Nancy, I'm a bit confused by your comment.

From my point of view, the PUA believers have the advantage at LW

What does "PUA believer" mean? Out of the folks who discuss pickup positively on LessWrong, I doubt any of them "believe" in it uncritically. However, they may feel motivated to defend pickup from inaccurate characterizations.

I do not see people who want to discuss pickup in a not-completely-negative way on LW as having an obvious advantage. The debate is not symmetrical. Anyone who can be painted as a defender of pickup is vulnerable to all sorts of stigma. Yet the worst they can say in their defense is to call the attackers close-minded or uneducated about pickup.

and being gently told, no it's wonderful, and the non-wonderful bits (the worst of which I'd never heard of until you brought them up, something I'm never sure you quite believed) don't matter when so much of it is different

Yes, different parts of pickup are different. No, the good parts don't necessarily justify the bad parts, but the presence of good parts means that pickup shouldn't be unequivocally dismissed.

being in the brainfog business is best for everyone even though there's no careful way for you to check on the effects on people you're taking charge of for your own good

There are lots of assumptions here to unpack, but I would rather hold off until I understand your views better.

just leaves me feeling rather hopeless about that part of LW.

Me too, but for different reasons.

A specific example: I think you're one of the people who says that some men in PUA start out misogynistic, but become less so after they've had some success with attracting women. I wonder how they treat the women they're with before they've recovered from misogyny. Those women don't seem to be there in your calculus.

I'm hurt that you don't think I've run the most basic consequentialist analyses on these sorts of questions. I've never stated my full moral calculus on pickup, so I don't know how you can say that it has gaps. That would be a complex subject, contingent on a lot of empirical and moral-philosophical questions that I don't know the answer to.

Luckily, since I'm not defending pickup in general, I don't have to know how to perform the moral calculus evaluating pickup in general. But I can assure you that I've thought about it. Nobody has asked me the right questions to learn my thoughts on the subject (well, some people have elsewhere... just not here).

In these discussions, sometimes I feel like some people consider pickup to be evil until proven otherwise, based on their initial impression. And that anyone who speaks positively about pickup in any way (or refutes any criticism) is a "defender" (or as you put it, "believer")... unless they write a long explication of all the problems with pickup that convinces that critics that it's not all bad, and that these believers are not completely horrible people.

Dealing with a biased, inaccurate, and polarized assessment of pickup doesn't exactly put me (and other people discussing pickup in a not-completely-negative way) in the right mood to talk about the practical and ethical problems we have with pickup. Just because we don't nail 95 theses to the door criticizing pickup before discussing it doesn't mean that we don't have problem with it, and that we haven't considered the consequences for women.

I suspect that our feelings about pickup are a lot more ambivalent and complex than you realize, but the discussion has become so polarized that people seem to feel like they are forced to pick "sides," and people who actually have very ambivalent feelings about pickup get thrust into the role of defending it.

I'm tired of defending pickup. I want to have a turn criticizing it! But I can't take my turn yet, because so much of my energy discussing pickup is getting consumed by correcting all the biased and wrong stuff that is written about it. If I wrote critical stuff about pickup, then biased people would just use it selectively as part of their hatchet job, rather than promoting a complete understanding of the subject.

How can we reduce this polarization?