

Study proves bad guys really do get the most girls - tortilla
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826614.100&print=true

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BrandonM
The study doesn't really prove anything. It creates a (poor) definition of
"bad guys", creates a (very slanted) definition of "get the most girls", and
then correlates the two.

Being confident in yourself could easily be confused with slight narcissistic,
being impulsive could certainly be a good thing, and not all aspects of
Machiavellianism are bad. It's not clear to me that their chosen traits
actually define a "bad guy".

In order to determine who got the most girls, all they did was ask the people
in the study (all college students) "how many partners they had and whether
they were seeking brief affairs."

They point out that the "dark triads" had more partners and more desire for
short-term relationships, but they don't even touch on the quality of the
partners or the relationships. Their definition of getting a girl apparently
includes one-night stands. Contrary to popular belief, there are girls who
just want one-night stands as well, so the guys didn't "get" anything special;
they engaged in an even trade. Getting a girl, in my opinion, is getting a
girl to care about you. The study doesn't even touch on that.

Also, as daniel-cussen said (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224005>),
because the study only focuses on college students, it gives far too much
weight to trivial, shallow college relationships while not enough touching on
the much-more-important relationships that come later in life.

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blurry
Nothing but a sensationalist article based on bad science. If I may paraphrase
the findings in simple terms: out of a narrow sample of 200 college-aged
males, some guys were rated as slightly more obnoxious than average... those
same guys said that they would like to have more hookups... and finally those
same guys said that they do in fact have hookups.

Could it simply be that obnoxious guys like to brag about their supposed
sexual conquests?

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nazgulnarsil
_gasp_ women _like_ alpha males? WTF?!?!?!?! on a less sarcastic note, notice
that the traits mentioned are all leadership traits. Leaders generally have to
be somewhat narcissistic, otherwise they wouldn't believe they are worthy to
be leader. They have to be risk takers to upset the status quo. And they have
to be Machiavellian to govern efficiently.

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nazgulnarsil
OTOH: this is my personal take on it. fuck you evolution and your maximized
expected reproductive utility. I'd rather be happy. Happiness is probably
selected against since satisfied, content people don't run around trying
desperately to mate as much as possible.

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asdflkj
Happiness is not selected for or against any more than satiety is. You're
using first-order reasoning on a second-order trait.

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petercooper
I'm bad at coding if that helps.

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bprater
If this kind of thing interests you, do some research into the "seduction"
community.

I've been very impressed with their psychological "experiments" with women and
how they have evolved systems that allow normal guys to get hot girls.

Doubleyourdating.com is a good starting point.

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pavelludiq
If any of you think to start being bad, you should think twice. Its very hard
to be just the right amount of bad. I'm talking from experience, i tried to be
bad and girls just think im creepy. :)

Anyway check <http://www.highstatusmale.com> and check the book "without
embarrassment" its good not only if you want more girls, but if you only want
a little more understanding of the way humans communicate, entrepreneurs might
find it interesting to find how they can be the wright amount of bad to be
able to talk to people and BE THE ALPHA MALE in the conversation. I had bad
luck with girls, but didn't have low self-esteem and didn't knew where the
problem was. I read the book and i found out that i was doing almost
everything right. So i started thinking why? And then i realized i was
sabotaging myself. Most girls i knew were boring people, so my subconscious
decided to sabotage me so that i wouldn't hang out with boring people and
after i realized that i still don't like boring(hot) girls. So some of us have
a problem with girls not because of low self-esteem, but because of too high
self-esteem(how i wish i wasn't so picky :D).

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rplevy
This reminds me of pg's "Why Are Nerds Unpopular?". Obviously these
"negative"-- and innate [directly or emerging from other innate behavioral]
dispositions, are present and purposefully developed and honed extensively by
individuals who prioritize the game of attracting mates, and gaining access to
higher quality/quantity of mates. Or maybe these universal traits just emerge
from the practical requirements of achieving their goals. In either case,
being that type of person requires an enormous time commitment. Social
hierarchy climbing is their one ambition in life, and sex is their reward.

It's a lot more compatible with being a politician or power-seeker in
business, than it is with being a geek. The geek seeks to create/understand.
So their creations and discoveries are their reward. The geek may want what
the alpha male has, even want it strongly, but values the primary geek rewards
more strongly, and will never prioritize the alpha male reward enough to be
that other person. And it's good that many of us are not that person, because
I couldn't see much value in a world without ambition to do actually
worthwhile things.

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anaphoric
Bad science... The article seems to suggest that this is 'genetic'. That there
must be coded traits that somehow have to be favored or at least persist.

