I don't want to have to be socially calibrated on LW.

That seems awfully close to "I want to act like an asshole on LW and not care what effect it has on anyone else". I hope that if you do then you'll get voted into the ground.

just don't mention it, because society has conditioned them to start going into a feminist death-spiral about it.

I think that holding a belief of the form "You mustn't admit to X outside our inner circle, because the unenlightened have been conditioned by society to hate and fear it" should be treated as a warning sign that one might have been sucked into something unpleasant. I expect the members of various cults have similar rules.

(Of course, sometimes it might be perfectly correct; see, e.g., Paul Graham's essay on what you can't say. But my guess is that such occasions are outnumbered considerably by ones where the reason why you'd get in trouble for saying X in public is because X is stupid or unpleasant or something of the kind, and people who haven't been desensitized to it will notice.

I suspect that efficiency is not necessarily the reason that many dislike PUA techniques. Personally, I don't particularly doubt that there are patterns for how women react to men (and vice versa), and that these can be used to have more sex. On the other hand, spiking people's drinks or getting them drunk can also be used for the same purpose, and that's commonly known as rape.

Sure, there are ways to hack into people's minds to get them to do what you want. The fact that they exist doesn't make them ethically acceptable.

Now, I don't know whether PUA methods are or aren't - but the fact that "the attitude that your partner should be respected" is seen as a negative thing seems to be pointing pretty clearly towards the no direction.

I suspect that efficiency is not necessarily the reason that many dislike PUA techniques. Personally, I don't particularly doubt that there are patterns for how women react to men (and vice versa), and that these can be used to have more sex. On the other hand, spiking people's drinks or getting them drunk can also be used for the same purpose, and that's commonly known as rape.

Sure, there are ways to hack into people's minds to get them to do what you want. The fact that they exist doesn't make them ethically acceptable.

Now, I don't know whether PUA methods are or aren't - but the fact that "the attitude that your partner should be respected" is seen as a negative thing seems to be pointing pretty clearly towards the no direction.

As far as I can tell most people who dislike PUA techniques don't really understand them.

What about women who dislike PUA techniques, them too?

Disliking talk about PUA in a place like this is very ironic, as that's the best example of practical use of evolutionary psychology I can think of.

If we also start disliking behavioral economics as equally manipulative, we're running of real world examples.

As far as I can tell most people who dislike PUA techniques don't really understand them.

Yup. Is there somewhere in the PUA literature where they tell you to, you know, notice the way women react to your speech?

Yes, it's called "social calibration", and from the way teachers go on about it, I gather it's one of the most difficult things to teach to someone who doesn't have it. By default, people pay more attention to their projections of what other people are thinking about what they're doing, than they are to either what they're actually doing, or how people are actually reacting to it.

Of course, social calibration is even harder in a purely textual environment, especially one where it's easy to mistake one's conversation for a one-on-one interaction with the person you're directly replying to. Here, it can be almost as if you're having a nice little person-to-person chat in a noisy club, and then all of a sudden, the music goes quiet just as you're yelling (to make yourself heard to the person next to you) some embarassingly out-of-context thing , and then everybody's staring at you...

That I am actually homosexual and hallucinated all my heterosexual encounters as a bizarre result of severe repression.

Of course nowadays I practice almost exclusively direct game, and it works for me.

So then WTF have you been advocating dishonesty, if you know it's unnecessary?

And yes, you are still manipulating someone when you are doing direct game. You're just doing it in a more natural and mutually enjoyable way.

I don't think it really does anyone a service to frame it that way, except maybe as a way to convince somebody to buy your course so you can then talk them out of it.

Thing is, by framing it as "manipulation" to yourself, you are implying that you are not good enough to get a woman without manipulation -- you are still maintaining a low-value frame, despite being nonreactive. You're just framing yourself as "low-value with workarounds", instead of "high value".

If you frame it instead as you providing women with mystery, intrigue, drama, or something else that they value -- then that immediately makes you a person of value... and flips over that "counter" in your brain that you asked about.

You've already done the hard work of getting competence and nonreactivity; now follow RSD Tyler's example and realize that you really do have something to offer. Voila! You now have value.

The difference between "value" and "manipulation" is mostly in the mind of the manipulator, but it also gets subcommunicated. And I personally believe it's better to spend a lot of time on flipping that switch, vs. learning all the many subcommunications that you otherwise have to mimic, because they're not being generated automatically.

If it takes you 100 hours of work on yourself to flip the inner switch, it's still 10 times more efficient than spending 1000 hours honing techniques that merely mimic the effect. Do the noobs a favor and don't send them down the "dark path" needlessly; better yet, be Yoda and warn them about its seductive dangers. ;-)

I'm not knocking the the natural way, or direct game, building inner game, which you seem to have been gifted with a lot of.

