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Viliam_Bur comments on Weird Alliances - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (19)
Yes, reactions to fanfiction and reactions to PUA are of a different kind. Fanfiction can be considered boring or irrelevant, but not unethical. So for example, an advice "if you don't like it, just ignore it" makes more sense for fanfiction than for PUA.
Speaking as a former fan of PUA, I think it would be good to distinguish between two things: "Which beliefs are correct?" and "Which techniques are ethical?" Not to treat them as the same question. People may behave unethically while having a correct model of the world, or behave ethically while having an incorrect model. Also, the "PUA techniques" is a large set; it may contain both ethical and unethical methods. To pick trivial examples, "negging" would be unethical, while "spend some time in the gym" is ethically neutral, and I would consider it instrumentally rational.
Sorry for getting to the object level, but I believe the rational response to PUA is to look at specific details and say: "this is correct", "this is incorrect", "this is ethical", "this is unethical". Not to accept everything, nor to reject everything. -- This can be further generalized: just because a bunch of ideas comes under the same label, it does not mean that their truth value is the same.
I think this is the "motte and bailey" applied to PUA. Normally when people say "PUA techniques," they mean something narrower than "anything you might do to increase your attractiveness."
I believe you are using the "motte and bailey" analogy incorrectly here. It is not supposed to mean "the worst thing you can associate with a group", but rather something like "a central teaching which is rather indefensible in a debate, but they keep returning to it as long as there is no opponent in sight".
Yes, they mean "behaving like (a PUA model of) alpha male". That includes a lot of things; and different people put emphasis on different subsets. The original approaches had a lot of "hacks to fool the alpha-male detector", and negging was one of those hacks. (And it was not meant to be used on every woman all the time, but as a way to get attention of a woman way above the man's level.) The recent approaches are about "just become the alpha male, duh".