I discovered pickup ten years ago and also found that it can have a considerable positive impact on one’s life. I’d love to see a rational, generalized approach to socialization skills.
Echoing SarahC and KristianKI’s comments, here are some thoughts:
Name: I also think this should have a better name than “Pick-Up Arts”—some possibilities: Charismatic Arts, Socialization Arts.
Focus: I agree with your core idea about moving the focus away from orgasm and dating, but I suspect this may be more difficult than anticipated. For most people, success in romantic relationships is the principle ends of success itself, and many of the positive side-effects stem directly from having more romantic success. If you over-generalize you just get Dale Carnegie. Perhaps the key is to focus on the means over the ends. The PUA community is overly and specifically focused on the particular ends of sexual conquest.
Behavioral Learning: The real fundamental difficulty of developing charismatic skills is their inherent non-intellectual nature. You can not develop charisma by reading about it anymore than you can become a master guitarist by reading about guitars.
As ChristianK said:
The problem with a lot of personal development stuff is that people read it but never really change their behavior.
Part of the difficulty is the skills that you need must be integrated into the deep subconscious level, and that simply requires massive practice. However I suspect it is even considerably worse than that, because of the deep connection to mood and social regulators.
Perhaps the most important ingredient in PUA success or charisma is what they call “inner-game”, a change in mood and inner psychology which comes only after initial successes initiate a snowballing chain of reinforcements.
I think that focusing more on changing inner game or psychology would better suit a means-focused charismatic skills program. This would probably include sifting through ideas from the self-help movement for gems that actually work, and applying a rationalist approach to modifying subconscious behaviors.
Community: The PUA communities I have participated in (such as the forums on mASF) leave much to be desired. There is often a general air of testosterone laden competitiveness which i find detrimental to the whole endeavor. The LW rationalist community already has a leg up in this respect. The LW structure would work well—top level posts about theory and techniques, threaded discussions for personal feedback, and so on.
Time Commitment: One of the big problems I’ve had with PUA is the apparent high time commitment. I’d love to see some way this could be improved, perhaps along the lines of refining and distilling the most successful techniques into a condensed and focused program. Perhaps it could even include some elements from the world of gaming and fun theory to help overcome akrasia.
This study points out that if you think about (or have) just a single episode of past success or failure, that it has the opposite effect you’d expect on future performance (i.e. what works in the direction you would expect is to reflect on a pattern of experience of failure or success, then you will have summarized/abstracted from the individual events and expect them to serve as the rule, not the exception).
That is, remembering a single failure made people perform better (I assume because they were able to avoid some of the mistakes, or simply try harder, without feeling completely helpless and likely to fail).
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but from the abstract it appears they compared general vs specific episodic memory, and do not reach the conclusion you claim.
The particular quote:
As expected, it was found that general memories of failure and specific memories of success resulted in worse performance than general memories of success and specific memories of failure
The study just shows that general memories have a more pronounced effect than specific memories—it doesn’t show the effect of a specific memory alone.
The takeaway is that recalling a specific example of success is not a powerful self-hypnosis strategy. That is why you need the snowball effect—you need enough past successes to change your subconscious evaluations.
I assumed they had also shown some isolated improvement from a specific memory of failure alone, which was indeed surprising to me.
Some of the participants were asked to reflect on a number of their past successes or failures by completing the sentence: “In general, I’m successful (I fail) when....”
The other participants were focused instead on a single episode of success or failure, by completing the sentence: “I succeeded (failed) once when I had to....”
The results were remarkable. People who were asked to reflect on their many past successes or a specific failure scored roughly 10% better on tests of mathematical ability, as well as verbal, spatial, and abstract reasoning, than those who reflected on either many past failures or a single specific success.
So my report of the article was correct. So, if what you say is true, then the article misrepresented the study (which I also have not read).
Yeah I started reading the article and then after a few paragraphs realized “this isn’t a physics paper, it would be quicker to just read the original”. If I wasn’t busy/lazy, I’d read the full paper and comment on the article to point out that it misrepresents its source paper, but it’s not a wikipedia article, so I don’t care so much. Happens all the time.
I am quite fond of this idea.
I discovered pickup ten years ago and also found that it can have a considerable positive impact on one’s life. I’d love to see a rational, generalized approach to socialization skills.
Echoing SarahC and KristianKI’s comments, here are some thoughts:
Name: I also think this should have a better name than “Pick-Up Arts”—some possibilities: Charismatic Arts, Socialization Arts.
Focus: I agree with your core idea about moving the focus away from orgasm and dating, but I suspect this may be more difficult than anticipated. For most people, success in romantic relationships is the principle ends of success itself, and many of the positive side-effects stem directly from having more romantic success. If you over-generalize you just get Dale Carnegie. Perhaps the key is to focus on the means over the ends. The PUA community is overly and specifically focused on the particular ends of sexual conquest.
Behavioral Learning: The real fundamental difficulty of developing charismatic skills is their inherent non-intellectual nature. You can not develop charisma by reading about it anymore than you can become a master guitarist by reading about guitars.
As ChristianK said:
Part of the difficulty is the skills that you need must be integrated into the deep subconscious level, and that simply requires massive practice. However I suspect it is even considerably worse than that, because of the deep connection to mood and social regulators.
Perhaps the most important ingredient in PUA success or charisma is what they call “inner-game”, a change in mood and inner psychology which comes only after initial successes initiate a snowballing chain of reinforcements.
I think that focusing more on changing inner game or psychology would better suit a means-focused charismatic skills program. This would probably include sifting through ideas from the self-help movement for gems that actually work, and applying a rationalist approach to modifying subconscious behaviors.
Community: The PUA communities I have participated in (such as the forums on mASF) leave much to be desired. There is often a general air of testosterone laden competitiveness which i find detrimental to the whole endeavor. The LW rationalist community already has a leg up in this respect. The LW structure would work well—top level posts about theory and techniques, threaded discussions for personal feedback, and so on.
Time Commitment: One of the big problems I’ve had with PUA is the apparent high time commitment. I’d love to see some way this could be improved, perhaps along the lines of refining and distilling the most successful techniques into a condensed and focused program. Perhaps it could even include some elements from the world of gaming and fun theory to help overcome akrasia.
This study points out that if you think about (or have) just a single episode of past success or failure, that it has the opposite effect you’d expect on future performance (i.e. what works in the direction you would expect is to reflect on a pattern of experience of failure or success, then you will have summarized/abstracted from the individual events and expect them to serve as the rule, not the exception).
That is, remembering a single failure made people perform better (I assume because they were able to avoid some of the mistakes, or simply try harder, without feeling completely helpless and likely to fail).
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but from the abstract it appears they compared general vs specific episodic memory, and do not reach the conclusion you claim.
The particular quote:
The study just shows that general memories have a more pronounced effect than specific memories—it doesn’t show the effect of a specific memory alone.
The takeaway is that recalling a specific example of success is not a powerful self-hypnosis strategy. That is why you need the snowball effect—you need enough past successes to change your subconscious evaluations.
I assumed they had also shown some isolated improvement from a specific memory of failure alone, which was indeed surprising to me.
So my report of the article was correct. So, if what you say is true, then the article misrepresented the study (which I also have not read).
Yeah I started reading the article and then after a few paragraphs realized “this isn’t a physics paper, it would be quicker to just read the original”. If I wasn’t busy/lazy, I’d read the full paper and comment on the article to point out that it misrepresents its source paper, but it’s not a wikipedia article, so I don’t care so much. Happens all the time.
Cool. The average quality of thinking on the blog (psychologytoday) is really low, so I should probably treat it like you do.