It seems likely that what's going on is that you have as an implicit premise in your argument that PUAs are all "good guys" or close enough to all that it doesn't matter, and that PUA skills will mostly only ever be used "for good".

Not even remotely. That position would be the opposite of stupidity.

However if one held such an implicit premise I could see why you saw no value in discussing the relevant ethical issues, since the relevant ethical issues are all dissolved by the assumption that PUAs are good guys.

Have I said I have no interest in discussing ethical issues? That doesn't sound like something I would say. In fact.

At this time I can neither confirm nor deny that I am a dummy account belonging to a member with vast karma, super powers, a sports car and a girlfriend who is an underwear model.

Eliezer Yudkowsky drives a sports car?!?!?? ;)

I'm going to assume that despite your words you meant "obviously fallacious" to only refer to part of the first paragraph of the comment you are responding to. That would make your argument much stronger.

problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by 'ethics'.

Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily because they defend PUA and attack ethics

Assuming your intuition about why people are voting as they are is correct, saying that something shouldn't dominate is hardly an attack against it. The statement that it shouldn't dominate was justified with a reason - a defeasible reason that does not apply in all contexts. When people can agree on facts, ethics based conversations can flow.

When people make ethical condemnations of caricatures that don't exist and refer to them with labels used for their political enemies, forcing the accusers to detach their claims from their subjective values hopefully keeps them honest.

Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily

Arguments aren't voted on. Posts are. Posts with multiple aspects. "It'd be kind of redundant," is wrong. Obviously fallacious, as you said. " If you are going to rape people then you don't need PUA," would approach being a non sequitur except for that the post responded to was so detached from reality that it may have had to have been said in that context.

The rest of the post is good, and worth upvoting. You are overconfident in attributing the worst possible motives to those voting for a post you disagree with.

One final distinction: the argument that ethical considerations should not dominate discussions is an argument against discussing ethics to a certain extent, at most it attacks discussing ethics, and the contextual posts show that ethical considerations were not being disregarded. This is in addition to the argument that there should be somewhat less of something being a mild one.

Obviously pressured sex happens.

I am simply saying its not a good tactic in the context of situations that PUA usually focuses on.

Note that pressure =/= nagging. For it to be pressure you need to have some social or physical leverage over the other person. Nagging dosen't imply you have either and in their absence the word brings up associations of begging. It is hard to gain great leverage on people of high social status.

I think the point here isn't that people don't get pressured into sex but rather that the specific strategy mentioned isn't one that PUAs would use because it is both pathetic and a highly ineffective strategy for them to be using. So if a completely amoral PUA was using unethical tactics to get laid he would still not use this one because he wouldn't expect this one to work.

In my mind, "nagging" in this context meant repeating a request such that the other person changed their response to the request rather than be subjected to further pestering, not pulling down a girl's pants time and time again until she stopped saying no and said neither yes nor no.

I'm going to skim the transcript from the Republican Presidential candidates' debate a few days ago for five minutes and see what biases I find that aren't prominent logical fallacies. I might find none, but I'm writing this now so that a later statement on what I found or didn't find will be more meaningful.

Wish me luck, I'm going in!

ETA: What a disaster. Most problems look simply like classic fallacies, but not all. I'll elaborate later.

Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.

You said this

Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is not rape.

In and of itself, it seems to me that at least potentially it is deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor.

However unless you believe that pick-up targets' relevant decision-making would be totally unaffected by the knowledge that the person approaching them was a PUA using specific PUA techniques, then concealing that fact from the pick-up target is an attempt to obtain sex without the target's free and informed consent. If you know fact X, and you know fact X is a potential deal-breaker with regard to their decision whether or not to sleep with you, you have a moral obligation to disclose X.

and this

…it's well-established in general societal morals that obtaining sex by deception is a form of non-violent rape. If you're having sex with someone knowing that they are ignorant of relevant facts which if they knew them would stop them having sex with you, then you are not having sex with their free and informed consent.

What’s the charitable interpretation of that?

I do not believe PUA is rape. I do not believe that "acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape". I do believe that sex coerced without the threat of sexual violence can still "count" as rape.

So do I. There are all sorts of coercion that are on the order of potency as physical violence or sometimes even worse which do constitute rape. (I actually drafted a reply to anonymous along these lines but the details were starting to seem distracting.)

"Torture" is a label you attached to things, and then when you ask if something is torture you're making a disguised query but you can't get out more than what you put in. Strong arguments against anything anyone affixes the label "torture" to don't exist.

If one has a way of carving up reality such that yields (set of activities 1), and another that yields a strongly overlapping (set of activities 2), one doesn't make the sets synonymous by acting as if there is only one mental bin as if there was only one set. An argument against each member of one set will always look like an argument against the members of the other if one makes this error.

