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After dating apps appeared, dating was ruined as a result, and this quickly started to influence dating outside of said apps as well. If you go back another 20 or 30 years, I'll claim that this wasn't much of an issue, meaning that dating was ruined by something recent (be it wokeness, feminism, signaling games or moralizers. With dating apps serving to accelerate us towards the nash equilibrium).
Now, people complain about the past because it was "immoral" and "unequal", and fair enough, but if you're on the side of modern morality and equality, then you're supporting the forces which are making healthy human relationships into a rare occurrence. People who want to "improve the world" in a way which rejects tradition are to blame that the world is getting worse, and it doesn't matter if they have IQs in the 140s, that they love altruism, that they have mathematical frameworks for reducing poverty and "saving the planet", they will fail, life will get worse for everyone, and they will continue to double down on their methods because they sound correct and make sense theoretically, especially to other smart people.
If the real world failed you, it's either because:
1: Society told you to be a "Good person", and you became somebody that society approved of but that women had no interest in. In other words, society told you how to act in order to benefit society, and not how to act in order to benefit yourself or be popular with women.
2: You're a reasonable human being, but the women around you bought into feminism, or have so many men to choose between that you can't compete. Once these women start to become reasonable, they're already old (and have high bodycounts or children). This is not yet the case in Asia (I'm afraid it will be soon, but I hope not).
This is true. But if they could control their own circumstances, then they'd mess everything up for themselves. Imagine this, you're playing a game, and you have the ability to cheat, you literally decide how difficult the game is. Can you prevent yourself from cheating? If you die and lose your items, can you prevent yourself from giving them back to yourself? For every cheaty action you take, you lower the value of everything you worked for, as the subjective value of everything is the same as the amount of work you put into it. It's my understanding that very few people have the self-control to keep such a game fun for themselves. They would have to create something to fight against, something which resists their efforts, which is counterintuitive to them.
It's another understanding of mine that the "optimization mentality" of rat-adjecent communities lead them to maximize rewards, meaning that they are much more likely to ruin the game for themselves than average people. Well-being consists of balance, and both maximizers and minimizers will almost surely fail to achieve this even if they have intelligence, money and cutting-edge technology.
Both 1 and 2, unfortunately.
In general, I largely agree with you. I differ on two key points:
That it is difficult, but easier, to fix men and women than to create alternatives. Our society is very, very good as solving technical problems, whereas human problems tend to be intractable. In the end, it turned out to be easier to invent Ozempic than to fix obesity. It was easier to invent the pill than to stop young girls getting pregnant. Etc. I think that erwgv3g34 is essentially right on this point.
That literal wire-heading would not still be unsatisfying. I think it is entirely plausible - though not desirable - that we figure out a satisfaction reward signal and manage to replicate it, at which point games at any level of difficulty are no longer required. Dopamine / heroin etc. are very crude substitutes.
We don't want to, really. I can imagine trying to make a chatbot that guides them / us into better social skills, but the temptation for whoever builds it is always going to be optimising it for society's benefit rather than for the benefit of the chump in question: I attended a 'Men's Leadership' course once, out of curiosity, and it was a series of lectures on how best to talk yourself into rolling over and showing your belly to your betters. And trying to help very shy people one-on-one is like pulling teeth - I'm far from the most social person but I've sometimes gone over to chat to the lonely guy in the corner out of pity and it's almost always agonising. Finally, humans are a group species and innately sort themselves into a relative hierarchy and most people, ultimately, don't want to risk their place by helping the lower orders too much.
I think this is very hard to avoid, unless the person asking for help has extremely clear goals that they are articulating well, and the person trying to help him actually knows how to get them. There's an autism program I sometimes interact with, and it's very clear that the goal is mostly teaching them to interface with a large institution. It isn't even clear what else it could be about, since there's a pretty rigid schedule that includes interfacing with a different teacher, therapist, or situation every 45 minutes or so. It seems like a smaller setting with l fewer transitions would be better, but maybe then they wouldn't even feel like they had anything to teach.
