Joshe

I never cared for more than one or two at a time. I enjoy having good friends. They bring me out of my head and provide spontaneous variety I otherwise wouldn't experience. A friend ringing to ask if you want to ride with them to the mall or bookstore - something simple like that brings me out of my head for a while and it's enjoyable because you're goofing off and laughing. It's often restorative. Also, you get to help them with their problems from time to time, which is an opportunity to be there for someone, which I think is healthy. Just seems healthy overall. Viewing friendship as transactional seems like an unnecessary, defensive frame.

lol, it's fuckin hilarious. Yeah, I've seen this but not sure how prevalent it is. Crazy how things have changed. That's my preference too. Strange how this isn't really taught that much.

Clickbait title but just to highlight the idea that data center as moat might not be the case in 5-10 years.

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Yeah, you're right, it's not always true. But take the star you're most attracted to and imagine the scenario. You might still turn it down, but surely you'd deliberate, right? lol. And depending on how things were going at the time... My sister wouldn't do it either. But she's one of those types of girls who once they're locked in, they're locked in. I don't think most girls are like this though. I'm sure the percentage who would turn it down increases with age/maturity. But typically, 20s and early 30s, I think it's a very high percentage. In my scenario, I don't think it's really about the sex, but more the prospect of a better life. I think the majority more girls would turn the offer down if there was clearly no prospect of something more than a one-night stand. Like, if the dude said he wanted to spend the next month with her to get to know her, the percentage probably skyrockets. I've always thought it was weird how girls with boyfriends openly talk about how attracted they are to some hunk on TV. My ex and her friend used to do that all the time with Jax Teller from Sons of Anarchy. Her friend was married and had a life-sized cardboard cutout of this dude in her house that her husband had to look at everyday. lol

If you’re average or above average in looks, erase “game” from your mind. It puts you at a psychological disadvantage and takes the fun out of it. Trying to run some system as opposed to relying on your own intuition in the flow is artificial and stifling. Game tells you to be imposing. And sure, if you approach 100 girls, you’ll increase your odds of sex, but this is no fun at all. Also, there’s nothing wrong with having a crush. In fact, that’s organic attraction, not some desperate ploy to get your dick wet. Nothing wrong with the latter, but crushes are more fun, especially when you actually do get your dick wet. To finally get that piece you’ve been working on and dreaming about for the last few months is much more fun than sexing some random you don’t even really know. Anyway, back to being imposing. “Be assertive” “Be direct” “Make a move”. My tact was always the exact opposite of this because I noticed it didn’t work. Of course, there might come a time for these, but IME, usually not. Usually, attraction leads to getting the dick wet without ever having to be direct at all. Rather than approaching 100 girls, run a long-form seduction on 20 girls at the same time. Hard to not get pussy when you’re swimming in chummed waters. The key is to spend time around women in loose social environments and to be unimposing, yet a bit mysterious and interesting. This is literally like 80% of it. You might let the attraction build over a dozen encounters, or even more if you detect no interest at all. Sounds like you were already doing this, but it’s all about subtlety and calibration. Long-form seduction might be a good name for it. After many interactions, there’s nothing quite like the moment she looks at you and finally let’s you know it’s time to kiss her. All without ever being talked about or you asking for her number. This doesn’t work for recluses. I mean, it can, but it’s hard to seduce your barista behind the counter of her workplace. Loose social environments are the waters to swim in. There is a reason why in the movies, 99% of sex scenes don’t culminate from a guy having asked for a number or making his attraction explicit in some other way. The way it works is attraction builds covertly, behind the scenes until it leads to kissing. No asking for phone numbers. IME, getting the number almost always came AFTER the kiss, not before. For the love of God, just put yourselves around women and learn how to calibrate your shit. This is how getting laid has worked for centuries. Op, you just learned what didn’t work. This is calibration data. Being direct didn’t work. You could have executed perfectly and it still not work. Once you made this move, you revealed your position, which severely constrains your maneuverability. Get good at reading the situation. And next time, don’t be direct. Instead, play interesting, subtle, escalating games. At each escalation, you're waiting on a signal to advance. Your job is to make that signal fire. When the signal fires, that doesn’t mean it’s time to seal the deal. It means it’s time to advance - time to make your seduction a little less subtle, but still not overt. Rinse and repeat on each signal fire until the most obvious next advance is tongue in mouth. But also, you have to allow each escalation sufficient time and not be in a hurry to reach the next one. It's close to time to seal the deal when she starts getting closer to you and getting physical, touching your face, hitting you, etc. I suppose the best barometer is noticing how often she closes the distance between you two, and with what energy. The distance is the tell and the energy is your calibration data. Reciprocate her actions. Never go out of your way more than she does but let her see you'll go out of your way if she will. The dance ensues. I was once standing at a crowded bar, drunk off my ass. Some girl I never seen before came up from behind me and reached into my pockets to take my keys out so I couldn't drive. No idea how she knew where my keys were. If a girl reaches into your pocket with playful energy, that means she's ready, lol. Probably because she saw me sitting with two other girls earlier and she could tell they were evaluating me. The girl who reached into my pocket made the other girl jealous. Had sex with both of them. Never cold approached, never asked for a phone number. Just building attraction in a loose social environment. Ahh, the good ole days. Oh and guess what, I was wearing dirty pants and shirt from having stopped at the bar after getting off work from my construction job. Dirty as fuck. All this "dress to the 9s" act like this, act like that. It's all bullshit. So yeah, you should give up "game". Also, keep in mind some girls are just weird af. And some aren't sure themselves of how the process works and will play oddball games because of it.

