Fair warning is that there’s some unsolicited armchair psychologist advice below but I want to give a meta comment on the “relationship John arc”.
I find it fun, interesting, and sometimes useful to read through these as an underlying investigation of what is true when it comes to dating. (Starting a year ago or so)
So I used to do this cognitive understanding and analysis of relationships a lot but that all changed when the meditation nation attacked? There was this underlying need for love and recognition through a relationship and this underlying want and need for that to feel whole or similar. It’s just kind of gone away more and more and I just generally feel happier in life as a consequence? It kind of feels like you’re looking to resolve that need through relationships and my brain is like “Why doesn’t he just meditate?”
Given the goal is happiness and well-being from this (which it might not be), are there any specific reasons here why you’re going the relationship route? From my own research, all (not all) the cool people (QRI & happiness researchers) agree that meditation gives you better vibes than the courtship stuff?
Finally a weird claim that I’ll make is that the relationship stuff is a lot easier when I’m in a good place when it comes to meditation as I find it a lot easier to read and understand people from this place. I like to go salsa dancing and I feel a lot more relaxed and playful when doing it compared to when I was “looking” for romance? I just bring a different more secure energy and I just stop worrying and start vibing? I agree with you that people’s signals are extremely unclear but it kind of doesn’t matter from that perspective? (You might also already be doing this but meditation probably can make you do this more.)
Therefore, part of me is like, “man he should really stop thinking and start to just sharpen his awareness and attention based systems and he’s gonna be a lot better off in these skills compared to the current investigation”.
So start meditating for an hour a day for 3 months using the mind illuminated as an experiment (getting some of the cool skills mentioned in Kaj Sotala’s sequence?) and see what happens?
I’m however very much enjoying the series of John applying his intelligence to relationships. So uh, do what you want and have fun!
Hm, I am unsure how much to believe this, even though my intuitions go the same way as yours. As a correlational datapoint, I tracked my success from cold approach and the time I’ve spent meditating (including a 2-month period of usually ~2 hours of meditation/day), and don’t see any measurable improvement in my success rate from cold approach:
(Note that the linked analysis also includes a linear regression of slope −6.35e-08, but with p=0.936, so could be random.)
In cases where meditation does stuff to your vibe-reading of other people, I would guess that I’d approach women who are more open to being approached. I haven’t dug deeper into my fairly rich data on this, and the data doesn’t include much post-retreat approaches, but I still find the data I currently have instructive.
I wish more people tracked and analyzed this kind of data, but I seem alone in this so far. I do feel some annoyance at everyone (the, ah, “cool people”?) in this area making big claims (and sometimes money off of those claims) without even trying to track any data and analyze it, leaving it basically to me to scramble together some DataFrames and effect sizes next to my dayjob.[1]
So start meditating for an hour a day for 3 months using the mind illuminated as an experiment (getting some of the cool skills mentioned in Kaj Sotala’s sequence?) and see what happens?
Do you have any concrete measurable predictions for what would happen in that case?
I often wonder if empiricism is just incredibly unintuitive for humans in general, and experimentation and measurement even more so. Outside the laboratory very few people do it, and see e.g. Aristotle’s claims about the number of women’s teeth or his theory of ballistics, which went un(con)tested for almost 2000 years? What is going on here? Is empiricism really that hard? Is it about what people bother to look at? Is making shit up just so much easier so that everyone keeps in that mode, which is a stable equilibrium?
Firstly, that is a pretty amazing data gathering exercise and I’m really impressed. From the frame of the data I would completely agree with you that it doesn’t seem to help.
I think my frame here is slightly different and specifically about non-cold approaches?
(I want to acknowledge the lack of skin in the game that this view has created for me, I do not care as much about relationships as I find myself quite peaceful and happy without it.)
It is for repeated interactions more? It’s also something that kind of changes the approach vector a bit? I don’t think I could go through the amount of cold approaches that you have here as I don’t care enough for it?
Let me try to give you a mental model of how I think about it and let me know if it makes sense:
Analogously, I would want to imagine that everytime you have a conversation with someone else you create a space, a room. This room can either be cozy with a bunch of nice cushions, maybe it is quite sterile like an operating hall or if it is a more nerdy relationship it might be filled with whiteboards or whatever, there’s a vibe. Meditation (or more specifically awareness + metta meditation) is a bit like creating an openness for that room? You’re allowing the other person space to place their own things in that room and you can more meet them where they’re at and so the conversations become a lot more natural and enjoyable as a consequence. “Oh, you really really want that specific lamp, I guess it doesn’t matter to me but that’s good to know as I can then place my couch here, instead of where the lamp would be”.
