Instead of relying on a toolbag of one-dimensional tactics, my recommended approach is to focus on understanding your partner's mental model of you, and of their relationship with you, and of the relationship they'd want.

That's a bit vague and difficult to enact. I want to get better at "Understanding your partner's mental model of you". That's the point of the AB test. I'm very open to alternative strategies for building this skill. I hope that responding to interest signals with more reactivity and disinterest signal with less reactivity will provide leverage on that question.

It's very common to be uncalibrated and apply a tactic that backfires on you because you weren't aware of the overall mental model that your partner had of you.

That seems like it would be true for many man-strategy dyads. It might be true for this dyad. Unfortunately without doing the experiment, there's no way to know. However, I do know that I am generally more reactive and become interested earlier in relationships than most men. So this seems worth trying.

I'll lay out some alternative strategies you might be advocating for:

Building practical skills for theory of mind

The alternative strategy, which I think you're suggesting, is to build general social intelligence, like "reading the mind in the eyes test". I could improve this by having lots of conversations with friends. I could constantly try to guess what they are thinking, and respond to it. That should build my ability to "undstand my partner's mental model of me".

One problem is COVID, so I can't really get face-to-face interaction outside of dates (major frustration in my life atm). The other problem is that I still need to behave some way on dates. So I can either do the AB test, all treatment, all control, or not go on dates. So I need to answer that question in a practical sense.

Just do control

Maybe you're suggesting I just do control? My prior is still 60% that PHTG would be more effective on dates on average. To do just control, I would forego all the value of finding out. That could only be worth it with an unjustifiably low prior (10%), such that checking the PHTG strategy is no longer worth it.

Do the AB test, but remember there are other factors

Maybe you are suggesting I "have an open mind" about the different causal factors involved.

This actually updates me toward the "all treatment" strategy. The reason is that PHTG requires I read a lot more signals than I normally do on a date. So if the set of causes is large, I'll only identify them from micro facial cues. So any strategy that forces me to practice theory of mind more will help me identify those factors in the long run.

Thanks for the response!

Other than the "teasing her more than I normally do" and "walking in a specific place relative to her" everything in your treatment group could also be called "being a good date."

Sounds like I'm on the right track :)

I would recommend, in your own head, think of it not in terms of "playing hard to get" but in terms of "treating your partner with respect."

"Treating your partner with respect" is a poor heuristic. It includes some great behaviors like listening but also some terrible ones that "put the woman on a pedestal". If you think respect has a special unusual definition on first dates, just taboo the word for better communication.

One could think about "being coy" or "respecting myself" or "withholding judgement until I know the whole woman" if they find "PHTG" distasteful. I have no preference.

Acting on Level 2, rather than Level 1, adds additional fail conditions and stress. http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/

This concern I hear a lot. I originally applied it to my dating-app-texting and send texts that felt natural to me. Those majorly underperformed texting strategies which relied on a few heuristic rules (short, easy to respond to, more teasing, etc.). We also know that most male animals do not use "be yourself" - see here. Also, the nature of system 1 is that it learns increasingly complex behavior with habit and reinforcement. So treatment could easily underperform at the start but eventually overperform.

Generally, I put some weight on this argument but not enough to switch to control only.

If your date realizes that you are "PHTG" that is, itself, a signal and will select for/against certain types of partners.

Half the probability mass in the "control is better" hypothesis comes from me being a bad actor, yes. On the other hand, looking desperate extends the number of dates needed to find an equivalent compatibility partner.

On that note, are you clear in your own mind about what your goal is? "What does it profit a man to gain the whole [girlfriend] but lose his [happiness]" and all that.

After the experiment if I hated PHTG but to outperformed the control, I can choose to do control anyway. That's unlikely but possible.

Interesting question Bucky!

I think on a date eye contact is usually a signal of intimacy and interest. If you were in a meeting with your boss you might look at their chin or your shoes as a sign of submission, but people would never do this is in a date. On a date eye contact is more about intimacy, interest, rewarding good convesation, etc. Therefore I expect more eye contact in the successful case.

What else does eye contact signal? It also says something about interest in the topic. I do observe that when people lose interest they look away a lot on dates. But this could just mean I'm talking to much, or picked a bad topic. I think conversation style choices should be guided by a "host" mindset rather than a status mindset. Making the other person comfortable is your prime concern. But when your doing posture, speech speed, pacing personal information, or defining the relationship it might be the dominant concern.

What do you think Bucky?

I just don’t feel comfortable if I act.

I think that's a great trait to have and I'd strongly recommend keeping it. If you can find enough things you like about yourself (and maybe have also worked on yourself to that end), you can also acquire genuine confidence in this way that feels way more robust than acting.