They’re two different creatures with totally different offerings. A lesbian is not offering the same thing as a man. I can’t think of a good analogy. It’s like comparing whiskey to beer and saying because age isn’t a factor with high quality beer, it’s not an important factor for high quality whiskey. People drink both to get loose or whatever, but they’re two different offerings with varying degrees of sophistication. We could have a totally separate discussion about what makes for a “true, good lesbian”, lol. As in, what separates a lesbian who gets ran out on often while another has something that keeps them around. A lesbian with a capital L, and man with a capital M. Lol. I’m sure there is some overlap, as there is with alcoholic drinks, but what makes one good is not what makes the other good. I think I see your point though, and it does muddy up my model somewhat. I’ll have to consider it.

It’s not just countries with this distinction, but individuals as well. It’s a common source of communication problems. I’ve heard it framed as “ask culture” vs “guess culture”. People of guess culture will present an indirect statement or a question and expect you to discern what they want from you. They do this because it’s how they themselves prefer to be addressed. They don’t want you being so direct, which is why they aren’t themselves. Seems like a threat minimization strategy. Guess culture might fish for an invite to your party whereas ask culture will just ask you outright.

The same way men get laid. By appealing to the woman. I’m not sure I follow. Getting laid and keeping them is a different story. I would imagine lesbians suffer at least as much, if not more with women leaving them than men do. Ever seen “Orange is the new black”? lol. And lesbians are specifically not looking for men, so they wouldn’t need to meet that specific bar?