When I’m in a warm, open and concentrated state I’m a lot better at conversations.
Do you have any concrete measurable predictions for what would happen in that case?
What I would track is my personal enjoyment of conversations that I have with people, if I did that sort of meditation I would expect myself to enjoy conversations with others more. (With the caveat of adding some sort of metta practice on top).
More statistically, If we model relationship probability as a markov chain we get something like (first meeting → date → date 2 → dating → relationship) and I think your transition probability from first meeting to date to anything beyond that goes up by quite a lot. I think the problem here is that it is more of a poission distribution so it is a bit difficult to do linear prediction on it? (unless you’re poly?) It’s more like a heuristic optimisation problem where the more warmth you have, the easier it is to have giving conversations with other people?
Also, it seems to me that long-term relationships seem to more naturally mature from activities with longer time horizons where you meet people repeatedly? (I could find some stats on this but the basic intuition here is that one of the main criteria for women wanting a long-term relationship is safety which is hard to build without repeated interactions. An optimisation setup is then to repeatedly show up at the right sort of events such as interesting book clubs, dance, meditation or other dependent on your preferences for the base person who shows up at such an event.)
These posts are not a particularly representative window into my dating efforts/thoughts/etc.
The main driver of the posts is me being like “man, why is my memetic environment feeding me all this stuff about dating which just clearly isn’t true?”, and sometimes I get sufficiently pissed off at my memetic environment to push back.
I like to go salsa dancing and I feel a lot more relaxed and playful when doing it compared to when I was “looking” for romance? I just bring a different more secure energy and I just stop worrying and start vibing? I agree with you that people’s signals are extremely unclear but it kind of doesn’t matter from that perspective?
One of my updates from slutcon is that my prior on whether a woman is aroused when dancing with me should be above 50%. (Note that I am an unusually good dancer, this does not apply to other people.)
… and in fact my gut-reads of people have been largely correct about that for years, but I previously thought that couldn’t possibly be right, because it turns out that the percent of women who will send a legible signal when they’re turned on by a dance is around 1%. (Which I know because I’ve danced with hundreds, I now have a rough estimate of what fraction are aroused when dancing with me, and I know that only a low-single-digit handful of the hundreds have sent legible signals.)
As an example, the most legible I’ve ever gotten was a woman proactively suggesting we exchange contact info. That has happened once, among hundreds.
Fair warning is that there’s some unsolicited armchair psychologist advice below but I want to give a meta comment on the “relationship John arc”.
I find it fun, interesting, and sometimes useful to read through these as an underlying investigation of what is true when it comes to dating. (Starting a year ago or so)
So I used to do this cognitive understanding and analysis of relationships a lot but that all changed when the meditation nation attacked? There was this underlying need for love and recognition through a relationship and this underlying want and need for that to feel whole or similar. It’s just kind of gone away more and more and I just generally feel happier in life as a consequence? It kind of feels like you’re looking to resolve that need through relationships and my brain is like “Why doesn’t he just meditate?”
Given the goal is happiness and well-being from this (which it might not be), are there any specific reasons here why you’re going the relationship route? From my own research, all (not all) the cool people (QRI & happiness researchers) agree that meditation gives you better vibes than the courtship stuff?
Finally a weird claim that I’ll make is that the relationship stuff is a lot easier when I’m in a good place when it comes to meditation as I find it a lot easier to read and understand people from this place. I like to go salsa dancing and I feel a lot more relaxed and playful when doing it compared to when I was “looking” for romance? I just bring a different more secure energy and I just stop worrying and start vibing? I agree with you that people’s signals are extremely unclear but it kind of doesn’t matter from that perspective? (You might also already be doing this but meditation probably can make you do this more.)
Therefore, part of me is like, “man he should really stop thinking and start to just sharpen his awareness and attention based systems and he’s gonna be a lot better off in these skills compared to the current investigation”.
So start meditating for an hour a day for 3 months using the mind illuminated as an experiment (getting some of the cool skills mentioned in Kaj Sotala’s sequence?) and see what happens?
I’m however very much enjoying the series of John applying his intelligence to relationships. So uh, do what you want and have fun!
Hm, I am unsure how much to believe this, even though my intuitions go the same way as yours. As a correlational datapoint, I tracked my success from cold approach and the time I’ve spent meditating (including a 2-month period of usually ~2 hours of meditation/day), and don’t see any measurable improvement in my success rate from cold approach:
(Note that the linked analysis also includes a linear regression of slope −6.35e-08, but with p=0.936, so could be random.)
