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Thanks for this well researched comment.
I'm growing to think that a lot of health experts had an implicit understanding that the systems around them in the west were not equipped to carry out their best plans of action. In other words, they saw the smoke under the door, decided that if they yelled 'fire' before it had filled up the room nobody would believe them and then decided to wait a bit before yelling 'fire'.
I believe you that the experts rationalize their behavior like so. The problem is that underselling a growing emergency was a terrible advocacy plan. Maybe it covered their asses, but it screwed over their stakeholders by giving us less time to prepare.
Their argument really proves too much. For example, the Wuhan provincial government could also use it to justify the disastrous coverup.
David Roodman was fired from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for his poor office politics skillS. He’s my greatest role model so you’re in good company.
He talks about it on his 80k interview, iirc.
Much of this thread is long time rationalists talking about the experience of new people like me. Here's my experience as someone who found rationality a year ago. It bears more closely on the question than the comments of outliers. I read the sequences then applied rat ideas to dating, and my experience closely resembles Jacobians model. Note that LW has little dating advice, so I did the research and application myself. I couldn't just borrow techniques, had to apply rationality[^1]. My experience is evidence that rationality is improving our outcomes.
I picked up The Sequences in February 2020 on a recommendation from 80k. I read the Yud's sequences cover to cover. Their value was immediately obvious to me, and I read deeply.
I finished the sequences in May, and immediately started applying it to my problems. My goal was not to look cool or gain status on a weird blog. I just wanted to make my life better, and The Sequences gave me a sense that more was possible.
Improving my romantic life has been my greatest rationality project. Dating was a hard part of my life. After The Sequences I realized most dating advice rested on Fake Explanations, anti-reductionism, just-world bias, and is just general crap. I could see conventional dating wisdom for the bullshit that it is. An instrumentally rational model of mate selection must be a bit complicated and a lot weird, but I knew it existed.
I started writing blog posts analyzing my experience, proposing experiments, and looking for advice. I eventually found the best research by Miller, Fleischman, LukeProg, Putanomit and the great ancient Hugh Ristik. You can look through my own LW history to see what happened. Most posts apply ideas from Fleischman or Miller to my own particular situation or attack conventional wisdom about relationships. A few things happened.
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Most posts were harshly criticized by LW'ers because people have strong feelings about romance. One post started a 50 comment debate about whether dating advice is too taboo for the site. I did not mind because the criticism was sometimes constructed and always less than my ideas got in the real world. The criticism is strong evidence my behavior was driven by problem solving not status seeking.
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None-rationalists harshly criticized my findings. I lost status repeatedly.
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I made mistakes. I overvalued status signalling sometimes. I overvalued mate choice copying. I under texted. I over texted. I worked until I found balance between intuition and model.
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People repeatedly told me "You should not try. I tried to apply system 2 to dating, and my results were bad." I thought to myself "There's a 50% chance he's right and I get no benefit. But if they're wrong the benefit is huge" and kept working.
Now in October my romantic life is way better. My strategies are more adapted. My predictive capacity is stronger. Dating isn't a scary chaotic part of life, it's a fun, silly chaotic part of my life. It's still frustrating sometimes but the improvement has been huge.
##Conclusions
This post is accurate. I went through the swamp of underperformance. I endured the sneers. I accepted having deeply weird beliefs. I attacked ugh field after ugh field. I believed non-just-world truths sometimes (without going all "red-pill"). And it took time but it worked.
The tribal culture of LessWrong wasn't a problem. I wanted rational people to comment on my ideas, so I posted here. I got what I wanted. It's fine.
[^1] I eventually found Geoffrey Miller's Book "Mate" which saved me enormous time.
Interesting question.
A separate reference class is cartels formed around profitable emerging technology. Many of the examples you cited refer to state lead projects in basic science. We would expect breakthroughs to cluster there because the cutting edge is rarely on the commercial applications side. The problem is that IF artificial intelligence advances become immediately profitable at some time, companies
Do you believe that unpopular statements, supported by novel arguments, damage the commons? I think having more voices particularly voices that challenge our preconceived notions and values is good for the commons.
I don't agree that I should be required to anticipate all counterarguments. That seems a bit silly.
The main complaint people make about shittesting is that its irrational or unfair. That complaint was addressed by my post by reframing it from the perspective of the tester and their goals. I did not make that argument explicit to avoid insulting the reader and to stay within my own experience (robustness).
People have raised an additional claim that some forms of shittesting are used for abuse. This is a rare complaint and I was interested to learn it, but I was not obligated to scour the interwebs for complaints before pointing out the value of an oft-maligned behavior.