I have been the nice guy and the bad guy many times. A lot of it has to do
with ones mood and phase of life. Pretty weak to suggest that this is genetic.
I don't buy it.

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rplevy
I know what you mean about how genetics is often thrown up as the answer
without much discussion on the complexities of human development.

The discussion on intelligence often suffers from this. There's a level where
we are talking purely about the myelin sheath and conductance latencies among
other speed factors in the brain (for example my brother-in-law is obsessed
with learning about history, but he is "slow" despite his knowledge), but
intelligence is driven by a desire to work through and explore the kinds of
things (reading, writing, problem solving) that as a side effect give
individuals the qualities that are judged as intelligent. And the presence of
smart adults causing children to see these activities as exciting, and also
pulling them up via active feedback and passive schaffolding, makes all the
difference. Some people have introduced the notion of "multiple intelligence"
to describe the fact that a difference focus of one's attention in developing
as a person will lead to difference categories of competency.

And my reason for bringing this up is that some will try to explain
intelligence in entirely genetic terms but this doesn't square with what is
observed. Evolutionary psychology helps explain a lot of things, but it is all
too easy to oversimplify.

If I were give my guess right now about how genetics influences traits, I
would say that it obviously determines thousands of reflexive behaviors we
perform, and of course it establishes potential competencies, but I think it
additionally can set up guideposts that determine personality. It is known (if
I remember correctly) that in some primitive organisms a single gene switches
on avoidance versus more social behavior. There are plenty of ways in which
even the complex behavior of behavior of humans could be guided by genetics
into certain personality tendencies or strategies. For example if the
cingulate cortex turns out to be a behavior-judging module in the brain among
other things, then genetics could program the cingulate to fire a note of
concern to the system, or fail to do the same, with regard to whatever complex
decision is being made, whenever it involves a choice to be with people or not
be with people.

Similarly if there are multiple genetically guided development strategies for
handling social information, and some of them just don't scale that well to
larger groups of people, then perhaps this would produce anxiety and a sense
of not being able to handle the situation, among people who have the more
brittle genetic strategy. But the same argument could be made for voluntary
control that would influence the underlying cognitive strategy, because not
enough is known yet.

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anaphoric
Yes I think you make some very good points.

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Zarathu
This is completely relevant to hacker interests.

~~~
Zarathu
</sarcasm>

I'm gay.

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nazgulnarsil
would have been funnier without the sarcasm tag.

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aswanson
Actually, he posted the closing tag before the statement. So maybe it was
meant literally.

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sygzzy
Quality of girl counts for a lot.

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qeek
Any tips on becoming a bad guy? :)

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ojbyrne
You just need to get rejected a bunch of times because you're a nice guy,
resulting in plummeting self-esteem, which naturally leads to multiple
substance abuse problems and a penchant for bar fights. Then you'll have to
resort to petty crime to support your habits, which leads to you getting
caught, eventually enough times to go to prison - and, bingo, when you get out
you can get the women who rejected you before :-)

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daniel-cussen
lol. Taking your joke literally, I think one would simply fuck his life up in
the process, without the upside of getting women at the end.

From what I've seen, guys with high time preference (short-term oriented) win
out at the beginning, and guys with low time preference (long-term oriented)
win out in the end. Pretty tautological stuff. Guys who spend high school
working out, worrying about clothes and social standing, and prioritizing
their sex lives get sex early on. But then you have Wall Street bankers from
elite colleges, and they get a lot of women too. They were often nerds in high
school.

Now, you could argue bankers are "bad" in the moral sense, but like the quasi-
criminal guys at clubs, they have status and (in many cases) the attending
arrogance. I think the "bad" question is more of a question of status than
morality, but the two get mixed up because people with status aren't always
super nice.

But I'm just basing it on baboon studies like this one:
<http://hanson.gmu.edu/showcare.pdf>

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nostrademons
Reminds me of Benjamin Graham (the "Dean of Wall Street" and Warren Buffett's
mentor), who basically ignored girls altogether until he was well into his
20s, and then became one of Wall Street's most notable womanizers in his 50s
and 60s. It probably helped that by then he was filthy rich and quite famous
in his field.

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mrtron
I suppose Scarface popularized this as well.

Tony Montana: In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you
get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get
the women.

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Oompa
How is this "hacker" news?

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daniel-cussen
You're right. The only people this kind of article would speak out to are
nice, lonely guys who are online on a Saturday night.

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nbroyal
In other news, water is wet.

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drios
Lucky Stalin!!!!

