People fear that if they gaze into that abyss they risk losing or destroying things they value
Yes, and no. My objection to the citation of PUA tactics is motivated by fear that it could lead down the dark path... but not fear that it might be true. Rather, it's fear that something that might be true in one narrow domain might get applied as a general rule in broader domains where it is no longer applicable.
In PUA circles, "winning" is defined by getting laid. So if you go to a meat-market and try your PUA tactics all night long, you may end up getting rejected 50 times, but be successful once, and your brain records that as a "win", cause you didn't go home alone (just like audiences at psychic shows remember the "hits" and forget the "misses"). But does that really tell you that PUA theory correctly describes typical social interaction? No, it just tells you that there is a certain, small minority of people on whom PUA tactics work, but they are a non-representative sample of a non-representative sample.
So when you then take one of these PUA tactics, which isn't even effective on the vast majority of people even in the meat-market pickup context, and start talking as if it was a universal truth applicable to all manner of human social interactions, it makes my head explode.
So where does my "fear" come in? Well, here's the thing... I suspect that a large portion of the audience for PUA material is AS spectrum, or otherwise non-GPU possessing people, who have trouble finding sex/romance partners on their own, so they learn some PUA techniques. Fine. But these techniques often require the abandoning of "black and white morality", as has been said earlier on this thread. Applied solely to the realm of picking up women, I don't necessarily have a problem with that - "all's fair in love and war" after all. But the thing is, most NTs are able to compartmentalize this kind of thing. I know many NT, "ladies man" types who are perfectly moral, ethical, upstanding people in just about every other way imaginable, but who have no problem lying to women to get in their pants. I find this a bit distasteful, but I don't object to it, I just recognize that this is how the world works. But the thing is, many AS/non-GPU people have difficulty compartmentalizing things like this in the same way NTs do.
So I fear that if you teach these kind of dark arts to the non-compartmentalizing, non-NT crowd, they're going to take away from it the message that abandoning "black and white morality" is the way to go about fitting in in the NT world, in areas beyond the meat-market. I fear that we may end up unintentionally creating the next generation of Bill Gates and Henry Kissingers.
You make a fair point that PUA probably doesn't explain all of human interaction - it explains just the bare minimum needed to get that 1 in 50 hit rate, so the majority of girls could be PUA-invulnerable and we wouldn't know it. But you also claim that a hit rate of 1 in 50 is bad and shouldn't be considered a "win", and I take objection to this. Do you also think that a good mathematician should be able to solve any problem in the world or give up their title? Or do you have an alternative theory that can beat PUA at PUA's game? (Then you should head over to their forums and if you're right, they will adopt your theory en masse.) If not, why should we suppress the best theory we've got at the moment?
Followup to: Do you have High-Functioning Asperger's Syndrome?
LW reader Madbadger uses the metaphor of a GPU and a CPU in a desktop system to think about people with Asperger's Syndrome: general intelligence is like a CPU, being universal but only mediocre at any particular task, whereas the "social coprocessor" brainware in a Neurotypical brain is like a GPU: highly specialized but great at what it does. Neurotypical people are like computers with measly Pentium IV processors, but expensive Radeon HD 4890 GPUs. A High-functioning AS person is an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition - with on-board graphics!
This analogy also covers the spectrum view of social/empathic abilities, you can think about having a weaker social coprocessor than average if you have some of the tendencies of AS but not others. You can even think of your score on the AQ Test as being like the Tom's Hardware Rating of your Coprocessor. (Lower numbers are better!).
If you lack that powerful social coprocessor, what can you do? Well, you'll have to run your social interactions "in software", i.e. explicitly reason through the complex human social game that most people play without ever really understanding. There are several tricks that a High-functioning AS person can use in this situation: