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.)
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.)