I'm not the greatest looking guy around, but I've dated some very hot women by breaking most of these "rules".
When you can sit down at a table of 4 gorgeous women without being invited you've hit gold. I'm ballsy, bordering on arrogant and women always know where I stand. Women respect that.
If you see a woman and you want to ask her out, do what it takes to make that happen. Women respect that.
You won't learn that in an 18 page PDF.
Guys focus way too much on the mechanics of flirting when they should really be developing their inner confidence, self-worth, and certainty.
Your main points are worth emphasizing but they _were_ reflected in the article and we should appreciate what a fascinatingly detailed study of human behavior this is.
I would hazard a guess that in fact you have mastered the nuances of flirting and just aren't conscious of the degree to which your successful behaviors are reflected in the guide or when your rule breaking is not beneficial.
First, my misgivings. Confidence takes you far with people because they assume you aren't a sociopath. They assume you're confident of earning their esteem because you enjoy the esteem of others. That's how your mind naturally works if you aren't a sociopath. It's no coincidence that the typical "get chicks by being confident" material on the web comes with a "for best results, be an asshole" slant. It's a sociopath fantasy, and most people simply aren't capable of being sociopaths.
That said, I agree with you that confidence is a huge problem for geeks. They underestimate themselves because they gauge their social and sexual worth in hypermasculine, competitive, heirarchical terms. Evolutionary psychology feeds their paranoia. (Even worse, clever people intentionally use evolutionary psychology to exploit men's paranoia, and geeks are perfect targets: smart, insecure, and prone to logical, discrete thinking.)
Geeks also tend to be averse to uncertainy and highly averse to making mistakes in their own favor, so they systematically underestimate themselves and assign high confidence to their estimates.
So, well-founded confidence is the only kind of confidence geeks can have, and geeks generally need to boost their social confidence. The question has already been asked: "How?" As you said, the answer is to develop it. Practice it. Pay attention. See what you're worth to people. See why you're worthwhile to people. Examine your assumptions: are your virtues void because somebody else is bigger, stronger, better hung? Your instincts and your own point of view cry "yes," but be skeptical about that answer. Examine it. Think about it from other people's points of view. That alone should boost a geek's confidence.
Many geeks have high confidence in everything except casual social encounters. Those geeks should first notice and then cultivate the ways they charm people. Take another look at that sentence. Charm means please, delight, or fascinate. You can charm someone by being attractive or smooth, but you can also charm them by entertaining them with a story or joke or by engaging them in a pleasant conversation. All you have to do is give them some kind of pleasure. The first step is to notice the way you charm people. Maybe you don't do it as often as you like, but every time you do give someone pleasure in conversation, analyze the situation afterwards. Give yourself credit. Then cultivate your skill. Prepare yourself to reproduce the situation. Did you tell a joke? Great, you're good at telling jokes. Next time you hear a good one, make a note of it. Everyone loves a good joke, but not everyone is good at telling them, and few people go to the trouble of remembering more than one or two. If you can tell one good joke a week in mixed company, people will remember you for it. Did you get a person to open up and tell you a story? Great, that's something you're good at -- not everyone is. Develop your skill and look for more opportunities. Whatever your value to other people is -- good looks, sexy body, elegance, musical talent, scintillating conversation, wit, compassion -- develop it. Learn to charm a wider range of people. For fun, you can even branch out to other ways of being charming.
Then, voila, you're confident. You will feel confident because you will have confidence that your presence in someone's life, however brief or lasting, will be valued. You will feel that your virtues are developed and unique, therefore not entirely interchangeable or trumpable by other people's virtues. You can even sensibly believe that some people will be particularly drawn to your virtues as you have developed them.
I thought most of the article was pretty standard stuff, but I was interested in this part:
Researchers have found that nodding can be used to 'regulate' conversations. If you make single, brief nods while your partner is speaking, these act as simple signs of attentiveness, which will maintain the flow of communication from the speaker. Double nods will change the rate at which the other person speaks, usually speeding up the flow, while triple nods or single, slow nods often interrupt the flow altogether, confusing speakers so much that they stop in their tracks. So, if you want to express interest and keep your partner chatting with you, stick to brief single nods.
One of the best ways to get out of a conversation involves breaking the other person's momentum - as soon as you can, ask three close ended questions. For example, if the person is talking about their favorite dog. Ask 'How old is the dog?', 'Do they like cats?', 'Is it 730 already?' - then excuse yourself politely. It's not the most tactful way to extricate oneself from a running-over conversational hog but it works effectively.
You know how you tie your shoes every day, but then one day you stop to think of how to tie your shoes and you find that you don't know how! And the only way to tie your shoes is to stop thinking about it and let your muscle memory take over.
