PUA reaction/info/derailment thread

[P3nT4gR4m]

Yeah, I get where you're coming from now. It's chicken and egg, I guess. Popular misinformation or misinterpretation meme informs actors who mimic tropes and behaviours thereby reinforcing the meme.

Vicious circle that's been spinning since I first heard about it back the 80's or 90's or whatever.

[LMNO]

Nigel, that was a great summary. Thanks.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Glad I was able to make sense of it, it's a difficult territory because social status hierarchies are for sure a real thing, but they don't conform readily to the simple dominance hierarchy.

[Reginald Ret]

We may live in large cities, but if you look at the habits of most humans, we actually circulate in a smaller community inside the city. Our neighborhood, workplace, gym, school, bar... these are the places we interact with people, and we typically interact with the same people over and over and over again. We form social groups of up to a couple hundred people, with a few hundred more people we are familiar with but don't interact with often.

Where the "alpha" concept really falls apart is in social settings where many people who don't have clearly defined hierarchy interact. You end up generally seeing similar types of people spending time with each other, including so-called "alpha" males forming close friendships, which is not how that dynamic works within the animal kingdom. We humans form hierarchies, but we also form networks, and these networks tend to occur between people of similar social status, which is not translatable into any kind of alpha-beta animal dynamic. Further, because of the way our lives are structured and the complexity of human society, a human being can be high-status in one context and low-status in another.

"Alpha" just doesn't work as a functional descriptive term defining human characteristics. It's as effective and as smart as using "chemicals" to describe substances you don't like and "natural" to describe substances you do like, and just because a lot of people do it doesn't mean they don't sound like idiots.

[Roly Poly Oly-Garch]

PUA's have picked up this idea of alpha and turned it into something toxic.  It's a weird metaphor anyway, since it is borrowed from wolves and their sexual dynamics are very different from ours but I don't think there is anything wrong with alpha people by definition, they just need to be in charge.  Someone who isn't alpha trying to act alpha, either to get laid or for other reasons, is going to act in ways that are not effective, alpha social strategies don't work for betas.  PUA's fetishize the alpha male status (and yes, an alpha male is going to have a greater chance of sex with a more desirable woman) while putting together a list of techniques that are not really related to being alpha in most cases.  I actually think they are more effective at their goal because of that, if their techniques all consisted of aping alpha male behavior they'd just be making themselves creepy.

I'm not a big fan of alphas in social situations, male or female, because they tend to need to control the conversation but I'd much rather have an alpha as a work supervisor than a beta, they are comfortable in a leadership position.  I'm also not personally romantically attracted to alpha females, they're too high maintenance for me.

It's not only based on the social dynamic of wolves, it's based on an artificial and forced captive social dynamic of strange wolves forced together in confinement that doesn't occur naturally in the wild at all.

And it doesn't occur in people. I wish we could just scrub the idea of "alpha" being applied to human beings from our consciousness altogether. It's wrong, and it causes people to think of human dynamics in a wrong way.

Yeah. The assumptions that you'd have to make for 'Alpha' to really be a thing, would have to be so broad as to be practically useless. Basically, you have to completely deny that power is ever dynamic and instead assume that Dominance, Leadership, Persuasiveness, Desirability, Prowess, Respectability, and Status (and probably 50 other descriptors) are all exactly the same thing and fixed across all interactions.

You could certainly paint a barn door pretty quickly with that brush, but it'd be pretty shit for drawing a map.

[axod]

Yeah, I get where you're coming from now. It's chicken and egg, I guess. Popular misinformation or misinterpretation meme informs actors who mimic tropes and behaviours thereby reinforcing the meme.

Vicious circle that's been spinning since I first heard about it back the 80's or 90's or whatever.

It's a hard skin to shed.  Come to think, also very insidious how it interfaces with the amygdala.  It's like putting on your favorite well-worn snake boots.  Gets hard to tear those suckers off again.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Yeah, I get where you're coming from now. It's chicken and egg, I guess. Popular misinformation or misinterpretation meme informs actors who mimic tropes and behaviours thereby reinforcing the meme.

Vicious circle that's been spinning since I first heard about it back the 80's or 90's or whatever.

It's a hard skin to shed.  Come to think, also very insidious how it interfaces with the amygdala.  It's like putting on your favorite well-worn snake boots.  Gets hard to tear those suckers off again.

I'm kinda out of that psychological influence loop nowadays but I'm not most of the population. The annoying thing is that, despite the fact that it's based on a false premise, it's still a model that can be employed to get results. For a given definition of "results". It doesn't have to be founded in reality to work at some other level of abstraction.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Interesting observation; very often, the highest-status person in a given situation is not even the one who exhibits the stereotypical "alpha" behaviors as described by PUA-types. In fact, many of those behaviors are simple youthful social jockeying.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Interesting observation; very often, the highest-status person in a given situation is not even the one who exhibits the stereotypical "alpha" behaviors as described by PUA-types. In fact, many of those behaviors are simple youthful social jockeying.

This.

"Alpha" behaviors are those exhibited by people who still think they're monkeys.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

"Hey I'm loud and I laugh loud and I talk loud and LOOK AT MEEEEE!!!"

[The Good Reverend Roger]

"Hey I'm loud and I laugh loud and I talk loud and LOOK AT MEEEEE!!!"

"I am self-consciously callous and mildly sociopathic.  This obviously qualifies me to mate."

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Plus a lot of that behavior is just your basic young-person-broadcasting-for-a-mate behavior, irrespective of social status. PUA types seem to have confused "normal youthful social interactions" with "dominance behavior", which is so hilariously wrong I don't even know where to start. It implies that if you are participating in group social interactions, you're "alpha", and that "alphas" travel in packs, which literally makes zero sense.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

"Hey I'm loud and I laugh loud and I talk loud and LOOK AT MEEEEE!!!"

"I am self-consciously callous and mildly sociopathic.  This obviously qualifies me to mate."

I honestly think that the reason young people are so loud is mostly because it's a way for them to broadcast their location to one another, increasing the likelihood of finding a mate.

[Chelagoras The Boulder]

God, i love this thread.

[P3nT4gR4m]

All it takes is one self styled "alpha", and a room full of self styled "betas", most of whom buy into the theory. Doesn't matter how valid the theory is or isn't, if everyone believes it, it informs the narrative.