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Apologies in advance for the long reply. Read what you want and ignore the rest
1: Is not hard to fix. It's arguably easier to throw away the restrictions that society has told you to place on yourself. You can be more true to yourself and be more successful as a result.
2 is harder. I got an Asian girlfriend myself, seemed easier all things considered.
I have to disagree that human problems are difficult. I think that the non-existence of these problems is the natural state. Society messed up when it created obesity, it introduced new problems which do not occur naturally. Most foods I see in stores have about 10% sugar, and even most "healthy" food is fraud (the apple juice is sugar-water with chemicals which taste like apple). Even if society can find a way to solve these problems, it also created them. My grandma grows her food in her own garden, these problems are alien to her.
Unwanted pregnancy is a good argument though, since it's natural. It's a feature though, rather than a bug. Your body knows exactly what it's doing. The same applies to depression and such, it's no accident, it's a strategy to increase yours odds of survival. I think it's good that self-modification is so difficult (in fact, it's likely difficult because those who were good at it didn't pass on their genes, meaning that wireheading killed them).
Wire-heading is really dangerous. If you do any, I recommend gratitude meditation (since it won't interferer with your functioning). Many forms of wire-heading can effectively destroy people. When girls grow up watching disney movie depictions of love, notice how many years it takes to reverse the standards and how many disappointments they must experience. If you feel pleasure 10 times stronger than anything real life would offer you naturally, it's really hard to go back. Gratitude meditation makes you enjoy real life more though, which is why it's safer.
Yeah, or income, and that would ruin it. That's how society functions. But it's not how we have to function, nor is it how everyone is forced to function. I don't feel any desire to optimize for socities benefit personally. These destructive incentives seem to emerge statistically. A company need not be evil, but companies are evil. A person need not be self-serving, but people are self-serving. The answers to all social struggles are quite simple. There's no real weights keeping people down. You can pirate "No More Mr. Nice Guy", "The University of Success" and "The Dating Black Book" and perhaps "12 rules of life" and read them in a few days. Internalize the gold nuggets which resonate with you and you're already ahead (the average person is very far from their potential)
You write as if some people are lower and some people are higher, and as if only years of hard work can ever hope to change this fact... But that's only true for ones socioeconomic position. Mental domains (social skills, happiness, charisma, confidence, likability, etc.) are completely mallable. Even if you've been a coward all your life, you can suddenly start being like John McAfee. Not acting like, but being like.
Helping shy people 1-on-1 is not difficult for me, I've done it many times. The hardest part is helping them believe in themselves, rather than to believe in you (even if you're prepared for this). It's also hard to keep them from falling in love with you (seriously. And gender doesn't matter.) I know a guy who involves everyone he meets in fun activities. It feels natural when he does it. You might feel like it's awkward, but it only gets awkward if you act like it is. Just pretend it's not awkward, and be casual and unconcerned (but friendly), and it will probably work out. They will likely relax when they notice that you don't seem to be uncomfortable because of them. People mirror eachother a lot, and you can control your side of the equation.
I think it's fine that people naturally fit into a position. Not everyone can be at the top, due to how hierarchies work. But I don't think lower positions are meant to be as terrible as they are. Consider a family which owns a dog - the dog is at the very bottom, right? But everyone takes care of it and treats it well. You'll be okay a long as you don't have unlikable traits.
Teaching people how to be likable is not difficult if you know how, but it probably takes a small books worth of information in total to communicate all the axioms (but in order to find all of them you have to read 100s of books and do some introspection as well). But if you follow the axioms, you literally cannot fail. There's not even any need to sell your soul, nor to roleplay and pretend. Of course, this alone will not make you into a millionare, but you could act with the exact confidence of a millionare if you wanted to.
(This is a placeholder to say that I read your comment with interest and enjoyed it, and hope to write some kind of response eventually).
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