The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships: Ruthlessly Optimized Strategies for Dating, Sex, and Marriage

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The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships: Ruthlessly Optimized Strategies for Dating, Sex, and Marriage by Malcolm Collins – eBook Details The authors cover numerous aspects of relationships: different dating markets, attraction strategies, to all sorts of practical questions which come up over the course of a relationship. Their approach throughout might be summarised as: decide on what you want; then look at the facts, logic, and best empirical knowledge for how it achieve it. Thinking like this, without ideological bias or lazily accepting common assumptions, is surprisingly rare and really refreshing.

If you're single and can't find the right partner, you'll understand why that has been happening and how to effectively find a mate that is aligned with your values and goals in life. It breaks down the dating mindset games. I think you'll be able to avoid wasting time on partners that won't last. I read many relationship books before but I always felt like depending on who wrote the book (either a female or a male) there was always a bit of bias towards one gender. This book is so different! It looks at relationships from a very objective point of view. If you were raised in the absence of a cohesive culture—or don’t like your given culture—but see the value of cultural and religious traditions, this book is for you.

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At long last a book that offers new and very unique perspectives on this important topic, presenting well researched information and compelling theories instead of the usual, sentimental therapists' views emphasizing self acceptance, reflection, feelings and blah blah blah. You knew "the real world" couldn't possibly be so mushy, right? There are 12 relationship lures you can use to find and keep a partner, which will directly affect the partners and relationships you’ll get. Humanity consists of coevolving software (our religion and culture), firmware (our hardcoded proclivities, such as language acquisition), and hardware (our brains). Ripping out a third of the equation has led to innumerous unintended—and typically negative—consequences. This book offers a guide to rebuilding or fortifying this increasingly neglected aspect of the human condition. Any group of people expected to work synergistically needs a system that structures their interactions. That system is “governance.” The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance takes a first principles approach to exploring the ways governance structures affect the humans living under them (and vice versa), with a special focus on how human psychology interacts with the structures that facilitate our interaction with other people.

I recommended this book to my male friends who are struggling with the dating scene as well, since I personally found this book to be insightful and useful. I think bearing in mind that the concept of BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement), aka Opportunity Cost in Economics (the second best alternative you can get next to the option you are evaluating), is incredibly important while dating, as the authors are trying to remind us readers. You should always know what your objectives are, how much you are willing to concede and if nothing works, what truly can make you happy in your personal life, BEFORE going into a relationship or even falling head over heels over someone. The authors, Malcolm Collins and Simone Collins have provided a well-thought-out book with some vivid imagery to help further and strengthen their advice. I had to smile at some of the comparisons however in their advice. Easy to understand and follow, they break the advice down into relatable comparisons. If you worry your culture or religion will go extinct and would like to see it endure across generations, this book is for you. Long-Term Relationship: Openly explaining that you’re looking for a long-term relationship will appeal to those who want the same. The relation between assumption # 3 and the problem of confounding may not be immediately apparent, but the intuitive idea is that the action of the confounding variable makes the independent variable and the residuals “move together” [ 2].

Cognitive separation is when people are simply roommates that share some income, have sex, and maybe even kids or pets. If you’re in a cognitively siloed relationship, you divide entire life domains, like finances or child-raising, between each other. A cognitively integrated couple, however, shares the various stages of the decision-making process across all domains of life. According to the Collins’, a relationship lure is the value you offer a potential partner. It sets the stage for the short and long-term quality of the partnership, so it’s vital that you get it right. Assumption #5 — Normality assumption: the residuals follow (the same) Gaussian distribution with mean zero and standard deviation sigma Why do we need these assumptions?

The Collins’ describe 12 lures in total. The first six – dominance, niceness, sexual exploration, easiness, sneakiness, or a promise of love – are inefficient. They lead to unstable relationships. The last six work better in securing a good, lasting relationship: Simone and Malcolm Collins present relationship theory and advice in a manner that is at once empathetic and devoid of sentimentality. As strange as this sounds, the combination works. In fact, it's a lot of fun to see relationships get dissected and rehashed from a more economic and biological perspective (rather than an emotional one).We all want our friends to support us, but when it comes to supportive lovers, society isn’t as encouraging. As the Collins’ say: The thing is, if your model exhibits perfect multicollinearity then there are multiple (in fact infinite) solutions to the problem of minimizing the least square sum of residuals. While this is not necessarily a problem for making predictions, it makes peeking at the coefficients pointless: their values won’t have much to do with the real correlation between features and target (the variance associated to their estimators being infinitely large). Use case 3: prediction with causal interpretation Relationships lures work like fishing lures. If you want to have a specific kind of relationship, you’ve got to use a certain lure. When we make an excuse like “all guys are the same,” often, we’re just trying to attract someone the wrong way. If a fisherman thinks all fish have whiskers, he’ll only use bait designed to catch catfish – and catfish(ed) is all he’ll get. You'll learn everything you need to know about dating and creating the relationship of your dreams.