How to Compliment 2020-12-16T08:25:58.186Z

The Geography of the Room — impact of position, orientation, and visibility on how often extraverts start conversations 2019-05-12T17:21:36.778Z

Comment by less_penguiny on More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA · 2018-10-04T10:15:45.140Z · LW · GW

Ask yourself: How would a cunning but ultimately good-hearted Slytherin commenter get a message they believed useful to others read when there are hundreds of other comments competing for the same limited attention?

By responding to the most-upvoted, and therefore highest-up-in-the-page existing comment, one of the only ones likely to get future eyeballs.

I read the first wave of pick up materials when I was a teenager, way back in the Internet Usenet days. It would not be an exaggeration to say they changed my life – not for romantic reasons, but because they spelled social interaction out in the way I needed at the time and got me on track to leading a fulfilling social life.

I read this thread on Less Wrong a few years back and it deeply resonated with me. Since then I documented over 2000 useful, intriguing or otherwise noteworthy observations of social interactions happening around me – ways people bragged, compliments that warmed my heart, techniques for starting conversations with strangers.

I'm now in the process of coding and analyzing my empirical observations, publishing the results in my blog, Less Penguiny: https://www.lesspenguiny.com/

(Less Awkward, as other commenters suggested, was sadly unavailable.)

PS Sorry for hijacking the comments, but I honestly believe my project is of value to Less Wrong readers for whom this thread was important, and I knew that there would be little chance of getting noticed if I instead appended comment #630.