Those are some cool phrases to pull apart different types of testing partners. I think using that phrase would change people's moral attachments to the same behavior. I also think they are generally more precise which is cool.
Woah woah woah, I don't think my title is "simply wrong". I could have been more sensitive to your concern, but I'm not endorsing such sweeping moral generalizations about complicated courtship behaviors at all. Let's break it down in a couple ways.
Firstly, you've asserted a pretty narrow definition of the word shittest, where it means "loyalty test". In the usage cases I've seen, a minority of uses of shittest refer to loyalty testing. The most common usage case is shittesting of a man's status or social skills. So if you are asserting that loyalty tests are ethically wrong in all cases, that does not mean that shittesting is ethically wrong in all cases.
Secondly, I think good can be parsed as instrumentally selfishly rational or as ethical (which itself has lots of meanings).
Instrumentally selfishly rational: I still think if a person wants to know the attributes of a potential partner they benefit from testing those attributes. Since most shiittesting is done by women toward men it's common that men talk about shittesting as a "irrational behavior". I was arguing in the piece that in certain circumstances some shittesting is not irrational but a sensible behavior. Women are usually interested in the social status and skills of potential partners.. The fact that some people use shittesting to abuse their partner, while deeply tragic, isn't a nockdown article which makes all shittesting irrational.
Fleischman has argued that in the evolutionary environment being abandoned with child by a partner was a huge risk to her fitness. In hunter-gatherer societies if a man dies or leaves the tribe while a woman is pregnant the odds of her child dying is much higher. So loyalty testing may have been good for fitness in the EE. Of course, that doesn't make it ethical today.
Ethical: I think offending people, in a reasonably predictable way, is unethical. I don't think testing the attributes of a prospective partner is irrational in all cases. As I've said below, I do believe that loyalty testing in general is immoral (in both relationships and institutions) and that testing someone in an ongoing relationship is mostly unethical, particularly if the behavior is frequent. But I think the majority of the shittesting that people do is really far from your case.
Now you’ve provoked a large number of comments, but they’re mostly focused on reinforcing the common definition of shit-testing rather than on the dating advice you said you wanted.
it's not a battle to control the definition of some word? I want to understand which behaviors are good for me to do, and to understand which behaviors are ethical for me to do. This comment section has helped open up the diversity of the term and discuss different cases and heuristics we can use to assess both usefulness and ethics. That's pretty cool.
Mate is very good. I should write an entire post reviewing the book.
Much of the value from Mate is that it helps you understand your own experience. The most valuable single chapter in Mate is the chapter on mating markets. The effect size of moving mating markets is so huge that its obvious to me. Of the five mating markets I've explored, by far the largest factor is the demographic ratios. When I was 24 and in a terrible mating market, my friends really did tell me the market didn't matter and the problem was my behaviors. I felt so unnatractive and stupid and socially incompetent while in that market. In retrospect the religious customs of that country just made dating a foreign atheist impossible. My mate value determined my outcomes much less than I thought.
If any straight readers are in a terrible mating market I have three recommendations. Read "Mate" then watch "Sex and the City". Also, consider moving.
I'm sorry that your ex hurt you like that. It sounds terrible.
I also apologize for the way I titled and framed the ideas of this post. I was aware that it would provoke strong emotional responses, and intended that. Many people respond to slightly edgey dating posts with strong norm-enforcing comments. I like these comments because they highlight places where readers misunderstand my arguments, they tend to come with compelling advice, and I can evaluate the moral content of dating strategies.
It did not occur to me that I would hurt people by reminding them of the pain that so many of us carry from our romantic lives. But that was reasonably foreseeable from my perspective. You deserve an apology.
Hmmm. That's an interesting thought. In part I gave it this title to get responses, because responses improve my communications skills. But also I had no regular word for testing someone on a date. The concept of shittesting probably taught me that testing people was possible. But I probably would have figured it out from signaling theory.
As an aside, for a woman who shittests in the classic sense, are you saying that the behavior is not selfishly instrumentally rational (SIR)? I would still argue that it is, but am very unconfident.
the average person seems to be 100% against the idea of shaping behaviour and providing reinforcements, but 100% for showing appreciation and providing positive feedback, the term and frame used really makes a world of difference even if you are describing the same process, applied to the same goals and with the same methods.
So true. What I really want is a woman smart/rational enough to notice this without having to incept it.
So what I really want to sort for is.
