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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5129 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does your significant other know about your use of The motte, and if so, what do they think about it?

No significant other but ill express my onion.

Isn't sharing what forum you pseudonomously post on playing with fire? Unless you are a "open book", Id guess writing such that I dont potentially incriminate myself as an uber bigot, in the motte! Would feel very restrictive. If your partner is nosy they will easily find your account, no snooping required. And no its not all that fun explaining why " you think blacks are dumb".

Why would you have any interest in trusting someone with your heart, if you can't trust them with your political views?

Because of https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/inferential-distance

For example, I have spoken about how I think the status of women in societies that place much status on a college degree is inflated because of subsidizing universities and job title inflation. 2 of the literal 3 self-identified women on the motte went did not take to it kindly, even though the proposals explicitly stated no rights would be taken away, but instead changes made to culture. That kind of shit would "scare the hoes."

I hate read /r/readscarepod sometimes, and there are gender war discussions there but as opposed to the motte, the majority is in favor of women. The men there who bring up even marginally "red pill" talking points get met with extreme prejudice. So my mental model is that men showing any sort of dissatisfaction or cynicism about the other gender is taken as a tremendous red flag, independent of how true or understandable their cynicism might be (shitting on men is tolerated btw).

That for example would immediately raise a red alert on my current account with a potential partner.

To quote Bennett: If she's still a feminist, you're not the guy. Read the whole thing, but a relevant quote that follows a discussion of what women are looking for in men:

And this is perfectly understandable: if she’s going to surrender, it should be to someone worthy, who will take her somewhere worth going. It would be humiliating to do this for some pothead, some clown who just wants her to scrub his unrinsed dishes. There’s dignity (for men & women) in swearing fealty to a righteous King, but not a petty bureaucrat.

This phenomenon sometimes get oversold by guys who are mad about it - you don’t have to tick all the boxes - but you will find that as you tick more & more boxes, the world becomes less & less feminist & postmodern in a 20-foot sphere around your person.

This is my personal experience, and I want you and all my friends to have that in your lives, not a pale imitation where you're constantly on eggshells or hiding parts of yourself. When you're in a genuine relationship of Eros/Compassion/Care/Empathy with someone, when your partner is really into you physically/romantically/emotionally/spiritually, their/your political views become much less important. You'll probably change each other at the margins anyway, but you'll interact on a level where political controversy is simply unimportant. When you meet the right girl, it won't matter if you're Right or she's Left, you'll be right for each other. Concealing your power level* is either unnecessary or actively harmful to you finding a mate; either she would accept it if you told her and it is unnecessary, or she wouldn't and you shouldn't be with her anyway.

So in a sense, all your prior interactions mean is, 2/3 women** on themotte aren't actively in capital-L Love with you. I would have bet on that regardless of what you post!

NB: Possibly my ideas are more mainstream/"ho friendly"/feminist than yours, but I've also had love affairs with women who are/were far to the left of mainstream (and wayyyy left of anything you'd even consider) and it's held up, so shift you an inch to the Right of me and if you shift your potential lovers an inch to the right you'll still have plenty of options.

*In a long term relationship. Don't bring it up on a first date, or in a Tinder profile, but if you're still pretending to be someone else months into it then you're making a mistake.

**I wouldn't bet on the third one either.

*In a long term relationship. Don't bring it up on a first date, or in a Tinder profile, but if you're still pretending to be someone else months into it then you're making a mistake.

I think you might be misunderstanding me to a certain extent.

The core reason I personally would not share my pseudonymous account is primarily because of the inferential distance, not the spiciness of the beliefs themselves. You propose that no belief is too spicy for True Love/Attraction, I agree, but with terms and conditions. I will come back to this later.

A secondary motivator for me is mere, "I don't want to", or "I don't feel the need to", because it can potentially bring downsides (yes yes I know you think otherwise) but little upsides, and I minimax upsides/downsides in just about everything because the math checks out, even if its sharing beliefs. I am not guided by an excel sheet here, but just intuition. It's more along the lines of how you don't call your wife fat even if she gained weight and is technically fat in your mental model, you sugarcoat it.

Similarly, I would want a potential partner to see my views come out of my mouth in a way that is designed for her to digest, understand and accept. Not in the way I express them to a bunch of degenerates on an online forum in specific lingo and with layers of irony and much-shared context and conversational history (the motte by all definitions is a very high-context culture that pretends to be low context).Think of it this way, if my wife was fat, I would just state as much when I make a pseudonymous most asking for hypothetical advice, but in real life, I would probably invite my hypothetical wife to go on cycling rides with me, and slowly drip feed her the information that she is getting fat.

