How so? When scientists perform studies, they can sometimes benefit (money, job, or simply reputation) by inventing data or otherwise skipping steps in their research. At other times, they can benefit by failing to publish a result when they can benefit by refraining to publish. A scientist who is willing to violate certain ethical principles (lying, cheating, etc) is surely more willing to act unethically in publishing (or declining to publish) their studies.

I submit that if I say, "you should x", and it is not the case that "x is rational", then I'm doing something wrong. Your putative observations should have been associated with downvotes, and the charitable interpretation remains that comments here are in support of rationality.

One thing that came up quickly on a cursory search: http://www.pualingo.com/pua-definitions/boy-friend-destroyer-bfd/ I suppose I should correct myself though - I intended to refer to techniques and attitudes etc. (based on the descriptions of people familiar with the culture, I expect that mysogyny is fairly common, even if not in the majority).

You are using the word incorrectly.

You and I disagree about whether this is collateral damage, not because we have a different definition of collateral damage, but because we disagree about whether there is intent in this situation.

If the end-goal is to have sex with a woman, and you choose to hurt this woman to gain it, then her being hurt is part of the plan - and is thus intentional. It is an important sub-goal of the main plan, which is what makes it intentional.

You could have instead chosen to buy her flowers, flatter her, or to choose a different woman (one that does not need hurting for you to gain the end-goal of sex). The presence of acceptable alternatives is one reason why I consider this situation to not be a case of mere collateral damage, but of intent.

Yep - I agree. It's a classic case that covers both ends of the spectrum.

It also only tends to trip up people that fall for the fallacy of the excluded middle ;)

In this case, it matches my pattern of "intentional damage" and therefore ethically questionable, in my opinion.

That's not to say that if more evidence came up eg information about how it's the only alternative, or if the "greater good" outweighed the downsides... it might still be the only preferable choice... but in any case, I'd take a strong interest in the ethics involved before making the decision if I were put in that position.

The reputational knock-on effects aren't enough to balance things out.

How can you be sure? You may well be noticing the successful compulsive liars (at least, the less subtle ones) and not noticing the guys who told one lie too many to the wrong people in their lives.

So this brings up one of the questions I wonder if PUAs can answer: do you have any kind of metric capable of telling whether something is attractive for "females" or for "the kind of females PUAs find easy targets"? It was obvious when I did my psychiatry rotation that the Cluster B personality disorder patients found themselves drawn to one another. Is the Dark Triad good for picking up women who aren't Cluster B, or primarily for picking up women who are? Or at least, are there tools available to actually answer that question?

Edit: this comment is in reply to wording that cousin_it has now removed from his comment. You can get the gist from the brief excerpt that I have quoted.

You are assuming that I'm trying to give you advice that benefits you?

Thats interesting - especially when you've made it clear that you don't bother to consider whether your actions benefit other people (in fact you choose to actively work against the benefit of other people). I think I made it pretty clear that, due to this behaviour, I neither respect you nor have any particular reason to help you. I was replying to your stated lack of understanding: "I don't understand why it should be adopted." in case you happened to have anything interesting to say about it.

I never thought that on balance you would choose to adopt the rule. :) I gave you the reasons why people do adopt this rule and let you choose for yourself if that applies to your circumstances.

If you want to give advice that benefits me, try to give advice that's actually been proven to benefit me, not advice that oh-so-conveniently happens to benefit you.

I'm sure we can each find oh-so-convenient examples that match what we choose to believe. I also expect that one person being a defector will probably clean up pretty nicely in a society full of people that choose not to defect (on average).

On average, it looks like it works for people that I've met (male and female)... that's about all I can say. Why do you expect that for my advice to be good advice that it has to be 100% true for you as well as me?

If you have anatomical feature X, and someone pushes a button to increase the utility of all people having feature X

This assumes some correlation between anatomical feature X and a term in a person's utility function.

