On the PUA side, I read The Game about 5 years ago, and have been tracking Roissy for at least a couple.
And I've been reading evo-psych since Round 2 came out near 2000. The Extended Phenotype, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Mating Minds.
Having said that, I claim that there's a simple, easy grand synthesis that explains human behavior in 3 words:
Status Matters Most.For 80%+ of human behaviors, when asking why did they do that...trace the status effects. Trace the status effects in-family, in-group, on the opposite gender, in the neighborhood/community/polis.
Strauss in 1 line:
How does a guy get girls in bed with him? Mostly, adjust his status upwards.Roissy in 1 sentence:
How does a guy adjust his status upwards, so as to make girls want to sleep with him?Robin in 1 sentence:
For explaining most activities, signaling status completely dominates the standard story.Seth (on the academy) in 1 sentence:
In academia, status is like peacock tails and diamond rings: usefulness is a negative.Eric in 1 sentence:
Relative status (or envy) predicts market behavior better than greedWife in 1 sentence:
90% of communication is emotion/status, and the words don't matter.
As opposed to the traditional aretae/philosophy-geek position (90% of communication is very precise wording choices)General evo-psych in one sentence:
People act like monkeys, especially in groups and in mating interactions, where status is key.---------------------------------------
Status status status. Full stop.
If you want to manipulate people, play in the status space...and largely ignore the content space.
If you want to interview well, manipulate your relative status compared to the interviewer.
If you want to teach (a classroom) well, own the status (actors and military folks often make real good teachers)
If you want to know whether a proposed organizational initiative will work, look first at whose status will change.
Try it next time you want to explain something: What are the status implications here?
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This explains, why perfectly logical and reasonable decision to buy a fuel efficient and reliable Honda civic for my long commute leaves me cold and unsatisfied. And the Lexus coupe I had before it did not even though I couldn't put a car seat in the back.
I'd already worked that out, but nice to see it in print.
This monkeybrains thing is also why, in the final analysis, I am with Foseti and Devin and not your anarchy-libertarianism. If society consisted of the four of us, we could likely get by with your system. But not everyone (not even close) is hyper rational enough to support it on the long term. Even here in the states, which is in many regards the closest - we depend on the secular religion to maintain, for the most part, a free society.
No wonder, with few exceptions, I prefer the company of my chickens and other animals to humans. I've never been able to grock the status game.
Freedom,
Or is it that you easily dominate the status of your chickens?
"If you want to know whether a proposed organizational initiative will work, look first at whose status will change."
Could you elaborate on that?
TGGP,
I spent a lot of the last year studying organizational change. There are a LOT of factors that impact whether change works, but probably the biggest single factor going is whether you can get everyone "on the bus". If you have folks resisting, pulling in other directions, you lose.
I'd argue that MOST org. change initiatives fail (something like 75% do fail) because the folks resisting win...the bureaucracy tends to win its fights against senior leadership.
So the question in org change is how do we get people on our side.
Most of modern org-change tends to be org-flattening. Empowering employees almost universally has positive impact, once finished (probably due to Hayek's knowledge problem). However...a push to flatten organizations almost universally steps on the managers' power/status...and an awful lot of these kinds of changes fail because the managers' status has not been addressed in the organizational change model. If you can manage the managers' status changes (actively give them status goodies), you can probably win the org-change. If you can't, there's a big chance it fails.
Is that the question?
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