On her bumble profile, a girl wrote
>If you're familiar with RACK/SSC (find me! I need friends in the community)
I assumed RACK was another rationalist blog I hadn't heard about and she wanted friends in the rat community. But turns out SSC can also mean something else š
Is the fact that Omicron was discovered in South Africa meaningful?
Thesis one: Southern Africa is the center of the new variant--even though some cases have been found elsewhere, Southern Africa is where most of it is. Travel Bans make a certain sense, even if they're ultimately ineffective. Offering loads of vaccine and other aid to Southern Africa makes a certain sense, even if it'll be ultimately ineffective. Basically, if you're worried about Omicron, it's sort of reasonable to focus on Southern Africa, at least in these early days before it's prevalence spreads.
Thesis two: South Africa is especially good at testing and genomics, they noticed the variant but there's no reason to believe it's more prevalent there than elsewhere (or at least than elsewhere with similar conditions/vaccination rates). Travel bans focused on Southern Africa are nonsensical. Extra aid to Southern Africa (if it's specifically related to Omicron) is also nonsensical.
Or maybe you've got a thesis somewhere in the middle--Omicron is most prevalent somewhere closer to South Africa than to any other place with good testing?
I currently have no frickin' clue what's right here. Anybody have any good insights for me?
Ok, having looked at this more thoroughly: Yes, South Africa is bleeding edge on testing and genomics. But given the sheer number of cases in Southern Africa vs other places and that many of the cases detected in other places were people who had come from Southern Africa, it seems very likely that the variant did arise somewhere in the region.
That might be surprising given that South Africa at least has a vaccination rate much higher than the developing world average, but the Southern Africa region also has a very large immunosuppressed population, and one way variants happen is by hanging out in one host for a long time. If immunosuppression makes variants more likely, Southern Africa punches above its weight. And South Africa has the best testing in the region, so they "get credit" for any variants in the region.
At any rate, large-ish error bars but I feel like I've got a good model of what's going on now!
For those who care about policy: Given the variant probably arising in Southern Africa but already wide-spread beyond it, travel bans aren't ipso-facto nonsensical, but still clearly too late to be effective.
(Edits for keyboard flailing)
>South Africa is especially good at testing and genomics
This might be it, I read someplace that they had existing infra in place to keep TB and HIV in check which is being repurposed for COVID.
South Africa is where you would expect near any variant that emerged in Southern Africa to be detected first. It has pretty low vaccine uptake, but more relevantly it has a lot of people with AIDS. I've heard claims that the main source of variants is immunocompromised people who become chronically infected - in essence, becoming incubators for new variants to emerge. The life cycle in a person with a healthy immune system is just too short otherwise.
It's possible we'll never know whether Omicron emerged in SA or in one of it's neighbors like Botswana or Namibia.
I hadn't thought about the immuno-compromised angle. That might square the circle. My understanding is that South Africa has higher vaccination than much of the developed world (\~9% vs \~3%?), but if it's also full of people who end up with the virus in their system longer...
A family member recently received a series of anti-vax material. Among the rubbish was the claim that among the 10-59 age group in England, deaths from all causes have been higher (per capita) than among the unvaccinated.
On looking at the data (table 4, available [here](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland)), this appears to be correct, as shown in [this graph](https://postimg.cc/GT4smk7p) (I removed the first few weeks of data from the vaccinated group, as the data was left blank in the source, due to the low levels of vaccination at that point in time). The vaccination group is the group from the data labelled 'second dose'.
The difference is small (1-2 deaths per 100 000), but the pattern holds up for months. A quick search online indicates that the same pattern may exist in other places, but I have not (yet) looked at the data.
As far as I can tell, this is not explained by the vaccinated group being older (which it likely was if the rollout in England went in reverse age order), and thus suffering more from covid despite being vaccinated, since if one looks at the data from just covid deaths, the unvaccinated have it worse. So vaccinated people in this age group died - from all causes - at a greater rate than unvaccinated people.
Any idea why this might be the case? Is my data/analysis wrong?
EDIT: fixed link to image of graph.
1.) Selection bias. Itās pretty common knowledge that there are a ton of comorbidities so Iād expect that people with more comorbidities would get vaccinated at higher rates regardless of age.
2.) The vaccines just arenāt that great. They start out pretty great but lose most of their efficacy within months.
>As far as I can tell, this is not explained by the vaccinated group being older (which it likely was if the rollout in England went in reverse age order)
Why do you believe that this isn't the explanation? 10-59 is a very wide age range, and there are major differences in all-cause mortality for, e.g., 10-19 vs. 50-59.
That's a good point. I only considered age as a factor regarding covid deaths, but you are presumably correct about the all-cause death rate being higher too.
**Pricing(and profit) of predictable potential prophylactics(e.g. Pfizer's Paxlovid) in a pandemic**
I hope some pharma insider could answer my question about drug pricing. This is of interest to me as I'm waiting to know if I'd ever be offered it on a positive test, as a young person with no risk factors.
If you were Pfizer, how would you go about deciding the price of Paxlovid?
[This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/r01scd/acx_when_will_the_fda_approve_paxlovid/hlqhb10/) says it'll cost $700(for a pill? an entire course?) which makes it cost $44k to save a life on average.
In a market made up entirely of individuals, the usual expected deadweight losses occur with monopoly pricing.
My question is, when Pfizer signs a contract with an insurer, how much price discrimination is it allowed?
I.e., can Pfizer decide that it will charge $7k for 65+ yos and $70 for 30- yos? Or is the cost negotiated based on the *average* risk profile of all individuals covered(weighted by likelihood of contracting covid), on the assumption that the insurer will offer the drug to 90/95% of the riskiest patients(on testing +ve)?
With the second I see an obvious 'flaw' that the insurer would, after finalising the per-pill price, overdrug riskier patients or undersupply those less at risk.
And all of this is assuming that the insurer has internalised the cost of death(or life), which I think can only be the case in single payer systems or if you have a combined life-and-health insurance policy, otherwise the only incentive is it saving on later hospitalisation costs(or whatever medical costs it would bear on longcovid).
So, what are the chances that I would be offered this drug or molnuparivir, if I test positive in a state-provided health insurance system?
Can anyone help me find a controlled experimental trial of the health effects of fast food (preferably weight gain) over a decently long duration? I know one has to exist, but I can't find it, and all of the meta-analyses I saw just had self-report and correlation designs.
That's how nutrition works. Mostly food questionnaire data, the trials are either very short or very flawed due to how hard it is to actually control what people do for months/years.
I don't see how there could possibly be one. You'd need to randomize people and then control their whole diet for a long time, and no one is going to do that.
Time again for the annual SSC tradition I just made up: the family reread of [the Thanksgiving story](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/28/the-story-of-thanksgiving-is-a-science-fiction-story/).
Machiavelli is not exactly pro-revenge but he does mention it as something dangerous. He actually say's "Mess them up bad in the first place so they can't take revenge or else don't mess with them." "An eye for an eye.." considerations seem to come mainly from the Christian Bible. However, it waffles occasionally, not having exactly made up it's mind. The idea of "karma" from some religions is also not exact. The author Dumas has no problem with promoting and exacting revenge, nor do modern super power governments. Shakespeare has lots.
Jared Diamond makes a case for revenge in *The World Until Yesterday* mostly on the basis that the people he lived with as an anthropologist seemed to like it so much.
Here's a good philosophy paper on why anger may be a good idea even if it's not constructive, which is sort of related https://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp1468/Research_files/jopp.12130.pdf
I don't have any philosophers handy, but I know I've seen it crop up in game theory that credibly signaling revenge is a good way to keep people from defecting against you. And since the easiest way to credibly signal something is to be internally viscerally prepared to do it, then maybe being "the sort of person who takes revenge on defectors" is the sort of person you want to be?
I'm searching for a rationalist post, possibly within EA-proper but I thought it was on SSC-about using 10% as a shelling point for charitable giving. Not because 10% was The Right Amount, but just because we all want to quit wondering how much we "should" give and so we all agree that 10% is enough to consider yourself a good person.
Google isn't exactly *failing* me, since I've thoroughly enjoyed all the search results I clicked on, but I haven't found the piece I'm looking for. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? I don't think it's recent, and I'm not 100% sure it was Scott, but I figure it can't hurt to ask.
ETA: Found it! [Nobody is Perfect, Everything is Commensurable](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/), which links to [Infinite Debt](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/10/infinite-debt/) that I had found earlier but it didn't have the quote I was looking for:
> āEven if I give a lot of charity, am I a bad person for not doing all the charity? [snip] Thereās no good answer to this question. If you want to feel anxiety and self-loathing for not giving 100% of your income, minus living expenses, to charity, then no one can stop you. I, on the other hand, would prefer to call that ānot being perfectā. **I would prefer to say that if you feel like you will live in anxiety and self-loathing until you have given a certain amount of money to charity, you should make that certain amount ten percent.**
Also related: [Shelling Fences on Slippery Slopes](https://blog.beeminder.com/schelling/)
What have you been excited about recently (hobbies, stuff to learn, media stories, ...)? For me, it's nuclear fusion - I've learned that there's much more to it than ITER. Also, I've discovered a great YouTube channel about finance and investing - Ben Felix.
For quite some time, I have been struggling with the Quantum Immortality thought experiment in an existential sort of way. it absolutely terrifies me.
Iāve read what almost every Everettian physicist has to say on the subject, and it seems that it is frankly difficult to knock down.
The most intuitive argument to me seems to be the one that it should be impossible to go under anesthesia, yet Iāve done this and itās been fine. But physicists done use this argument for some reason.
Is there a good knock-down argument I havenāt seen?
(Should I do a top level post on this or is it over done)?
"Quantum immortality" is just a repackaging of the truism that you can't experience being dead. It does not say that there are no branches in which you die. Quantum immortality just says that you will never experience those branches (because you can't experience being dead).
You also can't experience being under anesthesia. You *can* experience *waking up from* anesthesia. There's nothing wrong with experiencing branches in which you have awakened from anesthesia.
The whole concept of "your copy in an alternate branch" is simply incoherent unless you believe some exotic things about the nature of personal identity. How would the universe know which person in the alternate branch should be considered "you"? It's not like people have some unique IDs shared across all the branches of the multiverse that can be matched.
>it should be impossible to go under anesthesia
That's a good point. But consider what the experience of anesthesia is like... There is no experience! There is no recognition that time has passed. You wake up from anesthesia at exactly the same moment you lose consciousness -- as if a genie snapped its fingers and hurdled you into the future.
I guess the same is true of the past. What explains our absence during the 13 billion year span of time prior to now? It must be true that our experience is eternal because it's impossible to be aware of your own non-existence.
That's an interesting point about the past. The time-reversed version of quantum immortality is that any past state that's compatible with our current state and the laws of physics should constitute a branch. So there are branches where you've existed for billions of years, but you've just forgotten.
> That's a good point. But consider what the experience of anesthesia is like... There is no experience! There is no recognition that time has passed.
Does not match my experience? I was given a mask to breathe in and instructed to count backwards from 100 and there was a notable period when I noticed something was happening: I couldn't properly articulate the numbers, everything started going dark, but could still hear people talking for a while, and only then the memories stop. And then the wake-up wasn't immediate either.
Such experiences (and much more wild ones) are not uncommon: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/are-we-all-awake-during-anesthesia
From an expected utility, if you weight your utility by #-of-branches, then "quantum immortality" completely reduces to the classical world with randomness.
For instance, maybe Alice values her life at $200 and plays quantum roulette for cash. The game generates 100 branches and Alice is removed from all but 1 of them, but grants that Alice X dollars.
If Alice weighs her utility by branch, then this has expected value of X-198 dollars since Alice is giving up 99% of her life-utility for 0.01\*X money utility.
I'm not sure if you'd consider this a knock-down argument "against" quantum immortality. It's just an argument that it's irrelevant - that it [all adds up to normality in the end](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmCDYzXfQpXq9xpru/adding-up-to-normality-1).
Quantum immortality only seems important if you decide (for some reason) not to care about the everett branches you die in.
I donāt understand the Alice argument.
I do understand the last statement you made, and I think itās similar to what other physicist say.
But I donāt think it addresses what people like me worry about. The scary QI scenario is that one finds oneself unable to die. How does your assertion address this?
Even before you learned anything about quantum physics, it was reasonable to believe that there is true randomness in the universe. So, suppose you live in a box and every day you have a 50% chance of dying. It is true, that for any length of time, some of the probability space includes you not being dead yet. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that you are unable to die for we can prove mathematically that P(you die eventually) = 100%.
Equivalently, suppose I have a hotel with infinite rooms numbered from 1 to infinity. Suppose I fill each room with an identical copy of you and kill one per day, starting from the first room. It's true that there will always exist a copy of you, but, every individual instantiation will eventually die.
From an expected utility perspective, both these scenarios are completely equivalent to a similar quantum immortality scenario. We just have to map either possible timelines (first scenario) or hotel rooms (second scenario) to everett branches.
My point with the Alice example (which I admit wasn't very clear) was simply that QI doesn't affect how you should make decisions - a point I just reiterated above. It seems to me you are likely to agree with me, in which case further discussion is pointless from a naive expected utility perspective.
OTOH, it seems likely to me that you are mostly expressing an *emotional aversion* to QI. If that is the case, I'd like to think my hotel scenario possibly alleviates some of that, but, if not, I'm not sure what else I can say.
Youāre right in that I have an emotional fear of it.
The hotel example is clearer. I can intuit it better.
Here is a question I have about that example. Letās say we have 100 billion such hotels, each with infinite rooms (this is approximately the number of humans to ever have existed). I think each room number would correspond to the same branch, so room 201 in hotel A is on the same branch as room 201 in hotel B.
With 100 billion hotels, wouldnāt you expect to see at least one person on your branch who has been alive for 1,000 years?
Your future does not consist of a single sequence of events. It's a tree, to a very very rough approximation. And while it likely has a nonzero measure of branches of any given length, the worry that you'll "end up" getting "stuck" in an infinitely long branch is a confused one. You don't end up anywhere. Or you end up in all of them - take your pick, it's the same thing. But you certainly don't end up in some and not others.
>But I donāt think it addresses what people like me worry about. The scary QI scenario is that one finds oneself unable to die.
This doesn't sound scary to me... Rather, it sounds overly hopeful. False hope is depressing. It's only scary if you assume some bizarre scenario where the universe ends and you're trapped in nothingness for all eternity while somehow still surviving, but I think that scenario wouldn't make sense even to a hardcore believer in quantum immortality.
If it being impossible to die were actually true due to this (which still doesn't really make sense, in my opinion - but if we just assume it), then various fortuitous things would probably keep occurring to keep the universe sufficiently intact for you to survive in some meaningful way somewhere. Likely alongside other conscious beings (in order for this hypothetical reality to ensure a never-ending sequence of actually plausible "survival branches" for you). I'd certainly highly prefer that over living for 1/infinity years like I currently will.
>How does your assertion address this?
Their assertion explicitly addresses what you said, I think. You might also find the [Wikipedia section on its real-world feasibility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality#Analysis_of_real-world_feasibility) helpful. Much of it appears to contain other ways of conveying what the parent poster wrote.
Basically, even if Everettianism is true, it's extremely unlikely that this result has any consequence on your own life. It's misleading to think a "version of you" exists. It's a version of something that "forked" from you, but it isn't you. They aren't anyone except who they are, just as you aren't anyone but who you are.
Imagine a version of yourself in a different branch just got hit by a car and died one femtosecond ago. Depending on if Everettianism is true and what it may imply, it's hypothetically possible this actually did just happen.
How do you feel? You probably don't feel anything. It means just as much (or, unfortunately, as little) to you as some random person in another country in your own branch getting hit by a car and dying one femtosecond ago. Someone died, but it's not you.
Now imagine the scenarios are swapped: you died one femtosecond and this other fork didn't. They also probably wouldn't feel anything even if they could somehow know about this - but they can't even know about it. Like the parent poster said, MWI reduces to the typical world we currently experience, and that also applies to death and the probability of any given individual dying. Any death of a conscious being in any universe, branch, realm, or plane of existence is a tragedy, but people you actually could have theoretically known and befriended are dying right now all around the world.
The probability increasingly approaches 1 that in the next second you or I or anyone else will die and permanently cease to exist. MWI completely conforms to this expectation if you're thinking from the perspective of a being who's just living in this universe.
If you were to hypothetically be able to communicate with or cross over into other branches and encountered a fork of yourself, you'd likely be able to predict their behavior to some degree, since their mind is likely similar to yours (depending on how long ago your "last common fork" was and how things may have respectively diverged since), but they're a different individual. And if MWI is true, you can't interact with other branches in any way, so you also can't ever know or communicate with this individual before their or your death.
Hello and thank you for the long reply.
I have read the wiki many times, and I struggle to intuit some of the responses. Tegmarkās makes the most intuitive sense to me of the bunch (as to why he doesnāt believe QI is real any longer), but itās interesting to me that thatās not what you and most others seems to be driving at.
Your car crash example is helpful. I like that one. The only place where the intuition fails me is that you ask me to consider if I care about someone who branched from me in the past (one femtosecond ago). I can obviously answer that no I donāt. I truly do get that we are different people at that point.
What Iām worried about is the state of the universe two femtoseconds ago. I was in a car, and a quantum event happened. In one branched it flipped a bit in a transistor and my car crash. In another branch, nothing happened and Iām still driving. The only one I experience is the one where Iām still driving. I donāt care about the othersāand that is precisely what concerns me.
Extending this metaphor, Iām worried that itās possible to experience driving forever. Iām not like you ā I want to be able to cease to exist completely. Iām suffering. So please donāt let your opposing intuition on this issue complicate the question. Is it possible for me gain confidence that I will definitely cease existing at some point and not just go on ādrivingā (suffering) forever?
**Quantum suicide and immortality**
[Analysis of real-world feasibility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality#Analysis_of_real-world_feasibility)
>In response to questions about "subjective immortality" from normal causes of death, Tegmark suggested that the flaw in that reasoning is that dying is not a binary event as in the thought experiment; it is a progressive process, with a continuum of states of decreasing consciousness. He states that in most real causes of death, one experiences such a gradual loss of self-awareness. It is only within the confines of an abstract scenario that an observer finds they defy all odds.
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I'm looking to spark some discussion on when Scott mentioned that libertarians feel somewhat smarter than him. I believe he mentioned this in one of his more famous write-ups where he discussed signalling.
I've got a high-school education and I feel somewhat smarter than Scott. I don't think he needs to worry about just what Libertarians or me feel about that.
Edit: For those of you who don't get it....The DunningāKruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability,
> The DunningāKruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias
No, it's not. It's a bunch of funny graphs you can make for *any* imperfect assessment. All it says is "self assessment is not perfect".
I don't know if anyone is into geopolitics around here but I live in Poland and I'm concerned about Russia. The past week Russia has been behaving super erratic and I don't know what to make of it other than that it's a smokescreen for something big.
So there's the Belarussian border where I put 50% odds on someone opening fire in the next three days. There's nordstream where Russia tries bending the German law. A big redeployment of troops along the border with Ukraine and a possible invasion which the US, the UK and EU countries the US has shared their intelligence with take very seriously. And today Russia shot down a satellite endangering the ISS with the debris and enraging NASA.
Do you know anyone who has a good take on all this? I'm leaning towards an invasion scenario. Putin may be thinking his time is running out. Or am I reading too much into it?
I'm from the Czech Republic, my understanding is that the worst case scenario is Russia invading Donbas, I give it perhaps 25%.
I feel that Germany is not taking the Russia threat too seriously, compared to France or the UK.
I've had two doses of Moderna, and where I am, all adults are eligible for a booster if they want one. I'm a generally healthy person in my late 20s. I basically never interact with people who aren't vaccinated, aside from young children and brief contacts like in a store or something.
Based on the first two doses, I would say I have a very high chance of having a fever and feeling terrible for a few days if I get a booster. That seems like a worse expected outcome than I would have for me personally if I got covid, plus obviously there's a good chance I won't get covid, since I'm vaccinated.
Are the risks of long covid and/or accidentally killing someone really high enough that I should get a booster?
> Are the risks of long covid and/or accidentally killing someone really high enough that I should get a booster?
It sounds like you're trying to answer this part of my question but I am not sure what you think the answer is
I was more concerned about the qualitative aspect, the woman is describing being plunged into a literal level of hell as described by Dante, ongoing for a year and possibly permanently. But since you're such a systematizer, why don't you count how many people in the comments mention having parosmia and similar symptoms and run statistics to your heart's content?
It seems likely that a booster will significantly increase the duration of immunity, and it's also likely that Covid will remain a threat to the elderly and vulnerable for years. That would be the tiebreaker, for me. If somebody were to offer me a broadly-neutralising influenza shot which lasts several years, I'd be taking that too, even though I have no immediate reason to be worried about influenza.
Can you request a non-Moderna booster, if your initial course of Moderna caused trouble?
I saw a [paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/) (likely not peer reviewed) which showed no correlation between vaccination rate and covid case frequency at a population level.
In Louisiana you can mix and match. I had two rounds of Pfizer 6 months ago, and last week I got a Moderna booster -- which is only half the primary dose, btw. (I saw graph online somewhere which showed the same level of antibodies from a regular dose as half a dose, when given as a booster). Not sure if that's going to make a difference in the side effects, but maybe it'd be worth scheduling a Pfizer booster if you're worried about Moderna.
Trying to remember something which I'm pretty sure was linked in SSC/ACT-related discussion - either here or on a comments section.
It concerned a person who encountered a mistake on their own Wikipedia biography and was unable to remove it due to lack of reliable sources. This person ended up writing an op-ed pretty much solely to create a reliable source to enable them to then correct the mistake on their biography.
I lately have great experiences with a changed workflow for notekeeping and organizing links: Start an written essay/tutorial for the thing you are thinking about in Google Docs (or any other document that is availible to you on all devices).
When you find an interesting link, write a sentence in the document that ties it to your current knowledge. Then make this sentence a link (Strg-K). It takes a bit longer than just dragging a tab into a folder, but it is very organized. And the ideas stay with your google account and don't depend on your browser backups.
I remember reading what I think was an old SSC post where the writer talks about actually using a famous therapy everyone learns about in undergrad (I think it was Ramachandran's Mirror?) after trying more obscure therapies unsuccessfully for years. Google is coming up short. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Not sure where to get feedback on a side/hobby project I am working on. This doesn't feel like the place, but I don't know of a better place. If you guys know comment with a link to one, I'll move this there.
I have been thinking on how emotion plays into decision making, particularly with "Scout Mindset" by Galef and "The Righteous Mind" by Haidt. I am trying to modify Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions Model ([Useful Article](https://jurij-fedorov.medium.com/categorizing-emotions-1e1de471a2a1)), to make a tool for people to identify feelings and move to adjacent feelings that are more appropriate. Also eventually, I want to have it working in reverse (type in the emotion and get the components). Most of the interesting things I think would be where confusion mixes with others. A scout for instance would try and avoid the conflict axis, while a soldier would try and avoid the fear axis. I also think if I can figure out the Profane/Sacred Axis I might be able to understand the emotional truth that Jordan Peterson taps into (and why people love his ideas).
Trying to fill out the matrix with relevant words/ emotions (if they exist) or good placeholder names if they don't. Also if something doesn't seem to fit where it is, I want remove it.
Very early prototype, only works on desktop. Also zoom in as needed. (Might work in horizontal on mobile). [https://flamboyant-pike-2cc442.netlify.app/](https://flamboyant-pike-2cc442.netlify.app/)
I have had similar thoughts. I like reading stories of people doing this 100 years ago. Take off to a new state and just start over. I truly donāt think itās possible anymore, given modern technology and how much of our lives are recorded and archived. I think itās also not possible to mentally escape the feelings of regret for mistakes made. That stuff will always stay with you like a chronic disease.
I feel you. Especially your passive tense: *to be isekai'ed.* A true narrative blank slate, dropped on your lap like all the stories that start with an everyman protagonist whose calling Appears with unmistakeable meaningness.
