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.
Right. But now we have an ontological problem: "hack into someone's mind" and "not hack into someone's mind" are not natural kinds.
In any social, romantic interaction, there is some degree of mind-hacking going on. When a person spends all their time and energy chasing a member of the opposite gender who is not interested, what has happened is mindhacking. The pain of unrequited love is a ...
I'll also say that insofar as women think that PUA "mind-hacking" techniques are black-hat subversions of female rationality, the most obvious solution I see is disseminating more information about them. Knowledge of these techniques would allow women to at least attempt to "patch" themselves, assuming they are open to the idea that they actually work.
For example, say I learn about negs. I can either think, "Oh good, it's fun to be attracted to guys, so I hope guys neg me effectively," or "I think it is immoral to neg...
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.
No! NO! NO!
Your long-term partner should be your soulmate, with a high degree of mutual trust and respect. But a woman who you have not yet had sex with is simply not going to respond well to you "respecting" her.
I think that some people will easily misread your comment as implying that men should not respect women early in the interaction.
My guess is that you are actually trying to say something different, based on your use of "respect" in quotes: You are saying that women may not respond well to attempts by men to signal respect.
If you are saying the second thing, then I agree: it is important to hold respect for the other person at all points in the interaction, yet certain ways that society encourages men to signal respect are counterproductive and unattractive.
But a woman who you have not yet had sex with is simply not going to respond well to you "respecting" her.
Actually, people in general will be creeped out or think you're of lower status if you're too easily impressed, i.e. offer too much "respect" before they feel they've earned it. It's got nothing to do with gender, except insofar as low status-ness is unattractive.
Women are basically anosognosiacs about pick-up. In fact, I once discussed the efficacy of PU with a woman, and she started insisting that women couldn't possibly be that stupid. I had to remind her that she'd left her long-term boyfriend for a fling with afellow PUA a few months earlier.
People in general often misstate their preferences, or their behavior fails to match it. According to research summarized on my blog, both men and women do this, and women on average just do it more.
From Urbaniak, G. C., & Kilmann, P. R. (2006). Niceness and dating success: A further test of the nice guy stereotype. Sex Roles, 55, 209-224. (emphasis mine):
...Weiderman and Dubois (1998) used behavioral measures to assess women’s preferences for a mate and found a discrepancy between self-perceptions and behavior, particularly among women. For both men an
Some women aren't. I know because I'm one of them. I've already commented on this subject, and my views haven't changed much since then.
While I'm open to the idea that discussing PUA on LW is a net loss, selfishly I want the discussion to stay because I find it fascinating. Since I know it works on me, learning about it helps me understand myself better and make more informed choices.
As far as I can tell most people who dislike PUA techniques don't really understand them.
Most people here don't understand them because they have this model in their mind that if you treat an attractive woman nicely, try to respect her desires and needs, perhaps compliment her, with the internal attitude that women should be "respected" she will respond in kind by respecting your desire to have sex with her.
They never test this model by going to a bar and trying to use it to achieve the goal of sex with an attractive woman. I know this, becau...
Do PUA techniques withstand the woman's reflection? Once made aware, do they acknowledge the effectiveness and accurately reaffirm their interest independently of the technique's effect? If incredulous, is her attention held after a demonstration on another woman?
If the answer is yes, that does a good deal in converting PUA from a ("dirty") trick (like Fool's Mate, in chess) into a valid strategy (like Sicilian defense). If you could demonstrate valid strategies, you'd get a lot more karma out of the effort.
I think most of us here have had at least some exposure to the PUA worldview and a sizable fraction (including me) feels quite sympathetic to it. That said, I wouldn't want to see a toplevel post introducing the basics. There's already plenty of good introductory material elsewhere on the 'net, a couple clicks away. Our site will interest me more if it follows the general direction that Eliezer and Robin initiated at OB, not getting overly sidetracked into applied rationality topics like pickup, marketing or self-help.
I don't want to have to be socially calibrated on LW.
Social calibration for the seduction community has a very simple rule about talking about pick-up techniques: don't do it, except with other trusted members of the community. If someone outside the community brings it up, just don't mention it, because society has conditioned them to start going into a feminist death-spiral about it.
