The relevant test would be this: Compare a successful PUA social-skill’s trainer to a successful non-PUA social-skills trainer. I’m sure that almost all social-skills trainers broadly agree on all sorts of principles. The question is, do PUAs in particular have access to better knowledge?
I think the specific dimensions of performance on which PUA trainers would outscore general social skills trainers would be in short-term/immediate manipulation of social groups to achieve specified objective and tactical results.
General social skills trainers tend to focus on longer-term and “softer”, less-specific objectives, although this could vary quite a bit. They’re unlikely to have skills that would be useful at more Machiavellian objectives like, “get people in the group to compete with each other for your attention” or “make the group single out a person for ridicule”, or “get everyone in the room to think you’re a VIP who everyone else already knows”.
Granted, not every PUA trainer would have all those skills either, and that last one might be doable by some non-PUA trainers. But if you could come up with novel challenges within the scope of what a PUA social theory would predict to be doable, it would be a good test of that theory.
(Also, I predict that PUA theorists who agree to such a challenge as being within scope of their theory, will generally update their theory if it bombs. It’s an unusual PUA social theorist who hasn’t done a lot of updating and refinement already, so they are already selected for being open to experimentation, refinement, and objective criteria for success.)
I think the specific dimensions of performance on which PUA trainers would outscore general social skills trainers would be in short-term/immediate manipulation of social groups to achieve specified objective and tactical results.
General social skills trainers tend to focus on longer-term and “softer”, less-specific objectives, although this could vary quite a bit. They’re unlikely to have skills that would be useful at more Machiavellian objectives like, “get people in the group to compete with each other for your attention” or “make the group single out a person for ridicule”, or “get everyone in the room to think you’re a VIP who everyone else already knows”.
Granted, not every PUA trainer would have all those skills either, and that last one might be doable by some non-PUA trainers. But if you could come up with novel challenges within the scope of what a PUA social theory would predict to be doable, it would be a good test of that theory.
(Also, I predict that PUA theorists who agree to such a challenge as being within scope of their theory, will generally update their theory if it bombs. It’s an unusual PUA social theorist who hasn’t done a lot of updating and refinement already, so they are already selected for being open to experimentation, refinement, and objective criteria for success.)