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Is it a difference of degree you're seeing or is it a difference of kind?
Like, you can use the same job interview coach to help you get a job at Greenpeace or at Blackwater.
Some people might use PUA to recklessly womanise without a second thought for the hearts they break. Some might use it to seek a wife to start a family with. Some might model themselves on Carnegie to better raise funds for a worthy charity but some might use it to defraud pensioners. The underlying dynamics can use the same commonalities (canned openers, demonstrate value, assume rapport, build trust, exploit the fear of missing out, always be closing, etc).
Manipulation doesn't have to be all or nothing and it doesn't have to be purely right or wrong. The trouble with PUA and Carnegie types is they both trend towards inauthenticity in the pursuit of effectiveness.
Carnegie, at least that book, did not strike me as manipulative. It was more like "Be the kind of person that is likeable" and can actually effect change in someone else's view (possibly a naive hope in today's online climate where everything is rhetoric).
To answer, to me it seems like a difference in kind, though I could probably be argued into agreeing that it's actually a difference in degree. The goals of PUA (in practical terms, and as it is often presented in the forms I've seen it) seem more crass and selfish. Again, in The Game I believe Strauss was proposing more of a make yourself a better man philosophy, but that's been corrupted, in my view. To me it's not even the commodifying of the practice (which Carnegie also did, via lectures etc.) it's the purported goals.
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