Agreed. But is there any point beyond expressing opprobrium in having two words if you're not really talking about anything except your own feelings? What I'm really asking is whether a behaviourist along the lines of B.F. Skinner would have been able to distinguish the two concepts. If not, it goes in the "may need to phrase this differently depending on audience but no actual difference in facts or anticipations" category.

I write this post as to maybe generate a discussion on how the efforts could be concentrated and a new direction taken.

User interfaces are hard, especially if they're for the general public. Empirical testing helps.

Maybe we should start with what sort of things you personally would like to learn.

Just my opinion, but I think Eliezer's posts are what they are because he doesn't just want to say "here is how to be rational", he wants to give convincing arguments for why rationality makes sense. Not only does this show more respect for his readers' minds, it improves the odds that their understanding of rationality will resemble his. I'm hoping that there will be good ways of explaining rationality to people of average intelligence, but (at least in this community) this isn't close to being developed yet.

For the fun of it, is mathematics invented or discovered? If discovered, what sort of things are being explored? If invented, why is there so much commonality of results?

If you want to see somewhat about why PUA is such an ambiguous thing, check out Clarisse Thorn's Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser.

It seems to me that once we get away from obviously problematic situations (such as blackmail), the distinction is going to be in intent, which is never uncontroversial.

I think he can have, like, one point for ethics. He's a little sloppy about it in places and does sling generalizations, but there's nothing that egregious and he doesn't seem to hate women or consider us interchangeable.

Clarisse has been consulting with me and other people with pickup background. I don't completely agree with all her conclusions, but she isn't just cherry-picking pickup knowledge to keep and throw away completely haphazardly.

I am impressed at the quality of the comments in that thread.

That does sound more effective at the task of forming a sexually satisfying relationship. Sally loses out a lot because she made her strategy about maximising her chances at having a relationship with Bob. Until you actually have a personal connection, let's face it, potential attractive mates are basically fungible. There are plenty out there and there and there is no need to get all hung up about catching a specific target in particular.

I am currently working on ensuring that I hit emotional hookpoint with men on the first date, and then having sex on the first date. I seem to be relatively successful at this, but I'd like to be better at it.

Is there any particular tactic that works for landing the hook? (Well, apart from those tactics and techniques that add up to being so amazingly good in bed that no guy could help but come back for more!) The most obvious is extending the potential duration of the dates (to 7 or so hours if desired) and including multiple venue changes. The subjective experience of time is far more important than time itself.

There isn't such an overwhelming conflict of interest with regards to agenda (which is not to say that the political agenda wouldn't interfere even with advice to females at times as well).

You would think that if feminism was about watching out for women's interests, it would also watch out for their heterosexual interests. Yet some feminists seem to view women's heterosexual interests as counter their political interests, when those women have preferences for traditional gender dynamics.

In some conversations with feminists about pickup techniques, I often get the sense that they look down on the women who respond to particular techniques. For example, in a thread at Feministe, "negs" are only granted effectiveness because of vulnerabilities in women. It couldn't possibly be because some types of women actually enjoy some types of negs, without being psychologically broken!

For example, this comment supposedly distinguishes a "neg" from light teasing:

(1) A week or so ago I was sitting in a bar with a few friends and a guy walked up to me and said “You have lovely eyes, they’d be remarkable if you wore makeup.” That’s a neg. That made me laugh at him and tell him to go away.

(3) In contrast many years ago I was sitting in a coffee shop, when a guy walked up to me and said “You’re reading Kant? You know that guy will rot your brain right?” That is light teasing. That made me laugh, and talk to him for 5 solid hours. Then marry him…granted there might have been a bit more involved there…but it started with a tease that was not about dominance, but rather about shared experience.

Yet Clarisse Thorn herself pointed out to me that these sorts of comments actually aren't so different in principle. The second one is an intellectual "neg." The poster might hear the first approach, and think "what a pretentious asshole." Yet if a woman was merely reading Kant as an assignment, and received the second approach, she might also think "what a pretentious asshole." Both approaches have the possibility of getting a positive and a negative response depending on how it is pulled off, and what sort of woman receives it.

There seems to be a bias in some feminist women to view their preferences as the default, while viewing the preferences of other women as unhealthy, such that PUAs are "preying" on those women. Although I would agree to a limited extent that some common mainstream female preferences are unhealthy, and perhaps should not be satisfied, I am highly skeptical of feminist women trashing other women's preferences and trashing PUAs for fulfilling them.

What's your explanation/evidence

I like this sort of question. Based on my own field experience, I agree with wedrifid's advice. Also, it's not hard to delay sex a few weeks, especially if are only going out with the person once a week.

• Day 1: meet, exchange numbers, kiss goodnight
• Date 1: make out for a while
• Date 2: make out for a while with hands roaming
• Date 3: make out with some clothes coming off, dry humping, maybe one or both people get some manual stimulation
• Date 4: oral, manual
• Date 5: sexual intercourse

Spread out with a week in between, these 6 steps could take 1.5 months to complete. In my last relationship, the schedule was something like this, and it didn't feel unnatural. It also helped that she liked to initiate things, so that I knew that she would initiate sex when she was ready; then I didn't have to try to guess the right timetable for sex and risk being too fast or too slow.

