none of it has ever helped me one bit

I should be more specific:

• It would have helped me a great deal to have read this material when I was in college. It would have destroyed the dysfunctional things I had been taught (e.g., "Dating leads to sin; banter is rude; sex is dirty; women don't want sex; love is spiritual, not physical; just be yourself; just wait, and the right woman for you will be attracted to you"), and I probably would have been able to connect with at least some of the women who threw themselves at me when I was in college.

• It has helped me get a lot of phone numbers and emails from women - not using specific techniques, which I'm lousy at, but just knowing that nothing awful will happen if I walk up to a strange woman and talk to her and ask for her number. But those phone #s and emails that I got using PUA techniques, don't usually convert! And I've lost at least one woman by using those techniques, so I'm maybe breaking even.

• Bodybuilding was a more effective way of pickup up women. For me, spending an hour a day in the gym, and fifteen minutes talking to women, is more effective than spending an hour and fifteen minutes in a bar. For many guys that is probably not the case. I am a bar-environment-defective personality. Being the quiet type is appealing if you are muscular, possibly because women know it's by choice and not out of fear, and definitely because some women are intrigued by the contrast. Women like the strong and silent type, not the silent type.

I would agree with your call for rationalist debate on the matter and agree that branding such debate "wrong" is well wrong. But I must disagree with the venue, because of signalling reasons. I would also to a limited extent endorse your criticism of the effectiveness of PUA for some (our?) kinds of people.

The main value I got out of PUA is its excellent predictive value, not any particular benefit via applying said knowledge.

The main tangible practical benefit I got from PUA can be summed up in the following four points:

1. Preform many many light-hearted social experiments, you need data.
2. Most of everyday casual communication is status signalling
3. The meaning of a communication is the response it elicits.
4. "Natural game" is practised by millions who don't think about what they are doing at all. They are not punished, resented or reviled for it at all in fact they are admired and appreciated. What you are doing is developing a substitute for the black box in their brain that you seem to be missing. The behaviour itself is attractive, its not used as a shorthand for some other qualities (which is not to say that some other qualities can't be attractive in their own right). The behaviour itself is all that is attractive, the machinery that is behind it doesn't matter one bit unless it fails to emulate the output or if it demonstrates other undesirable traits. But the set of appropriate behavioured in themselves are still attractive. If undesirables traits overcome the positive effect upon objective analysis this is not a call against reverse engineering, it is a call to use a different design for emulation.

But I would like very much to read it. And I am offended by people who try to prevent people from saying things that offend them. So you have to offend somebody!

I know what you mean!

The branches of the PUA industry descended from Copeland, DeAngelo, and Mystery (we need a phylogenetic tree here) are focused on picking up the type of shallow, party-girl, bitchy woman that is not interested in intellectuals.

In the case of DeAngelo I have to disagree. He is basically just a 'intellectual' himself and his best work is targeted to similar audience as himself. It is well suited to non-bitch-party-girl girls and for most part is just stuff that is overwhelmingly obvious if you have lived in the world for a while or have read psychology books. Especially the parts where he literally just stands there and reads said psychology books.

As for Mystery and co, however, you have the caricature down pat. He even says pretty much the same thing himself. His method is aimed at 'particularly beautiful women', where his appreciation of beauty explicitly includes being 'dolled up' in such a way that most women of the class that you mention would be excluded.

I don't care if people are turned away by it. We've gotta have one place that is pure, where people can speak truth and be as politically incorrect and offensive as they dare, and not make reason bend over backwards in the name of popularity. And this is that place.

No, it isn't. There's already a pretty strong taboo against discussing politics, even though there's a lot of important ways politics interacts with rationality. And that's because even though it is theoretically possible to talk about politics safely, rationally, in practice it simply doesn't last, and has an overall negative effect on the community as people descend into tribalism.

I think there is plenty of good stuff to talk about regarding PUA. But it is going to have consequences. Women will be turned off unless it is discussed extremely carefully. Sooner or later someone will slip up and say something NOT careful, which comes across as sexist. The first few slip ups will be accidental and forgiveable, but unless there is a constant pushback from women and female-advocates, it's going to gradually get worse, and most of the males won't even notice. If there IS constant pushback and reminders whenever people inadvertently point out sexist thinking, many people will not say "oh, my bad," they will say "come on stop overreacting" which a) often ends up being sexist all by itself and b) creates a dichotomy which leads to tribalism. So for most intents and purposes, PUA counts as politics.

In this case, the slip up was in the very first line of the post: Lukeprog started with the words "Attraction and Seduction for Heterosexual Male Rationalists." This already suggests to women perusing the site that this is a site for heterosexual males, and the word "seduction" already is implicitly objectifying women. It's possible for someone to have done it tastefully and carefully, but this post wasn't it and the people reacting negatively to it are perfectly justified.

I don't care if people are turned away by it. We've gotta have one place that is pure, where people can speak truth and be as politically incorrect and offensive as they dare, and not make reason bend over backwards in the name of popularity. And this is that place.

But what about those who are turned away by the post? Don't they need such a place too? Do they not count in "we", or do we need more than one place?

Most are just non-introspective/shallow/high-energy/arrogant/cheerful/sociopathic (pick at least two). But none of them were taught.

Signals associated with the dark triade don't seem to be hard to replicate.