Henry,
What is it about you that attracts all these 10s if you're so average looking? Do you have a lot of money? Or you are just confident and believe this can't be taught? On one hand I agree with you. I see confidence as akin to an emotion and telling someone to be confident as similar to telling someone to be happy. You just can't force yourself. But what about the people who graudate from college as virgins learn this stuff and then go on to have sex with dozens of women? Its sorta hard to ignore the fact that they succeeded in faking confidence or learning it even if the majority of people fail.

When this debate started I claimed that PUA material could be broken down into three catagories. One of those catagories was stuff that does help but is plainly obvious and commonly known. In that respect for someone who is completely clueless PUA material will help because they need to be told the basics. I actually don't see anything wrong with that.

The stuff I have issues with is the rest of it which from my exposure seems to amount to the bulk of PUA. If PUA material was just the basics the programs would be a page or two which can't really be marketed well. So they add a whole ****load of stuff that is awful to make it seem like you are getting something important. When you combine that with the target audience already being nerdy / socially awkward you get a community that is 99% pathetic and 1% actual useful information. The people who benefit from it are the people who focus on the 1% of information that is useful.

The best PUAs tend to view PU as personal development or self-fulfillment - developing charisma & alpha traits in oneself and being a high social value person. Ability to lay chicks is tightly correlated with this, but so is job and relationship success. For these guys, lays are not the primary motivator.

natural-game PUAs don't use material anyway. no routines, no lying, none of that garbage. PU doesn't have to be so sketchy. material exists to help the beginners have something to say.

Once again, using this definition, any guy who tries to score with women is a PUA, making 90% of the single male population Pick Up Artists.

A friend of mine who is already good with women has been reading up on this stuff. So I've seen a lot of these materials lately. What strikes me is not that its obvious or phony but that its really detailed and meticulous.

1. For instance they say that if you approach girls who are at the bar you dont want to speak with them while they are facing the crowd and you arent because they will get distracted/have more to look at and this is a power leak.

2. When you approach a group that is sitting you want to sit with them somehow under some pretense otherwise they will have more physical comfort than you and this will be a power leak.

Im sure on some level theres some truth to these thing but to actually be thinking all this stuff in day to day interactions has got to be really difficult. I find whenever I read this stuff it makes me more self conscious because I'm thinking about all these different little things you're supposed to be doing and not doing.

By definition anyone who studies PUA can't be a "high social value person" -- that is the whole point.

Both those points are just crappy pop-psychology with no real underlying basis in reality. Nerds love that kind of **** so the people writing these at least know the target audience.

it makes them wannabes. the 'artist' in PUA means 'expert'.

shrug, i disagree. anyway by the time you have 'artist'-level success, you aren't trying/studying any more.

Many have argued that PU applies to business as well - would a nerd turned successful CEO through self-help material not be deemed high value based on definition semantics?

I'm not familiar with self-help books for success in business so I can't really comment.

If a CEO was involved with a community that was vastly dominated by losers and which espouses ******ed business theories then yes he would be looked down on by other business people.

Say what you really think.

many of the PU methods aren't ******ed, and the most successful PU methods revolve upon *becoming* a 'natural'. So as to say, the other business people wouldn't realize that the CEO used to be a nerd unless he told them.

Focus your argument more towards the PU success stories, not the losers. I do recall on the first page you said most people just don't belong to the correct social group - so I guess your argument is that there are no PU success stories? I'm probably misunderstanding your argument because that assertion is impossible to prove.

i imagine a lot of that stuff comes from mirroring the body language and behaviors of naturals - but its my opinion that the details are irrelevant, and really only the big picture stuff matters.

There are no PU success stories for anyone who doesn't see that the stuff Brad P teaches is ******ed. The vast majority of what PUA material teaches guys will not help them and will actually make things worse.

The only people who benefit from PUA material are the small group who focus on the stuff that I classify as stuff that is common knowledge. For the people who are missing this common knowledge they can benefit from PUA if they ignore the 99% of PUA that is complete crap and focus on the 1% that is just stuff that most guys learn as a matter of going from teen to twenty-something.

