have happened if the response was a bland, "okay". If he'd simply agreed without further comment, maybe he wouldn't have lost any points, but he certainly wouldn't have gained any either -- he has simply failed to distinguish himself from any other man who lacks the social skill to finesse the situation. He is out a drink, and gets nothing except (maybe) the continuation of the conversation... assuming that her attraction doesn't mysteriously evaporate shortly thereafter, due to her unconscious lowering of his status.

But the (extreme) case of a nerdy woman who's both sincerely asking for a drink and won't subconsciously decrease attraction upon compliance, is actually the worst case scenario for measuring the advantage of the "never buy a drink without quid pro quo" heuristic... and yet it still comes out well ahead of compliance in the best case, and only slightly better in worst-case!

And in all other scenarios, such as a woman using this to get rid of the guy or to get drinks, using it as a filter for non-interesting guys, or even a woman who thinks it's normal but unconsciously feels less attracted to men who comply... the heuristic produces much better results on average than buying the drink does. (Assuming, again, the guy has developed the social skills to pull it off.)

Among other things, it's also a counter-filter, since the woman who truly has no interest in the guy outside his ability to procure alcohol will immediately depart in search of another sucker, no matter how skillfully it's done. For the rest, you still either win, or else you don't lose.

Of course, this is all conditional on the man's skill in making use of all the available information in the situation... for one thing, he's got to be socially calibrated enough to be able to tell the difference between the woman who'll respond to "Sure, bend over, you spoiled brat" vs. the one who'll respond to "Not a feminist, eh?"... and preferably be able to tell that before even starting the conversation. (Oh, and let's not forget that those two can be the same woman, in different moods!)

But that's the "software" way of doing it... the "coprocessor" way is that the guy ideally just believes that it'd be silly to buy a woman a drink without a quid pro quo (like Feynman's advisor) and lets their social hardware handle the details of responding.

Attempting to cache a specific behavioral response in "software" isn't going to cut it, though; the PUA methods that revolve around "canned" material are necessarily probabilistic and essentially manipulative. So, if there's a flaw in Roko's example, that would be it: caching a specific response pretty much guarantees it's not going to be done with a truly beneficial level of skill.

And yet, even in that case, it's still probably positive-sum advice, as long as the man continues learning and improving over the long haul.

I only have anecdotes, of course, but I and most of my female friends and family members don't behave like that.

Well, if "behave like that" is asking guys for drinks, then there's no conflict with what Roko said, since the situation will never come up.

However, if "behave like that" is responding with increased attraction to a display of confidence, tact, humor, and/or other social skills, I'd be surprised. (It's just that what you would personally consider to be such a display is going to depend on a lot of situational factors that a single canned response can't possibly take into account.)

I think nerdy women are pretty numerous, far too numerous to be diagnosable autistics, and do just fine on the dating market. And I suspect the typical straight male LW reader wouldn't mind dating one.

There are many arguments that come to mind here, but above all: having to cut down your dating pool drastically because you can't handle typical social behavior is not winning.

All other things equal, it is better to have more choice, and all other things are not equal: "nerdy" occupations and communities are not gender balanced.

I'm still not convinced that a typical straight male LW reader won't find, in his dating pool, quite a few women who don't behave like the prototypical chick in a PUA parable.

Well, the "buying a drink" story is an extreme example that's been canonized to make a point. But I'm convinced that in general, human beings are always unconsciously "testing" each other, and that this applies to everyone, male or female, autistic or NT. It's just part of how humans talk and joke around and communicate. For instance, saying hi to someone and smiling is "testing": you're seeing what kind of mood someone is in. Making a joke, or laughing at a joke, is "testing": you're seeing how other people react.

I don't see the "PUA" stuff as about sex or dating or men and women. It's about human social interaction in general.

If pjeby's original intent, however, was to present NT women as those most likely to engage in this behavior, and non-NT women as least likely, then I would agree with him that such a correlation is plausible.

I actually didn't state either of the things that people are attributing to me. I simply referred to "the mostly-NT women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks".

The mostly-NT is hyphenated because it is an attribute of "women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks" -- and this attribution does not require any correlation. The simple fact that non-NT women are a minority, period, ensures that most of the women who do this showing up at bars and asking of drinks will be neurotypicals.

I was making a point about the selection bias effect of this on PUA models, not attempting to draw any conclusions about the likelihood of drink-asking behavior given neurotypicality. (I did suggest a negative correlation between neuro-atypicality and drink-asking behavior, however.)

personality traits are at least as big a factor as looks in explaining variance in conscious female status testing behavior.

FTFY

Partly that they put less effort into their appearance (which, for many, also includes a non-trivial effort to be thin), but also that a desire to be noticed is more related to extroversion and dominance than their opposites, and skill at being noticed favorably is related to neurotypicallity.

To the extent that the personality traits described are learned, I would expect more innately-attractive women to be less likely to develop them. (More specifically, women who were more attractive at some relatively young age, like how men's income is more strongly associated with adolescent than adult height [PDF].)