New Post version 2 (please read this ONLY if your last name beings with l–z)

Downvoted.

It's interesting and potentially useful, and I liked some of the links; however, I felt seriously skeeved-out throughout, probably due to the combination of uncomfortably personal authorial bildungsroman (with connotations of "if you do this right, you can be just like me"), and the implied promotion of polyamory. Would work much better if you could remove the autobiographical aspects.

I downvoted because of the assumption that there's something obviously wrong with jealousy and that monogamy is suboptimal. It's possible that both jealousy and monogamy are necessary components of reaching areas of utility that can't be accessed in the context of casual relationships. You could be gaining short-term pay off (not feeling jealous, being able to satisfy short-term urges) at the cost of higher utility long-term pay off (a traditional romantic relationship). Nothing is the story suggest that you'd obviously know if you were missing out on the latter either.

Neither upvoted nor downvoted. I didn't learn anything new from the article, but it doesn't look obviously wrong either.

Just a note about jealousy: beating yourself up for "immaturity" whenever you feel jealous doesn't sound to me like a healthy way to self-modify, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who's just starting out. IMO it's better to err in the other direction and grow confidence until you lose jealousy as a side effect. That happened to me once and I didn't even notice the change until afterward. But I'm sure you're already happy in the place you are, so it's probably no longer relevant to you.

• I'd say there's a good chance that you're equating correlation with causation, to an extent; it might not be your systematic self-improvement plan that's effective insomuch as you, yourself, have grown and matured over the past few years and are now more confident and self-assured with different needs and traits than those you had years ago. That, to me, seems like pretty typical individual maturation.

• I'd question the inherent assumption that polyamory is inherently more ethical. While monogamy does limit some relationships from forming, it can also prompt deeper emotional bonds and trust between the partners within that relationship.

• So too, it's unclear how long you've been in your current relationship. I'd question any analysis of "good relationships" that didn't look at quality over the course of a relationship for a significant amount of time. What "significant" is is debatable, but relationships tend to get harder as they go along, not easier, and if overall quality of one's relationships is one's goal, then initial quality would be, at best, misleading.

I thought this was a pretty good post. However, I may be biased as I agree with most of the things you said.

One thing that keeps me from immediately wanting to spend time going through the same set of scholarship/practice that you did is that it seems to me like the sort of person I would want to date long-term is extremely gender-atypical, and therefore these strategies will not help me much in this regard. So all this would buy me is lots of good casual sex, which may not be worth the seemingly large initial time investment.

I also, for instance, don't think I would want to build rapport with almost anyone --- to put it bluntly, talking to most people is a waste of time from the perspective of both personal enrichment/enjoyment and my long-term instrumental goals.

I did not upvote or downvote. Some parts contained useful information (despite being somewhat cursory), but other parts seemed like other-optimizing (the mostly one-sided pro-polyamory presentation).

Normally I like seeing individual stories and anecdotes and having information broken down into small pieces. Insofar as I might be interested in self-modifying toward polyamory in the future I think that this post would be helpful.

On the other hand, I was skeeved just like many other commenters. Major parts of that may have been from:

• I think I would have had a different initial reaction to Alice; more like an appreciation of her commitment than a sense of suboptimality.
• You say that you "scored [your] first one-night stand" then immediately go on to say how you do not enjoy casual flings. One part of my brain that I am not sure whether I endorse tells me that this means you are manipulating women, and another part tells me that you aren't even enjoying it, which turns into strengthening that negative response even though I am not sure if I want it. An extra sentence after the first one night stand before the statement about not enjoying them would help.
• Abrupt changes of subject make me feel weird and displaced, and you grouped it with other topics (like not talking about mathematics while flirting) that I am only just starting to come around to.

One thing that really intrigues me about the comments is how negatively some people react to the personal-story element of it, contrasted with Alicorn's Luminosity sequence, where people requested personal stories because they made it easier to identify with the material.

One big difference is that Alicorn's stories were third-person, and yours are first-person; another is that Alicorn's were nominally fictional and yours are nominally factual. Of course, the content is also different, and the community has changed.

Still, I wonder how this same post would have been received in a third-person-hypothetical mode.

I upvoted, but mostly because I too dislike our culture's promotion of owning other people's sexualities through monogamy, and am irritated that this is a cached thought that most rationalists either tacitly endorse or defend with crappy "evolutionary psychology".

