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"Training" (=manipulating) a person like you would a dog (https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/pfc43o/training_manipulating_a_person_like_you_would_a/)
posted on August 31, 2021 06:45 PM by u/rats_suck
82

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5QmtqBt6GDM8hYkAr/training-my-friend-to-cook

You know a post is questionable when even the LessWrong comment section has concerns.

​

My goal for covid lockdown was to train Brittany to cook.

OK…and what did Brittany want?

​

It was summer. […] After each picnic I’d send the leftovers home with her in lovely glass jars. This associated “homemade food” with sunshine, verdant trees, picnic tables and quality time with good friends.

Have already established the “homemade food” = “warm verdant picturesque parks” association, we moved our hangouts to her apartment. […] Though I always provided Brittany with leftovers, I also made sure that they never lasted more than a few days. Brittany would eat delicious food for a few days and then she’d be back to her TV dinners.

I keep forgetting Brittany is a person (as a matter of fact, a 20-something medical school student!) rather than a literal lab rat. Jesus.

​

One day Brittany ordered a box of meal kits. I gently, but stubbornly, refused to help her with them.

Wow, so she’s making baby steps towards cooking! Great. Imagine shutting those down because they aren’t what you think she should want.

​

I worried that I had conditioned Brittany to cook solely when I came over.

Blechhhhh

​

The second most important protocol I used was backchaining. I didn’t start by bringing Brittany to the store, then teach her to cook and have her eat at the end. I started by feeding her, then I taught her to cook and only at the end did I bring her to the grocery store. [my emphasis] If I started by bringing her to the grocery store then she wouldn’t understand why we were buying what we were buying. But when I started by serving her food in a park all she had to understand is “eat delicious food”. At every point in the process, Brittany understood exactly how the thing she was doing connected to “eating delicious food on a summer day under green trees”.

She wouldn’t understand? Really?

u/Nemnel 71 points at 1630438528.000000

this is disgusting and I hope their friend reads this article and ejects them from their life

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u/DELETED 34 points at 1630441303.000000
[deleted]
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u/dizekat 14 points at 1630518667.000000
It's Always Sunny episode. "The gang trains Dee to cook". Opening scene: Dennis is explaining something on the whiteboard to Charlie, Mac, and Frank. Dee walks in and they try to distract her from the whiteboard with bird jokes. Mid episode, Rickedy Cricket is recruited to help train Waitress not to hate Charlie. edit: teaches -> trains, lol.
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u/Theon 23 points at 1630488306.000000
>Brittany saw the article because the first thing I did after writing it was send her a link. Here is her response. >>Omg 😱 soooo funny 😁 >>Thanks sooo much for making this special piece. I love it 🥰 >>Someone was worried that I was not being treated with agency lmao >>Someone stood up for me and said sauté asparagus was totally the norm lol >>Hahahahahaha >>It's definitely a wholesome piece >>I feel soooo happy to see my food photos were so colorful https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5QmtqBt6GDM8hYkAr/training-my-friend-to-cook?commentId=8HomagQ79tXEKNfq3 Yeah I'unno guys
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u/Soyweiser 33 points at 1630500429.000000
Trainig lesswrongers to win by having them changing their priors to be pro manipulation by faking messages from my friends. Fake edit: showed this message to Yud and he said > Omg 😱 such a good idea 😁 I love it 🥰 this will stop the bad acausalrobotgod uwu manipulation is good actually ლ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ლ E: but yes at least the manipulator getting consent here sort of, is good.
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u/Consistent_Actuator 5 points at 1630646229.000000
🤯🤯🥵🐍🖥️🙈💸
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u/DELETED 62 points at 1630448938.000000

[deleted]

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u/PolyamorousNephandus 39 points at 1630449011.000000
Unpossible. Where's the conditioning. Low effort.
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u/NegativeTwist6 23 points at 1630466399.000000
> Unpossible. Where's the conditioning > > I taught my best friend who was living in the same ~~house~~ Skinner Box Better now?
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 14 points at 1630449345.000000
Oh I did plenty of that too, I can be a dickhead at times but I’m much better than I was when I was 18, I just didn’t make up excuses for being an asshole - and she’s still my best friend now we’ve acknowledged we were shitty to each other at times
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u/1an0ther 42 points at 1630440678.000000

It sautées the bok choy in the pan it does this whenever it’s told.

