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Viliam_Bur comments on Open Thread: March 4 - 10 - Less Wrong
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It's what remains of romance when you remove the mystery (i.e. stop worshiping your own ignorance).
As a long-time student of PUA, I call bullcrap on that one. PUA is, in general, highly manipulative and unethical. It also says nothing about:
Additionally, when your feelings of attraction run so high you can barely speak, when your misery is so great you cannot sleep, when your thoughts keep intrusively going back to your beloved, "removing the mystery and not worshipping your own ignorance" helps about as much as knowing medicine and physiology while drunk off your ass; it doesn't change the fact that you're drunk, it doesn't mitigate the alcohol's effects, and your judgement is perturbed enough that you might not even be able to use your knowledge.
That's why, for being drunk as well as for being in love, you take your precautions in advance.
Um, I'll have to call BS on all of these points. First of all, whether "PUA is, in general, highly manipulative and unethical" is simply not a meaningful question. However, many people find PUA to be extremely beneficial, quite independently of any such manipulation - and one key reason for this is that PUA does address these issues quite effectively, specifically through 'inner game', i.e. romance-oriented mindhacks.
For instance, if you are highly attracted to someone, a PUA might encourage you to meditate on how known biases such as the affect heuristic and the halo effect might influence your perception of the person you are attracted to. While this may not directly affect your attraction to that person, it will nonetheless allow you to behave more rationally and improve your overall outlook in romantic matters.
I've already done that, and that's not PUA, that's rationalism. Also, thinking rationally doesn't attenuate the feelings one bit, it just makes you better at achieving what you want to do in the moment.
Says who? You seem to be artificially restricting 'PUA' in that "only the bad parts count". But that's reference class tennis - it doesn't help us address the original question.
Interestingly, even if you object to using the term "PUA" for broadly acceptable practices (and this might be quite sensible on historical grounds), that hardly prevents groups - such as the Reddit group /r/letsgetlaid (caution: possibly NSFW) [1] - from drawing on the seduction community's knowledge about human interaction as a way of improving one's romantic success, while holding to strict ethical standards.
[1] It's quite early to say whether this particular approach will be successful. One reason for skepticism is that past attempts along the same lines (e.g. the 'be suave' community) have tended to devolve into repeating meaningless or wrong-headed truisms. Nonetheless, I view this effort as more likely to be helpful, partly because the ethic of "sex positivity" has improved the 'political' climate around what used to be quite uncomfortable ideas.
Let me rephrase that; "That's simply the application of the universal rationalist principles of maintaining an awareness of one's own biases and compensating for them, it does not include any special insights or techniques, and would be equally relevant in any situation where your feelings might get the better of you." Just like "keep your distance from an enemy and wait at for opportune time to strike" is general strategic advice, not martial arts, and "don't leave stuff on the fire without observation" is basic safety rather than a cooking technique.
That sounds like something I'd love to see.
Um, many things appear 'simple' and 'obvious' in hindsight, but this does not make them any less helpful. If for nothing else, the PUA community deserves credit for actively experimenting with this idea and reporting positive results, thus raising it to our attention as something that's potentially useful.
Maybe if you're talking about the general public, but no Lesswronger worth his salt is going to forget about these essential biases when attempting to compensate for how being in love may affect their judgement.
Rather, the point is to come up with principles and policies to follow, to compensate for those biases, knowing that, while they are high on love, they will not think or care to do so on their own. Mental preparation, "being set", is essential for avoiding mistakes while in mind-altered states.
PUA techniques are unabashed realpolitik. It's horrible between nation states, and horrible between individuals.
Yeah but States are non-personal entities that don't care.
Actually, one problem with 'realpolitik' theories in international politics is that they assume that states do care, specifically about their safety from outside coercion. This is quite strange when you think about it. Even when an inpersonal institution appears to 'care' about something, say a business caring about profit, this is typically a result of well-defined incentive structures, such as residual claimants controlling the business. But there is no equivalent for states (except for strong monarchies, dictatorships or oligarchies - or neocameralist/formalist polities), so how is this realpolitik thing supposed to work? Maybe it could work like PUA after all - evolutionary dynamics in the course of history have led states to pick up lots of adaptations that improve their security, and they execute on these adaptations even if they aren't security maximizers?
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It's very dangerous to play at evolutionary psychology when one isn't from the field. I'd abstain.