The study doesn't really prove anything. It creates a (poor) definition of "bad guys", creates a (very slanted) definition of "get the most girls", and then correlates the two.
Being confident in yourself could easily be confused with slight narcissistic, being impulsive could certainly be a good thing, and not all aspects of Machiavellianism are bad. It's not clear to me that their chosen traits actually define a "bad guy".
In order to determine who got the most girls, all they did was ask the people in the study (all college students) "how many partners they had and whether they were seeking brief affairs."
They point out that the "dark triads" had more partners and more desire for short-term relationships, but they don't even touch on the quality of the partners or the relationships. Their definition of getting a girl apparently includes one-night stands. Contrary to popular belief, there are girls who just want one-night stands as well, so the guys didn't "get" anything special; they engaged in an even trade. Getting a girl, in my opinion, is getting a girl to care about you. The study doesn't even touch on that.
Also, as daniel-cussen said (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224005), because the study only focuses on college students, it gives far too much weight to trivial, shallow college relationships while not enough touching on the much-more-important relationships that come later in life.
Nothing but a sensationalist article based on bad science. If I may paraphrase the findings in simple terms: out of a narrow sample of 200 college-aged males, some guys were rated as slightly more obnoxious than average... those same guys said that they would like to have more hookups... and finally those same guys said that they do in fact have hookups.
Could it simply be that obnoxious guys like to brag about their supposed sexual conquests?
gasp women like alpha males? WTF?!?!?!?!
on a less sarcastic note, notice that the traits mentioned are all leadership traits. Leaders generally have to be somewhat narcissistic, otherwise they wouldn't believe they are worthy to be leader. They have to be risk takers to upset the status quo. And they have to be Machiavellian to govern efficiently.
OH on train very recently. Yes, the girls were attractive and interesting.
Girl 1: "I think Eric likes me. I like him too"
Girl 2: "Why doesn't he ask you out?"
Girl 1: "I don't know. I like him. He hasn't taken the lead. It's so awkward."
Girl 2: "Yeah. Totally"
OTOH: this is my personal take on it.
fuck you evolution and your maximized expected reproductive utility. I'd rather be happy. Happiness is probably selected against since satisfied, content people don't run around trying desperately to mate as much as possible.
If any of you think to start being bad, you should think twice. Its very hard to be just the right amount of bad. I'm talking from experience, i tried to be bad and girls just think im creepy. :)
Anyway check http://www.highstatusmale.com and check the book "without embarrassment" its good not only if you want more girls, but if you only want a little more understanding of the way humans communicate, entrepreneurs might find it interesting to find how they can be the wright amount of bad to be able to talk to people and BE THE ALPHA MALE in the conversation. I had bad luck with girls, but didn't have low self-esteem and didn't knew where the problem was. I read the book and i found out that i was doing almost everything right. So i started thinking why? And then i realized i was sabotaging myself. Most girls i knew were boring people, so my subconscious decided to sabotage me so that i wouldn't hang out with boring people and after i realized that i still don't like boring(hot) girls. So some of us have a problem with girls not because of low self-esteem, but because of too high self-esteem(how i wish i wasn't so picky :D).
This reminds me of pg's "Why Are Nerds Unpopular?". Obviously these "negative"-- and innate [directly or emerging from other innate behavioral] dispositions, are present and purposefully developed and honed extensively by individuals who prioritize the game of attracting mates, and gaining access to higher quality/quantity of mates. Or maybe these universal traits just emerge from the practical requirements of achieving their goals. In either case, being that type of person requires an enormous time commitment. Social hierarchy climbing is their one ambition in life, and sex is their reward.
It's a lot more compatible with being a politician or power-seeker in business, than it is with being a geek. The geek seeks to create/understand. So their creations and discoveries are their reward. The geek may want what the alpha male has, even want it strongly, but values the primary geek rewards more strongly, and will never prioritize the alpha male reward enough to be that other person. And it's good that many of us are not that person, because I couldn't see much value in a world without ambition to do actually worthwhile things.
Bad science... The article seems to suggest that this is 'genetic'. That there must be coded traits that somehow have to be favored or at least persist.
I have been the nice guy and the bad guy many times. A lot of it has to do with ones mood and phase of life. Pretty weak to suggest that this is genetic. I don't buy it.
I know what you mean about how genetics is often thrown up as the answer without much discussion on the complexities of human development.
The discussion on intelligence often suffers from this. There's a level where we are talking purely about the myelin sheath and conductance latencies among other speed factors in the brain (for example my brother-in-law is obsessed with learning about history, but he is "slow" despite his knowledge), but intelligence is driven by a desire to work through and explore the kinds of things (reading, writing, problem solving) that as a side effect give individuals the qualities that are judged as intelligent. And the presence of smart adults causing children to see these activities as exciting, and also pulling them up via active feedback and passive schaffolding, makes all the difference. Some people have introduced the notion of "multiple intelligence" to describe the fact that a difference focus of one's attention in developing as a person will lead to difference categories of competency.
