something_else

How long is your typical interaction with a girl after you start talking to her? What does it typically go like? Who typically ends it, you or her?

It’s really messy. Definitely not abundantly clear what happened yet. But I’ll give my interpretation of what I’ve seen. From the evidence, it looks like she willingly consented to a threesome with one guy she trusted and his friend, but the situation quickly escalated beyond what she was comfortable with. Exactly what happened from there onwards is less clear, but it’s pretty apparent that at least several more men got involved and that she consumed significant amounts of ketamine, weed, and alcohol that night. I’ve seen multiple times what the combination of a lot of alcohol + ketamine does to people, let alone weed on top of that. You are not a remotely functional human after that and it is very apparent from the outside. At this point, every guy that saw her would be able to tell that she was in no state to consent. Let alone consent to group sex. Even if she said yes to more men joining, which it is disputed if she did or not, at this point I think there is little excuse for the guys continuing. Yet at this point one of the guys instead advertises “free pussy upstairs” to 50 frat dudes, which prompts even more men to join. By this point you have one drunk, high girl on her own with up to 7 random men surrounding her. Expecting her actions to be rational both during this encounter and after is unfair. Bearing this in mind I think is a plausible explanation for her inconsistent recounts afterwards. That’s what you would expect. Substance and alcohol use probably left her with very fuzzy and disjointed memories of what happened later into the night, but substantially clearer memories of the initial consensual encounter where she was less intoxicated. The mind can easily rationalise that into “I consented to all of it” before taking time to process what really happened. Two personal experiences also play into my interpretation of this last bit too. Firstly, I’ve met multiple women who have been spiked and essentially just shrugged it off afterwards or even laughed about it. Said it wasn’t that bad, or it wasn’t that big of a deal. Or they question themselves about how much they had to drink. One of them was even raped after being spiked and she told me this story like it was a joke while laughing, but you could tell it was like she was laughing through the pain. Trauma like this can do strange things to your mind. Defence mechanisms are powerful. Secondly, my closest friend went to Harvard and I have heard SO many stories from him about frat/club guys. Spiking girls or getting them drunk enough to take advantage is considered acceptable, or even encouraged, behaviour in many frat houses. The “free pussy” message and responses to it do strongly suggest this was one of those frat houses. Putting all of this together I just struggle to see how most of the 7 men involved are innocent of any crimes. Even if they did not directly participate they were aware what was happening and did nothing. That isn’t a crime, but it’s still extremely unethical. I keep an open mind though, and I’m interested to see what other evidence comes out. But at this stage it certainly feels like this went well beyond what could be classified as irresponsible behaviour.

Out of sheer curiosity, what was her reasoning for how anyone could easily make money?

Great points . I didn't really actively think about ways to make my last girlfriend's life better most of the time, the opportunities just arose naturally and I took them. Probably the most excited I've ever seen her was after she told me somebody ate her fruit pastels at work. Before she got home I went out the shop and bought her two more packs and gave them to her when she got home. Like 5 minutes of my time, £3 spent, and I'd never seen her look so happy. The other thing she got super excited about was when I'd bring her back cool rocks from a hike. 2 seconds of my time, £0 spent. Really simple, small gestures that show you're thinking about the other person make the world of difference in a relationship. Often more difference than the bigger gestures.

I’m meeting more girls through dating apps than ever before. Though I heavily support the idea of meeting people IRL. It should be the primary way you date and meet people. However if you can make apps work for you, they’re great to have running in the background. Time spent building an excellent profile pays dividends for years with little effort on your part. There are three things I don’t like about them though. Firstly, they get repetitive. Same conversations over and over and over which can give you a kind of burnout feeling. Secondly, these companies are pretty sketch, and I think they should be regulated quite heavily given how influential they are. They’re almost certainly up to some automated fucky shit to get people to pay. For example, my tinder gold membership expired last week for example and now miraculously I got more likes in 1 week (that I can’t see) than I did in 3 weeks prior with gold, and there are ads teasing me about gold unlocking them every time I open the app. I’ve had similar experiences before as well where I feel like I’m being manipulated by a dating algorithm crafted to keep my attention and extract money. Thirdly, I fucking hate how they handle bans. My hinge account got banned while I was travelling. I hadn’t even talked to anyone on the app in a week when it happened. Permanent. No reason given. No option to appeal. Comprehensive fingerprinting which immediately detects matching face, photos, phone IMEI, phone number, IP, email, Apple/Google account, so creating a new account is near enough impossible without significant measures.

It's one of those things you think and do, but don't necessarily say out loud. It's a bit cringe because it could be a lie just to make himself look better. It breaks the show don't tell rule.

