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mattnewport comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong
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I am highly familiar with the seduction community, and I've learned a lot from it. It's like extra-systemized folk psychology. It has certain elements of a scientific community, yet it is vulnerable to ideologies developing out of:
(a) bastardized versions of evolutionary psychology being thrown around like the proven truth, often leading to cynical and overgeneralized views of female behavior and preferences and/or overly narrow views of what works,
(b) financial biases,
(c) lack of rigor, because controlled experiments are not yet possible in this field (though I would never suggest that people wait until science catches up and gives us rigorous empirical knowledge before trying to improve their dating lives... who knows how long we will have to wait).
Yet there is promise for the community, because it's beholden to real world results. Its descriptions and prescriptions seems to have been improving, and it has gone through a couple paradigm shirts since the mid 80's.
I've also learned some useful things from my more limited familiarity with the community. I'd tend to agree with your criticisms but I think the emphasis on rigorous 'field testing' and on 'doing what works' in much of the community shows some common ground with general efforts at rationality. As you say, this is an area (like many areas of day to day life) that is not easily amenable to controlled scientific experiment for a number of reasons but one of the lessons of Bayesian thinking/'x-rationality' that I've found useful is the emphasis on being comfortable with uncertainty, fuzzy evidence and making the best decisions given limited information.
It's treacherous terrain for anyone seeking truth since, like investment or financial advice or healthcare, there is a lot of noise along with the signal. It's certainly an interesting area with many cross-currents to those interested in applying rationality though.