- Low Need For Closure
- Low emotional lability
- Creative problem solving skills
- Instrumental rationality
- Curiosity
I know how to assess everything but emotional lability. I think the shaping behaviors will be closely correlated with emotional lability so we mainly want to assess that.
Try providing good behaviour you'd like to be reinforced from her, to check if she uses reinforcements as shaping.
This is a good idea. I cannot yet think of a way to do it.
Discuss what you both like or don't like in a partner to find out which traits she'd try to change.
She will try to change my conscientiousness. I have ADHD and it makes lots of problems. Since conscientiousness is the trait women most often try to shape and its my worst trait, good bet that almost any woman will go for it.
But what else might she shape? That's actually an interesting question. I will start asking it on second dates.
Discuss previous instances when you had to react to behaviours you didn't like to elicit the same kind of anecdotes by her (or discuss theoretical scenarios).
I doubt this would work. If you ask people on a date "Do you often get angry at people when they make a mistake" how do you think they would respond? What if I asked them "In what situations should a person get angry"? That is much more interesting question.
Purposefully providing bad behaviour to see how she'd try to shape it does seems more like shit-testing.
Interesting idea. I could, for example, forget to make a restaurant reservation then observe her reaction when we have to look for a new place.
Once in a relationship, try to shape her shaping with rewards to the kind of shaping you'd like her to use.
In the long run, I should use this as well.
Appendix
the responses you'd get to negative behaviour would almost always be extremely different than the ones you'd get later in the relationship.
I disagree with this statement. I'm not interested in her response to my best behavior. I'm interested in the full spectrum of her behavior. Firstly, I will make mistakes in the future and she will subconsciously try to shape them. Secondly, her behavior toward others (like a waiter) is pretty important to the partnership. I don't want to date someone who is only well-behaved to me. I had a girlfriend who was mean to other people all the time; it was awful.
I'm not a native english speaker or completely familiar with the term, but it seems to me that the behaviour you are proposing is simply "testing" rather than "shit-testing".
That is correct. I intentionally picked the edgiest definition to get more comments (more comments improves my writing sklls).
I'd renounce straight away to test for watching the Diana Fleishman lecture
Those are great points and you are right.
You could try to introduce the theme as:
Outside of my sorting, I should work on these skills. That is a compelling influence strategy.
Thanks for bringing up Goodhart's law. It's a real problem. Rwanda girl probably did figure out intuitively that I wanted low NFC and respond to it. Fortunately for me, those attributes are hard to fake. Honestly I wouldn't trust myself to shittest for fakable attributes like affection, loyalty, interest and social status.
Is testing anti-correlated with self respect and competence? That seems likely. If I had greater social intelligence I would shittest less because I would be more confident to assess attributes naturally. And I should assume my partners have better social intelligence than me.
There probably are cases where a shit-test is justified - the time savings of fast-failures is worth the false-positives and additional friction that the artificial filter will create. But for many many cases (of romantic and other relationship-based exploration), you're best off looking for natural experiments than intentionally creating stressful situations.
I agree with this. I plan two shit-test per relationship. And in a different mating market I would do none.
Another problem is that if the test is different from your normal behavior, you're likely to see a different response than you would to your normal behavior. The differences will be correlated with just how different the test is from your baseline activities and signals.
Good point! I don't think it's actually a problem when selecting long-term partners. You want to see the full spectrum of behavior, not just how they respond to you. Hence the "watch how they treat the waiter" advice.
Interestingly, people actually just give tons of unqualified reinforcement to partners during courtship (unconsciously of course). DF argues that unqualified reinforcement helps show you the full range of the persons behavior. This is a valuable adaptive behavior, because you want as much info about the person as possible. For example, unqualified reinforcement might reveal that someone is very selfish or prideful. I've just realized this probably works on me.
Firstly, thanks for you comments and for taking the time to think through this.
Firstly, I contest your underlying assumption that the natural state of the mating market is free of manipulation. The natural state of courtship is full of probing, testing, manipulation, assessment and generally devious 0-sum fuckery. We just don't notice because most of these behaviors are subconscious. So at a basic level, there's no consequentialist reason to think the subconscious manipulations are more ethical than conscious manipulations. There is reason to think the opposite because I can at least consider the consequences of my conscious manipulations.
So... shit-testing allows you to select a better partner... but at the same time, "being the kind of person who shit-tests their partner" makes you a worse partner. (Which is kinda your partner's problem, not yours, but still...)
You can shit-test for lots of different attributes. Your comment mostly assumes I would shit test for loyalty, which I agree is a really bad idea.
- Firstly, it's the most unethical form of shittest because you're training the person to follow your commands unquestioningly, which is really bad for them.