@oOo I think we’re talking past each other on the level of claim being made. I’ll grant you two things. The examples I pulled don’t establish that this behaviour is currently widespread on the forum, and using ChatGPT to find them means I should have checked the surrounding thread context beyond the single comment. If my claim were “this is a pervasive problem in this forum in the year 2026,” then yes, I’d need much better and more recent evidence. But that isn’t the claim I’m defending. I’m saying that developmental hierarchies like SD can be used as a vehicle for ego/status inflation, and that this can sometimes be reasonably inferred from the language of an individual post without establishing a stable personality trait. You yourself seem to concede that with the “talking to Yellow and below is like talking to children” example. Once we agree that this is a clear instance, then the question of whether the phenomenon exists is basically settled. What remains open is how common it is. I also think your demand for repeated behaviour/predictive reliability makes sense if I were claiming “this person is an arrogant/narcissistic person” or diagnosing some enduring ego structure. But that’s different from saying “this particular statement is self-elevating/status-signalling.” Context can absolutely overturn that interpretation, but then the relevant response would be to show how the surrounding context changes the meaning of the statement. Not to require a longitudinal psychological profile before we can make any interpretation at all.

You could def pull this off in a way that women find attractive. Doesn’t sound like he did, but it’s def possible.

Uhm. I hate to break it to you, but this really isn't a well designed website. It's incredibly overwhelming, too bright, too much going on, no consistency among UI components, no hierarchy among UI elements. It's not immediately apparent what is going on at all.

@oOo The shift is pretty straightforward. Initially you claimed no one had provided a single example who would satisfy the criticism. Once examples were provided, the standard became repeated behaviour across time that can reliably predict future behaviour. I don’t think that standard is remotely necessary to say a given comment displays ego inflation, or that people will use a hierarchy like spiral dynamics to inflate their own ego. People are drawn to status, hierarchy and ego inflation like moths to a flame. Take the following list: ------------------ “I'm pretty sure I'm the only person on the planet who could help you with this, as no one else understands enough about spiral dynamics...” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/17011-2017-in-review-or-why-i-no-longer-need-actualizedorg/?comment=172825&do=findComment “Everything changed for me when I moved from Turquoise to Coral... When Turquoise people talk, it's not long before my mind starts screaming, Ego!” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/26536-is-enlightenment-awareness-of-awareness/?comment=300651&do=findComment “Tier2 is pretty low of a devleopment imo, it's not that hard anymore.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/86897-hurdles-of-being-sd-tier-2/?comment=1228577&do=findComment “Some people tell me I'm more turquoise than coral, but that's because those people are either green or turquoise themselves...” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/29944-typology-discussions/?comment=364548&do=findComment “You sound Green. Wait till ur Turquoise, Coral, or Teal.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/47437-spiral-dynamics-turquoise-blue-relationship-and-interaction/?comment=602241&do=findComment “Perhaps your dogma and ideology is blinding you? I'm stage yellow and I have transcended that stuff.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/62455-what-do-you-guys-think-about-this-vegan-timelapse-video/?comment=855147&do=findComment “Everybody is blue or orange, while I am green and yellow.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/4266-finding-yellow-friends-a-yellow-job-yellow-resources/?comment=37602&do=findComment “So our communication and things we do together is mostly me helping him grow to my level.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/47437-spiral-dynamics-turquoise-blue-relationship-and-interaction/?comment=600883&do=findComment “I have this problem of communicating with people below my stage... I don't know if I should even talk to them at all...” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/45910-how-to-communicate-with-people-below-or-above-the-spiral/?comment=577373&do=findComment “Clearly he's coming at it from a tier 2 yellow perspective... you're coming at it yourself through a stage green pseudo intellectual perspective.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/111754-tier-2-debates-tier-1-bryan-johnson-on-jubilee/?comment=1703992&do=findComment “Talking to yellow and below is like talking to children.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/74536-i-bet-game-is-broken-at-stage-coral/?comment=1028203&do=findComment “I consider myself stage yellow, going to turquoise, so you can imagine that women that are stage orange and bellow don't interest me at all.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/54879-lack-of-attraction-related-to-spiritual-work/?comment=724731&do=findComment “Girls tend not to be high conscious anyway in SD yellow way which is my development level.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/90680-i’m-not-attracted-to-females-of-my-own-age/?comment=1287297&do=findComment “Personally I identify best with stage yellow... only people in Tier 2 would be able to really understand it.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/7495-spiral-dynamics-yellow-to-turquoise/?comment=157163&do=findComment “I am a stage yellow muslim... If u are honest and innocent and study self improvement for 10 years, u will go back to islam.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/88267-leo-gura’s-false-assessment-about-muhammad/?comment=1249849&do=findComment “as yellow, I don't think beliefs can be ‘right’, only ‘effective and ineffective’... Maybe none of you see this yet perhaps.” https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/34741-the-loneliness-of-yellow-spiral-thinking/?comment=421726&do=findComment ------------------ In all of these examples, people are using their self-assigned Spiral Dynamics stage to elevate themselves over others, dismiss people beneath them, or give their own perspective additional status. You can call that an interpretation rather than a fact, but if none of these qualify as examples of the behaviour being discussed, I'm not sure what possibly could. More importantly, my argument technically only requires one example. “Some people use hierarchical developmental models to inflate their ego or claim status” is an existential claim, not a claim about prevalence. One genuine case establishes that it happens. That's really all I'm arguing. I'm not making some grand claim about this forum specifically. I'm saying people will turn hierarchical systems like Spiral Dynamics into status games because that's a very ordinary human tendency. This forum just happens to provide a convenient dataset because people talk about Spiral Dynamics constantly.

