Perhaps one of the most frequent and annoying criticisms made of game is that it has not been verified by science. Usually a claim made by pseudo-intellectuals who have a difficult time swallowing the red pill, these confused individuals insist that since there is no “peer-reviewed research” confirming the tenets of game, game should not be believed or practiced. Game, therefore, is akin to a religion, or cult, worshiped by followers who blindly believe what their chosen game guru tells them.
These same pseudo-intellectual game-haters will then use this line of criticism in front of unbiased observers in an effort to steer them away from game, so that their blue-pill beliefs about women will be protected. It then leaves the man who preaches the good word of game on the defensive position, since if he disagrees with the game denialist, he will be labeled as “anti-science” and portrayed as an idiot.
A typical example of this exchange…
An experienced man with women will tell you that women are emotional creatures who act based on their feelings and then rationalize their behavior afterwards.
A game-denialist will then come along and say,
“Men also have rationalization hamsters. How do you know women are worse than men? Where’s your peer-reviewed research supporting that claim?”
An experienced man will tell you that any woman will have sex on the same day she meets the right man in the right circumstances. If the right man with the right game comes along in her path, she will bang him regardless of her age or relationship status.
The game denialist:
“Has there been any controlled experiments done to prove this? How do you know all women are the same?”
The experienced man says all women are the same, and that they follow their hypergamous instincts as obediently as a dog follows his nose.
The game denialist:
“Where’s the study that proves women will behave like animals? You’re just talking out of your ass.”
By attacking game along epistemological fault lines, the game denialist hopes to sow confusion amongst the ranks of both players and uninterested observers. Science is treated as an all-mighty authority in Western culture, having long since replaced the church, and the average democratic citizen believes that while God might not save them, technology can. Without the backing of science, who can trust game?
These arguments take advantage of the public’s general ignorance regarding the nature of science, and sophistically use the lack of scientific research on game as evidence that the current beliefs surrounding game are bullshit.
Let us discuss what science is, how scientists actually practice it, and then we’ll discuss why game doesn’t need science (although it is helpful).
The first and most common misconception about science is that it can “prove” things. Science has never proven anything, nor can it. On a deep enough epistemological level, nothing can be proven.
In sixteenth century Europe, had you looked up the classification of what a swan was, you would see that scientists had listed these animals as white birds who lived in lake regions. But as Australia was colonized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, men discovered black swans.
And just like that, old science had been overturned and replaced with the new; classifying swans no longer referred to their color since if black swans exist, who is to say there are not purple swans out there in the universe, somewhere?
The same process of new science replacing the old is not an extraordinary phenomenon. Particularly notable examples include the Copernican revolution, where the Earth was no longer held at the center of the universe, the Newtonian revolution, where Aristotilean physics was replaced by Newton’s Laws, and the Einsteinian revolution, where the General Theory of relativity replaced Newtonian Laws of physics.
The reason new science constantly replaces the old is because science can only disprove theories, but never prove them. Science is merely an effort at clarification, and nothing more.
Think of how vast our universe is. In order for a scientific theory to be proven with absolute certainty it would have to be tested in every corner of the universe to prove that the theory in question is true. How could such rigorous testing even be possible?
For example, the proposition, “All men are mortal.” How do we know for sure that there isn’t some planet in the universe where men would never die while living on it?
We do not for sure, and we cannot know for sure, but that does not mean the statement “all men are mortal” is not approximately true or useful. Science is thus based on a pragmatic approach, whereby all beliefs are nothing more than approximations of what we believe to be true, and the role of science is to try and disprove old theories, so that they can be replaced with an updated theory that presents a better description of reality.
For example, when Galileo questioned Aristotelian physics, he went after the proposition that “heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones.” Galileo dropped two balls of different weight from a tower and showed that both fell at the same speed. And Aristotle was shown to be wrong. Someone then challenged Galileo and showed that a feather fell slower than the ball did, and Galileo responded that if there was no air pressure, both would fall at the same speed.
Of course there was no way for Galileo to test that statement about air pressure affecting the feather, so Galileo’s statement was unscientific. Unless something can be tested, it is not scientific. However, did it make Galileo’s refutation any less true or useful?
