I'm considering posting such a thread, but I'm thinking very very carefully if this is a good idea. It seems best to me to wait a few days, perhaps even consider a meta thread or two in preparation.

Discussion in the absence of ethics, dosen't really cover discussion that may hurt the community image or the image of posters, at least not explicitly. And while the current situation is intolerable I don't want to cause any damage with a botched fix.

he/she

Seriously now. Konkvistador?

I did mean risky, not just mindkilling. Also a third category of "slight side effects that may add up to risky".

Risky: If we're going to discuss "how to stick your dick in people", which is an important subtopic of PUA, and completely ignore ethics, we're going to discuss rape. For example, alcohol may be used to make people more open and sociable (both directly and because social norms change for groups of drunk people). It may also be used to make people pass out. Both of these reduce the likelihood of them turning down sex you initiate. That's actually not a very good example because people know that so we aren't teaching anyone how to rape, but discussion of other techniques may involve it.

Potentially risky: A core part of PUA is creating and signalling high status. This is often done by lowering one's opinion of women. While LWers are unlikely to start endorsing the verbal belief that women who have sex on the first date are worthless, discussing the usefulness of such a belief may allow it to leak.

Other problems: Yeah, so for a while good posters will waste time in an unproductive conversation, and onlookers will disapprove. Meh.

There would also be strong selective pressure for any genes which can override the segregation-distorter, even if the females can't recognize the males which carry it.

It seems easier to evolve a preference for incest.

We're not the only rationalists in the world.

I agree that finding the optimal course of action for humans dosen't mean much if it dosen't include ethics. But humans in order to do that often construct and reason within systems that don't include ethics in their optimization criteria.

There is a sometimes subtle but important difference between thinking and and considering "this is the optimal course of action optimizing for X and only X" and discussing it and between saying "you obviously should be optimizing for X and only X."

I argue that this is former is sometimes a useful tool for the latter, because it allows one to survey how possible action space differs taking away or adding axiom to your goals. It is impossible to think about what people who might have such axioms do, or how dangerous or benign to your goals the development of such goals seeking systems might be. You need to in essence know the opportunity costs of many of your axioms and how you will measure up either in a game theoretic sense (because you may find yourself in a conflict with such an agent and need to asses it capabilities and strategic options) or in a evolutionary sense (where you wish to understand how much fitness your values have in the set of all possible values and how much you need to be concerned with evolution messing up your long term plans).

In short I think that: generally It is not unethical to think about how a specific hypothetical unethical mind would think. It may indeed perhaps be risky for some marginal cases, but also very potentially rewarding in expected utility.

One can say that while this is theoretically fine but in practice actually quite risky in people with their poor quality minds. But let me point out that people are generally biased against stabbing 10 people and similar unpleasant courses of action. One can perhaps say that a substantial minority isn't, and using self-styled ethical agents cognitive capacity to emulate thinking of (in their judgement) unethical agents and sharing that knowledge willy-nilly with others will lead to unethical agents having lower enough costs and greater enough efficiency that it cancels out or overwhelms the gains of the "ethical agents".

This however seems to lead towards a generalize argument against all rationality and sharing of knowledge, because all of it involves "morally constrained" agents potentially sharing the fruits of their cognitive work with less constrained agents who then out compete them in the struggle to order the universe into certain states. I maintain this is a meaningless fear unless there is good evidence that sharing particular knowledge (say schematics for a nuclear weapon or death ray) or rationality enhancing techniques will cause more harm than good one can rely on more people being biased against doing harmful things than not and thus using the knowledge for non-harmful purposes. But this is a pretty selected group. I would argue the potential for abuse among the readers of this forum is much lower than average. Also how in the world are we supposed to be concerned about nuclear weapons or death rays if we don't have any good ideas if they are even possible? Can you ethically strongly condemn the construction of non-functioning death ray? Is it worth invading a country to stop the construction of a non-functioning death ray?

And note that at this point I'm already basically blowing the risks way out of proportion because quite honestly the disutility from a misused death ray is orders of magnitude larger than anything that can arise from what amounts to some unusually practical tips on improving one's social life.