I have no problem with Relsqui presenting this sort of advice, but I think (a) such advice requires more acknowledgment of how limited it is in scope, and (b) some of it is wrong. I think attempting to synthesize LW thoughts on online dating is an interesting subject, but drawing prescriptions from this synthesis, along with certain other assumptions, runs into the problems that pwno and Vladimi_M observe.
Since Relsqui is being such a good sport about receiving criticism, and Vladimir_M is being shy on certain subjects, I’m going to break it down myself.
This post is a summary of the parts of that thread which specifically address the practical aspect of good profile editing and critique.
What reasons do we have to believe that the aggregated LW on online dating is any use? Unless we have reasons to believe that it is useful, this aggregation is more interesting as a descriptive anthropological project (“Ooh, lookie at what the cute LWers think about online dating!”) than as a normative one. This post presents the aggregated advice as prescriptive without adequate caveat emptors.
Concrete Advice #1 is good except for this part:
Honesty (so as to find people who will actually like you)
What is the evidence that being honest will help you find the people who will actually like you? The fact is that in dating between everyone except extremely nerdy people, the norm is to engage in impression management.
Yes, it’s true in a trivial way that the information in your profile must relate to your actual traits to attract someone who is into you once they get to know you. Yet the need for impression management puts a ceiling on the level of honesty that is practical.
The other problem with honesty is that you have to consider the signaling effects of revealing information. If one reveals information that most people would impression-manage away according to current norms, then one signals that either (a) one is deliberately flouting impression management, or (b) one does not understand impression management, and by extension, has low social skills. Revealing too much negative information about oneself just makes one look insecure; revealing too much positive information just looks like boasting.
The next problem with providing too much accurate information is that people are judging you with crude schemas and stereotypes. If you provide information that triggers a stereotype, someone’s perception of you can be dominated by those stereotypes, and end up less accurate.
Here’s an example: some women judge men based on the “nerd” stereotype. “Geek”/”nerd” is a certain schema by which women associate intelligence and technical interests with low social skills, low social status, and other unattractive qualities.
In my case, I am far more exciting than the average male with my cognitive architecture, but I also have a fair amount of stereotypical “nerdy” interests and personality traits. Since I reject stereotypes about nerds as an accurate heuristic to judge me, and I reject being categorized as boring merely because men other than me with similar personality traits and interests aren’t sexually exciting, I deliberately foil this heuristic by having my profile emphasize my social interests, and play down my technical interests.
Jumping straight into the “nerd” trashcan that many women have doesn’t do either them or me any favors… even if it’s more “honest.” When a woman actually starts talking to me or meets me, then she can judge whether I have the mix of qualities that she is looking for. Women are going to find out about my technical vices eventually, but my main profile isn’t the correct place to disclose it, either practically or morally. The goal is to hide this information long enough that when I reveal it, it makes me look like an even cooler and multi-faceted person, rather than getting me tossed in the dustbin because it triggers a stereotype that dominates their perception of me.
Once women (in aggregate, which means not you, women of LW) stop treating technical interests and intelligence as horrible curses in men, I’ll stop doing this. (And to anyone thinking “if a woman would reject you for being nerdy, you don’t want her anyways,” don’t be the fox non-empirically calling the grapes sour. There are plenty of highly intelligent women, including nerdy women, who prefer intelligent men with high social skills over men who read as nerds at first glance… even if those highly intelligent social guys have nerdy interests.)
What reasons do we have to believe that the aggregated LW on online dating is any use?
Very little. In general dating advice serves a purpose other than providing information on how best to go about dating.(along the lines of Hanson’s homo hypocritus). This does not seem to be a bias that lesswrong is particularly good at overcoming.
On the positive side if anyone recommends anything particularly self destructive we can rely on HughRistik to correct it.
A lot of the comments here (particularly among those that do not include the word ‘should’) are good. Unfortunately it is difficult to know which advice is good and which is bad unless you already know what you are doing. There are other environments that are set up specifically for this kind of subject where there are mechanisms in place to ensure the ‘sanity waterline’ is high.
