Part of the issue is that, even when the hurt is minimal, it's a decision that one's own self-interest outweighs the harm to someone else, and as humans we're not very good at making that calculation objectively.

They rank women from 1 to 10 and advise different techniques.

Yes. The rating system is controversial in the community, and many PUAs refuse to use it exactly because they see it as objectifying. The reason that it probably sticks around is that it happens to be useful: a woman's conventional attractiveness is a factor in how she has been treated by men, and the physiological effect she has on the PUA, both of which are highly relevant.

As I said before, this differs from PUA because everyone realises what is going on.

Do women not realize what is going on when a strange guy approaches them?

The PUArtist intends to hide the artifice,

Are you against all hidden artifices in dating (including female artifices)? Or just some particular types of artifice? If the latter, what distinguishes the artifices that you find objectionable? The moral standards you are advocating seem potentially over-broad to me.

to convince a woman to sleep with him or lust after him without her realising he is using mind tricks to do it.

The problem I have with the term "mind tricks" is that a lot of these behaviors are isomorphic to social behaviors shown by men who are naturally successful with women (which is not to say that I don't have a problem with some techniques, see below). The neg, and cocky/funny for instance. It seems counter-intuitive to hold that these behaviors are OK if you don't realize you are doing them, but not OK if you know how they work. Of course, you might see the neg as bad either way, in which case it sounds like the main problem you have is with the effects of the technique, not its covert nature.

And indeed, I also have a problem with the neg. I think that the potential benefits it provides don't outweigh the potential discomfort or insult it can cause to the woman. Or though it might in some contexts, there are better ways to get the same interest without risking hurting her feelings. I think the seduction community as a whole is coming around to this view. Mystery had them believing that negs were practically necessary on highly attractive women in clubs, but eventually people discovered that there were other ways to get their foot in the door, so the neg could no longer be justified on the grounds of virtual necessity.

I think I agree with most of this. I did like the comments pointing out that we can be offended by having our status raised, but actually I think in that situation we're really offended on behalf of someone else when their status is lowered. Someone who puts down jewish people in front of me offends me because I object to the lowering of jewish people's status, rather than the raising of my own relative to them.

However, people also use the term "offended" when they're angered by something they think is morally wrong. So for example "I am offended by the idea that Nazi Germany is a desirable place/time to live." I don't know how that fits in here or if we could consider it a misuse of the term.

I want to note though that I was not at all offended by Summers' comments about women in science. I am a female economics undergrad and research assistant who fully intends to become a professor. But I (mostly) agreed with him and defended his comments - perhaps they were clumsy but they were not sexist or demeaning to women. I wouldn't have defended him if I felt he treated women as objects in his comments or excluded women from the intended audience.

Rachael, I think you raise some excellent questions about the ethics of social influence.

By "hack" I mean "influence in an underhanded way without permission"

Could you explain this without using loaded terms so I can understand exactly what your objection is? I'm glad you try to unpack "hack" as "influence in an underhanded way without permission", but "underhanded" is still a loaded term!

My best guess is that you're saying that it's unethical to intentionally use a tactic of social influence that the other person doesn't understand and hasn't granted permission for. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

I would agree that such behavior is often creepy or distasteful, but I think calling it unethical would have results that are counter to our intuitions. Does it imply that if the other person knew what you were doing, then it would be OK? Or that if you didn't know you were influencing them, it would be OK? Let's look at an example from the feminine behavioral repertoire: push-up bras. Are these a hack into the male mind? Some males probably don't know what push-up bras are, or what their effect is, so they are being influenced by that "tactic" without their knowledge or permission.

To avoid potentially banning large swathes of male and female mating behavior, I think we really have to look at the content of social influence techniques, not just at who knows how it works and who doesn't. I think what we should really be asking is: is the technique harmful, can the user of the technique reasonably be expected to know that, and can any potential harm be justified by potential benefits to the recipient of the technique? Are there any similar techniques out there that can accomplish the same result with less risk of harm?

When looking at pickup techniques, I think we would see a whole gamut of answers to those questions.

