Come to think of it the lessons are remarkably similar to those found in Alicorn's Luminosity that I've just been reading. I would go as far as to recommend Luminosity to people interested in gaining "PUA" kinds of qualities.

Amusingly, I'm trying to portray Edward as a little awkwardly unluminous whenever I can do it without screwing up the plot.

It isn't creepy, but it's very impersonal so far as relationships are concerned.

I agree with your perception that a lot of pickup discussion seems impersonal in the sense that it discusses commonalities across large groups of women. Why is this? Is it a "bug" in pickup, or a "feature"? In my view, the answer is "both."

A lot of knowledge in pickup is about the stages of the interaction that occur before you can really get to know someone on a personal level. You have to make a good enough impression for someone to even want to sit down with you and let you get to know them. As a result, it doesn't work to build models of people completely on-the-fly from the ground up in the middle of interacting with them.

Until you can get to know someone on a personal level, all you have to work with is an impersonal initial model. You start with a set of priors about how someone works based on what reference classes seem appropriate, and you update your beliefs about how they work when you gain new evidence.

Pickup artists have been doing a lot of work trying to figure out the correct priors to approach women with. As you can see from how AMP differs from what you've run into before, there is still some disagreement. The choice of reference classes in the explicit discourse of the seduction community sometimes seems a bit clunky. Often, only one reference class is described: "women." Also, PUAs don't explicitly talk much about how to update beliefs about women, and what evidence to look for in order to update.

Yet even though PUAs don't have the most sophisticated set of reference classes or updating process for their beliefs about women, there are plenty of ideas in the seduction community that relate to those skills. "Eliciting values" was a major part of Ross Jeffries NLP-based seduction starting in the late 80s; it involve drawing out a woman's individual values and beliefs and using those to interaction with her. There is also the notion of "calibration," the process of adjusting one's behavior to the individual woman's personality and responses (which sounds like it depends on some sorts of updating).

Why don't PUAs have more sophisticated reference classes? One possibility is that PUAs are stuck in stereotypes about women. Another possibility is that their single reference class of "woman" is actually useful enough to attain maps of commonly-encountered types of women that match up to the territory. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive: it's possible that a singular PUA reference class of "woman" is just powerful enough to allow them to get improvements in results with mainstream heterosexual women, but still lacking with other sorts of women that PUAs don't encounter so often.

The model that PUAs hold of women shouldn't be thought of as a set of facts about all women; it should be thought of as a set of strong priors that PUAs have found useful with the sorts of women they encounter most frequently.

Of course, the more divergent a woman is from other women, the more likely it is that a PUA's set of priors is wrong. But for women with rarer sets of personality traits and preferences, many PUAs just haven't seen enough of them to have useful models, yet...

...or have they? PUAs are always talking about the importance of "field experience." My hypothesis is that one of the reasons that field experience is necessary is that it helps guys approach future women with a more accurate set of priors, and update their beliefs faster when they encounter new evidence. Perhaps experienced PUAs do have more sophisticated reference classes and update very fast, but their knowledge is so contextual and subconscious that they haven't succeeded in putting it into words yet.

In general, PUAs use a certain set of priors for good reasons. What should our priors about their priors be? Well, we know about the potential for bias and ideology to exist in human communities, which should lower our confidence in PUA priors. On the other hand, we know that pickup is extremely popular and successful worldwide, which should raise our confidence in the priors of PUAs.

Nobody else has suggested a more empirically successful set of starting assumptions than PUAs, or articulated a way to attain better priors through more sophisticated reference classes, so they really have the "priors to beat." Just like it's hard to know how good a fighter is until someone beats them, it's hard to know how good PUA knowledge is until someone beats it and can explicitly describe what they are doing. Currently, it's safe to say that there are people who have beaten the general PUA model of women with a more sophisticated model and better set of reference classes and update process (and who can articulate their knowledge); yet I bet that most of the people who have done so are PUAs, or have some sort of PUA background (like me, for instance).

And yes, it sucks for non-gender-typical women that the best set of priors that men can achieve fails to describe how those women actually work. But when you think about it, the situation is that both gender-atypical women and PUAs are languishing under the statistical tyranny of gender-typical women. It's not the fault of PUAs that the set of starting assumptions they need to avoid getting burned all the time forces them to be wrong with all sorts of unusual types of women. Unless we can give them a better method of setting priors, like more sophisticated reference classes, we really can't knock them for using the priors that seem the most appropriate to them.

Update: See also my response to pjeby.

Do you have any thoughts about how PUAs should develop their priors better?

The problem, as I see it, is that even that link still doesn't have any hint of wanting to be with a particular woman because of her individual qualities.

Hm. I guess you missed the part where fully one-third of the program being sold is devoted exclusively to cultivating curiosity about, and appreciation for "her individual qualities." ;-)

That being said, from a marketing perspective, there's no need to discuss what qualities the reader is looking for, since those will be distinct to the individual reader. Instead, the copy assumes only that they be women that the reader wants to have a deeper connection with.

(I'm not sure about the testimonials on that page, but I have seen others on the site from men who purchased some of this company's programs in order to improve their connection with a girlfriend or spouse.)

An important piece of background info, by the way. The number one question received by PUA trainers, or asked on PUA forums, etc. is, "How can I get that one girl I like?" (followed by, "How can I get back that girl I like that I blew it with?")

What guys actually want, and what they like to signal to other guys that they want, aren't always the same thing. ;-)

One reason, btw, that PUA marketing often emphasizes ability to attract multiple women, has nothing to do with how many women the average man actually wants! One of my mentors in direct marketing once explained to me that the reason you want to make the boldest, most over-the-top claims that you can still support/prove, is because the average person reads the claim and thinks, "wow, if it'll do that, then for [my much smaller need/want] it ought to work easily!"

In other words, bold or exaggerated marketing claims are not made because the average reader needs the result shown, but rather, because they give the reader something to discount back down to the level of the reader's own requirements!

If you look at most effective (i.e mostly direct) marketing, you'll see this principle being used all over the place... for example, most of us do not need to glue ourselves to a girder via a hard hat, yet Krazy Glue nonetheless used that as a product demonstration. The intention is for the viewer to infer, "if it'll do that, then it should be good enough for what I need."

It was interesting-- and new to me (you may have mentioned it, though)-- that in this version, the crucial thing wasn't status markers, it was moment-by-moment connection.

There is some (minor) overlap between theories, in the sense that you could say the qualities that AMP are teaching are status markers of a sort. But I think it's actually more likely to be the other way around: i.e. that it's these qualities themselves (presence, appreciation, and integrity) that are evolutionarily desirable/attractive and lead to having status, rather than status leading to having these qualities, or these qualities being status signals.

Even Mystery gives some air time to things other than status and fertility signals. He discusses the creation of individual identities targeted to a smaller reference group of the kind of women you hope to attract.

Yes, and he also talks about "love" all the time. He considers love to "pair-bonding," but it's definitely more than status and fertility.

He discusses the creation of individual identities targeted to a smaller reference group of the kind of women you hope to attract. Mind you, even then he makes it quite clear that he "doesn't give a @#$% who you are underneath, just what identity you are going to construct and convey."

It's true that he doesn't talk much about whether the identities you display should be genuine or not. I think he would agree that it's better if they are genuine. And since he is so big on outer game, he may feel that if you can make a consistent display of a certain identity, you will grow to fill whatever big boots you are walking around in. In my experience, that's actually true. As I've argued here before, if you can get a bunch of people to think that you are really cool without any significant factual lies, then you are that cool.