Unless we have reasons to believe that it is useful, this aggregation is more interesting as a descriptive anthropological project (“Ooh, lookie at what the cute LWers think about online dating!”) than as a normative one. This post presents the aggregated advice as prescriptive without adequate caveat emptors.
There are other environments that are set up specifically for this kind of subject where there are mechanisms in place to ensure the ‘sanity waterline’ is high.
One of the best examples is, of course, PUA communities.
On the main forum I used to post on, here are some of the norms:
In the Techniques forum, you aren’t supposed to post any technique until you’ve tried it a couple times yourself. Furthermore, you aren’t even supposed to ask if something might work, instead you are told “go out and try it, then come tell us if it worked.” Even talking about an idea that hasn’t been tried can privilege the hypothesis too much. Of course, the fact that you’ve tried something doesn’t prove that it works (maybe something else you were doing caused the result instead), or that it generalizes to other people and situations, but it makes the hypothesis worth talking about.
Users are discouraged from posting on subjects they aren’t experienced about; doing so is called “Keyboard Jockeying” (aka “KJing”). There is some tolerance for speculation as long as you are clear that you are speculating (some guys will preface ideas with “I’m gonna KJ a little here...”), but too much KJing, even admitted KJing, is frowned upon.
Building up “street cred” is important. Users are encouraged to describe their experience, skill levels, and results. One way to do some is to relate anecdotes from your own experience, or to write “Field Reports,” stories of real life interactions. The purpose of field reports is to get feedback, and also to display experience, so other guys can contextualize why you make the claims you make. FRs are of course biased, hyped, selective, and sometimes false, but even they are much better than knowing nothing about the people making claims. At least, you have an idea of the upper bound of how good they are.
It’s considered acceptable to challenge people for not knowing what they are talking about. Especially boastful or implausible FRs do get challenged, especially when they are by people trying to sell products. Making bold claims without street cred is frowned on. All the time you will see guys coming on to the forum, writing about how awesome they are, and expounding on some new theories. The more skill they claim without detail, and the more controversy they make, the more likely they are to get a response like, “Dude, what you say sounds cool, but who the hell are you? Post some FRs so that people can know where you’re coming from and get back to us.”
The “street cred” norms do lead to a lot of ego wars among at least moderately skilled guys, but it helps prevent completely unexperienced guys from thinking they are qualified to argue with guys they should be shutting up and listening to. Could the less experienced guy be right, and the more experienced guy be wrong? Yes, of course. But since knowledge is correlated with success, the advice of the more successful guys gets higher priors.
The weakness of the community is that it’s vulnerable to all sorts of biases: availability heuristic, confirmation bias, hasty generalization, bandwagon effects, etc… But it’s no more vulnerable to these things than any other practical community that can’t do scientific testing. At least with PUAs, you have a better idea of why people think what they think, and it’s acceptable and encouraged to challenge people and say, “what’s your field experience?”. Even though the people who are accepted as having “street cred” have biases, these guys are generally successful, and they are less wrong than the keyboard jockeys on average about what works.
If I discovered some things that contradicted conventional PUA teachings, and talked about it on a PUA forum, I believe I could get people to rethink things if I did so through the appropriate channels. I would write a few field reports, answer some newbie questions, and do so in a way that reveals my skill and experience levels. Once I did so, I would have proved myself epistemically trustworthy to PUAs, and they would be open to unorthodox ideas as long as I backed them up with field experience, and explained them in the context of existing PUA theories. Sometime I will actually perform this experiment, but I am still gathering field experience.
Relative to a scientific community that can perform controlled empirical trials with large samples sizes, the epistemic standards of PUAs are weak. But the epistemic standards of PUAs are much, much better than any other form of dating advice, which is why the community is the gold standard.
