this is true. i am a nerd by nature (as if that isnt obvious) but because i've always been (extremely these days!) good looking with a natural swagger ive been popular (usu the alpha male's best friend) my entire life. ofc, social interaction has always been intensely interesting to me and i've applied a ''abstract/mathematical/nerdy'' approach to it since i was very young. pua interested me because the explanations provided matched (and improved upon in many details) many of my own.

tbh, i dont think my online persona is comprehensible if you dont know the above.

You can observe without actually being a participant. In fact I think it is a lot better to not participate since that adds stress and divides your attention. I'm thinking more of just going and listening in and observing strangers in social settings (preferably without making it obvious).

I find myself uncomfortable commenting on poker instruction given I somehow have managed to go from very successful at poker to someone who would be a losing player if not for the loyalty program.

That makes perfect sense to me as I do the same thing. One of the reasons that I enjoy strip clubs so much is to study the social interaction. The reasons I run my social experiments is because of my interest in human behavior.

I find PUA interesting as an example of human behavior but in a very different way. Earlier in this topic when I was being directed to various PUA discussion sites they were vary interesting in a group suspension of reality / Emperor's New Cloths kind of way. Reading the TRs anyone who has spent any amount of time in clubs and bars could tell that the TRs were for the most part complete fabrications yet no one would say anything. I find that interesting. That was what actually kept me responding to this topic for so long. At the time I even tried to get myself invited to a PUA group so that I could observe them in person but it never ended up happening.

i've coached a lot of players. with few exceptions they all make way more money than i do playing poker. i've been instructed by people who make way more money than i do playing poker. i have never found that instruction the least bit insightful (yes, yes i am familiar with elementary logic and arithmetic). the doing-versus-teaching divide is interesting to me for personal reasons.

eh, im not sure this works. a lot of the problems stem from not knowing what to say or not being able to say what they know they should say given time constraints (you have to both generate suitable statements and maintain the rhythm of the interaction; you have to both know your lines and say them on cue). even if they know the general ''form'' of a quality opener or quip, i.e., they could classify openers and quips into ''good'' and ''bad'' given a social context as well as anyone else (listening in would refine this ability), it does not follow that they will be able to generate openers and quips that are consistently ''good''. they are different skills and the latter requires a tremendous amount of practice. as an example (random), i can recognize ''chuck klosterman'' prose in a flash. i could classify paragraphs as klostermanesque versus not klostermanesque very accurately. however, i cannot generate klostermanesque paragraphs without a great deal of effort. if i was asked to produce one within, say, 2 minutes i could not do it. same thing for nerds and bantering/flirting.

So true, at least in my case. One of my best mates now pretty much made my life miserable in high school. I sometimes give him **** about being a bully, his response is 'meh if I hadnt bullied you you would still be a loser'.

Harsh but true

If such a person took the "completely transform themselves" route, what would be some of the main concepts you would advise?

For poker for me... i've found the helpfulness of the advise EXTREMELY correlated to their skill as a player. and it shows in poker books too when mediocre players who are "good teachers" write books.

henry want me to see if i can get you hooked up with a PUA outing?

bruiser,

what seems most helpful is not necessarily what is most helpful. what seems most helpful will depend in many ways on what conforms to your expectations of what helpful advice looks like, and your expectations of what helpful advice looks like will be influenced by all sorts of qualities that are only weakly correlated with advice quality. for example, most will consistently judge advice coming from those they know to be good at poker to be better than the advice of those they know to be only average at poker even if the advice being given is fundamentally the same (and often arbitrary). i can illustrate the point using examples (provided hourly) from the 2p2 forums if you like.

I'd say some of the things are, but some are not. It's mostly about confidence imo.

Also, a lot depends on what kind of person the girl is and the context and a lot of details. There's no one right way about how talk to women and what to do with them.

Btw: see my post (and the thread) about Polyamory in SMP here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/47...34/index2.html

Just some ideas I got back then, but I still think mostly the same. I pretty much feel sexualanarchism is my thing now.

vanveen wat you say may be true but not relevant here. in fact the opposite is true. it's much more likley that a "good teacher" who can present his information in a convincing manner will appear to be a good teacher but actually be saying something that is not interesting, relevant, or even correct.

It depends on them. What they want to be. What they are now. I choose a certain life I wanted and I just figured out what I needed to go from where I was to where I wanted to be. Then I committed to it with the devotion that failure was not even a possibility. That is the hardest part as most people don't have the will to do what it takes if the change is substantial. You need to figure out what type of person you want to be and then why you are not that person now.

The only two tips I could give that are somewhat universal is doing it at a normal life break helps. Like when moving to a new city or school where you have a fresh start. Much easier than reinvesting yourself in a setting where people already have views on you. The second is do it in one whole shot. At least the majority of it. Basically just do nothing but self-improvement until you are the person you want to be then go out and meet people.


