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Dude this is so passive aggressive I should clarify, I didn’t mean all of those were examples of bragging or ego. I could have been clearer on that. It was just every example ChatGPT could find of people self-identifying as tier 2. Some, including yours, are pretty reasonable. A lot are clearly just people pumping up their own tyres.

It's simply an effect noted in some people, and I notice the effect in myself. It doesn't necessarily apply to everyone, you may be different. I don't have that much interest in wildly ambitious goals, although I can see the value in them. They just don't work particularly well for me personally as a motivational tool. Small, achievable process-focused goals tend to work better for me. By process-focused goals I mean setting goals for consistency rather than outcome. For example if I want to get good at a particular skill, say a sport, gym, dating, programming etc. I set a goal like "I will go out 2 nights per week and initiate conversations with 5 people" instead of "I will be dating a model by the end of the year". Again, everybody is different. For some people the latter works better. One of the books on Leo's book list called Mastery covers my thoughts on this quite well. One of its central points is that mastery in a domain comes largely from consistency and learning to enjoy the process rather than constantly focusing on results.

I'm less convinced of this. Our team has been using AI agents for around 6-8 months now and they are amazing, but still a long way away from being able to do the entire job without human input. And it's not like what we are working on is cutting edge, it's full stack web development. Most likely there will be less jobs in software engineering because 1 developer can now do the work of 2-3. However that doesn't mean software engineering is going away. It's just changing.

I often find telling people about my goals makes me less inclined to follow through. When I noticed this I researched it and there is actually a relatively well-understood mechanism behind it. It's called the Gollwitzer Substitution Effect. The general idea is that telling people about your goals can make the desired identity feel partly achieved before you've actually earned it. That social recognition gives you some of the psychological reward of already being that person, which can reduce your motivation to do the work required to become them. As a general rule I now rarely tell people about my bigger goals, especially close friends and family where this effect is particularly powerful. I like keeping the motivation bottled up inside, not letting it out until I have actually achieved something.

I listed out about 20 examples I found on the previous page if you're curious. It actually happens even more than I expected it to.

I'm actually loving my job more than I ever have. Though I did have that feeling ffor a period of time, as did my coworkers. I'm lucky though the company I work for is small and listened to the dev team when we were complaining that the current system wasn't working. We've now restructured very fast to get the most out of AI tools. This restructure has actually made me enjoy my job a LOT more. Here is a brief summary of the restructure. Before Team of 8 devs, 2 product managers, 1 designer Split into two squads of 4 devs Each time works on a big project which takes 1 to 3 months to complete Architecture of the solution is planned by the tech lead Tickets are written by the tech lead for each dev Devs pick up the tickets and implement Design and product team work very separately from everyone else, almost exclusively with the tech lead After Team of 8 devs, 2 product managers, 1 designer Each dev works on a their own 1 to 3 month project, assigned to them based on preference and skill They form a 'Pod' with our designer, one of the product managers and a tech lead (designers, product and tech lead are distributed across multiple pods) The dev plans the architecture themselves They write their own tickets The dev ultimately has complete ownership of that project end-to-end Summary This works incredibly well with AI coding agents. The previous setup is more traditional agile, and with AI coding agents it was a nightmare. Everybody in a squad is producing a lot of code for the same projects, so everybody is stepping on each other's toes. At the same time, you end up feeling like a meat interface for the AI agent because you are just told what tickets to pick up, then you put them into Claude, review the results, then iterate on it to a solution. There is little architectural thought involved as the tech lead tended to handle that part early on. In the new setup I get to pick my own projects, plan out complex architectural solutions to them myself, break it down into a plan, break that down into tickets, implement each ticket, and work closely with product and designers the whole way along. In the end I have a single project which I feel completely responsible for and I love it.