Although Galileo could not test his statement when he made it, it was true. Thus we must ask ourselves: how useful is science, really, if science cannot prove anything true but merely disprove it?
Because ultimately that is all science is, and ever will be – a tool to disprove statements. So when it comes to evaluating game with science, there is not too great a need to do so, since at most science would clarify core game concepts, such as whether or not it is more effective to approach women in the daytime or nighttime when it comes to casual sex.
Moreover, if science failed to find anything false with current game tenets, it would mean that the practitioners of game were right all along, and never needed science to begin with.
And this brings us to the final aspect of science – how useful, exactly, is science anyways? Since the great men of history have always created their theories and then tested them after the fact, we can conclude that science is only there to help coerce the masses into understanding what great men intuitively figure out on their own.
The average person is weak, feeble, and lacking in any sort of conviction, so he needs science to make conclusions for him. Being too afraid to search for the truth on his own he instead works to cloud the judgement of others by shrouding all claims in obscurity and skepticism, in order to bring others down to his level.
In short, science is mostly for haters.
Game, being at once a collective and individual pursuit, will necessarily have non-scientific claims. And that is okay. Not everyone can run experiments to prove that wearing a certain shirt to a certain bar will get him laid more often, even though the man who does get laid knows which shirts work best on him. Likewise a man who can help men generate conversations with women may not have produced a reliable experiment and control to isolate all possible variables, but he can offer reasonable suggestions after helping a few dozen men make approaches.
There is no need for the hysteria of having science to “validate” game, as Heartiste so often does, because while it is cool to see science be unable to disprove core game concepts, it does not mean that there is not yet some discovery that will completely redefine how men approach and interact women. As an evolving concept, game relies on artistic and philosophical modes of thought to make real progress, while science merely sorts through the trash theories to show who was right all along.
And if you’re the guy sitting on knowledge of where the best spots in town to bang 18-year old chicks are, do you need science to make sure you can pursue them?
Read More: How I Learned How To Stay In The Game
The problem lies not with science, but with academia. The ranks of which are filled with people who have the audacity to claim a monopoly on science and equate their way of doing it (i.e. from a frame of feudalism) with truth. Science is a human endeavour – the quest ‘to know’ – something innate to a lot of people, with or without a PhD. It’s a systematic mindset. Whether or not something is peer reviewed doens’t exclude or prove anything. You’d be surprised at the sheer amount of fraud going on in those government-sponsored research labs.
this.
i have a heavy scientific background and the amount of information that is surpressed from publication, because it didn’t fit the narrative journals/ funders (big gov) would like, is staggering.
so long as people are involved in the process you will always have collusion and collaboration.
journals today are self perpetuating badge awarding machines, giving each other smiley face stickers while other countries are punished with their papers for not having prestigious enough names.
academia is rife with fraud and surpression of information
one small example of the kind of scientific breakthroughs that are purposely shelved or slowed down, just so government can achieve dominance:
someones paper got rejected, didn’t it?!
The problem lies not with science, but with academia.
You mean with the various Fluff Studies departments and, regrettably often, Anthropology and Sociology?
No. What I meant is that there are inherent problems with the way science is conducted these days. The abolishment of tenure and breaking the cartel-like publishing business would be a nice start to get things in the right direction.
You have missed the bigger picture. The key question that is answered by Heartiste, by Rollo, and others is not whether Game is scientific.
The bigger argument is “Is gender a social construct or a biological fact?” Which is more relevant, Cultural Psychology or Evolutionary Psychology? And Game supports Evo Psych or Evo Pysch supports Game, or both. And if Evo Psych wins this battle, then Feminism has no scientific basis.
Darwin followed Origin of the Species with a book on Evolutionary Psychology but it was more or less shelved.
Academia began to concentrate on Cultural Psychology with Margaret Meade and others. This fit into the goal of thinkers from the late 19th well into the later 20th century that culture was responsible for everything, for values, for thought, and specifically, for sex roles.
So if culture could be re-engineered then sex roles could therefore be redefined. And this is lynchpin of Feminism, the first and foremost justification.
