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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   5471 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 24, 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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Can anyone explain the (apparently) imminent government shut down? It looks like it's driven by disagreement about spending cuts between different Republican factions in the house, but I haven't found a good breakdown.

It's hard to tell, because there are a very few tiny fragmentary stories that come up in searches and I haven't been checking front pages for it every day to see if they've been highlighted, but it seems like effectively no general-interest major mainstream news organization has really said much/anything about the rollout of ChatGPT's vision capabilities yet.

LLM vision was already obviously 100% set in the pipeline so its arrival should not be that surprising to anybody who's been paying sufficient attention for the last year-and-a-half, but that's almost nobody. Given how much the next several normie-tiers down from that, including normies who matter, do seem to be relatively engaged with ChatGPT and its consequences, and they almost certainly had (and from this still have) no idea this was coming, shouldn't it be at least some degree of international frontpage news that it's even been announced?

I guess they're waiting until it gets actual wide user release over the next few weeks, but it's not like the media here are sober conservatives about not jumping the gun on things that will obviously eventually be enormous consequential news to their readership. What's going on here?

Can you use it as a toy to dick around with while at work? If not, no one will care.

Sorta a low-effort post, but this is the place. It would seem like there is no rational reason to be ethical, from a practical or game theoretic perspective. It's only disadvantageous if everyone or most people are unethical, but if only a few people are unethical they have a major advantage by not playing by the rules. Consider that unethical people can sometimes act with impunity for a long time before facing any consequences, assuming they ever do. Second, the victim(s) has to meet a very high burden of proof for someone who is unethical to be punished. This means gathering evidence, time to process evidence, etc. And finally, a lot of unethical people , having achieved success, then transition to becoming legit and covering up their history. The philosophical argument for being ethical fall short. yes, if everyone were unethical society would collapse, but there are enough people who are ethical that this does not happen.

  1. There's a negative feedback loop here that prevents this from being reliably true. That is, in an environment where it is possible/easy/profitable to consistently get away with unethical behavior, more people do it until it becomes common enough that people respond and become less trusting in order to protect themselves. This is largely what distinguishes high-trust societies versus low trust. Additionally, the expected cost of unethical behavior is the probability of being caught multiplied by the penalty, which means that you can stabilize at higher levels of ethics by ramping up the penalties, be that financial, reputational, or justice. I think this is largely why upper and middle class communities tend to be higher trust than lower class communities. If you have lots of money, stable long-term friends, and a job that relies on maintaining a professional bearing and reputation, then you have more to lose even if you do unethical but technically legal things. None of my friends have, to my knowledge, ever shoplifted in their lives, and if I found out they did I would lose respect for them and shame them for it. Because that's not the kind of person I want to hang out with, even if they were stealing from some soulless megacorp and there's no risk of them stealing from me. Ethical people who can reliably recognize each other and group together can create better. happier, more stable subcommunities by filtering, which creates a hard-to-measure cost to being unethical.

  2. The rational game theoretic perspective says to maximize your utility function, which if you are not a sociopath might itself contain a term for ethics. Don't fall into the trap thinking that people are profit-maximizing corporations, sometimes good deeds are their own reward. A large part of why I do ethical things even if I might get away with it is because one of my terminal values is the desire to be a good person. I feel guilty when I do bad things, and I feel good/proud/accomplished when I do good things, especially if there was a temptation to do a selfish bad thing and I chose to do the right thing anyway. Most people have something like that. The philosophical argument that you should be good because if everyone is bad you'd be worse off is weak, it was always weak. It's not the actual reason to be good, which is that it is good to be good, and if you're not an evil sociopath your utility function will care about that in its own right. If someone is an evil sociopath then there's not much the rest of us can do to convince them to care, all we can do is arrange society such that unethical behavior is punished harshly enough that the rationally selfish unethical behaviors we can't punish are rare and minor.

ever shoplifted in their lives, and if I found out they did I would lose respect for them and shame them for it. Because that's not the kind of person I want to hang out with, even if they were stealing from some soulless megacorp and there's no risk of them stealing from me. Ethical people who can reliably recognize each other and group together can create better. happier, more stable subcommunities by filtering, which creates a hard-to-measure cost to being unethical.