It seriously developed me as a person. If you neglect your social life you’ll probably be miserable. If you neglect sex and dating you’ll probably be miserable too. There are ways to do these things more consciously without completely rejecting them

Our team used Claude (Fable and Opus) until around 2 months ago, then we switched to ChatGPT / Codex. Oh my god, they're so much better to work with. I thought I was going insane using Claude because it talks in such weird, long prose that makes very little sense. It's INFURIATING. I hear they've fixed it in the newer models, but frankly Astra/Sol are faster and arguably better for coding. And I still think their way of writing is more human.

Here are like 20 for you

Agree entirely, this matches my experience. I think if you're already in the field and competent, AI boosts your productivity 2-3x. It's getting much harder to break into the field though.

I think there are existing solutions for this, do you use any CRM software already? Or AI outreach solutions? These tools exist. Throwing AI alone at the spreadsheets here is probably sub-optimal. And vibe-coding a cutting edge CRM with zero technical experience is... extremely optimistic. Sorry. I think it can work if you found a business niche you know well, for me software engineering, though it has a couple of major risks. As AI models get better, you'll be able to drop them into an organisation and they'll figure out how to collect the context they need themselves. Big tech companies are making it easier and easier to connect agents to different bits of software through protocols like MCP. Even now, a small / medium company using Microsoft services can just pay for a business Copilot subscription, download the salesforce connector and they're good to go. The model can instantly search all Microsoft services and your CRM for context. For most businesses this is more than enough and it's not really something you could reliably charge for I don't think. In some fields like software engineering it's a bit more complex because we are typically pushing these AI models to their limits. Our team has a full suite of Codex skills to make the AI conform to our coding standards, but I suspect there are less organised dev teams out there who keep putting this off. So there is definitely space for context-engineering in this field, and I assume other technical fields like Mathematics. But these are fields where you need deep domain knowledge to produce effective skills. So it isn't really a great way to grift a quick buck.

I have a lot to share on this from a software engineering perspective

I think you could definitely sell that premise. A custom or retrained model you can realistically create is unlikely to be competitive with frontier models for most tasks though. Retraining or fine-tuning is somewhat old news now for most use cases. You'd likely be better off running a context-engineering agency that configures the frontier models for companies through skills, plugins, custom agent loops, CLAUDE/AGENT.md files and other forms of external memory and context. Getting this setup right massively improves their performance on tasks for a business which can provide a lot of value. AI is all about getting the right context into the model just now. On your more general point, I don't know how this protects you against the risks of post-scarcity AI-driven world. We're talking about a world where there are basically two classes of people, those with control over the means to produce value and those without. Being able to build custom models or tweak them does not put you in the former unless you earn so much money that you are competitive with the likes of the massive AI companies who actually control the most capable models. Oh, right, yea on this point I agree. My point was not that everybody has equal value in the marketplace just now, my point is that everybody basically would in a post-scarcity AI-driven world. "bringing it into the real world" > "proposes highly unrealistic theoretical scenario" I'm only talking about a theoretical post-scarcity AI-driven world so much because that was the original topic of discussion. I have been trying to keep this discussion anchored to that original point. You said it was just my gut feeling that such a world is more likely to be dystopian than utopian, I think I have provided a fairly solid argument that it is very possible it will be, and that it is not just a gut feeling. I'm interpreting everybody 'owning AI equally' to mean everyone has access to a frontier model that they have full control over with no guardrails, which cannot be taken away from them. If that's not what you meant then please correct me. But assuming it is, who knows if that would be a good thing. It's just your gut feeling that it would be good. You would then have dictators all over the world who now potentially have the capability to produce an extremely effective bio weapon, or to hack into nuclear launch sites and reactors of other countries. To assume that such a chaotic and rapid transformation of the world would be positive is, I think, quite unwise.

