Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
tim.blog384 points by imakwana a day ago
384 points by imakwana a day ago
Personally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products. I refer to it as the “self-help mafia.” Tim Ferriss kind of created it.
Every time someone has said some goofy thing will go away because people are getting smarter or realizing something, it's absolutely not the case. A large number of people will always want someone to tell them that they have everything figured out and others just don't see how great they are, that they'll wake up rich and famous one day, that they're powerful, that they're beautiful, etc. Many will pay to be told this. Many will pay for subscriptions to become even bigger and better.
As an extreme example, pickup artists had a wave of success a few years back and people paid big money for those ridiculous courses. They got replaced with Andrew Tate style "a real man just smokes and fights and hates women" type content and people paid money with the hopes of becoming like them. Trends and life goals change, but people still gobble up self help.
I went down a rabbit hole of reading some of the "pickup artist" material many years ago, and it was fascinating because there was a whole range from the really ridiculous "one trick" peddlers who in some cases probably were proto-Andre Tates - isogynists who looked for all kinds of underhanded tactics to trick women and saw it as justified because they saw things as stacked against men - to people who were just a hair shy of more mainstream selfhelp of making yourself better to be more attractive. On the extreme end you'd see NLP, hypnosis and in some cases coaches trying to legitimise things that'd easily cross into assault. On the "near mainstream" end you'd see people pushing meditation, exercise, and mainstream authors on getting better at social situations (e.g. Dale Carnegie).
The former imploded in the aftermath of Neil Strauss' The Game, which made some of the popular techniques well known and/or mocked (e.g. you had Howard on Big Bang Theory who in the beginning "demonstrated" several of the more ridiculous methods) and a lot of the field pivoted towards closer to regular self-help because the weirder stuff would get them called out.
I wonder to what extent that contributed to channeling the people who didn't want to put in the work towards people like Andrew Tate, with the mockery that followed and the less extreme coaches in that field moving away from it leaving a whole bunch of angry young men ripe for the picking, now with one more bone to pick.
I went down that rabbit hole too and actually improved myself. I recommend Juggler (old school), Austen Summers and AttractionGym (Dutch). I would still recommend to use your common sense though. Not everything they say is good advice but I find them giving quite good advice while not being toxic (most of the time).
Though what helped me most was a mix of being more assertive, meditation and a strong sense of playfulness.
I always went the improv route, so while I read a lot of mainstream pickup stuff back then, I was too lazy to use it. Also, when it was clearly mean then I didn’t do it either (such as negging). It was fun to get some skill in being cocky and funny, but ultimately I fell in love with being playful. Communicating that way is so much fun, and it’s fun to go balls to the wall creative. Yep, I am in love with a communication style and way of looking at the world. So there’s that (I also was in love with learning Italian for a while). But my default mode is looking at the world in an analytical and data-driven/empirical way (while not noticing my irrationality).
The more reasonable dating coaches are still out there. They simply aren’t part of the mainstream advice.
The current mainstream advice about dating sucks. Though, to be fair: the mainstream pickup artists from back in the day also sucked. It’s a lot like mining: you dig through a lot of advice that is plain dirt so you can find the gems of advice that are sparsely scattered around the dirt.
I gave some dating advice to some HN’ers. If anyone wants some, feel free to message me. My email is in my profile.
I am married nowadays (after a few relationships).
What I do find interesting is: I can turn this part of myself off and then no woman sees me. Mostly because I lack initiative and look at the world too seriously. It’s handy because I never get into weird situations like a certain woman liking me at work, for example. It also helped when I didn’t know how to break off contact with someone who I knew wasn’t for me.
>The more reasonable dating coaches are still out there. They simply aren’t part of the mainstream advice.
I really want to ask: what would their reputation be if they were mainstream, in your opinion?
I find it to be a very interesting spot of culture and society, like at one point you had a bunch of guys who were dealing with the cognitive dissonance between what society asks of men and what society wants from them in a context that wasn't yet politicized.
It is my impression that when it started showing up a little bit in the mainstream, the accusations of misogyny came, and with that most who actually cared about misogyny left the boat, in public terms. So now all we have left is Tate and the likes.
A lot of the accusations of misogyny were well founded, but there were also a lot of people who genuinely just did struggle with why they couldn't meet people, and who wanted to genuinely improve.
I think effectively those coaches who worried most about reputations to a large extent pivoted from focusing on the dating aspect to more general self-improvement, where dating success might still get mentioned but without so much focus on it, and especially not so much focus on getting sex.
There's lots of mainstream self-help around overcoming shyness and getting better at socialising for example that was/is directly relevant to a lot of people who struggle with dating, and there are lots of ways of framing the non-manipulative, non-creepy parts of a lot of dating coach advice in ways that nobody would consider misoygynist.
But, yeah, I think at least to some extent the attention given to some of this subculture unwittingly ended up driving some of them into the arms of people like Tate. It's not that there weren't plenty of those coaches that deserved negative attention, but the end result might well have been worse.
> A lot of the accusations of misogyny were well founded, but there were also a lot of people who genuinely just did struggle with why they couldn't meet people, and who wanted to genuinely improve.
Agreed
> and there are lots of ways of framing the non-manipulative, non-creepy parts of a lot of dating coach advice in ways that nobody would consider misoygynist.
Yea, agreed
One issue is that pickup artists always framed it as men seducing women. But quite frankly, most ideas would also work the other way around. I remember talking to some dating coaches who strongly disagree with me but they view women too much as women and men too much as men, whereas my view is that we’re humans first and our sex/gender second.
Viewing things in such a gendered way was a factor for misogyny.
Back in the day, I coached a woman to be better at dating. I taught her what I knew and she took her own spin on it and had tons of fun.
Just some examples as to what is interchangeable:
1. Being playful
2. Emotional intelligence
3. Good style
4. Cold approaching
5. Disqualification technique (e.g. what work do you do? I’m a hermit in the woods and sing to birds all day - when you are clearly not)
6. Open body language, and the concept of tonality, body language and non-verbal communication in general
7. Good logistics such as having a place of your own, moving a date to a second or nth location etc. (this just requires planning)
8. Being able to signal intent at the right time (I do it 10 to 60 minutes after when the playful vibe is clearly established)
Women can do these things too, and it works. This is just from the top of my dome. There are many more examples. Such as being optimistic, adventurous and genuinely yourself (I know sounds contradictory, it’s a long topic but yeah works for women who want to seduce men too).
I wouldn’t be surprised if all of this also works for gay/lesbian people but I never thought about that.
The funny thing is that a while after having spent time reading up on it but not really tried many of those techniques, I ran into a woman in a club who started running "textbook game" on me, and in that context reciprocating and trying out even techniques I'd never feel comfortable with on someone who didn't know what was going on was fun because I could tell she also immediately recognised it. It ended up being a fun dance of back and forth. The biggest problem with a lot of those techniques is when one side isn't aware - and of course that is often why they were being thought. But, yeah, the part you list are all definitely interchangeable.
Textbook? So the whole status dance?
The whole status dance was never my thing.
Or more like playful banter? Those vibes are super fun, even though I am not much of a banter guy.
> The biggest problem with a lot of those techniques is when one side isn't aware - and of course that is often why they were being thought.
Seducing someone on pure technique, while possible, screws with many things. One of them is one’s self worth, as someone like that is now dependent on being a certain way that isn’t them.
> But, yeah, the part you list are all definitely interchangeable.
95% of my whole game is listed there, haha.