[EDIT: I was wrong, Adrian Wells was in no way involved in pioneering CBT. He was trained in the framework, but it was not his invention. Not sure where I got that idea. My bad!]
(Context note: Slutcon is a rationalist-flavored sex-positive event where attempts to, among other things, make the rationalist men hotter in a quest to get more of her friends laid. God’s work.)
Let’s Talk About Dog Training
So. Beagles.
The thing about beagles is that they're hungry. Pathologically, overwhelmingly hungry. They will eat tin foil with food residue on it. They will eat moldy banana peels they find on the ground. Given the opportunity, some beagles will literally eat themselves to death.
Dog breeders didn’t intend this, precisely. But when you're breeding for trainability across hundreds of generations, you're selecting for dogs that respond strongly to food rewards. And the simplest way to respond strongly to food rewards is to be constantly desperate for food.
The mutation that causes this is well-understood: it's a deletion in the gene that regulates satiation. Dogs with this mutation never feel full. Their baseline state is “I am starving” even immediately after eating.
This is amazing for training, of course, because you always have a reward signal available. A chow chow or shiba inu might get full after ten treats and stop caring about your training session. A beagle will perform complex behavioral sequences for the three-hundredth identical kibble with the same enthusiasm as the first.
The actual training process exploits this hunger through careful manipulation of reward timing. Every correct behavior gets a treat immediately. Sit? Treat. Down? Treat. Dog starts licking itself in response to your saying “sit”? No treat. The dog learns the causal connection quickly because the feedback is instant and consistent.
The key is that the trainer has total control over the reward environment. You decide when food appears, how much, and for what behaviors. In the real world, a dog might occasionally find food by random chance (you never know when you’re going to come across a moldy banana peel!) In training, food only comes through you, and only for behaviors you've selected.
Anyway
Let’s talk about men's relationship to the approval of pretty women.
For a certain subset of men—particularly those who end up at dating workshops (ahem)—romantic validation operates on similar mechanics to food for beagles. It's scarce, desperately wanted, and the hunger for it shapes behavior in predictable (and often unfortunate) ways. Except unlike dog food, which you can buy, romantic validation from attractive women arrives rarely, randomly, and with deeply unclear causation.
Consider the actual learning environment for dating in the real world. You meet someone, have an interaction, and maybe three weeks later you find out through a friend that they thought you were “nice but kind of boring.” What specific behaviors led to this assessment? Which of the forty things you said mattered? Was it your body language? Your topics of conversation? The fact that you apologized four times for no reason? Who knows. The feedback is sparse, delayed, and hopelessly confounded.
Even when you get positive signals, they're ambiguous. She laughed at your joke—was it genuine or polite? She agreed to a second date—enthusiastically or reluctantly? You might iterate on completely wrong assumptions for years because the data points are so few and far between. You're trying to learn a complex skill with maybe one clear piece of feedback per month, if you're actively dating.
You say something. She frowns. Was it the thing you said? Was it how you said it? Maybe… maybe she just had indigestion?
The Structure Of Dating Workshops
Model work (where some pretty girls do structured exercises with men who have paid for their time) in dating workshops try to solve the reward sparsity problem in a similar fashion as dog trainers: artificial concentration of rewards in a controlled environment.
In the workshop I attended, the coach (her name was Lynn) both orchestrated the events and also acted as a wrangler for the actual sources of approval-reward (the pretty girls). She would, after an exercise, oftentimes give her opinion of how it went before any of the models; I don't know if this was intentional, precisely, but it definitely had the effect of framing things in a way that made the models much more likely to echo Lynn's sentiments.
The workshop created conditions that don't exist in nature:
Immediate feedback (not three weeks later through a friend)
Clear signals: the models explicitly tell you what they think after each exercise
Low real stakes. These women will never see you again.
High perceived stakes. Your lizard brain doesn't know they're paid to be there or that you won’t see them again. Your lizard brain doesn’t even understand the concept of “money.” Lizard brain only understands “HOT GIRL LIKES US” or “HOT GIRL MADE A BAD FACE” and it has opinions about which of those it would prefer. Lizard brain is powerful, but stupid.
