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.
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.