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Comment by datapimp | Hacker News Reader

That's a common criticism, but it is mostly false and dependent on the person who is using the science to be more successful in getting what they want.

What mystery is talking about is simple attraction psychology, and it is all based on evolutionary psychology. Incidentally, so are all "serious adult relationships". Mystery says that women are attracted to men who display three things: 1) they're leaders of men 2) they are desirable by other women 3) they take care of their people. As anyone who has been in a "serious adult relationship" can tell you, these things are just as important for maintaining attraction in a long term relationship as they are in a one night stand.

The things mystery and more serious evolutionary psychologists have elaborated on are valid in all cases where men desire to maintain the attraction of a woman. It isn't entirely selfish or manipulative either. Women want to be attracted to you.

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If I was going to try and look for scientific backing for my dating technique, I would use behavioral psychology like the OP rather than evolutionary psychology. Evo-psych is a decent source of hypotheses, but until those hypotheses are empirically verified case-by-case they don't count for much. It's not a theory that's particularly good at picking out one hypothesis as better than the other because you can make up equally plausible evo-psych stories for a lot of hypotheses before-the-fact.

Confounding this, of course, is the huge challenge of overcoming ethnocentrism--you might assume that standard Western behaviors and attitudes around sexuality are universal human things, but in a lot of cases they're just culturally-dependent arbitrary crap. Evo-psych won't help with this. As far as evo-psych helps you, at best it'll help you attract cro-magnon hunter-gatherer chicks, not affluent Westerners with all kinds of cultural influences added on, influences that evo-psych fundamentally has no way of predicting.

Behavioral psych is tricky since any psych study on affluent Western chicks will have conclusions which can only be confidently applied to affluent Western chicks, but if that's who you're trying to pick up that's a help, not a hindrance.

What cultural influences are you talking about? Can you give an example? Specifically, what influences that aren't just a parameter within the framework of evolutionary psychology?

Cultural variations in meeting-and-mating practices are all around if you read the tiniest bit of anthropology on the subject. Can you clarify what you mean by "just a parameter within the framework of evolutionary psychology"?

I mean back in hunter-gatherer days, women were impressed by your animal hides or whatnot, and not your luxury car, but those two things are isomorphic. You can find a lot of such ultimately trivial variation, where you only have to adjust your model a tiny bit. Give me an example of an important social phenomenon not explicable through a minor adjustment to common ev-psych principles.

I think the argument for claiming evo-psych justifications for PUA techniques make the assumption that picking up women in bars is at all isomorphic to human sexual practices among prehistoric hunter-gatherers. You can't even find practices isomorphic to that among all (or even most) contemporary human cultures--how can you claim that as some sort of universal human thing?

Not to mention, it's increasingly difficult to talk about the community as one entity. MM and his style is actually mocked in many circles of the community. They have the most mainstream branding due to the show but in no way do they represent the most popular style anymore.

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