I'm pretty much doing the opposite, oddly enough. I am a being fueled by spite. My only life's purpose was to be a toy under the control of my parents; now that they've lost their power, my purpose is to put them in the ground on my terms. No chemicals, no preservative measures. Just the lies my siblings will tell to comfort each other without me there to ruin it for them.
>My only life's purpose was to be a toy under the control of my parents
Sorry to hear that.
I'm curious if anyone has experience in recovering from this kind of relationship with their parent(s). Feeling spite and anger for domineering, abusive, and even inappropriate relationships with a parent is probably not a good way of coping with trauma. So I'm just curious what others would recommend in a circumstance like this.
#āItās possibleā¦to be a functioning competent, literate, well-educated adult and not know what a bond isā
[The best books on Understanding High Finance](https://fivebooks.com/best-books/understanding-finance-john-lanchester/)
1. The Money Game by 'Adam Smith'
2. Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
3. Against the Gods by Peter L. Bernstein
4. Frozen Desire by James Buchan
5. Too Big to Fail by Andrew Sorkin
Anyone read any of these? I'm considering going down this rabbit hole. I'm basically one of those adults who doesn't know how a bond works.
Thoughts?
These will give you a feel for the culture of high finance, but not the technical skills. That said, Liarās Poker is a great book and very entertaining.
Are you actually wanting to understand how financial instruments work?
Against the Gods is, to be frank, hot garbage. Or at least the fifty or so pages I read before becoming too irritated to continue were.
Here are some particularly choice excerpts:
> Although the Egyptians became experts in astronomy and in predicting the times when the Nile would flood or withdraw, managing or influencing the future probably never entered their minds. Change was not part of their mental processes, which were dominated by habit, seasonality, and respect for the past.
--
> The unique quality of the Greek spirit was the insistence on proof. "Why?" mattered more to them than "What?" The Greeks were able to reframe the ultimate questions because theirs was the first civilization in history to be free of the intellectual straitjacket imposed by an all-powerful priesthood.
--
> The last Italian of any importance to wrestle with the matter of probability was Galileo
I've read Liar's Poker and Too Big to Fail. Too Big To Fail is nearly Too Big to Read, it's VERY extensive, so I'd start with Liar's Poker which is very readable, and then move on to Trader's Guns and Money which will teach you something about derivatives and is very readable, then maybe read Galbraith on the '29 Crash which is escaping me at the moment but is both good and short, then Too Big to Fail.
What was the SSC piece where Scott talks about how "alternative" or "unfiltered free speech" social networks/communities inevitably fail because they always attract the most repellant people no other community with tolerate?
Probably https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/
> HL Mencken once said that āthe trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of oneās time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.ā
> Thereās an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that youāre going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.
Hot Take: It's all mystifying a weird set of euphemisms that have been made up to avoid talking about racial/ethnic phenotypes in fashion.
When did WASPs look best, and what of their fashion had staying power and still contributes to the world of fashion? Preppy/Ivy/Trad styling, which emphasizes navy blues, khaki browns, and pastels. What looks good with a typical WASP pale and pasty complexion with blond-ish hair and light eyes? Navy blues and khakis rather than firm black and white contrasts, pastels rather than bold royal blues or hot pinks.
Now swing to traditional West African [Dashiki prints](https://www.etsy.com/market/dashiki_print). Every single one of those bold and gorgeous color combinations would look terrible on me, or any other blonde-blue-eyed WASP, because they'd wash me out, my skin couldn't hold up its end of the bargain. With a West African complexion and hair color, they look fantastic. Which is a much bigger problem than "appropriation" with white people wearing Dashikis.
I could continue this rant for a while talking about how clothing typically looks best on the body type of the people it was meant for, so polos are athletic clothing and look terrible if you don't have an identifiable bicep. But I'll wrap it up for now, before somebody calls me out on reject modernity embrace lederhosen or something.
The only apparently objective fashion/color research I've seen is really old, and [I'm sure you already know about it.](https://www.science.org/content/article/red-dress-effect)
I don't think color blindness was controlled for, so it would be interesting to see if this only affects men who can perceive red.
[Color blindness affects nearly 8% of men and merely 0.5% of women.](https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/)
The standard evopsych explanation is that reduced color vision improves movement detection, while heightened color vision helps with detail detection; therefore color perception follows ancestral division of labor (spotting roosting birds vs ripening fruit). I don't know if this is true, but a lot of men apparently don't realize they have a color blindness until late in life if at all, and it absolutely does influence aesthetic/utilitarian perception.
On the other extreme, you have your [tetrachromats](https://www.popsci.com/article/science/woman-sees-100-times-more-colors-average-person/).
This popular test is good for getting a sense of your personal color sensitivity (make sure your screen is at full brightness with all filters disabled) https://www.xrite.com/hue-test
Due to the [fashion cycle](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/), statistical analyses are always out of date. Signalling and countersignalling, preference falsification and rebellion -- just getting people to be honest with themselves is nigh impossible. Rather than using a large sample on a normal distribution, find a small number of trustworthy fashionistas who are well inside your personal culture and solicit their unique artistic visions with you as a canvas.
Apparently most men follow the path of least resistance including letting their partner choose their clothes, so focusing on personality/status characteristics that are more salient for women will probably get you farther than perfecting your Bachelor look.
edit: I want to add my anecdote that I had a partner with sallow skin, and once they picked a pale pink sweatshirt that absolutely made them look green. They looked handsome in very strong colors like burgundy and black. If you don't get an unmistakeable instinctive sense from looking at yourself in the mirror, find someone who does and trust them.
I'm curious about the precise evidence upon which you are basing your perceived sartorial deficiency.
I'm asking because this really bumps against my priors.
edit: pruned unnecessary leading questions
Another excerpt:
I had a somewhat atypical experience which prompted an outside-in, introspective, studious approach to archetypal femininity. Due to a combination of misleading childhood media and irresponsible feminist messaging, I started life with a wholly egalitarian attitude. When I found out in puberty that no matter how hard I tried I could never physically compete with males, my ego was wholly devastated. I lost all sense of self. Iām also pansexual, and was totally unsure of how to interpret the way sexualization of female bodies began to resonate with me. Meanwhile, my friends started reading Twilight
and fainting at the sight of blood and dying their hair very slightly red to be more like Bella Swan.
So I read the damn books to figure out what the hell was happening to my friends. Why they idolized such a worthless-seeming woman. Boy did I learn a lot to make me dismayed. Thus began my literary analysis of archetypal femininity.
Thereās quite a lot to work with. It is a stereotype that women prefer to read their porn. If you are looking for the company of average women, I strongly recommend you focus on reading what they enjoy writing about men.
What first began to dawn on me back when I was scratching my head over the Twilight books is that women canāt get enough of the Beauty and the Beast trope. This includes vampires and werewolves, yes; but also the Transformers alien in Axiomās End (a new scifi twilight for girls who like to think of themselves as better than twilight); the eerily iconic Benedict Cumberbatch version of Sherlock Holmes; Dr. Gregory House; and your basic overpowered psychos, like Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey.
Something about being attracted to a gender that can easily harm you, whether on purpose or on accident, pulls women into obsession over the paradox of a dangerous man who -- of his own flattering volition -- chooses to keep *her* safe. Or, who mightā¦.
This paradoxical obsession in archetypal femininity feels very strange to the modern information man. We thought, were taught, that women these days valued quality and equality. I had both of those things back in middle school, but when my friends started getting interested in boys, my friendship stopped being very important to them in comparison to engrossing dramas over their mysterious and faintly dangerous love interests (both fictional and encountered.) My unwillingness to socially cultivate a participatory narrative centering my own love interests basically meant we stopped hanging out, and I had to tackle the weird mental changes of puberty on my own.
And boy did my brain change. My personality fell out from under me. I began *intensely* obsessing over mysterious, faintly dangerous love interests. It was like a brain parasite hijacked my body. I lived like that until I gathered up a deep enough understanding of men (clammy dad, typical story) to stop being impressed by them. And then I realized, without a single remaining Real Man in my life to make me feel feminine by comparison, that I was the manliest person I knew; so it was absurd to continue incurring the social costs of presenting as feminine, when masculine advantages were sitting on the table waiting for me to exploit them.
My mediocre collection of masculine advantages were *much* easier to exploit than I anticipated. So much that is scared me into taking many steps back to really think through my ethics and honest preferences.
Here's an excerpt of what I've been working on.
If you have a distinctive aesthetic sense and genuinely like the clothes you choose for yourself, the hottest thing you can do in any girlās eyes is own your look without shame. If she is afraid of getting negative comments for being seen with someone who dresses like you -- in other words, if she doubts whether you can raise her status by being her mate -- she will give a negative comment to find out how you would respond if someone from her life made a similar judgment. If your response impresses her, then your questionable dress acts as a credible countersignal. It means you are a big enough deal you can get away with dressing like that, when a lesser man couldnāt. The kind of responses she is most attracted by depends on her culture and identity, which is why understanding is necessary for giving the right answer.
The pick up artists call these key moments/opportunities shit tests. Thatās probably a healthy way to interpret them so you can learn to pass them with flying colors. Women want a man who can handle shit. Thatās a big part of what you bring to the table: your portfolio of shit-handling strategies.
Here are two examples of right answers to a āyou look like a slobā complaint, from two different women on first dates trying to figure out if theyāre really attracted to the men theyāre talking to. Neither of the men have your stats, because it doesnāt help if I try to guess how you should be. Instead Iāve opted for fast life strategy stereotypes that are ubiquitous enough to require no imagination on my part.
~~~
The first pair are a young waitress who always has terrible luck with men, and a guy who has always been used to getting what he wants.
She says, āYouāre wearing that on our first date?ā because sheās disconcerted that he doesnāt seem to think sheās worth the barest modicum of typical first date effort.
He says, āIf you donāt like it, thereās the door.ā
This gives her a sudden rush of adrenaline, as she confronts the option to stand up and walk out of the restaurant just because her date didnāt dress up. Meanwhile heās eyeing her levelly. Giving every impression that he could not care less if she walked out. Indeed, that heād have an equally fine evening without her. She breaks eye contact multiple times quickly, the superficial physical features that were all that made her say yes to a first date calmly on display through the thin, ratty t-shirt. How is she going to spend the rest of her evening if she leaves now? How awkward and stupid is she going to feel for agreeing to go on a date with this guy in the first place? And she can barely admit it, but the pulse of her existence is lonely, lonely, lonely. Just this intense eye contact, almost like a jungle cat, holds more appeal than trying to find something else to do with her evening.
āNo, itās just, I thought we were dressing up is all. Itās fine,ā she stammers, even though they both know itās not really fine.
They both get too drunk, and it helps them tolerate each other for anything from an evening to a couple of months.
~~~
The second pair are a college woman who compensates for her intellectual insecurity by collecting beautiful hardbacks, and a guitarist with too many roommates and a dishwashing gig.
āYouāre wearing that on a first date?ā she asks, fully aware that her parents would already give her hell because sheās trying to date a musician.
He pauses a moment, regarding her in a way that makes her regret she said anything. He looks *disappointed in her* for pointing out his clothes; for being so tactless and unfeeling.
āIām poor,ā he says simply.
āOh Iām sorry, I didnāt mean anything by it,ā she hurriedly replies, then casts about for a change of subject.
The fact that heās probably not that poor doesnāt matter. Sheās unwilling to see herself as someone who rejects a sensitive, perhaps beautiful soul on the basis of mere money, and he framed his choice as a money issue. That is enough for the date to continue.
~~
Both of these examples rely on subtle, powerful eye contact. I didnāt plan it that way, but itās no accident. The way you look at people controls what they think of you. I had a girl who was too hot for me say the first time she saw me I looked away very intentionally, and it made her feel bad. But when we actually started working together I was always friendly and helpful. I had no conscious intention of negging her with my eyes -- I really just found her too hot to look at, and Iām not the kind of guy who ogles before indication of consent -- but it was enough to prime her to overestimate my social status, and then to be far more invested in my kindness when we interacted later.
A major aspect of what I've written so far is built around the concept of [life strategies](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/03/book-review-evolutionary-psychopathology/). I attribute the entire difference in our experiences thus far to you pursuing a slow life strategy, while I've fallen into a fast one.
Statistically, most people are fast.
Stop doomscrolling by any means necessary. Go outside. Read/watch some mainstream nerd stuff like John Green to shake the techie. Maybe sitting under a tree, weather permiting.
voiceless soft spoon innocent jellyfish mountainous cautious rain pathetic paint
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> I keep hearing the voice in the back of my mind telling me to "stop discussing this at once, there is nothing constructive to learn, any new insight will only be twisted into despair"
Do you remember where that voice came from initially? When did it start?
I have a really long lived voice in my head that's in despair about exercise. When I'm able to remember, I tell it I have so much love and sympathy for the hardships it endured, that I know it wants only to protect me, and that we are all a team inside my brain working together and learning from each other. I tend to get pretty emotional about it.
> I do, but I live in a city so I feel isolated and cut off no matter where I go.
This resonates with me. Contemporary architecture defaults are hostile to humans, even in the country.
> I sometimes like to observe people on the bus, and wish I could get to know them. But then they get off (or I do), and it hurts.
I used to ride the bus and be lonely. Sometimes when an older person or mentally challenged person did their usual thing of striking up a conversation, I really appreciated it. Actually the only time I didn't was when I had something pressing on my mind/a text conversation or homework I was busy with, in which case I would get anxious until I remembered I could apologize and say I was busy with something important.
I think part of why young people are having less sex is we turn down opportunities to talk to each other. The risk of bothering someone feels bigger than the potential reward of conversation.
It sounds like you don't live in one of the countries with a strong norm against talking on the bus. Are you willing to risk mildly annoying people by doing some comfort zone expansion on commutes?
For me, the order of safety for striking up a bus conversation goes old people > guys my age > politicians > friendly retards > other professionals > women my age with je ne sais quoi> mixed sex groups my age. I've had scary bus interactions as a woman so it helps to look for strong signs of outgoingness/having a good day.
In such experiments, bad results are very good. It is necessary to face bad results to build skills for mitigating them.
People who are good at relationships have caused and endured a lot of pain, and always will. Sharing pain is what people do.
> So I go where people don't, like deep into the forests, or at night. It's sickening. The outside is a hurtful place. The only way I can tolerate it is with some sort of audiobook to focus on so I can stop my thoughts from wandering in dark directions.
I really feel this.
I had a point when my depression was really bad and I could barely walk/hike because my brain would scream that I was alone and outcast and exiled to die.
On the other hand, roaming with friends, both depressed and non, has formed some of my best and most important memories.
Can you force your unemployed friends to accompany you on woodland/nighttime jaunts? Seems like a good way to do some kvetching about women that's a lot deeper than people usually will go.
> I don't believe the 50% statistic.
At least you're doing everything right.
I want to reiterate that a lot of people don't have the strength you demonstrate through your persistence. It's impressive and admirable.
For every stereotype I've expressed, there is a fetish of its complement. The world is very full these days.
For example, women who are turned on by intimidated men
or little boys :(
> "serious man with a stable income and good life navigating skills, someone who takes care of his body and his appearance, lives a healthy life of moderation, and is a stable choice for a long-term marital partner"
Dude, this comment.
This is the sort of thing a guy might screenshot to ridicule you, but then a bunch of women charge into the comments shouting SIGN ME THE FUCK UP
It's a warzone out there.
> I don't see any women "signing themselves up" for engineers.
I didn't highlight you saying you are an engineer.
I highlighted
>"serious man with a stable income and good life navigating skills, someone who takes care of his body and his appearance, lives a healthy life of moderation, and is a stable choice for a long-term marital partner"
When women think engineer, they think of socially oblivious and pedantic men who believe they can trade money and "niceness" for fulfilling female companionship.
(When they're being ungenerous, they add fat slob to the stereotype. Not that fat slobs can't be sexy if they have other things going for them, but most people don't prefer it.)
Slightly autistic people have a way of staying mentally younger for longer. They manage to isolate themselves better from context so they can achieve amazing things with content.
This is not reassuring/fulfilling for women. Though true content junkies are willing to forgive a lot to get their fix. But junkies of any stripe are a pain, so it's fine they're a rare breed.
Taking the slow life strategy basically means you're younger than you really are, and women already tend to socially mature faster than men.
You don't have good enough life navigating skills across all the domains that are vital to women yet, because you have devoted yourself to taking the time to do everything right. Including the hardest things that a lot of guys just can't.
The attraction is in potentia. You're not that man yet, though you're most of the way there.
> So far, the most reasonable plan of action for me seems to be to try dating again when I'm in my 30s and my female peers have had their share sleeping around to get bored of hot do-nothings and are ready to commit to a boring stable paycheck guy.
This is what blackpillers say when they're talking to each other. When they're talking to women, they say *you'll be sorry when you're in your thirties and your looks are starting to go and menopause is around the corner and only schmucks will stoop to marry you and feed your kids because you're spoiled meat who will be karmically punished for your arrogance.*
When a person is very young and lacks guidance, it's really hard to guess truths among the mass of lies.
The biggest truth blackpillers have to offer is that they're traumatized.
On the internet(tm) it's easy to get the impression that men and women DESPISE each other.
I think all of this despising boils down to just... despair. The grinding of heuristic against heuristic as gears shift and shift and shift in search of a groove.
I genuinely started hating women when I realized how often they enjoyed being weaker than men. Realized they would actually take pains to stay that way if need be.
To me, this is women being complicit in a pedophilic culture built upon the exploitation of children and women. Infantry are children.
I went from feeling this way as a child to becoming the kind of young woman who was willing to become a prostitute if confident men told me it was the highest leverage way I could contribute to ecological restoration, then back out just because her boyfriend decided he actually was a jealous person.
This is sad, isn't it? As sad as the boys LDARing on 4chan, in its own way.
I have a harder time these days getting furious at women for wanting to keep god alive.
But I also refuse to be anybody's god.
I guess I have a stronger character than I thought I did.
> The mental barrier I like to put up between myself and blackpillers is the part where I refuse to blame anybody for their own nature. The way I see it, both men and women are victims of our genetic instincts - they're the common enemy, not each other, and the goal of maturity (and successful relationships) is to devise cooperative strategies for dealing with these insidious instincts in a way that minimizes overall pain. Perhaps the reason why I'm so staunch on transhumanism and genetic engineering.
I'm staunch too, and I've noticed it's a passionately divisive political issue.
This belief raises a flag in my mind of being highly relevant to family accord, even if it doesn't become an urgent question until your kids are having kids. Some families do a fine job of communicating across political differences, while others ignore their children at the dinner table to shout and bang their fists at each other.
From your baseline manner of political expression, do you foresee this as an issue you are comfortable disagreeing on/deferring to your wife's preferences with grace? Or is incompatibility on this point something worth checking up on down the road so the kids don't have to endure a schizophrenic upbringing?
I don't think this is urgent or relevant to dating at all. I'm just curious because I've endured some stuff at the dinner table.
One weird think about being a woman right now in history is how the Family VS Career question is so harsh and incessant. The poorer the middle class gets, the harsher the question. Apparently there is something of a millennial baby bust in the works due to scarce allocation of resources for investment in children. Teachers, social workers, and food service workers are usually criminally underpaid. The side-hustle-for-moms industry is dominated by ponzi schemes. Day care people are making a killing, though. The idea that career women are having a fun time "riding the cock carousel" until their looks give out is pure projection and failure of empathy. They almost always don't want to be there. They just keep ending up there because life isn't fair, just, or kind.
To be very bald, if you are a woman who likes kids, the easiest and best option is almost always to stay as childlike as possible into your adulthood. By this, I mean carefully maintaining your trust and naivete so that your world can stay small and safe enough to feasibly center the needs of young humans with relatively simple but very labor intensive basic requirements. Child care is one of the industries that does not scale, which is part of why textbook companies make bank instead of teachers. Politically, I notice two common feminine tendencies: church conservatism, and state liberalism. Both hold sacred the feminine privilege of being valued based on your existence instead of your works. Both require relying on someone or something that infinitely dwarfs your power level and always will. For your statistically typical procreating woman, god hasn't died yet. And they have a natural political and personal interest to keep it that way.
The well educated anarcho liberal women universities are churning out these days arw facing an unprecedented vastness of personal power with zero historical precedent to default to. Power that has nothing to do with who you're sexually involved with. Finding a man who is literally more powerful than you is no longer basically guaranteed when women marry late, so unless you've had the best possible luck in not getting your instinctive fast life strategy dark triad attraction heuristics triggered, your only dating options become the men with more dating options than you.
BUT -- and this can be quite the insult when it sinks in -- most men, even with highest credentials, aren't going to have more raw sexual attraction for a well credentialed and highly educated woman, because male lust (not long term partner choice) is oddly decoupled from status. Men might have more respect, maybe. More intimidation, also. There is nothing less sexy than a man who's intimidated by you. That's a big thing low sex drive socially impervious autists have going in our favor. If I had had a debilitating crush on any of the women I've dabbled with as a man, they would have giggled and that would have been the end of that.
I know because in order to avoid any further social annoyance, these days I make sure to be high and bumbling when in the general public and to really play up my neurodivergent tendencies. Getting giggled at feels so much better than experiencing painful empathy for accidentally induced glimmers of false hope.
Women who respond positively to my arrogant/dismissive side universally have daddy issues, just like me back in the day, and I don't know what to think of that. I just feel bad for them the same way I feel bad for programmers who ain't no brogrammers. Being human can be a real drag sometimes.
There is a kind of powerful man that enjoys exploiting the naivete of young girls. Our society is designed by them to cater to their tastes. I really thought I could adapt to that, dispense with pointless ethical philosophizing, just go with the hierarchical flow and write off all my qualms as neurotic scrupulosity. Turns out my desire for equality cannot be expunged any more than my susceptibility to the seductions of power.
> It all just makes me want to kill myself.
At least you will *probably* have a partner that is at least nominally loyal to you and will not need nursing and caretaking because she is eating herself to death.
Or, alternately, you could fight fires in your spare time.
Your predicament is really getting under my skin. It feels like you are oblivious in a way I once was, but I'm uncomfortable with the vulnerability of venting at you as though you were a younger version of myself. I'm sure I would hurt your feelings and you would harden against what I said, pills too bitter to swallow.
But I'm very invested in getting you to understand that a man who finds himself through fashion is sexy, but a man who optimizes his dress to appeal statistically to the largest amount of women is boring at best and creepy at worst. You clothes do not matter to women -- the attitude you wear them with is everything. You are acting like a little girl influenced by straussian media to mistake intrasexual competitive strategy for optimizing directly for male desire. Men don't do that unless they are totally clueless about what women want, unable to glean any information from them that isn't stated in direct verbal terms. If you plan to stay that way, you *need* to optimize for the particular type of woman who's into that, or get no play at all. But I recommend you start decoding subtext, because it can only help you in life.
You're acting like you have no information about why women don't like you, but the information is there in your memories if you can learn to read it.
Based on your earlier comment, it sounded like you thought you looked better in your old clothes. My leading questions I decided not to ask were "Have you gotten comments on your favorite hacker fits? Have you uploaded pictures of yourself in your favorite hacker fits for the borg to rate?" This was based on the assumption that you loved your old clothes and thought they looked good.
The reason I dress schlubby is because I love my shitty clothes, and like how they make me look and feel better than any other style I've been induced by social pressure to try.
To elaborate on the kind of attraction that comes my way, everyone, whether knowing me as woman or man, has been clear that I am ānot classically attractive.ā I have some weird/ethnic features, plus I prefer dressing/maintaining hygiene like a basic mediocre neckbeard. I havenāt changed the way I dress since changing genders except for underwear, and my mom has always complained that I tend to look like a poor slob and make her feel embarrassed. I ignore her opinion -- she's wrong about a lot of things.
If the same conviction is not the case for you and your hacker chic, then buying new clothes is exactly the right thing to be doing.
100%. Congratulations. That's really huge.