This is assuming the cluster structure of thingspace doesn't make the argument against everything in (set of activities 1) valid or invalid, which it usually does if the set's boundaries aren't arbitrary and sharp.

In a recent case a man was jailed for obtaining sex by deceiving a woman about his religion.

Almost certainly not.

Back in July, it was reported that the two met in a Jerusalem street in 2008, had consensual sex within 10 minutes of meeting each other...

It was also reported at the time that Kashur was charged with rape and indecent assault, and the conviction of rape by deception was a result of a plea bargain.

New details in the case emerged when the woman's testimony, which had been kept secret, was declassified last week.

It shows an emotionally disturbed woman who had been sexually abused by her father from the age of six, forced into prostitution, and lived in a women's shelter at the time of the encounter with Kashur.

During her initial testimony, she repeatedly broke down in court as she accused Kashur of rape.

...

BBC

Obtaining sex by deception, or bullying which does not involve physical violence or the threat thereof, for example, is still going to get you charged with rape in most places.

This is not an accurate statement of the law in common-law jurisdictions, nor, I suspect, of the law in most other Western countries. With some narrow exceptions -- such as impersonating the victim's husband, performing sexual acts under a false pretense of medical treatment, or failing to disclose a sexually transmitted disease -- enticing people into sex by false pretenses is usually perfectly legal in these jurisdictions. In the past seduction was a common-law tort in its own right (and sometimes even a statutory offense), but seduction by lies was never considered as a form of rape.

As Richard Posner writes in his Sex and Reason (which I can't really recommend otherwise, but whose statements about law are reliable given the author's position):

The law usually treats force and fraud symmetrically in the sense of punishing both, though the latter more leniently. It is a crime to take money at gunpoint. It is also a crime, though normally a lesser one, to take it by false pretenses. But generally it is not a crime to use false pretenses to entice a person into a sexual relationship. Seduction, even when honeycombed with lies that would convict the man of fraud if he were merely trying to obtain money, is not rape.

You clearly know something of the law. Then why would you try to learn from a case in an israeli jurisdiction!? They still use relgious law there. Which is the most obvious kind of appeal to authority fallacy the law produces. Clearly the verdict, case and even police cannot be trusted to be unbiased.

This seems a lacking definition. Do you disagree that, say, drugging or blackmailing someone in order to have sex with them is rape?

Blackmail is an interesting one. It probably depends somewhat on the nature of the blackmail and whether sex is the only option for payment provided. Since I approve of both blackmail and prostitution it would seem somewhat inconsistent of me to label a combination of the two to be either rape or immoral. But there is huge scope for abuse of power here and any abuse of power for the purpose of extracting sexual favours tends to be viscerally offensive to me.

My preferred solution here would be the same one that I would use for all instances of blackmail - strict legislation requiring contracts. Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment. Supplement this with extremely severe jail terms for any blackmail done without a contract and for any violation of the terms of the blackmail arrangement.

Note that here I refer to the the meaning of blackmail that excludes extortion - which is a whole different kind of moral issue whether it is in regards to money or sex.

Do you disagree that, say, drugging or blackmailing someone in order to have sex with them is rape?

Drugging I would consider physical violence, so that falls within my definition; blackmailing, no.

But we should not be having this discussion on this forum.

If you don't know "what on earth [your interlocutor is] talking about", this should make you less sure of your footing.

I'm pretty sure the question was rhetorical.

I do not trust everyone to judge the effects of their actions on others,

Unfortunately, the mere fact that you are raising this concern specifically in this context communicates a certain stance on the underlying issue(s), or, more bluntly, alignment with a certain faction in this particular power-struggle.

...and I'm probably communicating the opposite alignment by replying in this manner. So it goes.

Rather than trying to resurrect this one particular argument may I suggest that it would be better to make a new argument about an ethical problem with respect to particular strategies for seducing mates. Because there are valid arguments to be made and ethical questions to be considered. But that particular argument is sloppy thinking of the kind we don't accept here and offensive - both to the actual victims of rape who are having their experience trivialized and to the group that is being vilified as rapists.

This highlights a further problem that is sometimes encountered when ethical questions come up. When people are moralizing they often make terrible arguments - and in the wild terrible arguments about moral questions tend to suffice. But here terrible arguments and sloppy thinking tends to be brutally rejected. This means observers are going to see a whole lot of obnoxious, incoherent arguing in the general direction of a perceived virtuous moral positions rejected. Naturally that leads people to believe that the community is totally in support of the opposite side to whatever the nonsense comments are.

There are parts of PUA that are problematic wrt consent, and that could help to coerce sex from others.

If someone were to, say, argue "Persuading people to do stuff (like shag you) that you know damn well they really don't want to do is totally a dick move!" then I suspect it would meet with overwhelming support. Some would enjoy fleshing out the related concepts and details.