Recent brainstorming sessions at SIAI (with participants including Anna, Carl, Jasen, Divia, Will, Amy Willey, and Andrew Critch) have started to produce lists of rationality skills that we could potentially try to teach (at Rationality Boot Camp, at Less Wrong meetups, or similar venues). We've also been trying to break those skills down to the 5-second level (step 2) and come up with ideas for exercises that might teach them (step 3) although we haven't actually composed those exercises yet (step 4, where the actual work takes place).
The bulk of this post will mainly go into the comments, which I'll try to keep to the following format: A top-level comment is a major or minor skill to teach; upvote this comment if you think this skill should get priority in teaching. Sub-level comments describe 5-second subskills that go into this skill, and then third-level comments are ideas for exercises which could potentially train that 5-second skill. If anyone actually went to the work of composing a specific exercise people could run through, that would go to the fourth-level of commenting, I guess. For some major practicable arts with a known standard learning format like "Improv" or "Acting", I'll put the exercise at the top and guesses at which skills it might teach below. (And any plain old replies can go at any level.)
I probably won't be able to get to all of what we brainstormed today, so here's a PNG of the Freemind map that I generated during our session.
This is really interesting. There is something to notice here, but it's not about PUA, it's about the roles women play in society.
My first thought is that the rules should be:
I added the extra limitations because of wobster's concerns: basically, it seems like a cheap trick to just ask drunk guys to buy you a drink until one says yes, and it seems mean to snub him afterwards.
Then, after I formulated those rules, I realized that these are basically the rules that women are socialized to follow: women are generally taught to be less assertive than men, to get what they want through manipulation, to not snub or make men feel bad, and to find indirect ways of getting out of situations without offending anyone.
I'd argue that this is the rough equivalent of one specific sub-field of PUA, albeit the most well-known: doing cold approaches in a loud meat-market type of bar, because it consists of approaching someone and controlling their interest level.
(There is some confusion here in that the term 'pickup' originally referred to exactly this, as in 'bar pickup,' whereas now terms like 'PUA' or 'Game' have been broadened significantly to include the entire spectrum of dating and relationship skills. I suspect that this semantic difference causes a lot of problems.)
So, in a sense, it's the female equivalent: the way PUA (in some cases) teaches men to follow normalized gender roles [1], this teaches women to follow normalized gender roles. The reason it seems skeevier than PUA is that the roles women are "supposed" to follow are skeevier and more manipulative. And, as Manfred pointed out, the gender roles in the "bar-trawling subculture" already seem skeevy.
A more general equivalent would be sales: go door-to-door and get people to buy magazines or something.
A good counterpoint might be an assertiveness exercise such as:
This is surprisingly difficult for a lot of people to do.
[1] Obviously, this is a huge category, and there are definitely individual teachers who focus on the development of more feminine traits as an alternative strategy; however, a lot of pickup is learning to take on the "man" social role.