Hugh, your complaint as I understand it is that society not only doesn't provide rituals which turn "dating and mating" into a well defined process with agreed upon rules, but in fact actively resists the demands of people who would use such rituals.

Dating already involves enough rules and rituals. I'm not advocating adding any more. What I want to see is more specification of how to perform under the existing rules and constraints (e.g. the constraint of the typical desires of the people you are trying to date).

Although it's often difficult to define in advance how to behave in a particular situation, it can sometimes be possible to codify the types of things to avoid, or to know what result your behavior needs to achieve, even if you must improvise how you get to that result.

Furthermore, on a more global level, it's possible to taskify the problem of learning how to date. For instance, learning how to increase your attractiveness in general, or learning how to dynamically improvise in situations of uncertainty.

I'm arguing that society is blocking problem-solving on both local problems ("what do I see when I approach the attractive stranger at this party?" or "what do I need to accomplish with the first few things I say to this person?") and global problems ("what do I need to do to develop into the kind of person who knows what to say to attractive strangers at party without even needing introspection?").

Yet when one researches the question "what are the formalized rituals of dating and mating", well, there's plenty of information out there. May I suggest that it would be wortwhile to yourself and to your readers to do the research, and report back on what you found, and then possibly point out any remaining large gaps?

What makes you think I haven't? Yes, I haven't really got specific about what exactly I think is lacking in conventional dating advice, though I might in the future if I consider it on topic for LessWrong. For now, my main topic has been an attitude about breaking down dating—and the process of learning how to date—into tasks to the extent that this is possible.

The strategy that relied on building up a social network looked a lot more appealing to me, at least in the professional domain.

One's social network is important in both business and dating. Social network is a big plus, but it isn't a prerequisite for dating.

That rather depends on the specifics of your problem statement. The "problem" of sexual encounters is at least partly taskified (think "oldest profession in the world")...

Most people do not have a problem statement that can be solved by the oldest profession.