OP is learning from Cialdini. But he should really be learning from Mystery, and other pick up artists who have been field testing principles from Evolutionary Psychology for over a decade.
I'm not so hot on OP's tone, but for people looking for relationships it seems a lot more productive than the "lying through your teeth while maintaining a veneer of confidence" that so much of the PUA community relies upon.
There have been numerous posts about dating on HN (and reddit) over the past few days. I think all of it can be summed up as: "care, but don't care too much". All of the advice on OP's post can really be broken down to that axiom.
which makes it a really, really poor tactic if you ever plan on seeing the girl again.
Donno, I have multiple friends who have been/are in happy long-term relationships as a result of the community. These are some of the biggest nerds until they found the community.
Sure, for a while a lot of the new entrants become super weird and awkward but when the dust settles, I think the community has helped many, many people!
Having said that, in the last few years, there has been an influx of gurus claiming to know the secret. They are nothing more than snakeoil artists who don't know shit about getting with the other sex beyond ripping off desperate--but financially okay--men.
That's a very convenient thing to say, but the phrase "too much" is really a compacted way of saying "are much as the situation would call for in order to be successful, and no more," at which point you really have a circular definition. How do you succeed? Do what you need to to succeed.
In other words, if you want to do the right thing, you should do what is good and not what is bad. Also, we should elect the best representatives if we want our democracy to succeed. And here's some good dietary advice: everything in moderation, don't eat too much of anything.
What mystery is talking about is simple attraction psychology, and it is all based on evolutionary psychology. Incidentally, so are all "serious adult relationships". Mystery says that women are attracted to men who display three things: 1) they're leaders of men 2) they are desirable by other women 3) they take care of their people. As anyone who has been in a "serious adult relationship" can tell you, these things are just as important for maintaining attraction in a long term relationship as they are in a one night stand.
The things mystery and more serious evolutionary psychologists have elaborated on are valid in all cases where men desire to maintain the attraction of a woman. It isn't entirely selfish or manipulative either. Women want to be attracted to you.
Confounding this, of course, is the huge challenge of overcoming ethnocentrism--you might assume that standard Western behaviors and attitudes around sexuality are universal human things, but in a lot of cases they're just culturally-dependent arbitrary crap. Evo-psych won't help with this. As far as evo-psych helps you, at best it'll help you attract cro-magnon hunter-gatherer chicks, not affluent Westerners with all kinds of cultural influences added on, influences that evo-psych fundamentally has no way of predicting.
Behavioral psych is tricky since any psych study on affluent Western chicks will have conclusions which can only be confidently applied to affluent Western chicks, but if that's who you're trying to pick up that's a help, not a hindrance.
In the West not many people get married without dating first...