Diagnosing someone's developmental stages can also be quite cringe. It comes across as patronising. Because SD is hierarchal, when you are 'diagnosing' someone with Stage Green blindspots the implication is that you are more developed than them as a person, even if that's not the intention. Obviously that annoys people. If the goal is to help them develop, that's likely a bad strategy. It's better to just point out the flaws in reasoning without actually labelling them as 'Stage green blindspots'. One of the capacities associated with Yellow is being able to understand people operating from different value systems and communicate in a way that makes sense within their frame. That means showing someone the limitations of their thinking without constantly pointing out, or implying, that they’re lower down the spiral than you. If we are talking about the stages theoretically and discretely I think this is valid. But their expressions in practice are never discrete, people exist on a continuous spectrum across the spiral. There's a reason the term used to describe someone's level of development is "centre of gravity is around stage green" rather than someone "is stage green". People may have aspects of stage yellow in their development even if their centre of gravity is around green. If you are operating from the perspective of "I am yellow and they are green, therefore I am more developed across all domains of life than them" then you are using the model wrong. Check out the document below, it has shit formatting but I can't find the better version. Cowan specifically warns about people identifying too strongly with Tier 2, and argues that the need to proclaim yourself as Tier 2 can itself display traits that are at odds with what Tier 2 is supposed to represent. He also warns about it becoming a status symbol, and about using the model to look down on people as less developed because they aren’t on the same “Tier 2” plane as you. https://spiraldynamics-integral.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Cowan-Christopher-First-and-Second-Tier.pdf I agree that you rarely see people posting on a quest to develop a deep understanding of systems here, but that's hardly surprising. You're ultimately just very unlikely to develop that kind of understanding from a forum debate, and this place is rife with high-level shit-posting and intellectual sparring to boost one's own ego. I'm far from immune to that, in fact I enjoy it. Aside from that the forum is also really good for giving and receiving more practical advice. But the higher level stuff just isn't something that can be absorbed very well in this format because it doesn't capture attention well enough to keep the thread popular, so people stop posting that kind of content. I don't really agree with this. I see plenty of people making interesting points across the spiral here. I feel like this demonstrates the issue with building an identity around tier 2. Rather than acknowledge that someone from any level of development may have interesting ideas, you are flattening them all down into caricatures of their development stage.

Cringe is largely about delivery and context, rather than content. If a software engineer said “I studied systems architecture at university, and here is the specific principle I think you’re overlooking” I wouldn’t find that cringe. They’re giving a reason and explaining why their background is relevant. If instead they said “I studied systems architecture, so you’re wrong and simply lack the experience I have” that has a much higher potential to be cringe because the credential is being used as a substitute for explaining the disagreement. That latter is much closer to how Spiral Dynamics stages get used on this forum. There is also another important difference between the two cases. “software engineer” is relatively bounded, competence in that field can be verified quite easily. Whereas “I’m Yellow” is often a self-assigned assessment of one’s own developmental level for which there is little evidence on a forum. So using “I’m Yellow” as evidence that your interpretation is more correct than someone you deem as "Green" will often not land well unless you can really back it up to the point where people believe you are at that level. I think this point misses what the Spiral Dynamics hierarchy is supposed to represent. The point isn’t that Yellow is simply “more correct” than Green, Blue, Red, etc. Each stage embodies ways of thinking that are adaptive to particular conditions and problems. Sometimes a Green lens may be the most appropriate one, sometimes Blue, Red, Orange, and so on. So “I’m Yellow, therefore I understand this better than someone at Green” doesn’t follow the system. Someone whose centre of gravity is Green could have a much better understanding of a particular domain than someone who considers themselves Yellow. Developmental stage is not a substitute for domain knowledge, experience, or the quality of the actual argument. In fact, if Yellow is supposed to recognise the functional value of the earlier stages, then automatically dismissing a Green perspective because it is Green seems contrary to the very thing Yellow is supposed to understand. Yellow is not meant to be a label to boost someone's ego and assert dominance, authority, or correctness. So when it is used that way it often comes across as cringe.