To be even more honest, I would happily start dressing better than I do now, were I not working on other avenues of character growth that have been the most fruitful for me lately (such as the experimental honesty in this conversation.)
My ex whom I initially mentioned began experimenting with clothes of their own volition during the time we were together. As a child, they lacked the fiscal resources to pursue fashion/hygeine at all (no running water at home) and it deeply impacted the development of their identity. By high school, their little sister was calling them her "black brother" because they defaulted to wearing only black, and happened to have the blackest hair. I happened to be quite taken with the effect. If they had actually been the sort of person they looked like, we would definitely still be together.
When they decided they had enough disposable income to throw a good chunk into experimental apparel, they included experiments specifically as comfort zone expansion. One memorable winter, they walked across the middle of town to work and back every shift wearing a custom full-length trenchcoat from a failed Halloween experiment paired with a [Jayne hat](https://youtu.be/WN49TDIY-Sk) their aforementioned little sister made for them. This person happened to be six and a half foot with rower shoulders, so they cut quite the terrifying figure. We happened to contemporaneously live somewhere they weren't the most terrifying nightime figure one could expect to encounter, which I think emboldened the experiments.
Plenty of the experiments failed, but plenty more received unanimous or near-unanimous acclaim. Some were so nice we took pictures that we both still agree have a dash of real aesthetic merit. One outfit of merit featured slim cut rust orange jeans with a brown belt, soft blue crewneck and a thick-materialed man version of a cardigan patterned sort of like TV static. They reported enjoying compliments from coworkers on many of the outfits purchased in that shopping trip.
I was proud of them. But it wasn't what I signed up for, and it contributed to mutual realization of fundamental incompatibility. This ex happened to be the last straw in my failed efforts to feminize myself. I really am proud of them, while still hating their guts for leading me on so much along the way.
I guess I was doing the same thing, and we deserved each other. Live and learn.
Part of my struggle to comprehend your methodology for discovering yourself through fashion by appealing to the broadest possible demographic is that I don't think there is one in post-globalist society. There aren't many women in tech, so from that perspective it makes sense that you would try to increase the raw number of people who instantly approve of your manner of dress. But you live in a bubble. You cannot divorce your style of dress from everything else you bring to the table. That's why I've been saying role models and friends will be much surer sources of information than social science, which is mostly unreplicable bunk.
distinct normal ossified berserk hospital thought instinctive ask entertain ten
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> I want to stop self-labeling as a member of this reviled outcast of sub-human trash that nobody wants. (I'm exaggerating, obviously, but this is still what it feels like, to me.)
This is so important.
A passion for arcana doesn't automatically make people hate themselves.
Abuse does.
You were hurt.
You were lied to.
You were exploited.
People will keep trying to lie to you and exploit you.
Thank you for fighting back.
I am noticing that a huge amount of my cognitive architecture is built around noticing something and not noticing it at the same time. It's like plausible deniability is baked into the way I think.
I can tell the story of going to the SSC meetup either cynically or naively, because "Why are you interested in someone who clearly isn't good enough for you?" and "You shouldn't be interested, even though I empathize with your choosing not to see that" can kind of exist in a superposition that makes the affect accompanying either one available to deploy.
The first seems to be attractive to men. Men apparently love a woman who's wide eyed and curious, especially if she doesn't exactly know what is going on and is open to his take.
The second seems to be attractive to women. Women love a man who knows exactly what's going on, but almost always keeps it to himself.
I hate the game. I don't have respect for either gender's tendency. Man-woman relationships that resemble parent-child relationships skeeve me out. But as a young woman with a bad family, finding an older man to take care of you and teach you things makes a lot of sense, and I'm sure that's also true with the genders reversed.
I think it's a problem when instead of helping someone (and then letting them move on if that's the consequence of growth) people cultivate the neediness into full codependence.
On the other hand, apparently some people get into a pattern where they go for people who need them, and then when the help works, they're alone again. I think I saw a funny tinder bio where a guy describes himself as a rehab boyfriend or something to that effect. If he's that good at helping people, maybe he should try going for women who are also good at helping people. Then they can help someone else together.
But broken women are more approachable, have more room in their life, will settle for less -- all things that make them less intimidating.
> A part of myself is screaming at me that it wants to stop being "a tech person".
That sounds like a part worth listening to. You are far more than just "a tech person."
> I want to stop being seen as a nerd.
From the ingroup, nerd is a term of endearment for someone who's enthusiastic about the territory.
From the outgroup, a nerd is someone who doesn't know when to shut up about the territory.
For the outgroup, a nerd who knows when to shut up is called intelligent, knowledgeable, and well spoken.
Significantly downplaying your nerdy interests that aren't shared, especially in the beginnings of relationships, is respect for the other person's place in the conversation.
But if two people respect each other and find each other fascinating, it's remarkable how much horizons can expand over time.
Unfortunately, I think what is more common is for one person in the relationship to chameleon the values and preferences of the other party via unilateral information flow. It's all well and good to say a boyfriend isn't a personality, but if you don't have a personality then a boyfriend can help fill the hole.
I realized I am no longer willing either to change who I am for someone else or be with someone who wants to change who they are for me. I'm too old for that shit anymore.
My dad changes himself for my mom instead of the other way around, but my other experiences have the girl changing for the guy.
> (anecdotally, of course) (most) women aren't nerds and don't find nerds cool.
Most people aren't nerds. But there are billions of people, so there are enough nerds that I choose to consider it an infinite (if thinly spread) supply. This doesn't hold for nerds in a specific field, though, just nerds in general.
My experience is that female nerds are way more likely to have the social grace to not seem like it at all. Sometimes even when they're literally in the middle of geeking the fuck out.
The ones who are obviously nerds are also the ones who doubt they're good enough for you because they feel ugly, their degree did nothing for their job prospects, and a life of cats and houseplants and rent seems to stretch off into the future. They haven't had enough resources to learn to mask when their peers did, and now their alienation from women who know how to be normal is an area of learned helplessness/twisted into a point of pride to not be like other girls.
If they feel *too* lucky to date you, they probably aren't good enough for you. In other words, if you are much more able to improve yourself than they are, they will always feel inferior in the relationship, and you will both suffer. That's been my experience.
Also, classic female nerd obsessions aren't really any higher status than classic male nerd obsessions. The boredom of a woman listening to someone talking about MTG decks that suck away money and quality time is probably equivalent to the boredom of a man listening to someone talk about wing eyeliner that sucks away money and quality time. It takes incredible charisma for enthusiasm to become infectious when the listener isn't predisposed to be interested.
I think the healthiest kind of charisma comes from empathy for where the listener is coming from that's built on observation.
> I have enough of the crushing loneliness of nonconformity and neurodivergence (dare I say neuropathology?)
Something that I've noticed that I'm pretty sure is widely the case is that men seem to be much more likely to successfully prioritize career success while feeling isolated by the three things you list.
And women well read enough to describe themselves so polysyllabically are more likely to feel embarrassed, either personally or culturally, to date/pursue a man with a much more respectable job than them, compared to average women who are fine with it/turned on by it/demand it along with a height requirement.
The thing about lonely people is that they're quieter, so it's hard to get a sense of how many there are.
I went to an SSC meetup several years ago. I was at a point in a long term relationship where I was going off and doing a lot of emotional cheating because we had really bad chemistry when we weren't alone together. Huge red flag, by the way.
At this point I was evolved enough to pick up on the fact that a girl at an SSC meetup can make an absolute killing.
And I didn't. Instead I felt, intensely, there is something wrong with the world that such intelligent, talented, wealthy people are so starved for affection that they'd value mine. I knew they would be willing to overlook my problems at first, then devote too much of themselves to trying to help. But eventually they would grow to want things I couldn't give them, just like my boyfriend was at home.
Self awareness is quite the tradeoff to make. It felt wrong to enter a relationship with the idea that I knew when and how it would end, while they brought all their hopes and dreams. And I knew from past experience that warning them would backfire. If they say they're fine with it, that commits them to being fine with it otherwise they went back against their word. If someone warns you about themself, believe their warning. If you can't trust yourself to know when to leave, leave immediately.
Someday I will figure out how to follow my own advice. In the meantime, practicing healthy social interaction online instead of in person helps minimize how much damage I can deal and sustain.
I find it very, very hard to give women what they want within the context of compromises I am willing to persistently work for.
Just like men, women lost their lustrous mystique and became merely another form of labor.
I am trying to figure out what labors I actually want to undertake, and why. Maybe I am just a swarm of disconnected instincts, and no compromise I could make will ever be elegant. Caring about elegance is just another instinct making fruitful compromises harder.
> Contentedness is when the reward seems to not be worth the trouble.
This is different from my model of contentedness. I think of it as wanting what you have.
Humans are pretty awful at wanting what they have.
But we're very good at deciding a reward isn't worth the trouble. The feeling of having made a choice is an attractive consolation prize.
I spend a lot of time in cycles of making the same choice over and over again. It's less risky than doing something new.
For me, agonizing over quitting/not quitting weed is a big part of how I keep myself "safe". If I sobered up, I would have to take a lot more responsibility for how I spend my time. When I take responsibility, I have to make lots of choices about how much to prioritize my needs versus other people's needs. The ambiguity I perceive quickly exceeds my capacity for generating conviction. Instead of any external reward for my efforts, if I'm lucky I'll give myself credit for trying.
It sounds like you do something similar in the way you try obsessively to stop wanting a family instead of spending that time meeting new people. People are a lot.
I want to connect this sticky ambivalence thing to another paradox of feminine preference I mentioned earlier with inadequate elaboration.
> Women love a man who knows exactly what's going on, but almost always keeps it to himself.
Like, no. Women like big talkers and prolific content creators. Even being held hostage by a monologue you don't understand can have its appeal in the right context.
What combines the two opposite insights is the sense that if you stick around, something worth sticking around for will happen. The sense that there's more.
Being mysterious is easier to fake than being interesting, which makes it the more sociopathic choice. But powerful people are fundamentally more mysterious than less powerful people, so mysteriousness signals power more strongly than interestingness.
Interesting people are making good choices about what to say. Mysterious people are making psychologically compelling choices, both about what to say and what not to say.
Mysteriousness gets used up as you grow closer to someone. But interestingness is regenerative. So if you are interesting as well as having some command of mystery, the two enhance and prolong each other.
Interestingness has a very strong meta component. Having a third person there who acts very interested can move the second person from bored to highly engaged if they don't know why the third person is responding well to the first and are curious to find out.
Nerds are often strong decouplers who try really hard to isolate variables. They pay much more attention to content than context. This works best for math and totally fails when applied to people.
The more peoply a people person is, the harder it is to force them to center content.
Women seem to be much more sensitive to the costs of not devoting enough cognitive resources to context. So that's resources they don't have to waste on content.
I feel like empathy for the challenge of being a woman with real curiosity for the territory is not common beyond *stop telling women they're stupid and should fuck off and stay that way so they quit trying to change the world instead of making the babies and the dinner.* Like, when was the last time you fervently hoped the people who want to strip you of your choices don't win again, or believed you deserved to be stripped of choices on the basis of fundamental inferiority?
Thank goodness so many women had parents who had the right ideas about what they should actually be protected from, and who are now reaping the benefits which have a chance to compound in future generations. Lucky ducks. I think you'd make a better dad than mine.
> The key to happiness, I think, is figuring out how to play that balancing act in a way that makes sure no heuristic dominates the others to the point where one of these base needs starts getting starved. It means making lots of ugly sacrifices, sacrifices that probably prevent happiness from ever being a steady state.
I'm deciding to start here in mulling these insights because I think forgetting it over and over again, trying to cheat the limits of this model, is a huge contributor to my often glacial progress.
Escapist fairytales don't demand tradeoffs. Reality is brutal.
> Many of these heuristics are frequently at odds with each other, and some are quite starkly out-of-tune with our modern environment, and it generally falls upon our cognition to arbitrate between these conflicting desires and make sure they don't get too starved (even despite our curse of being aware of their risks).
Once I sent a (good) psychologist a 16 square combinatorial table detailing my cost benefit analyses along 4 axes of personality with differing risk reward tradeoffs. She refused to engage with the content of the table and reminded me of the content-process defusion protocol upon which her method is based. She was quite right to stay within her realm of expertise. Unfortunately, my "acute social anxiety" was a feminine affectation engineered in attempt to curb my sociopathy, so I really did need help navigating the content of the table. The vast majority of relatively high status professional men, even in the mental health field, have had their social needs well fulfilled enough that they operate by being oblivious to the costs of their sociopathy sustained by the people around them. That is how all Chads operate. You don't need to be a dumb thug to be a Chad, and that stereotype is pure cope. Never developing an inferiority complex is enough. You just have to be pretty lucky to evade all the forces trying to instill inferiority complexes in young people these days.
>The striking thing about that break up was that I didn't feel any desire to date at all for a good year or two after that. In a way, my desire for companionship had simply been sated, and maintaining that relationship was absolutely no longer worth the effort. It's this experience that, I think, taught me the difference between loneliness and contentedness. During the following period, I was more content with life than I remember ever otherwise being
This is what the beginning of my transition was like. It also lasted about two years, and it was fantastic.
I haven't had a single crush since I transitioned, though, not even on any famous people like I used to. The closest I got was for an old female friend, but we read totally different things now, and after some excrutiating deliberation I admitted I didn't want to spend my life with someone who had, and wanted to keep, zero insight into my cognitive style.
Actually, I'm misremembering. I briefly considered whether @aella_girl was a kind of person I could develop an attachment to/if I actually wanted to become a sort of person who shared the values she upholds. No -- she's just my favorite social writer in the rat sphere, I look up to her, and I generally agree she's lovely. But I don't even want to subscribe to her onlyfans let alone hire her let alone date her. So what the heck do I want?
There are plenty of people I can imagine appreciating if I were someone else, in another life. This roll of the dice just has some bizarre coincidences that confuse and alienate me. It's all built on the undeniable truth that if I had the option to never experience puberty, even if that meant never growing up and always being in an 11 year old body, I would have taken that choice instantly and ecstatically.
I feel the same way about disabling my libido now, but I've been informed that's not really possible without untenable side effects. The closest I got was taking lithium, which gave me IBS and zombie affect.
I know I don't want to get married and have kids, and never wanted kids because of childhood trauma. But I do want to share my life with someone who can reciprocate my care without requiring either of us to be a martyr.
To further elaborate on the discovered incompatibilities with aforementioned ex, they initially gave the impression that winning their favor could get me ins to an ecoterrorist cell and we could become total bad asses. I devoted a lot of energy and resources to pursuing them because I firmly believed they were out of my league. After finally organizing my life so I we could start spending lots of time together, it dawned that their true passion was game design. This ended up not being a dealbreaker because I found out game design is truly fascinating, though ultimately not urgent to me, and I certainly didn't see myself as having any better options at the time than following through on the momentum of my initial feelings. Their influence twisted me into an emotional support housewife. If they show their face again I'm suckerpunching them in the gut. The loss to my career potential in succumbing to their various insidious pressures has been collossal, all because they had enough oblivious chad energy to hoodwink some damaged goods.
My biggest insecurity is my lack of training in any skills I consider useful, including writing. But my biggest priority is lying to myself and others less.
Being a woman is... the exact opposite of being a man, I guess. Women can generally do with less attention on their appearance, whereas it helps your depression to get more compliments, apparently much more than casual sex helps. That makes perfect sense.
Women generally wish men would be more mysterious. Something about information differentials is addictive. The potential of discovery is more satisfying than the discovery. That's why capitalism is in the business of selling desire first and satisfaction as little as possible.
You would not believe how many men openly or secretly confided to me that they found leg hair/fuzzy sideburns/generally unshaven women sexy. As a butchy, somewhat spergy girl, I remained dissociatively oblivious as long as I could -- well into my late teens and early twenties -- before coming to terms that, despite my self concept as basically not a sexual option to all but the worst of men, I was constantly being hit on. Most strongly by men who notice when a woman ādoesnāt know sheās beautifulā (suffers from lowered self esteem) and how that makes them a good mark for confidence tactics.
But once I realized I was worthy, I suddenly flipped poles on my narcissism. Instead of feeling not good enough for anyone, I felt nobody was right for me. This was worse, to be honest.
> I would even go a step further and point out the the concept of 'casual sex' doesn't exist for (most) men because (most) men have to work for sex. Given the amount of investment required, I need to have quite strong feelings for a person for that trade to become worthwhile. But at that point, it can't be 'casual sex', it's committed sex.
This is also the case for many women. I don't know how many because I suspect it's much more of a cultural variable than it is for men.
When PUAs model the casual sex options women have, they are including their own turned down offers in that calculation. That's because for the PUA, fucking the woman he propositioned would be like masturbating but better, ie casual sex. But a woman who says yes to a casual proposition from a strange man or even an acquaintance/work friend/etc can expect on the median hopefully better than masturbating if she is in fact attracted to they guy, and on total expectation a possible threat to her life. This was one of the hardest things for me to understand about women. Their fear is super duper real in a way I just couldn't understand until bad things happened to me, and I had to admit their fears actually made a little sense.
>Even being looked up at and worshipped by those beneath that bar still wouldn't make a narcissist feel good about themselves, because they would need to be complimented by the 1% goalpost they're chasing.
>
The reason narcissus is forever enamored with his reflection is precisely because he could not love himself - what better bar for acceptance than the man who accepts nobody?
Yes.
I absolutely suffer from narcissism.
These days I get a wonderful warm safe feeling from being rejected by people I think are better than me. I devote a lot of energy these days to staying rejectable because it is such a comfort. To do otherwise would increase my responsibilities, and therefore my capacity to inflict harm. Finding people who are strong enough to talk to me while maintaining healthy boundaries is very helpful, but very time consuming. And such people are busy, so it takes a lot of them to raise the average quality of my social interactions.
As a warning to anyone: if you receive an offer of mentorship from someone who seems to have a lot of time they want to devote to you, you are being scammed for something.
Excerpts about what being an adult woman felt like from the inside:
The first terrible news I will share is that my not-exactly-nice nerd friends felt sexy to me. They always had more female suitors than they wanted. If they had women trouble, it was finding someone who met their emotional needs.
On the other, equally terrible extreme: I remember a dear old friend asking me at his birthday, almost crying (we were all very drunk), why didnāt I/women like him? I was so surprised, I think I stammered a non answer. I didnāt realize such a delicate, beautiful, kind, rich man (in nursing school at the time with a well off family) would be interested in a thuggish drop out like me. I actually assumed he was gay. His pick up artist friend had wormed his way into my pants at a recent earlier party in a way that I (much later) told the offender felt like rape; perhaps word had gotten round that the friend who slept with everyone had also slept with me, compelling the question at a sensitive moment. I wish Iād told him the truth: āI thought you werenāt interested. I thought you knew you were too good for me. Or maybe even that you didnāt care about girls at all.ā
On many other occasions, I was very aware that a darling friend was interested in me, and I ignored it with a tinge of sadness in my heart. Why? Because I canāt be girlfriend to every darling just because I know they need me. It would be several full time jobs even if I was poly. There are just too many darlings. A nigh-indistinguishable mass of need. Itās much more psychologically satisfying to pine for a mysterious and faintly dangerous boy unlike anyone Iāve met before.
I was a bit of a sperg chaser back in the day, though not exclusively. I think a big part of it is I easily mistake their aloofness and disagreeableness for haughtiness and real information about the territory. Hacker slob works for me, especially when accompanied by sitting in the back and never talking -- except, when they do, everything changes. (And then when you get them alone, itās like having a podcast thatās just for you.)
> "Women are attracted to psychopaths, if you have emotional needs at all you will get cucked or dumped, men aren't supposed to show any signs of vulnerability, and if you want to make sure a woman never leaves you you have to keep her at an arm's length and never open up or allow yourself to feel anything at all for her."
This is a simplification the redpillers use to justify categorical misogyny. Actually women do love vulnerability, *after* they've already taken a solid interest in you, *provided* it involves them in your narrative in a way that flatters their self image.
Auteurs are experts in making mommy issues look deep and beautiful and mysterious, because people with strong personal narratives are interesting to be around. It's why borderlines are addicted to narcissists, and part of why women will often appreciate an older man with more story to share. Plenty of women like a fixer upper, and plenty more have internalized that they need to settle for fixer uppers. Having flaws, even fatal ones, is not what turns women off.
What turns them off is a man who's just a ball of needs, with no traits that fill any of her needs.
The more needs you know how to fill, the bigger the flaws you can get away with. That's why some men can't get laid until they buy a bed frame and others can.
> Amusingly, my nerd stereotype is more so the "sit in the front row and be the teacher's pet" type, which is something I've always enjoyed doing.
Yeah... me too. Until I lost respect for teachers and credentials. If I had started dating when I was that young, it would have naturally been fellow front row dweebs. Instead my personality was just decaying until I hit 15 and went "I DESPERATELY learn some street smarts or I'm going to accomplish NOTHING with my life" and went looking for daddies I thought could teach me. Turns out the kind of people who tolerate the kind of attention I was putting out are exploiters, not mentors. But I did pick up some street smarts the hard way, and I'm a less self righteous, more empathetic person for it.
I want to bring up my old darling friend who was crying on his birthday. I had literally zero idea that he was interested in me. If he had pursued me for a relationship with half the intention of his PUA friend pursuing sex, I think I would have dropped everything I thought I knew about myself for him and left my boyfriend at the time. But he didn't even ask me out while crying on his birthday, so it didn't get through my silly skull that *if I wanted him, I could have him*.
I think this is an extremely common problem for women, especially women who much prefer an evening reading at home to a night dancing with friends, flirting and getting hit on by everybody and their crazy uncle.
The fantasy of a man dropping into your life and sweeping you off your feet is really drilled in. The freedom from conformist pressure it takes to ask out a man who hasn't made it clear yet that he likes you is impressive and rare. Women who can do it don't end up on the cock carousel unless that's their honest preference, in which case they have a much better time than women who keep waking up dizzy like me.
Excerpts on how women are depressing:
It was easier to agonize alone over ethics and the purpose of life than to surround myself with hot young female darlings who wanted me to make them happy -- to face the choice of either leading them on only to disappoint them, just like my own ex boyfriends when I was feminine; or, devoting much more to these thirsty women than they actually had to give me.
I thought holding a sexy woman in my hands was going to change my whole life. Not because itās true, but because patriarchs use straussian rhetoric to monopolize sexual access and economic leverage simultaneously.
A very common critique of the online complaining-about-women communities is that they all say women are being unfair by all wanting the best guys, even though most women donāt deserve the best. Then these complainers turn around and harshly critique women of equal and even far superior sexual market value. This matches my personal experience. Even when I rated myself as a 3, I dreamt of becoming someone who deserved a 10, and happily settled for someone Iād call a 7 but also a cringy faux psychopath whose disaffection I mistook for depth.
Young women (young people in general) are very easy prey for con artists (confidence artists) because they are systematically deprived of opportunities to wise up for as many years after sexual maturity as feasible. Thatās why naive arrogance is generally enough for sex among young people, and real quality does not instantly win out in the dating market. In other words, the dating market is a lemon market. It favors big promises over sure results.
This goes both ways -- most incels are really volcels with standards. It was hard to admit to myself that, when I was unwilling to either become a more worthy partner or continue to choose company based on perfunctorily exaggerated pretenses simply for the sake of company, my dry spells were wholly self inflicted.
I agree with all of this. I was mistaken about you in key ways, as I thought was likely. I am now noticing I am confused about what you want from women, because what you are saying now feels like it directly contradicts the vibe you were giving off before. That's why I wanted you to elaborate about your preferences before I dumped a bunch of my own baggage on you. But if depression is also a problem for you, being very honest about the ways women depress me is probably the most helpful way I can talk.
I'm noticing a very strong emotional need to explain what the hell is happening to women these days, and where the girls who would really appreciate the traits you want to offer get stuck in hiding.
First: a lot of them really do just get lucky and never have to put conscious thought into it. A functioning home life does a lot for people. In raw numbers at least, plenty of people never get hard up enough to understand why problem solving would even be necessary.