Women are not lying, conniving, deceitful, manipulative bitches because it is in their biological natures, but rather they are forced to be because of the gender role imposed on them by the culture and because of a lack of power. So if their role could be redefined, the power dynamic changed, then they would be different. So liberal and academic thinkers set about in justification that everything was a product of the culture and that it was supreme over any biological considerations.
An example was the paper from Patrick Monyhian, when he was Assistant Secretary of Labor under Kennedy and LBJ.
From Wikipedia’s page on Monyhian:
“Moynihan’s research of Labor Department data demonstrated that even as fewer people were unemployed, more people were joining the welfare rolls. These recipients were families with children but only one parent (almost invariably the mother). The laws at that time permitted such families to receive welfare payments in certain parts of the United States.
Moynihan issued his research under the title The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, now commonly known as The Moynihan Report. Moynihan’s report fueled a debate over the proper course for government to take with regard to the economic underclass, especially blacks. Critics on the left attacked it as “blaming the victim”, a slogan coined by psychologist William Ryan. Some suggested that Moynihan was propagating the views of racists because much of the press coverage of the report focused on the discussion of children being born out of wedlock. Despite Moynihan’s warnings, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program included rules for payments only if the “Man [was] out of the house.” (See Man out of the house (welfare rule).) Critics said that the nation was paying poor women to throw their husbands out of the house.”
Feminists have admitted disregarding his research over the need and importance of having the male in the house because it suited both Feminist purposes and Cultural psychologists to re-engineer society and support, bolster, enforce the virtue of a matriarchy.
So at that moment Cultural Psychology was supreme, all people could be molded, changed, improved with good policy.
In the l970s, the modern era of Evolutionary Psychology was born.
From Wikipedia on Evo Psych
“In the 1970s and 1980s university departments began to include the term evolutionary biology in their titles. The modern era of evolutionary psychology was ushered in, in particular, by Donald Symons’ 1979 book The Evolution of Human Sexuality and Tooby and Cosmides 1992 book The Adapted Mind.”
Cultural Psychologists countered, aggressively, with claims of “Just So” stories and attacked the methodology. As Evo Psych progressed, it adopted measures of testing that did not rely on “self-response” and could gather data independent of the subjective evaluation of test subjects. And as the collection and testing methods improved, the results of the SCIENCE could not be refuted by cultural biologists and psychologist.
Evolutionary Psychology asserts that gender roles are not merely cultural constructs, and in fact, have a hard wired basis and any attempt to redefine and change the EVOLVED gender role will have unintended side effects. And over the past 10 years, the supremacy of Cultural Psychology has come under constant attack.
And Game is the “street” version of the attack. It is basically a million “scientists” out on the street using Evo Psych ideas to attack and disprove Cultural Psychology to reinforce Evolutionary Psychology.
Evolutionary Psychology is the best argument against Feminism and Social re-engineering.
And because of this then Game must be attacked, must be discredited, because a whole massive political movement is founded on the ideas that Game disproves, everyday, as more and more men adapt it as a mating strategy.
And we assert that SHE is a lying, cheating, conniving, deceitful, manipulative bitch because that is what she is, and is born to be. And no amount of policy, of laws, of re-engineering, of indoctrination will ever change that fact.
And that is crux of the argument.
Mark, have you considered writing for this blog regularly? I urge you to consider it.
Mark, I couldn’t agree more and you supplement the main points of my article nicely.
How useful is science if it is taken over by political ideologues who refuse to look into any controversial theories?
What good are peer-reviewed studies when the subject matter being reviewed is controlled for political correctness first?
All the men who practice game have their own theories as to how the world works, but because we have no means to thoroughly test them, they remain unscientific. But how much does that matter given how worthless the current state of scientific research on human nature currently is?
The problem with most of the manosphere is a strong obsession with being accepted by mainstream science. This is wrong, there is no need to be accepted.
We do not need science; men are figuring out what’s useful without the help of any scientific experimentation. At this point, science can only help on the margins, but it remains pretty niche and useless for the majority of men.
Great post…good to know the tiller of thought is sometimes grasped by a steady hand.
Game is science.
Science doesn’t ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ physical theories. Science does however, with each additional experiment, confirm and dis-confirm theories.