And my reason for bringing this up is that some will try to explain intelligence in entirely genetic terms but this doesn't square with what is observed. Evolutionary psychology helps explain a lot of things, but it is all too easy to oversimplify.
If I were give my guess right now about how genetics influences traits, I would say that it obviously determines thousands of reflexive behaviors we perform, and of course it establishes potential competencies, but I think it additionally can set up guideposts that determine personality. It is known (if I remember correctly) that in some primitive organisms a single gene switches on avoidance versus more social behavior. There are plenty of ways in which even the complex behavior of behavior of humans could be guided by genetics into certain personality tendencies or strategies. For example if the cingulate cortex turns out to be a behavior-judging module in the brain among other things, then genetics could program the cingulate to fire a note of concern to the system, or fail to do the same, with regard to whatever complex decision is being made, whenever it involves a choice to be with people or not be with people.
Similarly if there are multiple genetically guided development strategies for handling social information, and some of them just don't scale that well to larger groups of people, then perhaps this would produce anxiety and a sense of not being able to handle the situation, among people who have the more brittle genetic strategy. But the same argument could be made for voluntary control that would influence the underlying cognitive strategy, because not enough is known yet.
You just need to get rejected a bunch of times because you're a nice guy, resulting in plummeting self-esteem, which naturally leads to multiple substance abuse problems and a penchant for bar fights. Then you'll have to resort to petty crime to support your habits, which leads to you getting caught, eventually enough times to go to prison - and, bingo, when you get out you can get the women who rejected you before :-)
lol. Taking your joke literally, I think one would simply fuck his life up in the process, without the upside of getting women at the end.
From what I've seen, guys with high time preference (short-term oriented) win out at the beginning, and guys with low time preference (long-term oriented) win out in the end. Pretty tautological stuff. Guys who spend high school working out, worrying about clothes and social standing, and prioritizing their sex lives get sex early on. But then you have Wall Street bankers from elite colleges, and they get a lot of women too. They were often nerds in high school.
Now, you could argue bankers are "bad" in the moral sense, but like the quasi-criminal guys at clubs, they have status and (in many cases) the attending arrogance. I think the "bad" question is more of a question of status than morality, but the two get mixed up because people with status aren't always super nice.
Reminds me of Benjamin Graham (the "Dean of Wall Street" and Warren Buffett's mentor), who basically ignored girls altogether until he was well into his 20s, and then became one of Wall Street's most notable womanizers in his 50s and 60s. It probably helped that by then he was filthy rich and quite famous in his field.
Tony Montana: In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.
I disagree (but not enough to vote you down). I think you're on the right track, but it's not the tact filter that you should ignore. It's the "I can't possibly talk to that girl because she'll reject me," filter that you need to ignore.
I'll agree the fear of rejection is bad, but if one focuses on not being shy, one will find out why one was shy in the first place. One needs to know protocol first.
Heh, I didn't think my comment was going to generate this much discussion. Anyways, my point was that shy people have this weird thing where they tend to only say really nice, sugary things. It comes off a little odd (or so I've heard). So a good place to start is by biting your tongue less. Or something like that.
It's not, really, but there's presumably a number of "good guy" geeks here who have difficulty interacting with the opposite sex. Unfortunately the hacker-entrepreneur community is also implicitly a community of guys with various inadequacy issues, so stories like this (I remember one purporting to explain why beautiful women marry less attractive men making it the front page) and, say, stories about getting bullied get voted up.
/*
This story could be hacker news if the discussion were focused on:
1. how countervailing strategies can be successful for some niches
2. what this tells us about human motivation
3. some other aspect that tells us something about what it is to be human.
but since the discussion seems to have started at the level of rhetorical oneupsmanship and be sinking rapidly into resentful misogyny; it is neither news, nor for hackers.
*/
Being confident in yourself could easily be confused with slight narcissistic, being impulsive could certainly be a good thing, and not all aspects of Machiavellianism are bad. It's not clear to me that their chosen traits actually define a "bad guy".
In order to determine who got the most girls, all they did was ask the people in the study (all college students) "how many partners they had and whether they were seeking brief affairs."
They point out that the "dark triads" had more partners and more desire for short-term relationships, but they don't even touch on the quality of the partners or the relationships. Their definition of getting a girl apparently includes one-night stands. Contrary to popular belief, there are girls who just want one-night stands as well, so the guys didn't "get" anything special; they engaged in an even trade. Getting a girl, in my opinion, is getting a girl to care about you. The study doesn't even touch on that.
Also, as daniel-cussen said (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224005), because the study only focuses on college students, it gives far too much weight to trivial, shallow college relationships while not enough touching on the much-more-important relationships that come later in life.