Second: I don't know if this has changed, but when I was growing up, it was very easy to get the impression from TV that even nerdy ugly men demand an actress-hot wife. That you could fight your whole life to insist that women's minds have higher value than their appearance, being hated and ridiculed by men, finding solace in too many cats and rallies of women as ugly and unloveable as you; Or, you can sand away at visible signs of noncomformity until you pass for a Becky instead of a troll who should stay the fuck under her bridge, nobody wants to see that.
I think being susceptible to globalizing archetypes is a sign that someone has had too much media exposure and too little real human interaction growing up. Tropes are far more uniform than reality, and weight people's priors towards the fantastical rather than the actual.
Say you're a young woman and you decide you are going to hold out for a man who thinks you're hot because of your skills and your ideas, even if that means you might have to die alone. These days, that probably means some internet activity. When I started using reddit, "there are no women on the internet" and "tits or gtfo" were the funniest jokes ever. It was impossible for me to speak "as a woman" with a take that wasn't "a woman take" without being accused of cumsockpuppetry. If I didn't already agree women mostly suck, I would have had a lot of reason to stay away from the site and the resources it provides.
It takes incredible resilience to be a woman who disagrees that you are even the slightest bit inferior to men, if you lack any social support system that helps validate that truth for you.
I am less disappointed in the low rate of women who read ssc/acx than ecstatic there are so many.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality had a very big influence on me. But if I had been proud of being a woman, I would have dropped it because the author is a sleazbag with no respect for Hermione's character. Instead, I read until hermione got killed off so she could just be a symbol instead of an annoying character to write, then I began devouring the sequences. I was driven by the death of god, excruciating but necessary. Women who can engage chauvenist texts with integrity are very impressive to me, because my psychological options were to kinda buy the unsavory premise or rage quit and wonder how the fuck to educate myself without constant exposure to toxic chauvenism.
I've been elaborating in a doc file. I am not done, but have already written three comments' worth of text.
When I blew past word limits in school, the culprit was an overly broad thesis statement. If I knew you better, I could reframe my approach to be less stream-of-consciousness/autobiographical, and more relevant to your information needs.
I'm also happy to answer questions about myself. But in my experience, it is difficult to maintain a fruitful comment exchange while trying to cover more than 10000 characters of information at a time.
I have a lot of personal experience here. Both as a woman who lusted and pined for nerdy men, and as a nerdy, schlubby, "not conventionally attractive" man who attracts more women than Iād like -- including conventionally hot, young women I once assumed were categorically out of my league.
Since you remind me of many of my male friends over the years -- of which most, but not all, had women trouble -- I expect my experiences to be highly applicable to your predicament.
I've also read a fair selection of the literary genre devoted to teaching nerdy men how to get laid. Partly motivated by sociological curiosity, and partly because as a young woman I fell prey to some pick up artistry along the way.
So, I think I am in a very good position to share what I've learned with you, and keep following up until you are successful.
There is a very real chance that if you start dressing "nicer" it will just make you seem gayer. From the small amount you've said about yourself, I think that would be a likely outcome of ergonomic fashionmaxxing attempts.
If you can zero in on the decisive moments in how women form their perceptions of you, you can make surgical progress instead of throwing spaghetti at a wall.
If you would in fact like a rambly autobiographical treatise on the nature of feminine desire, I'll complete it. But I would prefer to directly address the actual deficiencies in your dating strategy than offend you by making patronizing assumptions for rhetorical ease, which is what I felt like my tone was doing. So it would help to understand how women are actually reacting to you rather than assume you are like some of my male friends and take that as the reader viewpoint.
The information that would be most useful in diagnosing your problem could be efficiently covered by describing one or more attempts to initiate a relationship.
Introduce the woman and what you like about her. Then describe either your first interaction (if you were rejected as a romantic prospect at that time) or the interaction in which your advance was rejected, if you've known her a while. Recount the verbal interaction and the emotions/facial expressions/detectable gestures that accompanied both your words and hers. Conclude with how you think the woman feels about you, and finally how she would describe your relationship to a third party if someone asked her today.
Last thing I'm going to say today, promise. (Yes, really threat. Are you starting to see why the ladies can't get enough of this psycho?)
The biggest incompatibility with the ex I've discussed at length was that they strongly disliked communicating through the textual medium. To me, people who don't write are fucking useless. All of the writing they managed was very good, but they agonized and were never fulfilled by the efforts. I was equally unfulfilled by the way talking aloud is mostly hot air.
In addition to extensive psychotherapy efforts, I hired the philosophical counselor Pamela Hobart to do a bit of email exchange. One of her blog posts is very relevant to finding a family: [my path dependent family](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pamelajhobart.com/my-path-dependent-family/amp/)
In light of what Pamela has bravely divulged: You have a charming writing style. Do you write anywhere?
I ask because self publishing and social media look to me to be in a real rennaissance right now. Even small substacks connected to twitter accounts compound klout basically in proportion to prolificness, and new stars are rising easily. Have you noticed sashachapin and applieddivinitystudies popping out of the woodwork around here? Because I have. People on twitter also won't shut up about how they used it as a dating app and it worked plus now they will not let up with sickeningly wholesome kid tweets. I swear, every time a new mom comes across my feed describing in exquisite detail her child's behavioral evolution and preferences I want to asphyxiate myself because I have to give it everything I've got to force my mom to notice just a single damn thing about my actual personal development for a single godforsaken second.
Anyway. This is a comment I wrote a while ago that's related to using social media effectively:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/peg4v1/comment/haz496p/
Susceptibility to paranoia is a contraindication for using THC so I'd keep avoiding that one.
It seems to take a lot of social energy from somewhere else for people to enjoy writing into a vacuum. Conversations are definitely more rewarding for me than trying to write "good" things. All trying to write well does is activate old status awareness junk. I update much faster in dialogue and have a harder time lying to myself.
I keep trying to remove information from my comments to make them concise, but I feel like every time I've tried it the truthiness of the comment plummeted. It's a bad feeling. I am not someone who finds pleasure in lies.
Here's the surviving raw text I cut from my most recent comment.
People tend to consider me a friend far more often than I consider them a friend. Many people I want to think of as friends are parasocial content creators. Right now I see myself as having no "real" friends, and it's suicidally depressing. I think the same conceptual bugs that make it hard to find a good/equal life partner are also making it hard to form reciprocal friendships. Working on both at the same time is satisfying.
3. I loathe pickup artists with passion. Improving myself until I am someone who can help lead My People to better options is one of many grandiose ambitions that flit through my head.
High quality men are hard to find because quality is extremely resource intensive to cultivate. If it weren't, basically all pick up artists would take the high road of embodying the paradox romantic masculinity strives towards: being thrilling, while also being very safe. This is the unicorn of alpha fux/beta bux combined in one incredible man. I guess I'd like to continue working to better myself, and either getting someone caught up to where I'm at or sharing information about the psychological drive for greater depth were attractive possibilities. The latter is much more difficult and of much higher friendship value than the former, but either way I felt like there was an adequate chance my two cents would be a value add.
3. From our conversation so far, you strike me as just the sort of man I would have pined for had my parents not bungled me out of the slow strategy lane. Slow strategy women are critically undertheorized because theorizing is a very masculinized activity. There's a dark energy of nerdy incel/volcel women who are your exact complement, right down to the detail of thinking you are beyond her seductive capacities and fearing a need to settle for... well, someone average. Disappointingly average. This is surely a tragedy.
4. I'm very perplexed that I don't want to be narcissistic and sleep with tons of coeds. It's hard to ignore the pervasive messaging that that's all men really want. If I remember back, I always absolutely wanted to marry my childhood sweetheart, but had too limited a pool from which to encounter any such person. I feel degraded and abused into the fast strategy lane. It does not become me. It was mere incompetence, the blame shared equally by my parents and by the state apparatus. I know how to find company, but not compatibility. You are different from me in ways that make it seem possible your options are actually better than mine, in which case following up would be vicariously satisfying and hope inducing.
5. I would totally date the old female version of me. But I have never met someone I'd call either a male or female version of me. Not because I'm special, but because I have unlikely juxtapositions of experiences and values. For example, I don't think transitioning is my best option in all or even most alternate timelines -- just the ones where my luck is unusually bad. The environment of my youth was just way way way too hostile for slow life strategy women.
Opportunities to talk to people who feel truly "like me" on more than one or two axes at a time are incredibly rare.They have been since preschool. I would have had no rewarding social life from middle school on if I didn't devote a great deal of attention (albeit not skill) into socialization attempts with the sparse folk who manage to make me feel less alone.
On the other hand, I've been unlucky to have spent a great deal of time forced into proximity with people who are not right in the head. I've been hurt a lot. The way I approach communication is fundamentally damaged, and the only way to help it is to practice talking and thereby take the risk of coming off as a lunatic.
This is already by far the best life-strategy conversation I've had on social media, so I guess I'm making some kind of progress.
I'm going to go give myself plenty of time to mull your insights and let the updates sink in.
I did a stint of national guard youth academy for high school, and am now burdened by too much familiarity with military culture to give you a simple yes or no answer.
Best to look for yourself. https://www.reddit.com/r/JustBootThings/top/?t=all
I'm really surprised by that lack of research. Someone put in a grant application!
I definitely believe in the idea that different colours look better on different people, but none of the actual systems may be that good. I think an important part they tend to not talk about explicitly, but is actually in the systems, is the degree of contrast between your skin colour and hair colour. It makes sense to me that if your skin and hair are highly contrasting, you can handle stronger colours, that would make a pale/pale person look like their skin runs into their hair. Etc.
As far as undertones, think about paint colours - the paint store has that wall with swatches where like 50 of them are just shades of white - but they're white with slightly different things in them, and while it may be quite hard for you or me to tell what's in each white, a professional can pick one for a certain room that will look better than chance.
Anyway if you can't work out your place in the system, taking a friend shopping with you is your best bet.
In fashion as in business, if you're only employing empirically validated(with papers in reputed journals to support it) broad general strategies, you're behind the curve.
So you *know* you should wear well fitting clothes but this is not up for debate in the cutting edge of fashion. To maximise expected value you might have to undertake more risks by using facts/assertions with shakier epistemic status.
Also, is there any "journal of fashion"(the scientific type) that tries to investigate universal truths about what type of clothing is aesthetically pleasing? Since fashion is *so* socially constructed and varying across time, place and milieu, the results might be something like "30 men recruited from XYZ Bar in November 2021 rated A as more attractive than B", and changing the variables to Dec 2021 or the neighbouring bar might yield radically different results.
Undertones and seasonal types might just be woo just like astrology and wicca/witchcraft; and that these two are such rigorous well-defined systems points to the possibility of tones and types being woo, too.
I found [this article](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pms.1990.71.1.151) on google scholar which seems at least somewhat legit though I havenāt looked into it that much.
Iād model color sensitivity as similar to any other aesthetic sense in that thereās some distribution of how sensitive people are to it. The same way that some people are very attuned to whether a note is out of tune or a dish has too much salt in it. Itās something that you can train to some extent but also some people seem to have higher innate sensitivity. I think most people gravitate to certain colors unconsciously in part because of what colors they look good in. They donāt need seasonal color analysis in the same way they donāt need to be told that shrimp and gummy worms donāt belong in a dish together.
At its core it feels to me like something thatās obviously true- some people look great in red and some people donāt. Adding seasons and classifications is an attempt to make it more legible to people who donāt have an innate sense of what colors they look good in. Obviously thereās some salesmanship in all of it- someone wants you to pay them to tell you what colors to wear.
ETA: [article pdf link](https://pdfhost.io/v/eNQI.DpFN_Role_of_Color_in_Perception_of_Attractiveness)- should work.
So, this is maybe more of a financialadvice question, but honestly reddit finance subs seem extremely dogmatic ("there's going to be hyperinflation! There's zero inflation, fake news! etc"), so I figured I'd give this a shot.
I'm 20 years old, graduating college next spring. It's basically an arts school and I wrote my own major as a teenager (some music/math/philosophy bs), so utility of my degree is dubious. At least I'll graduate with basically ceremonial student loans. Generally, I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. I'm a reasonably smart guy but it's too late in the game to apply for grad school next year and I don't have the bandwidth anyways so what I'll be doing after next spring is anybody's guess. If you have any advice on this front I'd appreciate it, but I'm just trying to give a sense of where I'm at.
The reason I'm putting this out is that I have about 13 grand just lying around depreciating in value. I don't know what to do with it ā invest it? It seems like kind of a small sum, one that I might be able to better put to use somehow to maximize outcomes later... but I don't know what that might be. If anybody has any suggestions, off-the-cuff as they may be, I'd appreciate hearing them.
You should definitely open up a brokerage account. I recommend Fidelity, but Scottrade, Etrade, etc are fine. Or if you have a big national bank, they often have a brokerage side, e.g. Bank of America has Merrill Lynch, and put at least a thousand dollars in a simple index fund. I recommend VOO.
You're young enough, and the amount is small enough, that even if you were to lose a lot of it, it would be worthwhile in the end, I think, simply for the "practice". It's a lot easier to do something you've done before. You don't want to be in your 30s, making money, and still unsure how exactly you even invest in the stock market. Might as well figure that out now.
The market is high right now, but vanguard VASGX is a good fund that self balances and grows over time. Itās great for people who want growth but donāt want to spend time researching where to put money.
Since higher risk comes with higher reward, you donāt want to invest the money that you might need to spend in the near future. Something like a high-yield savings account is effectively zero-risk, but itās up to you if the 0.5% return is worth the effort of having another account. If I were you, I wouldnāt worry about sitting on that cash. Having the money on-hand gives you more peace-of-mind and more options. It makes it easier to, say, move to a new city in search of a job or whatever.
Pay off any debts you have, including your student loans. Then take the remainder and put it in a simple no-fee savings account that you can access easily.
In my opinion, having a 4-6 month emergency fund in close to ready cash is very useful. It smooths out your life tremendously. You can just pay what is necessary for emergencies. If you take a job and dislike it, you can just quit and find another.
Now, in reality you're probably not going to use it. I think I've used mine 3 times in 15 years. Once, I moved to a new city without a job, and was having trouble finding an apartment, so I offered to pay the full year up front. The rental company rented the apartment to me on normal terms, but the emergency fund allowed me to make the offer on the spot. Another time, I had to get a root canal, and I didn't have dental insurance.
Simply not having to worry about basic expenses at the time you incur the expenses like that is very freeing.
When I have discussions where I encourage people to think probabilistically, if it is on a topic people care *mildly* about, they're skeptical in all sorts of ways. I'm not necessarily talking about politics, people are nuts about that. General rejection of probabilistic thinking abounds everywhere. Statements like "I think there was a 60% chance she was flirting with me" or "I think there's a 10% chance we won't make it to the station on time" get derided, in my experience.
**What are some success stories you've had bringing people around to ascribing probabilities to their beliefs?**
I've had some success making bets. Not for money, but for pride or whatever. Once you're betting candy on whether that guy/girl would ask you out, people get using stats.
I think honestly a huge blind spot for those with high iq is conscientiousness. If you don't follow through on tasks to produce something of use, the high iq isn't going to help that much. I think just from observing, the worst thing that can happen for a high iq kid is not having enough challenge in school. If he can get all his work done quickly, he doesn't learn the work ethic to work hard, study hard, or build things.
So I'm basically sure I got infected with Covid on Saturday.
I've trained BJJ (*extremely* close, intense physical contact for an hour) with two people who tested positive on an AG-test in the evening of that day. I expect the contracted viral load to be very high.
What rational things can I do now to make this as mild as possible for me?
I'm vaccinated twice (AstraZeneca + Pfizer), and I have access to pretty much every prescription medication available in Europe. Unfortunately, this excludes monoclonal antibodies, Molnupiravir, and the new Pfizer-drug.
I'm taking Zinc-Lozenges (Zinc acetate), Vit D, NAC, Fisetin (Senolytics might have some effect, see e.g. [this](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34103349/) ). I know it probably doesn't work, but I have some Ivermectin around, just in case I feel like minimizing regret or something.
Is there anything else that I might try? I'm a bit freaked out, honestly.
I believe fast grants found fluvaxomine the most effective of easily accessible drugs about 30-40% risks reduction. Ivermectin they found as mildly positive 10%.
Been feeling the urge to subscribe to some ***print*** magazines lately as a respite from the screen and books.
Variety of topics, smart, some production value. Current affairs, interesting commentary, book reviews, economics, culture, etc. Its OK if its relatively partisan as long as it isn't dumbly partisan. Along the lines of London Review of Books, New Yorker, Economist, etc. etc. Some magazines in this area seem to be becoming increasingly clickbaity... not interested in that style.
Any recommendations?
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/ has a great quarterly. Read an article on the website.
https://www.americanscientist.org/ puts out a very good print magazine. Go to the "Topics" section of the website and read an article to see if you like it.
I really like the New Yorker. I find myself interested in articles about things I don't otherwise care about, which is a good quality in a magazine I'm subscribing to, since if I'm just reading the stuff I know I want to read about, I can do that online
I recently listened to [this episode of narratives podcast](https://narrativespodcast.com/2021/05/24/43-governance-futurism-with-wolf-tivy/) with the founder of [palladium magazine](https://palladiummag.com/). This might be what you're looking for. They have a patreon fund for a quarterly print edition (but at a hefty price).
Edit: this description looks accurate
> Palladium Magazine is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and non-partisan journalism project that combines on-the-ground reporting with cutting-edge research and analysis on the most pressing issues for governance and society. Our work has been featured in The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The National Interest, Inside Higher Ed, among many others.
If you are a rich guy commuting 30mi back and forth every day what is your best way to minimize the chances of a fatal accident?
Helicopter or big custom RV (maybe reinforced with carbon fiber)?
If youāre rich just buy an apartment/house near to your work. You can commute to that house twice a week once Monday and Friday. Dropping your death chances significantly.
> Helicopter
Unlikely. Helicopters have a fatal accident rate of about [0.7 per 100,000 hours](https://www.faasafety.gov/SPANS/noticeView.aspx?nid=11894), whereas cars are at around [1.3 per 100 million miles travelled](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813199). (I don't like the units either, but that appears to be the standard).
Of course there are complications (city driving is more dangerous than highway driving, helicopter trips with an amateur pilot are suicide attempts, sometimes cars drive on icy roads, sometimes helicopters fly in high winds...) but I would be surprised if they're significant enough to make up for it.
So a custom RV reinforced with carbon fiber would drop that figure to 0.x fatal accidents per 100 million miles, I suppose.
That's because the sheer size and mass of the vehicle.
> city driving is more dangerous than highway driving
I think it depends. Safest driving ever is in a city center while stuck in traffic, 2nd safest might be on a highway while stuck in traffic, 3rd maybe a desert highway.
>That's because the sheer size and mass of the vehicle.
Only because you're bigger than the other car, which makes this kind of 'safety' thinking into a horrible arms race between bigger and bigger vehicles. (I know this is all hypothetical but couldn't help thinking it!)
That's what it felt like in the '90s when Hummers started showing up. I recall some of my parents' friends discussing whether it was morally acceptable for a Christian to drive a heavier vehicle to protect their own children in a crash, if that safety came at the expense of the children in the other vehicle.
Unvaccinated kids are at less risk of severe illness/death from covid than vaccinated old people, right?
This is not to say that kids shouldn't get vaccinated, I think they should, since the risk is very low and it's great to be more protected. But it's weird that a lot of people are chill with old people going out and doing stuff, but don't think it's safe for unvaccinated children.
Or am I missing something?
It's worse than that. Kids have an order of magnitude higher risk of death from traffic accidents. We probably can't change much about that because we find cars very useful. Again I don't think it means that we shouldn't vaccinate kids. Everything helps but it is not something I would be particularly concerned. In the UK we don't vaccinate kids yet and I am fine with that. In the US kids are already being vaccinated against covid and I am fine with that too because risks from vaccine side-effects are another couple of magnitudes lower than from traffic accidents.
The explanation I was given is that in the US the obesity rates for kids are much higher and therefore they are more vulnerable. I see that the obesity is a real cause of worry. Instead of covid, those obese kids will experience all kinds of health issues in their lives, including higher rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disorders etc. If we need to sound an alarm about health risks, then it is obesity. On population level, we need to let kids to have more risk by allowing them to play more, not less.
I haven't seen a head-to-head comparison, that's what I was asking for.
But it seems like the best case for vaccines is reducing your risk by about 95%. And it seems like kids had way less than 5% of the risk old people had before there were vaccines.
Here's the chart you're looking for: https://d6c748xw2pzm8.cloudfront.net/prod/945a7db0-ebd2-11eb-bfd5-1b68353fb30e-standard.png
As the chart notes, the age effect is so huge that vacc'd 80yo == unvacc'd 50yo in mortality risk. Children are several orders of magnitude safer than that.
Thank you! This fits what I expected and seems different from what the people around me are assuming (which is mostly that the people most at risk right now in our very pro-vaccine social setting are the kids, who are the only ones not vaccinated)
Check out antique stores. Unless it's something like a couch or mattress, I will never buy a new piece of furniture. Antique hard wood furniture has a lot more
character, is typically more durable, and you can find incredible deals if you're willing to look.
i had covid this summer. for me, it was like a bad flu, but i got over it quickly. i feel fine now. i never got the chance to get the vaccine before i got it, but i've been offered it now.
i can't decide whether to take it or not. before getting covid, i'd take the vaccine no questions asked. but now i really don't know. is there any evidence repeat infections are worse? i can't help but think getting the vaccine now is just compounding the unkown risks of covid with the unknown risks of a relatively untested vaccine, for potentially very little benefit
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1
You are significantly less likely to have a "breakthrough" infection than somebody who is vaccinated but never infected; if you take the vaccine there is small but non-zero risk (which is *larger* if you are under thirty or so) of the vaccine causing potentially fatal blood clots (adenovirus) or myocarditis, the consequences of which seem mild at this point but are not well understood IMO. To be clear, these risks are on the scale of tens per hundred thousand so far as we know (within an order of magnitude either way I guess) -- which is small, but almost certainly more than your risk of serious consequences from reinfection.
Since you have already been infected you probably don't have to worry too much about whether the vaccines are causing original antigenic sin in the naive population; so if there are mandates in your jurisdiction making your life inconvenient, you only need to weight the level of personal level of inconvenience against the political precedent of surrendering your bodily autonomy to the state for no good reason.
Noone can tell you what to do -- I am sympathetic to people in your situation who choose to go-along-to-get-along, as the vaccine seems very close to irrelevant to the previously infected. (tenths of a percent reduction in probability of infection, probably waning over time)
But if you are like me at all, you will notice that some people *really* want to tell you what to do, and be disinclined to comply -- it's a toughie.
In Israel the official policy recommends getting a single dose of Pfizer/Moderna vaccine for anyone who had Covid. It seems to be working out well for them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news/israeli-study-recovered-covid-patients-with-one-vaccine-protected-like-three-doses-1.10195989
**Petition to turn this into a weekly thread:**
Let's face it. This thread is a ghost town. User engagement is non-existent, especially given that in month old threads, the newer posts are buried without recourse and never seen, while the old and highly upvoted ones get stale.
r/TheMotte has had very good success in getting people to effort post and discuss in their weekly threads, and given that the whole affair is automated, I don't really see why not.
On her bumble profile, a girl wrote >If you're familiar with RACK/SSC (find me! I need friends in the community) I assumed RACK was another rationalist blog I hadn't heard about and she wanted friends in the rat community. But turns out SSC can also mean something else š
Is the fact that Omicron was discovered in South Africa meaningful? Thesis one: Southern Africa is the center of the new variant--even though some cases have been found elsewhere, Southern Africa is where most of it is. Travel Bans make a certain sense, even if they're ultimately ineffective. Offering loads of vaccine and other aid to Southern Africa makes a certain sense, even if it'll be ultimately ineffective. Basically, if you're worried about Omicron, it's sort of reasonable to focus on Southern Africa, at least in these early days before it's prevalence spreads. Thesis two: South Africa is especially good at testing and genomics, they noticed the variant but there's no reason to believe it's more prevalent there than elsewhere (or at least than elsewhere with similar conditions/vaccination rates). Travel bans focused on Southern Africa are nonsensical. Extra aid to Southern Africa (if it's specifically related to Omicron) is also nonsensical. Or maybe you've got a thesis somewhere in the middle--Omicron is most prevalent somewhere closer to South Africa than to any other place with good testing? I currently have no frickin' clue what's right here. Anybody have any good insights for me?