- Its the most hackable shittest.
- There's a failure mode where you fall in love with the power or they fall in love with it or something like that
- Finally, I don't actually think my mate retention is correlated with testable loyalty (Christians and non-Christians get divorced at the same rate despite different loyalty norms). I suspect the best mate-retention strategy is to maintain your own attractiveness (behaviorally and physically) over the relationship. Have good conflict resolution skills. There's probably a bunch of evidence-based methods from positive psychology to use as well.
In contrast, I think shittesting for hard to observe and hard to fake traits is a dank and ethical strategy (epistemic status: P(T)= .75).
- It saves both of us time because I can reject candidates earlier before we bond (I bond way too fast).
- If I get rejected for shit-testing on a first date, I have only lost the time it takes to replace the candidate. I can politely leave the dinner and resign myself to ~20 hours of app use. NOTE If I was the majority in my mating market and I wanted a shorter relationship, I would revise this
- The cost of falling in love with someone who lacks these attributes (its a narrow set) is really high. I have to hang out with that person for years! Once I stare into their eyes, I'll start ignoring their bad attributes, which is really bad for me!
Conditions
I do not accept your proposition that waiting for natural stimuli is as a rule more ethical than shittesting, mainly because everyone benefits from assessing each other's attributes quickly and accurately.
So when is a shit-test ethical and when is it unethical? After reading your comments I would propose the following.
- Loyalty tests are more unethical and less instrumentally rational than attribute shittests
- Shittesting later in a relationship is less ethical and less IR than in the beginning
I agree with all of those points.
Depends on whether the specific woman finds dominance attractive. And that probably also depends on the type/degree of dominance, her mood, and how well you know each other. Yes, this "partially agree, partially disagree" strategy seems like the golden middle way between being disagreeable and boring.
I think many women, perhaps a majority, find a more dominant man attractive. Basically ensure any fact-based dominance display doesn't make the other person feel stupid. Good rule for lots of interactions.
True. I should rephrase my thesis "What people often mean when they say "mansplaining" is explanations which are intended to express dominance rather than to mutually arrive at better understanding".
The problem with mansplaining -
Why do men mansplain and why do people (particularly women) hate it? People sometimes struggle to articulate what mansplaining is and why they dislike it, but I'm surely not the discoverer of this argument.
Recently I was talking to a colleage during a strategy game session. He said "You are bad because you made these mistakes" and I said "yes I am bad at these aspects of the game. Alsol, you should have invested more into anti-aircraft guns". He immediately began repeating a list of mistakes I had made, as evidence that his investment in AA was optimal. But I have seen the AA formula so I made a technical argument for strong AA in the late game. He stepped back and said "Well you were trashtalking me so I had to...".
Then I realized that we were not explaining the game to one another or discussing the best build. We were really having a dominance fight, through vaguely technical arguments. Once you realize that men do this, you see it fairly often. Recently I said that transaction costs were built into the bitcoin code from the beginning, and a friend argued back that only third party exchanges charge transaction fees. It took me a while to prove him wrong because the content was about dominance, not about bitcoin[1].
Meanwhile I've been learning to flirt with women. Originally I though that you cannot disagree with a women while flirting, since it is a dominance play ala man world. But actually you can disagree in a non-conflictive way. For example, on Tinder I asked a women what she reads, and she said "I don't think reading indicates intelligence or curiosity". I responded by saying "I accept the argument on intelligence, but I expect curiosity and reading are correlated. Otherwise would be too surprising". I have found this type of disagreement actually gets a longer response (signal of interest). My theory is that the qualified disagreement shows intelligence, status and social intelligence.
1 - To his credit, he eventually accepted the technical argument
My response
1. Ew gross worms
2. That logic holds up, Greater expected value in worm world.
Thanks for the comments, I suspect they would speed up finding relationships. A few notes
The "mating market" section of the mating plan is now quite trivial due to the absolute dominance of the dating app option for anyone who isn't strongly extroverted or already connected to a strong social network.
This could be misinterpreted as saying that mating markets are no longer relevant, which is false. I believe you mean that the apps have collapsed whole cities into one big mating market. That's probably true. For other readers, still think about the mating market when choosing a city to live in. If you're a non-muslim guy and you move to Saudi Arabia, tinder won't help you. If you're a woman and you move to Kiev, same problem. But within a city, the apps probably merge the markets.