Maybe you've thought about this already, but I'd flag that some people (and more women than men) don't themselves compartmentalize so much between "just sex" and "romance". Humans have some degree of sexual dimorphism around attraction (e.g., "demisexuality" is rare among men but not that uncommon among women). So, the habit you mention and the way you phrase it might substantially decrease the pool of otherwise compatible partners. 

With the phrasing, I'd be worried that what many people might take away from your paragraph is not so much "This person cares about avoiding situations where they'd be incentivized to act inauthentically, therefore they prefer prostitutes over dating people with whom conversations don't feel meaningful", but rather "Something about intelligence, therefore hookers". 

The mismatch in psychologies is harder to address than the phrasing, and maybe that just means you don't think you're a good match to others who view the topic differently – it really depends on what feels right all things considered.

Just to be clear, I don't necessarily mean "view it differently" on moral grounds. For instance, I don't think extraverted people are immoral, but I'd feel weird and maybe too insecure with a partner who was too extroverted. Similarly, some women will feel weird and insecure if their partner has too much of a "men are bad/threatening" psychology, whether or not they think it's immoral. So finding other ways to meet the same needs could make sense if one worries about the pool of potential soulmates already being small enough, and if one places value on some of the normative intuitions, like importance of emotional connection during intimacy with a partner and not wanting to risk it being adversely affected. (The extraversion analogy isn't great because it sounds wrong to repress a core aspect of personality – the question with compartmentalization of romance vs. sex is if it's that or more/also influenced via habit formation and so on. I don't know much about the empirical issues.) 

Maybe you think what I write in the paragraphs above goes way too far in the direction of: 

Also implicitly you end up showing more regard for a stranger you don’t know than for yourself, because you basically end up fighting for someones affection instead of giving someone the choice to like you or not like you.

I'd say it depends. "Accommodations" come in degrees. Also, if you make them for any stranger, you're indeed not showing respect for yourself (as well as treating other people's personalities as interchangeable). However, if you find yourself particularly motivated to be good for partners with a certain type of character, that means that you already want to be the sort of person who appeals to them.

Do you have any evidence that happy people fall in love slower than happy people. So far I have only noticed a slight inverse relationship where crisis retard my romance response. All attempts to slow the response by having more friends failed (although being happier is nice for other reasons). Past attempts at PHTG have often succeeded.

If you believe that I fall in love faster than other people because I am “desperate” then all my past relationships should have collapsed when I told the person I liked them. This has not occurred. As long as I wait until the fifth of sixth interaction to say “I like you” the relationships are perfectly stable. Maybe that model just applies to certain people

After I’ve had sex with a woman a few times I find being affectionate is punished much less. It’s a temporary strategy to get through the early stages of courtship. I’m sorry but “Acting for the rest of your life” is a bit melodramatic. On their first dates people pretend to be kinder, funnier, smarter, taller and hotter than they really are. They don’t keep pretending forever.

"It could be that women coincidentally smell my terrible BO when I mention I want a long-term patner, but I doubt it."

It could also be that your signal of interest is the catalyst for them deciding to act on their pre-existing feelings of doubt. Perhaps they were already harbouring doubts but didn't voice them until you, essentially, forced them to decide.

What kind of indicators of interest are you making, how are you making them, and when are you making them?

I'm glad I could help!

Here's my plan for analyzing the data, let me know what changes your would make.

Bayes rule odds form: $$\frac{P(H1{)}_{prior}}{P(H2{)}_{Prior}}x\frac{P\left(E|H1\right)}{P\left(E|H2\right)}=\frac{P(H1{)}_{Posterior}}{P(H2{)}_{Posterior}}$$

So all I need from the experiment is the ratio of how likely I am to observe this result given H1 vs. given H2. At first I thought calculating that with t-distributions would be trivial, but I'm noticing a problem now. If I have 7 successes in treatment and 3 in control, I can use the t-dist to calculate how often I would observe that in the null. But since the null is decision irrelevant, that doesn't get me the likelihood ratio which I want. I see that now. I'll circle back to this problem when I have more time later.

Found a guide

I don't care about the null because if the null is true and I get the wrong answer, it doesn't matter.

• Meters-Briggs has a junk, so that’s fine. My past romantic partners have consistent big five profile either.

Sure there are sources of bias. I can’t control for them. But th

1. No generalizability needed. It just has to work for me and the women I normally date. Who cares if it would work for the “average guy”

2. I have no reason to assume a small effect size. My current positive rate on dates is 20%. Lots of room for improvement.

3. The subjectivity isn’t a problem because I’m the analyst and implementer. I don’t need well defined terms like communicating an academic study. I can reproduce the study from memory whenever I want.

Finally, there is no real cost to the study. Currently I’m ambivalent between treatment and control.