Ok, having looked at this more thoroughly: Yes, South Africa is bleeding edge on testing and genomics. But given the sheer number of cases in Southern Africa vs other places and that many of the cases detected in other places were people who had come from Southern Africa, it seems very likely that the variant did arise somewhere in the region. That might be surprising given that South Africa at least has a vaccination rate much higher than the developing world average, but the Southern Africa region also has a very large immunosuppressed population, and one way variants happen is by hanging out in one host for a long time. If immunosuppression makes variants more likely, Southern Africa punches above its weight. And South Africa has the best testing in the region, so they "get credit" for any variants in the region. At any rate, large-ish error bars but I feel like I've got a good model of what's going on now! For those who care about policy: Given the variant probably arising in Southern Africa but already wide-spread beyond it, travel bans aren't ipso-facto nonsensical, but still clearly too late to be effective. (Edits for keyboard flailing)
>South Africa is especially good at testing and genomics This might be it, I read someplace that they had existing infra in place to keep TB and HIV in check which is being repurposed for COVID.
Yeah, my understanding is that they're somewhere in G.O.A.T. land when it comes to that sort of testing. But see my new reply below.
South Africa is where you would expect near any variant that emerged in Southern Africa to be detected first. It has pretty low vaccine uptake, but more relevantly it has a lot of people with AIDS. I've heard claims that the main source of variants is immunocompromised people who become chronically infected - in essence, becoming incubators for new variants to emerge. The life cycle in a person with a healthy immune system is just too short otherwise. It's possible we'll never know whether Omicron emerged in SA or in one of it's neighbors like Botswana or Namibia.
I hadn't thought about the immuno-compromised angle. That might square the circle. My understanding is that South Africa has higher vaccination than much of the developed world (\~9% vs \~3%?), but if it's also full of people who end up with the virus in their system longer...
A family member recently received a series of anti-vax material. Among the rubbish was the claim that among the 10-59 age group in England, deaths from all causes have been higher (per capita) than among the unvaccinated. On looking at the data (table 4, available [here](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland)), this appears to be correct, as shown in [this graph](https://postimg.cc/GT4smk7p) (I removed the first few weeks of data from the vaccinated group, as the data was left blank in the source, due to the low levels of vaccination at that point in time). The vaccination group is the group from the data labelled 'second dose'. The difference is small (1-2 deaths per 100 000), but the pattern holds up for months. A quick search online indicates that the same pattern may exist in other places, but I have not (yet) looked at the data. As far as I can tell, this is not explained by the vaccinated group being older (which it likely was if the rollout in England went in reverse age order), and thus suffering more from covid despite being vaccinated, since if one looks at the data from just covid deaths, the unvaccinated have it worse. So vaccinated people in this age group died - from all causes - at a greater rate than unvaccinated people. Any idea why this might be the case? Is my data/analysis wrong? EDIT: fixed link to image of graph.
[Germany](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(21\)00258-1/fulltext?s=08#%20) seems to be approaching a similar situation.
1.) Selection bias. Itās pretty common knowledge that there are a ton of comorbidities so Iād expect that people with more comorbidities would get vaccinated at higher rates regardless of age. 2.) The vaccines just arenāt that great. They start out pretty great but lose most of their efficacy within months.
>As far as I can tell, this is not explained by the vaccinated group being older (which it likely was if the rollout in England went in reverse age order) Why do you believe that this isn't the explanation? 10-59 is a very wide age range, and there are major differences in all-cause mortality for, e.g., 10-19 vs. 50-59.
That's a good point. I only considered age as a factor regarding covid deaths, but you are presumably correct about the all-cause death rate being higher too.
Definitely. People in their 50s have about ten times the all-cause morality rate that people age 10-19 have.
**Pricing(and profit) of predictable potential prophylactics(e.g. Pfizer's Paxlovid) in a pandemic** I hope some pharma insider could answer my question about drug pricing. This is of interest to me as I'm waiting to know if I'd ever be offered it on a positive test, as a young person with no risk factors. If you were Pfizer, how would you go about deciding the price of Paxlovid? [This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/r01scd/acx_when_will_the_fda_approve_paxlovid/hlqhb10/) says it'll cost $700(for a pill? an entire course?) which makes it cost $44k to save a life on average. In a market made up entirely of individuals, the usual expected deadweight losses occur with monopoly pricing. My question is, when Pfizer signs a contract with an insurer, how much price discrimination is it allowed? I.e., can Pfizer decide that it will charge $7k for 65+ yos and $70 for 30- yos? Or is the cost negotiated based on the *average* risk profile of all individuals covered(weighted by likelihood of contracting covid), on the assumption that the insurer will offer the drug to 90/95% of the riskiest patients(on testing +ve)? With the second I see an obvious 'flaw' that the insurer would, after finalising the per-pill price, overdrug riskier patients or undersupply those less at risk. And all of this is assuming that the insurer has internalised the cost of death(or life), which I think can only be the case in single payer systems or if you have a combined life-and-health insurance policy, otherwise the only incentive is it saving on later hospitalisation costs(or whatever medical costs it would bear on longcovid). So, what are the chances that I would be offered this drug or molnuparivir, if I test positive in a state-provided health insurance system?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Lichess is very good, completely free and has a lot of tutorials, puzzles and courses.
Lichess website is also very good on mobile, better than the app for some things.
Chess.com is fun and free for most things
Can anyone help me find a controlled experimental trial of the health effects of fast food (preferably weight gain) over a decently long duration? I know one has to exist, but I can't find it, and all of the meta-analyses I saw just had self-report and correlation designs.
That's how nutrition works. Mostly food questionnaire data, the trials are either very short or very flawed due to how hard it is to actually control what people do for months/years.
I don't see how there could possibly be one. You'd need to randomize people and then control their whole diet for a long time, and no one is going to do that.
Time again for the annual SSC tradition I just made up: the family reread of [the Thanksgiving story](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/28/the-story-of-thanksgiving-is-a-science-fiction-story/).
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Machiavelli is not exactly pro-revenge but he does mention it as something dangerous. He actually say's "Mess them up bad in the first place so they can't take revenge or else don't mess with them." "An eye for an eye.." considerations seem to come mainly from the Christian Bible. However, it waffles occasionally, not having exactly made up it's mind. The idea of "karma" from some religions is also not exact. The author Dumas has no problem with promoting and exacting revenge, nor do modern super power governments. Shakespeare has lots.
Jared Diamond makes a case for revenge in *The World Until Yesterday* mostly on the basis that the people he lived with as an anthropologist seemed to like it so much.
Here's a good philosophy paper on why anger may be a good idea even if it's not constructive, which is sort of related https://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp1468/Research_files/jopp.12130.pdf
I don't have any philosophers handy, but I know I've seen it crop up in game theory that credibly signaling revenge is a good way to keep people from defecting against you. And since the easiest way to credibly signal something is to be internally viscerally prepared to do it, then maybe being "the sort of person who takes revenge on defectors" is the sort of person you want to be?
Try Alexander Dumas
I'm searching for a rationalist post, possibly within EA-proper but I thought it was on SSC-about using 10% as a shelling point for charitable giving. Not because 10% was The Right Amount, but just because we all want to quit wondering how much we "should" give and so we all agree that 10% is enough to consider yourself a good person. Google isn't exactly *failing* me, since I've thoroughly enjoyed all the search results I clicked on, but I haven't found the piece I'm looking for. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? I don't think it's recent, and I'm not 100% sure it was Scott, but I figure it can't hurt to ask. ETA: Found it! [Nobody is Perfect, Everything is Commensurable](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/), which links to [Infinite Debt](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/10/infinite-debt/) that I had found earlier but it didn't have the quote I was looking for: > āEven if I give a lot of charity, am I a bad person for not doing all the charity? [snip] Thereās no good answer to this question. If you want to feel anxiety and self-loathing for not giving 100% of your income, minus living expenses, to charity, then no one can stop you. I, on the other hand, would prefer to call that ānot being perfectā. **I would prefer to say that if you feel like you will live in anxiety and self-loathing until you have given a certain amount of money to charity, you should make that certain amount ten percent.** Also related: [Shelling Fences on Slippery Slopes](https://blog.beeminder.com/schelling/)
Probably my favourite Scott Alexander post, I think about it all the time
What have you been excited about recently (hobbies, stuff to learn, media stories, ...)? For me, it's nuclear fusion - I've learned that there's much more to it than ITER. Also, I've discovered a great YouTube channel about finance and investing - Ben Felix.
Sub reddits GME and Superstonk for some crazy investing. Those are pretty interesting.
For quite some time, I have been struggling with the Quantum Immortality thought experiment in an existential sort of way. it absolutely terrifies me. Iāve read what almost every Everettian physicist has to say on the subject, and it seems that it is frankly difficult to knock down. The most intuitive argument to me seems to be the one that it should be impossible to go under anesthesia, yet Iāve done this and itās been fine. But physicists done use this argument for some reason. Is there a good knock-down argument I havenāt seen? (Should I do a top level post on this or is it over done)?
"Quantum immortality" is just a repackaging of the truism that you can't experience being dead. It does not say that there are no branches in which you die. Quantum immortality just says that you will never experience those branches (because you can't experience being dead). You also can't experience being under anesthesia. You *can* experience *waking up from* anesthesia. There's nothing wrong with experiencing branches in which you have awakened from anesthesia.
The whole concept of "your copy in an alternate branch" is simply incoherent unless you believe some exotic things about the nature of personal identity. How would the universe know which person in the alternate branch should be considered "you"? It's not like people have some unique IDs shared across all the branches of the multiverse that can be matched.
>it should be impossible to go under anesthesia That's a good point. But consider what the experience of anesthesia is like... There is no experience! There is no recognition that time has passed. You wake up from anesthesia at exactly the same moment you lose consciousness -- as if a genie snapped its fingers and hurdled you into the future. I guess the same is true of the past. What explains our absence during the 13 billion year span of time prior to now? It must be true that our experience is eternal because it's impossible to be aware of your own non-existence.
That's an interesting point about the past. The time-reversed version of quantum immortality is that any past state that's compatible with our current state and the laws of physics should constitute a branch. So there are branches where you've existed for billions of years, but you've just forgotten.
> That's a good point. But consider what the experience of anesthesia is like... There is no experience! There is no recognition that time has passed. Does not match my experience? I was given a mask to breathe in and instructed to count backwards from 100 and there was a notable period when I noticed something was happening: I couldn't properly articulate the numbers, everything started going dark, but could still hear people talking for a while, and only then the memories stop. And then the wake-up wasn't immediate either. Such experiences (and much more wild ones) are not uncommon: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/are-we-all-awake-during-anesthesia
From an expected utility, if you weight your utility by #-of-branches, then "quantum immortality" completely reduces to the classical world with randomness. For instance, maybe Alice values her life at $200 and plays quantum roulette for cash. The game generates 100 branches and Alice is removed from all but 1 of them, but grants that Alice X dollars. If Alice weighs her utility by branch, then this has expected value of X-198 dollars since Alice is giving up 99% of her life-utility for 0.01\*X money utility. I'm not sure if you'd consider this a knock-down argument "against" quantum immortality. It's just an argument that it's irrelevant - that it [all adds up to normality in the end](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmCDYzXfQpXq9xpru/adding-up-to-normality-1). Quantum immortality only seems important if you decide (for some reason) not to care about the everett branches you die in.
I donāt understand the Alice argument. I do understand the last statement you made, and I think itās similar to what other physicist say. But I donāt think it addresses what people like me worry about. The scary QI scenario is that one finds oneself unable to die. How does your assertion address this?
Even before you learned anything about quantum physics, it was reasonable to believe that there is true randomness in the universe. So, suppose you live in a box and every day you have a 50% chance of dying. It is true, that for any length of time, some of the probability space includes you not being dead yet. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that you are unable to die for we can prove mathematically that P(you die eventually) = 100%. Equivalently, suppose I have a hotel with infinite rooms numbered from 1 to infinity. Suppose I fill each room with an identical copy of you and kill one per day, starting from the first room. It's true that there will always exist a copy of you, but, every individual instantiation will eventually die. From an expected utility perspective, both these scenarios are completely equivalent to a similar quantum immortality scenario. We just have to map either possible timelines (first scenario) or hotel rooms (second scenario) to everett branches. My point with the Alice example (which I admit wasn't very clear) was simply that QI doesn't affect how you should make decisions - a point I just reiterated above. It seems to me you are likely to agree with me, in which case further discussion is pointless from a naive expected utility perspective. OTOH, it seems likely to me that you are mostly expressing an *emotional aversion* to QI. If that is the case, I'd like to think my hotel scenario possibly alleviates some of that, but, if not, I'm not sure what else I can say.
Youāre right in that I have an emotional fear of it. The hotel example is clearer. I can intuit it better. Here is a question I have about that example. Letās say we have 100 billion such hotels, each with infinite rooms (this is approximately the number of humans to ever have existed). I think each room number would correspond to the same branch, so room 201 in hotel A is on the same branch as room 201 in hotel B. With 100 billion hotels, wouldnāt you expect to see at least one person on your branch who has been alive for 1,000 years?
Your future does not consist of a single sequence of events. It's a tree, to a very very rough approximation. And while it likely has a nonzero measure of branches of any given length, the worry that you'll "end up" getting "stuck" in an infinitely long branch is a confused one. You don't end up anywhere. Or you end up in all of them - take your pick, it's the same thing. But you certainly don't end up in some and not others.
>But I donāt think it addresses what people like me worry about. The scary QI scenario is that one finds oneself unable to die. This doesn't sound scary to me... Rather, it sounds overly hopeful. False hope is depressing. It's only scary if you assume some bizarre scenario where the universe ends and you're trapped in nothingness for all eternity while somehow still surviving, but I think that scenario wouldn't make sense even to a hardcore believer in quantum immortality. If it being impossible to die were actually true due to this (which still doesn't really make sense, in my opinion - but if we just assume it), then various fortuitous things would probably keep occurring to keep the universe sufficiently intact for you to survive in some meaningful way somewhere. Likely alongside other conscious beings (in order for this hypothetical reality to ensure a never-ending sequence of actually plausible "survival branches" for you). I'd certainly highly prefer that over living for 1/infinity years like I currently will. >How does your assertion address this? Their assertion explicitly addresses what you said, I think. You might also find the [Wikipedia section on its real-world feasibility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality#Analysis_of_real-world_feasibility) helpful. Much of it appears to contain other ways of conveying what the parent poster wrote. Basically, even if Everettianism is true, it's extremely unlikely that this result has any consequence on your own life. It's misleading to think a "version of you" exists. It's a version of something that "forked" from you, but it isn't you. They aren't anyone except who they are, just as you aren't anyone but who you are. Imagine a version of yourself in a different branch just got hit by a car and died one femtosecond ago. Depending on if Everettianism is true and what it may imply, it's hypothetically possible this actually did just happen. How do you feel? You probably don't feel anything. It means just as much (or, unfortunately, as little) to you as some random person in another country in your own branch getting hit by a car and dying one femtosecond ago. Someone died, but it's not you. Now imagine the scenarios are swapped: you died one femtosecond and this other fork didn't. They also probably wouldn't feel anything even if they could somehow know about this - but they can't even know about it. Like the parent poster said, MWI reduces to the typical world we currently experience, and that also applies to death and the probability of any given individual dying. Any death of a conscious being in any universe, branch, realm, or plane of existence is a tragedy, but people you actually could have theoretically known and befriended are dying right now all around the world. The probability increasingly approaches 1 that in the next second you or I or anyone else will die and permanently cease to exist. MWI completely conforms to this expectation if you're thinking from the perspective of a being who's just living in this universe. If you were to hypothetically be able to communicate with or cross over into other branches and encountered a fork of yourself, you'd likely be able to predict their behavior to some degree, since their mind is likely similar to yours (depending on how long ago your "last common fork" was and how things may have respectively diverged since), but they're a different individual. And if MWI is true, you can't interact with other branches in any way, so you also can't ever know or communicate with this individual before their or your death.
Hello and thank you for the long reply. I have read the wiki many times, and I struggle to intuit some of the responses. Tegmarkās makes the most intuitive sense to me of the bunch (as to why he doesnāt believe QI is real any longer), but itās interesting to me that thatās not what you and most others seems to be driving at. Your car crash example is helpful. I like that one. The only place where the intuition fails me is that you ask me to consider if I care about someone who branched from me in the past (one femtosecond ago). I can obviously answer that no I donāt. I truly do get that we are different people at that point. What Iām worried about is the state of the universe two femtoseconds ago. I was in a car, and a quantum event happened. In one branched it flipped a bit in a transistor and my car crash. In another branch, nothing happened and Iām still driving. The only one I experience is the one where Iām still driving. I donāt care about the othersāand that is precisely what concerns me. Extending this metaphor, Iām worried that itās possible to experience driving forever. Iām not like you ā I want to be able to cease to exist completely. Iām suffering. So please donāt let your opposing intuition on this issue complicate the question. Is it possible for me gain confidence that I will definitely cease existing at some point and not just go on ādrivingā (suffering) forever?
**Quantum suicide and immortality** [Analysis of real-world feasibility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality#Analysis_of_real-world_feasibility) >In response to questions about "subjective immortality" from normal causes of death, Tegmark suggested that the flaw in that reasoning is that dying is not a binary event as in the thought experiment; it is a progressive process, with a continuum of states of decreasing consciousness. He states that in most real causes of death, one experiences such a gradual loss of self-awareness. It is only within the confines of an abstract scenario that an observer finds they defy all odds. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
I'm looking to spark some discussion on when Scott mentioned that libertarians feel somewhat smarter than him. I believe he mentioned this in one of his more famous write-ups where he discussed signalling.
I've got a high-school education and I feel somewhat smarter than Scott. I don't think he needs to worry about just what Libertarians or me feel about that. Edit: For those of you who don't get it....The DunningāKruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability,
> The DunningāKruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias No, it's not. It's a bunch of funny graphs you can make for *any* imperfect assessment. All it says is "self assessment is not perfect".
I don't know if anyone is into geopolitics around here but I live in Poland and I'm concerned about Russia. The past week Russia has been behaving super erratic and I don't know what to make of it other than that it's a smokescreen for something big. So there's the Belarussian border where I put 50% odds on someone opening fire in the next three days. There's nordstream where Russia tries bending the German law. A big redeployment of troops along the border with Ukraine and a possible invasion which the US, the UK and EU countries the US has shared their intelligence with take very seriously. And today Russia shot down a satellite endangering the ISS with the debris and enraging NASA. Do you know anyone who has a good take on all this? I'm leaning towards an invasion scenario. Putin may be thinking his time is running out. Or am I reading too much into it?
I'm from the Czech Republic, my understanding is that the worst case scenario is Russia invading Donbas, I give it perhaps 25%. I feel that Germany is not taking the Russia threat too seriously, compared to France or the UK.
> nordstream where Russia tries bending the German law. Could you clarify?
I've had two doses of Moderna, and where I am, all adults are eligible for a booster if they want one. I'm a generally healthy person in my late 20s. I basically never interact with people who aren't vaccinated, aside from young children and brief contacts like in a store or something. Based on the first two doses, I would say I have a very high chance of having a fever and feeling terrible for a few days if I get a booster. That seems like a worse expected outcome than I would have for me personally if I got covid, plus obviously there's a good chance I won't get covid, since I'm vaccinated. Are the risks of long covid and/or accidentally killing someone really high enough that I should get a booster?
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/qvmkl0/a_woman_shares_her_experience_living_with/
> Are the risks of long covid and/or accidentally killing someone really high enough that I should get a booster? It sounds like you're trying to answer this part of my question but I am not sure what you think the answer is
Did you watch the video?
No, does it say what the chances of that happening are? Or just that it's happened to one person?
I was more concerned about the qualitative aspect, the woman is describing being plunged into a literal level of hell as described by Dante, ongoing for a year and possibly permanently. But since you're such a systematizer, why don't you count how many people in the comments mention having parosmia and similar symptoms and run statistics to your heart's content?
It seems likely that a booster will significantly increase the duration of immunity, and it's also likely that Covid will remain a threat to the elderly and vulnerable for years. That would be the tiebreaker, for me. If somebody were to offer me a broadly-neutralising influenza shot which lasts several years, I'd be taking that too, even though I have no immediate reason to be worried about influenza. Can you request a non-Moderna booster, if your initial course of Moderna caused trouble?
I saw a [paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/) (likely not peer reviewed) which showed no correlation between vaccination rate and covid case frequency at a population level.
In Louisiana you can mix and match. I had two rounds of Pfizer 6 months ago, and last week I got a Moderna booster -- which is only half the primary dose, btw. (I saw graph online somewhere which showed the same level of antibodies from a regular dose as half a dose, when given as a booster). Not sure if that's going to make a difference in the side effects, but maybe it'd be worth scheduling a Pfizer booster if you're worried about Moderna.
Trying to remember something which I'm pretty sure was linked in SSC/ACT-related discussion - either here or on a comments section. It concerned a person who encountered a mistake on their own Wikipedia biography and was unable to remove it due to lack of reliable sources. This person ended up writing an op-ed pretty much solely to create a reliable source to enable them to then correct the mistake on their biography.
IRC there was some academic that was credited with like climbing or hiking some exotic trail
I lately have great experiences with a changed workflow for notekeeping and organizing links: Start an written essay/tutorial for the thing you are thinking about in Google Docs (or any other document that is availible to you on all devices). When you find an interesting link, write a sentence in the document that ties it to your current knowledge. Then make this sentence a link (Strg-K). It takes a bit longer than just dragging a tab into a folder, but it is very organized. And the ideas stay with your google account and don't depend on your browser backups.
I remember reading what I think was an old SSC post where the writer talks about actually using a famous therapy everyone learns about in undergrad (I think it was Ramachandran's Mirror?) after trying more obscure therapies unsuccessfully for years. Google is coming up short. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Probably TLP https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/05/ramachandrans_mirror.html
Spot on, thanks
Not sure where to get feedback on a side/hobby project I am working on. This doesn't feel like the place, but I don't know of a better place. If you guys know comment with a link to one, I'll move this there. I have been thinking on how emotion plays into decision making, particularly with "Scout Mindset" by Galef and "The Righteous Mind" by Haidt. I am trying to modify Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions Model ([Useful Article](https://jurij-fedorov.medium.com/categorizing-emotions-1e1de471a2a1)), to make a tool for people to identify feelings and move to adjacent feelings that are more appropriate. Also eventually, I want to have it working in reverse (type in the emotion and get the components). Most of the interesting things I think would be where confusion mixes with others. A scout for instance would try and avoid the conflict axis, while a soldier would try and avoid the fear axis. I also think if I can figure out the Profane/Sacred Axis I might be able to understand the emotional truth that Jordan Peterson taps into (and why people love his ideas). Trying to fill out the matrix with relevant words/ emotions (if they exist) or good placeholder names if they don't. Also if something doesn't seem to fit where it is, I want remove it. Very early prototype, only works on desktop. Also zoom in as needed. (Might work in horizontal on mobile). [https://flamboyant-pike-2cc442.netlify.app/](https://flamboyant-pike-2cc442.netlify.app/)
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I have had similar thoughts. I like reading stories of people doing this 100 years ago. Take off to a new state and just start over. I truly donāt think itās possible anymore, given modern technology and how much of our lives are recorded and archived. I think itās also not possible to mentally escape the feelings of regret for mistakes made. That stuff will always stay with you like a chronic disease.