That seems a little harsh to cut off a friendship over that. yeah, rape, for sure, but that seems too harsh given how common it is . If someone stole from me personally after I told him or her to stop, then that would be another matter. Interesting point...goodness is its own reward. It does not need any justification beyond that.

I wouldn't straight up cut someone off if they were already a friend for other reasons and that was the only thing about them I disliked. But it would be a yellow flag which would make me less comfortable around them. Because stuff like that rarely shows up in isolation. I've never actually had the issue show up, because the type of people I typically hang out with are so far from that archetype that it's not even a remote possibility.

Second, the victim(s) has to meet a very high burden of proof for someone who is unethical to be punished. This means gathering evidence, time to process evidence, etc.

Pretty dubious.

In fact, it's pretty telling just how much energy civilization dedicates to making it hard in specific contexts, precisely because people WILL rush to judgment. We are handicapped in judging people, but it's an artificial handicap.

Outside of the oasis of the legal system though...people are less constrained. They don't need to meet some insane burden. They just have to suspect you and/or convince others. For most of our history and even today, that sort of social sanction can be pretty bad on its own.

There's also the concern that, if you're the sort of person who flouts rules, you may not be able to keep the contempt that attitude implies from leaking out, which makes it easier to damn you. Not everyone is a high-functioning sociopath.

The philosophical argument for being ethical fall short.

The universalist or absolutist argument does. It's just not plausible that doing something wrong is never of benefit, absent some dubious concept of an afterlife.

That is not the same as it not being beneficial to be moral in general.

The universality of trying to justify morality (and the drive to justify our sense of it as overriding via philosophy) is telling imo.

'look at all these idiots, blindly following society's prescribed recipe for cassava. I bet I could do a way better job!'

Society is older than you, even if you might be smarter. It's developed all kinds of tricks to trip up the unwary defector. This isn't to say that the system is unbeatable... but it's harder than it looks.

Most people aren’t smart enough to consistently get away with criminal behavior. This includes very smart people. In addition, the psychological burden of looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life for all the enemies you’ve made, and for the law, can be taxing.

As for non-illegal unethical behavior, the lines are more blurred, but you’ll still make a lot of enemies. And all it takes is for one of them to snap, and it’s (as we’ve discussed here before, I think) very easy for a committed, vindictive person to ruin your life, provided they don’t care much about their own.

Most people aren’t smart enough to consistently get away with criminal behavior. This includes very smart people.

hmm as others alluded below, but you don't hear about the ones who get away unless they choose to confess

I know one guy who did. I'll call him the Carpenter. He dealt a shit ton of weed in the 90s and made an assload of money before he went legit and had a big carpentry business.

There are always more successful criminals than we think there are because a very big part of being a successful criminal is that as few people as possible know about your crimes. This is also why many people in law enforcement think criminals are stupid; all the criminals they know about are stupid. While its true that always "watching over your shoulder" can be burdensome for many, being successful at something you can never tell people about is often too much for many otherwise "smart" people. The instinct to brag and broadcast success is too much for many and often proceeds their detection.

If ethics weren't effective in some way, they wouldn't exist. They might not be consciously rational but they still work.

You have to also consider game-theoretic consequences between societies and not just within them. Even short of an internal collapse, a society with a higher proportion of unethical people will eventually be outcompeted due to inefficiency. Of course, this can take many lifetimes.

Note that this only works if migration flows are small. If they are large, then equilibration negates between-group competition.

