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One of the big reasons that LW is unable to be rational about pickup is that we have a small group of vocal and highly non-average women here who take any comment which is supposed to be a useful observation about the mental behavior of the median young attractive woman to be about THEM IN PARTICULAR.
You, NancyLebovitz, are not the kind of woman that PU is aimed at. You do not go to night clubs regularly. You do not read gossip magazines and follow celebrity lifestyles, you do not obsess about makeup . You post on weird rationality websites. You are not the median young, attractive woman. And that goes for Alicorn too.
Even amongst the set of IQ + 1 sigma women you are almost certainly highly nontypical.
Comments about female psychology are not directed at you, they are not about you, your personal experience of YOUR OWN reactions are not meant to be well described by pick-up theory.
I do not mean this in a negative way. I mean you no offence; in fact you should take it as a compliment in the context of intelligence and rationality. I am merely making an epistemological point.
The next time I make a comment about PU, I will carefully disclaim that PU is primarily designed to analyse the average psychology of just one particular kind of woman: namely relatively young, culturally-western, hetero- or bi- sexual and relatively attractive.
As I've pretty much argued before, people could escape the majority of needless wasteful friction if they were just willing to use words like "average" and/or "median" when that's indeed what they mean instead of "all".
You could have said "average women" from the start. Am not talking about "careful" disclaimers here -- I'm just talking about the single word "average", which by itself would have vastly improved your comment. And yet you didn't choose to have that word. Why? Was one word so costly to you?
Or was rudeness and stereotyping intentionally being signalled here in a "Alphas don't bother with politeness, that's submissive behaviour" sort-of-thing?
Surely you mean
"the average person could escape the majority of needless wasteful tension if they were just willing to use words ... "
since I am sure there is some person out there who overuses "average" when they really mean "all", yes? And yet you didn't choose to have that word. Why? Was one word so costly to you?
No, I'm sure I wasn't talking about average people, I was talking about people collectively. If I added the word "all" it would be closer to my meaning that if I had added the word "average".
But I guess I was right in my estimation about the intentionality of the signals you were giving, as you're now reinforcing them.
Especially important since major and well-respected proponents of PUA around here do not assume this premise, and in fact it is generally assumed that there are different areas of PUA that will help people of particular sex/gender/sexual orientation accomplish varying sorts of goals.
PU may well apply (to a certain extent) to almost all pre-menopausal hetero/bi women, but the case is much more clear cut for women who are also relatively young, culturally-western, hetero- or bi- sexual and relatively attractive, because that's the subgroup of women where extensive field-testing of the concepts has been done.
PUA is a large field with many different subfields and schools of thought. There are those who aim for one-night-stands at bars, and those who aim to find the particular soulmate they've been searching for. There is PUA writing from the perspective of homosexuals, both men and women, teens, older folks, and all sorts of different perspectives.
If you think there is just one set of techniques in the field and they are only applicable to a small subset of humanity, then you're not very familiar with PUA and should stop making blanket assertions about the field.
The definition of "pick up artist" from wikipedia is:
So if we are indeed referring to the same thing by the phrase, then I think that I am correct in saying that
There have been small offshoots into "girl game" and some guys focus more on older women, and I am explicitly not denying that there are results and facts there. But the core of the concept, the VAST majority of the field testing and online material is about quickly seducing "women who are relatively young, culturally-western, hetero- or bi- sexual and relatively attractive"
It certainly looks like you are::
Maybe you forgot a 'not' in there somewhere?
It sounds like you're making a strawman out of your own arguments. You made blanket statements about how this is a bad and misleading article because it ignores the truth about how women respond to men. When people pointed out that this is not true of particular women, you amended it to refer just to the vast majority of women, and now you're amending it further to only apply to a particular goal regarding a minority of women.
So the takeaway from your arguments seems to be that you should not follow the advice given in the above post, in the case that you have a very specific goal with respect to a relatively small group of women.
