Thanks, Gwern. I would add only that the thesis highlights that although prestige in the seduction community depends on having good game, this isn't the only or even the main thing men get from membership.

If I were your wife, then what I'd want you to do would be to remark at some point while trying to bring me out of a funk, "This wouldn't have been my first instinct, but it really seems to make you feel better," or something along those lines. Then, assuming that in this parallel universe I retain my trait of honesty, I could determine whether it makes me feel better by a wide enough margin to be worth the cost and communicate that information.

I'm afraid that's going to be a selling point of any movement that's marketing itself to men, irrespective of whether it's actually true.

This approach conflates honesty with tactlessness.

I have a problem with the seduction community because it openly advocates treating women dishonestly.

Any girl within about 2 standard deviations of the mean of physical attractiveness will have been approached on numerous occasions by men who will introduce themselves and suggest further meetings.

False. False false false.

This applies only to women with a certain social attitude who frequent certain social situations. (I'm bi, and therefore qualified to judge whether the women I've met fall into the physical attractiveness range you specify.)

Look, I have some sympathy. There are some lingering cultural norms and an average sex drive to each gender that probably make things very difficult for heterosexual men to scratch their itches, for free, with women "within about 2 standard deviations", without resorting to either rape or the art of pickup. But you know what? Lots of people have desires they can't satisfy ethically. This isn't just the plight of straight men. It's the plight of physically unattractive or shy or cautious women; it's the plight of gay people in small towns; it's the plight of pedophiles and zoophiles and other people with unconscionable fetishes.

I have some sympathy, but I'm not going to ethically greenlight dishonesty so you can get what you want by exploiting the poor judgment of other members of my gender. I'm just not.

Incidentally, have you heard of the whole thing where "nice guys" are in love with their female friends and pine for them in long laments that they post on the Internet? It happens to girls, too. It is not the case that no one ever falls for a guy based on his personality. It's not even the case that no one ever falls for a basically average guy based on his personality. The difference is she probably doesn't say anything, and she might be a little farther south of the "mean of physical attractiveness" than the more shallow type of guy prefers.

Upvoting you doesn't seem like quite enough.

There needs to be a "this comment is strongly confirmed by my experiences" button

I don't know what humans in general want, but I don't think I'm completely alone - an illustrative cartoon - in wanting affection that is genuine in the way I describe. But maybe I'm a rare specimen? If you're content to have relationships where you and others model each other on a web of carefully selected half-truths, I'm not exactly going to parasail in and demand that you stop like a spandex-clad vigilante for truth and transparency. You simply won't have anything, in having that relationship, that I have an inclination to value, promote, or normatively endorse.

Also, I don't see how the link is relevant. The article is about deadlines and cost estimates and there's nothing apparently applicable to this topic.

This talk of "the way it is supposed to work" strikes me as irrational; you are looking at what "ought" to be, what you want to be, and ignoring what actually is.

Why is it irrational to think that the ways things ought to be is different from the way they are?

...and we come full circle to:

It's their goal, not their means of deriving methods to achieve their goal, that I would be tempted to take issue with if I tried to engage with the topic.

If your goal is to get sex and that's all, the ethical choices are to explicitly advertise this goal and find someone who shares it, or to take the solo route. As I said, I'm not offering practical advice for the morally indiscriminate pickup artist. I'm talking about ethics.

An example: you take a girl back to your place from a nightclub. She'll say something like "we're not going to have sex" or "I'm just coming in for a coffee". If you respond honestly "actually I do want to have sex with you", she won't come back with you.

Not because you're being honest, but because you're being tactless. Compare with this answer: "oh, darn, here I was thinking you were trying to get me alone so you could have your way with me...." and that's just the first thing that popped into my head when I saw your comment. (Probably because I have a vague recollection of having said something similar to a girl once, a few minutes before she literally attacked me.)

ASD is a social calibration ping: she wants to make sure you're a cool guy. It is not necessary to lie or even conceal the truth in order to be a cool guy, it is only necessary to communicate that you understand the rules of the game being played and are willing to play it. A response like the one I gave above would be an honest answer, but not a tactless one.

Huh, no. If an adult isn't willing to owning up to their desires, that’s their own friggin' problem and it's not my job to second-guess them.

Once you're already experienced, yes. But get a newbie to SOI a girl and he'll either bottle out or completely screw up. To get to the stage where you have the confidence in your ability to get laid that is required for direct game to work, you need indirect game, AKA lying and manipulation.