Of course, some of these steps can be accelerated, and people might meet more than once a week. The point is that it should be easy to delay sex past the two week mark, while still doing more sexually each time.

Don't be hanging out more than twice a week, or more than two days in a row. People shouldn't be doing that anyway in the beginning, because it's a great way for people to get sick of each other.

Have dates be activities where sex is logistically hard. Keep everything in dark corners of clubs, in parking lots, in cars, or out in nature. If the environment is a barrier to sex, then you won't have to refuse it.

See the amazing Playette FAQ:

If you haven't hit emotional hookpoint it yet AND YOU WANT IT, don't put yourself in a situation where sex can happen and then refuse to have sex -- just try to keep subtle control of logistics such that the rate at which you approach a possible hookup roughly corresponds to the rate at which his emotional attraction is growing. If you can't think of a smooth, natural way to delay isolation until you've hit hookpoint, then you have to weigh your options and make a quick decision: would you rather bail on the interaction, or go for it and risk the possibility that you won't hit hookpoint at all? I'd like to stress gently, here, that no matter what there are no guarantees. Some guys can hit hookpoint after sex. Some will immediately before. And some, no matter how long you have with them, never will. In either case, a smooth interaction is key - smoothly bail, or smoothly go with it. In general, I would avoid any kind of 'status of the hookup' talk or obviously artificial speedbump.

The most stylish solution would be to logistically delay sex without it feeling artificial for the other person. Yet if you are dating someone who is nerdy and/or capable of explicit communication around sex, explicitly trying to explain when you do or don't want to have sex could work. And if they specifically ask you when you will want to have sex, or keeps trying to initiate it, then they may force your hand (but if they are playing stylishly, then they shouldn't be trying to make you logically explain yourself).

Explicit negotiation can be very costly, and this cost isn't recognized by people in culture who are always gushing about "communication" and "talking about it." Setting up a date that makes sex difficult subcommunicates that you don't want to have sex, which can often be superior to explicitly explaining it to your partner.

I recommend the movie "Filming Desire" for what I found to be a very interesting and nuanced feminist analysis of objectification, and what happens when women try to represent sex for ourselves rather than buying into how the dominant culture represents sex (i.e., how men with stereotypical desires represent sex).

Here is an edited version of a comment I recently wrote on my own post "Ethical Pick-Up Artistry" [ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/03/23/ethical-pick-up-artistry/ ], which I think is tangentially relevant:

I don’t really like the idea that men’s sexuality is generally more focused on stereotypically “hot” women, and that it’s some kind of inherent difference -- beyond cultural influences -- that it's more unusual/more difficult for men to be attracted to non-conventionally attractive women than to conventionally attractive ones, as opposed to the way attraction works for most het women. But it could be true, and if it is then I don’t feel comfortable shaming men for that. (It seems like gay men frequently exhibit similar attraction patterns to straight men, in terms of being considerably more attracted to younger partners and more, shall we say, sculpted partners. I seem to recall reading somewhere that lesbians have written critiques of ageism in gay men’s attraction patterns.)

There’s evidence for sexual fluidity but there’s no evidence for being able to consciously change sexuality. Maybe changing culture can change sexuality. There’s no evidence for this and I’m extremely reluctant to police art, porn, whatever based on a weak hypothesis, especially if the goal is to police sexuality even more than it is already policed. All the anecdotes (and sexuality scholars) I’ve encountered have said that sexual fluidity appears to happen in a way we can’t control and don’t understand. The ex-gay movement shows us that even people who are very motivated to abandon homosexuality simply cannot meet with success, and will become disillusioned witnesses against the programs that tried. What good is shame for influencing such a force?

But is it such a problem that attraction patterns are like this? Well, it sucks for conventionally unattractive women in particular. I have a lot of sympathy for this (as my frequently-noted fears of aging show). On the other hand, a lot of things about sexual attraction just aren’t fair, and if we start insisting that people are obligated to have sex with people they’re not attracted to, that’s not right either.

I think the real, and important, problem comes in when people (especially women) who are attractive are given more social power in other areas: more likely to be promoted, more likely to be seen as competent, etc (studies show that blonde hair is most universally attractive to men and that blondes make more money on average than other women). Some famous misogynist, I can’t remember which one, is on record as saying that feminism is about giving unattractive women more power in society (even leaving aside its massive misread on feminism, this statement assumes that unattractive women don’t deserve any power in society, which is obviously fucked up).

People aren’t very good at watching their biases in general, and so when I say that men generally suck at watching out for how biased they get about attractive women, I’m not trying to say something specific about men. It may be that women are less biased by conventionally attractive men because our hormones just work differently. It may also be that attractive men would be able to get ahead through their attractiveness more if women had the same amount of overall power in society as men. Regardless, it seems like the focus should be on de-biasing people to think that attractive people are better at things that have nothing to do with attraction, rather than on attempting to change men's attraction patterns.