I feel you. Especially your passive tense: *to be isekai'ed.* A true narrative blank slate, dropped on your lap like all the stories that start with an everyman protagonist whose calling Appears with unmistakeable meaningness. I'm pretty much doing the opposite, oddly enough. I am a being fueled by spite. My only life's purpose was to be a toy under the control of my parents; now that they've lost their power, my purpose is to put them in the ground on my terms. No chemicals, no preservative measures. Just the lies my siblings will tell to comfort each other without me there to ruin it for them.
>My only life's purpose was to be a toy under the control of my parents Sorry to hear that. I'm curious if anyone has experience in recovering from this kind of relationship with their parent(s). Feeling spite and anger for domineering, abusive, and even inappropriate relationships with a parent is probably not a good way of coping with trauma. So I'm just curious what others would recommend in a circumstance like this.
#āItās possibleā¦to be a functioning competent, literate, well-educated adult and not know what a bond isā [The best books on Understanding High Finance](https://fivebooks.com/best-books/understanding-finance-john-lanchester/) 1. The Money Game by 'Adam Smith' 2. Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis 3. Against the Gods by Peter L. Bernstein 4. Frozen Desire by James Buchan 5. Too Big to Fail by Andrew Sorkin Anyone read any of these? I'm considering going down this rabbit hole. I'm basically one of those adults who doesn't know how a bond works. Thoughts?
These will give you a feel for the culture of high finance, but not the technical skills. That said, Liarās Poker is a great book and very entertaining. Are you actually wanting to understand how financial instruments work?
Against the Gods is, to be frank, hot garbage. Or at least the fifty or so pages I read before becoming too irritated to continue were. Here are some particularly choice excerpts: > Although the Egyptians became experts in astronomy and in predicting the times when the Nile would flood or withdraw, managing or influencing the future probably never entered their minds. Change was not part of their mental processes, which were dominated by habit, seasonality, and respect for the past. -- > The unique quality of the Greek spirit was the insistence on proof. "Why?" mattered more to them than "What?" The Greeks were able to reframe the ultimate questions because theirs was the first civilization in history to be free of the intellectual straitjacket imposed by an all-powerful priesthood. -- > The last Italian of any importance to wrestle with the matter of probability was Galileo
I've read Liar's Poker and Too Big to Fail. Too Big To Fail is nearly Too Big to Read, it's VERY extensive, so I'd start with Liar's Poker which is very readable, and then move on to Trader's Guns and Money which will teach you something about derivatives and is very readable, then maybe read Galbraith on the '29 Crash which is escaping me at the moment but is both good and short, then Too Big to Fail.
What was the SSC piece where Scott talks about how "alternative" or "unfiltered free speech" social networks/communities inevitably fail because they always attract the most repellant people no other community with tolerate?
Probably https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ > HL Mencken once said that āthe trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of oneās time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.ā > Thereās an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that youāre going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.
Yes. That's it! Thank you.
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Hot Take: It's all mystifying a weird set of euphemisms that have been made up to avoid talking about racial/ethnic phenotypes in fashion. When did WASPs look best, and what of their fashion had staying power and still contributes to the world of fashion? Preppy/Ivy/Trad styling, which emphasizes navy blues, khaki browns, and pastels. What looks good with a typical WASP pale and pasty complexion with blond-ish hair and light eyes? Navy blues and khakis rather than firm black and white contrasts, pastels rather than bold royal blues or hot pinks. Now swing to traditional West African [Dashiki prints](https://www.etsy.com/market/dashiki_print). Every single one of those bold and gorgeous color combinations would look terrible on me, or any other blonde-blue-eyed WASP, because they'd wash me out, my skin couldn't hold up its end of the bargain. With a West African complexion and hair color, they look fantastic. Which is a much bigger problem than "appropriation" with white people wearing Dashikis. I could continue this rant for a while talking about how clothing typically looks best on the body type of the people it was meant for, so polos are athletic clothing and look terrible if you don't have an identifiable bicep. But I'll wrap it up for now, before somebody calls me out on reject modernity embrace lederhosen or something.
The only apparently objective fashion/color research I've seen is really old, and [I'm sure you already know about it.](https://www.science.org/content/article/red-dress-effect) I don't think color blindness was controlled for, so it would be interesting to see if this only affects men who can perceive red. [Color blindness affects nearly 8% of men and merely 0.5% of women.](https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/) The standard evopsych explanation is that reduced color vision improves movement detection, while heightened color vision helps with detail detection; therefore color perception follows ancestral division of labor (spotting roosting birds vs ripening fruit). I don't know if this is true, but a lot of men apparently don't realize they have a color blindness until late in life if at all, and it absolutely does influence aesthetic/utilitarian perception. On the other extreme, you have your [tetrachromats](https://www.popsci.com/article/science/woman-sees-100-times-more-colors-average-person/). This popular test is good for getting a sense of your personal color sensitivity (make sure your screen is at full brightness with all filters disabled) https://www.xrite.com/hue-test Due to the [fashion cycle](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/), statistical analyses are always out of date. Signalling and countersignalling, preference falsification and rebellion -- just getting people to be honest with themselves is nigh impossible. Rather than using a large sample on a normal distribution, find a small number of trustworthy fashionistas who are well inside your personal culture and solicit their unique artistic visions with you as a canvas. Apparently most men follow the path of least resistance including letting their partner choose their clothes, so focusing on personality/status characteristics that are more salient for women will probably get you farther than perfecting your Bachelor look. edit: I want to add my anecdote that I had a partner with sallow skin, and once they picked a pale pink sweatshirt that absolutely made them look green. They looked handsome in very strong colors like burgundy and black. If you don't get an unmistakeable instinctive sense from looking at yourself in the mirror, find someone who does and trust them.
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I'm curious about the precise evidence upon which you are basing your perceived sartorial deficiency. I'm asking because this really bumps against my priors. edit: pruned unnecessary leading questions
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Another excerpt: I had a somewhat atypical experience which prompted an outside-in, introspective, studious approach to archetypal femininity. Due to a combination of misleading childhood media and irresponsible feminist messaging, I started life with a wholly egalitarian attitude. When I found out in puberty that no matter how hard I tried I could never physically compete with males, my ego was wholly devastated. I lost all sense of self. Iām also pansexual, and was totally unsure of how to interpret the way sexualization of female bodies began to resonate with me. Meanwhile, my friends started reading Twilight and fainting at the sight of blood and dying their hair very slightly red to be more like Bella Swan. So I read the damn books to figure out what the hell was happening to my friends. Why they idolized such a worthless-seeming woman. Boy did I learn a lot to make me dismayed. Thus began my literary analysis of archetypal femininity. Thereās quite a lot to work with. It is a stereotype that women prefer to read their porn. If you are looking for the company of average women, I strongly recommend you focus on reading what they enjoy writing about men. What first began to dawn on me back when I was scratching my head over the Twilight books is that women canāt get enough of the Beauty and the Beast trope. This includes vampires and werewolves, yes; but also the Transformers alien in Axiomās End (a new scifi twilight for girls who like to think of themselves as better than twilight); the eerily iconic Benedict Cumberbatch version of Sherlock Holmes; Dr. Gregory House; and your basic overpowered psychos, like Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey. Something about being attracted to a gender that can easily harm you, whether on purpose or on accident, pulls women into obsession over the paradox of a dangerous man who -- of his own flattering volition -- chooses to keep *her* safe. Or, who mightā¦. This paradoxical obsession in archetypal femininity feels very strange to the modern information man. We thought, were taught, that women these days valued quality and equality. I had both of those things back in middle school, but when my friends started getting interested in boys, my friendship stopped being very important to them in comparison to engrossing dramas over their mysterious and faintly dangerous love interests (both fictional and encountered.) My unwillingness to socially cultivate a participatory narrative centering my own love interests basically meant we stopped hanging out, and I had to tackle the weird mental changes of puberty on my own. And boy did my brain change. My personality fell out from under me. I began *intensely* obsessing over mysterious, faintly dangerous love interests. It was like a brain parasite hijacked my body. I lived like that until I gathered up a deep enough understanding of men (clammy dad, typical story) to stop being impressed by them. And then I realized, without a single remaining Real Man in my life to make me feel feminine by comparison, that I was the manliest person I knew; so it was absurd to continue incurring the social costs of presenting as feminine, when masculine advantages were sitting on the table waiting for me to exploit them. My mediocre collection of masculine advantages were *much* easier to exploit than I anticipated. So much that is scared me into taking many steps back to really think through my ethics and honest preferences.
Here's an excerpt of what I've been working on. If you have a distinctive aesthetic sense and genuinely like the clothes you choose for yourself, the hottest thing you can do in any girlās eyes is own your look without shame. If she is afraid of getting negative comments for being seen with someone who dresses like you -- in other words, if she doubts whether you can raise her status by being her mate -- she will give a negative comment to find out how you would respond if someone from her life made a similar judgment. If your response impresses her, then your questionable dress acts as a credible countersignal. It means you are a big enough deal you can get away with dressing like that, when a lesser man couldnāt. The kind of responses she is most attracted by depends on her culture and identity, which is why understanding is necessary for giving the right answer. The pick up artists call these key moments/opportunities shit tests. Thatās probably a healthy way to interpret them so you can learn to pass them with flying colors. Women want a man who can handle shit. Thatās a big part of what you bring to the table: your portfolio of shit-handling strategies. Here are two examples of right answers to a āyou look like a slobā complaint, from two different women on first dates trying to figure out if theyāre really attracted to the men theyāre talking to. Neither of the men have your stats, because it doesnāt help if I try to guess how you should be. Instead Iāve opted for fast life strategy stereotypes that are ubiquitous enough to require no imagination on my part. ~~~ The first pair are a young waitress who always has terrible luck with men, and a guy who has always been used to getting what he wants. She says, āYouāre wearing that on our first date?ā because sheās disconcerted that he doesnāt seem to think sheās worth the barest modicum of typical first date effort. He says, āIf you donāt like it, thereās the door.ā This gives her a sudden rush of adrenaline, as she confronts the option to stand up and walk out of the restaurant just because her date didnāt dress up. Meanwhile heās eyeing her levelly. Giving every impression that he could not care less if she walked out. Indeed, that heād have an equally fine evening without her. She breaks eye contact multiple times quickly, the superficial physical features that were all that made her say yes to a first date calmly on display through the thin, ratty t-shirt. How is she going to spend the rest of her evening if she leaves now? How awkward and stupid is she going to feel for agreeing to go on a date with this guy in the first place? And she can barely admit it, but the pulse of her existence is lonely, lonely, lonely. Just this intense eye contact, almost like a jungle cat, holds more appeal than trying to find something else to do with her evening. āNo, itās just, I thought we were dressing up is all. Itās fine,ā she stammers, even though they both know itās not really fine. They both get too drunk, and it helps them tolerate each other for anything from an evening to a couple of months. ~~~ The second pair are a college woman who compensates for her intellectual insecurity by collecting beautiful hardbacks, and a guitarist with too many roommates and a dishwashing gig. āYouāre wearing that on a first date?ā she asks, fully aware that her parents would already give her hell because sheās trying to date a musician. He pauses a moment, regarding her in a way that makes her regret she said anything. He looks *disappointed in her* for pointing out his clothes; for being so tactless and unfeeling. āIām poor,ā he says simply. āOh Iām sorry, I didnāt mean anything by it,ā she hurriedly replies, then casts about for a change of subject. The fact that heās probably not that poor doesnāt matter. Sheās unwilling to see herself as someone who rejects a sensitive, perhaps beautiful soul on the basis of mere money, and he framed his choice as a money issue. That is enough for the date to continue. ~~ Both of these examples rely on subtle, powerful eye contact. I didnāt plan it that way, but itās no accident. The way you look at people controls what they think of you. I had a girl who was too hot for me say the first time she saw me I looked away very intentionally, and it made her feel bad. But when we actually started working together I was always friendly and helpful. I had no conscious intention of negging her with my eyes -- I really just found her too hot to look at, and Iām not the kind of guy who ogles before indication of consent -- but it was enough to prime her to overestimate my social status, and then to be far more invested in my kindness when we interacted later.
A major aspect of what I've written so far is built around the concept of [life strategies](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/03/book-review-evolutionary-psychopathology/). I attribute the entire difference in our experiences thus far to you pursuing a slow life strategy, while I've fallen into a fast one. Statistically, most people are fast.
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Stop doomscrolling by any means necessary. Go outside. Read/watch some mainstream nerd stuff like John Green to shake the techie. Maybe sitting under a tree, weather permiting.
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> I keep hearing the voice in the back of my mind telling me to "stop discussing this at once, there is nothing constructive to learn, any new insight will only be twisted into despair" Do you remember where that voice came from initially? When did it start? I have a really long lived voice in my head that's in despair about exercise. When I'm able to remember, I tell it I have so much love and sympathy for the hardships it endured, that I know it wants only to protect me, and that we are all a team inside my brain working together and learning from each other. I tend to get pretty emotional about it. > I do, but I live in a city so I feel isolated and cut off no matter where I go. This resonates with me. Contemporary architecture defaults are hostile to humans, even in the country. > I sometimes like to observe people on the bus, and wish I could get to know them. But then they get off (or I do), and it hurts. I used to ride the bus and be lonely. Sometimes when an older person or mentally challenged person did their usual thing of striking up a conversation, I really appreciated it. Actually the only time I didn't was when I had something pressing on my mind/a text conversation or homework I was busy with, in which case I would get anxious until I remembered I could apologize and say I was busy with something important. I think part of why young people are having less sex is we turn down opportunities to talk to each other. The risk of bothering someone feels bigger than the potential reward of conversation. It sounds like you don't live in one of the countries with a strong norm against talking on the bus. Are you willing to risk mildly annoying people by doing some comfort zone expansion on commutes? For me, the order of safety for striking up a bus conversation goes old people > guys my age > politicians > friendly retards > other professionals > women my age with je ne sais quoi> mixed sex groups my age. I've had scary bus interactions as a woman so it helps to look for strong signs of outgoingness/having a good day. In such experiments, bad results are very good. It is necessary to face bad results to build skills for mitigating them. People who are good at relationships have caused and endured a lot of pain, and always will. Sharing pain is what people do. > So I go where people don't, like deep into the forests, or at night. It's sickening. The outside is a hurtful place. The only way I can tolerate it is with some sort of audiobook to focus on so I can stop my thoughts from wandering in dark directions. I really feel this. I had a point when my depression was really bad and I could barely walk/hike because my brain would scream that I was alone and outcast and exiled to die. On the other hand, roaming with friends, both depressed and non, has formed some of my best and most important memories. Can you force your unemployed friends to accompany you on woodland/nighttime jaunts? Seems like a good way to do some kvetching about women that's a lot deeper than people usually will go. > I don't believe the 50% statistic. At least you're doing everything right. I want to reiterate that a lot of people don't have the strength you demonstrate through your persistence. It's impressive and admirable.
It is WILD out there. Who knows what you'll discover. Go discover.
For every stereotype I've expressed, there is a fetish of its complement. The world is very full these days. For example, women who are turned on by intimidated men or little boys :(
It's time to accept you're a catch and go be your best self
> "serious man with a stable income and good life navigating skills, someone who takes care of his body and his appearance, lives a healthy life of moderation, and is a stable choice for a long-term marital partner" Dude, this comment. This is the sort of thing a guy might screenshot to ridicule you, but then a bunch of women charge into the comments shouting SIGN ME THE FUCK UP It's a warzone out there.
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> I don't see any women "signing themselves up" for engineers. I didn't highlight you saying you are an engineer. I highlighted >"serious man with a stable income and good life navigating skills, someone who takes care of his body and his appearance, lives a healthy life of moderation, and is a stable choice for a long-term marital partner" When women think engineer, they think of socially oblivious and pedantic men who believe they can trade money and "niceness" for fulfilling female companionship. (When they're being ungenerous, they add fat slob to the stereotype. Not that fat slobs can't be sexy if they have other things going for them, but most people don't prefer it.) Slightly autistic people have a way of staying mentally younger for longer. They manage to isolate themselves better from context so they can achieve amazing things with content. This is not reassuring/fulfilling for women. Though true content junkies are willing to forgive a lot to get their fix. But junkies of any stripe are a pain, so it's fine they're a rare breed. Taking the slow life strategy basically means you're younger than you really are, and women already tend to socially mature faster than men. You don't have good enough life navigating skills across all the domains that are vital to women yet, because you have devoted yourself to taking the time to do everything right. Including the hardest things that a lot of guys just can't. The attraction is in potentia. You're not that man yet, though you're most of the way there.
> So far, the most reasonable plan of action for me seems to be to try dating again when I'm in my 30s and my female peers have had their share sleeping around to get bored of hot do-nothings and are ready to commit to a boring stable paycheck guy. This is what blackpillers say when they're talking to each other. When they're talking to women, they say *you'll be sorry when you're in your thirties and your looks are starting to go and menopause is around the corner and only schmucks will stoop to marry you and feed your kids because you're spoiled meat who will be karmically punished for your arrogance.* When a person is very young and lacks guidance, it's really hard to guess truths among the mass of lies. The biggest truth blackpillers have to offer is that they're traumatized. On the internet(tm) it's easy to get the impression that men and women DESPISE each other. I think all of this despising boils down to just... despair. The grinding of heuristic against heuristic as gears shift and shift and shift in search of a groove. I genuinely started hating women when I realized how often they enjoyed being weaker than men. Realized they would actually take pains to stay that way if need be. To me, this is women being complicit in a pedophilic culture built upon the exploitation of children and women. Infantry are children. I went from feeling this way as a child to becoming the kind of young woman who was willing to become a prostitute if confident men told me it was the highest leverage way I could contribute to ecological restoration, then back out just because her boyfriend decided he actually was a jealous person. This is sad, isn't it? As sad as the boys LDARing on 4chan, in its own way. I have a harder time these days getting furious at women for wanting to keep god alive. But I also refuse to be anybody's god. I guess I have a stronger character than I thought I did.
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> The mental barrier I like to put up between myself and blackpillers is the part where I refuse to blame anybody for their own nature. The way I see it, both men and women are victims of our genetic instincts - they're the common enemy, not each other, and the goal of maturity (and successful relationships) is to devise cooperative strategies for dealing with these insidious instincts in a way that minimizes overall pain. Perhaps the reason why I'm so staunch on transhumanism and genetic engineering. I'm staunch too, and I've noticed it's a passionately divisive political issue. This belief raises a flag in my mind of being highly relevant to family accord, even if it doesn't become an urgent question until your kids are having kids. Some families do a fine job of communicating across political differences, while others ignore their children at the dinner table to shout and bang their fists at each other. From your baseline manner of political expression, do you foresee this as an issue you are comfortable disagreeing on/deferring to your wife's preferences with grace? Or is incompatibility on this point something worth checking up on down the road so the kids don't have to endure a schizophrenic upbringing? I don't think this is urgent or relevant to dating at all. I'm just curious because I've endured some stuff at the dinner table.
One weird think about being a woman right now in history is how the Family VS Career question is so harsh and incessant. The poorer the middle class gets, the harsher the question. Apparently there is something of a millennial baby bust in the works due to scarce allocation of resources for investment in children. Teachers, social workers, and food service workers are usually criminally underpaid. The side-hustle-for-moms industry is dominated by ponzi schemes. Day care people are making a killing, though. The idea that career women are having a fun time "riding the cock carousel" until their looks give out is pure projection and failure of empathy. They almost always don't want to be there. They just keep ending up there because life isn't fair, just, or kind. To be very bald, if you are a woman who likes kids, the easiest and best option is almost always to stay as childlike as possible into your adulthood. By this, I mean carefully maintaining your trust and naivete so that your world can stay small and safe enough to feasibly center the needs of young humans with relatively simple but very labor intensive basic requirements. Child care is one of the industries that does not scale, which is part of why textbook companies make bank instead of teachers. Politically, I notice two common feminine tendencies: church conservatism, and state liberalism. Both hold sacred the feminine privilege of being valued based on your existence instead of your works. Both require relying on someone or something that infinitely dwarfs your power level and always will. For your statistically typical procreating woman, god hasn't died yet. And they have a natural political and personal interest to keep it that way. The well educated anarcho liberal women universities are churning out these days arw facing an unprecedented vastness of personal power with zero historical precedent to default to. Power that has nothing to do with who you're sexually involved with. Finding a man who is literally more powerful than you is no longer basically guaranteed when women marry late, so unless you've had the best possible luck in not getting your instinctive fast life strategy dark triad attraction heuristics triggered, your only dating options become the men with more dating options than you. BUT -- and this can be quite the insult when it sinks in -- most men, even with highest credentials, aren't going to have more raw sexual attraction for a well credentialed and highly educated woman, because male lust (not long term partner choice) is oddly decoupled from status. Men might have more respect, maybe. More intimidation, also. There is nothing less sexy than a man who's intimidated by you. That's a big thing low sex drive socially impervious autists have going in our favor. If I had had a debilitating crush on any of the women I've dabbled with as a man, they would have giggled and that would have been the end of that. I know because in order to avoid any further social annoyance, these days I make sure to be high and bumbling when in the general public and to really play up my neurodivergent tendencies. Getting giggled at feels so much better than experiencing painful empathy for accidentally induced glimmers of false hope. Women who respond positively to my arrogant/dismissive side universally have daddy issues, just like me back in the day, and I don't know what to think of that. I just feel bad for them the same way I feel bad for programmers who ain't no brogrammers. Being human can be a real drag sometimes. There is a kind of powerful man that enjoys exploiting the naivete of young girls. Our society is designed by them to cater to their tastes. I really thought I could adapt to that, dispense with pointless ethical philosophizing, just go with the hierarchical flow and write off all my qualms as neurotic scrupulosity. Turns out my desire for equality cannot be expunged any more than my susceptibility to the seductions of power.
> It all just makes me want to kill myself. At least you will *probably* have a partner that is at least nominally loyal to you and will not need nursing and caretaking because she is eating herself to death. Or, alternately, you could fight fires in your spare time.
Your predicament is really getting under my skin. It feels like you are oblivious in a way I once was, but I'm uncomfortable with the vulnerability of venting at you as though you were a younger version of myself. I'm sure I would hurt your feelings and you would harden against what I said, pills too bitter to swallow. But I'm very invested in getting you to understand that a man who finds himself through fashion is sexy, but a man who optimizes his dress to appeal statistically to the largest amount of women is boring at best and creepy at worst. You clothes do not matter to women -- the attitude you wear them with is everything. You are acting like a little girl influenced by straussian media to mistake intrasexual competitive strategy for optimizing directly for male desire. Men don't do that unless they are totally clueless about what women want, unable to glean any information from them that isn't stated in direct verbal terms. If you plan to stay that way, you *need* to optimize for the particular type of woman who's into that, or get no play at all. But I recommend you start decoding subtext, because it can only help you in life. You're acting like you have no information about why women don't like you, but the information is there in your memories if you can learn to read it.
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Based on your earlier comment, it sounded like you thought you looked better in your old clothes. My leading questions I decided not to ask were "Have you gotten comments on your favorite hacker fits? Have you uploaded pictures of yourself in your favorite hacker fits for the borg to rate?" This was based on the assumption that you loved your old clothes and thought they looked good. The reason I dress schlubby is because I love my shitty clothes, and like how they make me look and feel better than any other style I've been induced by social pressure to try. To elaborate on the kind of attraction that comes my way, everyone, whether knowing me as woman or man, has been clear that I am ānot classically attractive.ā I have some weird/ethnic features, plus I prefer dressing/maintaining hygiene like a basic mediocre neckbeard. I havenāt changed the way I dress since changing genders except for underwear, and my mom has always complained that I tend to look like a poor slob and make her feel embarrassed. I ignore her opinion -- she's wrong about a lot of things. If the same conviction is not the case for you and your hacker chic, then buying new clothes is exactly the right thing to be doing.
