Post #2919083

2026-05-28 08:21 UTC

CW: creepy dudes A few days ago, a LWer of 15 years wrote a long very weird post about how flirting works: lesswrong.com/…/why-physical-attractiveness-matte… It made the frontpage. Someone tried to set him right with both personal anecdotes and Aella-style research: lesswrong.com/…/contra-wentworth-on-physical-attr… Here’s original poster thanking for the update, and writing My biggest update was… five hours!?!? Going through the list of women I’ve slept with, the median is around 30 minutes of direct interaction between first meeting and sex. Granted, some of that was at RMN, but even without those cases the median is still around 30-60 minutes. Five hours sounds absolutely insane to me. That probably explains a large chunk of my confusion; apparently people are spending very large amounts of time flirting/courting/etc. These are just very weird people.

Replies (4)

@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-05-28 08:44

I mean, those sound like rookie numbers to me. I regularly spend like, less than five minutes between eye-contact-and-smile and wild hardcore sex, and most of the five minutes is the time to walk them down to the dungeon and negotiate limits. The only special trick is simply going to a space where everyone else also wants to have sex, it’s called a sex club. Leaving aside all considerations of ethics, I cannot comprehend why the supposed bastions of rationality would waste time with baroque theories of psychological manipulation to try to coax randos at non-sexual situations into having sex, when if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever. You know, like, if I wanted to play boardgames I would go to boardgame night, if I wanted people to listen to me sing I would go to karaoke. I would not approach strangers in a bus stop and go, “hey wanna hear me sing?” The idea of doing that for sex of all things is bizarre to me. (This is a rhetorical sneer, the pickup-artistry phenomenon is easily comprehendable; it’s because these men are not really trying to have sex, they’re trying to fulfil a gaping hole of unexamined, endless need for validation.)

Open ##2919721
@rook@awful.systems 2026-05-28 08:56

In the same way that lazy studios need to produce a film for each element of the powerset of character IPs they own, I guess we were overdue a Rationalist x Pickup Artist episode. I’m slightly surprised the whole “model women as quasi-sentient deterministic sex machinery” idea wasn’t already very popular there, but maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.

Open ##2921047
@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-28 15:47

Ouch, “picking up a cute young thing at the bar and hot tub at the ski resort” “building a happy working relationship with a sex worker” and “romantic pair-bonding” are three different skills! No wonder he thinks looks and body language are so important if he is trying to take women straight to bed. RMN is a pro wrestling event, but he probably means Red Means No, Aella’s consensual-nonconsent orgies.

Open ##2927073
@Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 2026-05-28 23:55

imo one should treat others as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to an end that is to say, ugh! rationalists talk about your relation to other people

Open ##2934211