SOI - statement of intent -- stating outright what you intend towards a woman, anything from, "I think you might be cool to hang out with", to "[explicit details of what I'd like to do with you in bed tonight]".
cold approach - meeting someone you don't know
warm approach - being introduced, already knowing them online, etc.
alpha subcom - communicating confidence non-verbally: body language, facial expressions, gesture, posture, voice tone, inflection, word choice, stories told, beliefs and attitudes expressed... everything, pretty much. Acting as-if you are an attractive and desirable man, not in the way of trying to show it, but acting the way such a man would naturally act.
shit-test - a verbal or non-verbal challenge by a woman, usually in the form of being rude or implying the man has is unworthy or "not in her league", but this can also be in the form of a false IOI (indicator of interest). For example, a woman who speaks in an aggressively sexual fashion, without any actual sexual interest, is often shit-testing to find out if the man will respond in a way that reveals he's more desperate for sex than he's trying to appear. In general, shit tests are when women probe to see how confident a guy actually is, versus what he's pretending to be. This is obviously much more an issue with cold approach than other situation, but some women shit-test their way through entire relationships.
Shit tests are a controversial subject, to say the least. Having given it more thought, I now can remember being shit tested, but I don't think I've ever slept with anyone who shit tested me on initial contact. However, I also kind of agree with the trainers who say that shit testing really is an indicator of interest, in the sense that a woman only shit tests because she wants to know if the guy is "for real" -- that it's like an instinct to pinch yourself to see if you're dreaming.
Recently, my wife's grandmother died, and she ended up shit-testing me because on an emotional level, she needed to know that I was strong and she was safe. I didn't handle it well at first, because I didn't realize that was what was going on; I thought she was being unreasonable and vicious towards me for no reason.
Once I understood, however, I was able to give her what she needed, and afterward she agreed with my interpretation; she just couldn't tell me at the time, because on an emotional level it would've defeated the entire purpose. (This is not a regular occurrence, fortunately.)
(In female language, I've had women friends tell me that they want a guy who "doesn't let them get away with anything" or "put up with their shit". In other words, a guy who isn't fazed by their shit tests, either by passively putting up with them, or by freaking out, but instead by setting boundaries and making her feel safe within them.)
social proof - evidence that you're not a weird, creepy stalker or something, as demonstrated by having friends, especially female ones. esp. such proof in real-time, visual form -- i.e., saying that you have friends doesn't count for much.
pivot - female wingman, i.e., a woman who is with you to help you meet other women and/or get laid. Usually a friend who's not attracted to you, but thinks you should get laid more often, and will spread helpful rumors or try to match you up. (At least, that's the kind I have experience with. I never did "club game" with a pivot, just had a social network.)
LMR - "last minute resistance" -- having doubts or seeking reassurance just before sex is about to happen. Often, this takes the form of a need for reassurance that the woman is not a slut or otherwise of questionable character just because she is having sex with a guy she "hardly knows". I don't have much experience with this because I was never in so much of a hurry to get laid. Some PUA trainers claim that you need to know someone for at least 7 hours in order to minimize LMR, and except for the women who sought me out, I'd always spent at least that much time with someone long before they dragged me to the bedroom. (Like I said, I've never been much of an initiator, at least outside the chat room.)
"open" -- start a conversation and have it go somewhere, as opposed to immediate rejection or quickly fading into nothingness.
rapport stage -- conversation stage where you actually start to get to know someone
kino -- touching, either casual, flirtatious, or beyond
escalate -- taking things past rapport, to some kind of action or relationship in the present or future
time bridge -- smoothly establishing a reason for future contact, without making a big commitment or "date" out of it, e.g. talking about a cool art gallery early in the conversation, then ending by saying, "oh hey, I'm going to that gallery on Thursday with my friends, you should come check it out with us," and exchanging numbers or email.
Whew. There is a lot of terminology, isn't there? It really is a Conspiracy with a capital C. There are a lot of different schools, but the language tends to get shared across the board.
(This article expands upon my response to a question posed by pjeby here)
I've seen a few back-and-forths lately debating the instrumental use of epistemic irrationality -- to put the matter in very broad strokes, you'll have one commenter claiming that a particular trick for enhancing your effectiveness, your productivity, your attractiveness, demands that you embrace some belief unsupported by the evidence, while another claims that such a compromise is unacceptable, since a true art should use all available true information. As Eliezer put it:
And with this I agree -- the idea that a fully developed rational art of anything would involving pumping yourself with false data seems absurd.
Still, let us say that I am entering a club, in which I would like to pick up an attractive woman. Many people will tell me that I must believe myself to be the most attractive, interesting, desirable man in the room. An outside-view examination of my life thus far, and my success with women in particular, tells me that I most certainly am not. What shall I do?
Well, the question is, why am I being asked to hold these odd beliefs? Is it because I'm going to be performing conscious calculations of expected utility, and will be more likely to select the optimal actions if I plug incorrect probabilities into the calculation? Well, no, not exactly. More likely, it's because the blind idiot god has already done the calculation for me.
Evolution's goals are not my own, and neither are evolution's utility calculations. Most saliently, other men are no longer allowed to hit me with mastodon bones if I approach women they might have liked to pursue. The trouble is, evolution has already done the calculation, using this now-faulty assumption, with the result that, if I do not see myself as dominant, my motor cortex directs the movement of my body and the inflection of my voice in a way which clearly signals this fact, thus avoiding a conflict. And, of course, any woman I may be pursuing can read this signal just as clearly. I cannot redo this calculation, any more than I can perform a fourier analysis to decide how I should form my vowels. It seems the best I can do is to fight an error with an error, and imagine that I am an attractive, virile, alpha male.
So the question is, is this self-deception? I think it is not.
In high school, I spent four happy years as a novice initiate of the Bardic Conspiracy. And of all the roles I played, my favorite by far was Iago, from Shakespeare's Othello. We were performing at a competition, and as the day went by, I would look at the people I passed, and tell myself that if I wanted, I could control any of them, that I could find the secrets to their minds, and in just a few words, utterly own any one of them. And as I thought this, completely unbidden, my whole body language changed. My gaze became cold and penetrating, my smile grew thin and predatory, the way I held my body was altered in a thousand tiny ways that I would never have known to order consciously.
And, judging by the reactions, both of my (slightly alarmed) classmates, and of the judges, it worked.
But if a researcher with a clipboard had suddenly shown up and asked my honest opinion of my ability as a manipulator of humans, I would have dropped the act, and given a reasonably well-calibrated, modest answer.
Perhaps we could call this soft self-deception. I didn't so much change my explicit conscious beliefs as... rehearse beliefs I knew to be false, and allow them to seep into my unconscious.
In An Actor Prepares, Bardic Master Stanislavski describes this as the use of if:
Is this dangerous? Is this a short step down the path to the dark side?
If so, there must be a parting of ways between the Cartographers and the Bards, and I know not which way I shall go.