One thing that's struck me is how much TRP helps in business. Understanding female psychology is helpful in the oddest places. And understanding business also helps with TRP.

For example, I work a lot with guys at startups and venture capitalist. What I've noticed is that VCs act exactly like women.

When you go to VCs, if you're acting needy and overly placating, you will never get funded. They think, "wow, this company must be crap if they're this eager." If you return their calls too quickly, if you're willing to do a deal too easily, you're screwed.

On the other hand, if they see or hear that other VCs are interested, they're immediately interested. VCs that wouldn't return your calls are calling you. Every day. Multiple times.

If you project confidence, as in "I can get funded in a Manhattan minute if I wanted to," then they are interested.

A guy I know at a top drawer VC told me that they did a comprehensive analysis of every possible variable to predict whether a startup would succeed, and guess what? The best, and only, factors were whether Sequoia, Greylock, and other top drawer VCs invested or not. It was overwhelming.

See, VCs have limited capital. They have to invest it and get a return on it, but startups are very risky. And they can't really tell how well the company is doing. They have to rely on secondary signals, such as how the company founders are acting and how the other VCs are acting.

Like women, they are dependent on the success of their mate/investment for their success. None of them can support themselves, they rely on the success of their startups. This is why VCs are hypergamous. They will drop a startup in half a heartbeat if something better comes along.

The reverse, of how business knowledge can help you understand TRP can be true as well.

Here is an example.

A lot of guys come to TRP because they're very logical and can't figure women out. Why do women act the way they do?

A good framework for explaining this comes from business. In business, we distinguish between complicated problems and complex problems.

Complicated problems are problems like "how do you send a rocket to the moon?" It's hard to calculate, but there is a defined answer.

Complex problems are problems like "how do you raise a child?" There is no one answer that can be calculated because when you do one thing, the child does another, and you have to respond to it.

Football games, as in this classic post by jacktenof hearts's, is another complex problem.

Some problems are both complicated and complex.

You can't "solve" a complex problem analytically. There is no predefined solution. More importantly, there are so many moving parts, applying logic doesn’t work very well. What works? Heuristics - rules of thumb, and trial and error.

A lot of business (and people) run into problems when they confuse one kind of problem for another.

A lot of guys here arrive at TRP after trying to use a hammer to saw wood, trying to use logic to solve a complex problem, namely women's behavior. Or thinking being nicer will lead to sex. Or asking for sex will result in higher likelihood of sex. That if you push forward, the object will move forward.

No.

Just about the most complex problem there is is sexual reproduction. When you push forward, the object will often move backward.

Some of us get led astray though, because sexual reproduction is a complicated and complex problem and we can unravel just a piece of it using logic so we think we can unravel all of it using logic.

No.

The reason we can't figure women out logically is because we're not using the right frame. The frame is that of a complex and complicated problem, where the best you can do is heuristics layered on top of logic.

What's more, women instinctively know this. They use heuristics all the time, because their evolutionary survival depended on solving a problem that's nearly as complex: behavior of men.

So while men sometimes cling to logic even when push comes to shove, women won't. They can't. They're evolutionarily wired to ditch logic and go all in on heuristics when going gets tough.

So let's look at one example of heuristics in action. I made this post, Explaining the Skittles Man a while back.

In it, I quoted a journalist who predicted that Trump was going to win because he treated volunteers the worst. I drew an analogy to women, who often gravitate toward men who treat them the worst (Skittles Man, or "Jerks"), because the men were displaying OI and abundance.

Now when I said Trump was going to win, I was being tongue in cheek because I’m a rational guy and I believed the polls. Plus, in the part of country I’m in, no one thought he was going to win.

But, heuristics won out again. The heuristic “the candidate who needs the volunteers least is going to win” was right.

So let’s call this the Skittles Principle. A woman is well served if she chooses the man who needs her the least. The man who gives her Skittles, not Tiffany’s jewelry.

Women have been evolutionarily wired to maximize survival.

Let’s say there was a power struggle thousands of years ago in a tribe. A woman who followed the Skittles principle (in this case, choosing Trump) would have fared far better than a woman who followed logic or conventional linear wisdom. Women whose hamsters were strong would have lived and reproduced, those whose weren’t would have reached an evolutionary dead end.

"Hilar the Caveman is more intelligent and stronger and is logically likely to win and he treats me like a queen, and is desperate for me to be with him while Trumpo the Caveman treats me like crap because he doesn't seem to need me at all. I will choose Hilar."

Bam. Evolutionary dogmeat.

Evolution is the harshest truth there is. When logic meets failure of sexual reproduction, logic loses.

What this means is that women don't act the way they do because of a defect. It's a feature, not a bug. They are preprogrammed for maximal evolutionary survival, namely to go with their feelz and not for logic, because in the sexual reproduction race, logic cannot keep up with heuristics.