Repetition (dozens of relevant interactions per day)
Lynn herself was extremely pretty, and intentionally dressed in the intersection of “professional” and “sexy.” I think this was load-bearing for her purposes insofar as it meant that approval from Lynn was considered valuable by my lizard-brain in a way that approval from some guy would not have been. She functioned as both a reward wrangler and a direct reward provider.
The models, conversely, served as consistent reward dispensers. Unlike real-world dating where every woman has wildly varying preferences and moods, the models were (I strongly suspect) selected to be girls that respond well to high-status male behaviors: boldness, honesty, masculinity. It's standardized, as much as such things can be. Reproducible. Exactly what you need for behavioral conditioning.
Flirting Is A Skill Similar To Rock Climbing Or Dancing But Way Harder To Teach
Flirting is hard to train explicitly because male flirting behaviors that are coded as attractive are complex and trying to train in mechanical approaches like explicit decision trees is actively counterproductive. Instead, Lynn had basically two options in front of her:
First, she could praise attractive actions and (more often) condemn unattractive safety behaviors. Which works, a little, but unfortunately the set of safety behaviors is vast; Lynn scolding a given man for over-praising or for nervous rambling was in many ways a deeply unproductive whack-a-mole.
She had an alternative to this whack-a-mole exercise which she also pursued: trying to install in the men a mindset which would reliably generate attractive behaviors as a side effect.
But that is a hard task. Lynn cannot reach into the participants’ minds and make alterations; she cannot mind-read. Instead, she’s forced into a role where she’s trying to sculpt very complicated mindsets in the men using an incredibly blunt tool: by observing whether the behavior of the participant signals an attractiveness-generating mindset and inflict rewards/punishments by proxy (the models) and hope the participants update properly.
This worked… sometimes. Not usually. Guys would often land in local minima; she spent the workshop basically yelling at three-quarters of the participants to be bolder because “bolder” in this case means reaching outside the basin of behaviors the participants had already tried in the workshop, but she had a dilemma because prescribing specific concrete behaviors would instantaneously, as if by magic, drain all boldness from those behaviors.
Like I said: Lynn had a bastard of a task in front of her and frankly it’s impressive it worked at all on the subset of participants it did. The vulnerability exercises (including things like “describe, in graphic detail, your sexual fantasy about this woman while staring her in the eyes from a foot away”) I think were extremely load-bearing on the enterprise.
Let’s talk about those exercises.
The Vulnerability Ladder
Here's one problem Lynn ran into: boldness is hard to perform because "boldness" in a romantic context means "doing things in full knowledge that they are risky and might get you disapproved of." If you attempt to mimic boldness in the hopes of gaining approval then you fail, because you are trying to gain the rewards of boldness without actual boldness, which is cringe. It's a catch-22.
The workshop attempted to fix this by having the specific exercises be a sort of graduated ladder of tasks revolving around vulnerability. We were expressly asked to tell the girls things that we were likely to think reflected poorly on us; for instance, at one point we were asked to tell our most mortifying kinks to the assembled group of men and women. This was clever, because notice that this vulnerability ladder gets rid of the catch-22: “boldness” (by the definition I am using here) is easily possible here by literally following the stated instructions of the workshop host. You don't have to figure out what is appropriately-calibrated boldness; you literally just have to follow instructions as-stated and you're done, because “boldness” at its core is “performing actions that you know could get you disapproval from people that you want to like you.” If you describe your graphic sexual fantasies on request without apology or hedging, then you’ve succeeded.
And if the workshop participant successfully executes on this directive and unlocks the reward (approval from the models), then gradient descent can work its magic. Stating the vulnerable, bold thing sometimes will get adoration from the girls and then BOOM, your brain starts positive-ruminating on the resulting enormous predictive loss where the prediction of “they'll definitely hate me for saying this” runs into the reality of “actually they now love me and apparently think I have enormous balls” and then your worldview collapses as you realize that all of your safety behaviors were always pointless.