Overwhelming confirmation might be considered ‘proof’, whereas, overwhelming dis-confirmation might be considered ‘disproof’. It’s probably best to save the words ‘prove’ and ‘disprove’ for the mathematicians.
Game is social science. But guess who dominates the ranks of social scientists? Leftoids and feminazis.
There’s your answer.
Game practitioners and proponents use scientific methods and are often informed by scientific knowledge, but I would hesitate to call it a science. It’s more like an art or a discipline. There’s often intuition or “leap of faith” type of guesswork in between application of game and the foundation principles, and a reliance on some level of skill, natural talent, and willpower to use them. There’s often a somewhat careless disregard for accuracy, particularly when discussing generalized applications.
Preselection, for example. It’s commonly accepted that preselection by females is a DHV that increases your sexual appeal. It certainly makes sense as a concept, and there are even some studies that confirm some specific aspects of this effect. But even so– there are certainly scenarios where evidence preselection can reduce your odds of getting laid. We don’t have a very deep or precise understanding of what’s happening in this case. Was the attraction enhanced and the girl scared off by potential competition? Was the attraction actually lessened, and if so was it because of the nature of the relationship with the women doing the pre-selecting? We have a very crude understanding of these dynamics, by scientific standards.
But still, lots of game involves real hypotheses based on practical observations. For example, you might have a hypothesis for the best moment to approach a girl who is buying a drink at the bar. Hard, scientific knowledge is difficult to extract from this, because there are too many uncontrolled variables and contingencies unaccounted for, but as a crude piece of information to help a guy get laid, it’s infinitely better than nothing.
Yah, good point. Hesitation to call game a science is reasonable. Definitely not a hard science… yet.
Pick up scientist? Better to be a PUA rather than a PUS(sy).
Your examples from denialists have one thing in common : passive-aggressive questioning.
One gets this all the time in comment threads. You make a profound statement and someone who doesn’t like it posts a reply with a barrage of questions instead of a compelling counter-argument.
In the examples you cite (and this is typical), they ask you to provide peer-reviewed research links, or to go on some goose-chase to come up with answers to their questions marks.
It’s a passive, feminine response meant to put you on the defensive. It’s aggressive in that it is usually accompanied by some prissy insult about your manhood or intelligence or sexism/racism.
What’s laffable is that feminists never fail to invoke “new studies have shown”, citing some amateur journal article by career female grad students as proof of male inadequacy. Here’s a good example :
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/17/why_are_men_so_foolish
…spot on. No big deal, more and more men are waking up to the fem-bot scam and in the mean time, we can all enjoy gratuitous blow-jobs from women eager to demonstrate that they are as sexually liberated as any man ever.
I’d be interested in a article on “why is it so important to me that others recognise game (fall all it might be – fill int he blanks)”?
As for science…
You might as well be citing the old “the parachute has never been proven to effectively decrease mortality rates when jumping from high altitude, a double blind crossover study never took place…”
Science isn’t only for haters. You going to drink green tea or get that radical surgery/radiation when your 6/10 prostate turns malignant?
”In short science is mostly for haters”. Hahaha! As a scientist, I approve.
Game is science, and many studies have supported its theories. Check out Heartiste’s blog for updates on such. Thing is they are too long for me to want to read, and I already accept its tenets.
The average guy learning game doesn’t have time for double-blind controlled studies. It’s about observing, sharing info with others, and adjusting. It’s a layman’s form of the scientific method. He wants results, not peer-reviewed research.
All the game denialists need to do is open their eyes, but there’s a fat chance of that happening.
Game IS backed up by science, but people don’t think scientifically. We tend to have our conclusions, find and remember evidence that backs them up, and forget and ignore all evidence that doesn’t.
I actually just wrote a post on how studies aren’t necessarily the best way to bring somebody over to your point of view. It’s in the context of politics more than Game, but it’s the same principle. Don’t attack what they think, attack how they think:
http://alphaisassumed.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/the-bridge-to-nonsense/
Just watch “The Science of Sex Appeal” on Netflix. It breaks down what compels women towards certain men, which is a direct reflection of Game.