Teaching men how to get laid is backwards. They need to first be taught how to be men. I’ve never seen any material that actually teaches this plainly. The way you’d teach this is to transfer the appropriate internal responses to various situations - how to emotionally deal with things. Not just “how to respond internally”, but why. Without the why, they often just fake it. The why has to be sufficiently internalized. It would work the same way you teach a child to navigate their emotional landscape. Learning how to not be afraid of the dark or not cry over trivial things is no different than learning how to deal with your girlfriend making eyes at another. When you have dozens of these emotionally challenging situations solved such that you internally manage them well, you join the ranks of men. To work through neediness, cowardice, bitterness, jealousy, self-pity, etc. These are the trials by which you genuinely become a man women are attracted to. If you suppress these trials or continually fail at them, you will forever have to fake being a man. Teaching how to navigate these trials is IMO the highest value things you could teach regarding courtship. I suppose they call this “inner game”, lol. One issue with this frame is it doesn’t seem to sufficiently acknowledge the emotional fragility of men, and the term “game” gives a false sense of control over their emotions, which biases them toward conquest of their emotions rather than letting them be what they are and to endure them until they lift while in the meantime seeking a healthy resolution via reason. Men should be taught from the outset the shape of the emotional challenges that lay ahead, and be given good resources/guidance for how to navigate them, and what proper resolution looks like. @aurum not sure if these thoughts could be useful.

In sum, the next Brad Pitt will always be able to fuck your girl, and that’s ok. Lol

Aside from filling the main requirements, you have to offer something like a unique selling proposition, something they will miss and not easily find again if they leave. It could be anything from the perfect sized dick to making them laugh. For me, it’s a sort of unique intimacy they aren’t likely to find with the next guy. This single quality is the main thing that kept my gfs from moving on. And it’s what keeps them calling me back years later. But like any good thing, it exhausts. Even if you have a good USP, if you’re dating a nympho, she’s gonna stray, lol, as it’s just in her nature. But there’s the other end of the extreme: I’ve hypothesized about 5-10% of girls, once you win them over, they’ll basically never leave you and you’ll always be the object of their affection. But this comes with its own downsides as these are the girls that will always want to be in your personal space. The types that scoot right up to their man in the truck, always wanting to hold your hand, etc. But these are the extremes. The average woman requires a fair amount of maintenance for you to remain the only one she has eyes for. I used to ask my girlfriends after several years, if your favorite movie star showed up right here while we’re out to dinner and invites you to come with him, would you leave right now and go with him? They knew lying to me wasn’t an option, lol. Fucking hilarious. All they could do was fight back a smile. I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s possible, but it takes a lot of maintenance and an actual USP (you can’t just be any geek off the street). Also, I don’t think it’s a worthwhile endeavor, as it’s too much trying to control things outside yourself, and trying to control this aspect of reality is setting yourself up for a massive let down when reality shows you it’s not in your control. Relationships just end as each party exhausts the good things that were keeping them there. Don’t cling, and accept their impermanence.

“Awakenings” or insights don’t magically reprogram the brain’s behavioral patterns. For that, you’d need to start a much more difficult project than spirituality. Maybe this new project is enabled by your spiritual accomplishments. What if the point of spirituality is to gain access to the depths of your mind such that you actually can, with intense effort, become whatever you desire. Maybe this is the point of spirituality.

“Ignorance is bliss”. It’s when you start thinking about it that it becomes a burden. They don’t see it as anything to escape because they haven’t built the structures to bother them. “The ability to step back and see the bigger picture” only occurs if you have the preference and capacity. Without the preference and capacity, the ability never manifests. Sure, it’s a more sophisticated use of the mind, but I’m not sure calling it “advanced” is the best frame, as it seems to smuggle ego in while at the same time obfuscating the more important preference and capacity mechanisms. Maybe I’ve misread, but you seemed to have projected a problem a very specific cognitive architecture perceives onto the general population. Modern life has a way of wearing all of us down, but in different ways. For thinkers such as ourselves, it’s a different kind of burden with different challenges. The average person isn’t bothered by endless complexity, because they don’t perceive it.

Good observations. Just one idea I think is missing: The mind and endless options aren’t overwhelming most people. This only happens for neurotic thinkers like ourselves, lol. It’s self-inflicted. You claim to be inoculated by a meta perspective, but it’s the meta perspectives that are the most burdensome. Try sharing a meta perspective with the average person to witness how taxing it is. It’s not that the average person couldn’t see it - it’s that the cognition required to see it is too burdensome. It could easily take you 2 hours to successfully transfer a perspective. That’s painful and most people aren’t willing to endure that, which is why they don’t do it naturally. The difference is mostly in cognitive architectures.