What you listed in Section 4 on "small wins" are all nice things, but mostly unnecessary as instrumental milestones to dating (except mental health). If your goal is dating, you can focus more directly on the tactics to get a date: Having good pics on dating apps, a specific kind of conversation skill that leads to dates, and conversation skills for dates.
Seems plausible. I have not been in the US adult dating market long enough to comment.
Re "5. Focus on social life and fun", also seems like a distraction. Dating apps have enabled a more direct and efficient process where you don't have to just pretend like you're having non-goal-oriented fun in a platonic social group, you can just instantly turn a stranger into a date and there's mutual knowledge that you're both evaluating each other's compatibility toward your mating goals.
That may be true. I like an active social life and networking has large career benefits. Probably would recommend socializing less to a third party.
Thanks for the informative post. Oregon's referendum system has borrowed the information element of Switzerlands - check it out here https://scholars.org/contribution/how-citizens-initiative-review-can-improve-elections-where-voters-directly-decide
I mentioned "gold digging" as an ideological label, not to imply that being attracted to high-status suitors is the same as gold-digging. Personally, what turns you on cannot be unethical. I wouldn't judge a woman who has more crushes on captains than skippers or a man who has more crushes on large-breasted women. So if "gold-digging" implies marrying someone for money, in the absence of attraction, that is a different issue. No comment on if gold-digging is ethical, but its a separate question.
This distinction between preferences and behaviors helps escape the ideological traps of discussing romance.
Lol mating was not my best choice of word. But hey I’m here to improve my writing.
I'll comment on this post from Geoffrey Miller's perspective (which I still believe is the closest map to the territory for heterosexual men)
1. Examining your goals is really valuable. I agree you should start by exploring your goals and your ethics.
take the simplistic belief "women prefer rich men". Assuming that you believe that, and therefore you want to become rich;
This is good advice. To clarify neither I nor Miller believe that women prefer rich men. Financial success is probably correlated with extrovertion, intelligence, conscientiousness, social skills, the ability to provide, an effective degree of assertiveness, which are all attributes women have evolved to be attracted to.
But AB testing out the preferred attributes yourself would take a lifetime. The evopsych approach is to get a prior for which traits are attractive from evolutionary thought experiments, then test the beliefs with psych methods. I decided to get my priors from Miller because his epistemology seems sound in interviews and writing. Then I a/b tested his theories by posing hypotheticals to female friends and trying to guess which behavior they would label more attractive. I found Miller's theories generalize pretty well, much better than my own mind projection. So I went with it. So beliefs about what women prefer are empirical, use you scholarship and low-cost tests.
Generally, if you believe that X helps at dating, focus on X, and stop talking about dating.
I agree with this too. My strategy is hyperfocusing on dating theory for a month, then writing up what you learned for comprehension. Now I can stop talking about dating moving forward, which is awesome!
The wrong kind of debate (about dating, politics, etc.) is when people already come with their ideologies fully formed, and try to get the majority of the audience on their side.
This is usually true. For my part, my orginal ideology a month ago said that women do not prefer high-status men. I realized I was in conflict with the data and my incorrect belief was hurting me. So I changed it. Unfortunately, new readers may assume my original ideology was "women are gold diggers". Se la vie!
There's a bunch here to respond to, I'll take them in order of how relevant they are to my empirical questions, and put the infohazard stuff at the bottom.
1. Buzzwords -
If you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it. Imagine instead:
I disagree, the Yudkowsky quote is too vague and you misinterpret it. If you talk about being "rational" you will not achieve the way. But if you talk about specific individual epistemic tools with a defined empirical goal and a desire to know and grow stronger, you will better map the territory. My use of those cached thoughts from Yudkowsky made my reasoning way better. Plz comment specific misinterpretations on the original.
Since you don't specifically call out any misused epistemic tools, I will justify my arguments to simplicity (its the same as Robin Hanson's signalling argument).
The simplest explanation for when relationships occur is randomness. I approach more in good times but have less success, which is unlikely if each approach is equal. So there is a sorting mechanism I misunderstood. Next I listened to people's explanations but after many long conversations I noticed an explanation from one instance did not predict behavior in another instance. So I read Cialdini and thought about the next simplest explanation, and arrived at the status signalling explanation. This explanation does a great job of explaining the data.
The signalling explanation outperforms the neediness explanation because neediness suggests that a confident "I like you" on the first date would work (it doesn't). When I was having a crisis I was desperately needy, in the sense that I craved a friend and companion to help me through the traumatic experience. But I put less effort into signalling interest in relationships. That increased approach success rate. If I had never looked for a simple hypothesis and rejected rationalizations, I would not have noticed the signalling definition of needy. So the arguments to simplicity and heuristics are powerful. My reasoning would have been worse without those "buzzwords".
