drethelin comments on Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love. - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Raemon 23 December 2012 06:56PM

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Comment author: drethelin 24 December 2012 07:22:14AM 2 points [-]

This is kind of a tangent but I'm curious as to how you view PUA as nonconsensual, compared to eg, just being charming, or friendly or nice. Do you announce every interaction with "Now I am being nice to you, because I want you to like me more."?

Comment author: Raemon 24 December 2012 07:25:03AM 9 points [-]

I am going to officially request that we not make the comments section of this post a discussion about PUA. It's a valuable topic, but please, not here.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 December 2012 07:31:54AM 6 points [-]

I won't go too far this tangential rabbit hole, especially since it has been covered quite a lot on here previously. But a quick answer:

I am actually a PUA moderate. I don't think Dark Arts or their usage are inherently bad. There are some bad practices (i.e. things that cause the target to feel bad) and ideas (i.e. lets focus on "Women" being manipulatable, rather than "People" being manipulatable.) there, but People Having Social Skills is good, and systematizing can be useful.

That said, my comment about fore-knowledge was to show how informed ritual and PUA are completely different anyways, and the comparison doesn't hold. So we don't even have to go into the PUA discussion.