Will do. But the point is that no matter how well-done a study may be, if somebody’s worldview won’t allow them to believe it, they won’t.
Likewise, we all know Game works, and we’ll know if works even if every faculty on every campus in the Western world says otherwise.
I have suspected for along time that the “game denialists” are driven by one or more of the following motivations, whether conscious or not: (1) a need to rationalize their own mediocre success with women; (2) an unwillingness to put the necessary work in needed to improve their social and dating skills; (3) a mind closed to new ideas by the ceaseless torrent of feminist/PC propaganda that puts women on a pedestal.
With discipline, work, and conviction, anyone can achieve results. “Game” is just a word for improving one’s social skills with women. Not all of us will have pussy every night of the week, of course, just like not all aspiring weightlifters will be Franco Columbu.
…smokin article, this is definitely something that needs to get talked out. The cool kick-ass thing about Game is that, like any decent piece of progress, it didn’t involve men sitting around trying to determine the sure-fire way to get something done, they just kept working until they found something that worked.
Thing is Game IS firmly grounded in well-established theories and takes the most applicable pieces of several of them to enhance both male attractiveness and female compliance.
Dig it:
Evolutionary Psychology: The first words about Game I ever read were that your brain is wired to exist in a primitive setting; its outdated software that you can learn to back door. People’s primary drives center around physical safety, relationship/ peer group success, and reproduction.
Social-circle Theory: That a person can only manage a social circle of approximately 150 people. Knowing that you’re going to have to carve out a niche and appear to fit into that circle is a key point of Game.
Sexual attraction Theory: Women are found attractive primarily in terms of their reproductive viability (age, hip-to-waist, fidelity) and men in terms of their capability as a provider (access to resources, social status, general health).
Basic relationship/ hypnosis/ NLP: These tools help us optimize our communication with women and speed up the rapport development process.
Since all this is based on PERCEPTION, menm, even with Game are running far behind women in their ability to control how they are perceived. Women have entire department store sections devoted to manipulating the appearance of their primary points of attraction! And until Game came along, men were only putting in this half-assed effort to build attractiveness the same way they expect women to: work out, have flashy stuff, and dress nice….allll physical appearance, allll about a half effort compared to the lengths women go to, and almost useless in terms of what women are actually attracted to. But if a guy understands the bedrock theories that Game is based on, his Game practically runs itself!
Fuck man, an honest academic with a little time on his hands could probably establish Game as a fairly generalizeable theory without too much effort….even though every feminist with a tenure would lose their mind…besides, Game was bullshit, guys wouldn’t get laid and it would go away overnight.
Although I like Evolutionary Psychology, I think a lot of it is “just so” science because I could think of 10 more explanations for why humans are the way they are using evolutionary explanations, on top of what a lot of people theorize about.
This is really the essence of science, the guesswork is really the most exciting part of the process and is where most discoveries are made. But don’t be fooled into thinking we’ve got all the answers just because we can come up with a pretty theory.
It’s difficult to make dedicated studies, because so much of game is ephemeral concepts which require different applications for individuals. To tie in to the author’s shirt argument, I know without a doubt that a navy blazer nets me better success with women than a tweed sport coat. It seems as if girls will barely give me the time of day in the latter, and swoon over me in the former. I could try to do “tests” and “studies” to prove my assertion, and I have a few hypotheses why this is so, but any organized study would necessarily be so rigid, in order to eliminate variables, that it would be impossible. I’d have to use the same opener, have the same conversation, approach the same girls, in the same venue… and even if somehow I miraculously succeeded in doing all these things and was afterwards able to draw some meaningful conclusion from my data, the whole exercise would be pointless anyway, because owing to the nature of the game, it’d be applicable to nobody but me, and I already knew the results beforehand. All we can do is offer general guidelines and relate what has worked for ourselves, and what we have observed to generally be true. Truth is truth, whether or not it is popular today, and whether or not it has been endorsed by men in ivy-clad buildings.
“Truth is truth, whether or not it is popular today, and whether or not it has been endorsed by men in ivy-clad buildings.”
This.
When science increases our understanding of reality, it’s wonderful. When it’s used to obscure common sense, it’s beyond evil.
