The PUA bit (“driving away the very gender you’re trying to seduce”) doesn’t follow because seducing women doesn’t mean luring them to LW.
Yes, I can’t imagine any nascent PUAs here are really interested in attempting a text-only seduction of distant, anonymous, females. If they are, they should probably try to attain some basic rationality first, and see why that plan is flawed.
I apparently missed most or all of the PUA discussions here, but my guess is they were trying to discuss strategies—not actually attempting to seduce the women on this forum.
I apparently missed most or all of the PUA discussions here, but my guess is they were trying to discuss strategies—not actually attempting to seduce the women on this forum.
Actually, what happens is that “rationalists should win” usually ends up in someone using PUAs as an example of basic instrumental rationality being applied to winning, or examples from the field of PUA-teacher competition as to the success of visible criteria for rationality teacher awesomeness.
This is then followed by various people (mostly men) denouncing the arts as evil or self-defeating, followed by other men defending them. Unfortunately, this is just as useless of an ongoing conflict as the gender wars; for the most part, the people making ignorant stereotype-based judgments about the pickup arts will no more be convinced by reason or facts than anybody making ignorant stereotype-based judgments about anything. So, I think I at least will stop bothering to answer such ignorance, though if somebody wants to throw together a FAQ page on the wiki, I might be willing to contribute to it. (Certainly, someone with more time is free to link my comments or use the text from them to create such a FAQ).
We could probably generally use more FAQs that summarize the positions on various standard debates here, like the ones on True vs. Useful, Perception vs. “Reality”, etc.
Yes. Also, while the jury’s still out on whether discussing PUA should be deemed offtopic, I consider it self-evident that actual seduction attempts in the comment threads should be downvoted to oblivion, or better yet never happen here. This would be like students using the “anyone got questions?” phase of the lecture as an opportunity for loud flirting.
Yes, I can’t imagine any nascent PUAs here are really interested in attempting a text-only seduction of distant, anonymous, females. If they are, they should probably try to attain some basic rationality first, and see why that plan is flawed.
I apparently missed most or all of the PUA discussions here, but my guess is they were trying to discuss strategies—not actually attempting to seduce the women on this forum.
Actually, what happens is that “rationalists should win” usually ends up in someone using PUAs as an example of basic instrumental rationality being applied to winning, or examples from the field of PUA-teacher competition as to the success of visible criteria for rationality teacher awesomeness.
This is then followed by various people (mostly men) denouncing the arts as evil or self-defeating, followed by other men defending them. Unfortunately, this is just as useless of an ongoing conflict as the gender wars; for the most part, the people making ignorant stereotype-based judgments about the pickup arts will no more be convinced by reason or facts than anybody making ignorant stereotype-based judgments about anything. So, I think I at least will stop bothering to answer such ignorance, though if somebody wants to throw together a FAQ page on the wiki, I might be willing to contribute to it. (Certainly, someone with more time is free to link my comments or use the text from them to create such a FAQ).
We could probably generally use more FAQs that summarize the positions on various standard debates here, like the ones on True vs. Useful, Perception vs. “Reality”, etc.
Yes. Also, while the jury’s still out on whether discussing PUA should be deemed offtopic, I consider it self-evident that actual seduction attempts in the comment threads should be downvoted to oblivion, or better yet never happen here. This would be like students using the “anyone got questions?” phase of the lecture as an opportunity for loud flirting.