. — LessWrong

Raemon15y80

While I don't necessarily think the discussions about sex/gender/etc have been overall unproductive, I do think a lot of them end up qualifying as "talking about politics." I don't think it needs to be tabood completely, but I don't think we need to encourage more of it.

However, I'll also note that previous discussions were often specifically about PUA and/or feminism. More recent posts were about relationships without either of those topics directly connected, which may be way they had higher quality discussion. PUA/Feminism are inherently somewhat political, especially when they are viewed as opposites.

HughRistik15y90

PUA/Feminism are inherently somewhat political, especially when they are viewed as opposites.

Arguably, they aren't opposites, because they have significant overlap on certain dimensions. I've argued that a lot of pickup techniques are actually compatible with feminist values.

Then there are folks who criticize both feminism and pickup for being overly pandering to women:

http://lifestylejourney.blogspot.com/2010/02/pua-scam.html

PUA theory takes the extreme position that men are usually to blame for lack of success with women. This of course complements

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16Vladimir_M15y

Trouble is, I can hardly see how these discussions can remain sufficiently close to reality without getting into issues where the problematic "PUA and/or feminism" stuff becomes relevant. In fact, from what I see, attempts to do so are one of the principal ways in which I observe the death spirals forming. People write things that are strong applause lights, including in response to each other, and this results in a happy death spiral whose drift away from reality could be stopped only by criticizing the assumptions behind these applause-lights assertions -- but no such criticism is possible without bringing up relevant points that trigger the dreaded "PUA and/or feminism" mind-killers. If nobody even attempts such criticism, what follows is something that may superficially look like a "higher quality discussion," but is in fact a festival of applause lights and happy death spirals -- and on the whole even worse than a quarrel, in which it's at least clear that something's gone badly wrong. In my honest opinion, this is in fact what has been happening.