Lots of mainstream dating advice “experts” have only have their own experiences to go on. Instead of giving any charismatic person who claims to be a successful dater a book deal and TV time, imagine if you took thousands of successful daters and aggregated their experiences (some PUA forums have tens of thousands of members). Even though this aggregation is biased by ideological bandwagon effects, and by the fact that the community self-selects for successful daters who agree with it, it’s still way more epistemically trustworthy (about what works, not necessarily about what is true) than most mainstream dating “experts.”
FRs are of course biased, hyped, selective, and sometimes false, but even they are much better than knowing nothing about the people making claims. At least, you have an idea of the upper bound of how good they are.
You can tell a lot about someone even based off which lies they choose to tell.
Lots of mainstream dating advice “experts” have only have their own experiences to go on. Instead of giving any charismatic person who claims to be a successful dater a book deal and TV time,
An illustrative anecdote is that “Mystery” admits that he is actually quite bad at attracting “7s”. Sure, that’s hyperbole for the purpose of showing off, but there is an element of truth behind it. If he wasn’t able to take on board knowledge from people other than himself and extracting the general insights then his advice would be quite limited.
On the other hand there are people like (so called) David DeAngelo who, well, isn’t exactly an outlier on the ‘charismatic person’ scale and is more of a simple ‘educator’. He just teaches the sort of classes on human behavior that would be taught in highschool if school was actually about teaching people useful stuff. He comes complete with a table of books on a variety of subjects that are well reputed in mainstream culture that he holds up, describes and recommends. Handing out assignments wouldn’t seem out of place and nor would assigning pracs on ‘body language and posture’. Come to think of it he does do both of those things without using those terms.
That sort of source (only PUA advice in the broadest possible usage) has a somewhat higher epistemic standard—albeit trading off somewhat on the most specific techniques by playing it safe and keeping it basic.
The other problem with honesty is that you have to consider the signaling effects of revealing information. If one reveals information that most people would impression-manage away according to current norms, then one signals that either (a) one is deliberately flouting impression management, or (b) one does not understand impression management, and by extension, has low social skills. Revealing too much negative information about oneself just makes one look insecure; revealing too much positive information just looks like boasting.
This is well said. I addressed the balance of honesty and attraction somewhat but clearly not sufficiently, since a couple of people have remarked on it. However, you’re the first person to give a clear description of what could be added. I’m mildly daunted by the task of rearranging the post to lengthen that portion of it, what with all the segues, but if I find the (time*priority) for it I’ll see what I can do.
I am far more exciting than the average male with my cognitive architecture,
Ooh, burn.
It sounds like how you present yourself, vis a vis nerdiness, and how I do, are actually quite similar—we just came at it from different directions. In both cases, we’re downplaying things which would fit us into that mold, because it doesn’t suit us.
I have no problem with Relsqui presenting this sort of advice, but I think (a) such advice requires more acknowledgment of how limited it is in scope, and (b) some of it is wrong. I think attempting to synthesize LW thoughts on online dating is an interesting subject, but drawing prescriptions from this synthesis, along with certain other assumptions, runs into the problems that pwno and Vladimi_M observe.
Since Relsqui is being such a good sport about receiving criticism, and Vladimir_M is being shy on certain subjects, I’m going to break it down myself.
What reasons do we have to believe that the aggregated LW on online dating is any use? Unless we have reasons to believe that it is useful, this aggregation is more interesting as a descriptive anthropological project (“Ooh, lookie at what the cute LWers think about online dating!”) than as a normative one. This post presents the aggregated advice as prescriptive without adequate caveat emptors.
Concrete Advice #1 is good except for this part:
What is the evidence that being honest will help you find the people who will actually like you? The fact is that in dating between everyone except extremely nerdy people, the norm is to engage in impression management.
Yes, it’s true in a trivial way that the information in your profile must relate to your actual traits to attract someone who is into you once they get to know you. Yet the need for impression management puts a ceiling on the level of honesty that is practical.
The other problem with honesty is that you have to consider the signaling effects of revealing information. If one reveals information that most people would impression-manage away according to current norms, then one signals that either (a) one is deliberately flouting impression management, or (b) one does not understand impression management, and by extension, has low social skills. Revealing too much negative information about oneself just makes one look insecure; revealing too much positive information just looks like boasting.