I also have buckets of thoughts and ideas that I only share with specific people or no people at all and these boundaries are hard boundaries, a violation of this is a violation of privacy in my eyes. My sexual partner and my sexual partner is the only person who will know about all my kinks and fetishes, and this won't change no matter how friendly the half-drunk conversation at a dinner party is. Similarly what I write through a pseudonymous account is only for me and the readers, if I wanted otherwise I would have written it through a real name, why wouldn't I associate thousands of words and potential insight to my real name for free?

This is my personal experience, and I want you and all my friends to have that in your lives

I have experienced this. I eventually turned a girl from covid sympathetic to full-blown covid skeptic through the power of ranting about it nonstop. She did not actually understand the arguments I was making but she adopted them anyways. (our overton windows diverged in many other areas as well)

I did not see this as a sign of true love or admiration. I know it's a fairly common feature of women to eventually mold into their partner's attributes, but I don't think this is a feature of a strong mind rather just something that is. In its extreme circumstances, it's called Borderline Personality Disorder. The Last Psychiatrist talk where he touches on this line of thinking. https://youtube.com/watch?v=l8lQqTFaFS0

So being able to experience that is nice for you ego in the sense that "oh I have the power to do that, nice", but it's not something that you should try to do or even optimize for, it's a proxy, optimize for the things that produce that result, fortunately there are a thousand other proxies to know if you can actually do that. I hate to be condescending/ungrateful but I think wordcels like the guy who wrote that substacks source material are prone to fall for failures of pattern matching such as this one.

Finally back to why I think there are downsides.

I already said that different views are phrased differently for different audiences, but there is more to it. Views are signals.

In the simplest of cases, not having mainstream views classifies you as an outcast in some shape/capacity, this is hardly harmful in a majority of the cases.

What does all my gender war talk imply? That at one point in my life I was pissed off with girls enough to actually study about it! Who do you think is out there discussing the gender war without a horse in the race? I DONT WANT to potentially reveal that part of my intellectual history. I literally cannot see a single upside to doing that

Or what about HBD? That I was jobless enough at one point in my life to read about skull sizes? What is the connotation of someone who discusses HBD online?

In simple words, I don't want my views to slap the person in the face, I can drip-feed them over time as I see fit, if I do at all.

On a similar note, I actually don't care about the body count of my potential partner if there is a reasonable guarantee that number won't go up while we are together. I won't like hearing about that number, so whats my solution "Don't tell me, I don't care". The process that led to me having certain non PC cynical views is the same, it's my history and I don't want to know or tell. I will forfeit knowledge for privacy.

Good post, I agree with you.

Potential is there word here, you’re worried about hypothetical women when you should concern yourself with the individual ones you meet. My SO knows and agrees with my views on women, but then again she herself mocks the concept of human rights.

I can't keep on narrowing the search space indefinitely.

If I have to start worrying about opsec around my wife, someone has made a wrong turn somewhere. Even back when she was hanging out with the woke crowd, and giving me the side-eye for disagreeing with the latest progressive push, she always respected my space to have my own thoughts.

Not sure if I could stand a long term relationship with someone I would have to hide so much from, and I don't consider myself an "open book".

She knows I use Reddit (we occasionally share things from there) but I haven't mentioned this place. I imagine she just thinks I'm on Reddit when she sees a wall of text on my phone.

More in the abstract than in the specifics. I'll occasionally talk with her about something that was discussed here and she has her own opinions, but she doesn't particularly care where I have these topics from. It helps though that she is pretty anti-woke, generally anti-mainstream and frankly at times sounds like a misogynist (you don't want to hear her opinion of women drivers, lol).

my partner is a Jewish tree-hugger who works for a global-elite consensus building organization that people write conspiracy theories about.

Very very open minded, but I don't want to have to explain how tolerating people who literally hate her guts is in the interest of steel manned good faith conversations.

I keep it to occasionally sending ACX articles which I don't think she ever reads. But she knows I have my special places.

Don't think so, mostly because she doesn't care - where exactly I go to argue on the internet is not something that would have any interest to her I think. If she asked, I'd tell her but tbh I'd be surprised she cares about this.

No, he's entirely uninterested in politics. Talking about this place would bore him to tears and he'd forget about it overnight anyway because it just wouldn't be important.

She knows I ramble around arguing on the internet, and I know she does (she had a semi prolific career trolling a certain corner of Twitter) but we never share accounts or websites specifically. I'll often bring up a topic discussed here, whether because I want her opinion or to give her a play by play of a highlight, and her thoughts are interesting; but we both believe in zones of privacy in a relationship.

Yeah, basic Opsec would suggest you shouldn't even give your pseudonym to your SO.

Similar to how they shouldn't need to have a recording device listening in to all your daily conversations just in case.

