ETA: There is now a third thread, so send new comments there.
Since the first thread has exceeded 500 comments, it seems time for a new one, with Eliezer's just-posted Chapter 33 & 34 to kick things off.
From previous post:
Spoiler Warning: this thread contains unrot13'd spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality up to the current chapter and for the original Harry Potter series. Please continue to use rot13 for spoilers to other works of fiction, or if you have insider knowledge of future chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
A suggestion: mention at the top of your comment which chapter you're commenting on, or what chapter you're up to, so that people can understand the context of your comment even after more chapters have been posted. This can also help people avoid reading spoilers for a new chapter before they realize that there is a new chapter.
Right. There is only so much that PUA materials can even say about individual women. Dealing with individual women and taking into account her personal characteristics is the job of the PUA, not of the PUA teacher. All the teacher can do is give the PUA a set of tools, and give the PUA the task of customizing those tools and figuring out which tools apply to which women.
That's a good point. I think it's true for other reasons, also. A lot of men would like to have a relationship with women of a similar level of looks and intelligence, yet those women are out of reach. To be able to have a relationship, these men need more choices in women.
Dating multiple women may or may not be the goal, but the right goal to aspire to is to have a high enough level of attractiveness that multiple women will want to date you, even if you only want a long-term relationship with one woman. If you want to date women with multiple men after them, then you need to be the sort of guy who has multiple women after you. More choices in women gives you more relationship prospects.
For men who are unsuccessful with women, "How can I get that one girl I like?" is sort of the wrong question. It's like someone who's never played the violin asking "how do I play the Brahms violin concerto?" or someone with no startup experience asking "how do I get acquired by Google?" The mistake in these questions is trying to solve a certain problem before having an understanding of the fundamentals involved in solving problems of that type.
As I pointed out to Nancy, developing a model of people from the ground-up, on-the-fly every time you interact with someone is not scalable. Trying to give a woman a personalized experience that way is usually going to give her a crappy experience because you spend most of the time blundering around out of a misplaced fear of being "impersonal" or "stereotyping" (because heuristically, the search space of possible behaviors is much larger than the space of attractive behaviors). Instead, start with a framework of priors based on any similarity you can see between her and other women you've interacted with in the past, and update them on-the-fly by watching for feedback; that's the real way to create a personalized experience for a woman in a way that actually works.
The reality is that most of the time in social interaction, other people who meet you probably make up their mind about you before you have much chance to get to know them as a person and update your beliefs about them very much. As a result, your process for making a good first impression cannot be dependent on having very much personalized knowledge. If you do, you will just be way too slow. People aren't going to still for several hours and tell you their life stories, listen to yours, and only then decide their impression of you.
While I do think it's very important that PUAs update their beliefs about individual women during interactions with them, it's absolutely correct for them to begin by applying "impersonal" knowledge about large groups of women. PUAs have the right idea, even if their updating and references classes aren't as sophisticated as they could be.