The post is focused on (banter → sex) mainly because that’s the place where I most strongly feel I’m missing something, i.e. I am unable to picture how it would plausibly work. Banter as a general social skill, e.g. for making friends or just having fun conversations or breaking the ice with new people, is something I’m already quite comfortable with.
Indeed, much of the reason I was originally confused about the (banter → sex) pipeline was because I have had so much of that kind of conversation for so many years, and over all that time it did not particularly seem to lead to sex.
Back in college, when one of my CS courses had an RPS tournament, the strategies to beat were:
Kill the process running the opponent’s code. This looks like the opponent crashed, resulting in a win.
Use gdb to get access to the opponent’s random number generator. Then, run opponent’s code with the RNG set to match, in order to perfectly predict what they’ll do.
Obviously this is not in the spirit of the game, but seems worth noting.