In cases where meditation does stuff to your vibe-reading of other people, I would guess that I’d approach women who are more open to being approached. I haven’t dug deeper into my fairly rich data on this, and the data doesn’t include much post-retreat approaches, but I still find the data I currently have instructive.
I wish more people tracked and analyzed this kind of data, but I seem alone in this so far. I do feel some annoyance at everyone (the, ah, “cool people”?) in this area making big claims (and sometimes money off of those claims) without even trying to track any data and analyze it, leaving it basically to me to scramble together some DataFrames and effect sizes next to my dayjob.[1]
Do you have any concrete measurable predictions for what would happen in that case?
I often wonder if empiricism is just incredibly unintuitive for humans in general, and experimentation and measurement even more so. Outside the laboratory very few people do it, and see e.g. Aristotle’s claims about the number of women’s teeth or his theory of ballistics, which went un(con)tested for almost 2000 years? What is going on here? Is empiricism really that hard? Is it about what people bother to look at? Is making shit up just so much easier so that everyone keeps in that mode, which is a stable equilibrium?
Firstly, that is a pretty amazing data gathering exercise and I’m really impressed. From the frame of the data I would completely agree with you that it doesn’t seem to help.
I think my frame here is slightly different and specifically about non-cold approaches?
(I want to acknowledge the lack of skin in the game that this view has created for me, I do not care as much about relationships as I find myself quite peaceful and happy without it.)
It is for repeated interactions more? It’s also something that kind of changes the approach vector a bit? I don’t think I could go through the amount of cold approaches that you have here as I don’t care enough for it?
Let me try to give you a mental model of how I think about it and let me know if it makes sense:
Analogously, I would want to imagine that everytime you have a conversation with someone else you create a space, a room. This room can either be cozy with a bunch of nice cushions, maybe it is quite sterile like an operating hall or if it is a more nerdy relationship it might be filled with whiteboards or whatever, there’s a vibe. Meditation (or more specifically awareness + metta meditation) is a bit like creating an openness for that room? You’re allowing the other person space to place their own things in that room and you can more meet them where they’re at and so the conversations become a lot more natural and enjoyable as a consequence. “Oh, you really really want that specific lamp, I guess it doesn’t matter to me but that’s good to know as I can then place my couch here, instead of where the lamp would be”.
When I’m in a warm, open and concentrated state I’m a lot better at conversations.
What I would track is my personal enjoyment of conversations that I have with people, if I did that sort of meditation I would expect myself to enjoy conversations with others more. (With the caveat of adding some sort of metta practice on top).
More statistically, If we model relationship probability as a markov chain we get something like (first meeting → date → date 2 → dating → relationship) and I think your transition probability from first meeting to date to anything beyond that goes up by quite a lot. I think the problem here is that it is more of a poission distribution so it is a bit difficult to do linear prediction on it? (unless you’re poly?) It’s more like a heuristic optimisation problem where the more warmth you have, the easier it is to have giving conversations with other people?
Also, it seems to me that long-term relationships seem to more naturally mature from activities with longer time horizons where you meet people repeatedly? (I could find some stats on this but the basic intuition here is that one of the main criteria for women wanting a long-term relationship is safety which is hard to build without repeated interactions. An optimisation setup is then to repeatedly show up at the right sort of events such as interesting book clubs, dance, meditation or other dependent on your preferences for the base person who shows up at such an event.)
Also, don’t listen to me, listen to this successful person!: https://youtube.com/shorts/QEsc1ObYeFk?si=X-3PicapZqJ16DHg
(Ethos guru argument successfully applied!)
(This take is like literaly a copy paste from Dr.K validated through my own experience.)
These posts are not a particularly representative window into my dating efforts/thoughts/etc.
The main driver of the posts is me being like “man, why is my memetic environment feeding me all this stuff about dating which just clearly isn’t true?”, and sometimes I get sufficiently pissed off at my memetic environment to push back.
One of my updates from slutcon is that my prior on whether a woman is aroused when dancing with me should be above 50%. (Note that I am an unusually good dancer, this does not apply to other people.)
… and in fact my gut-reads of people have been largely correct about that for years, but I previously thought that couldn’t possibly be right, because it turns out that the percent of women who will send a legible signal when they’re turned on by a dance is around 1%. (Which I know because I’ve danced with hundreds, I now have a rough estimate of what fraction are aroused when dancing with me, and I know that only a low-single-digit handful of the hundreds have sent legible signals.)
As an example, the most legible I’ve ever gotten was a woman proactively suggesting we exchange contact info. That has happened once, among hundreds.