[prepend]

I had this book recommended to me so many times, I read it and really disagreed with it on so many levels [0].

Generally I don’t like how the author acts like everything is rooted in science and everyone is forced to act out their biology.

And I don’t like its oppositional nature of men vs women in a zero sum game to get what? Married? Laid?

It’s not a useless book, especially if you want to be an alpha and pick up girls.

But I think I’m looking for a bit more than that and feel there are genuine connections based on interest and purpose and aligned goals. And the other people interested in that would detect and not be interested in the “tactics” called out here.

The book mentions hypergamy many, many times and this is based on the biological inferiority of women to men and for women to seek out men more attractive than them. I think there are now many women with equal or even superior careers and ambitions and passions who aren’t seeking a “superior” mate. The book spends some time calling out how people like me are wrong, etc. but the evidence presented is a bunch of anecdotes.

And every anecdote told just made me think all parties are skeezy and not attractive to me. In that I don’t want to pick up waitresses and randos, etc.

So this may be a situation of the book and technique just isn’t for me. But I wanted to share this because it really is recommended so much to me and it perplexed me how bad the book seemed to me.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4273072082

[lxgr]

> Generally I don’t like how the author acts like everything is rooted in science and everyone is forced to act out their biology.

The naturalistic fallacy is a pretty easy one to commit, and it seems to be running especially rampant in the genre of "scientific"/"rational" dating/relationship advice.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that evolutionary biology has tons of interesting discoveries that can help humanity understand itself better, and I find it extremely interesting myself.

But the fallacy happens when looking at what there is, in terms of the biological/genetic basis (and frankly, the evidence and science is often not nearly as clear as these books present it), and taking that as a guideline or even commandments as for what there ought to be.

Harari has a nice way of putting this idea in "Sapiens": If there is a defining nature to Homo sapiens, it is that we have a quite strong and persistent capability of not being bound to our biology's defining nature (hope I'm paraphrasing somewhat accurately here).

Of course biology (as the hardware that's running our software) has an incredibly strong influence on our experience, and denying that has caused a lot of needless suffering (and still does), but just explaining away the significant impact of culture and our minds on our biological reality seems overly reductionist.

Or to go with a computational analogy: Our minds are turing-complete, so they can run any software there can possibly exist – some paths do have extremely good hardware acceleration, but efficiency isn't everything in (human) life :)

[jesterson]

Please don’t take it the wrong way - but from what you say I tend to sense some idealistic attitudes.

The book doesn’t teach how to “be alpha and get laid”. The most important aspect of it is knowledge of opposite gender games. If you understand it - you will never ever be confused of relationships. If you don’t - you will be constantly confused.

The truth, like God, doesn’t care if you disagree with it or not. It’s just there, whether you like it or not, whether you believe in it or not.

Things like game exist and will always be because it’s necessary for evolution. On other hand, things like “genuine connection” do not exist outside of your imagination.

[lxgr]

> Things like game exist and will always be because it’s necessary for evolution. On other hand, things like “genuine connection” do not exist outside of your imagination.

Nothing exists outside of your imagination. Reality is a soup of particles interacting with each other, and your mind is trying to make sense of these through a complex layer of abstractions and modeling.

"The game" is no more or less real as a concept than "genuine connection". They're essentially both attempts to model reality, and arguably, they are not even trying to model the same aspects of reality.

So, sure, be aware of our biological needs and constraints, as neglecting them means fighting a hard-to-win uphill battle. But I wouldn't make the mistake of seeing biology as any more or less real than psychology and culture. They're different models for different levels of our stack, and arguably, meaningful relationships necessarily span many more of these layers.

I wouldn't expect biology (alone) to give me meaningful relationship advice just like I wouldn't expect psychology and sociology to tell us how to cure cancer.

> but from what you say I tend to sense some idealistic attitudes.

What's wrong with a bit of idealism, ideally mixed with a heavy dose of pragmatism? Knowing exactly where you already are is important, but it doesn't tell you where to go next.

[jesterson]

> "The game" is no more or less real as a concept than "genuine connection". They're essentially both attempts to model reality, and arguably, they are not even trying to model the same aspects of reality.

There are key differences - "the game" is real, it's mechanisms were arguably as long as evolution out there. It's been developed as a part of evolution process and likely be there for a while.

Now we need to clarify that "game" is not "being alpha and get laid" as some may speculate, it's a much wider definition.

On the opposite, constructs like "genuine connection", "love" and sorts do not exist and are solely a construct being used for whatever reason out there.

> I wouldn't expect biology (alone) to give me meaningful relationship advice just like I wouldn't expect psychology and sociology to tell us how to cure cancer.

Noone is denying that. If you have only absorbed biological context out of the book, perhaps it's time to reread.

> What's wrong with a bit of idealism

Nothing. We are entitled to have any picture of our world. But the more distant it is from reality, the more confused and frustrated it will leave us when - inevitably - the discrepancy hits us on head hard. Nature doesn't care if you believe in this or that, it just follows it's laws.

[prepend]

> The truth, like God, doesn’t care if you disagree with it or not. It’s just there, whether you like it or not, whether you believe in it or not.

I think I understand this and I disagree.

Maybe I am idealistic, but I’m ok with that. And there’s many situations where I’ll stay idealistic despite reality, but I think there are many valid outcomes while going my own way and not using anything in this book.

It’s hard to compare outcomes, but I’m content. And, anecdotally, it’s not like there’s shining data for people following this approach.

It’s pretty easy to show that games are necessary now as we don’t need to evolve. Humans aren’t slaves to biology and in many ways transcend what evolution wants us to do.

[jesterson]

Games exist regardless of whether we believe or not. There is nothing wrong in being idealistic - we all delude ourselves either temporarily or perpetually, on narrow or wide range of subject. If that helps to be content - by all means.

Evolutionary some creatures openly face adversities, some prefer to hide head in sand pretending everything is alright. There is no right or wrong answer here I guess, whatever gives peace of mind.

[GaryNumanVevo]

> On other hand, things like “genuine connection” do not exist outside of your imagination.

Really telling on yourself here.