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You know the problem with not outright saying that what you are advocating is actually eugenics is that eventually someone else will do it for you.

use the evidence that you see to update your model of the world,² and your model of the world to decide which possible behaviours would be most likely to achieve your goals

I endorse this advice. Note however some consider this in itself unethical when it comes to interpersonal relations. I have no clue why.

I'm actually at the point when I think it is impossible to give men useful advice to improve their sex lives and relationships because of the social dynamics that arise in nearly all societies. Actually good advice aiming to optimize the life outcomes of the men who are given it has never been discussed in public spaces and considered reputable.

Same can naturally be said of advice for women. I think most modern dating advice both for men and women is anti-knowledge in that the more of it you follow the more miserable you will end up being. I would say follow your instincts but that doesn't work either in our society since they are broken.

  1. Approach lots of women
  2. Act confident
  3. Have entertaining things to say
  4. Dress and groom well

...

If all PUA said was those 4 things, it wouldn't be interesting or controversial

This sounds reasonable until you actually think about the four points mentioned in Near mode. Consider:

  1. What does approaching lots of women actually look like if done in a logistically sound way? How does this relate to social norms? How does this relate to how feminists would like social norms to be?

  2. Observe what actually confident humans do to signal their confidence. Just do.

  3. Observe what is actually considered entertaining in a club envrionment that most PUA is designed to work in.

You know most of the things considered disreputable that PUAs advocate are precisely the result of first observing how points one to three actually work in our society and then optimizing to mimic this.

Only dressing and grooming well is probably not inherently controversial and even then pick up artists are mocked for their attempts to reverse engineer fashion that signals what they want to signal.

uncritically downvote anything feminist sounding, and upvote armchair ev-psych;

This is frustrating to read since complaints of other groups that amount to the same thing are ignored, but then again this is to be expected.

From the complaints (and not just here and now) it seems obvious that there is a problem we really should solve.

There being a problem people complain about and it actually being worth solving are remarkably uncorrelated. Here is an argument I made on the matter in the past.

Schelling point for metacontrarian replies of the sort I currently don't feel like making but probably need to be made despite bad signalling.

No dude. Just no. If that becomes policy I'm out of here.

Okay, so... you're going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most? And what else? Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can't for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.

Consider the context of this debate. Are you really sure (mostly) white (mostly) heterosexual (mostly) middle class women are really the most depriviliged group present on LessWrong?

Yet clearly they are the ones with the most explicit political activism and seem to be winning the popularity contest here. See any kind of controversy over sex/romance/gender/PUA we've had over the past oh... 5 years?

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