I have heard, but don't have the know-how to confirm, that the following tax loophole exists:

  1. Commission a famous artist to create an art piece, for $50,000

  2. Get it appraised to be worth $5 million

  3. Donate it, getting a full $5 million tax writeoff

  4. Profit income_tax_rate * valuation - commission_cost

Is this more or less correct? If so, I have the following harebrained idea to take advantage of it / force the IRS to address it:

  1. Create an accredited 501c "NFT art museum"

  2. NFTs are already naturally WAY overvalued relative to their cost-to-produce, but just to encourage things to remain that way, create a custom NFT collection with a few accredited artists who are the only ones allowed to add to that collection. Make the transfer fee super high so that these NFTs are disincentivized from remaining in the market.

  3. Design this whole thing to be totally sincere. Call it the "Artist and Artist Appreciation DAO" or something. Nominally, the point is to fund the creation of new artwork. New NFTs are regularly commissioned and donated to the art museum, and whoever paid for the commission eats the tax benefits.

  4. Possibly tokenize the whole process so that it's easy to buy a $1 tax deduction for only $0.10. Honestly doubt this would work with the current tax code though even if the rest of the process does work. I think there would need to be some kind of organization filing copyrights on all created pieces of artwork, then legally filing somewhere that the ERC20 represents legal ownership of the artwork. Even then, it probably wouldn't work.

  5. Profit? Either infinite tax write-offs, or the IRS closes a loophole that should never have existed anyways.

Anyways, can anyone tell me why this definitely wouldn't work?

The special sauce is the inflated appraisal value. this is done with real estate too or insurance fraud.

The short version is the IRS knows about this trick and has a very successful record of prosecuting people who try to use it.

That looks very different to me since the appraisal was faked.

It seems like it would be hard to pull off this trick without faking the appraisal; if the artist's paintings are for-real worth $5,000,000, then he could just paint them and sell them for that price rather than accepting literally 0.01x that payment from you.

Elsewhere I said:

Just like with regular art, I think the process of donating it to charity actually increases its fair market value. Also, the fact that it was commissioned (rather than being sold directly by the artist) increases its fair market value. Yes, that isn't how these things should work, but art is mostly signaling anyways so in this case you literally get what you pay for; the more you pay the more valuable it is.

So, I think it is evident that there exist situations where I could create, then donate, an art piece worth $5MM, without being able to create and sell the piece for anywhere near as much.

And you need to put at least three people's heads on the block to make this scheme work - your own, someone to sign receipts on behalf of the charity (you only get to deduct the appraised value if the charity uses the donated object as part of its charitable activities, so someone needs to confirm this), and the appraiser.

501(c)s also have to have a non-profit board, with a minimum of three people. The exact rules for how many must be 'independent' and what that means are complicated as hell, but it adds to the issue.

Well the charity would be a real charity, there already exist online "NFT museums." The appraiser would also be real. NFTs already get utterly absurd valuations, and have gotten multi-million dollar legit appraisals. Generally I'm not planning on actually running a scam, just genuinely taking advantage of a loophole in a way somewhat more blatant than is the norm.

No, the standard is not a "legit appraisal." An appraisal can help establish what you believed to be the fair value the contribution to charity is, but in most cases you would need to show that the item could have been sold by the charity in an open market transaction for the amount deducted. The fact that there would be a recent transaction where an artist was willing to produce the piece for $50,000 would set the baseline case not the $5MM appraisal. The burden of proof would be on you and the appraisers to show otherwise. You would have to make an affirmative case the valuation is justified, the fact that the market is illiquid, so like no one knows the real price man, is not a defense. This is not a new idea, and appraisers and tax filers lose cases regularly where an inaccurate appraisal is used to claim an unjustified deduction.

I'm on the same page as you about all of that except the part about the market being illiquid. I think it would be doable to have a liquid enough market, where 90% of a given NFT collection is owned by the museum, but the remaining pieces are swapped around with some frequency. This is already how normal NFTs work much of the time--their "market cap" is sky high but this is because most of the supply is not circulating.

Yes, I understand none of this is necessarily an ironclad defense of the NFT's value, but aside from the internal IRS appraisers, I'm not sure how much more ironclad you can get than fair market value. I'm quite confident that, given NFT's properties (especially the ability to set extremely high transfer fees) you could set a "fair market value" extremely high without necessarily leading to a situation where people sell their NFTs without donating to them. That said, the IRS does include the stipulation that the market must not be artificially inflated, which sounds like a pretty central description of this whole scheme. Maybe.

