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pjeby comments on Generalizing From One Example - Less Wrong
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This reminds me of some of the literature on fallibility of introspection. (If you have time only for one essay, read "The Unreliability of Naïve Introspection" and try the experiment with the playing card.)
As far as generalizing about an entire gender: It's extremely likely that I know a wildly unrepresentative sample of women, but why would you assume that the pickup artists don't? I imagine they meet vast numbers of women, but if they find them all at parties and clubs and bars, they're going to meet the kinds of women who go to parties and clubs and bars, not the ones who spend their time gardening at home or who go to all-women gyms to avoid being hit on or the ones who play D&D with their brothers in the basement. Even if their statements are accurate about that sort of woman (which I am not yet prepared to believe), that doesn't make them applicable to the entire gender, and the stereotype remains wildly inappropriate and offensive. If you're hearing things about men as a group that don't apply to you or any men you know, then chances are you're not hearing from someone who has a really ideal sample. If a female friend of mine complains about her sixth boyfriend in a row being a jerk, I don't conclude that men are jerks, I conclude that she has terrible taste.
You're right.
The success of pickup artist techniques only prove that there are enough women who are vulnerable to them to keep pickup artists in business. Same with any stereotypes about males. If my post implied there was strong evidence that such people were in a majority, that was an error. Although I think if these women were too small of a minority, the PUAs would alter their techniques to ones that worked on a more representative sample of women (assuming they're rational; I don't know any, but people in this community seem to have a high opinion of them.)
I think the general point that we're too unwilling to believe there are significant groups of people who think differently from ourselves still stands, though, whether it's closer to 20% or 60%.
One phenomenon I've observed is that some of the biggest gurus have begun talking about "higher quality women" or "true 10s" in the last couple of years, where they are meaning "women who have more than looks going for them"... suggesting that as the gurus and their markets mature, they become more interested in other qualities. And these gurus then begin emphasizing personal development, getting one's own life in order, etc.