That's how reading that article made me feel about social interaction.
This is a terrible guide for analytical people who over-think things to begin with.
When you first approach an attractive stranger, having established at least an indication of mutual interest through eye contact, try to make eye contact again at about 4ft away, before moving any closer. At 4 ft (about two small steps away), you are on the borderline between what are known as the 'social zone' (4 to 12 ft) and the 'personal zone' (18in to 4ft).
If you're having problems socializing with people, drawing 'zones' around them and following strict rules of interaction isn't going to help.
People who over-think things are paralyzed by uncertainty when it comes to social interaction because it seems so intellectually intractible. The rules and guidelines aren't meant to encourage their compulsive ratiocination; they're meant to serve as a security blanket, to give people enough courage to actually start interacting. Simply by being short and comprehensible, they provide authoritative reassurance that flirting doesn't require a highly sophisticated understanding. Once a person is reassured enough to get started, the rest will come with experience.
Actually computing equilibria in even toy mathematical models of social collaboration is horribly intractible even at a single time step. So what you wind up being best off doing is randomly choose your initial location and just follow the local gradient of fun, then iterating this a few times and choosing the best one.
Nobody is suggesting doing game-theoretic analyses before engaging in social interaction. Obviously someone who thinks that they can completely derive their actions from formal rules of behavior is doomed to fail, but it's not like the only two possible choices are "behave completely randomly" and "perform a game-theoretic analysis of the situation based on formal rules". Guides like this provide a good set of heuristics and help the socially unskilled people understand the general ideas and general concepts which socially skilled people seem to just pick up from their environment. This is important so you can pick a reasonable starting location before doing your hill climbing algorithm -- if you just choose a completely random starting point, everything is just extremely discouraging, there's no useful feedback from the environment (other than "YOU FAIL"), and there's absolutely no fun gradient to maximize. (Or at least, the fun gradient is so negative in all directions that it's difficult to figure out which way is up.)
It always amazes me how socially skilled people apparently can't even understand what it means to be socially unskilled. It would be as if everyone who learned to ride a bicycle later completely forgot that they had to learn this skill, then just went around telling everyone who didn't know how to ride a bicycle, "you just get on and pedal, it's so easy, I don't see why you keep falling, you must not be trying".
Bumbling around by semi-randomly trying behaviors learned from pop culture and from other kinds of interactions, discovering empirically what works in what contexts, is actually the normal way to do it. Most people start a lot younger, though. If you make the same mistakes at 18 that other kids did at 13, people aren't going to be very impressed, just like you wouldn't be impressed by a college student taking remedial algebra classes.
The good news is that flirting is a lot like math: most people don't learn any new concepts after the first two years of college. Once you've caught up to that point, it's just a matter of getting from the point where you understand the concepts, but have to think very hard while applying them, to the point where you apply them automatically without thinking about them. It's the difference between understanding the principles required to solve x^2 + x - 6 = 0 but having to think your way through each step of the solution, vs. just looking at the problem and letting your mind produce the solution out of habit.
regarding the first part, you're absolutely right, but understanding the worst case computational complexity of a problem does lend a certain appreciation to the average case complexity that happens when people implicitly approximately solve those problems.
Admission: My current research project involves studying the computational complexity of socially inspired optimization problems. Turns out that even the simplest nontrivial ones are PPAD Hard or #P hard. (so special cases or approximations become key very quickly)
This is why its useful to put social problems into at least semi-mathematical language to make it easier to spell things out to the socially oblivious (but still logically endowed, which sadly isn't always the case) or to make it easier to discuss a complex social issue with a friend
This reminds me of an article I read years ago about cognitive psychologists trying to model how outfielders catch fly balls. Evidently, even given the massively parallel nature of the brain, it was very hard to come up with a model that was effective enough to explain the performance of real outfielders (Little League to Major League) but was simple enough to be neurologically plausible. Just like the social models you describe, none of the mathematically straightforward ways of modeling the fly ball problem were cognitively feasible. Yet, if you were teaching an engineering student to catch a fly ball, they would probably be helpful, even though the final goal would be to induce an entirely unrelated cognitive structure in the engineer's mind.
"it seems paralyzing to try and keep that stuff in mind and react in real time"
You're leaving out step three:
1. Read guidelines and reassure yourself that flirting is something you can understand and perform acceptably at.
2. Work up your courage and go to a bar/party/gathering where your friends say you will meet women.
3. Freak out when you actually get to the bar/party/whatever and consume a large quantity of alcohol to take the edge off your anxiety.