No, it doesn't. Pick Up Artist is a type of thinking, it is not a title you get given because of success. I'd say the title would be people calling you a 'player'.

your definition of a high value person appears to be: a person who doesn't learn and investigate new things. given your definitions it isn't hard to see how you can be so confident in yourself.

Not all learning is valuable. People who go to various MLM seminars believe they are learning and that they are going to be rich -- that never happens. People who study PUA think they are going to get laid constantly -- it doesn't happen. Someone would have better success using the Law of Attraction from The Secret than some of the crap Brad P suggests.

I read a bit of the first page, and a bit of the last, so I'm not trying to topple any big arguments here. But when I read 'Magic Bullets', which as far as I know is pretty much "The" contemporary book on PUA, it opened up my game in the same way, say, Ed Miller's "Small Stakes Hold 'em" did when I first read it.

That is to say, it's not so much that any one chapter or idea is mind blowing (I'm supposed to raise ATs on the big blind against 4 limpers in micro limit hold'em? Oh rlly), but that, taken all together, it plugs the holes in your game.

your arrogance is well disguised as confidence, but underneath it all you are simply dumb. obviously not all learning is valuable, thanks for your worthless truism. "a high value person does not study PUA stuff by definition." lol.

If it was that obvious you would have saved your money instead of wasting it on boot camps that have left you no better off. Every other day you come in to this topic and post a new ad hominem attack because you have no other rebuttal. You went to boot camps twice and studied this stuff do you get laid by attractive girls on a regular basis?

Why bother arguing with idiots dude. Dont you have a better way to spend your time.

I think the need to rack up the new high score in the bedding game is an indication of a particular insecurity in a person's life. Generally speaking, a person who is so interested in banging loads of girls that they would go as far as going to camps for it probably isn't doing it for the typical "sex is fun" pleasure, but so that he can feel like he's better than other people who can't. The whole PUA community puts a ridiculous value on a person's ability to get girls that it indicates that the rest of their lives are lacking in value.

I don't get the impression that a successful investment banker would care so much about increasing his score that he would devote a lot of time to finding out how to be better at it since he has better things to do with his time. On the contrary, I can imagine a lot of people who are mediocre at everything thinking "well at least I'll be cool if I can get more girls".

I find how groups of people I generally don't associate with think interesting. It is the only reason I even post on 2P2.

I think you have missed the demographic completely. The people who go to these camps do so because they can't get laid. They are not going after the high score or a high body count -- they would just like to get on the scoreboard. They are guys who have failed with women and are desperate. That makes them easy marks for con men offering ridiculous programs. As PUA has moved somewhat into the mainstream it might be attracting some guys who had moderate success and want to go for higher body counts but the typical PUA follower is a guy who is socially awkward and can't get laid.

I wasn't saying that they have moderate success and want to improve it. The demographic is simply "people who want to be able to get with an extraordinarily large of girls". Now, most people fall into that category, but there are typically less humiliating ways to go about it that will work for most people (i.e. dressing better, working out). We can probably assume that most people try mainstream methods before they begin going to PUA bootcamps. The people who do end up at the camps are those willing to endure humiliation in order to make it happen since more mainstream methods didn't work for them.

That said, there is a lot of stuff that the PUA community teaches which is hugely beneficial (i.e. desperation is a turnoff, the importance of confidence, etc), but there's a lot of really bad stuff too (sven, peacocking), and the group of people who follows it isn't generally able to distinguish between the stuff that is great advice to follow vs that which will fail horribly. That makes the PUA material as a whole a negative to the community.

While I agree with you I'm starting to question if they find it humiliating -- they should because it humiliating but they seem almost proud.

i agree, but I think if those average twenty-somethings read some material, their game would skyrocket. I'd compare it to academics, where you can be naturally proficient at something like being a fluent english speaker, but you can't take it to the next level without breaking it down into all the concepts that are implied but not defined, and studying how the concepts relate, then putting it back together and whammo english phd.

very few twenty-somethings are naturals or players. pu material isn't just for losers.