Let's break them into two groups: the outright tricksters and the "inner" school. We can agree, unless i'm very much mistaken, that the tricksters are clearly attempting to hack women's brains (ie with the little psychological games to make them look insightful or deep, with use of negging, etc) in an unethical way. Mystery is a good example of this

Agreed. Ross Jeffries and Mystery both explicitly belong to this school. However, the general trend in successful schools has been moving progressively further and further away from these approaches. Indeed, even Mystery is viewable as a step away from Jeffries' position - arguably most of the Mystery Method can be compared to a generalized pattern for "how to give a speech" -- i.e., this is the order of steps that people go through in becoming attracted to one another, so this is the order in which you should do things. You can discard all of the specific problematic techniques at each stage, and just use the stages themselves.

In fact, this is what the RSD people do - the company formed from the feud between Mystery and certain of his Project Hollywood brethren. They kept the logistics, and substitute what might simplistically be called "confidence" for the use of canned material and tricks. The RSD people have famously claimed that any statement, no matter how ridiculous, can be used to start a conversation, if used with the right attitude. And one of their examples is, "I like salad!"

Clearly, this is not some sort of underhanded mind hack.

It seems to me that, in general, the direction of larger PUA schools since Mystery is increasingly away from the direction of "tricks", and for various economic/marketing reasons (which I won't bore you with here), I expect this trend to continue. But in addition to those business reasons, there's a deeper reason as well.

In one workshop video excerpt I saw, a teacher told a story about his first attempt at pickup, after having read some stupid poem on the internet that was supposed to be a magic pickup line or something. Only, being young and gullible, he totally and utterly believed it would work. So he went to the nearest bar, went straight to the best-looking woman in the room, and used it... and it worked.

Not because it was magic. But because he believed it would work, and therefore gave off all the attractive signals of a man with complete confidence in himself.

So, what's been happening is that there's an increasing realization among the teachers that, really, there are only two things to teach: confidence, and the details. (Where details might be compared to stage management, planning & prep., and improvisation skills in relation to public speaking.)

In practice, I'm also using the word "confidence" to cover a broad spectrum of ideas such as frame control, nonreactivity, positive state and projections, self-image, etc.

But the inner school still includes techniques to optimise/hack the woman, for example the systems of how to touch women casually so that they "feel safe"

Surely you'd want to know how not to touch someone in an offputting way, or to convey a degree of interest that you didn't mean to? I guess I'm confused how learning to touch in a courteous way constitutes "hacking".

I don't see how that's any different from the tricksters. For example, Juggler says: "You can figure out what IOIs you want and then 'trick' or command them from girls." He even says men should "Tell her to sit with the proper posture" or get "her" to "accept your commands" by starting small and then building up.

The public speaker gets up in front of an audience, and says, "How's everybody doing tonight?" No responses. Louder: "How's everybody doing tonight?", and gets some response. Later, the speaker asks how many people are local/from out of town, asks them to raise their hands.

By the speed of the responses, the speaker knows whether his audience is responding to his message. Also, by making them do things, the speaker is asking for a greater commitment to and involvement with whatever message is being presented.

However, this is not "hacking" the audience. If somebody is not open to what is being said, they're gonna sit there with folded hands and their mouth shut, no matter what the speaker says or asks. The speaker's actions may increase the response of audience members who are at least minimally responsive, but their minds are hardly being hacked! If it were possible to really hack minds in this way, seminar speakers would make considerably more money than they already do. ;-)

These types of responsiveness requests are mainly useful for measuring the temperature of an interaction, and prompting a move to the next stage of an interaction that's already going well. They can't be used to create something that isn't already there, which is why public speakers can't just give people a bunch of commands to raise their hands or stand up or sit down or clap, as a simple lead up to saying, "now go to the back of the room and give me all your money."

Do you really think that even the most devious PUA tricks have any more mind hacking power than this? I don't. And my general impression is that the skilled PUAs and teachers don't expect any of these tricks to do the work for them; having showmanship or salesmanship is not really a substitute for having something worth showing or selling.

To me the inner school is fundamentally the same as the tricksters, except it adds in a component of self-optimising as well as the manipulation of the woman - that makes it less wrong but certainly not right.

Well, since I haven't taken any classes from any of these people, I can't absolutely refute this with any certainty. But my understanding is that, for example, RSD's "Blueprint Decoded" workshop consists of four days of nothing but self-improvement, as do the Double Your Dating "Man Transformation", "Deep Inner Game", and "On Being A Man" workshop products. So, there are definitely guys out there wanting to buy stuff that's only inner game and has nothing to do with manipulating anybody (or the DYD people sure as heck wouldn't have made three high-end products on the topic!).

