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Morendil comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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This is a really interesting point, actually. What is about PUA that makes it more concerning from a consent standpoint than, say, advertising? Both are manipulative, and I see considerable parallels between the two. (I find it hard to believe that the big advertising firms have put less effort into figuring out how to get people to do things than pickup artists have...) Should advertising to someone require their consent? Is there a significant difference between product placement in entertainment media and PUA techniques that are based on normal conversations, as opposed to PUA techniques based on being in a traditional picking-up-dates scenario, which seem more like standard commercials? What does consent even mean in the context of situations like PUA or advertising where the point of the manipulation is to get you to say yes? Is it even possible to require consent to that kind of thing, without just pushing the problem back a level and having the manipulators focus on getting you to give your consent to be advertised/PUA'd to?
There are some PUA techniques, at least, which only work on people who are not aware of them. There's this funny passage in The Game which discusses how one group of guys is preemptively spoling another group's pick-up lines at a party, and later on something along the same lines happens to the protagonist (it would be spoilerish to give any more detail).
By contrast I doubt that advertising agencies would suffer much if their techniques were exposed; the reason Avatar was so successful, I surmise, is simply that they saturated the public's awareness with it, which only required a large cash outlay.
"Techniques which only work against you because you're not aware of them" is one of the reasons for the PUA's bad rap, I suspect. (There are others, such as insincerity, but that'll have to be for another time.)
This sounds intuitively like a good heuristic, but the underlying logic isn't obvious to me. Can you expand?
Assume that when someone finds out about a technique, they judge whether they think it ought to work on them or not, and adjust their behavior accordingly. If a technique doesn't work when the subject is aware of it, that usually means that they would decide, for some reason, that they don't want it to work. So if a technique works only when the subject is unaware of it, then using that technique is going against their preferences.
Pretty much. I like to contrast this with the techniques I use in sales meetings to guide the sale toward closing, which I not only don't mind if my clients find out about them, I'm usually happy to feature them if the occasion arises.
"Sales techniques" is something that seems cringeworthy to many people - I've had more than one person confirm that. One of the happiest find in my careers as a freelance was this set of non-manipulative sales techniques.
Solution selling in particular was a watershed in turning me from an engineer into a (pretty successful) salesman while getting rid of any qualms I might have had about the transition. It helps a lot that what I'm selling is my own services and I happen to know what I'm good at; but that's the point of solution selling.
FWIW, it's the increasing frequency of such events occurring that has forced the evolution of "natural" methods, which aren't vulnerable to such revelations. (Since they attempt mainly to modify the male's personality and expressiveness, rather than teaching him ways to manipulate.)