In the end, I agree there's still a piece missing, but if it's possible for standard art then it's probably possible for NFTs too.

To me, the part that doesn't work is the idea you can "set" the fair market value. The fair market value is the price a knowledgeable buyer would actually pay for the entire quantity donated. The appraisal value must be for the entire collection donated. If you can today produce NFT's people will actually pay $5MM for a cost to you of $50k. You should, and will make a profit of $4.95M and have to pay taxes on the gains. This is always strictly better than just collecting the tax savings. If the NFT market is not actually deep enough to clear $5MM from selling all the NFT's in an open market the fair market value is not $5MM.

If all you have done is manipulate the market cap up by adding transaction costs, limiting the free float, or trading with yourself or co-conspirators you have not set the fair market value higher. You have just committed more crimes by manipulating the price of unregistered securities.

You have to make an affirmative case for your valuation if the IRS challenges it, which is going to be pretty hard when 79% of all NFT collections ... remained unsold.

Edit: Always strictly better under the current system, Andrew Granato and Tyler Cowen pointed out this would not be the case under the proposed 40% capital gains rate back in 2021.

If you can today produce NFT's people will actually pay $5MM for a cost to you of $50k. You should, and will make a profit of $4.95M and have to pay taxes on the gains. This is always strictly better than just collecting the tax savings.

Just like with regular art, I think the process of donating it to charity actually increases its fair market value. Also, the fact that it was commissioned (rather than being sold directly by the artist) increases its fair market value. Yes, that isn't how these things should work, but art is mostly signaling anyways so in this case you literally get what you pay for; the more you pay the more valuable it is.

So, I think it is evident that there exist situations where I could create, then donate, an art piece worth $5MM, without being able to create and sell the piece for anywhere near as much.

To me, the part that doesn't work is the idea you can "set" the fair market value. The fair market value is the price a knowledgeable buyer would actually pay for the entire quantity donated. The appraisal value must be for the entire collection donated.

Well, what I have in mind is that these pieces are created and donated a few at a time. I once again agree that it should work this way, but in practice this just isn't how art, or really anything, is valued. Is oil's fair market value determined by what someone would pay for all the oil in the world? Generally, no matter the asset, selling the entire supply at once would mean selling at a steep discount. The market doesn't need to be deep enough to absorb the entire supply at once for that to be the fair market value.

If all you have done is manipulate the market cap up by adding transaction costs, limiting the free float, or trading with yourself or co-conspirators you have not set the fair market value higher. You have just committed more crimes by manipulating the price of unregistered securities.

They're certainly not securities, no matter how much the SEC wants them to be. However the rest is valid. Like I said, I do think there's a piece missing before this scheme makes sense at all, but right now it's looking like the piece might exist.

You have to make an affirmative case for your valuation if the IRS challenges it, which is going to be pretty hard when 79% of all NFT collections ... remained unsold.

Meh, they analyzed 73,000 collections. I can programmatically create that many for like $1 and now 90% of collections remain unsold. The "blue chip" NFTs, let's say the top 10, are like 80% of the total NFT market cap.

I'm not trying to 100% disagree with you, I think your objections are reasonable and generally it's the exact sort of thing the IRS would come down on hard, but I do disagree with some of the specifics and think that through that process of debate we can arrive somewhere closer to the truth.

So, I think it is evident that there exist situations where I could create, then donate, an art piece worth $5MM, without being able to create and sell the piece for anywhere near as much.

If it is ever challenged by the IRS, you will need to make an affirmative case that the value has been increased, not only that there exist situations where it is possible. The price you would be able to sell for is literally the definition of fair value the IRS uses.

Is oil's fair market value determined by what someone would pay for all the oil in the world?