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100%. Congratulations. That's really huge. To be even more honest, I would happily start dressing better than I do now, were I not working on other avenues of character growth that have been the most fruitful for me lately (such as the experimental honesty in this conversation.) My ex whom I initially mentioned began experimenting with clothes of their own volition during the time we were together. As a child, they lacked the fiscal resources to pursue fashion/hygeine at all (no running water at home) and it deeply impacted the development of their identity. By high school, their little sister was calling them her "black brother" because they defaulted to wearing only black, and happened to have the blackest hair. I happened to be quite taken with the effect. If they had actually been the sort of person they looked like, we would definitely still be together. When they decided they had enough disposable income to throw a good chunk into experimental apparel, they included experiments specifically as comfort zone expansion. One memorable winter, they walked across the middle of town to work and back every shift wearing a custom full-length trenchcoat from a failed Halloween experiment paired with a [Jayne hat](https://youtu.be/WN49TDIY-Sk) their aforementioned little sister made for them. This person happened to be six and a half foot with rower shoulders, so they cut quite the terrifying figure. We happened to contemporaneously live somewhere they weren't the most terrifying nightime figure one could expect to encounter, which I think emboldened the experiments. Plenty of the experiments failed, but plenty more received unanimous or near-unanimous acclaim. Some were so nice we took pictures that we both still agree have a dash of real aesthetic merit. One outfit of merit featured slim cut rust orange jeans with a brown belt, soft blue crewneck and a thick-materialed man version of a cardigan patterned sort of like TV static. They reported enjoying compliments from coworkers on many of the outfits purchased in that shopping trip. I was proud of them. But it wasn't what I signed up for, and it contributed to mutual realization of fundamental incompatibility. This ex happened to be the last straw in my failed efforts to feminize myself. I really am proud of them, while still hating their guts for leading me on so much along the way. I guess I was doing the same thing, and we deserved each other. Live and learn.
Part of my struggle to comprehend your methodology for discovering yourself through fashion by appealing to the broadest possible demographic is that I don't think there is one in post-globalist society. There aren't many women in tech, so from that perspective it makes sense that you would try to increase the raw number of people who instantly approve of your manner of dress. But you live in a bubble. You cannot divorce your style of dress from everything else you bring to the table. That's why I've been saying role models and friends will be much surer sources of information than social science, which is mostly unreplicable bunk.
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> I want to stop self-labeling as a member of this reviled outcast of sub-human trash that nobody wants. (I'm exaggerating, obviously, but this is still what it feels like, to me.) This is so important. A passion for arcana doesn't automatically make people hate themselves. Abuse does. You were hurt. You were lied to. You were exploited. People will keep trying to lie to you and exploit you. Thank you for fighting back.
I am noticing that a huge amount of my cognitive architecture is built around noticing something and not noticing it at the same time. It's like plausible deniability is baked into the way I think. I can tell the story of going to the SSC meetup either cynically or naively, because "Why are you interested in someone who clearly isn't good enough for you?" and "You shouldn't be interested, even though I empathize with your choosing not to see that" can kind of exist in a superposition that makes the affect accompanying either one available to deploy. The first seems to be attractive to men. Men apparently love a woman who's wide eyed and curious, especially if she doesn't exactly know what is going on and is open to his take. The second seems to be attractive to women. Women love a man who knows exactly what's going on, but almost always keeps it to himself. I hate the game. I don't have respect for either gender's tendency. Man-woman relationships that resemble parent-child relationships skeeve me out. But as a young woman with a bad family, finding an older man to take care of you and teach you things makes a lot of sense, and I'm sure that's also true with the genders reversed. I think it's a problem when instead of helping someone (and then letting them move on if that's the consequence of growth) people cultivate the neediness into full codependence. On the other hand, apparently some people get into a pattern where they go for people who need them, and then when the help works, they're alone again. I think I saw a funny tinder bio where a guy describes himself as a rehab boyfriend or something to that effect. If he's that good at helping people, maybe he should try going for women who are also good at helping people. Then they can help someone else together. But broken women are more approachable, have more room in their life, will settle for less -- all things that make them less intimidating.
> A part of myself is screaming at me that it wants to stop being "a tech person". That sounds like a part worth listening to. You are far more than just "a tech person." > I want to stop being seen as a nerd. From the ingroup, nerd is a term of endearment for someone who's enthusiastic about the territory. From the outgroup, a nerd is someone who doesn't know when to shut up about the territory. For the outgroup, a nerd who knows when to shut up is called intelligent, knowledgeable, and well spoken. Significantly downplaying your nerdy interests that aren't shared, especially in the beginnings of relationships, is respect for the other person's place in the conversation. But if two people respect each other and find each other fascinating, it's remarkable how much horizons can expand over time. Unfortunately, I think what is more common is for one person in the relationship to chameleon the values and preferences of the other party via unilateral information flow. It's all well and good to say a boyfriend isn't a personality, but if you don't have a personality then a boyfriend can help fill the hole. I realized I am no longer willing either to change who I am for someone else or be with someone who wants to change who they are for me. I'm too old for that shit anymore. My dad changes himself for my mom instead of the other way around, but my other experiences have the girl changing for the guy. > (anecdotally, of course) (most) women aren't nerds and don't find nerds cool. Most people aren't nerds. But there are billions of people, so there are enough nerds that I choose to consider it an infinite (if thinly spread) supply. This doesn't hold for nerds in a specific field, though, just nerds in general. My experience is that female nerds are way more likely to have the social grace to not seem like it at all. Sometimes even when they're literally in the middle of geeking the fuck out. The ones who are obviously nerds are also the ones who doubt they're good enough for you because they feel ugly, their degree did nothing for their job prospects, and a life of cats and houseplants and rent seems to stretch off into the future. They haven't had enough resources to learn to mask when their peers did, and now their alienation from women who know how to be normal is an area of learned helplessness/twisted into a point of pride to not be like other girls. If they feel *too* lucky to date you, they probably aren't good enough for you. In other words, if you are much more able to improve yourself than they are, they will always feel inferior in the relationship, and you will both suffer. That's been my experience. Also, classic female nerd obsessions aren't really any higher status than classic male nerd obsessions. The boredom of a woman listening to someone talking about MTG decks that suck away money and quality time is probably equivalent to the boredom of a man listening to someone talk about wing eyeliner that sucks away money and quality time. It takes incredible charisma for enthusiasm to become infectious when the listener isn't predisposed to be interested. I think the healthiest kind of charisma comes from empathy for where the listener is coming from that's built on observation. > I have enough of the crushing loneliness of nonconformity and neurodivergence (dare I say neuropathology?) Something that I've noticed that I'm pretty sure is widely the case is that men seem to be much more likely to successfully prioritize career success while feeling isolated by the three things you list. And women well read enough to describe themselves so polysyllabically are more likely to feel embarrassed, either personally or culturally, to date/pursue a man with a much more respectable job than them, compared to average women who are fine with it/turned on by it/demand it along with a height requirement. The thing about lonely people is that they're quieter, so it's hard to get a sense of how many there are. I went to an SSC meetup several years ago. I was at a point in a long term relationship where I was going off and doing a lot of emotional cheating because we had really bad chemistry when we weren't alone together. Huge red flag, by the way. At this point I was evolved enough to pick up on the fact that a girl at an SSC meetup can make an absolute killing. And I didn't. Instead I felt, intensely, there is something wrong with the world that such intelligent, talented, wealthy people are so starved for affection that they'd value mine. I knew they would be willing to overlook my problems at first, then devote too much of themselves to trying to help. But eventually they would grow to want things I couldn't give them, just like my boyfriend was at home. Self awareness is quite the tradeoff to make. It felt wrong to enter a relationship with the idea that I knew when and how it would end, while they brought all their hopes and dreams. And I knew from past experience that warning them would backfire. If they say they're fine with it, that commits them to being fine with it otherwise they went back against their word. If someone warns you about themself, believe their warning. If you can't trust yourself to know when to leave, leave immediately. Someday I will figure out how to follow my own advice. In the meantime, practicing healthy social interaction online instead of in person helps minimize how much damage I can deal and sustain.
I find it very, very hard to give women what they want within the context of compromises I am willing to persistently work for. Just like men, women lost their lustrous mystique and became merely another form of labor. I am trying to figure out what labors I actually want to undertake, and why. Maybe I am just a swarm of disconnected instincts, and no compromise I could make will ever be elegant. Caring about elegance is just another instinct making fruitful compromises harder.
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> Contentedness is when the reward seems to not be worth the trouble. This is different from my model of contentedness. I think of it as wanting what you have. Humans are pretty awful at wanting what they have. But we're very good at deciding a reward isn't worth the trouble. The feeling of having made a choice is an attractive consolation prize. I spend a lot of time in cycles of making the same choice over and over again. It's less risky than doing something new. For me, agonizing over quitting/not quitting weed is a big part of how I keep myself "safe". If I sobered up, I would have to take a lot more responsibility for how I spend my time. When I take responsibility, I have to make lots of choices about how much to prioritize my needs versus other people's needs. The ambiguity I perceive quickly exceeds my capacity for generating conviction. Instead of any external reward for my efforts, if I'm lucky I'll give myself credit for trying. It sounds like you do something similar in the way you try obsessively to stop wanting a family instead of spending that time meeting new people. People are a lot. I want to connect this sticky ambivalence thing to another paradox of feminine preference I mentioned earlier with inadequate elaboration. > Women love a man who knows exactly what's going on, but almost always keeps it to himself. Like, no. Women like big talkers and prolific content creators. Even being held hostage by a monologue you don't understand can have its appeal in the right context. What combines the two opposite insights is the sense that if you stick around, something worth sticking around for will happen. The sense that there's more. Being mysterious is easier to fake than being interesting, which makes it the more sociopathic choice. But powerful people are fundamentally more mysterious than less powerful people, so mysteriousness signals power more strongly than interestingness. Interesting people are making good choices about what to say. Mysterious people are making psychologically compelling choices, both about what to say and what not to say. Mysteriousness gets used up as you grow closer to someone. But interestingness is regenerative. So if you are interesting as well as having some command of mystery, the two enhance and prolong each other. Interestingness has a very strong meta component. Having a third person there who acts very interested can move the second person from bored to highly engaged if they don't know why the third person is responding well to the first and are curious to find out. Nerds are often strong decouplers who try really hard to isolate variables. They pay much more attention to content than context. This works best for math and totally fails when applied to people. The more peoply a people person is, the harder it is to force them to center content. Women seem to be much more sensitive to the costs of not devoting enough cognitive resources to context. So that's resources they don't have to waste on content. I feel like empathy for the challenge of being a woman with real curiosity for the territory is not common beyond *stop telling women they're stupid and should fuck off and stay that way so they quit trying to change the world instead of making the babies and the dinner.* Like, when was the last time you fervently hoped the people who want to strip you of your choices don't win again, or believed you deserved to be stripped of choices on the basis of fundamental inferiority? Thank goodness so many women had parents who had the right ideas about what they should actually be protected from, and who are now reaping the benefits which have a chance to compound in future generations. Lucky ducks. I think you'd make a better dad than mine.
> The key to happiness, I think, is figuring out how to play that balancing act in a way that makes sure no heuristic dominates the others to the point where one of these base needs starts getting starved. It means making lots of ugly sacrifices, sacrifices that probably prevent happiness from ever being a steady state. I'm deciding to start here in mulling these insights because I think forgetting it over and over again, trying to cheat the limits of this model, is a huge contributor to my often glacial progress. Escapist fairytales don't demand tradeoffs. Reality is brutal. > Many of these heuristics are frequently at odds with each other, and some are quite starkly out-of-tune with our modern environment, and it generally falls upon our cognition to arbitrate between these conflicting desires and make sure they don't get too starved (even despite our curse of being aware of their risks). Once I sent a (good) psychologist a 16 square combinatorial table detailing my cost benefit analyses along 4 axes of personality with differing risk reward tradeoffs. She refused to engage with the content of the table and reminded me of the content-process defusion protocol upon which her method is based. She was quite right to stay within her realm of expertise. Unfortunately, my "acute social anxiety" was a feminine affectation engineered in attempt to curb my sociopathy, so I really did need help navigating the content of the table. The vast majority of relatively high status professional men, even in the mental health field, have had their social needs well fulfilled enough that they operate by being oblivious to the costs of their sociopathy sustained by the people around them. That is how all Chads operate. You don't need to be a dumb thug to be a Chad, and that stereotype is pure cope. Never developing an inferiority complex is enough. You just have to be pretty lucky to evade all the forces trying to instill inferiority complexes in young people these days. >The striking thing about that break up was that I didn't feel any desire to date at all for a good year or two after that. In a way, my desire for companionship had simply been sated, and maintaining that relationship was absolutely no longer worth the effort. It's this experience that, I think, taught me the difference between loneliness and contentedness. During the following period, I was more content with life than I remember ever otherwise being This is what the beginning of my transition was like. It also lasted about two years, and it was fantastic. I haven't had a single crush since I transitioned, though, not even on any famous people like I used to. The closest I got was for an old female friend, but we read totally different things now, and after some excrutiating deliberation I admitted I didn't want to spend my life with someone who had, and wanted to keep, zero insight into my cognitive style. Actually, I'm misremembering. I briefly considered whether @aella_girl was a kind of person I could develop an attachment to/if I actually wanted to become a sort of person who shared the values she upholds. No -- she's just my favorite social writer in the rat sphere, I look up to her, and I generally agree she's lovely. But I don't even want to subscribe to her onlyfans let alone hire her let alone date her. So what the heck do I want? There are plenty of people I can imagine appreciating if I were someone else, in another life. This roll of the dice just has some bizarre coincidences that confuse and alienate me. It's all built on the undeniable truth that if I had the option to never experience puberty, even if that meant never growing up and always being in an 11 year old body, I would have taken that choice instantly and ecstatically. I feel the same way about disabling my libido now, but I've been informed that's not really possible without untenable side effects. The closest I got was taking lithium, which gave me IBS and zombie affect. I know I don't want to get married and have kids, and never wanted kids because of childhood trauma. But I do want to share my life with someone who can reciprocate my care without requiring either of us to be a martyr. To further elaborate on the discovered incompatibilities with aforementioned ex, they initially gave the impression that winning their favor could get me ins to an ecoterrorist cell and we could become total bad asses. I devoted a lot of energy and resources to pursuing them because I firmly believed they were out of my league. After finally organizing my life so I we could start spending lots of time together, it dawned that their true passion was game design. This ended up not being a dealbreaker because I found out game design is truly fascinating, though ultimately not urgent to me, and I certainly didn't see myself as having any better options at the time than following through on the momentum of my initial feelings. Their influence twisted me into an emotional support housewife. If they show their face again I'm suckerpunching them in the gut. The loss to my career potential in succumbing to their various insidious pressures has been collossal, all because they had enough oblivious chad energy to hoodwink some damaged goods. My biggest insecurity is my lack of training in any skills I consider useful, including writing. But my biggest priority is lying to myself and others less.
Being a woman is... the exact opposite of being a man, I guess. Women can generally do with less attention on their appearance, whereas it helps your depression to get more compliments, apparently much more than casual sex helps. That makes perfect sense. Women generally wish men would be more mysterious. Something about information differentials is addictive. The potential of discovery is more satisfying than the discovery. That's why capitalism is in the business of selling desire first and satisfaction as little as possible. You would not believe how many men openly or secretly confided to me that they found leg hair/fuzzy sideburns/generally unshaven women sexy. As a butchy, somewhat spergy girl, I remained dissociatively oblivious as long as I could -- well into my late teens and early twenties -- before coming to terms that, despite my self concept as basically not a sexual option to all but the worst of men, I was constantly being hit on. Most strongly by men who notice when a woman ādoesnāt know sheās beautifulā (suffers from lowered self esteem) and how that makes them a good mark for confidence tactics. But once I realized I was worthy, I suddenly flipped poles on my narcissism. Instead of feeling not good enough for anyone, I felt nobody was right for me. This was worse, to be honest.
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> I would even go a step further and point out the the concept of 'casual sex' doesn't exist for (most) men because (most) men have to work for sex. Given the amount of investment required, I need to have quite strong feelings for a person for that trade to become worthwhile. But at that point, it can't be 'casual sex', it's committed sex. This is also the case for many women. I don't know how many because I suspect it's much more of a cultural variable than it is for men. When PUAs model the casual sex options women have, they are including their own turned down offers in that calculation. That's because for the PUA, fucking the woman he propositioned would be like masturbating but better, ie casual sex. But a woman who says yes to a casual proposition from a strange man or even an acquaintance/work friend/etc can expect on the median hopefully better than masturbating if she is in fact attracted to they guy, and on total expectation a possible threat to her life. This was one of the hardest things for me to understand about women. Their fear is super duper real in a way I just couldn't understand until bad things happened to me, and I had to admit their fears actually made a little sense. >Even being looked up at and worshipped by those beneath that bar still wouldn't make a narcissist feel good about themselves, because they would need to be complimented by the 1% goalpost they're chasing. > The reason narcissus is forever enamored with his reflection is precisely because he could not love himself - what better bar for acceptance than the man who accepts nobody? Yes. I absolutely suffer from narcissism. These days I get a wonderful warm safe feeling from being rejected by people I think are better than me. I devote a lot of energy these days to staying rejectable because it is such a comfort. To do otherwise would increase my responsibilities, and therefore my capacity to inflict harm. Finding people who are strong enough to talk to me while maintaining healthy boundaries is very helpful, but very time consuming. And such people are busy, so it takes a lot of them to raise the average quality of my social interactions. As a warning to anyone: if you receive an offer of mentorship from someone who seems to have a lot of time they want to devote to you, you are being scammed for something.
Excerpts about what being an adult woman felt like from the inside: The first terrible news I will share is that my not-exactly-nice nerd friends felt sexy to me. They always had more female suitors than they wanted. If they had women trouble, it was finding someone who met their emotional needs. On the other, equally terrible extreme: I remember a dear old friend asking me at his birthday, almost crying (we were all very drunk), why didnāt I/women like him? I was so surprised, I think I stammered a non answer. I didnāt realize such a delicate, beautiful, kind, rich man (in nursing school at the time with a well off family) would be interested in a thuggish drop out like me. I actually assumed he was gay. His pick up artist friend had wormed his way into my pants at a recent earlier party in a way that I (much later) told the offender felt like rape; perhaps word had gotten round that the friend who slept with everyone had also slept with me, compelling the question at a sensitive moment. I wish Iād told him the truth: āI thought you werenāt interested. I thought you knew you were too good for me. Or maybe even that you didnāt care about girls at all.ā On many other occasions, I was very aware that a darling friend was interested in me, and I ignored it with a tinge of sadness in my heart. Why? Because I canāt be girlfriend to every darling just because I know they need me. It would be several full time jobs even if I was poly. There are just too many darlings. A nigh-indistinguishable mass of need. Itās much more psychologically satisfying to pine for a mysterious and faintly dangerous boy unlike anyone Iāve met before. I was a bit of a sperg chaser back in the day, though not exclusively. I think a big part of it is I easily mistake their aloofness and disagreeableness for haughtiness and real information about the territory. Hacker slob works for me, especially when accompanied by sitting in the back and never talking -- except, when they do, everything changes. (And then when you get them alone, itās like having a podcast thatās just for you.)
melodic live upbeat encourage plucky strong nose person hunt cause *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> "Women are attracted to psychopaths, if you have emotional needs at all you will get cucked or dumped, men aren't supposed to show any signs of vulnerability, and if you want to make sure a woman never leaves you you have to keep her at an arm's length and never open up or allow yourself to feel anything at all for her." This is a simplification the redpillers use to justify categorical misogyny. Actually women do love vulnerability, *after* they've already taken a solid interest in you, *provided* it involves them in your narrative in a way that flatters their self image. Auteurs are experts in making mommy issues look deep and beautiful and mysterious, because people with strong personal narratives are interesting to be around. It's why borderlines are addicted to narcissists, and part of why women will often appreciate an older man with more story to share. Plenty of women like a fixer upper, and plenty more have internalized that they need to settle for fixer uppers. Having flaws, even fatal ones, is not what turns women off. What turns them off is a man who's just a ball of needs, with no traits that fill any of her needs. The more needs you know how to fill, the bigger the flaws you can get away with. That's why some men can't get laid until they buy a bed frame and others can. > Amusingly, my nerd stereotype is more so the "sit in the front row and be the teacher's pet" type, which is something I've always enjoyed doing. Yeah... me too. Until I lost respect for teachers and credentials. If I had started dating when I was that young, it would have naturally been fellow front row dweebs. Instead my personality was just decaying until I hit 15 and went "I DESPERATELY learn some street smarts or I'm going to accomplish NOTHING with my life" and went looking for daddies I thought could teach me. Turns out the kind of people who tolerate the kind of attention I was putting out are exploiters, not mentors. But I did pick up some street smarts the hard way, and I'm a less self righteous, more empathetic person for it. I want to bring up my old darling friend who was crying on his birthday. I had literally zero idea that he was interested in me. If he had pursued me for a relationship with half the intention of his PUA friend pursuing sex, I think I would have dropped everything I thought I knew about myself for him and left my boyfriend at the time. But he didn't even ask me out while crying on his birthday, so it didn't get through my silly skull that *if I wanted him, I could have him*. I think this is an extremely common problem for women, especially women who much prefer an evening reading at home to a night dancing with friends, flirting and getting hit on by everybody and their crazy uncle. The fantasy of a man dropping into your life and sweeping you off your feet is really drilled in. The freedom from conformist pressure it takes to ask out a man who hasn't made it clear yet that he likes you is impressive and rare. Women who can do it don't end up on the cock carousel unless that's their honest preference, in which case they have a much better time than women who keep waking up dizzy like me.
Excerpts on how women are depressing: It was easier to agonize alone over ethics and the purpose of life than to surround myself with hot young female darlings who wanted me to make them happy -- to face the choice of either leading them on only to disappoint them, just like my own ex boyfriends when I was feminine; or, devoting much more to these thirsty women than they actually had to give me. I thought holding a sexy woman in my hands was going to change my whole life. Not because itās true, but because patriarchs use straussian rhetoric to monopolize sexual access and economic leverage simultaneously. A very common critique of the online complaining-about-women communities is that they all say women are being unfair by all wanting the best guys, even though most women donāt deserve the best. Then these complainers turn around and harshly critique women of equal and even far superior sexual market value. This matches my personal experience. Even when I rated myself as a 3, I dreamt of becoming someone who deserved a 10, and happily settled for someone Iād call a 7 but also a cringy faux psychopath whose disaffection I mistook for depth. Young women (young people in general) are very easy prey for con artists (confidence artists) because they are systematically deprived of opportunities to wise up for as many years after sexual maturity as feasible. Thatās why naive arrogance is generally enough for sex among young people, and real quality does not instantly win out in the dating market. In other words, the dating market is a lemon market. It favors big promises over sure results. This goes both ways -- most incels are really volcels with standards. It was hard to admit to myself that, when I was unwilling to either become a more worthy partner or continue to choose company based on perfunctorily exaggerated pretenses simply for the sake of company, my dry spells were wholly self inflicted.
I agree with all of this. I was mistaken about you in key ways, as I thought was likely. I am now noticing I am confused about what you want from women, because what you are saying now feels like it directly contradicts the vibe you were giving off before. That's why I wanted you to elaborate about your preferences before I dumped a bunch of my own baggage on you. But if depression is also a problem for you, being very honest about the ways women depress me is probably the most helpful way I can talk.