Yea, exactly. I rarely think explicitly about "producing value". I find that to be a flawed framework for me personally, although it is definitely necessary sometimes. Same as you, I put effort into what I am passionate about and what I am good at, and that often brings value to others. But bringing value to others was never really the underlying motivation so much as a side effect, or a tool necessary to sustain doing things I enjoy. There's a reason we're drawn to people who provide value from a place of deep intrinsic motivation. When you meet someone like this they often have a mystical quality to them that is very appealing. Passion is very magnetic. Compare that to people who are coming from place of strong extrinsic motivation, or who have a deep inner passion but it's for something external like money or power. Often they come across like grifters, or in the worst case psychopaths. Obviously most people are somewhere in the middle, but looking at the extremes on either side I know which side I'd rather lean towards.

Yes. It is one of the things that defines us as a species. Most humans strive for it, some with more success than others. What is someone meant to do? "ChatGPT defend me and my family against the AI apocalypse" What is the pitfall you are talking about? It isn't clear to me from your comment, could you expand? Yes, a safety net is a good idea. I think UBI would be great if implemented well, but we have no way of knowing that it will be. "Competent" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in making that second sentence sound reasonable, but competence of an average individual becomes meaningless in a heavily-automated post-scarcity world. You are outcompeted by a billionaire's ASI in every domain you could possibly develop competence in. That essentially leaves your argument at "it's a good thing if the rich people who just happen to control the AI continue to empower themselves and their dynasties at the expense of everybody else" which is pretty hard point to defend IMO. I don't know if you realise just how different a post-scarcity world could be from our current one. It's possible money and wealth would cease to exist in their current forms. Our current tools barely work now, let alone in this theoretical world.

Get 10 or 15 friends and you’ll have options for plans most weeknights, and parties and clubs to go to at weekends. You’ll meet tons of girls this way. Social circles are exponential. Through every friend you will often meet a bunch of other people, many of whom will be girls. This is particularly true in university. On top of this, girls find you more attractive when you have friends. Having few or no close friends will make most girls lose interest in you very quickly. Massive action may be required but putting all of your eggs in one basket, cold approach, is unwise. Better to distribute that massive action across several areas like social circle, style, gym, dating apps, and yes, cold approach.

@yetineti I agree with your underlying point, which is that when someone tries to enforce their system of value on me (which is what I interpret @LordFall as doing to you), my inherent reaction is to question it, or tell them to fuck off. I think the problem you’ve run into is that you’re now trying to justify that stance at length, which leaves you playing the status game you’re trying to deconstruct. Better to simply not participate, or firmly stand your ground. Define your own internal values and measure yourself against those. Ironically, doing that may well result in you providing more value to the world even under the external framework @LordFall is trying to box you into. I think that is also a point you have made before too, which I also agree with. I don’t really disagree with @LordFall either. Providing value to others is important, and to some degree it’s part of living a good and successful life. Generally, being able to genuinely help other people will create more opportunities and better outcomes for you as well. Where I disagree is that you don’t need to constantly measure yourself and others against these external hierarchies in order to do that, unless your goal is to rise to the very top of them. Most people don’t need that. You can define success according to your own values and still live a very fulfilling, valuable life. For some people, their internal values will align very closely with the external measures society rewards. For others, they won’t. Not everybody who loves music wants to be a rockstar. Some people are perfectly content performing locally, making good music, connecting with people, and having that be enough. There’s nothing wrong with that. I think you both just take very different approaches to life and have very different value systems, so you may never agree. And that’s fine.

I agree with all of this, however I don’t think a post-scarcity UBI driven world would be as happy as it sounds. You could have a society where everyone has their basic needs covered, cheap entertainment, healthcare, food etc, while almost all productive assets and economic power are owned by a tiny group of people. So materially, life might actually be very comfortable. But if you have almost no ability to compete economically, accumulate wealth, or meaningfully change your position, then you’re still completely dependent on whatever redistribution the ownership class decides is necessary to keep society stable. That doesn’t sound like freedom to me. It sounds like some kind of techno-feudalism. My argument is not that AI is going to create an awful life for everybody, it’s more that I think the range of possible outcomes here is massive and very uncertain. It’s IMO unwise to assume that a post-scarcity ASI-driven world will create a good life for everybody. There are so many ways it could go wrong before we even reach that point, and even more ways it can go wrong if we reach it. For example, imagine ASI eventually gives a tiny number of people the ability to replace most human labour and potentially wield an unprecedented amount of power over society. The danger isn’t that every billionaire would abuse that power, or even that most would. The danger is that you only need a small number of sufficiently ruthless people controlling sufficiently powerful systems for things to go catastrophically wrong. Human history gives us plenty of examples of what people are capable of when power becomes extremely concentrated, and ASI could amplify that power to a level we’ve never seen before.

