Thanks for the response!
Other than the “teasing her more than I normally do” and “walking in a specific place relative to her” everything in your treatment group could also be called “being a good date.”
Sounds like I’m on the right track :)
I would recommend, in your own head, think of it not in terms of “playing hard to get” but in terms of “treating your partner with respect.”
“Treating your partner with respect” is a poor heuristic. It includes some great behaviors like listening but also some terrible ones that “put the woman on a pedestal”. If you think respect has a special unusual definition on first dates, just taboo the word for better communication.
One could think about “being coy” or “respecting myself” or “withholding judgement until I know the whole woman” if they find “PHTG” distasteful. I have no preference.
Acting on Level 2, rather than Level 1, adds additional fail conditions and stress. http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/
This concern I hear a lot. I originally applied it to my dating-app-texting and send texts that felt natural to me. Those majorly underperformed texting strategies which relied on a few heuristic rules (short, easy to respond to, more teasing, etc.). We also know that most male animals do not use “be yourself”—see here. Also, the nature of system 1 is that it learns increasingly complex behavior with habit and reinforcement. So treatment could easily underperform at the start but eventually overperform.
Generally, I put some weight on this argument but not enough to switch to control only.
If your date realizes that you are “PHTG” that is, itself, a signal and will select for/against certain types of partners.
Half the probability mass in the “control is better” hypothesis comes from me being a bad actor, yes. On the other hand, looking desperate extends the number of dates needed to find an equivalent compatibility partner.
On that note, are you clear in your own mind about what your goal is? “What does it profit a man to gain the whole [girlfriend] but lose his [happiness]” and all that.
After the experiment if I hated PHTG but to outperformed the control, I can choose to do control anyway. That’s unlikely but possible.
Do you have any evidence that happy people fall in love slower than happy people. So far I have only noticed a slight inverse relationship where crisis retard my romance response. All attempts to slow the response by having more friends failed (although being happier is nice for other reasons). Past attempts at PHTG have often succeeded.
If you believe that I fall in love faster than other people because I am “desperate” then all my past relationships should have collapsed when I told the person I liked them. This has not occurred. As long as I wait until the fifth of sixth interaction to say “I like you” the relationships are perfectly stable. Maybe that model just applies to certain people
After I’ve had sex with a woman a few times I find being affectionate is punished much less. It’s a temporary strategy to get through the early stages of courtship. I’m sorry but “Acting for the rest of your life” is a bit melodramatic. On their first dates people pretend to be kinder, funnier, smarter, taller and hotter than they really are. They don’t keep pretending forever.