I haven't decided whether to upvote or downvote yet. For now a quick note about the intended method of getting feedback: I don't know if A-H has the same number of people roughly as from I-Z. Moreover, there may be other issues if some cultural groups are more likely to have surnames that end in a letter from one part of the alphabet.

Here I am on this post now! And... gosh, I'm annoyed that there's not enough difference between the two posts for it to be worth my time to look over both. I understand your motivation, but as a reader I...

Feel cheated.

::BADUM-TISH::

But seriously. I do feel kind of bothered that you put the reader through a serious inconvenience just for the purpose of your own statistics. Is it a logical thing to do? Yes. But I'd really like to have two posts to read out of your little experiment, not 1.1 posts.

It doesn't seem like this strategy will continue to be effective when you are no longer a young man. Is this a short-term strategy?

It doesn't seem like this approach will yield stable and reliable companionship into old age.

There is no mention of the desire for offspring in this post. Historically the point of sexual relationships has been offspring, the nominal "reason" for dating has been to find a suitable partner with which to raise offspring.

Sorry if this post is unbearably quaint, but I can't figure out why you're even bothering with all this. I mean, save yourself the trouble, just remain celibate or use prostitutes.

I like the personal example of using rationality to figure out what will really make you happy. I don't like the implication that what you learned about yourself would also be true of everyone else. For example, the implication that everyone could or should be polyamorous is not adequately justified.

With 70% probability, after reading this, I'd so totally do you.

upvoted.

I didn't upvote or downvote-- the post doesn't seem wildly different in quality than other vaguely ok posts I've seen.

It took me a while to get past sympathy for Alice to think about other aspects of the post. What is your understanding of your mistake when breaking up? I've got my own theory, and I'm curious about whether they'll match.

I'm surprised that you got so much good out of research.

I think there was a comment tweaking you for needing to figure out that women are looking for positive subjective experiences. (One annoying thing about the double post is that there are two discussions.) There's a lot of nonsense in the culture, and it takes work to get past it. In particular, I think there's a background belief that men should be able to attract women through innate wonderfulness, and as stated, this just isn't true. The belief also causes a lot of misery.

I'm wondering whether people who have trouble getting started on relationships are more likely to come from families where the adults were in an unhappy relationship. I think that people are more vulnerable to nonsense from the culture if they don't have good countervailing examples.

i would find this a more compelling narrative if you explained more clearly the ends towards which various actions were directed. What kind of relationship[s] did you want, at each stage of this process? Are there other goals for which these means would have been more or less applicable?

My initial reaction was "Upvote". Then I read the comments, thought about it some more, and decided to upvote anyway.

I'm also reminded of this...

Neither voted up nor down. For one, the thought that there's another post out there was extremely distracting as I was reading. I kept speculating on what was different and whether it was a kind of test (of the reader; clearly it's presented as a test of the article).

As for the structure of the article, it seems unfocused. There are a few good bits here and there, but it's mostly a repetition of things I've seen many times elsewhere. I would have gotten more out of a post that explores your approach to polyamory in more detail and leaves the other stuff out.

Now I'm going to go read the other version, since I'm curious, but I promise not to vote on it one way or the other.

I wasn't sure where the post was going. It has interesting, potentially useful points, but I wasn't clear on the goal of the post. The first heading gives a clue, but I think it would be helpful to expand on this.

Upvoted for several different reasons:

1: I liked the general progress of the story. It contains several thematic elements that in general I find appealing (finding emotional happiness, building skills)

2: I know people who I believe this advice would be of great help to. Specifically this section:

Every book on dating skills told me to go talk to women, but I thought I needed a completed decision tree first: What if she does this? What if she says that? I won't know what to do if I don't have a plan! I should read 10 more books, so I know how to handle every contingency.

The dating books told me I would think that, but I told myself I was unusually analytical, and could actually benefit from completing the decision tree in advance of actually talking to women.

The dating books told me I would think that, too, and that it was just a rationalization. Really, I was just nervous about the blows that newbie mistakes (and subsequent rejections) would lay upon my ego.

3: I have also had that experience where after yet another woman rejected me I thought "I need to refine my approach to avoid making the same mistakes that I did previously." In my specific case, the second problem, which I was stuck on for years, was that I was getting friend zoned by people who weren't looking for a boyfriend right now.