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u/Soyweiser 14 points at 1630503775.000000
It sautées the bok choy in the pan or it counts to 10 again!
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u/blakestaceyprime 42 points at 1630461548.000000

At every point in the process, Brittany understood exactly how the thing she was doing connected to “eating delicious food on a summer day under green trees”.

Narrator: And then winter came, and Brittany ate nothing but canned soup and untoasted Pop-Tarts.

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u/SubjectVanilla 3 points at 1631023456.000000
Read that in my mind with Sean Bean's voice lmao
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u/Consistent_Actuator 28 points at 1630441287.000000

Rational PUA?

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u/ComicCon 57 points at 1630448891.000000
This post is also doing the PUA thing where they think they are masterful manipulators and can perfectly predict what other people are thinking. The classic example being a PUA having a one night stand with a woman he met at a bar. They always assume that it was their mastery of PUA techniques that caused it, and not that maybe the woman also went to the bar to have a one night stand? Notice all of the times the poster makes assumptions about what Brittany is thinking vs what she actually does. If you strip out the weird psychoanalyzing it kind of just looks like Brittany was down to learn how to cook from her friend? Seems like a very wholesome interaction, but then the rationalists have to go and make it weird and obvious they consider themselves some sort of superior species.
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u/dizekat 24 points at 1630518885.000000
> Seems like a very wholesome interaction, but then the rationalists have to go and make it weird and obvious they consider themselves some sort of superior species. Precisely. This is about the OP larping a clever manipulative psychopath with actual theory of mind, while simultaneously revealing OP is very bad at it (probably is a psychopath but a very inept kind where being a psychopath is more of a side effect from inability to even form a concept of "other people"). Goes also with their "Bayes" and probability larping: the OP has very detailed speculations about what someone else is thinking, which is thoroughly stupid (too unlikely to be true due to being too speculative). edit: note btw a funny little bit: the food is being conditioned onto something else. Apparently the food is not tasty enough and his girlfriend has to be conditioned to want food. Virgin Pavlov: conditions dogs using food. Chad rationalist: conditions food using picnics.
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u/Soyweiser 12 points at 1630605976.000000
Post Chad Rationalist: conditions himself to be hungry after going into a park.
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u/Citrakayah 18 points at 1630458397.000000
Yeah, I am willing to bet that this master manipulator is actually nothing of the sort.
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u/Arilou_skiff 8 points at 1630949384.000000
It's kind of interesting, because I remember reading some summary of a PUA thing way back when it was still a relatively unknown thing, and one of the things the summary stressed was that the "secret" was to simply not try with people who aren't interested: Basically they'd try to as quickly as possible figure out if the other party was interested in a one-night stand and if not, move on. They explicitly rejected the entire master-manipulator bit and wasy basically "The secret is to find someone who wants the same thing as you do"
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u/ComicCon 4 points at 1631140961.000000
Yeah, I also remember that from going on some of the PUA forums a long time ago. It was always a bit unsavory, but at least they had a more realistic perspective around their limits. Honestly a lot of the blame for the shift probably lays with Neil Strauss. He really played up the manipulation angle in *The Game*, and attracted the kind of people who wanted to learn how to be manipulative. There is a certain kind of person that wants to be able to treat every social interaction as if it's math problem, and I think they really took over PUA culture(or at least the more toxic elements that eventually became TRP/Manosphere) after the book came out.
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u/titotal 33 points at 1630447861.000000
The admiration for PUA shit is barely concealed, Scott alexander used it as the prototypical example for his "typical mind fallacy" article. The one rationalist I knew IRL was deep into PUA and "rationalist dark arts": aka emotional abuse.
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u/spectacularlyrubbish 18 points at 1630445367.000000
That's exactly it. Bet he negs her through commentary on her seasoning.
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u/Soyweiser 16 points at 1630503944.000000
PUA stuff has always been part of the Rationalists sphere. The anti haertise faq didnt come out of nowhere. ([Rationalwiki on the shithead haertiste](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Chateau_Heartiste)) Via rw: > Aside from content [sexism white nationalism and anti leftism], Weidmann's writing style is notably wordy and obnoxious We tend to focus a bit more on the NRx part here, but there certainly is also a PUA undercurrent in Rationalism (the secondary question is of course if there even is a line, iirc haertiste also worries about 'the cathedral', and might consider himself part of the dark enlightenment (not sure, but he certainly talked about it)).
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u/BewareTheSphere 26 points at 1630452716.000000

Wait, what’s wrong with sauteing asparagus?