The prefrontal cortex allowed us to think greater, but the more thinking opted for over just going with the flow and feeling, the more burdensome. Some minds are glad to pay the tax because the cost is worth it, for whatever reason.

@Natasha Tori Maru I don't see your questions and overall engagement with me as good faith. 2-3 weeks back you asked me some questions about how I got to where I did and I spent 30 minutes or so answering them in sharp detail, explaining to you how my position was built, and your response to me was to not waste my time. So I don't think you're actually curious about my positions so much as you wanting something else. Possibly for me to not sound so sure of myself. Which is a matter of style that just rubs you the wrong way. (current best hypothesis) I assure you, it's the ideas or the consequences or implications of them I'm putting down, not the people. I don't want anyone to feel put down. I should perhaps be more sensitive and less prickly. Ok, let's see if we can get along.

😂

It is not a fact that pink is the best color. But if I say it is, I'm going to have you on my ass talking about "that's not actually true". I'm not going to mark each of my sentences whether or not they're factual. You assumed I held it as a fact because I stated my position without disclaimer or acknowledgment that it wasn't. It was just me saying "this is how I see things and how I operate - my current best understanding". The things I think are true, I will state as if they are without disclaimers, even though they might not actually be true or may be lacking. We've been over this before. I don't have some weird thing about being wrong and not being able to change my mind. I act and speak with the best understanding I have at the time. You might think this is irresponsible or whatever, but I hold an open mind at all times and everything can be revised. This is second nature to me. Show me a better way, and I adopt as soon as I see it. The implication here is that I don't have to go around parading uncertainty to demonstrate my epistemic hygiene. I wasn't saying that. My whole point about direction and use was a tangent that spun off being told not knowing would do me some good. It had nothing to do with user's engagement on this topic. There you go again telling me what's factual and what's not, lol. I can't explain it to you, but your model of me is just wrong on so many levels, and you have no idea what I can know. Also, when I state my reads, they're just that, reads. They could be wrong. I'm basically just stating my reads and you seem to take it personally. Rather than always arguing about me being the way that I am, just argue how I'm wrong. I arrive at a conclusion and then argue on its behalf, to see if it wins out, not to put anyone down. I'm not a sadist. I actually care about transfering my understanding, not about others not having it or holding it above them. I've re-read some of my post and thought they did sound quite arrogant. And I was like, "shit, am I like Leo?", lol. FYI, my modus operandi is more to improve my models of reality, which involves testing them. I don't get much luck here though. The only thing that usually gets tested is my character. I think you and I are not going to get on well. I don't think you have good intentions, and you obviously can't stand my style. So let's just keep a little distance. You can continue to make snide remarks about me, but let keep engagement to a minimum if it doesn't involve good-faith battle of ideas.

No worries bro. I don't mind a little combativeness in argumentation, if you couldn't tell, lol. When I attack or mock ideas, I'm not mocking the people making them, so if I ever seem combative or rude or whatever, that's just a little fun rough-play. We should all want our bad ideas to be playfully mocked to the high heavens, lol.

Obviously when I make that statement, I'm not stating a fact. When I say "the point of arriving at a conclusion is to provide you with direction in thought or action", I'm doing two things: 1) Saying this is what the point of it is to me and what I think it should be. 2) Implying that if the point is something other than this, that's an inferior way, in the sense that those other ways are less wise. The 3 not being equal isn't a belief I hold as fact. It's a position I've worked out. You seem to see these options as all equally valid approaches. You can rank the 3 under "What's the best way to live or be?" and see which is more wise, more mature. Of course it will be a matter of opinion and personal preference, but some ways of being and opinions are wiser than others. Which you obviously agree with because you're telling me that it's best to be open and "not know" and to look very deep to find the things you've found regarding "not knowing", and then you suggested a book to help me reach those understandings. You imply there is a "proper way". Same thing I did. Neither, lol. There are deeper motivations. "Truth for its own sake" needs to be unpacked and reconciled with how psychology actually works. Someone having a deep curiosity about aliens does not equal "I care about truth for its own sake". lol. At best, "I care about truth for its own sake" is a lazy description of one's true motivations and reward system. At worst, it's a tool of the ego and fosters self-deception. Here, it's most often a blessed-from-on-high virtue signal. A fine specimen for the "conformity" thread.

