If you do not know any women, something is wrong.
This isn’t quite Silas’ complaint. Clearly, he does know some women. What he is looking for is women who are receptive to his attempts to date them. This means he needs to know them in a context where he can actually make advances, and he needs to know how to actually make advances (which are appropriate to that context). His other complaint was that he was getting a date, but then it fizzled because she lost interest.
I won’t speak of Silas’ specific situation, but I will emphasize that there are many men who are decent guys from the standpoint of society, and who don’t have anything major wrong with them psychologically, physically or financially, but who don’t have significant options with women. This isn’t because they don’t know women, but because the women they know aren’t available to them because the women don’t find them attractive enough (since women are more selective, the average women is going after men with above average attractiveness, not after her average male friends), and/or because they are insufficiently knowledgeable of all the societal rituals around dating. Those rituals place a higher burden on the male for initiating things, and men don’t have that stuff encoded in their DNA. It’s something that the cooler kids learned in adolescence, and the less cool ones didn’t.
The result is that by high school, it’s common for males with certain personality traits such as introversion and systemizing (i.e. personality traits typical of males who identify as rationalists) to be so far behind socially that their ability to get something going romantic with the women around them is limited, even to the extent of being practically locked out. Women with similar personality traits will also experience difficulties, but not to the same magnitude since they aren’t typically expected to be the initiators, and because personality traits like confidence (that can easily be damaged during adolescence) aren’t so important for their attractiveness. This is not to say that women don’t experience challenges and difficulties in relationships; they do, but their primary challenges occur at different points (e.g. once some sort of dating has actually started, not so much difficulty getting any kind of date) and are a totally different subjects (e.g. being seen only sexually).
It is possible for a man to be surrounded by women, yet be walled off from them. As someone who experienced this years ago, I can say that it was no fun. And meeting friends of friends isn’t any use if you can’t capitalize on it, not to mention that it’s a slow and unreliable way of meeting people. And even if you can get a date, there are a million more ways for the male to bungle than for the female to bungle it (again, women are more selective, and male behavior is a larger factor in female attraction than female behavior is in male attraction… just think about the ways women use words like “weird” or “creepy” in describing potential suitors), which enforces a steep learning curve that is difficult to climb when you don’t know what you are doing.
You might say that there is a problem these guys have, which “needs to be addressed on their end,” and you would be absolutely right. But that is exactly Silas’ complaint. What is the nuts and bolts of what these men need to address such that they can successfully date the women all around them, and who is going to show them how to do it? Who is going to teach them all the dating rituals that they missed during adolescence, and give them back the self-confidence that they lost? Society isn’t.
I’m glad to see someone bringing up the topic of seduction, and how it relates to rationality, and how attitudes inside and towards the seduction community relate to rationality and biases.
I’m going to give a big warning to everyone on this topic. The seduction community is an expansive and heterogenous phenomenon. Unless someone has some experience of the community (say 30+ hours of reading of multiple gurus with different philosophies, and they have gone out and tried the approaches the community advocates or seen real pickup artists in action), then it is virtually impossible to understand what it involves and describe it in a way that isn’t skewed.
Elana Clift’s honors thesis is a good place to start.
Yvain, you are right to take the mass perceptions of people of each sex as evidence (though evidence of what is unclear, so far). Let me unpack a few things:
There are guys who think like this, but not all pickup artists do, and probably most of the men who think like this aren’t pickup artists. Here’s my quick availability-heuristicky impression of what pickup artists think on these subjects, and whether or not these beliefs are complimentary, based on more than half a decade of involvement with the community:
Female attraction to male friends: Pickup artists typically believe that if a woman sees a man as “just a friend,” then it is unlikely that this perception will change, and that his efforts are best allocated elsewhere.
Alpha males: Pickup artists typically believe that women are attracted to “alpha males.” What “alpha male” means is subject to intense debate.
Lying and trickery: Pickup artists typically don’t believe that women want to be lied to or tricked. Pickup artists do present themselves selectively and strategically. Yet the modal point of view in my experience is that lying and trickery are looked down on, and seen as antithetical to seduction. If a pickup artist isn’t looking for a relationship, then he will try to make that obvious, or even state it explicitly.
It’s good to see someone caring what pickup artists think, but I would take their views with a bit more caution for several reasons:
The availability heuristic. The seduction community has a pretty good model of young female extraverts with average IQ, because these are the women they encounter most often. As you look at women who differ more and more from the average extravert, the prototype of the seduction community becomes less and less correct. This is a point where I agree with Alicorn. This doesn’t mean that the community’s advice completely ceases to work, but it requires modification. Women who are nerdy, systemizing, bisexual, feminist, or in alternative subcultures are wired differently. (And to tie in to your post, women with those traits are going to be bad judges of the preferences of typical women due the Typical Psyche Fallacy, which I think is a special case of the availability heuristic.)
Naive realism. Pickup artists often assume that because a theory produces results, then it is true. This isn’t necessarily the case. Pjeby has correctly described how correct-enough theories will often be useful without being true. Having a model of women that lets you predict the behavior of say, 30% of women better than chance is actually really good for a guy who is completely in the dark about women and their preferences and behaviors.
(I wonder whether more complex models would necessarily be more useful; I think this varies. When you are a beginner, it may be best to understand typical women, and then later try to figure out how all the outlier types of women work by seeing their similarities and differences from typical women. Ultimately, the model that is most important to have is the model of the type of women you are compatible with.)
When you put these two together, you get pickup artists running around with oversimplified-but-nevertheless-useful models of women, who start to get some better results, confirming their over oversimplified-but-nevertheless-useful models of women in their minds.
I figured this out because I view the empirical approach as the core of the seduction community’s teachings, so I often try out stuff that my gut tells me and break the rules of what is “supposed” to work or not work.
As for how much the view of women in the seduction community is complimentary or true, those are topics I’ll have to save for another time.