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I'm not entirely sold on this line of thinking. Sure, the pragmatic value of a belief is at odds with its truth value. After all, I won't tell my mom she's being a bitch if even she is (armchair psychologists would say there is a lot to unpack there). But outside of close interpersonal relationships, And regarding matters of ones model of The World. I do think, thinking as such as at the root of many of todays irrationalities, the inability to stare at the uncomfortable truth at its face.
Speaking in less abstract terms. Let's say being 'blackpilled' is infohazardous. In so far as it prevents a guy from exerting disproportionate effort towards "getting laid" because he knows his effort is disproportionate. Ultimately leading to an unhappy and lonely life. That's a failure mode for sure.
But one man's infohazard is another man's wisdom. If the non-Blackpilled guy fails left and right, he has a dim chance of figuring out exactly why (assuming BP is true). The BPed guy at least knows how to chisel away at the problem.
Knowing it's all fucked. But having the resolve to carry onwards anyways is a more than good enough approximation of the Heros Journey. Lest we not gimp the strong to protect the weak. The people who "deserve" it the most as per the purest meaning of that word.
I believe absolutely nothing can be done about it; in the absence of forcing people to do things they really really don't want to do.
I don't have a good enough mental model to describe the process that encompasses all the variables. But I intuit that there are many things we want that are tradeoffs against other things we want. For example TFR (weak proxy but lets use it for now) might just be inversely correlated with Economic strength. In other words, it's a control system.
And if we want to be really pessimistic. I don't think humans want it any other way. I don't think the drive to pair bond in humans is that much of strong one (across both sexes). After all, we do possibly have twice the number of female ancestors. In the simplest of words, I got nothing. If I was Tsar, there is absolutely nothing I could do. You can't have an ELO system without losers, its not possible.
But let's assume as a Tsar, my people don't expect too much from me. I am tasked with just restoring male sexlessness to the early 2000's level. Then there is still not much I can do that isn't overtly authoritarian, the cats are out of their respective bags. I might think about this and post a top-level later.
The relationship blackpill is best approximated by the online discourse around "hardgainers" in lifting, which given you're a lifter and online I'm sure you're familiar with, where beginner after beginner hops on /r/fitness or /r/weightroom and announces that they just can't gain/lose weight, it's not working and I'm doing everything right. Most of them are not doing everything right, or even most things right, 50% of self-described hardgainers have their calorie counts wrong, a good amount of the remainder literally aren't doing the exercises they said they were doing if you dig in a little, and almost all simply haven't been trying long enough to say whether they are hardgainers or not.* The lifting community basically rejects the idea of hardgainers because individuals are so bad at determining whether they are personally hardgainers, everyone thinks he's a hardgainers when he isn't jacked after eight weeks or whatever the magazine promised him. I've been around long enough to have seen it over and over in real life, I'd guess that 80% of lifters will at some time think they are a hardgainer, and that less than 10% are true hardgainers (can't achieve an above average physique with reasonable normal efforts).
There are, of course, a percentage of men who are genetically cursed, who simply don't put on muscle from ordinary exercise (just as there are men who put on muscle seemingly without ordinary exercise). But if the lifting community embraced hardgainer memes, if the conventional wisdom online was "if you think you're a hardgainer you're probably a hardgainer and should give up/take steroids" rather than "you're not a hardgainer try harder," what would happen is that the 10% of true hardgainers would say "phew, now I don't have to waste my time on this" and have slightly better lives, but the much bigger group of guys who think they are hardgainers will stop lifting and never find out they weren't hardgainers after all and their lives would be much worse.
The latter is the problem with forwarding black pill narratives online. My belief is that most, if not all, men go through In(voluntarily)Cel(ibate) phases in their lives. I suspect that if I had found the modern, polished black pill discourse when I was 17 I might have thought to myself "yup, that's me" and never grown into myself. And, moral cards on the table, I guess I value the suffering of the true hardgainers banging their heads against the wall less than I value the possible winners who never discover their potential. The former's lives were probably going to suck anyway, the latter have a chance to do something really great. And when we talk about "a bigger percentage of men never getting laid could destabilize society," the latter are the marginal cases and also far more important than the former.
I'm interested to read your ideas on What is to be Done?. Looking forward to it. Just do me a favor and never sell yourself short irl.
*Speaking personally, my "hardgainer" phase in lifting consisted of doing bad rep schemes, and at one point literally being too stupid to realize that my old barbell was 10 lbs lighter and my sand-filled vinyl plates were off.
I don't think it is. Not because of ideological reasons but because I think it's sloppy thinking. Lifting is a points-based system, there are metrics. It's not an ELO system like finding a mate is.
I understand that there is a common factor of people overestimating how much they are doing to achieve said goal. And that's what the analogy is for, well and clear to me.
Nonetheless, I don't think much more needs to be said about this. Because you are arguing from a different frame than what the initial post was about. I don't need to be convinced of a change of mindset at this moment in time.
I'm writing up a post about "The System". As in a more comprehensive model of the "mating market". Any why I think the modern market is somewhat different than it used to be in the past. It's going to be abstract and mathematical.
Spoiler: What is to be done? Get famous.
I'm aware that specific topics give off too many "bad vibes" even to bring up. I recently had a girl tell me I am "too depressing and dark" for talking about the state of the world economy post covid and post-Ukraine war; Not a single thing I was discussing wasn't factual, and the discussion was strictly about the facts. Point is, to speak to the audience.
As for marketing, I'll let the product sell itself. There's not much I can do besides correct information asymmetries.
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As I'm often inclined to do, I'll addend your observations on the lifting community by saying that this exact phenomenon replicates itself in the running and cycling communities. I guess there's an except to that, in that the /r/running community and others like it are kind of rah-rah, blackslappy bullshit that tells everyone they're doing great, and that it's not their fault that they're slow, but that sort of shit doesn't really fly as soon as you're into boards that are actually more performance-oriented. If someone say they're having success running 30 miles per week, the answer is going to be "congrats on the talent, but you'd be a lot better if you ran more". If someone insists that they don't get significant aerobic fitness gains from running big miles at easy paces, the response is going to be, "post your logs and we'll help you figure out what you're doing wrong". Pretty much no one accepts that someone is running 70 miles per week, knocking out legitimate track reps and tempo work, but just stuck at a 21 minute 5K. Doesn't happen, not real outside of legitimate medical issues.
Of course, in both worlds, there are going to be legitimate differences in genetic talent and ability caps partly determined by what you did in early life, but the reality is that the vast, vast majority of people that would like to run decently fast, put on significant muscle mass, or ride up Alpe d'Huez in under an hour can do so with tried and true training methods. The best advice for almost everyone is going to be based on helping them figure out what they're doing wrong rather than coddling people and telling them that it's not their fault.
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That can't be more than, what, 5%, right? Being able to put on muscle would be a hard requirement for survival historically, even in agriculture-time, so evolution should provide it. Now, 'ordinary exercise' would have to mean 'committed weight training + good diet, sleep, etc', as opposed to 'going jogging sometimes'.
The specialized definition to work with here is "putting on muscle" to mean something like "having noticeable defined muscle mass compared to an untrained individual." Which I'm not sure exactly how one relates all that back to survival, humans have found a lot of ways to skin that particular cat over the millenia.
I would probably guess that 5-10% of people will just never really get there, either because of specific muscle building issues, or because of other debilitating conditions that prevent them from training properly. But I'd guess that multiples of that percentage will, at some point in their journey, believe that they are in that 5-10%.
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