I'm not saying to never rest at "I don't know". I'm saying people are avoiding moving away from "I don't know" because they prefer not to. Not because they're thinking clearly and staying humble. They're prefer exotic explanations over mundane ones. Also, I botched my idea with action/non-action. The point I was trying to drive home was that the whole purpose of epistemology is to arrive at a conclusion, and the point of arriving at a conclusion is to provide you with direction in thought or action. Moving in the right direction is what it's for. I'm advocating for the application of sound reasoning, critical thinking, and honest updating. To critically test every claim and to objectively weigh the evidence. That's all. For each incident, exhaust the mundane before reaching for the miraculous. If you do an honest accounting and still find the mundane explanations lacking, fine. But you have to do the honest accounting first. Otherwise you're just doing what Q'Anon and flat-earthers do except you're wearing an "I don't know" humility costume, thinking it buys you cover.

Sounds like it's doing you harm. Not-knowing is meant to be provisional, not something you mire in indefinitely. Many here don't seem to understand the point of good epistemology. The point is to arrive at the most accurate conclusions given the data. And what's the point of arriving at conclusions? ACTION, or maybe better "Non-action" Good epistemology is a filter. What is the job of a filter? To collect clean outputs by discarding pollutants. It's meant to be a tool, not an identity. Not a badge of honor. Not something you parrot, but something you actually fucking employ. You say it's possible you're just spinning webs of bullshit. How about you elaborate on that in the same loving detail you apply to your alien project? You don't build a detailed classification of things you think you're inventing. You're making this shit up and believing in their possibilities to a large degree. Then, at the end, you build an escape hatch. The flat-earther has done at least one thing epistemology requires. They've stuck their necks out. Perpetual one-line hedges that you could be full of shit, then not making any gains in one direction or the other isn't what good epistemology looks like. You work toward a conclusion of what is most likely, then you state your position. You falsify and weigh evidence until something gives. At least Q'Anon and flat-earthers have the balls to make falsifiable statements. "I could be wrong" disclaimers and while not updating is a tell that you're not trying to be right or wrong at all. And that's the point of these alien projects. They're pure entertainment for you and most everyone who indulges. To prove them bullshit would bring your fun time to an end. To never arrive is the point. Which is why you spend the majority of your time consuming content aimed at their truthfulness rather than content calling out the bullshit. Do you realize this is the same exact thing flat-earthers say. The same exact thing Q'Anon, astrology, ghost believers, and Scientologists say? When your best defense against a serious critic maps 1:1 to the best defense of Q'Anon and the like, that's a strong signal worth paying attention to. Aliens almost certainly exist in our universe, but your 70-80% or whatever conviction that they're visiting us on earth is an unfounded, fantastical leap. Every piece of evidence anyone has presented, when put under a critical rigorous analysis, has mundane explanations none of you can refute. Yet you all are making gigantic leaps, dismissing those analyses, and saying "I still think it's true, we just can't know", and it's all licensed by Leo, your epistemic authority, because hey, he's the most epistemically responsible human alive, right? Leo would get torn to shreds in an actual debate on this. His "high volume reporting - not everyone is full of shit", his 1930's Italy, his Navy video, all of these have very good explanations that you're all dismissing in favor of something more exciting. Typically, that's fine, but it's maximally hypocritical for this specific community.

lol. That’s some cool art.