Now, whether the products match the way they're promoted, I couldn't say. But I think it's interesting, the shifts in marketing that have taken place over the years, and I think it reflects an increasing understanding that while many guys will buy tricks, what a large percentage of them really want, is just to be someone who's comfortable around attractive women, and doesn't put them off in a hundred tiny ways they don't even realize they're doing.

I think this is a worthwhile thing, and I assume you do as well.

A person willing to employ pickup artistry or similar is revealing their opinion that women do not deserve full agency and/or the chance to make informed decisions in this arena, purely because the Artist disagrees with their probable decision.

Is a person willing to take a class on public speaking revealing their opinion that audiences do not deserve full agency or the chance to make informed decisions about what they're presenting in a speech? Should they not practice to make the best possible impression?

I realize there are schools of PUA that are based on trickery. However, the "direct", "natural", and "inner" schools of PUA studies deal only with what makes men more attractive to women, generally. That information is unlikely to be useful to you as a bisexual woman, but it is certainly not about treating women as objects. Some teachers (most notably Johnny Soporno) are quite explicitly about emancipating women from oppressive societal constructs around sexuality (such as the idea that having sex with more than one partner means a woman has no self-worth).

Still other teachers (e.g. Juggler) teach men how to make emotional connections in conversation -- to reveal themselves better and to learn more about a woman than just "what do you do" type chitchat. And others (e.g. Tyler of RSD) emphasize learning how to provide a woman with a safe space and positive energy. (I know that sounds kind of woo-woo, but actually explaining it in a reductionist way would take way more time and space than I want to spend here.)

None of these things are any more offensive or objectifying to women than public speaking classes are to audiences. They're teaching men to be better men, not how to "control" women.

I can't understand your position. There are people who seem to reliably be able to (in a sense) "hack" women's minds ... and you don't want to know about it? Wouldn't you want to be aware of when you are tricked into wanting something that goes against your interest?

ETA: I'm male, and I felt the same revulsion at PUA discussions, but decided that it's all the more reason to learn about them.

Eliezer, I think you're spot on here. I think objectification is both exclusion from the dialogue and being relegated to the status of an object, but I hadn't considered the first aspect to it before.

The PUA dialogue as a whole is unpleasant for me, as a woman, exactly because women are implicitly excluded as agents. I am bisexual and I would like it if more women were interested in me, so one would think PUA might be of interest. But PUA excludes me completely and alienates me. When I read about it, I realise with a horrified fascination that I am reading instructions for someone else on how to hack MY BRAIN for their own personal gratification.

Being "objectified" in the sense of being relegated to the status of an object implies that one neither needs nor deserves autonomy or agency. A person willing to employ pickup artistry or similar is revealing their opinion that women do not deserve full agency and/or the chance to make informed decisions in this arena, purely because the Artist disagrees with their probable decision. I believe that's why I and so many other women find PUA repulsive: it is an attempt to control us and dilute our autonomy.

And for the record, I am really interested in evolutionary psychology and don't understand how it could be offensive. It doesn't attempt to exclude or disempower any group to my knowledge - am I wrong? From my reading on the matter, it is simply one scientific approach attempting to explain and predict human behaviour.

(edited for clarity)

The problem is real. I am a 21 year old woman and an aspiring rationalist, and my friends are mostly women and some are also aspiring rationalists. We find much of the conversation about women on this site so off-putting that I for one have never commented before. I read Eliezer's work and enjoy it very much indeed, which is why I stick around at all.

I am simply astounded at the men here confidently asserting that they aren't alienating women when they talk about "getting" "attractive women" and speak of women as symbols of male success or indeed accessories for a successful male. This reduces me and other females (including female rationalists) to the category of a fancy car or a big house, and I feel humiliated when I read it.

I am fully aware that some men think this way, and that in certain social scenes almost all the "players" in the social "game" see it this way. If getting ahead in a social game like that gives you loads of utility then thinking of women in this way might be rational. But if you would derive more utility from having long and close relationships with female rationalists, you might like to know that female rationalists will be less likely to seek out your company and attention if you persist in that attitude.