Same goes for philosophy. It can be used to help you understand the world in which you like, or it can be used to get you to doubt the existence of the chair you’re sitting in.
The male hamster at work. An article that contains some of the greatest names in history- names of scientists- proceeds to tell us that science is for haters and followers.
“Science is only there to help coerce the masses into understanding what great men intuitively figure out on their own.” False. Science is the process by which great men make new discoveries about the human condition and the world (universe) around us. Glorified gossip (journalism, peer review, etc.) is the process by which those truths are disseminated to the masses. Like a brilliant artist working, living, and dying in obscurity, only to become famous years after his death, a good scientist works at uncovering the mysteries of the universe for himself, or because he is driven to do so. The wider acceptance of his theories or discoveries is neither within his power nor the primary motivation for his work.
“how useful, exactly, is science anyways?” He asked, by typing words into his computer and posting them on the Internet, while probably sitting inside an air-conditioned building, and with the knowledge, in the back of his mind, of what a cell is, what an atom is, and what a galaxy is. The retardedness of that question is self-evident.
It’s true that the haters will always cry NAWALT and say that your experiences aren’t representative of the general population, and it’s true that an “alpha” doesn’t need to carry around volumes of research that reveals the hypergamous motivations of women to defend himself. But essentially saying “fuck science that’s for pussies” is more than just throwing the baby out with the bath water. It makes you look like you rode the short bus to school every day and had to have the bus driver buckle your seat belt for you.
This. Exactly what I was going to say.
yes. Agreed.
Science can help you build you a bridge that can support 100,000 people per day for 50 years, but you’ll have to wait 200 years for the physics and nother 5 years to design and build the bridge.
Or you can still just wing it, building a bridge using some intuition and hastily gathered materials. The crude bridge might only support 50 people per day and 1 out of every 1000 trips across someone falls to their death, but it still gets you to the other side faster than walking hundreds of miles to find a crossing.
Game is instructions for building the makeshift bridge, shared by guys who have some experience building makeshift bridges. Because right now there is no better scientific knowledge available.
Also, a nitpick: As you correctly identified, what distinguishes scientific knowledge is testability and verifiability. But the tricky part here, which I don’t think you covered particularly well, is that a knowledge must be testable eventually, even if a test cannot actually be accomplished with currently available tools or data. The feather hypothesis is valid because you could say “if we had a way to create a space with no air and drop a feather through it, and the feather still falls more slowly than the ball, then the hypothesis is wrong.”
More commonly, untestable hypotheses are elaborately disguised tautologies. The Meyers-Briggs personalities are a good example of untestable hypotheses. MBTI types fail scientific testability because there is no way to arrive at a result not accounted for by the quiz and no way to prove that the quiz categorized you incorrectly. There’s no way to update the model to account for new observations and no way to actually use the test results to make predictions about anything other than future quizzes.
“But the tricky part here, which I don’t think you covered particularly well, is that a knowledge must be testable eventually, even if a test cannot actually be accomplished with currently available tools or data.”
And who knows what we can or cannot test? There does not seem to be a limit to what we “may discover” yet. Think of all the theories we’ll be able to test after the first time-machine is built.
Thus whether or not something can “eventually” be tested is a pretty weak criterion, since it’s just speculation if we’ll be able to test it someday.
Game is about human interaction, particularly interaction between men and women. This is a highly complex system with many degrees of freedom. It is a known fact that science can only give you an approximate description of such complex systems. You can always try to find a good way to neglect some variables and focus only on the ones you are interested in, but this will be a very subjective way of doing science. This is why social sciences are not actual sciences. Your system is so complex that you can never find a theory containing all the variables describing your system and hence, at the end, you can only test for a hypothesis describing a simplified version of the global system. In hard sciences, such as physics, you have this same problem for complex systems (e.g. the formation of stars, the homogeneity of the universe, etc.), but the physics of lets say the trajectory of a cannon ball is accurately described by Newtonian mechanics (even if General Relativity is the fundamental one). In the latter case we can clearly identify all the variables of the system (the initial velocity of the cannon ball, its initial position, etc. ), and thus science would give us a very good description of reality. If you don’t believe this I dare you to be my target while I use a cannon to shoot you and I use Newtonian physics to calculate the trajectory.