The value if you donate $5MM, marked to last trade or mid, worth of oil futures is very close to $5MM, close enough that you can probably claim the full $5MM. The true market value is close to but less than $5MM. This is because the oil futures are fungible and the market is very liquid, with literally trillions of dollars of notional value changing hands regularly. If you think you can regularly move $5MM of oil futures with literally zero transaction cost to arrival you should go become the worlds best market maker, you have discovered an infinite money glitch. What you are proposing is moving millions of dollars of notional value in market with a few tens of millions of dollars average daily notional volume where each product is non-fungible. Your price impact will be greater.

They're certainly not securities, no matter how much the SEC wants them to be.

Surprisingly the SEC hasn't taken a strong stance on if NFT's are securities, but certainly is way to strong of a statment though since the existing case law contradicts you. It also doesn't change the criminality because of the fact that any artifice to manipulate a price done by computer is still wire fraud even if it is not securities fraud.

The "blue chip" NFTs, let's say the top 10, are like 80% of the total NFT market cap.

There is literally a section titled "The Current State of the Top NFT Assets." If you have the ability to consistently create some of the top valued NFTs you have a very valuable skill, running a tax scheme is arguably a very high risk way of monetizing that skill, but it shouldn't be surprising that there is some way to extract value from that ability.

There's a limit of 30% of your AGI and it can't be things you created (those are ordinary income properties with a different treatment).

The authority of the IRS is so absolute, and the tax code so complex and yet also vague, that they can and will fuck you for anything they decide they don’t like. That essentially translates to “the spirit of the rules”.

Knowing very little about tax code, I think this shouldn't work because the jump from $50k -> $5million would be counted as profit in some sense, similar to if you buy $50k of stock and then sell it for $5 million. I think it's called an "asset appreciation tax"? So your taxable income would go up by 4.95 million from having an asset you paid $50k for go up in valuation, and then down by $5 million for the donation, giving you a net -$50k (because you spent $50k that you then donated). But I'm not certain this is how it actually works.

You can donate appreciated stock at it's stepped up value and avoid capital gains taxes. It's a very good way to make charitable donations. It is however limited to 30% of your AGI though.

From IRS Pub 526

However, the reduced deduction doesn't apply to contributions of qualified appreciated stock. Qualified appreciated stock is any stock in a corporation that is capital gain property and for which market quotations are readily available on an established securities market on the day of the contribution.

That's definitely how it should work, but I believe is not how it actually works if you donate it. I'm in the same boat as you though and am not exactly an authority on this.

First off: There's no way this would work. I mean, it might work in the sense that you can write whatever numbers you want on a document and hope the IRS doesn't look into it, but there's no way it would hold up in tax court.

Second off: Jesus Christ the tax code is impenetrable. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm usually pretty good at finding relevant citations whenever I need them. I've never seen anything like Title 26. It's obscene.

I think this only works because those involved have enough prestige to make it look legit. They can find somebody with letters after their name to back up their claims to artistic integrity. They have friends at museums with respectable names. They have money and by implication lawyers standing behind them.

IRS auditors are required to refer all gifts of art valued at $20,000 or more to the IRS Art Advisory Panel. The panel’s findings are the IRS’s official position on the art’s value, so it’s critical to provide a solid appraisal to support your valuation.

Can you bamboozle the government artist auditors? That's the real test.

IRS auditors are required to refer all gifts of art valued at $20,000 or more to the IRS Art Advisory Panel. The panel’s findings are the IRS’s official position on the art’s value, so it’s critical to provide a solid appraisal to support your valuation.

Interesting, I wonder what the guidelines are for art valued below $20,000. It's really easy for crypto to find loopholes and bust them open; it would be child's play to just create 100 pieces valued at $15,000 or something rather than one piece valued at $1.5M. The whole point is to put this loophole into the Common Man's hands anyways, so a $15,000 tax writeoff is reasonably close to the sweet spot.

I think this only works because those involved have enough prestige to make it look legit. They can find somebody with letters after their name to back up their claims to artistic integrity. They have friends at museums with respectable names. They have money and by implication lawyers standing behind them.

