Saturday Night’s Alright For Blogging

What else would I be doing on a Saturday night?
Apropos of what other people are doing, I offer this days-old link on seduction from Tyler Cowen of the must-read Marginal Revolution. (If you can’t trust an economist to improve your game, who can you trust?) Cowen’s point is that those who think that a strategy of playing hard-to-get will lead to success in the meat dating market are right, but only up to a point, Lord Nash. (ITA’s own Josh Claybourn has argued the game-theoretic properties of dating before.) Cowen notes that being hard-to-get can’t succeed in isolation; it isn’t a dominating strategy, in other words, but rather one that works only when the environment is right.
And so the post-modernists are proven right: You can’t build a theory of anything useful from first principles.