The next problem with providing too much accurate information is that people are judging you with crude schemas and stereotypes. If you provide information that triggers a stereotype, someone’s perception of you can be dominated by those stereotypes, and end up less accurate.
Here’s an example: some women judge men based on the “nerd” stereotype. “Geek”/”nerd” is a certain schema by which women associate intelligence and technical interests with low social skills, low social status, and other unattractive qualities.
In my case, I am far more exciting than the average male with my cognitive architecture, but I also have a fair amount of stereotypical “nerdy” interests and personality traits. Since I reject stereotypes about nerds as an accurate heuristic to judge me, and I reject being categorized as boring merely because men other than me with similar personality traits and interests aren’t sexually exciting, I deliberately foil this heuristic by having my profile emphasize my social interests, and play down my technical interests.
Jumping straight into the “nerd” trashcan that many women have doesn’t do either them or me any favors… even if it’s more “honest.” When a woman actually starts talking to me or meets me, then she can judge whether I have the mix of qualities that she is looking for. Women are going to find out about my technical vices eventually, but my main profile isn’t the correct place to disclose it, either practically or morally. The goal is to hide this information long enough that when I reveal it, it makes me look like an even cooler and multi-faceted person, rather than getting me tossed in the dustbin because it triggers a stereotype that dominates their perception of me.
Once women (in aggregate, which means not you, women of LW) stop treating technical interests and intelligence as horrible curses in men, I’ll stop doing this. (And to anyone thinking “if a woman would reject you for being nerdy, you don’t want her anyways,” don’t be the fox non-empirically calling the grapes sour. There are plenty of highly intelligent women, including nerdy women, who prefer intelligent men with high social skills over men who read as nerds at first glance… even if those highly intelligent social guys have nerdy interests.)
continued...
Very little. In general dating advice serves a purpose other than providing information on how best to go about dating.(along the lines of Hanson’s homo hypocritus). This does not seem to be a bias that lesswrong is particularly good at overcoming.
On the positive side if anyone recommends anything particularly self destructive we can rely on HughRistik to correct it.
A lot of the comments here (particularly among those that do not include the word ‘should’) are good. Unfortunately it is difficult to know which advice is good and which is bad unless you already know what you are doing. There are other environments that are set up specifically for this kind of subject where there are mechanisms in place to ensure the ‘sanity waterline’ is high.
Cute. I love it.
One of the best examples is, of course, PUA communities.
On the main forum I used to post on, here are some of the norms:
In the Techniques forum, you aren’t supposed to post any technique until you’ve tried it a couple times yourself. Furthermore, you aren’t even supposed to ask if something might work, instead you are told “go out and try it, then come tell us if it worked.” Even talking about an idea that hasn’t been tried can privilege the hypothesis too much. Of course, the fact that you’ve tried something doesn’t prove that it works (maybe something else you were doing caused the result instead), or that it generalizes to other people and situations, but it makes the hypothesis worth talking about.
Users are discouraged from posting on subjects they aren’t experienced about; doing so is called “Keyboard Jockeying” (aka “KJing”). There is some tolerance for speculation as long as you are clear that you are speculating (some guys will preface ideas with “I’m gonna KJ a little here...”), but too much KJing, even admitted KJing, is frowned upon.
Building up “street cred” is important. Users are encouraged to describe their experience, skill levels, and results. One way to do some is to relate anecdotes from your own experience, or to write “Field Reports,” stories of real life interactions. The purpose of field reports is to get feedback, and also to display experience, so other guys can contextualize why you make the claims you make. FRs are of course biased, hyped, selective, and sometimes false, but even they are much better than knowing nothing about the people making claims. At least, you have an idea of the upper bound of how good they are.
