How To Fail At Reinforcement Learning Through Hot Girl Feedback

Men hate making romantic bids.

This is for a variety of reasons, most of them sympathetic. Rejection hurts; sometimes you’ll discover that by making a bid you made someone uncomfortable, which is unfortunate when it occurs but which cannot be prevented reliably, since the same thing that gets you information about whether a bid is likely to succeed is, itself that bid.

Reinforcement Learning From Hot Girl Feedback sessions are offered at a lot of Lighthaven conventions. A facilitator and a group of pretty girls stand on a stage, only one of which interacts with the male participant at any given time; it’s a little bit like one-way circling, where the girl expresses whatever it is she’s feeling in-the-moment, positive or negative. “I’m enjoying this,” “I felt attraction there,” “you feel like my little brother,” “I’m getting serial killer vibes.” Whatever she’s feeling.

I see a lot of behaviors in Reinforcement Learning from Hot Girl Feedback which I’d term as disapproval-avoidance behaviors. These all represent ways of avoiding making a legible romantic bid while still engaging with the event; the verbal channel must be occupied by something and the “something” men choose varies wildly.

I have seen the following, and I classify all of these as fundamentally avoidance behaviors:

1. Men doing things that are transparently silly and jokey in a way that is intended to read as unattractive: goofy flailing motions, exaggerated facial expressions.

2. Men talking about how weird and artificial the RLHF experience is. This is accurate-- it is weird and artificial-- but this is also beside the point.

3. Men ratcheting up the conversation to a higher level of abstraction, wanting to talk about the container itself or about whatever intellectual interests they have.

It’s like convergent evolution in ways to not flirt during exercises that specifically revolve around flirting.

The common thread is that these are all ways of not making a romantic-sexual bid that could be rejected. Someone called out (1) as simple self-sabotage (can’t feel bad about failing if you never really tried), which is a possible explanation but which feels less true to me than the explanation where they have substituted the correct-but-feels-risky behavior (expressing desires that could get them judged) with a behavior that feels-safe but isn’t really the point of the exercise (anything else.) Maybe it’s both, I dunno.

This tendency manifests in real life… mostly via that same kind of avoidance. It only registers in RLHF as avoidance instead of “ordinary social existence” because the point of the exercise is literally to improve at flirting: men love to take a format whose entire goal is expressing desire and then filling it with patter instead until they’re ushered off the stage.

I think these behaviors occur for really straightforward reasons. Making a pass at somebody is, whatever else it is, a status bid: you are implicitly claiming that you are the sort of person that is allowed to make romantic bids. You can see echoes of this fact in popular media: the smooth-talking jock who makes a pass at the female lead and gets told off is someone going through a very unpleasant status correction in real time. People hate getting downward status correctives.

The fear, I think, is that if you make a pass at the girl on stage then you’re setting yourself up to be humiliated in front of an audience. Which is true! This is a possible outcome, mostly because no matter how gentle everyone involved is being the activity itself is deeply vulnerable. They feel the sting of the implicit status-lowering from rejection; they feel the rush of status increase from Doing A Good Job. It feels like a high-stakes performance and the problem is that attempting to treat it as such is what generates the behavior stream that makes dudes fail at RLHF in the first place.

Which is a microcosm of romantic bids in real life. What fun!

I think the girls who are running these RLHF sessions are doing god’s work; but I also think that when they critique specific surface behaviors they’re mostly missing the underlying generator. It reminds me strongly of when my old dating coach would run model work.

It’s still useful, though, because I think the more bites at the apple the guys get the more opportunity they have to crack the underlying principles involved.

Vulnerability Is Making A Status Claim You're Willing To Let Fail

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Feb 7

I mentioned in previous essays the concept of “vulnerable honesty” as one of three process goals that can replace anxious approval-seeking. I gave it the definition of “saying the thing you’re actually thinking instead of the thing you think is safe.” See also this: