Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Boring Game Theory

The world is a boring place. Much of the bullshit floating around is a series of attempts to deny this basic truth; people want justifications for their passionate attachments that make it seem like those attachments and investments are somehow necessary and the truth. But, alas, there is nothing but humans and the black void around us. That void - the pure contingency of all that is - stands as a constant rebuke to our endless attempts to dominate the world with another one of our stupid, petty concerns.

Game theory is one of those attempts. The authors of such blogs as Chateau Heartiste want to explain why a set of behaviours - those blessed with the term alpha - work so well on such a wide variety of women. In their experience - and for the sake of conversation, let's say they are correct - this collection of behaviours is really, really effective at getting women to fuck you and make you sandwiches.

Their answer is evolutionary psychology. Given that evolutionary psychology is to critical thought as creationism is to science, that is not the correct answer. The real answer: plain old behaviour modification. As I said in the previous post, people are boring. And because they are boring, they can be taught to dance through blows and petty morsels.

These evo-psyche influenced game theorists want to insist is that humans - normal humans, a key distinction - have one specific set of desires, and that these desires can be elicited or satisfied with a specific set of rewards and punishments. For their purposes, the key desires are that women want to be dominated by an alpha male, and that men want to fuck lots of women.

Here is the crux of the bullshit, however: in order to get to their concept of "woman," a long list of abstractions and exclusions need to be made. Some women are excluded from the game even before it begins: lesbians, the transgendered, the disabled. Others are excluded because they do not appear where the game is played: bars. Still others are left out by virtue of occupation - "lawyer cunts" is a popular term on Chateau Heartiste. And finally, age: older women are staid. Settled. Not exciting.

The selection continues: only women that dress in a certain way and wear makeup in a certain way are included in the set "women" that game is concerned with. I doubt anyone has even attempted game on a butch lesbian.

In other words, the only women that game is observed to work on are the women that PUAs are aware of: the young and self-consciously hot. All others are invisible; they do not count as "normal women." In other words, the only woman that exists in the PUA world is the classic partial object, the cause of desire.

After the selection process, PUAs narrow down their expectations: fucking and sandwich making. Other concerns such as marriage are excluded. Marriage would, of course, require a much greater range of behaviours to be displayed and accepted.

Women are only acknowledge to the extent that they display this narrow range of behaviour; either they accede to a pump and dump, or they are put on rotation as part of a harem. The cost of deviation is banishment from the PUA world.

This is what the PUAs are attempting to explain: why a set of rewards and punishments elicits a narrow range of behaviour from a narrow range of women. Their myopia leads them to believe that these behaviours are the pinnacle of relations between men and women, that everything can somehow be reduced to them. The extensive exclusion process gives the lie to this.

And because they ignore their own exclusion process, they think that their narrow range of possibly accurate observations and experiences can be generalized to humanity as such. It is a loop: lesbians are excluded from game; the range of women that PUAs engage with are declared to be "normal"; lesbians are not normal. QED. They are repressing something or they are damaged.

The selection process is a large part of the real answer as to why game works. Old school behaviouralism makes for shitty anthropology and a shitty theory of subjectivity, but if you are willing to abstract out a large portion of humanity and behaviours, then it is perfectly capable of explaining why that subset behaves as it does under specific circumstances.

If a girl hates you, you will be on her mind constantly. Hate is a strong investment, and one strong investment can morph into another easily enough. Contempt, however, is a weak investment; it will not get you into a girl's pants. Poking at someone's insecurity is a great way to throw them off and to get them into your frame. Letting it be known that you only want them to do a handful of things - dick sucking, wearing tight dresses - is an easy way to make someone secure. They feel like they know how to please you, and that is a comfortable situation.

Game seems to be a constant process of offering security and taking it away. Play on her insecurity by pointing out a roll of fat, then offer her security be letting her get you a beer. There is a possibly apocryphal story about Stalin: he showed a colleague some chickens he had spent several weeks feeding. Then he set about kicking them and pulling their feathers off. The chickens ran away, of course. A few moments later, Stalin pulled out a bag of feed and offered it to them. The chickens eagerly returned.

Game itself is a tool, and it is neutral; there is nothing particularly meaningful about wanting to get laid. Game theory, however, as an expression and reinforcement of the social relations it deals with, narrows women into chickens and men into Stalins.

8 comments:

  1. How disappointing!

    You just wasted a lot of words regurgitating the same, boring, tired "game works, but only on airhead, low self esteem sluts" criticism

    Game comes with asterisks like most things do, but the considerations are shorter than the fine print in most commercials, and a lot shorter than what you propagandize.

    Game is not limited to bars, nor to the self consciously hot... Bars are but one of many places game is practiced and the young, and self consciously hot are only one type of woman on which it is used.

    Game also works on those lawyer cunts you seem so offended for, but lawyer cunts simply aren't in high demand.

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  2. Game comes with asterisks like most things do, but the considerations are shorter than the fine print in most commercials, and a lot shorter than what you propagandize.

    Really? So you use game to sleep with butch lesbians and transgendered people? Do tell, I'd like to hear these stories.

    Game also works on those lawyer cunts you seem so offended for, but lawyer cunts simply aren't in high demand.

    This just rephrases my point. "It works... but we don't want to." In other words, one or two PUAs somewhere has dated a lawyer, hated it, and suddenly "lawyer" is a bad thing.

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  3. Mike, Mike, Mike,

    Classical mechanics can't describe what happens to a butch lesbian when traveling at the speed of light. And...

    Trannys and such make up what tiny percentage of the female population dude? Do you have a fetish or something?

    And to set the record straight, PUA's bang plenty of lawyers. The reason these chicks ain't in high demand is that they aren't that good looking on the whole.

    See for yourself

    http://www.kramerlevin.com/attorneys/List.aspx

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  4. Right, they are either impossible to figure out or a tiny minority. Either way, they don't count and your theories remain pristine.

    That's my point: game theory guys speak as if they've found some kind of key to all relations between men and women - hell, the key to human behavior period. But for the theory to remain pristine and coherent, all sorts of people need to be excluded.

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  5. You’re obsessed with crap at the margins and you project that on to game theory.

    Game theory is interested in the actions that get physically attractive heterosexual women to put out with the shortest amount of resource expenditures.

    It is the key to panties, not the key to male female relationships that PUA’s are concerned with. We are NOT worried about the grand theory of everything. You are!

    Check please!

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  6. Can't tell if stupid or trolling. A mix of both, I guess. Roissy and Vox Day of Alpha Game Plan are constantly talking about things far beyond the horizon of just getting laid.

    Neil Strauss had or has no theory, just advice. Your own blog is, so far, just advice and commentary on being an asshole.

    Let's say it together: I am not talking about game. I am talking about game theory that symptomatically uses evo psyche to justify itself,

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  7. Game aside, that opening paragraph has to be one of the most deliciously crafted pieces of nihilism ever set down by man.

    Any familiarity with Buddhism? Certain texts stress the value not of boredom, but of attaining a comfort with boredom.

    Stan was right: "Everything is just ... shit."

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  8. I don't actually consider myself a nihilist. I think garden-variety nihilism fails because, yeah, it takes the world as a totally contingent, meaningless thing, but then goes on to say we should somehow lament that, or be comfortable with it. Nah. If the world is actually meaningless, then we are not condemned to getting enjoyment from thinking about that meaninglessness.

    Meaninglessness is meaningless. So, just ignore it.

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