I absolutely agree, but that at least sounds like a somewhat tractable problem. There are some legit museums displaying NFTs, and some other legit museums minting NFTs from their artwork. If legit museums can display NFTs then presumably there is at least a little wiggle room there.

I am rooting for you...but suspect that Uncle Sam is going to be very much not amused and that this stunt could potentially land you in prison. Good luck. Consult a tax lawyer first - the very best you can find.

Hydroxychloroquine is used to treat malaria. It is also used to prevent malaria infection in areas or regions where it is known that other medicines (eg, chloroquine) may not work. Hydroxychloroquine may also be used to treat coronavirus (COVID-19) in certain hospitalized patients.

Using this medicine alone or with other medicines (eg, azithromycin) may increase your risk of heart rhythm problems (eg, QT prolongation, ventricular fibrillation, ventricular tachycardia). Hydroxychloroquine should only be used for COVID-19 in a hospital or during clinical trials. Do not take any medicine that contains hydroxychloroquine unless prescribed by your doctor.

What's going on here? A hat tip to the crazies who really want to use it despite lack of evidence, or has The Science changed, and I should pray they do not alter it any further?

Based on the page history at archive.org the "certain hospitalized patients" line was added in May 2020, with the "should only be used in a hospital or during clinical trials" part being added around a month later. At the time it seemed plausible that it would work.

Thanks! Didn't think of checking the history of the page.

I’m still not seeing evidence that it works, much less that it’s a “silver bullet.”

2021: literature review as of the Delta variant finds null effect, albeit with “low confidence”. Taiwanese authors.

2021: meta-analysis finds no clinical benefits with “moderate” confidence. Brazilian authors.

2022: Another Brazilian study and meta-analysis. No significant effect on outpatients.

2023: No significant effect. Most recent meta-analysis that I’ve found. American lead authors.

2023: Indian RCT (n = 594) finds insignificant effect. This was the most recent individual research I found with a casual search.

I don’t think anything has upturned the consensus. Sites are still reporting that HCQ doesn’t work and may also make you poop yourself. Not sure why Mayo has a different line; perhaps they’re just hedging?

HCQ, when taken with zinc, has always been the silver bullet. It worked wherever it was tried. People were sneaking it into the hospitals to give to their relatives. I guess the Mayo Clinic finally had to bow to actual science.

Anecdote:

Since I couldn’t get any HCQ, I took tonic water (quinine water) with lots of zinc, plus horse paste (ivermectin), vitamin D, and vitamin C during my first bout (probably Delta, Nov. 2021). I remember the final night of the fight, when I felt the characteristic flu-like aches, and took aspirin. The next morning, I felt far better than the previous week, and I was on the mend; I lost my sense of smell for a year, but didn’t have brain fog or long COVID. My dad and mom, squarely in the risk zone of their 70’s, took a similar medicine regimen and also both survived without long COVID.

On my second bout (summer 2022, Omicron), I got a week’s groceries and prepared for another long haul. Vitamin D and zinc, plus tonic water and walking outdoors in direct sunlight, but to my surprise it was over in three days. Not only that, I felt great afterward! I felt better than I had before the illness, oddly.

I'm not convinced brain fog or long covid are real anyways. Incidence of each in Covid survivors seems to basically match base rates.

(Unrelatedly, I somewhat dislike referring to abuse survivors, rape survivors, suicide survivors, etc. by that name while 'survivor' otherwise has such a powerful connotation, so a fun way to play with those terms is to use 'survivor' where it is slightly, but only slightly, more obvious that it's inappropriate)

What else do you not believe in the existence of?

To some degree some long COVID is psychosomatic. It correlates strongly with political ideology and a minority of people reporting long COVID have no COVID antibodies.

Being sick weakens you. So to some degree some portion of people have long COVID. But also I think many (most?) people suffering from long COVID are imagining it. They truthfully feel down or slow. And they blame it on COVID. But COVID is an unusually mild cold to most people and given that some of these long COVIDers never even had COVID, I think there is much hyperbolic doomerism about it decoupled from the facts.