You're talking about cold approach in a public social situation with immature and self-deceiving women. The situations I'm talking about were the exact opposite in all three, as I like intelligent, mature women. If I had to lie to a woman for more than say, five minutes on first meeting her, before admitting to the lie as a way to get to talk to her, I really wouldn't be interested.

I realize some men aren't wired that way. I'm just pointing out that if all you want is to "get laid", then verbal alpha subcom is sufficient, especially with social proof. Before I got married, every party I went to had a room full of pivots -- i.e., female friends who either specifically set me up, or at least gave social proof by talking to me. And anybody I went out with, I'd already chatted with online, and impressed verbally that way.

"Direct game" - being relatively honest about your intentions still isn't full honesty. For example, you'll still have to deal with LMR, the girl will still want to be chased, she'll shit-test you etc, etc.

You've got to be kidding me. Girls chased me. I've never been much of a chaser, to be honest. I can't remember anyone who shit-tested me. And LMR is only an issue if you're the one doing the initiating.

In a way, I'm kind of glad that I didn't study this stuff in those days, because I might have run into some of the stuff you're saying here, and actually believed it. I could have used more confidence, and if I'd been better at attraction/extraction logistics I probably I wouldn't have had to wait until I was 20+ to lose my virginity.

In college, never got past the rapport stage on cold approach, but it wasn't a question of shit tests or anything. I could open and get rapport, but I didn't know how to kino, escalate, time bridge, any of that stuff.

Just the logistics of pickup knowledge would've helped immensely there, no need for lying or manipulation. I'm pretty positive that many of those girls I talked to in college wanted me to make a move, I just didn't have a clue how.

Anyway... lying is totally unnecessary, I don't care how noob you are. If you can't handle cold approach without lying, get social proof. If you're actually worth sleeping with, you should have no problem making female friends.

I've tried it on >20 women, with poor results in every case.

That's really not very many women, for club game and cold approach. Are you counting based on sets opened, or only ones where you got to an extraction attempt?

Women want to be chased, and an honest exchange of information doesn't give them a chase.

I see two problems with your statement. First, I've had women chase me. Second, the fact that some of them wanted to be chased didn't interfere with honesty; I just changed myself in such a way that I could be honest.

So, your poor results might have been affected by your taste in women. I like smart girls who are sexually aggressive, or at least passionate and sexually self-aware. That probably makes a big difference in my results, since my criteria would tend to select for women who would find honesty sexy, because they don't like playing games.

Those women are somewhat less likely to be found in bars and clubs, but I've met a few, so it's not like they don't exist.

Honestly, though, based on the entitlement attitude you've been showing, I suspect the reason your "honest" approach flopped was a function of your inner game, not of the women. The existence and success of such things as the apocalypse opener, forced IOI openers, Gunwitch method, mode one, and um, I forget what the other one is called, but that one where you alternate between escalating sexually explicit SOIs and casual conversation without giving any opportunity to object...

Anyway, the existence of all these methods shows that there are other PUAs who get results with the bold, explicit, truth, up to and including expressing a desire to have sex with the girl in the first few sentences of conversation.

To me, that says it's not the women. It's you.

What about if you just want sex quickly with an attractive woman irrespective of what kind of person she is? Is there something wrong with this?

The point is just that you're using your particular taste to justify your ethics, when, if you valued your ethics more, you could still find women who would appreciate your honesty.

Beyond that, I think your attitude shows a flawed understanding of women: you think they respond to qualities independent of the guy those qualities are attached to. But this is not entirely true: women often come to appreciate a quality that's possessed by a man they find attractive. Even if those 20 women never appreciated an honest man before, you still had the opportunity to make them appreciate your honesty... as long as it wasn't an excuse to be boring.

Hell, consider Steve P. -- the guy goes around telling people in a monotone that he teaches women how to have the best orgasms of their lives; I don't get any impression that he "games" in the least, and he's not exactly a great looker. But women chase him because he offers a unique sexual experience. (There are some definite parallels between what he does and what I did, but I'll not go into details here.)

My point is: if you cared as much about having something to offer women as you apparently care about what they offer to you, you wouldn't have problems with honesty. And if all you really care about is fast sex with a desirable body, why not just pay for it in the first place? That takes far less time than developing your game, and it's more honest, too.

The only way that I see you can get stuck in the spot where you're saying you are is if you:

• don't value women enough to offer them any value of your own, aside from intrigue, DHV stories, and ASD excuses...

