If a PUA technique is deceptive or untruthful then it deprives the person to be seduced from relavent information that could help them make a better decision. That is what I see at the heart of many peoples concerns, even if they are often not able to verbalize it.

I think that's a plausible hypothesis about the "manipulation" objection to pickup. What I'm wondering is how those people are defining "manipulation."

You think that the objection that PUA techniques use deception or untruthfulness is overblown?

Yes.

I would speculate that the three main worries about deceptiveness and pickup are that (a) PUAs will lie about their relationship interest in order to trick women into sex, (b) PUAs will lie about their accomplishments, profession, and experiences, and (c) PUAs will be "putting on an act" socially and "acting like someone they are not." Do you think there are any other components to that objection?

(a) is probably just false, because PUAs don't advocate lying about relationship interest. Actually, PUAs are far more likely to display less relationship interest than they truly have, rather than more. There are various game-theoretic reasons why that can be a strong strategy, and I will make them more explicit if necessary.

(b) is false, except for white lies in routine-based pickup. Routines are hardly universal in the seduction community, and they are widely hated, even though some methods use them as training wheels. I discussed the ethics of white lies in routines in this post, where I argued:

Ok, then could you give me a specific example, other than one I've already stipulated (e.g. telling anecdotes about friends who don't exist during the first 10 minutes of conversation)? No, there isn't really a fight outside, and no, you don't really have a friend who is buying his girlfriend a cashmere sweater. But can't we excuse such white lies in helping people learn to socialize? Once a guy gets some social experience under his belt, then he will have entertaining anecdotes about friends that are actually true, and he will be as cool as those canned stories make him seem. [...]

I think that PUAs engaging in impression management, or even using scripts as a temporary measure to learn social skills, are not in the same moral category as substantive deception (lying about accomplishments, career, and income) or the same moral category as deception on a permanent basis (makeup, push-up bras). I think women should recognize that the intention of PUAs is not to deceive women about how they measure in qualities that women use to evaluate them, but to actually develop those qualities over the long term.

Although I'm personally not a fan of canned routines that contain factual untruths, I think such white lies (e.g. stories about imaginary friends within the first hour of conversation) could be justified on utilitarian grounds. The benefit of the user is high, because it keeps him in conversations that will allow him to learn social skills. The cost to people he interacts with is low. Furthermore, there is a benefit to women when he eventually learns social skills and discards routines, expanding the pool of datable men.

(c) is technically true, in that PUAs certainly do things that many people would call "putting on an act." In the past, I've argued that this judgment is unfair, because it presupposes a static notion of self and an overly restrictive and hierarchical notion of self-development. "Fake it 'til you make it" is a valid way of learning just about anything, and it gets unfairly hated on when applied to personal development. From the linked comment:

In my experience in real life, people who try to signal more social skills than they actually have tend to get seen through or make people feel uncomfortable almost immediately, or get believed on a permanent basis. While I think it's possible to hit somewhere in between, where people initially think you're cool and then later decide that you're a loser, doing so is hard, because signaling substantially more social skills than you actually have is hard.

I suspect that most of the time, the amount of social skills that someone can "fake" is about the level of social skills they could attain if they would practice a bit, get some good reactions from people, and believes in themselves. In some cases, merely one or two tries of a new social behavior with such positive results are enough to grant you that social skill.

Predicting how you would act if you were more socially skilled than you actually are, and pulling it off, is almost as paradoxical a notion as predicting what you would think if you were more intelligent than you actually are. To predict what the more intelligent / socially-skilled version of you would do, then you would need that level of intelligence / social skills!

Social reality doesn't work by the same rules as physical reality. Any notion of deception presupposes that there is some sort of truth being hidden, but often in the exterior social world and the interior world of self, it's hard to say what is true. You can partially change yourself merely by changing your self-narrative (to use Daniel Dennett's terminology).

Sorry to throw so much stuff at you all at once, but I hope the reasoning I've presenting in this post, and the linked posts, starts to show why I believe that the "deception" criticism of pickup is overblown. Let me know if you have any objections, or if there is anything that still bothers you (or might bother other people).

In my mind, the real problem with pickup is that some particular techniques and mindsets are toxic. Some techniques have a negative expected value. Some attitudes result in morally-neutral techniques being applied in negative ways.