One of my fellow mPUAs and meetup participants, “Trophy” (so called because it’s an award for women), sent me an interesting theory about why so many men who are new to the dating community worship gurus who are TERRIBLE in the game. He’s in college learning evolutionary psychology and marketing, and I’m the lucky recipient of his discoveries. He also comes up with a new, cutting-edge theory.
Now, as for the bad gurus, don’t get me wrong, there are many who ARE good and have put in the time and effort to not only learn the game of social arts, but also to learn how to be good instructors. My pickup truck driver “Baron” was one of the greats, but he never trained anyone in a corporate, profit-making way. But he’d put him up against Mystery, Neil Strauss, AFC Adam Lyons and the other well-known gurus any day for his sheer ability to teach picking AND prove it too.
A lot of the best gurus started out in the days of the alt.seduction.fast newsgroups, and most of those original guys are really good instructors. But there’s a new batch of gurus out there who have ebooks, teach boot camps, and generally take people’s money for producing a bad product. Their training is minimal or poorly managed. My students and I have a foolproof way of determining if a guru or PUA is really good, or if they’re just posing with a bunch of models at the club du jour and posting it on Facebook or Youtube. You can’t fake a real attraction and we have a foolproof method of knowing when an in-frame image or video is a real attraction or not. It’s insider information right now but very easy to do and involves pictures of the gurus posting on their websites.
As Trophy puts it, “The Dunning-Kruger effect shows why some people are led by incompetent ‘PUA Gurus.’ more confidence in a decision, regardless of their competition.
So what is this effect? First of all, it is a “cognitive bias”. In other words, when we seek the truth, we sometimes get sidetracked by bias… the inability to see that we are being influenced by reasons other than good, sound, logical reasoning to make a decision or have an outcome. For example, if you have two identical sodas, one in a red can, one in a silver can, and 80 out of 100 people choose the red can, you would think that the red can is the most preferred and base your marketing on that. . But if the red can was in front of a sexy porn star and the silver can was in front of a granny, you’d know there was a selection bias…the guys possibly chose the can based on who held it. not the color of the can. Sometimes we filter what is really behind the decisions we make.
So, beginning or incompetent pick-up artists choose gurus based on this same bias: the less someone knows about a subject, the more they will admire someone equally incompetent, as long as they display confidence in their knowledge. No matter how bad a guru is, the fact that he is confident, pictures of him with a model or star, or a flashy website with good marketing and copywriting will give you more credibility as a guru just because beginners don’t know anything. better.
As the saying goes, “In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
You always hear stories of a student asking a guru to demonstrate his picking skills in the field, and he refuses. Despite all the confident talk, the guy is a phony and a flake. And many students who have gone to boot camps that cost more than $2,500 come home angry that the guy never displayed the skill or energy it takes to be a guru or a master picker. They were fooled by the trust and flashy marketing this guy provided. Many beginning artists don’t know any better based on the Dunning-Kruger effect. Because their guru is incompetent, THEY END THEMSELVES THINKING THEY ARE BETTER THAN THEY ARE, AND ALSO BECOME INCOMPETENT PUAs and “GURUS”.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: An inexperienced person makes bad decisions and reaches the wrong conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.
Lots of students come to me, and when I’m real about their poor skills, they hate me because I’m pointing out faulty teachings from other gurus who didn’t know jack. They say, “XYZ Guru of Jacksystems or Jacklife or Jack Arts or Jack Dynamics couldn’t have been wrong! He makes 2500 a day! He can’t be wrong! He’s taught hundreds of guys and been on VH1 as a dating expert.” How can YOU know anything, you’re an unknown guru from North Carolina!” etc. etc. Once I clear the cobwebs and show you how a true guru can work in the field, and the evidence I teach people about how to critically evaluate a so-called “guru”, their eyes open. It allows them to sort through knowledge with a more critical and conscientious eye and distinguish the good from the bad. This allows them to choose training grounds more critically and cheaply rather than of spending thousands on a charlatan snake oil salesman whose snake oil is his false confidence.
According to Wikipedia: “The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underestimate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.” I don’t know how many students I’ve accepted only to tell them at their first boot camp that they were already masters of the picking arts. They just didn’t see it. His previous instructors did not see him. So the opposite is also true. The Dunning-Kruger effect can make a competent and more skilled person think that their abilities are worse than they really are. So the way I see it, there are instructors teaching social arts who don’t know much about it or how to teach it, creating more people who suffer from illusory superiority.
So be careful with newer programs or instructors. Get testimonials or referrals. Ask others if they have heard of them. Recognize references. It takes a guy who has been in the game and seen the different people out there or experienced the training to help him on his way.
But watch out for the opposite too. Example would be a guy who has the skills who leaves the game because he doesn’t perceive success. Sometimes it takes an adjustment from a teacher like me to be successful. I’ll never forget having boot camp with Kosmo, the winner of VH1’s “The Pickup Artist” season 1. I wasn’t getting as many kiss locks as my wingman even though my wingman said he was good enough to get them and he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t getting them. Kosmo assessed my game and then said, plain and simple, “You forgot about the declaration of intent. Tell the girls you like them! Then continue in the game and go for the kissing.”
I followed his advice and the rest is game history. I was already VERY GOOD at luring and just forgetting a crucial step in the Mystery Method. You just couldn’t see how good it was except from an outside observer. So despite being skilled, he had weakened my self-confidence despite being competent.
I have seen far too many people, including some of my closest allies and colleagues, drop out of the social arts game for this very reason. After a year of work, they give up thinking they had nothing to do when all they had to do was look around and see their true abilities compared to a bunch of less skilled guys with flashy Facebook pages. They didn’t get me as their teacher and guide soon enough. I am not a guru either. I’m just a guy who has proficiency in playing and teaching.
You can read about the Dunning-Kruger effect here on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
In conclusion, beware of the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you worship one guru over another, you may be affected by the same effect and partake of it! If you would like competent instruction on how to pick from a competent master rather than a guru, please visit http://masterpickupartists.com.