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wedrifid comments on Teachable Rationality Skills - Less Wrong
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The female possible-equivalent kind of skeeves me out, and doesn't seem to exercise the same skills. I would guess, and I hope, that there are better ways to practice status-projecting, confidence, taking control of interactions, and body language.
Q: What sort of things are these social skills good for other than playing a fairly limited social game?
A: Confidence and social dominance are useful in all sorts of Interactions. However, some of the parts are specific to human romance in this culture.
Q: Do I really care about helping people practice the parts specific to romance in a specific culture, rather than a broad class of social interactions?
A: Nah, not really.
Q: Okay, so what kind of things test your social dominance, without splitting your audience or necessarily practicing culture-specific mating rituals?
A: Getting people to do things (maybe specific behaviors) for you [e.g. go get me a drink]. Practicing specific skills to be dominant [e.g. never giving the appearance that you don't know what to do or need the other person's approval]. Navigating what is considered to be a difficult social interaction that is helped by being impressive [getting a job, making a product pitch].
There is something to notice here.
Yes, that manipulation to get drinks is a flawed analogy, not equivalent. (I reject your connotation.)
It is not easy to find a direct female equivalent to the kind of skills Eliezer was suggesting developing. Simply because of the huge difference in the usual difficulty level in that kind of interaction. Perhaps the most direct translation would be "learn how to approach, attract and build a connection with prospective mates that would previously have been out of your league".
Above I argue that this is an equivalent of at least one part of PUA, and explain the subtext behind why it seems skeevier.
I'd suggest something more like Intolerable Cruelty, it retains the sense of the effort and strategy being very personally significant, but also retains the ambiguous attractiveness of what might in another era be called "the glamor of evil".
I need to think about this more, but my current belief is that it is less of a stretch to say that a pickup artist is satisfying actual preferences of a woman who chooses to sleep with him than to say a woman who sets out to marry a rich guy so that she can divorce him is satisfying actual preferences of the rich guy.
One yardstick our legal system and our society use to determine actual preferences is the principle of "informed consent". It seems to me that the consent of most of the woman who go home with pickup artists is significantly more informed than the consent of the Beverly Hills lawyer in Intolerable Cruelty is.
For your analogy to be illuminating and not misleading, the pickup artist would have to falsely profess a desire to spend the rest of his life with the woman or at least carefully navigate conversations with the goal of concealing the fact that his interest is other than what she thinks it is, and I currently do not think a significant number of them do that. Alternatively, the rich guy would have to know or strongly suspect that her goal is to cash out in a divorce -- and marry her anyway (e.g., because he cannot live without her) -- but the expected fraction of rich guys who would do that is much lower than the expected fraction of women who would go home with a pickup artist even if all of those women were fully informed about the pickup artist's actual intentions.
Please do not interpret this analysis of one particular analogy as my being dismissive of women's concerns about the pickup community -- I'm not. Also, I think some parts of your analogy are illuminating, e.g., the part where for many or most women, sex is very personally significant.