My poker issues stem from the game changing and I haven't. I was a very good poker player in 1994 but I haven't developed at all since the late 90s and I just don't have the desire to. The games are actually easier to beat now than they were in the 90s but I'd have to learn a whole new skill set and that is just too much work.

In the future maybe but not at the moment. I got football and hockey going plus some family health issues so not really the time to be doing social experiments. If this topic is still going in the spring I'll probably be interested.

what you say here doesn't really seem like it's the opposite of what vanveen is saying at all.

he says that "what seems most helpful is not necessarily what is most helpful".

you say something that appears to....well it's not really clear what point you are trying to make here.

i think you yourself are probably a good example of the point. you are very likely the most successful or most talented poker player in this thread. but frequently you will make posts that i'm sure make sense to you but come out as completely muddled thoughts to the rest of us.

you may think it's partially the failings of the rest of us, but i'd say most of us think it has more to do with your inability to properly communicate what it is that you are thinking, and that's even giving you the benefit of the doubt that you actually are thinking clearly. i'm sure you could be or are might actually now a successful coach, but your communication shortcomings prevent you from being as successful a coach as you probably could be, and there are for sure poker teachers who are significantly worse players than you but who could do a better job as a coach/teacher, simply because they spend more time focusing on how to communicate the concepts. you might become worse (or it would slow your improvement) as a player if you spent the required time to improve your communication skills.

so a post of mine might be hard to understand but a post by another player which you find helpful could be flat our wrong. and i am not nitpicking here. because NLHe is complex and because there are so many different styles and decisions to make people can make nice looking posts with significantly sub optimal advise!!!

bruiser, the difference is most poker players use teaching as a way to avoid variance, in real life this isn't usually a motivator to teach. successful people in real life jobs don't have this motivator to teach so very few do. also there's at least a handful of pure coaches in poker who probably are only breakeven in practice at higher stakes.

I dealt with a lot of anticonformist people over the weekend because I went to the singularity conference in NYC. There were people walking around in pocket protectors and stuff. I still think those people are probably pretty rare and wouldnt neccessarily attend PUA workshops. Online poker is dying in my opinion. There can only be so many multitablers before a lot of them can't beat the rake.

dumb nerd seems like an oxymoron at first?

edit: also, where did I bash him? why would i bash a fellow nerd?

I think it makes greatness in many fields more likely, and maybe in most. Keep in mind that introversion is uncommon in general, so even if 70% of top businessmen (for example) are extraverted, the introverts are still over-represented.

I don't think introversion is +EV in general, probably -EV in terms of general utility. But I think it facilitates top performance.

40% introverts was the last number I saw for CEOs. I didn't see the sample tested to see what size companies etc. I think people assume that introverts don't socialize well. They can and do, but it just takes more effort on their part and can leave them exhausted after being placed in large groups for social purposes. This is assuming that introverts are introspective obv.

I interpreted that more narrowly, but okay.

But among those who are passionate about doing things, I think the introspective have an advantage. There are many people who practice constantly and never reach the top, and I don't think that has to do with simple physical talent. For example, Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan show signs of an impressive level of analysis of their respective games. They look at their performance, they think about it, they consider how to improve it. Even top athletes who don't think at all need coaches who can think for them, plan their training, identify and shore up weaknesses while suggesting strategies to maximize strengths. Those who play a purely non-reflective game, in my opinion, tend to get stuck in local maxima and never reach the top.

It sounds like you're talking about introspection during the event. I believe most of us have the ability to suspend introspection when we get into the flow of a competition, but post-mortem analysis is still critical imo. And skill at that analysis, I'd wager, correlates with top-level success in most fields.

Edit - Of course, when people can't suspend introspection during a performance, that's a problem. I think relevant to this discussion, self-consciousness during social interaction is almost always a liability. But I think virtually everyone will learn to put that second-guessing aside and devote their full resources to their interactions with sufficient exposure, regardless of which tips they're practicing. I would almost call it a psychological deficit not to.

The problem is to the term 'introverted' is very general. Its pretty normal for human interaction to exhaust a person mentally (and why shouldn't it?), but this is a common definition.

No, really there is a distinction. Introverts after socializing actually prefer to do tasks on their own and using this alone time to refuel and gain energy after socializing. Extroverts actually gain energy from interacting with other people. They are stimulated in two completely different ways.

this is pretty stupid but pretty funny

This removes all context though. i'd be shocked if it were this simple.

I read several books about personality, and it seems the "big 5" traits are more useful for thinking about this than the traditional MBTI way of looking at things.

bruiser, you're missing the point. you might have the right answer, but because you are focused on the playing skills instead of the teaching skills you might not be able to convey the right way to think about the solution. you're the better player but a lot of your knowledge is implicit or unconscious, so maybe you don't even have a coherent way of explaining how you got to the answer. maybe you have thought about it coherently but can't explain in a way that would enable the reader/student to be able to incorporate your solution into their general strategy.

but all of this is beside the point to this thread so we should not discuss this further here.