If that is what you meant to say, then yes you needed to be specific about what special circumstance you thought the post doesn't apply to. It is not particularly surprising that the advice given in the post only works for most people with most goals.
This goes too far. The vast majority of men are heterosexual, gender-normal, and the vast majority of those are most attracted to women who are not:
Pickup is popular because it tells men how to attract precisely those women who they desire most.
You left out:
Which was apparently important to your case above.
It's an interesting claim, though I'm not buying it, and it is anyway irrelevant to my earlier claim.
Most people are not heterosexual, gender-normal men who are most attracted to women with none of those qualities. And most relationship goals are not seducing such people. And most people do not have that goal.
Probably ~40% of pepople are heterosexual, gender-normal men who are most attracted to women who are young and straight.
It seems like you are using weasel words to describe the goal of ~40% of the people on the planet as a "very specific goal".
Let me put it another way. On a website with a strong majority heterosexual male readership, the article fails to mention what I think is the definitive body of knowledge to improve the dating lives of heterosexual men. You then criticize me because, of all people, just under half are heterosexual males, almost all of whom (surprise) like young, attractive, straight women; you use weasel words saying that my point is for a "very specific goal", when in fact probably ~60-80% of people reading this site have the goal of attracting/keeping a young, attractive, hetero/bi woman.
TBH, I feel that you, and LW in general, are trying to use pedantry/weasel words/motivated cognition to close your eyes to the truth about attraction between men and women. Perhaps there is some subset of people here who want to know, but I feel that if I mention the subject I will end up arguing against some form of denial/motivated cognition, rather than discussing the subject in the spirit of a collaborative enquiry to get at the truth.
Theists comprise a much larger percentage of the global population than 40%, but that doesn't mean we'd consider a goal like "being closer to God" to be particularly important or worthy of discussion here.
Just FYI, some of us hate pro-PUA rants as much as we hate anti-PUA rants. Actually, I hate the pro-PUA rants more, because they do more harm than good.
Telling people they're closing their eyes to the truth is not a rational method of persuasion in any environment, and certainly not here.
If you learned half as much from PUA as you think you have, you should have learned that if you want to catch fish, then don't think like a fisherman, think like a fish.
In this discussion, you are not thinking like a fish.
Also note that I am just as pedantic when I'm talking about a subject that I like, and I'm sure people would back me up on this. Maybe I should step up the pedantry in general to make that clearer, to avoid this sort of accusation.
And nowhere here did I say something like "PUA should not be discussed" or "PUA is incorrect about its subject matter" or even "The particular sub-branch of PUA you have in mind is incorrect or useless". Indeed, I think rational inquiry into relationships is a noble goal and often cite PUA as a rare area of discourse where beliefs are tested against the world in rapid iteration.
Rather, I was annoyed that you were making patently false claims and then when people called you on it you acted like they were doing something wrong. If you want to assert falsehoods, please do it elsewhere.
I don't think that means what you think it means.
Ceteris paribus, I would regard pedantry as evidence of a vice in favor of truth-seeking, not in the opposite direction. I'm surprised you think otherwise.
I find this hard to believe. As of the last survey only 33% are "single and looking". If we combine that with the 24.2% that were "in a relationship", assume they were all polyamorous, and that all of both groups were men, we still do not approach the lower bound of your estimate. It fails a basic sanity check.
I would assert that most people here would benefit more from attracting vastly atypical partners, and we are mostly outliers in more ways than one, so your generalizations are even less helpful here than in the world at large. But that belief is irrelevant to my above statements.
ETA: bad sanity check.
Listen carefully to what I said, Thomblake:
One must distinguish carefully between the set of women for which I (in a Bayesian sense) believe PU would apply to, versus the set of women for which I am stably highly confident that it applies to because of overwhelming field-testing.
Indeed, saying that "PU may well apply (to a certain extent) to almost all pre-menopausal hetero/bi women" does not logically entail that I think it doesn't apply to post-menopausal women or lesbians etc. Personally I have no clue about lesbian attraction, and very little about how to attract post-menopausal women, so I make no claim in particular.