Imagine instead:
Your prescribed method would have failed because in aggregate I outperformed my peers even in needy periods. If I'd just compared myself to peers I would not have seen this pattern.
This is really important because in dating you do not make one decision to be "needy" or "not needy". You make tons of small, contextual decisions about when to text, when to say "I love you", when to have "the talk", and who, how and why to approach. I don't need to know "if needy bad" I need to be able to predict optimal signals in diverse social/relationship contexts. I can't a/b test the whole relationship, so simple theories with good predictive power (like signalling) are incredibly useful.
TLDR: The language you use to describe your reasoning affects your reasoning
Another thing is that the author seems to only be interested in this one topic. But this is not a dating-advice website; this is a rationality website.
I cannot worry about dating theory my whole life. I crammed the whole process into one month. It worked really well. A lot of posts in rapid succession is a great way to build comprehension, I would recommend it.
The dating websites are full of ideology and unethical people (with a few notable exeptions). If I posted there I would have gotten very different comments I did not want.
Yes, we had some dating advice in the past, but it was usually written by people who already got some rationalist creds by writing highly upvoted articles on other topics.
LIfe optimization is a well accepted theme on LW. Had I written 4 posts about task prioritization, then a summary "task prioritization plan" no one would have complained.
Another thing is that the author seems to only be interested in this one topic.
I prefer not to write anonymously, so I write anonymously only on this topic. Again, I'm sorry to be anonymous but the topic is too sensitive.
Finally - Yes, I am not yet a great writer. I came here to grow stronger. I don't apologize for trying, you can't improve if you never get feedback.
OP here to clarify.
Was the edit just to add the big disclaimer about motivation at the top?
Edits - Added disclaimer at the top; changed every instance of "mating" to "dating"; replaced personal details with <anonymized>
I honestly don't see what is so objectionable about the original version either. I like your last sentence, will add that as well.
Thank you for the apology. I understand your motivations better now.
I disagree that the dating world cannot get any better. I think this is an incredibly neglected and moderately tractable area.
Here's why I still think there is positive utility to discussing this -
1. The association exists because of Scott Alexander's post. That post gets tons of views and is frankly a terrible introduction to rationalist thinking. A new reader can easily see it as an identity politics post and dismiss rationalism.
2. We best sell rationalism by showing how we think, not that we bite bullets, lots of other communities bite bullets. I try to highlight aspects of how rationalists think about problems in each post, so that visitors get a better image of us (experimentation, random trials, scholarship, etc.). Luke Progs romance posts are a great example.
If the public associated rationalist stuff w/ Luke Progs work there would be a better argument, but the Scott Alexander post is the real face.
Finally, google searches for rationality/less wrong/slate star codex are in a gradual decline, so the value of self-censorship to achieve mainstream adoption is lower. The barriers to mainstream adoption probably are not the dating stuff.
I did replace mating with dating throughout the post for availability heuristic reasons.
If you notice the cologne your doing it wrong. It could still be true that a small amount of cologne provides a benefit that is too small to notice.
There's tons about female mating choices that has an effect size small enough that the academic studies find it but introspection does not. The literature has consistently found that smell is important to mate selection (although cologne specifically is unkown).
Oh no totally, you didn't say either of those things. I think addressing ethics up front will just help people not judge by availability bias.
And I mean honesty about your relationship goals. Definitely radical honesty will destroy your romantic life. Clarifying that now.
I'm sad that so many are alone and don't know why. I was lonely for much of my life and lacked tools to understand or change my romantic life. Talking about these issues with my friends and siblings taught me that our society fails to equip lonely people with useful tools to become more attractive, particularly for men. I mean attractive behaviorally and physically.
The conventional advice is terrible; "be yourself" and "be honest, tell her how you feel" are so easily misinterpreted that they make things worse. Meanwhile pick up artist forums have an uneven epistemology, a weak evidence base, are poorly explained, and are often unethical. A third way is possible. I wrote this to show people it exists, that they don't have to be lonely and confused forever.
A note on my mating ethics
1. Preferences cannot be immoral. You cannot judge a woman for preferring physically attractive, high status women. You cannot judge me for preferring physically attractive, ambitious women. The conscious part of your brain does not get to override the part that chooses when to be horny (imo, not a psychologist).
2. Honesty is important. I make sure people know my intentions as early as possible (expressing them in a non-awkward way). That is why I start the mating plan with my intentions.