It’s considered acceptable to challenge people for not knowing what they are talking about. Especially boastful or implausible FRs do get challenged, especially when they are by people trying to sell products. Making bold claims without street cred is frowned on. All the time you will see guys coming on to the forum, writing about how awesome they are, and expounding on some new theories. The more skill they claim without detail, and the more controversy they make, the more likely they are to get a response like, “Dude, what you say sounds cool, but who the hell are you? Post some FRs so that people can know where you’re coming from and get back to us.”
The “street cred” norms do lead to a lot of ego wars among at least moderately skilled guys, but it helps prevent completely unexperienced guys from thinking they are qualified to argue with guys they should be shutting up and listening to. Could the less experienced guy be right, and the more experienced guy be wrong? Yes, of course. But since knowledge is correlated with success, the advice of the more successful guys gets higher priors.
The weakness of the community is that it’s vulnerable to all sorts of biases: availability heuristic, confirmation bias, hasty generalization, bandwagon effects, etc… But it’s no more vulnerable to these things than any other practical community that can’t do scientific testing. At least with PUAs, you have a better idea of why people think what they think, and it’s acceptable and encouraged to challenge people and say, “what’s your field experience?”. Even though the people who are accepted as having “street cred” have biases, these guys are generally successful, and they are less wrong than the keyboard jockeys on average about what works.
If I discovered some things that contradicted conventional PUA teachings, and talked about it on a PUA forum, I believe I could get people to rethink things if I did so through the appropriate channels. I would write a few field reports, answer some newbie questions, and do so in a way that reveals my skill and experience levels. Once I did so, I would have proved myself epistemically trustworthy to PUAs, and they would be open to unorthodox ideas as long as I backed them up with field experience, and explained them in the context of existing PUA theories. Sometime I will actually perform this experiment, but I am still gathering field experience.
Relative to a scientific community that can perform controlled empirical trials with large samples sizes, the epistemic standards of PUAs are weak. But the epistemic standards of PUAs are much, much better than any other form of dating advice, which is why the community is the gold standard.
Lots of mainstream dating advice “experts” have only have their own experiences to go on. Instead of giving any charismatic person who claims to be a successful dater a book deal and TV time, imagine if you took thousands of successful daters and aggregated their experiences (some PUA forums have tens of thousands of members). Even though this aggregation is biased by ideological bandwagon effects, and by the fact that the community self-selects for successful daters who agree with it, it’s still way more epistemically trustworthy (about what works, not necessarily about what is true) than most mainstream dating “experts.”
You can tell a lot about someone even based off which lies they choose to tell.
An illustrative anecdote is that “Mystery” admits that he is actually quite bad at attracting “7s”. Sure, that’s hyperbole for the purpose of showing off, but there is an element of truth behind it. If he wasn’t able to take on board knowledge from people other than himself and extracting the general insights then his advice would be quite limited.
On the other hand there are people like (so called) David DeAngelo who, well, isn’t exactly an outlier on the ‘charismatic person’ scale and is more of a simple ‘educator’. He just teaches the sort of classes on human behavior that would be taught in highschool if school was actually about teaching people useful stuff. He comes complete with a table of books on a variety of subjects that are well reputed in mainstream culture that he holds up, describes and recommends. Handing out assignments wouldn’t seem out of place and nor would assigning pracs on ‘body language and posture’. Come to think of it he does do both of those things without using those terms.
That sort of source (only PUA advice in the broadest possible usage) has a somewhat higher epistemic standard—albeit trading off somewhat on the most specific techniques by playing it safe and keeping it basic.
This is well said. I addressed the balance of honesty and attraction somewhat but clearly not sufficiently, since a couple of people have remarked on it. However, you’re the first person to give a clear description of what could be added. I’m mildly daunted by the task of rearranging the post to lengthen that portion of it, what with all the segues, but if I find the (time*priority) for it I’ll see what I can do.
Ooh, burn.
It sounds like how you present yourself, vis a vis nerdiness, and how I do, are actually quite similar—we just came at it from different directions. In both cases, we’re downplaying things which would fit us into that mold, because it doesn’t suit us.