The topic change is that when I made the uniqueness comment, I was talking about womanizers I've known, not PUA or famous PUA gurus. Secondly, you keep equivocating on unique. Of course every person offers a unique experience of interaction. They are also all made out of utterly unique particles in utterly different configurations and no two of them have ever precisely occupied the same locations in time-space. That's all irrelevant for the sense of uniqueness I explained, which has do with behavior and interchangeability.
The way in which I've said that womanizers I've known do not behave as if women are unique is that when they go out clubbing, if they're with a bunch of friends, they're quite willing to draw straws to see which of the potential women they get to chat up, and they hardly care which of many attractive women they get to go home with, as long as they go home with one of them, for they consider them not to be unique in the requisite sense of being attractive and willing to sleep with them. Sure they're all different, but the differences are irrelevant to them, except possibly as a strategy to use for seducing the woman in question.
That's all irrelevant for the sense of uniqueness I explained, which has do with behavior and interchangeability.
And you're still missing my point: the behavior you describe can be generated by many different beliefs or perceptions internal to the person generating the behavior, and you cannot know (unless you ask, or at least perform a more detailed test than the one you've desribed) whether the person is willing to meet many different women because he does -- or does not -- consider them unique.
That is, until you ask, you can't know whether his thoug...
Disclaimer: If you are prone to dismissing women's complaints of gender-related problems as the women being whiny, emotionally unstable girls who see sexism where there is none, this post is unlikely to interest you.
For your convenience, links to followup posts: Roko says; orthonormal says; Eliezer says; Yvain says; Wei_Dai says
As far as I can tell, I am the most active female poster on Less Wrong. (AnnaSalamon has higher karma than I, but she hasn't commented on anything for two months now.) There are not many of us. This is usually immaterial. Heck, sometimes people don't even notice in spite of my girly username, my self-introduction, and the fact that I'm now apparently the feminism police of Less Wrong.
My life is not about being a girl. In fact, I'm less preoccupied with feminism and women's special interest issues than most of the women I know, and some of the men. It's not my pet topic. I do not focus on feminist philosophy in school. I took an "Early Modern Women Philosophers" course because I needed the history credit, had room for a suitable class in a semester when one was offered, and heard the teacher was nice, and I was pretty bored. I wound up doing my midterm paper on Malebranche in that class because we'd covered him to give context to Mary Astell, and he was more interesting than she was. I didn't vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary. Given the choice, I have lots of things I'd rather be doing than ferreting out hidden or less-than-hidden sexism on one of my favorite websites.
Unfortunately, nobody else seems to want to do it either, and I'm not content to leave it undone. I suppose I could abandon the site and leave it even more masculine so the guys could all talk in their own language, unimpeded by stupid chicks being stupidly offended by completely unproblematic things like objectification and just plain jerkitude. I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended. (In general, I'm very hard to offend. The fact that people here have succeeded in doing so anyway without even, apparently, going out of their way to do it should be a great big red flag that something's up.) If you're wondering why half of the potential audience of the site seems to be conspicuously not here, this may have something to do with it.
So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support, but usually after I or, more rarely, someone else sounds the alarm, and usually without much persistence or apparent investment. There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems, which does nothing to disincentivize being piggish around here - some people seem to earnestly care about the problem, but this isn't enforced by the community at large, it's just a preexisting disposition (near as I can tell).
I would like help reducing the incidence of:
We could use more of the following:
Thank you for your attention and, hopefully, your assistance.