1. Obviously I'm not trying to date the homeless women, for plenty of reasons.
2. Why do you assume women who volunteer at a homeless shelter prefer long-term relationships. Is the argument "good girls volunteer" and "good girls want to get married", seems a bit like availability bias. I wouldn't predict off of that logic, in my experience women are more diverse than that.
3. It's a reference to LOTR. I'm not sorry that I overthink things, I'm not sorry that I experience horniness. LessWrong isn't about pretending we are all paragons of virtue that only experience the "good" emotions. It's about improving our map of the territory so that we can interact with the world better.
Also, being promiscuous is not something to be ashamed of.
I disagree. The dating world doesn't get better if we never think about it. I recommend listening to Dr. Diana Fleischman's talk on rationally speaking for a transhumanist perspective.
I post on LessWrong because I want people to evaluate my arguments on whether they will make the world better or not. I agree that there are many parts of the internet where I can post and people will play the "does this word give me the bad feels" game. I post on LessWrong to get away from that nonsense.
Actually improving your lives and the lives of others requires discussing what is true. Virtue signalling in my description of dating will just leave both me and my potential partners would just be lonely more often. It's not worth it.
Thanks and I love that we can call ourselves rats!
After finishing Geoffrey Miller's Mate, I arrived at a similar position. If someone did not understand courtship more broadly and the classic PUA failure modes, my advice would probably make them worse. But if you have a good model and are already okay at conversation, reminding yourself to have open gestures and make confident eye contact provides net benefit. Your toddler analogy is helpful.
Thanks for the informative comment. My observations also support this claim.
Lol if I was socially savvy. I would not be asking these questions. 9 years of the wrong moves in the dating game have brought me here.
In your own example of dating, this last technique can help you see that your desirability function for women probably is quite disaligned with your actual values, and you'll gain a lot by meditating on what you really value and fixing your desirability function. The technique can be quite helpful in fixing your nutrition as well.
Can you explain this in greater detail?
True. Interesting point.
I have no time to wade into evopsych debates, so I am just reading Geoffery Miller's "Mate"
Hmmm, I have a few thoughts about that
1. If true, all of my reading should be useless. Depressing, but possible!
2. That contradicts some of my data. I have dated <anonymized other culture> women and American women and a few mediteranean catholic women. Some aspects of their tastes were maybe different, like for monogamy vs. polyamory. American women were more likely to leave the relationship after having sex than both catholic med and <anonymized>. Other than that, they both prefered high status men. The <anonymized> women seemed to like guys with lots of money much more than the mediteranean and American women. But overall they both respond to hard-to-get tactics, seek high status in early stages. In late-game they want trustworthy and caring partners who are emotionally mature and good communicators (and also the first stage things). So mostly the same with a few significant differences. Just my experience
3. We know that psych differences between women and men are not described objectively by psychologists. Julia Galef's podcast episode. Basically, because most people think women and men have different intelligence and they actually do not, psych researchers overcorrect by arguing against difference even in entirely unrelated cases. A bit of a blue vs. green thinking. So the evidence from psychologist consensus is a bit weaker bc they might hold that view contrary to evidence. It's still okay evience tho.
Can you tell me what areas of female tastes are considered plastic, and perhaps areas which are not?
Ooops, I thought this comment was on my evo psych question earlier.
I have heard LWers mention their IQ's or talk about IQ surveys a couple of times in passing. Intuitively, if you feel insecure about your intelligence the sequences on confusion and double think suggest just finding the answer.
I'm gonna talk to cute girls in the park. If maintaining them distracts me form small talk I'll stop doing it.
You are implying I won't do the other practices. I agree that Luke Progs other points are higher cost-benefit and should be done first. But just because other things pass cost-benefit does not mean the body language changes also do not.
Anyway, we've presented our pro and con arguments. I'm gonna go test it. Will report back.
Hard to parse you question. I think you mean "how do you know that the behaviors you will be learning into habit are attractive to women". I'm just using conventional wisdom on that one. I'm getting the list of behaviors here - https://relationshiphero.com/blog/what-does-your-body-language-say-to-your-date
The article says to try them on your next date. But learning a bunch of habits is hard, and you want to do them all at the same time. So hiring an acting coach I can practice a bunch of fake interactions to ingrain the habits, move them from S1 to S2. You can learn the perfect golf swing by playing thousands of wholes, but you learn faster at the driving range.
For someone who struggles with being playful, I might not recommend this approach. I'really good at being playful. I am bad at displaying status. Generic problem of advice.