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u/Luonnoliehre 36 points at 1630453730.000000
nothing. in typical rationalist fashion, the OP is trying to act like an authority on a subject by making definitive statements that aren't even true.
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u/ComicCon 21 points at 1630464171.000000
Yeah, between the primarily cooking with rice and beans and all of the simply prepared veggies I kind of get the sense this is a person that learned to cook for health/budgetary reasons. No shame there, but that hardly makes one a professional chef. Also, if Brittany is Taiwanese I totally get why she would try to sauté asparagus. I feel like asparagus is a veggie you see that a lot in Chinese cooking, especially in stir fry dishes.
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u/blakestaceyprime 22 points at 1630462223.000000
> Thin asparagus is best steamed, boiled, **sautéed,** stir-fried, or microwaved (white asparagus generally takes a few minutes longer than green). The fleshy spears of thicker asparagus are suited to roasting and grilling. Cook asparagus quickly. It is done when it turns bright green and is tender, with a trace of crispness. Even 1 minute of overcooking will start turning it dull. Whatever the cooking method, remove the pieces as they are ready. *The Joy of Cooking* (1997 edition), p. 342.
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u/StPatsLCA 22 points at 1630445675.000000

Rationalists making roundabout excuses for why they suck at communicating.

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u/TiberSeptimIII 22 points at 1630509591.000000

What kind of a pea brain thinks that medical students don’t understand what grocery stores are for?

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u/PolyamorousNephandus 41 points at 1630440889.000000

Sadly common and exhausting. One of my abusers bragged to me over dinner at one point that he would train my then-metamour (a freshman in college at the time) to not experience disordered eating any more. Through sex. He insisted he could literally cure her ED with his dick.

Galaxy brain operant conditioning strikes again, and meanwhile LW is all like “aw it’s so kind of you to train this high agency med student!”

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u/wrexinite 19 points at 1630446732.000000
I thought you meant Erectile Disfunction and I was genuinely confused there for a sec
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u/PolyamorousNephandus 14 points at 1630449066.000000
Haha sorry I should have thought about that before including ED and dick in the same sentence!
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u/backgammon_no 21 points at 1630447616.000000
> metamour ??
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 17 points at 1630449187.000000
Your partner’s partner, it’s a polyamory thing
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u/PolyamorousNephandus 9 points at 1630448966.000000
Am polyamorous. Metamour is a term for your partner's partner, so another person he was dating.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 5 points at 1630449495.000000
What’s the etymology of “metamour”? I have plenty of polyamorous friends - although personally I can’t handle the scheduling - but I don’t encounter that term often. I’ve heard it but only here and there.
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u/wokeupabug 8 points at 1630450155.000000
> What’s the etymology “metamour”? The original sense is someone who gets turned on by irony. Cf., Gen-X, F Schlegel.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 3 points at 1630451992.000000
Schlegel was polyamorous?
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u/PolyamorousNephandus 6 points at 1630452250.000000
[This is what I found](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/metamour).
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 4 points at 1630453422.000000
Ok that makes sense
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u/cum_in_me 11 points at 1630520123.000000

Ugh disgusting. Also not reinforcing baby steps toward a behavior is idiotic. What he’s trying to do is called “shaping” when used with people, and the protocol is to REWARD baby steps toward the goal. So he didn’t even correctly complete a (very well established) behavioral psychology protocol. Moron.

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u/Shitgenstein 23 points at 1630440308.000000

I keep forgetting Brittany is a person (as a matter of fact, a 20-something medical school student!) rather than a literal lab rat. Jesus.

Ickier when you remember that child grooming is a thing.

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u/sue_me_please 4 points at 1631136614.000000

If Patrick Bateman had a blog.

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