Manipulators as Mirrors
Mirror, mirror, on the wall … Do you want to see yourself as you really are, instead of as you wish you were? If so, you can’t do much better than to see how successful manipulators see you. Listen in on successful professional marketers, salesfolk, coaches, bosses, recruiters, etc. telling each other how to manipulate folks like you. And since some of our most cherished illusions are on romance, frank romantic advice could be especially disturbing:
Unfortunately, these may be advisors telling people what they want to hear, rather than successful professionals giving frank inside advice. How can we find the most frank inside accounts of how we are successfully manipulated?
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By Robin Hanson · Hundreds of paid subscribers
This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
I disagree with the idea that men are especially attempting to manipulate. No matter what Roissy says, both sides of the mating game have tried since the advent of higher brain functions to influence the desire of the other side. Smells (perfume), colors (makeup), shapes (clothes), sub-communicate and influence a lot more than some pick-up lines, no matter what the intentions behind the lines were.
There are plenty of places (like cliffslist.com and others) where men come to discuss these techniques, just like women do. Dating is the ultimate sales call; the best customer is the one that sees through it.
Roissy is correct about some women, but not others. He uses screening techniques to maximize his success, but the women he seduces are not indicative of the female population as a whole.
How is this unscientific? When you do an experiment don't you try to control for extraneous variables? If you want to look at nuclear fission do you assume it ought to work the same for every isotope of every element, or is it worth doing some purification first?