And if the workshop participant doesn’t successfully execute on this directive, then… he’ll get nothing. Expectation violation is minimal in this case because he didn’t explore parts of the loss landscape that would get him expectation violation.
That’s why dating workshops are hard to run successfully (where I define “success” as “generating lasting romantic positive change in their participants.”) It worked for me; I think this was unusual in that particular workshop, and this was downstream of me having a series of counterintuitive revelations about what I was doing wrong, and why, and how to stop.
The talk I want to give is, basically, a cheat sheet for “how to stop trying to win someone’s approval, for reals, even on the inside, while still engaging with them meaningfully in a way that could possibly lead to romantic entanglements.”
I’m Giving A Talk At Slutcon Meant To Prep Guys To Achieve Satori Via RLHF Sessions And I Have Three Weeks To Prepare God Damn It
I’m not qualified to give this talk because nobody is qualified to give this talk. But I don’t see anyone else offering to deliver it, so here we are.
My goal is to install a mindset in the guys where they understand the shape of their problem. The natural way for guys to start off in model work is trying to make the pretty girls like them, because a pretty girl liking you is socially-approved heroin.
The goal they ought to be chasing instead, I am convinced, is to successfully suppress the part of themselves that reliably generates unattractive and unappealing behaviors, which has for whatever reason bloated to monstrous size in their psyche. I’m referring, of course, to the approval-seeking drive (also known as “impression management” to the therapeutically minded.)
The first part of the talk is going to be theory: draw the diagram of how “social-romantic anxiety safety behaviors” is a strict subset of “viscerally unattractive male behaviors,” and point out that these are downstream of threat-monitoring in romantic situations, and point out that that is downstream of negative rumination and anxious planning for past and future romantic interactions, and that all of those are downstream of them subconsciously taking as their North Star the dysfunctional goal of getting the pretty girls to like them. That goal ruins you utterly; I suspect this becomes truer the smarter you are, hence why rationalist men (with notable exceptions) don’t have reputations as amazing at seduction.
The second part of the talk is going to be the master list of banned behaviors. Mostly, banned mental behaviors. No modeling what a girl’s reaction is likely to be to you doing or saying anything at all. No negative rumination on what a girl might have thought of you previously. If there was a cringe moment, let it die in your memory uninvestigated. No saying or doing anything to make a girl like you or to make her think you’re pleasant. You are allowed precisely three motivations for action: honesty (ideally, the risky sort of honesty), basic kindness, and selfish impulse.
Because participants are at Slutcon, we can add a new directive that’s a bit less practical for real life: if you think of something that you could say, and then realize “oh that’s cringe” or “oh that’s tryhard” then this is an amazing signal for you to say whatever that thing is. Cringe is the feeling of your brain marking out spots on the loss landscape that you will never ever explore in real life and that means Slutcon is your opportunity to do the cringe thing and see what happens. Maybe mild awkwardness! Or maybe something much much better. But the only way to do this is to genuinely sideline what the girl thinks of you as a priority; otherwise your habitual safety behaviors will sabotage you.
This is actually more-general lifestyle advice: I think that saying slightly mortifying things, things that could well result in someone thinking less of you, is good to do with some frequency because it trains the muscle that you need to have if you want to exist as a human being apart from other people. Do you exist only because other peoples’ opinions allow it? How sure are you about your answer?
Anyway.
I suspect imparting this knowledge in a deep, visceral way is a task comparable in difficulty to persuading someone— with the aid of a large number of helpful diagrams and supportive counseling— that they ought to swallow a live grenade. I do not expect a high rate of success but I also don’t expect a zero rate of success which is why I’m giving the talk; if it’s going to be successful anywhere it’ll be successful at Slutcon, which is explicitly designed to be a laboratory for men to experiment with sexual boldness.
I hope it works. I think there is a low but nonzero chance that my hour-long talk will give someone what I got from Connecting With Women: a total reconfiguration of their entire model of human social interaction.
If nothing else is achieved, I give banger presentations.