Based on your comment and this exchange, it's not clear to anyone what exactly are we talking about (my first question was "What do you mean?" for a reason). The conflict I took as the topic of the conversation is generally the direction of change in balance of influence (i.e. status) between partners or potential partners in a relationship from the default established by social status quo.

If you reason in CDT style, then the only effect of increasing your own influence is improvement of your experience in your present relationship. (Incidentally, I don't see how your sex is relevant to the character of this activity, the salient category seems to be simply your own person.) This way of thinking seems to explain your discussion in this thread best (correct me if you were in fact assuming something else).

Alternatively, if we are talking about influencing the social status quo, then from the (narrow) point of view of any potential heterosexual relationship, you win from the improvement in relevant aspects of background status of your own sex. It would be obvious that the result of such shift is beneficial overall only if you focus primarily on egoistic value effects of its consequences, ignoring the effect lowered background status has on all of women (which is huge scope). This is essentially the sense which I assumed in making this comment. (This works the other way as well, i.e. the effect worsened relationship experience would have on all of men.)

The reason the first looks like the second to me is that from TDT perspective even the personal decisions you make in influencing the course of your own relationship, without intentionally meddling with the global status war, have global effects through decisions made by other people for similar reasons. If you decide to pursue greater influence in your own relationship, this allows you to infer that other people would behave similarly, which makes for a greater damage to opposite sex's values than just your partner's.

So even if we make the reasonable assumption that you hold your own immediate preferences in greater value than other people's, and so you'd be inclined to bargain in your own direction, the combination of possibly greater marginal value of improvement for the other sex with nontrivial scope of the decision makes it non-obvious.

The rest rests on the factual and moral questions of who gets how much greater marginal benefit from shifts in the current default status quo influence. There seem to be convincing arguments for both sexes.

Actually, I quite deliberately didn't argue anything, because I wasn't even sure that I understood what claim you were making.

Instead, I attempted to make my inferences explicit, asked for confirmation, and asked for clarification on the piece that remained unclear to me. (I'd still sort of like those things.)

So it's not surprising that you can't figure out what I'm arguing with, though it's a little puzzling that you assumed I was arguing with anything at all. Re-reading my comment I'm not sure where you got that idea from.

Anyway: I agree that the willingness of my partners doesn't change whether I like sex more than no-sex or vice-versa.

And I'm not sure why it matters, but just to be clear: if I take "I like X more than Y" in a situation to mean that I estimate that I prefer the actual X in that situation to the counterfactual Y, then I've had sex I liked more than no-sex, I've had sex I liked less than no-sex, I've had no-sex I liked more than sex, and I've had no-sex I liked less than sex.

Edit: Um. Apparently the comment I was replying to got deleted while I was replying to it. Never mind, then?

The sides are "those who condemn (so as to discourage) the use of pickup" and "those who see nothing wrong with pickup".

Forgive me, but this is the fallacy of the excluded middle (it's possible you do not ascribe to there being just two sides, but you are unclear on this point).

The "sides" as I see it also include, at the very least:

"those who condemn certain common practices of pickup that deliberately harm other people, but are fine with (or even encourage) other practices that are not"

You may be right... the reason I made my inferences explicit was precisely so that we can be clear about this stuff, rather than move forward as if we were talking about the same thing when we aren't.

That said, I was responding to the sentence: "The goal of pickup is to engineer the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, not the most desirable outcome for the victim," which seemed to be what Nancy was responding to.

Oh, there are many more difficult.

In the mainstream discourse it's undoubtedly so, but on LW, I'm not so sure. On many occasions, I've seen people here make comments about topics that are seen as even more inflammatory or outlandish in respectable mainstream circles, only to get calm, rational, and well-argued responses. Certainly I can't think of any topics that are such a reliable discourse-destroyer on LW as the gender relations/PUA issues. I find it a fascinating question why this is so.

Point taken. Its representation here is probably better explained by calling it one of the more difficult ones that we don't have a taboo against discussing, although it's definitely high up on my canonical list of mind-killing subjects outside of LW as well.