If they're worried about you sneaking around talking to other romantic/sexual partners behind their back that's another thing altogether.

you shouldn't even give your pseudonym to your SO

You should. Have 2 accounts.

  • The supposedly pseudo account you use to comment about anything within the overton window.

  • And the another one that she never suspects exists because she already knows your pseudo-anonymous account.

Social engineering & ML is going to make hiding accounts very hard if someone is motivated enough. The key is to satiate their curiosity, not make them extra suspicious by pretending you don't have a presence.

Wait are we still talking about hiding this from your gf/wife or have we taken a left turn somewhere?

If your SO is that snoopy, dtmfa and move on. My wife doesn't know my accounts and doesn't look for them, simple as.

If you hold relatively extreme views, hiding them from your SO, or anyone else IRL, might be a pragmatic move. Like, if you're a literal nazi (although things similarly-extreme, not necessarily in a similar direction, to "literal naziism" are probably true *, so it's not just evil people who have this motive). Even if your SO is also a nazi, separating IRL and online pseudonyms is still a good move - your SO's probably less privacy-conscious than you are, and little bits of info slipping out here and there are very dangerous if random antifa people want to dox you.

* and you can see this by historical analogy - take a person from 1500 or 2k BC and our views are closer to literal naziism than that - so looking today's technological and societal rate of change, beliefs, or whatever the AIs do, 2k years from now will be weird

Hiding your views from your SO is probably not a good base for a relationship, at least not in the long term. I mean, if you just have somebody to chat and occasionally tumble under the sheets, who cares, but if you are building life together, at least in terms of years, it's not gonna work. OpSec may be good to not share accounts, have separate computers, etc., maybe not even show up at the same forums if they are of a variety where participation can lead to bad consequences - but there's difference between OpSec and hiding your views.

Yeah, but revealing you're a nazi, or something as 'bad' as a nazi but in a different direction, is also rather bad for a relationship - in most cases worse than hiding views. I think one could somewhat-honestly claim to be a traditional conservative (or equivalent)

More comments

Nope. My wife doesn't know about my activities on the motte but she doesn't care. If sees me and asks, I tell her posting on some internet forum and that's the end of it (cause again it's no big deal).

If they're worried about you sneaking around talking to other romantic/sexual partners behind their back that's another thing altogether.

I've gotten laid in some weird places, but the day people start getting laid on theMotte, boy, I don't know.

Anything's possible.

One of these days the Friday Fun threads may just get out of hand.

The handful of Gay Male Mottizens out here like...

Oh lord, I can’t even imagine a real life Friday fun meetup. The possibility is simultaneously horrifying and maybe slightly interesting….

Honestly it hypothetically wont be soo bad, communities centered around doing things, in the mottes case discussing ideas are infinitely less cringe than ones centered around being things, those optimize for attention seekers who really tune up their characters to comedic levels.

She does.

It's usually not noteworthy, though there were a couple exceptions.

I remember complaining about some of the really edgy usernames when we first made the site move. It was clearly inflammatory-without-evidence, if I had to fit it into the posting rules, and more broadly, it spoke to an interest in trolling rather than discussion. That account ended up earning one of the first bans on the new site. But at the time I felt like I was supposed to be okay with it. Like a good classical liberal, I should turn my nose up and ignore the defectors; objecting meant I was too thin-skinned. When I mentioned this conflict to her, she responded:

"Why do you hang out with these people?"

So I think she's aware that it's incredibly witch-friendly, and has no interest in engaging with that.

Yes, we call it "the place of civilized shit-slinging".

She does, and she proofreads my posts sometimes. She's also pretty anti-woke and libertarian leaning so it works out well.

Getting a proofreader for forum posts is really putting the effort in effort posting I suppose. I don't even put mine through a spell checker, it feels wrong.

My thought process is kind of like if you are trying that hard for forum posts, you must be working yourself to the bone in your real work. A faulty mental model of effort allocation ratio? Maybe.

Yeah no I just am weirdly neurotic about writing quality. I also hope to launch a blog, so I guess this is practice for that eventuality. If it happens.

Did you try grammarly premium?

Relationship goals!

Hah, we've got our own issues but we're intellectually on the same level, thank God. Every other person I've dated has been... unable to grasp a lot of things I care about, or they just didn't care enough to. Makes intimacy difficult.

She does, and I half-wooed her in the first place by waxing eloquent about my feelings for her a while back, then showed it to her the next time we met. I believe she thinks it's just a particularly nerdy version of Reddit.

She does. I don't think she thinks anything specific about it, other than asking "and what do these people think about X" whenever an adjacent topic comes up. We do shit-talk y'all with some frequency.

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