While I agree with you, that science cannot give a complete description of Game, I think the reason is different (i.e. is such a highly complex system), and when haters give you the argument that you need peer-reviewed-papers to prove or disprove Game Hypothesis, they do not really know how to do science. The reason you state in your post has more to do with the philosophy of science and how this will help us to treat social sciences as actual sciences, but in my opinion this can never be done because of the reasons I exposed.
True, however the criterion is only there to determine whether a given assertion is a valid scientific hypothesis or not. It says nothing about its value.
Certain claims may be so vaguely specified that a test simply cannot be devised using any known model. For example:
“Humans are either taller than 6 feet or shorter than 6 feet.” – Not a hypothesis
“Current average human height is 5 feet, 6 inches.” – Valid hypothesis.
Also when I say “eventually” I mean given the reasonable bounds of current scientific knowledge and assumptions made in the claim. Galileo may not have been capable of performing his vacuum test, but there were certainly plenty of theories about the properties of air that would make such a test reasonably possible based on future technology.
Interesting article:
1. Science is awesome
2. A lot of ‘game’ has been shown, by ‘science’, to be true (seriously, The Chateau discusses scientific studies ALL THE DAMN TIME. I cant be the only ROK reader that reads The Chateau??? Really???)
3. Please don’t conflate ‘science’ with bullshit subjects like Sociology, Anthropology, Womens Studies, or just about any BA.
4. Once more for the cheap seats – there are studies out there that back up the basic tenets of game. I have never lost an argument with a ‘game denialist’ who attempted to hijack scientific studies, because when it comes to scientific arguments about game, they are in MY FUCKING HOUSE. Never.
5. “The average person is weak, feeble, and lacking in any sort of conviction, so he needs science to make conclusions for him”
I remember Matt Forney making a similar swipe when I pointed out that Edenism has holes in it big enough to fit his fat potato-shaped head through. And Ill say now what I said then – science is cumulative and reproducible, and once you understand the intricacies of scientific method, and can actually READ a scientific study (what was the studies power? Confounding variables? Who paid? Replication studies? etc), you can have a fair idea as to whether a scientific paper has any merit whatsoever.
Equally though, there are people out there that will take a study, any study, at face value, simply because it has been published. Ive met these people, and hate them with an unholy fury. They misunderstand the whole fucking point – “but I read it in New Scientist!” – no, you deserve to be sterilised. I’ll concede on this you have a fairly solid point; Ive met some very intelligent people who would believe the Pope shits Doubloons if it was in Cognitive Psychology. That doesn’t diminish the idea of the scientific method though. At all. It just means idiots permeate all fields of life
In short, science is awesome, science backs the tenets of game, and whilst the majority of people misunderstand studies/publications/theories/hypothesis testing/statistical analysis/etc, it doesn’t mean science is shit. It means they are shit.
Funnily enough, it was philosophy I considered to be a bullshit field. I’m only just ‘getting it’ now…
Great post, and thank you for pointing out that Sociology et al shouldn’t be counted as “science”. They are bullshit studies programs masquerading as serious fields (for the most part.)
If science could determine how to seduce women, then lab technicians would be getting laid and the “bring the movies” guys would be crying into their deep-fryers.
Understand that science is an extremely broad topic. Someone (a lab technician) might be an expert in physics, but that doesn’t mean he understands evolutionary psychology.
I have no doubt good science will eventually prevail and show that the principles behind game are grounded in reality. Though that doesn’t mean every person engaged in some form of scientific endeavor will understand game.
Satire buzz-kill.
I’m in academia, getting a Ph.D. in a multidisciplinary field.
Most game principles have sound psychological or economic principles behind them. The people yammering about “where is your peer reviewed research?” don’t have a drop of research behind THEIR beliefs. Roissy among others have pointed to peer-reviewed research that supports various tenets of game, and during my education I’ve seen a number of other scientific papers that support what you would call “game principles”.
Really, all we are lacking is a grand unified theory of game that ties together all the existing scientific research.
Exactly. I don’t think there is a lot of research going on in the field of women’s/gender studies.