How does any of this prove we are all going to be living a life of abundance? I'm assuming the mechanism by which you see that happening is UBI, but it isn't nearly as developed as you made it out to be in your last post. The Canada bill would require the government to develop a framework for implementing something along the lines of UBI, and it may not even pass. Even if it does pass, it doesn't actually implement UBI, it just requires the government to develop a framework. Progress, yes, but not as far reaching as you make it out to be. It's also just a single country. The EU has a citizens' initiative advocating for UBI, but that isn't legislation being passed either. Initiatives are proposed for all sorts of things that never ultimately become law. So where is the actual mechanism that gets us from "AI makes production much cheaper" to "everyone lives in abundance"? What makes you think utopia is the way this will go, and not dystopia?

I would argue it is the primary thing worth considering, given that it has basically defined our species for 200,000 years of history. Also, I don't think we are really very close to AI actually doing everything for us and providing us all with a life of abundance. I use AI all day for my job as a software engineer and it is insanely good, but not anywhere near good enough that it could be trusted to do the job autonomously. That would be catastrophic. And coding is the complex task that these models are by far the best at right now. We are at a stage where the economy is going to shift massively in the coming years because you now need one person to do the job of 4 in some white collar fields. But predicting how this will actually go in practice is hard.

Stop viewing social circle as a distinct pickup skill, or as a tool to get laid. There is 'social circle game' and there is 'making friends and having a social life'. You want the latter. Stop putting your energy into cold approach, if it's not working for you after 2500 approaches then it's not probably not going to work at all. Go make some new friends instead. It's pretty easy, especially in university. Having a good group of friends significantly increases your self esteem and confidence. It makes you much more attractive. It exposes you to tons of cool new people (men and women) through parties and events. It will also just make you enjoy your life in university much more. You want to be meeting people mostly organically instead of entirely through cold approach, I promise you it will work so much better for you.

I don't disagree entirely, however I think a core component of improving your dating life involves organically instilling a feeling of high value in yourself. If all you do is get really good at mimicking high value behaviour, that doesn't necessarily mean you ever develop that feeling of being "good enough" deep down, which is what makes a lot of those behaviours come naturally in the first place. I think a more holistic approach is better than going all in on behaviour modification through pickup, though I don't deny that can help some people. Focusing on building a solid all-round life that you actually enjoy living will, for most guys, make a huge difference to dating. The "high value" behaviours start to flow more naturally when you genuinely believe you bring value to other people's lives. For example, if I list the stuff I've done in the past 6 years to improve my dating life in order of what had the biggest impact, I'd rank them like this: Building a solid social circle of deep friendships Better grooming / style Long-term travel / backpacking (such a good way to build natural confidence and social skills) Gym Actively practising pickup and learning "correct" behaviour Just generally getting older and wiser I specifically noticed that doing stuff which made me feel fulfilled with my life massively increased my confidence and "high value" behaviours. When I was forcing myself to go out every weekend and do approaches, I actually felt pretty awful. There was value in it, but it often made me feel dirty and sleazy, not fulfilled. So I don't think pickup is useless. I just think deliberately training the behaviours is only one part of it, and probably not the most important one.

Full material abundance for me, but not for thee. This vision of utopia is entirely dependent on powerful people being willing to give up what differentiates them from the masses, which is extremely unlikely. Extinction is more likely. I suspect once humanity develops this kind of tech it will make wealth inequality much worse, not better.