

The New Dating Game - wallflower
http://weeklystandard.com/print/articles/new-dating-game?page=12

======
gjm11
Semi-interesting, but I am strongly disinclined to trust anything Charlotte
Allen has to say about culture because other things I've read by her seem
always to have a heavy social-conservative spin on them. A few examples:

<http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/whWereare.htm> ("The vast majority of women
who might otherwise qualify as public intellectuals would rather recite the
feminist catechism or articulate some new twists and refinements on it than
carve out a place for themselves in the larger public world." The sole purpose
of this article seems to be being as negative as possible about present-day
feminists.)

<http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/17/opinion/oe-allen17> ("I can't stand
atheists -- but it's not because they don't believe in God. It's because
they're crashing bores." Most of the article consists of this sort of insult
and sneering.)

[http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00...](http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/484gmzem.asp)
(unkind but not very unfair summary: Bill Ayers! Barack Obama! Progressives
are idiots, hahaha! Look, some Marxists!)

And, surprise, surprise, it turns out she works for a conservative think tank.
Of course it's perfectly possible for someone who works for a conservative
think tank to have useful and interesting things to say, but in practice I
tend to find that such people give a high enough priority to pushing a
particular agenda -- as, after all, they are being paid to do -- that I can't
trust anything they say without independent verification. (The same may well
be true of people working for think tanks on the other side, but there seem to
be considerably fewer of them about.)

~~~
endtime
If you read the content and find it interesting (and aren't worried about
neuro-linguistic hacking or subliminal messaging or hypnosis or any other
covert channel), why does the source matter?

~~~
gjm11
I can tell whether something is interesting without knowing anything about the
source, but I can get a better idea whether something is _trustworthy_ , with
less effort, if I have some information about the source.

The source probably doesn't matter at all if, for whatever reason, I've
already decided that I'll go through checking every single assertion, looking
out for every unstated insinuation and every tendentious turn of phrase. But,
odd though it may seem, I don't normally do that, and I don't think anyone
else normally does that, either. So it's useful to have some advance notice of
what level of caution is called for in reading the text.

------
cia_plant
_the median number of lifetime sex partners for all U.S. women ages 15 to 44
is just 3.3, according to the Census Bureau’s latest statistical abstract._

Huh? How exactly do you end up with .3 of a sexual partner?

~~~
nandemo
Curiously, the corresponding number for males is 5.4.

Black males are such studs (8.3 partners) and latinas really save themselves
for marriage (1.7!).

Guess what, people lie.

~~~
gjm11
With equal or roughly-equal populations of men and women, the _means_ should
be the same for both, but the _medians_ needn't be. Thought experiment: 100
men, 100 women; there are 10 women who have sex with all the men, and no other
sex is had. Then the mean number of partners is 10 for both men and women, but
the median number is 10 for the men and 0 for the women.

You can get a similar result even with means, if for some reason your sampling
procedure doesn't catch the outliers. (For instance, if they're very rare, or
if they're demographically different in a way that makes it harder for your
sampling to find them.)

Having said all that, I suspect lying really is the main contributor to these
differences.

~~~
gaius
If you had 100 men and 100 women, you wouldn't get 100 couples. You'd get
everyone going after the top 10 of the opposite sex and ignoring everyone
else.

------
random_guy
It's all true. The effectiveness of the approach is amazing, I lost every
single bit of respect in the female gender in the process of trying it out
myself. Now I'm searching for someone on which this stuff doesn't work. I'm
afraid i'll end up alone.

~~~
qq66
What would you recommend in terms of 10 hours of reading that I can do to go
out and start myself?

~~~
random_guy
I started with 'The Game' from Neil Strauss, that gave me the idea. From then
it was all downhill, you just have to go out and try. I never used canned
openings and that kind of stuff, i also never read any kind of specific
'technical' material like the Mystery method.

I think that the really important things are to grasp the concept, learn to
use the feedback that you receive from them effectively and (most importantly)
get over the fear of rejection that goes with the approach. Once you lose the
fear everything becomes easy.

~~~
eru
Should come in handy when you start your career in sales, too.

------
philwelch
Previously discussed a couple months ago here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108017>

What struck me about the article wasn't so much the information (I already
knew about this stuff before) but the particular spin imparted onto it by the
neocon point of view. I don't mean this as a criticism but as a genuine point
of interest.

------
Snark7
Sounds like things have not changed much in the dating world in the last ten
years. Presumably the weekly standard prints this to boost page views. The PUA
lifestyle has been a non-story for the last five years at least. And, yes, it
is possible to seduce attractive women by creatively debasing yourself. _sigh_

~~~
_delirium
Their focus on one particular famous guy makes it not that convincing, either.
"Famous men have no trouble picking up women, even if they're jerks" hasn't
_ever_ been unusual.

~~~
eru
I guess that Max guy is just in there, because he's famous. The real hero of
the piece is Roissy.

------
GFischer
"the short-statured, the homely, the paunchy, the balding, and the sweater-
clad are, if not turned away outside by the bouncer, ignominiously ignored by
the busy, beautiful people within."

As a short statured, homely, paunchy, balding sweater-clad person, I guess I'm
dead :P (I wish I was joking... I don't use sweaters all the time, but I guess
that's my only saving grace.. )

The article has a point about Roissy's blog, which someone here on HN pointed
me out: it's darkly fascinating.

~~~
marvin
Check out Roissy's "Dating Market Value" tests. I wish someone could convince
me that this stuff is a big lie. Of course, it's exaggerated to make a
point..but then again, his exaggerations aren't that big either. He's not
close to approaching irony or sarcasm.

~~~
GFischer
I did (ugh). -14 ... well, I'm determined to change what I can of my life (no,
I'm not going to wear a wig :P )

(handy link in case you have no idea what we're talking about:
[http://roissy.wordpress.com/dating-market-value-test-for-
men...](http://roissy.wordpress.com/dating-market-value-test-for-men/) )

------
dschobel
Great line re: the 'pick up artists'-- _If it all sounds cheesy, tedious,
manipulative, obvious, condescending to women, maybe kind of gay, it’s because
it is._

Pretty funny to read that coming from the Weekly Standard.

~~~
necrecious
In the next sentence, he state: "but it works." It was pretty telegraphed
given the setup.

------
dotBen
(Although it is paginated into 12 pages, I found it easier to read the article
on the original template rather than the print template:
<http://weeklystandard.com/articles/new-dating-game>)

~~~
necrecious
Use the readability bookmarklet instead. Bless the HNer who told me of this.

<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

~~~
dkberktas
this is really good!