Maybe, maybe not. None of your comments are strong evidence it won't work. It's a few bits of weak evidence. Also you strawmaning my post by saying "that completely ignores your own emotions".
1. Immediate reaction times are necessary to receive any benefits - immediate reactions can be trained, even highly sophisticated and creative ones. Improv comedy is great evidence of that.
2. These aren't incredibly sophisticated behaviors I'm imitating. It's just controlling your movements a bit, making a lot of eye contact, having good postures, having a good fake smile. Check out Luke Progs lecture about using body language to pick up women. Honestly looks entirely fakable, so easily fakable that you shouldn't call it fake - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvcuZhDWLgg&feature=player_embedded
3. Two alternative explanations for your comment. One is that the paid dating coaches want to protect their market. Two is that you strawmanned my argument when you presented it to them (perhaps by saying I intend to learn painstackingly every single movement of flirting from an acting coach then reproduce them entirely system 1, which is not at all what I said).
4. Sure that is true. But you can do habitual behaviors like eyecontact and good posture and still have a playful emotional state. Basically all of sports requires you to perform habitual behaviors and have a playful emotional state.
What would you being right lead me to predict? That making more eye contact but being slightly more tense will be a bit confusing to a date. That seems plausible, but unlikely. And if that does occur, changing tactics will be super easy. What would you being wrong lead me to predict? I might permanently flirt 50% better at in-person. Cost-benefit is still super positive.
So far my reductionist conclusions have been getting way more attention than conventional wisdom, so I'll lean on them.
So the biggest change was to make wayyy simpler questions. I'm like... mad at myself for not noticing that earlier. But also like, if someone ghosts you have no idea why, so...
At least we know reductionism is a good philosophy. Occams razor: because it works.
Update on day 3 - I altered the treatment variable on advice from a colleague. In the treatment case I only write messages that can be responded to in 5 seconds. Steer the conversation to something vaguely praiseworthy about the other person. Reward them for the statement. Try to repeat that a couple times
For the control group I just use my old tinder convos, that's easier.
So far the results show massive increases in response rates. I'm stunned.
Yeah I observed that as well. Why have a rationalist community if you accept motivated reasoning or have an ideological standard. Like being woke is still an ideology. You did not become woke by evaluating every assumption your ideology supports and finding all of them true. So why use that to write answers at the bottom of the page. Whatever, Dagon is right.
This does update me toward thinking rationality has many many failure modes which are hard to avoid. Tsuyoku Naratai is important. Having external goals to our rationalism is important.
Even in the deepest darkness, there are warriors for truth.
Forecast- Conditional on the results being conclusive - 2:1 odds in favor of Aloof Alfie
Preregister a Tinder Randomized Control Tiral:
In a previous post I suggested that early in a relationship hetero women prefer men who show only slight interest. I argued the optimal early dating strategy is to show only as much interest as she does and cultivate a state of "Is he into me or does he just want to be friends". This RCT is intended to test the theoretical issue, and advise future Tinder and Bumble policy specifically.
Method:
I will randomly select Tinder/Bumble matches to receive disinterested, low-energy messages and the rest will receive control messages. Matches will be split by flipping a coin. My swiping will continue as normal, as the algorithm is weird about it. The target sample size is 20.
The control group will receive my usual messages (Todd's). They begin with a comment on a mutual interest or interesting fact about the person from their profile. If I see nothing interesting on their profile, I will introduce a topic I would like to talk about. Average message length is 3-5 lines, and double messages are common. Control group will occassionally receive emogis and exclamation points as an expression of interest. This is my regular texting style. After 6-7 messages I will invite the person to a coffee date. Ghosters will receive a second, in-character message on an unrelated topic after 48 hours.
I altered the treatment variable on advice from a colleague.
- In the treatment case I only write messages that can be responded to in 5 seconds.
- Never use exclamation points or emojis
- Steer the conversation to something vaguely praiseworthy about the other person. Reward them for the statement. Try to repeat that a couple times. Only reward attributes that are plausibly praiseworthy, do not reward just similar attributes "that's so cool, we both like Chinese food"
- Respond to messages as quickly as possible but never respond when you lack time for a full conversation
Removed all standardization of response time
Analysis:
Control and treatment will be compared on the following four variables: number of first responses, number of total responses, number of coffeedates, and number of ghostings.
Edited because I changed the treatment on advice from a colleague.
Changelog
- removed all discussion or response time, I just respond as quickly as possible when I can have a conversation (never during work hours)
- big changes to treatment variable
- I can't reward people for religious statements because I am too athiest, other than that the rewarding is going well
- Replacing control group with my previous messages to save time