FAQs
Q. This all seems rather artificial. Shouldn't you just "be yourself"?
Regrettably, for many guys “yourself” is a people-pleasing ball of anxiety. The point of workshops such as this isn’t “pretend to be someone else”; the point is “cause your True Self to become someone who is hotter.”
Is self-improvement becoming less your True Self? Is wearing makeup? Are those even meaningful questions? Who decided that you at this instant is actually your Truest Self? And, most importantly:
What if your Truest Self is really bad at critical life skills?
Q. It seems inauthentic to try and condition yourself into unnatural behaviors.
All behavior is conditioned. We are all Skinner’s dogs (or, like, pigeons or whatever), except we wear clothes and walk on our hind legs and have inflated self-concepts. The only relevant distinction here is whether our behaviors are intentionally conditioned or accidentally conditioned, and whether this conditioning ends up being useful to our long-term goals.
Dating workshops are simply a form of behavioral conditioning that men opt into because they want to be so conditioned.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Q. What are the behavioral correlates of boldness?
Let’s make a list:
Verbally:
Not hedging statements with qualifiers (“maybe,” “I don't know if you'd be interested but,” “this might sound weird”)
Not apologizing preemptively or repeatedly
Sitting with silence, instead of filling it with chatter
Not immediately backtracking when something lands ambiguously
Stating preferences/desires as declaratives rather than questions
Making observations about the other person rather than only talking about safe, external topics
Declaring assumptions instead of asking questions.
Making unambiguous requests that could be rejected (asking for a number, for instance) without derisking maneuvers (such as by first asking if they’re seeing someone.)
Physically:
Making extended eye contact
Closing physical distance
No fidgeting or defensive postures (such as having crossed arms.)
Temporally:
Think thoughts, say thoughts. No rehearsal or thinking about whether they will land well.
In short: it’s saying and doing things that could invite a negative response, or that give someone an opportunity to reject you. An enormous and frankly unrealistic amount of social calibration is necessary to make these land predictably well, which is why boldness requires the authentic generation of thick skin. If you tell a girl at a party that she has impressive cleavage, then maybe she’ll be happy, or maybe she’ll call you a creep and throw her drink in your face.
All are possible universes and all must be acceptable to you, deep in your gut, for you to be bold.
Q. But I don’t want to invite a negative response.
Then you will not be bold. (This is a tautology.)
Q. The cleavage thing is inappropriate and I would never want to say that.
Valid! I do not argue, here, about whether you should be bold or not-bold in any specific moment. Boldness is one thing that makes men attractive to most women, but being attractive is also not the most important thing in the world, and it can also be achieved in other ways.
If you have decided that this or any other instantiation of boldness isn’t worth the tradeoffs, then, well, you have so judged. What else is there?
Q. So… does boldness require accepting you might be perceived as a creep?
Yes.
Q. Fuck.
Right?
I actually did one of the Fully Known three day workshops previous to connecting with women, and it wasn't terrible but in the end i didn't feel like I got too much out of it; in retrospect the exercises we spent much of the workshop on just felt too disconnected from the learning that actually needed to happen.
I didn't, ultimately, feel like I understood Nick's theory of change or the ontology from which he approaches the problem of helping guys unclench. Which isn't necessarily damning-- I understand many people have had luck with his methods-- but yeah, ultimately my moment of satori was delivered by Lynn, not Nick.
The connecting with women exercise seems like a slightly worse version of how Nick Grant does model exercises at Fullyknown.live . He’s also presenting at Slutcon so it might be useful to chat. It sounds like there’s a lot of overlap in the talk you want to give. My guess is that spending a lot of time talking about the failure modes is mostly a waste of time just like when you’re training a behavior you mostly care about rewarding positive examples.
From working with him, his focus seems to be more on running a loop of noticing what you would like, what you want, and what feels good to you and then acting on that and expressing that. In building this habit, I noticed I can make myself feel good on demand so I don’t care as much about other’s approval.
That’s at the cognitive level, at the physical level his approach seems to be about what would make your body feel good at this particular moment, noticing where you feel tension in your body and taking steps to relieve that tension and make your self feel better.