At this point I doubt long COVID exists in any significant portion of the population, outside of some trivial sense that getting sick makes you feel worse for a while.

Plenty of things, what are you looking for?

This seems very insensitive to me, a person, who like billions of others, is a survivor of the common cold.

Can you provide any clinical data to support this “silver bullet”?

This pre-print, as reported by Yahoo News in 2021.

This study in Nature is about HCQ alone, and suggests it would have been even better during Omicron than previous waves due to the different pathways Omicron takes.

This study in Clinical Infectious Diseases of a "prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled multicenter trial" on zinc alone, with positive results.

This extensive examination of Zinc's use with HCQ for COVID by Alberto Boretti in Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology Volume 71, May 2022.

This ScienceDirect study on the so-called "Zelenko Protocol" of zinc, HCQ, and azithromycin (AZM), with astounding results.

Disclaimer: I used dogpile.com to find this clinical data, which doesn't have the restrictions on misinformation (and "misinformation") of Google. I don't have a list of citations at hand, so I did this search in approx. 1 hr.

Disclaimer: I used dogpile.com to find this clinical data, which doesn't have the restrictions on misinformation (and "misinformation") of Google. I don't have a list of citations at hand, so I did this search in approx. 1 hr.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Is it just me, or is the market for computer books dying?

I usually check libgen when I need to research a new topic, and it looks like the usual suspects like O'Reilly, Manning, Wiley and Apress just don't bother publishing anything anymore. A lot of the books haven't been updated since 2017 or so, even though the latest major version of the software in question was released in 2020.

Have piracy and Packt killed the market for good computer books for good? Will I have to read random Medium articles for the rest of my career to stay up-to-date?

These days I mostly dive straight into the technical documentation or the source code of whatever I am reading up on.

In the past these would have been reference books. But freely published technical documentation is better since they can be easily updated.

I do feel this state of things is sad since it removes a straight forward source of monetization for good technical writers, despite being objectively better.

In the absence of good docs or easily readable source code I start looking up blogs. Now, depending on the domain you may end up with a lot of blogspam, but as long as you search via HN, lobste.rs or a relevant subreddit you can do fine.

Textbooks/Research papers still have their place for more theoretical topics that do not become outdated as fast, but it is less than it was in the past.

SBF was right about books. Sorry bookworms, but they’re obsolete. Every good book should have been either a blogpost or a video lecture.

  • -11

Sorry articleworm, but you're wrong. You can't truly develop a good knowledge base without books.

See, aren't low-effort dunks fun?

Its IQ all the way down

Hmm so if you have a 130 IQ person raised by wolves, and a 120 IQ person who reads books throughout their childhood, I wonder who would be more intelligent?

IQ is important, but it's not literally everything.

By definition the 130 IQ person.

So are you saying that IQ literally equals intelligence in a 1:1 parallel? I'm trying to get across that while IQ is an important and useful concept, it is not g.

Even in the boring homogeneous environments we study, IQ changes as you age, with only something like r=.66 between adult and child IQs IIRC. So it wouldn't be completely surprising if the "130 IQ person" (scored 130 on a children's test before being handed over to the wolves for some reason) turned out to be a 119 IQ person after growing up, even assuming the wolves had no effect!

OP's wording implies they were tested as adults.

OP's wording seems to imply that "130 IQ person" and "120 IQ person" are referring to time-invariant concepts. Hence "reads books throughout" (ongoing) instead of "read books" (past tense, appropriate for someone tested as an adult) or "then reads" (future, for someone tested as a child). @TheDag can correct me, but in context it seemed that the intent of the question was "I wonder how much extreme environments could change the intelligence of someone who would have been 130 IQ in a typical environment", not "I wonder whether the higher scorer on an intelligence test would score higher on an intelligence test". Basic Gricean Maxims, isn't that? If you find a statement seemly implying something trivial or nonsensical, look for alternative possible interpretations.