• don't care about women enough to help them get over the societal programming that makes ASD excused necessary.

• are too cheap to pay for what you want in any other way,

• and not only have insufficient self-worth to be perceived as an attractive man, but also no desire to improve yourself to becoming one.

So frankly, you sound like you don't like women or yourself very much. That, IMO, is the "something wrong with this".

But where do you draw the line between tact and lying? For example, you approach a girl and ask her out on a date or tell her you think she's cute straight away. Tactless?

Maybe, maybe not. Most people would make either approach a DLV, but some men could make either one a DHV. (Hell, I can think of a guy I once knew who could have opened with, "Hey... you're cute, can I have your number?" in such a fun-yet-sarcastic way that it would've been perceived as anything from a rapport-building "gee these other guys are stupid to approach you in such a lame way", to a flat-out neg (i.e. "you're not really cute and I don't care about your number.")

Ok, but what other honest approach can you do?

Forced IOI openers and kino-based game would select for women who are open to a physical approach but who prefer to avoid verbal acknowledgments. When you get ASD, just raise an eyebrow like, "are you serious?", but say nothing. Or say, "Don't worry, I'll still respect you in the morning." HOW you say or do this is vastly more important than the words. Lying is really not necessary... hell, talking much at all isn't necessary, AFAICT.

(I'm not using myself as an example here; I hung with naturals once or twice in college, who tried and failed to teach me anything. But AFAICT they didn't really say much between "Hey" and "Let's get out of here", although there was some time in between, some dancing and a couple of location bounces within the club. They mostly let the girls do the talking.)

In short, every piece of evidence I have tells me that it ain't the women, it's you. Every man can be a natural, if he believes he actually has something of value to offer. But I get the impression you don't think you have anything to offer, and if you don't want to grow old chasing club girls with equally low self-esteem, you might want to change that.

I run the website www.theyhatethegame.com - which has been mentioned in this post a few times.

I used to be shy, insecure, and lonely. After a low point a while ago I began reading books on female psychology, evolutionary sexuality and relationship management. These books did NOT turn me into a social robot that manipulates people. They DID give me a feeling of security because they gave me the impression that we are all human - we are all the same and we all need each other.

This feeling prompted a series of social experiments over a period of three months where I determined - through trial and error - what I could do to give others the most pleasurable social experience possible. The end result was simple. I turned myself into a confident, competent person that people like because of a high level of social intuition and empathy.

My website is dedicated to giving men the tools that I wish I had when I was on my journey from "looser to winner."

Some of you may label what I do as social manipulation (I accept that you have read more books on how to label what is and is not social manipulation than I have and that's okay with me - I was out having fun while you were reading.) but what helps me sleep at night is knowing that I have changed. I used to not like who I was. Now I like me - and I am able to enrich the lives of those around me. Women and men.

P.S. I'm impressed with the quality of conversation going on here. I don't get exposed to these view points often. Cheers.

I've tried it on >20 women, with poor results in every case.

I don't suppose they were selected at random from the population, were they?

Women want to be chased

I'm sure you have simply loads of data points on this, of women who you chased who really liked it and weren't trying to remember if their favorite law firm does restraining orders, but since I'm an actual woman and do not have an interest in being "chased", it would have displayed some politeness to add a qualifier like "some" or "in my experience".

What about if you just want sex quickly with an attractive woman irrespective of what kind of person she is? Is there something wrong with this?

Yes. This displays a revolting attitude towards women. Unless (as pjeby suggested) you pay for it, or (as I mentioned in another comment) you find a woman who just wants sex with an attractive man (I'll charitably assume you are one at least to some people) regardless of your personality. The latter sort of woman exists. She can be found on Craigslist. She is, however, immensely picky because she gets several hundred e-mails every time she posts an ad, because your desires are not remotely uncommon and you have a lot of competition. If you aren't good-looking enough to stand out from the crowd of honest seekers of NSA sex, of course investigating other categories of women who might let you sleep with them and using every trick in the book to get them to do so would seem like the next logical choice. That doesn't make it right.

But where do you draw the line between tact and lying?

Broadly, tact is about what topics you bring up. Lying is about what you say about the topic at hand, whatever it may be. Attempting to actually have sex implicitly brings up the topic of your motives, because if it's had under false pretenses, consent is flimsier and the entire thing is thrown into moral confusion.