No, what I had was non-neediness and non-reactivity, combined with empathy and intelligent conversation. My inner game actually sucked. I was non-needy and non-reactive because that was my response to fear of rejection. I believed no woman would ever really love me, so there was no point in pining over what I couldn't have.

You could say I was following "The Tao of Steve", as in "Be desireless, be excellent, be gone"... but not because I had reached some sort of true inner peace.

But let us suppose, for a moment, that you're a guy who doesn't start off naturally confident, and doesn't live in the pjeby Shangri-La of abundant, sexually aggressive, confident, intelligent, high self-esteem women who always chase and want to date you.

I never said those women wanted to date me. A few did, most just wanted to get off or fulfill a fantasy. (To be clear, I didn't sleep with these women or have intercourse with them; I almost exclusively saved "standard" sex for my LTRs or FWBs, not the girls who just wanted to experiment.)

Another thing is to completely throw your dignity out of the window and pay for sex.

If you look down on people who pay for sex (and by implication, on sex workers), this is part of your attitude problem. You believe you have no value, so you take paying as evidence to support this belief, while ignoring the fact that rock stars also pay for sex... as Charlie Sheen I believe put it, "you're paying them to leave".

So it's not the act of paying for sex that throws out the dignity that you're afraid you lack in the first place.

Getting into game with a healthy attitude is better, I think. This means realizing that some of the time, some girls want to be manipulated, and that if you don't go out and take what you want, you won't get it. But this doesn't mean being an asshole - it just means realizing that you have to play the game.

You seem to be ignoring the part where manipulating doesn't equal lying, and that being tactful, cool, and fun does not equal "manipulating".... unless you view them through a frame where YOU are low-value!

Yes, eventually you'll pick up so much confidence that you'll be able to go natural and then yes, girls will pick up on this and start chasing you. But until that point, it will help to have some tactics under your belt.

You don't even need confidence; I certainly never had it. Non-neediness and non-reactivity are plenty enough.

This is like saying "any man can be a millionaire by having $ 1million in his bank account". But it's really really hard to change from believing that you are low value to believing that you are high value.

You don't need a trick -- you just need to cultivate something of genuine value. What do you really have to offer women? In my case, it was conversation, understanding, and a certain class of sexual experiences. You might offer excitement and adventure. Another guy might be an artist or musician. Per the Tao of Steve, what are you "excellent" at? What could you be excellent at? Value is just being excellent at something, that offers a woman an experience.

People (not just women) want emotional experiences. They are bored and afraid and dissatisfied, for the most part. What can you give them?

Not as a trade, not as a "look at me I'm awesome", but... what is part of your world that someone else would want to find out more about, or be a part of? I never flaunted my "fantasy fulfillment services"; I simply mentioned them in passing and never tried to talk anyone into making use of them. They had to ask me, and I was pretty tight-lipped about it, simply because I genuinely didn't want to push it on anyone. I'd answer questions briefly, then return to whatever non-sexual topic we were on.

Then, later... sometimes much later... someone I mentioned it to would come back and make a more serious inquiry, at which point I'd tell them about my NLP theory of how you can create fantasy experiences for someone by interpreting one of their existing fantasies, and we were off to the races.

This worked for me precisely because it was not a technique. I really didn't care. I hadn't seen "The Tao Of Steve", but I was desireless, I was excellent, I was gone.

This was not "inner game" or belief in my own value. It was just nonreactivity. Women don't really care about confidence so much as they care about you NOT being creepy or needy... as long as you also have some sort of "excellence" to enjoy.

If it were easy, if you could just think "ah, I'm going to change the counter in my mind that represents self-value from low to high", then a million dollar seduction industry wouldn't exist.

Nor the self-help industry. The catch is that there's more than one "counter", and as I always say, the brain has no "view source" button to let you list them all. (Technically, they're frames, not counters.)

By the way, I'm always looking for new and better ways to improve my inner game, so if you have any tips on how you got there, do share them with us.

My personal advice to you would be to ask what it is that you're afraid is true about yourself. Not are you afraid of rejection or relationships or any of that, what are you afraid is true about you, specifically?

Low self-esteem, and especially the sort of compensating ideals you're promoting, are usually based in fears of low-value qualities. But if you know what you're afraid of and admit to it, you'll have the chance to do something about it -- either decide that it's not really true of you, or that it is true, but you can change it.