So if I follow that rule, I will just have to not mention it here.
That I am actually homosexual and hallucinated all my heterosexual encounters as a bizarre result of severe repression.
The difference between "value" and "manipulation" is mostly in the mind of the manipulator,
Right, so first you have to learn how to manipulate women, then you realize that they like being manipulated, then you realize you're doing them a service, then you realize that in this special case, the ability to manipulate people is a great and valuable thing to have, and it makes you a more interesting and exciting person to be around (not that you weren't to start with), and once you've had this realization, you become a natural!
Of cours...
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?
To be honest, nothing in particular. I genuinely thought hard about that question. I suppose in the past, when I was less mature, there were things.
Of course nowadays I practice almost exclusively direct game, and it works for me. And yes, you are still manipulating someone when you are doing direct game. You're just doing it in a more natural...
"honest" approach flopped was a function of your inner game, not of the women In short, every piece of evidence I have tells me that it ain't the women, it's you.
Of course! If you had perfect inner game, you wouldn't need game.... that's why naturals exist. They're men with very good inner game because they had (probably early) life experiences that built their confidence and sense of self-worth up to unusually high levels. I'm not knocking the the natural way, or direct game, building inner game, which you seem to have been gifted with a lot...
Maybe it doesn't work for the kinds of women you happen to be interested in,
I've tried it on >20 women, with poor results in every case. Women want to be chased, and an honest exchange of information doesn't give them a chase.
which I think says something about your taste.
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?
...As I said in another comment, the "radical honesty" movement conflates honesty with tactlessness and that's decidedly unn
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 m...
This is an honest question, but I am curious. Do you consider this type of behavior ethical? Or would you agree that you value getting laid more than being an ethical person?
A lot of girls expect men to lie to them, and actually want you to. It's a social game which is tacitly acknowledged and sanctioned by most women and the 10% or so of men who are really good with women.
An example: you take a girl back to your place from a nightclub. She'll say something like "we're not going to have sex" or "I'm just coming in for a coffee". If ...
An example: you take a girl back to your place from a nightclub. She'll say something like "we're not going to have sex" or "I'm just coming in for a coffee". If you respond honestly "actually I do want to have sex with you", she won't come back with you.
Not because you're being honest, but because you're being tactless. Compare with this answer: "oh, darn, here I was thinking you were trying to get me alone so you could have your way with me...." and that's just the first thing that popped into my head when I s...
Thing is, having confident SOI or being "mode one" makes you a high-value
Once you're already experienced, yes. But get a newbie to SOI a girl and he'll either bottle out or completely screw up. To get to the stage where you have the confidence in your ability to get laid that is required for direct game to work, you need indirect game, AKA lying and manipulation.
"Direct game" - being relatively honest about your intentions still isn't full honesty. For example, you'll still have to deal with LMR, the girl will still want to be chas...
last thing they should do is add "manipulative liar" to the "flaw" column.
Again, if you want to obtain the result of getting sex, learning how to manipulate people and not being afraid to lie in social interactions is a great way to get that result.
The behaviour you advocate here is totally unethical.
To get sex with no strings attached, you have to lie and manipulate, or be extremely high-value for some reason. (e.g. by being a rock-star)
This is, as I often say here, entirely counter to my experience. Lots of women are attracted to no-strings sex; you just have to be a good person to have no-strings sex with. I think in large part people sleep with me because I accurately communicate a happy, positive, fun-loving attitude to sex from which people correctly infer that I'll be fun to sleep with and I won't be trouble afterwards.
Maybe it doesn't work for the kinds of women you happen to be interested in, which I think says something about your taste.
Honesty doesn't have to mean, though, saying to random women "please have sex with me, I'm kind of desperate". As I said in another comment, the "radical honesty" movement conflates honesty with tactlessness and that's decidedly unnecessary.
It is indeed a shame that you have to behave like this to get laid. But it is fun in its own way.
This is an honest question, but I am curious. Do you consider this type of behavior ethical? Or would you agree that you value getting laid more than being an ethical person?
Fully general counterargument against any unpleasant truth.