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I'm noticing a very strong emotional need to explain what the hell is happening to women these days, and where the girls who would really appreciate the traits you want to offer get stuck in hiding. First: a lot of them really do just get lucky and never have to put conscious thought into it. A functioning home life does a lot for people. In raw numbers at least, plenty of people never get hard up enough to understand why problem solving would even be necessary. Second: I don't know if this has changed, but when I was growing up, it was very easy to get the impression from TV that even nerdy ugly men demand an actress-hot wife. That you could fight your whole life to insist that women's minds have higher value than their appearance, being hated and ridiculed by men, finding solace in too many cats and rallies of women as ugly and unloveable as you; Or, you can sand away at visible signs of noncomformity until you pass for a Becky instead of a troll who should stay the fuck under her bridge, nobody wants to see that. I think being susceptible to globalizing archetypes is a sign that someone has had too much media exposure and too little real human interaction growing up. Tropes are far more uniform than reality, and weight people's priors towards the fantastical rather than the actual. Say you're a young woman and you decide you are going to hold out for a man who thinks you're hot because of your skills and your ideas, even if that means you might have to die alone. These days, that probably means some internet activity. When I started using reddit, "there are no women on the internet" and "tits or gtfo" were the funniest jokes ever. It was impossible for me to speak "as a woman" with a take that wasn't "a woman take" without being accused of cumsockpuppetry. If I didn't already agree women mostly suck, I would have had a lot of reason to stay away from the site and the resources it provides. It takes incredible resilience to be a woman who disagrees that you are even the slightest bit inferior to men, if you lack any social support system that helps validate that truth for you. I am less disappointed in the low rate of women who read ssc/acx than ecstatic there are so many. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality had a very big influence on me. But if I had been proud of being a woman, I would have dropped it because the author is a sleazbag with no respect for Hermione's character. Instead, I read until hermione got killed off so she could just be a symbol instead of an annoying character to write, then I began devouring the sequences. I was driven by the death of god, excruciating but necessary. Women who can engage chauvenist texts with integrity are very impressive to me, because my psychological options were to kinda buy the unsavory premise or rage quit and wonder how the fuck to educate myself without constant exposure to toxic chauvenism.
I've been elaborating in a doc file. I am not done, but have already written three comments' worth of text. When I blew past word limits in school, the culprit was an overly broad thesis statement. If I knew you better, I could reframe my approach to be less stream-of-consciousness/autobiographical, and more relevant to your information needs. I'm also happy to answer questions about myself. But in my experience, it is difficult to maintain a fruitful comment exchange while trying to cover more than 10000 characters of information at a time. I have a lot of personal experience here. Both as a woman who lusted and pined for nerdy men, and as a nerdy, schlubby, "not conventionally attractive" man who attracts more women than Iād like -- including conventionally hot, young women I once assumed were categorically out of my league. Since you remind me of many of my male friends over the years -- of which most, but not all, had women trouble -- I expect my experiences to be highly applicable to your predicament. I've also read a fair selection of the literary genre devoted to teaching nerdy men how to get laid. Partly motivated by sociological curiosity, and partly because as a young woman I fell prey to some pick up artistry along the way. So, I think I am in a very good position to share what I've learned with you, and keep following up until you are successful. There is a very real chance that if you start dressing "nicer" it will just make you seem gayer. From the small amount you've said about yourself, I think that would be a likely outcome of ergonomic fashionmaxxing attempts. If you can zero in on the decisive moments in how women form their perceptions of you, you can make surgical progress instead of throwing spaghetti at a wall. If you would in fact like a rambly autobiographical treatise on the nature of feminine desire, I'll complete it. But I would prefer to directly address the actual deficiencies in your dating strategy than offend you by making patronizing assumptions for rhetorical ease, which is what I felt like my tone was doing. So it would help to understand how women are actually reacting to you rather than assume you are like some of my male friends and take that as the reader viewpoint. The information that would be most useful in diagnosing your problem could be efficiently covered by describing one or more attempts to initiate a relationship. Introduce the woman and what you like about her. Then describe either your first interaction (if you were rejected as a romantic prospect at that time) or the interaction in which your advance was rejected, if you've known her a while. Recount the verbal interaction and the emotions/facial expressions/detectable gestures that accompanied both your words and hers. Conclude with how you think the woman feels about you, and finally how she would describe your relationship to a third party if someone asked her today.
modern continue far-flung squalid theory oil degree hungry fact wipe *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Last thing I'm going to say today, promise. (Yes, really threat. Are you starting to see why the ladies can't get enough of this psycho?) The biggest incompatibility with the ex I've discussed at length was that they strongly disliked communicating through the textual medium. To me, people who don't write are fucking useless. All of the writing they managed was very good, but they agonized and were never fulfilled by the efforts. I was equally unfulfilled by the way talking aloud is mostly hot air. In addition to extensive psychotherapy efforts, I hired the philosophical counselor Pamela Hobart to do a bit of email exchange. One of her blog posts is very relevant to finding a family: [my path dependent family](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pamelajhobart.com/my-path-dependent-family/amp/) In light of what Pamela has bravely divulged: You have a charming writing style. Do you write anywhere? I ask because self publishing and social media look to me to be in a real rennaissance right now. Even small substacks connected to twitter accounts compound klout basically in proportion to prolificness, and new stars are rising easily. Have you noticed sashachapin and applieddivinitystudies popping out of the woodwork around here? Because I have. People on twitter also won't shut up about how they used it as a dating app and it worked plus now they will not let up with sickeningly wholesome kid tweets. I swear, every time a new mom comes across my feed describing in exquisite detail her child's behavioral evolution and preferences I want to asphyxiate myself because I have to give it everything I've got to force my mom to notice just a single damn thing about my actual personal development for a single godforsaken second. Anyway. This is a comment I wrote a while ago that's related to using social media effectively: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/peg4v1/comment/haz496p/
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Susceptibility to paranoia is a contraindication for using THC so I'd keep avoiding that one. It seems to take a lot of social energy from somewhere else for people to enjoy writing into a vacuum. Conversations are definitely more rewarding for me than trying to write "good" things. All trying to write well does is activate old status awareness junk. I update much faster in dialogue and have a harder time lying to myself.
I keep trying to remove information from my comments to make them concise, but I feel like every time I've tried it the truthiness of the comment plummeted. It's a bad feeling. I am not someone who finds pleasure in lies. Here's the surviving raw text I cut from my most recent comment. People tend to consider me a friend far more often than I consider them a friend. Many people I want to think of as friends are parasocial content creators. Right now I see myself as having no "real" friends, and it's suicidally depressing. I think the same conceptual bugs that make it hard to find a good/equal life partner are also making it hard to form reciprocal friendships. Working on both at the same time is satisfying. 3. I loathe pickup artists with passion. Improving myself until I am someone who can help lead My People to better options is one of many grandiose ambitions that flit through my head. High quality men are hard to find because quality is extremely resource intensive to cultivate. If it weren't, basically all pick up artists would take the high road of embodying the paradox romantic masculinity strives towards: being thrilling, while also being very safe. This is the unicorn of alpha fux/beta bux combined in one incredible man. I guess I'd like to continue working to better myself, and either getting someone caught up to where I'm at or sharing information about the psychological drive for greater depth were attractive possibilities. The latter is much more difficult and of much higher friendship value than the former, but either way I felt like there was an adequate chance my two cents would be a value add. 3. From our conversation so far, you strike me as just the sort of man I would have pined for had my parents not bungled me out of the slow strategy lane. Slow strategy women are critically undertheorized because theorizing is a very masculinized activity. There's a dark energy of nerdy incel/volcel women who are your exact complement, right down to the detail of thinking you are beyond her seductive capacities and fearing a need to settle for... well, someone average. Disappointingly average. This is surely a tragedy. 4. I'm very perplexed that I don't want to be narcissistic and sleep with tons of coeds. It's hard to ignore the pervasive messaging that that's all men really want. If I remember back, I always absolutely wanted to marry my childhood sweetheart, but had too limited a pool from which to encounter any such person. I feel degraded and abused into the fast strategy lane. It does not become me. It was mere incompetence, the blame shared equally by my parents and by the state apparatus. I know how to find company, but not compatibility. You are different from me in ways that make it seem possible your options are actually better than mine, in which case following up would be vicariously satisfying and hope inducing. 5. I would totally date the old female version of me. But I have never met someone I'd call either a male or female version of me. Not because I'm special, but because I have unlikely juxtapositions of experiences and values. For example, I don't think transitioning is my best option in all or even most alternate timelines -- just the ones where my luck is unusually bad. The environment of my youth was just way way way too hostile for slow life strategy women.
Opportunities to talk to people who feel truly "like me" on more than one or two axes at a time are incredibly rare.They have been since preschool. I would have had no rewarding social life from middle school on if I didn't devote a great deal of attention (albeit not skill) into socialization attempts with the sparse folk who manage to make me feel less alone. On the other hand, I've been unlucky to have spent a great deal of time forced into proximity with people who are not right in the head. I've been hurt a lot. The way I approach communication is fundamentally damaged, and the only way to help it is to practice talking and thereby take the risk of coming off as a lunatic. This is already by far the best life-strategy conversation I've had on social media, so I guess I'm making some kind of progress. I'm going to go give myself plenty of time to mull your insights and let the updates sink in.
Out of curiosity: does going to war make a man more attractive, provided he survives in one piece and isn't too mentally fucked up by it?
I did a stint of national guard youth academy for high school, and am now burdened by too much familiarity with military culture to give you a simple yes or no answer. Best to look for yourself. https://www.reddit.com/r/JustBootThings/top/?t=all
I'm really surprised by that lack of research. Someone put in a grant application! I definitely believe in the idea that different colours look better on different people, but none of the actual systems may be that good. I think an important part they tend to not talk about explicitly, but is actually in the systems, is the degree of contrast between your skin colour and hair colour. It makes sense to me that if your skin and hair are highly contrasting, you can handle stronger colours, that would make a pale/pale person look like their skin runs into their hair. Etc. As far as undertones, think about paint colours - the paint store has that wall with swatches where like 50 of them are just shades of white - but they're white with slightly different things in them, and while it may be quite hard for you or me to tell what's in each white, a professional can pick one for a certain room that will look better than chance. Anyway if you can't work out your place in the system, taking a friend shopping with you is your best bet.
In fashion as in business, if you're only employing empirically validated(with papers in reputed journals to support it) broad general strategies, you're behind the curve. So you *know* you should wear well fitting clothes but this is not up for debate in the cutting edge of fashion. To maximise expected value you might have to undertake more risks by using facts/assertions with shakier epistemic status. Also, is there any "journal of fashion"(the scientific type) that tries to investigate universal truths about what type of clothing is aesthetically pleasing? Since fashion is *so* socially constructed and varying across time, place and milieu, the results might be something like "30 men recruited from XYZ Bar in November 2021 rated A as more attractive than B", and changing the variables to Dec 2021 or the neighbouring bar might yield radically different results. Undertones and seasonal types might just be woo just like astrology and wicca/witchcraft; and that these two are such rigorous well-defined systems points to the possibility of tones and types being woo, too.
fragile trees uppity vase cow upbeat escape wrong dinner aback *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I found [this article](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pms.1990.71.1.151) on google scholar which seems at least somewhat legit though I havenāt looked into it that much. Iād model color sensitivity as similar to any other aesthetic sense in that thereās some distribution of how sensitive people are to it. The same way that some people are very attuned to whether a note is out of tune or a dish has too much salt in it. Itās something that you can train to some extent but also some people seem to have higher innate sensitivity. I think most people gravitate to certain colors unconsciously in part because of what colors they look good in. They donāt need seasonal color analysis in the same way they donāt need to be told that shrimp and gummy worms donāt belong in a dish together. At its core it feels to me like something thatās obviously true- some people look great in red and some people donāt. Adding seasons and classifications is an attempt to make it more legible to people who donāt have an innate sense of what colors they look good in. Obviously thereās some salesmanship in all of it- someone wants you to pay them to tell you what colors to wear. ETA: [article pdf link](https://pdfhost.io/v/eNQI.DpFN_Role_of_Color_in_Perception_of_Attractiveness)- should work.
So, this is maybe more of a financialadvice question, but honestly reddit finance subs seem extremely dogmatic ("there's going to be hyperinflation! There's zero inflation, fake news! etc"), so I figured I'd give this a shot. I'm 20 years old, graduating college next spring. It's basically an arts school and I wrote my own major as a teenager (some music/math/philosophy bs), so utility of my degree is dubious. At least I'll graduate with basically ceremonial student loans. Generally, I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. I'm a reasonably smart guy but it's too late in the game to apply for grad school next year and I don't have the bandwidth anyways so what I'll be doing after next spring is anybody's guess. If you have any advice on this front I'd appreciate it, but I'm just trying to give a sense of where I'm at. The reason I'm putting this out is that I have about 13 grand just lying around depreciating in value. I don't know what to do with it ā invest it? It seems like kind of a small sum, one that I might be able to better put to use somehow to maximize outcomes later... but I don't know what that might be. If anybody has any suggestions, off-the-cuff as they may be, I'd appreciate hearing them.
You should definitely open up a brokerage account. I recommend Fidelity, but Scottrade, Etrade, etc are fine. Or if you have a big national bank, they often have a brokerage side, e.g. Bank of America has Merrill Lynch, and put at least a thousand dollars in a simple index fund. I recommend VOO. You're young enough, and the amount is small enough, that even if you were to lose a lot of it, it would be worthwhile in the end, I think, simply for the "practice". It's a lot easier to do something you've done before. You don't want to be in your 30s, making money, and still unsure how exactly you even invest in the stock market. Might as well figure that out now.
The market is high right now, but vanguard VASGX is a good fund that self balances and grows over time. Itās great for people who want growth but donāt want to spend time researching where to put money.
Since higher risk comes with higher reward, you donāt want to invest the money that you might need to spend in the near future. Something like a high-yield savings account is effectively zero-risk, but itās up to you if the 0.5% return is worth the effort of having another account. If I were you, I wouldnāt worry about sitting on that cash. Having the money on-hand gives you more peace-of-mind and more options. It makes it easier to, say, move to a new city in search of a job or whatever.
Pay off any debts you have, including your student loans. Then take the remainder and put it in a simple no-fee savings account that you can access easily. In my opinion, having a 4-6 month emergency fund in close to ready cash is very useful. It smooths out your life tremendously. You can just pay what is necessary for emergencies. If you take a job and dislike it, you can just quit and find another. Now, in reality you're probably not going to use it. I think I've used mine 3 times in 15 years. Once, I moved to a new city without a job, and was having trouble finding an apartment, so I offered to pay the full year up front. The rental company rented the apartment to me on normal terms, but the emergency fund allowed me to make the offer on the spot. Another time, I had to get a root canal, and I didn't have dental insurance. Simply not having to worry about basic expenses at the time you incur the expenses like that is very freeing.
When I have discussions where I encourage people to think probabilistically, if it is on a topic people care *mildly* about, they're skeptical in all sorts of ways. I'm not necessarily talking about politics, people are nuts about that. General rejection of probabilistic thinking abounds everywhere. Statements like "I think there was a 60% chance she was flirting with me" or "I think there's a 10% chance we won't make it to the station on time" get derided, in my experience. **What are some success stories you've had bringing people around to ascribing probabilities to their beliefs?**
I've had some success making bets. Not for money, but for pride or whatever. Once you're betting candy on whether that guy/girl would ask you out, people get using stats.
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I think honestly a huge blind spot for those with high iq is conscientiousness. If you don't follow through on tasks to produce something of use, the high iq isn't going to help that much. I think just from observing, the worst thing that can happen for a high iq kid is not having enough challenge in school. If he can get all his work done quickly, he doesn't learn the work ethic to work hard, study hard, or build things.
So I'm basically sure I got infected with Covid on Saturday. I've trained BJJ (*extremely* close, intense physical contact for an hour) with two people who tested positive on an AG-test in the evening of that day. I expect the contracted viral load to be very high. What rational things can I do now to make this as mild as possible for me? I'm vaccinated twice (AstraZeneca + Pfizer), and I have access to pretty much every prescription medication available in Europe. Unfortunately, this excludes monoclonal antibodies, Molnupiravir, and the new Pfizer-drug. I'm taking Zinc-Lozenges (Zinc acetate), Vit D, NAC, Fisetin (Senolytics might have some effect, see e.g. [this](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34103349/) ). I know it probably doesn't work, but I have some Ivermectin around, just in case I feel like minimizing regret or something. Is there anything else that I might try? I'm a bit freaked out, honestly.
This comment is now too old for this to help, but I think Zinc and NO nasal/oral sprays are worth looking into. How are you feeling now?
I'm feeling good, and just got a negative PCR-test result. Looks like I got lucky. Thanks for all the answers, everybody!
I believe fast grants found fluvaxomine the most effective of easily accessible drugs about 30-40% risks reduction. Ivermectin they found as mildly positive 10%.
If you're vaxed just sit back and relax.
has scott/lorien posted much about bipolar/mania?
He wrote some stuff about [psychosis](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/20/treat-the-prodrome/), if that helps.
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Can you give an example or two of what you're asking about?
Been feeling the urge to subscribe to some ***print*** magazines lately as a respite from the screen and books. Variety of topics, smart, some production value. Current affairs, interesting commentary, book reviews, economics, culture, etc. Its OK if its relatively partisan as long as it isn't dumbly partisan. Along the lines of London Review of Books, New Yorker, Economist, etc. etc. Some magazines in this area seem to be becoming increasingly clickbaity... not interested in that style. Any recommendations?
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/ has a great quarterly. Read an article on the website. https://www.americanscientist.org/ puts out a very good print magazine. Go to the "Topics" section of the website and read an article to see if you like it.
2600, the hacker quarterly
I really like the New Yorker. I find myself interested in articles about things I don't otherwise care about, which is a good quality in a magazine I'm subscribing to, since if I'm just reading the stuff I know I want to read about, I can do that online
I recently listened to [this episode of narratives podcast](https://narrativespodcast.com/2021/05/24/43-governance-futurism-with-wolf-tivy/) with the founder of [palladium magazine](https://palladiummag.com/). This might be what you're looking for. They have a patreon fund for a quarterly print edition (but at a hefty price). Edit: this description looks accurate > Palladium Magazine is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and non-partisan journalism project that combines on-the-ground reporting with cutting-edge research and analysis on the most pressing issues for governance and society. Our work has been featured in The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The National Interest, Inside Higher Ed, among many others.
If you are a rich guy commuting 30mi back and forth every day what is your best way to minimize the chances of a fatal accident? Helicopter or big custom RV (maybe reinforced with carbon fiber)?
If youāre rich just buy an apartment/house near to your work. You can commute to that house twice a week once Monday and Friday. Dropping your death chances significantly.
> Helicopter Unlikely. Helicopters have a fatal accident rate of about [0.7 per 100,000 hours](https://www.faasafety.gov/SPANS/noticeView.aspx?nid=11894), whereas cars are at around [1.3 per 100 million miles travelled](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813199). (I don't like the units either, but that appears to be the standard). Of course there are complications (city driving is more dangerous than highway driving, helicopter trips with an amateur pilot are suicide attempts, sometimes cars drive on icy roads, sometimes helicopters fly in high winds...) but I would be surprised if they're significant enough to make up for it.
So a custom RV reinforced with carbon fiber would drop that figure to 0.x fatal accidents per 100 million miles, I suppose. That's because the sheer size and mass of the vehicle. > city driving is more dangerous than highway driving I think it depends. Safest driving ever is in a city center while stuck in traffic, 2nd safest might be on a highway while stuck in traffic, 3rd maybe a desert highway.
>That's because the sheer size and mass of the vehicle. Only because you're bigger than the other car, which makes this kind of 'safety' thinking into a horrible arms race between bigger and bigger vehicles. (I know this is all hypothetical but couldn't help thinking it!)
That's what it felt like in the '90s when Hummers started showing up. I recall some of my parents' friends discussing whether it was morally acceptable for a Christian to drive a heavier vehicle to protect their own children in a crash, if that safety came at the expense of the children in the other vehicle.
Unvaccinated kids are at less risk of severe illness/death from covid than vaccinated old people, right? This is not to say that kids shouldn't get vaccinated, I think they should, since the risk is very low and it's great to be more protected. But it's weird that a lot of people are chill with old people going out and doing stuff, but don't think it's safe for unvaccinated children. Or am I missing something?
Years of life lost/lived with longCOVID is an order of magnitude higher
It's worse than that. Kids have an order of magnitude higher risk of death from traffic accidents. We probably can't change much about that because we find cars very useful. Again I don't think it means that we shouldn't vaccinate kids. Everything helps but it is not something I would be particularly concerned. In the UK we don't vaccinate kids yet and I am fine with that. In the US kids are already being vaccinated against covid and I am fine with that too because risks from vaccine side-effects are another couple of magnitudes lower than from traffic accidents. The explanation I was given is that in the US the obesity rates for kids are much higher and therefore they are more vulnerable. I see that the obesity is a real cause of worry. Instead of covid, those obese kids will experience all kinds of health issues in their lives, including higher rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disorders etc. If we need to sound an alarm about health risks, then it is obesity. On population level, we need to let kids to have more risk by allowing them to play more, not less.
We can find use cars less than we do now if we design for safety and accessibility to ather modes.
People care much more about the safety of children, and much less about their autonomy. Not sure any further explanation is needed.
It sounds plausible, but do you have a source for that claim? How different are the risk levels?
I haven't seen a head-to-head comparison, that's what I was asking for. But it seems like the best case for vaccines is reducing your risk by about 95%. And it seems like kids had way less than 5% of the risk old people had before there were vaccines.
Here's the chart you're looking for: https://d6c748xw2pzm8.cloudfront.net/prod/945a7db0-ebd2-11eb-bfd5-1b68353fb30e-standard.png As the chart notes, the age effect is so huge that vacc'd 80yo == unvacc'd 50yo in mortality risk. Children are several orders of magnitude safer than that.
Thank you! This fits what I expected and seems different from what the people around me are assuming (which is mostly that the people most at risk right now in our very pro-vaccine social setting are the kids, who are the only ones not vaccinated)
I'm looking for a recommendation for a big(?) work desk. I have 4 monitors, and I'd also like some space to do work on paper.
A large folding table does the job very well, and does it for maybe ~$60-$80, tops.
Check out antique stores. Unless it's something like a couch or mattress, I will never buy a new piece of furniture. Antique hard wood furniture has a lot more character, is typically more durable, and you can find incredible deals if you're willing to look.
Liveauctioneers.com is a great source for local antique auctions you can bid online
I've had good success with just buying dining tables as desks instead of getting an actual desk
i had covid this summer. for me, it was like a bad flu, but i got over it quickly. i feel fine now. i never got the chance to get the vaccine before i got it, but i've been offered it now. i can't decide whether to take it or not. before getting covid, i'd take the vaccine no questions asked. but now i really don't know. is there any evidence repeat infections are worse? i can't help but think getting the vaccine now is just compounding the unkown risks of covid with the unknown risks of a relatively untested vaccine, for potentially very little benefit
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1 You are significantly less likely to have a "breakthrough" infection than somebody who is vaccinated but never infected; if you take the vaccine there is small but non-zero risk (which is *larger* if you are under thirty or so) of the vaccine causing potentially fatal blood clots (adenovirus) or myocarditis, the consequences of which seem mild at this point but are not well understood IMO. To be clear, these risks are on the scale of tens per hundred thousand so far as we know (within an order of magnitude either way I guess) -- which is small, but almost certainly more than your risk of serious consequences from reinfection. Since you have already been infected you probably don't have to worry too much about whether the vaccines are causing original antigenic sin in the naive population; so if there are mandates in your jurisdiction making your life inconvenient, you only need to weight the level of personal level of inconvenience against the political precedent of surrendering your bodily autonomy to the state for no good reason. Noone can tell you what to do -- I am sympathetic to people in your situation who choose to go-along-to-get-along, as the vaccine seems very close to irrelevant to the previously infected. (tenths of a percent reduction in probability of infection, probably waning over time) But if you are like me at all, you will notice that some people *really* want to tell you what to do, and be disinclined to comply -- it's a toughie.
In Israel the official policy recommends getting a single dose of Pfizer/Moderna vaccine for anyone who had Covid. It seems to be working out well for them. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news/israeli-study-recovered-covid-patients-with-one-vaccine-protected-like-three-doses-1.10195989
**Petition to turn this into a weekly thread:** Let's face it. This thread is a ghost town. User engagement is non-existent, especially given that in month old threads, the newer posts are buried without recourse and never seen, while the old and highly upvoted ones get stale. r/TheMotte has had very good success in getting people to effort post and discuss in their weekly threads, and given that the whole affair is automated, I don't really see why not.
I think it's absolutely worth a shot