Good article. I would compare game to hunting because game is an art. The hunter doesn’t need to know the scientific reasons why deer don’t see colors, why deer run in packs or alone, why deer like apples, why deer always travel through certain fields, etc. All the scientific research on deer behavior is interesting but it doesn’t really do anything for the hunter in the field. Maybe once in a while a scientific breakthrough can help a hunter refine a technique, but the only validation the hunter needs is whether he is bagging a deer consistently.
Some of the haters are such losers they would be challenging the grizzly old hunter, asking him why he is putting on that silly camouflage, using that caliber of rifle, sitting in that blind, next to that field, at this time of year, etc.
So much stupid it hurts.
“And this brings us to the final aspect of science – how useful, exactly,
is science anyways? Since the great men of history have always created
their theories and then tested them after the fact, we can conclude that
science is only there to help coerce the masses into understanding what great men intuitively figure out on their own.”
Coercion: the practice of forcing another party to act in an involuntary manner
There is no force involved with publishing results. Aside from this pedantry, there are other issues here. Often, science involves finding the ideal value of something. No great man ever said, “the ideal temperature for this experiment is X”. Instead, X is found through trial and error. Similarly, game requires experimentation and a scientific approach. Finding the ideal number of drinks to consume, the amount of time to wait between texts, etc are all quantities that should be found. While some great men may have intuition for the approximate ideal values, it is only experimentation that can reduce the width of our confidence interval.
Instead of claiming that game does not require justification of science, it would be better to claim that to practice game, that is to make approaches, is itself experimentation.
“Instead of claiming that game does not require justification of science, it would be better to claim that to practice game, that is to make approaches, is itself experimentation.”
Both are true. Game does not need the justification of science but game itself is nothing but experimentation.
Before you start calling people stupid, think of how both statements can be true without contradicting each other. So many angry commenters here, people get way too emotionally attached to what is nothing more than an essay designed to make people think.
A couple of comments:
1. You are attacking the wrong target. The kind of knee-jerk skepticism that you portray is indeed annoying. But what is annoying is that it almost always stops there. These are people who are experts at being skeptics and ‘rational’ rather than being good scientists. Science in practice is a dirty business. You have to get an intuitive sense at first, and a real scientist will be curious to explore this despite the initial lack of rigour. Eventually, but typically towards the end, everything is neatly packaged in a more rigorous way, which is all the professional skeptic gets to see.
2. The stuff about Karl Popper and science only disproving theories is kind of silly. When the new particle, believed to be the Higgs boson, was recently discovered at CERN with a probability greater than 99.9999%, why put the emphasis on the 0.0001% chance that it was a fluke? Sure, of course there is that possibility. But we’re having a conversation about everyday things where we can assume that if we see a computer screen in front of us, it really is there, et cetera, rather than a hardcore philosophical discussion!
Dude, in 500 years from now the Higgs boson particle will be thought about in the same way scientists think about Lamarckism.
You attack game-denialism with science-denialism, and that imo is pretty annoying.
“On a deep enough epistemological level, nothing can be proven.” This is an opinion of someone who is called “first year relativist” (because first year phil. students are often attracted to this position). Such a person knows little of philosophy and says things like “PHILOSOPHICALLY you cannot PROVE anything at all!” and tilt the shit out of anyone who has ever hear of pragmatism, or read David Hume, or passed “Introduction to epistemology”. If you dont know anything about philosophy of science or epistemology cant you just not comment on them?
“Science is thus based on a pragmatic approach, whereby all beliefs are nothing more than approximations of what we believe to be true, and the role of science is to try and disprove old theories, so that they can be replaced with an updated theory that presents a better description of reality.”
Game
is mainly an Art and not a Science.
You forgot one thing: Science actually verifies game concepts, however only decades after experienced men figured them out themselves.
Look at Heartiste’s archives, there are many articles of how science validates yet another game theorem.
Science isn’t bad per se, it’s only kept on a tight leash like a dog by political correctness. You don’t see many discussions about male/female differences, racial differences because it’s suppressed by the PC establishment and gender studies-feminazis are screaming “dats sexist!11” and “dats racis!!!11”