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Just to provide a different female perspective, I'd heard about the seduction community a while back, and a few months ago decided to find out more about it. I read some (admittedly not all) of The Game, watched The Pickup Artist, and read a very substantial amount of material online, including most of the archives of a few blogs, my favorite of which was The Sinns of Attraction.
I take almost no issue with the seduction community, in fact my response is closer to the opposite. Insofar as the techniques advocated work, and I have every reason to believe they do, this seems to me to be, if anything, positive-sum.
Maybe I'm unusual girl, but what I remember thinking when I saw most of the advice was that it would totally work on me, and that that would be a good thing! For example, consider body language when approaching a group of girls. I hadn't given all that much thought in the past to what made me feel creeped out by some guys when they came up to me, but I always knew I didn't like that feeling! If more guys are learning to approach girls in a way that makes them more attractive and less creepy, I'm all for that, because that makes my life better.
To me, guys learning pickup seems analogous to girls putting on makeup or wearing heels, deceptive only in a way that everyone wants to be deceived anyway, since it's usually more fun to be attracted to people than not to be. As a few people have said elsewhere in the thread, learning "game" allows normal guys to have the sort of success with women they would have if they were much better looking. If someone offered to wave a magic wand and make all the guys in the world twice as hot, I wouldn't have a problem with it, so I don't have a problem with the seduction community either.
I think one of the biggest things to remember when talking about attraction is that, at least for most people to a great extent, attraction is not a choice. A girl may logically think a guy is great, and nice, and would probably be wonderful for her in a lot of ways, but not be attracted to him. Can the seduction community train guys to get girls to sleep with them who wouldn't have otherwise? Sure. I think the guys have made themselves more attractive, and girls prefer to sleep with people they are attracted to.
That being said, I acknowledge there may also be some less positive-sum aspects to the seduction community, but this blog post covers them better than I could.
To provide yet another different male perspective:
Some part of the success caused by "game" can no doubt be explained as a rationally justifiable taking-into-account of genuinely increased excitingness/attractiveness, but some other part of the extra success is no doubt better explained as a direct influence on the decision mechanism, not on the thing that it makes decisions about. "Game" that's mostly about the former strikes me as being a good thing for the reasons divia mentions; "game" that's mostly about the latter strikes me as being manipulative.
The part that I haven't seen emphasized is that in some cases PUA success shows there are security flaws in female decision-making about mating, and just like it's bad to exploit security flaws, it's bad not to patch them up. When evidence shows my decisions (or the decisions of members of a group I belong to) are not in line with the values I hold on a conscious level, I worry about how I can defend psychologically against the distortions.
Lest I be seen as taking easy potshots across the gender fence, I think the same is true for men and female appearance: being with a better-looking woman will make a man happier, but the degree to which men pursue good-looking women is probably even greater than can be explained by rational projections of their self-interest, and certainly greater than is pro-social. Men should strive from a selfish point of view to be more immune to this sort of short-circuiting, and from a pro-social point of view to de-correlate their tastes from those of other men and to be less attracted to behaviors that, like "game", are a pain in the ass unto the behaver. To the degree that that's even possible, of course.
tl;dr: we should combat within ourselves decision-making distortions such as those uncovered by PUAs, though only insofar as they are distortions.
Could you elaborate on these claims. Neither is obvious to me. Are you suggesting that people should altruistically pursue relationships with people they are not attracted to?
OK, the "certainly" was an overstatement. Probably there are some arguments from evolution you can make about how it's probably installed mechanisms that can work against (at the same time as being valid input to) your rational judgments of future happiness or whatever else you're pursuing. It's my impression that in men visual attraction is more like this than other considerations, but I might be wrong.
No, that sounds like a terrible idea. Maybe it could tip the balance in close marginal situations; but I was thinking more in terms of altruistically exerting nonzero psychological effort to change what one finds attractive; I agree though that the process is mostly (or wholly?) not under one's conscious control. Probably I should have stuck to self-interest, as it's less minefieldy.
It's fairly clear that men already do weigh physical attractiveness against other qualities when judging a mate, and in fact use different weights based on the length and nature of the relationship they are considering entering into. I feel I'd need to see more evidence to back up a claim that they consistently over-weight attractiveness in such a way that it works against their own long term interests before accepting that it is the case though.
Indeed, 'attraction is not a choice'. I think there might well be scope for some rationally directed self-manipulation to direct attraction towards individuals that you judge to be more suitable than what your natural unguided instincts would guide you towards. I think it would be very interesting to see a movement amongst women to take the lessons learned by the seduction community and use them to redirect their own feelings of attraction towards individuals who they rationally judged to be more desirable partners.