What say you?

I agree, pretty much completely.

In general, I thought the recent discussions on seduction were beneath us. First I was put off by the de-personalization of people considered as sexual partners; and then I was equally offended by the undercurrent of "some people don't deserve (a high level of) sexual gratification, because they're not attractive enough" running through some of the indignant responses that I should otherwise have agreed with. For all the talk about "altruism" and concern for "humanity" in this community, there wasn't much of that spirit to be found anywhere in those threads.

Having locker-room discussions in public is low-status behavior. Now it is a debatable question whether we should go out of our way to signal high status. (I for one think the prestige of Overcoming Bias, run as it was by high-status folks like Robin Hanson and associated with no less than Oxford University, contributed in no small part to getting us this far, and is something we are in danger of losing to the extent we become perceived as a group of underachieving sex-starved male computer programmers in their twenties.) But I think most of us should be able to agree that signaling low status is not helpful toward our goals as a community (which after all don't necessarily include individual members' getting laid in the short term).

So, yes, this is in fact an argument for a certain kind of political correctness -- just enough of it to avoid signaling low status if at all possible. Let me suggest a heuristic: this should in theory be a place where someone like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett would be comfortable posting. (Speaking of which, why haven't we seen them here? They share many of our goals and interests.) Now these are folks who definitely aren't unwilling to call a spade a spade. At the same time I have a feeling they'd be turned off by some of the discussions of "PUA" and the like.