Nice just isn't really a distinctive personality trait. If the best someone can say about you is that you're "nice" then it means you are likely quite boring. Kindness is attractive, especially if coming from a place of strength where you choose to be kind.

Yes, shame and guilt are stage blue values brought about to tame stage red’s wildness. Some degree of shame and guilt is healthy in that regard, but the higher stages find better ways to tame that energy like education and opportunity. What happens with anti-porn and no-fap is an extreme amount of shame built up around something fairly natural and harmless in moderation. This is not healthy. I agree with LordFall that if you’ve got drive, goals and at least some success in your life, porn and jerking off is pretty inconsequential. If cumming to a porn star’s asshole is frequently the highlight of your day then yea, probably a bit of shame and guilt may help you move towards better values.

This is counterintuitively a really bad idea. You actually want the big porn sites around because they respond to regulation and reason much more readily, while the smaller porn sites do not. And you don't really want people going to the sketchy smaller websites. Better to try and ban the sketchy smaller sites if anything. The UK's porn ban recently is a good example of this dynamic at work; they legally required porn sites to enforce strict age verification via ID or face scans to prevent children being exposed to porn. Good intentions, terrible implementation. The only porn sites actually following this are the big ones. This drives people, and particularly worryingly kids, to the dodgy porn sites that don't have strict age verification. In general, there is such a high demand for porn that no matter how restricted you make it people will find a way. In general I also don't really like the govt getting involved too much in automating censorship on the internet, even if it's seemingly for a good cause. It sets up precedent and infrastructure for future clamp downs on freedom of information that's deemed 'harmful'.

Your standard of evidence is both far too high, and shifting substantially between comments. This is especially egregious because you’re also making broad psychological judgments about the forum without providing the same breadth of evidence you are demanding from others to make similar judgements. Nobody needs a longitudinal predictively validated behavioural model to reasonably say “this post looks ego-inflated.” That’s an interpretation of the language being used, not a scientific diagnosis of the person. And once concrete examples were actually provided, the claim shifted from “show me even one example” to “show me a repeated pattern across time that can reliably predict future behaviour.” That’s just moving the goalposts. I think the fairest interpretation of this issue is that self-identifying as Yellow/Turquoise does not automatically imply ego inflation, but there are examples which plainly contain hierarchical self-aggrandisement. You can dispute the interpretation, but demanding near-scientific proof before any social inference is allowed just makes your own argument completely unfalsifiable.

Only the opposite, I’m not reading all of that lol. It was every example ChatGPT could find of people self-identifying as yellow, I could have explained that better in the post however I did explain that in a response a few comments later. Some of them are relatively reasonable, some of them are pretty obviously people pumping up their own tires and building an ego around being Tier 2.

Dude right now it can't even tell me whether we should use a library or build an implementation from scratch for a particular project at work. It has access to our entire codebase and knowledge base, our coding standards, and our project requirements. All the context it could reasonably need, and it still flipfops back and forth between recommending both of them after every prompt. The slightest bit of pushback and it does a 180. Slightest bit of pushback again and it does another 180. Point being it is incapable of making decisive architectural decisions like this reliably. For the same project I vibe coded a POC in like 30 minutes for a project that is going to take us around 3 months to build properly. Amazing? Yes. Except we gave the POC to our designer so she could vibe code some other features into it for experimentation and it just fell apart the more changes she made. It was a house of cards. Pure vibe coding is very unsustainable because the poor architectural choices of the AI compound exponentially over time. Imagine somebody non-technical came to you tomorrow and asked you to work on their web app that they'd built entirely with Claude vibe-coding over the past year. Do you seriously think that has any chance in hell of being remotely maintainable? The idea that we would let LLM agents operate autonomously in place of an entire dev team is kind of a joke, and I don't see that changing in the next few years. Maybe in 5-10.

I think in most cases people are pretty willing to accept someone is more developed when they feel the person has earned it in whatever hierarchies they value. If they instead feel like someone is trying to bluff, manipulate or dominate their way into higher status than they deserve, there’s a natural urge to knock them back down. In short, arrogance triggers people because it often feels like an attempt to impose dominance and status instead of earning it. It violates the “show don’t tell” principle. I think this can actually serve as an indicator of how developed you really are. If you find people are constantly trying to drag you back down it may indicate your opinion of yourself is higher than those around you think it ought to be from the evidence they’ve seen. If you were really as good as you say you are, they’d call you confident instead of arrogant. There are obviously people who simply cannot stand anybody being better than them, but that’s a different phenomenon. People generally seem quite willing to grant status to people who earn their respect. As an example pertinent to this thread, I think Leo could refer to himself as stage yellow without anybody really interpreting that as arrogance or ego, there’s just plenty of evidence for it and so it would read like more of an honest self-assessment.

The Big 5 is a better personality model. It allows for change over time and is continuous rather than discrete. But it’s less popular for that same reason. Humans like discrete categories. Cognitive functions are cool too, and I think quite a valuable model for understanding types of thought and perception. But mapping them to MBTI types is… questionable

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