4. Find someone to talk to, forget all the rules, and either bomb out completely because they find your awkwardness off-putting or do just fine because your nervousness and ineptitude are within their acceptable range.
Rules are useful even in social situations. Sure, experience and intuition will be a lot more natural and successful, but not everyone has that to use.
And besides, everyone needs a little work on social skills, and rules will at least give them specific suggestions to implement. That's why advice columns are so successful.
It's like playing music. I've played the trumpet for years.
Sure I don't consciously think about the specific fingerings that I need to use next, it just comes naturaly. But I got that intuition from many hours of practice following rules and doing drills. I wasn't just handed a trumpet and told to play something. And when I'm having trouble with a section of music, I break it apart into tiny sections, and usually slow the tempo down. None of that is natural, but it's all necessary to play a piece of music.
That is a great way to sum up how I felt about it. For example, the facial.= expressions - I was always able to intuit a real smile vs. a fake one, but only if I am not thinking about it.
"Guides" on social behavior are by definition an awkward mix of over-generalized observations and overly-specific deductions. This one is no exception:
In pubs, for example, the area around the bar counter is universally understood to be the 'public zone', where initiating conversation with a stranger is acceptable, whereas sitting at a table usually indicates a greater desire for privacy. Tables furthest from the bar counter are the most 'private' zones.
When you first meet new people, their initial impression of you will be based 55% on your appearance and body-language, 38% on your style of speaking and only 7% on what you actually say.
That isn't to say they have no value. It's helpful to be aware of the various aspects of social interaction, like how eye contact and the distance you keep affects a conversation. The danger is that the ideas are presented as definitive facts, as though all you need to do is follow their prescription to success:
When you first approach an attractive stranger, having established at least an indication of mutual interest through eye contact, try to make eye contact again at about 4ft away, before moving any closer. At 4 ft (about two small steps away), you are on the borderline between what are known as the 'social zone' (4 to 12 ft) and the 'personal zone' (18in to 4ft).
The truth is, there is no prescription. At least, not a universal one. If you need a place to start, try simply to enjoy yourself when you're out. Being social comes more naturally when you're having a good time.
Pop culture is the best and only guide we have. Dave Hickey said the cultures that write love songs are the ones that don't have rigid scripts for love and courtship. We listen to love songs because we accept few limitations and instead use a shared collection of stories to orient ourselves in the vast space of possibilities.
So, what part of pop culture tells us how to flirt? (If you say reality television, I will climb out of your monitor and stab you in the face.)
I think their intent is just to describe the mean, not the universal.
Plus, its very likely that as humans, our impressions of how well we are doing in one particular area will be dramatically incorrect, so if you are using this as a howto guide, you will inevitably get it wrong without lots of practice.
May be off-topic, but I found it very interesting and not at all obvious. The stereotype of a hacker tends to be very socially oblivious, so this is perhaps relevant. Read before you kill.
27 percent of those in social class AB found this unacceptable, increasing to 35 percent of the C2s and Ds, and 45 percent of those in social class E.
I'm sure whoever wrote this was just trying to refer to the different groups in a succinct way, but to me this classification system is amusingly reminiscent of a Brave New World's.
While some may find this guide a bit obvious, I find it an interesting read, and somewhat fitting here in HN. I say this because when I think "hacker", I think of someone who knows more than just the correct API call to make, but the reason why. Well, this guide goes beyond stating what or how, but goes into why as well, in a way that reminds me of technical articles written for those who are past "Hello World".
"Almost any participant sport or hobby can involve flirting. The level of flirtatious behaviour, however, often tends to be inversely related to the standards achieved by participants and their enthusiasm for the activity."
Damn, so much for meeting someone while doing something I actually like. The good news is I've always wanted to join a book club but never have because I don't like the books they read. I didn't realize my distaste for chick lit would actually work to my advantage.
Don't stop trying. Remember the world is full of girls who are a bit more awkward than their peers, not to mention girls who had socially awkward fathers. As long as you're making a sincere effort to interact pleasantly with people, without pretending that you don't have a problem, you will find girls who are willing to overlook your awkwardness. It's just another unattractive characteristic that some people mind and other people don't, like being chubby, short, boring, badly dressed, poor, always late, glib, irresponsible, whatever. People can even find it endearing.
Good intentions + sincere effort + honesty about who you are = nothing to be ashamed of.
When you can sit down at a table of 4 gorgeous women without being invited you've hit gold. I'm ballsy, bordering on arrogant and women always know where I stand. Women respect that.
If you see a woman and you want to ask her out, do what it takes to make that happen. Women respect that.
You won't learn that in an 18 page PDF.
Guys focus way too much on the mechanics of flirting when they should really be developing their inner confidence, self-worth, and certainty.