Also, for whatever it's worth, I seem to recall that the period in my life where women were most abundant and I was at my most non-reactive/confident, was when I was doing daily Zen meditation of at least 20 minutes, and doing an extended session once a week at the local Zen center.

I've tried it on >20 women, with poor results in every case.

That's really not very many women, for club game and cold approach. Are you counting based on sets opened, or only ones where you got to an extraction attempt?

Women want to be chased, and an honest exchange of information doesn't give them a chase.

I see two problems with your statement. First, I've had women chase me. Second, the fact that some of them wanted to be chased didn't interfere with honesty; I just changed myself in such a way that I could be honest.

So, your poor results might have been affected by your taste in women. I like smart girls who are sexually aggressive, or at least passionate and sexually self-aware. That probably makes a big difference in my results, since my criteria would tend to select for women who would find honesty sexy, because they don't like playing games.

Those women are somewhat less likely to be found in bars and clubs, but I've met a few, so it's not like they don't exist.

Honestly, though, based on the entitlement attitude you've been showing, I suspect the reason your "honest" approach flopped was a function of your inner game, not of the women. The existence and success of such things as the apocalypse opener, forced IOI openers, Gunwitch method, mode one, and um, I forget what the other one is called, but that one where you alternate between escalating sexually explicit SOIs and casual conversation without giving any opportunity to object...

Anyway, the existence of all these methods shows that there are other PUAs who get results with the bold, explicit, truth, up to and including expressing a desire to have sex with the girl in the first few sentences of conversation.

To me, that says it's not the women. It's you.

What about if you just want sex quickly with an attractive woman irrespective of what kind of person she is? Is there something wrong with this?

The point is just that you're using your particular taste to justify your ethics, when, if you valued your ethics more, you could still find women who would appreciate your honesty.

Beyond that, I think your attitude shows a flawed understanding of women: you think they respond to qualities independent of the guy those qualities are attached to. But this is not entirely true: women often come to appreciate a quality that's possessed by a man they find attractive. Even if those 20 women never appreciated an honest man before, you still had the opportunity to make them appreciate your honesty... as long as it wasn't an excuse to be boring.

Hell, consider Steve P. -- the guy goes around telling people in a monotone that he teaches women how to have the best orgasms of their lives; I don't get any impression that he "games" in the least, and he's not exactly a great looker. But women chase him because he offers a unique sexual experience. (There are some definite parallels between what he does and what I did, but I'll not go into details here.)

My point is: if you cared as much about having something to offer women as you apparently care about what they offer to you, you wouldn't have problems with honesty. And if all you really care about is fast sex with a desirable body, why not just pay for it in the first place? That takes far less time than developing your game, and it's more honest, too.

The only way that I see you can get stuck in the spot where you're saying you are is if you:

• don't value women enough to offer them any value of your own, aside from intrigue, DHV stories, and ASD excuses...

• don't care about women enough to help them get over the societal programming that makes ASD excused necessary.

• are too cheap to pay for what you want in any other way,

• and not only have insufficient self-worth to be perceived as an attractive man, but also no desire to improve yourself to becoming one.

So frankly, you sound like you don't like women or yourself very much. That, IMO, is the "something wrong with this".

But where do you draw the line between tact and lying? For example, you approach a girl and ask her out on a date or tell her you think she's cute straight away. Tactless?

Maybe, maybe not. Most people would make either approach a DLV, but some men could make either one a DHV. (Hell, I can think of a guy I once knew who could have opened with, "Hey... you're cute, can I have your number?" in such a fun-yet-sarcastic way that it would've been perceived as anything from a rapport-building "gee these other guys are stupid to approach you in such a lame way", to a flat-out neg (i.e. "you're not really cute and I don't care about your number.")

Ok, but what other honest approach can you do?

Forced IOI openers and kino-based game would select for women who are open to a physical approach but who prefer to avoid verbal acknowledgments. When you get ASD, just raise an eyebrow like, "are you serious?", but say nothing. Or say, "Don't worry, I'll still respect you in the morning." HOW you say or do this is vastly more important than the words. Lying is really not necessary... hell, talking much at all isn't necessary, AFAICT.

(I'm not using myself as an example here; I hung with naturals once or twice in college, who tried and failed to teach me anything. But AFAICT they didn't really say much between "Hey" and "Let's get out of here", although there was some time in between, some dancing and a couple of location bounces within the club. They mostly let the girls do the talking.)

In short, every piece of evidence I have tells me that it ain't the women, it's you. Every man can be a natural, if he believes he actually has something of value to offer. But I get the impression you don't think you have anything to offer, and if you don't want to grow old chasing club girls with equally low self-esteem, you might want to change that.