I am curious how you met your first girlfriend and more details about your relationship before you noticed that problem you mentioned. While I like the story, the in media res beginning leaves that as an unknown. (I'm not saying you should add it to the story necessarily, just that it leaves me personally curious.)

I don't see what you plan to gain from splitting the article into two slightly different versions - you won't have the statistical power to get results that would, e.g., convince me to change my article-writing behavior about anything important.

No vote, because I don't typically vote unless something sticks out.

I thought the article was pretty ok. I liked reading your story of personal development. :) The short sections with clearly labelled points were effective. I don't have too much objection to the specific advice you mentioned, except: there were certain ones that apply to, yes, a nice large portion of people, but an individual might find that they are more compatible with people outside that portion (eg. people who appreciate math jokes as flirtation) and I think it's worth looking for that compatibility even if it's not as common.

Neither upvoted nor downvoted. It contains material that would be helpful for some in the LW community, but you personally come off as a bit callous in the process, and that's fairly off-putting.

Second the neither upvoting nor downvoting part. While I enjoyed the humor, I'm not actually sure I want to encourage it on LW - Luke being Luke, there's all the hard science I want in the links, but for other contributors...?

And now I have to go read the other version to try to figure out what the difference was and what responses Luke expected!

You don't touch too much on the ways by which you form relationships, but if the approaches described in the "Use Science" section are indicative of what you always do, I'm appalled.

It surprises me that your "rational" approach to getting women involves being largely dishonest about who you are to them. Why avoid talking about politics, math, programming, and religion if that's what you enjoy talking about? If she doesn't, then maybe you shouldn't be together. If forming a satisfying relationship is truly your goal I don't think this is the best way. It seems to me that your "rational approach" is more about tricking both of you into thinking you like each other so that you can enjoy each other's company for a night.

And for that matter, for someone who is a prominent member of a blog devoted to improving the art of human rationality, you seem perfectly willing to discard rationality and abuse women's inherent biases when it serves your sexual interests.

Edit: I no longer endorse a number of the things I have said in this thread. Particularly bad comments have been retracted.

Interesting I went through a similar assessment of my sexual and social results, and ultimately reached similar positive results with a different arrangement.

So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty. Later, I realized how hard it is to think of a more damaging way to break up with someone.

Ouch. That sounds so similar to something I might have done at a one point. I guess I must have been lucky or passed through that awkwardness where you leave standard social scripts but haven't built good replacements rather quickly. Hurting someone is really something I have a hard time getting over.

I hit diminishing returns in what books could teach me.

Satisficing is hard to do when searching for solutions. Finding "optimal" solutions is so tempting.

Note: This is a rather old post though. Overall its still reasonably close to my positions.

Upvoted for it brings an interesting discussion.

I didn't upvote or downvote (and haven't yet read the other article), because I generally don't unless I feel strongly about the content of a post, one way or another, and I didn't, aside from wanting to argue about polyamory and such.

Having now read them both individually and then side by side, the other is far better. The other comment I made still stands though, for both articles.

I seem to have put in a lot less effort to get what seem to me to be similarly awesome results. This very weakly implies that a lot of your skill gaining might not have been necessary:

There might have been a learning curve, but by golly, at the end of all that DIY science and rationality training and scholarship I'm actually seeing an awesome poly girl, I'm free to take up other relationships when I want, I know fashion well enough to teach it at rationality camps, I can build rapport with almost anyone, my hair looks great and I'm happy.

I didn't really do much of anything, yet at 19 I'm living with a very laid-back 21yo Cal cognitive science student who pays for my rent and food, I know fashion well enough to turn heads when I walk down the street, I can somehow build rapport with almost anyone I particularly care about building rapport with, my hair looks great when I bother to get it cut which is really a rather simple procedure, and I don't remember the last time I felt the emotion of "happiness" but that wasn't really the focus of this article. Back when I was in the game I was banging cheerful sweet intelligent 17yo models like it was no big deal. I pulled that off despite the fact that I have a lot of weird psychological/neurological stuff going on that makes many people think I'm autistic or something, and I'm at only like 7 on the physical attractiveness scale. My secret? Probably decision theoretic anthropic selection.