Game involves a strong element of applied psychology, and thus it behoves the aspiring player to make a review of ‘normie’ academic psychology to plunder key concepts and get abreast of the discipline. It’s not difficult to grasp because the social sciences are – to put it mildly – not where civilisation’s finest minds go to work. [1] If you’re entirely new, I’d suggest a UK A-level textbook such as Richard Gross’s Psychology. It’s written for average IQ teenagers so my esteemed readers should have no problem whizzing through it. [2]

There are some great concepts in there, even at the A-level entry point, and one I like [3] is the Dunning Kruger effect: “a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is.”

Your first reaction is likely to be a scoff, at all those stupid other people who keep falling into this trap. A few seconds later you may feel a slight wobble, a tremor from deep down, that perhaps you too could fall into this trap and not realise it. Likely, you squashed that thought and turned your mind to the more spectacular examples of Dunning Kruger on PUA YouTube [4]. Generally, the literature considers the DK effect to be a problem, because it leads to an inaccurate model of the world and encourages overconfidence.

Overconfidence? you say.

Yes.

And that’s why PUAs have a unique relationship to the DK effect. If you’re trying to build a bridge over the Rio Grande, you’d better have an accurate estimation of your engineering skills. If you’re trying to smoke out globalist traitors from the highest levels of the NSA, CIA and FBI [5], you’d better have an accurate assessment of the world.

But if you’re trying to pick up women? Well, as Heartiste has so often advised us, overconfidence is king. I don’t refer to him as often as I should so let’s lavish a full quote box on his advice, from the Sixteen Commandments Of Poon:

XI. Be irrationally self-confident
No matter what your station in life, stride through the world without apology or excuse. It does not matter if objectively you are not the best man a woman can get; what matters is that you think and act like you are. Women have a dog’s instinct for uncovering weakness in men; don’t make it easy for them. Self-confidence, warranted or not, triggers submissive emotional responses in women. Irrational self-confidence will get you more pussy than rational defeatism.

Delusions of grandeur are absolutely essential for the aspiring PUA. Speaking from my own experience, if I’d known how low my SMV really was, how bad my Game was, and how difficult the road ahead was…. I’d have given up at the beginning. The quest to bang youngerhottertighter is a foolhardy one in which we are trying to beat Nature at her own game. Most aspiring players are fucking insane for even thinking they can do it.

And yet they try, and more of them succeed in rapid escalating and first-date sodomising Mother Nature than we’d ever expect. How? How is this possible? Let’s first consider the problem. The best way to have casual sex with many pretty women is to be (i) high SMV (ii) surpremely confident (iii) sure of your eventual success. Most aspiring PUAs face the following problems:

1. Low SMV
2. Low confidence
3. Persistent uncertainty

Fortunately the PUA industry has engineered a meta-game to keep its apprentices on the right path to learning the skills. It does this by engaging in the following tricks.

1. The Monomyth
Joseph Campbell wrote a masterwork distilling the key dramatic elements of literature into a single all-purpose monomyth. His book is The Hero With A Thousand Faces and I’ve written about it before. The key takeway is that when the aspiring player conceives of himself as the hero and the Player’s Journey [6] as a proxy to the Hero’s Journey he is leveraging a deep DNA-level semantic structure within his brain. He is no longer a bumbling fool engaged in a hopeless waste of time that’ll probably end in tears. Rather, he has heeded the call to adventure.

Consider the structure of typical novels and movies. As the Aaron Sorkin Masterclass makes beautifully clear, drama requires Intention and Obstacle. This is what distinguishes it from mere journalism. There is something the hero wants (in our case to bang hot birds) and there is something/s preventing him getting it (being shit with women, being sexually deselected, Nature itself…. this list is very long). The plot structure guides the hero in his quest to overcome the obstacles until finally he achieves his goal. Art house movies aside, he always achieves his goal. When inserting oneself into the monomyth, one gains a deep feeling of inevitability about success. Believe me, you’ll need that.  (Here’s an example of the daygame monomyth in action, leading to results after a tough start)

2. The Path
I remember Tyler once saying, off-hand, in his Blueprint Decoded video seminar words to the effect of “the path is there, all you have to do is walk it”. That’s a little like saying “the mountain is there, all you have to do is climb it” but the point is in the subtext. It’s not random, it’s not a jungle wilderness. There is a path. That implies:

• People have walked it before you
• It is well-trodden and thus easier to walk than jungle thickets
• It leads somewhere worth going
• It has an end

The most powerful inner game is that which rests outside our conscious mind, our assumptions and world view that inform the decisions made consciously. By conceiving of the Player’s Journey as following a path we acquire direction, purpose, and the confidence that we’re not wasting our time on a wild goose chase. That’s powerful considering our path is just an abstraction and that running around chatting up women is fundamentally a rather random act.

3. The Secret Method
Game was originally marketed just like those scam products on how to beat the lottery or the secrets to self defence. If you’re an average man, you don’t expect to achieve above-average results on a level playing field – be it sports, business or girls. The outsize results come when you deploy a tactical advantage unavailable to your competitors such as the Mohammedan hordes using heavy cavalry to colonise Europe, or Charles Martel developing heavy infantry to finally push them back. PUA promises you access to a secret system that provides a tactical advantage over not just the girls you’re seducing, but the rival males (‘chodes’) also competing for them.

When you believe you’re bringing a gun to a knife fight, you develop confidence and a sense of inevitable victory.

So how does this tie in with the Dunning Kruger effect?

Your early dabblings in pick-up will be met with crushing failure and yet…… it won’t feel that way. An objective assessment of my first thousand sets would be: “Banged two mediocre birds. Waste of time”. Yet for all my failure, pain, and despair in that first year I never truly wavered from The Path. The PUA industry had supplied me with all kinds of rationalisations to cushion the pain of reality and to nurture the flame of hope.

“Every rejection is another brick in my palace of Awesomeness”

I truly believed I was better than I really was [7] and that my results were better than they were. I always believed the tsunami of hot pussy was just around the next corner. My Dunning Kruger effect – let’s call it the Stunning Krauser effect – led me like a carrot in front of a donkey. It was my visualisation of the new identity I was growing into. Each time my real abilities advanced (as they necessarily will when you put in the work) my delusional self-image would advance with it.

Your reality may never catch up with your delusion, but so long as both move forward in lock-step, you will get better with women.

It is only when you take a pause on your journey up Relativity Mountain and gaze back at what you were that you truly appreciate how far you’ve come. Looking backwards you can drop the ego and face reality. You can say “actually, that bird was a bit minging” or “that text game was awful” and it doesn’t sting, nor does it knock you off your perilously narrow path forwards.

For the aspiring PUA, the Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that keeps you afloat while you’re learning to swim. Don’t try to overcome it.

[1] Sociology in particular is a swamp of Marxist filth that makes no effort at doing real science but takes great pains to pretend it does.
[2] A general rule when dealing with social sciences is to avoid anything written in the last twenty years, as unlike the hard sciences, the social sciences usually move backwards over time because they are so pozzed. The best work in the entire field was conducted in the fifty years leading up to 1960. I read the 1991 edition so I’ve no idea if later editions have become pozzed.
[3] By “like” I mean “recently accused of personifying, by Jimmy”
[4] I feel like Deepak Wayne deserves a nod here.
[5] Obligatory pro-Trump reference.
[6] It’s no coincidence that I coined this phrase to describe our efforts to get better with women.
[7] Still do. No reason to dismantle a successful delusion mechanism.

If you like the idea of inserting yourself into a monomyth in order to chart your progress upon the Player’s Journey, you might well like my book. It’s the most detailed map of The Path ever written.