Maybe. On the other hand, books offer convenient access to information with zero continued effort or resource expenditure on the part of the author/publisher. What do I mean by this? Consider the phenomenon of linkrot. There are a few causes of linkrot - an org may revamp their website, someone may lose interest in the subject and stop maintaining the site, someone might die and not have made arrangements for the continuation of a site, among others.

With a book, none of these are a problem. Yes, it comes with other issues of course.

Maybe this is simply a weird perspective from someone focused on a niche-ish hobby, but I would almost rather have the reference material in book form than online, simply because I don't think it'll stay online eternally. Whereas no one is going to take my copy of FN Browning Pistols offline.

Hardest of disagrees. Books and physical media are more necessary than ever. Digital content can be patched to be censored, edited or even removed, and there's not much you the end user can do about it. Digital book burnings are much easier than physical ones. If the powers that be want to, for instance, hide any evidence that they ever advocated treatment X for condition Y now that it's been found to cause horrible side effects, they can just do it.

and there's not much you the end user can do about it.

Yeah other than downloading it -____-

If you're allowed. And if your app won't auto-update it anyway next time it connects to the internet somehow...

There are 3 kinds of books:

  • Fiction novels
  • Textbooks
  • The rest

Fiction Novels entertain & enlighten. Textbooks educate. If your textbook can be condensed into a blog it isn't a good text book. If your Novel can be enjoyed just as easily in a video, then it isn't a good Novel. A book should be borne out of necessity, not narcissism. Sometimes you are desperate to express an idea or tell and story, and every medium falls short. Books are the last resort. But they work.

Growing up, I thought I was immature not not being able to enjoy non-fiction. But, I've since realized that non-fiction books are prime candidates for blog-i-zation. If the cliff notes for a book is no better than reading the book itself, then that's a gross failure.

The best non-fiction is either sufficiently fictionalized to be fiction novel, or sufficiently dense to be a textbook. There are no other types of books.

There's a contingent of people out there (including, I suspect, sbf) who see fiction as low status and generally not worth your time, ignoring the deep connections between human thought and fictional stories.

I’d say among very smart people, non-fiction in general is lower status than fiction. The archetypal midwit reads very little fiction but has a bookshelf full of Pinker, Dawkins, Harari, various biographies of businessmen and presidents and so on.

Most very smart people I've met limit their reading to technical literature.

Unless they’re extremely autistic I find it hard to believe someone only reads textbooks and journal articles.

Lots of people like this in STEM.

I think that there's an understated risk to reading a lot of fiction. Because it's all made up it can teach false lessons and prop up self serving narratives.

Non fiction has the advantage that you can learn true things from true events, even if the author is completely out to lunch.

With fiction, you know the author is making it up.

With nonfiction, nobody will believe you that the author is making it up unless they don't like the conclusions. There's no compulsion to report "true events" in nonfiction - compare Zinn's A People's History with A Patriot's History. Both chock full of "true events" narrowly defined, but which true things can you learn? Better never to begin.

Hey, what fiction have you read that wouldn't have been better as a six-paragraph blog post?

Well, there was that meta-porno in the other thread…

That one would have been better compressed to zero paragraphs.

Six paragraphs?! @FiveHourMarathon got War and Peace down to three words and I now demand all fiction in that format.

"I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."

It's actually amazing how much seethe he generated with such a simple set of words.

It's an A tier bait. Second only to S tiers like "Its okay to be white" and "Islam was right about women"

Video content is easier to monetize. Also software tends to be more of an evergreen model these days with constant changes. It's hard to keep a large book up to date, and hard to convince customers to buy something that will soon be out of date.

Are you talking about hardware or software books ?

Software books are.. meh?

It's like you don't need a whole ass book for 1 package unless you plan on becoming a maintainer for that package or something. Documentation is usually enough to get using it within a day or two.

I'm not talking about packages, but larger software like Kafka or a similar-sized Apache project.

What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all? Women do this through pregnancy and childbearing, which I have heard legitimately compared to frontline infantry combat in its level of hardship. Therefore, what good is a man, in a relationship, if he is not willing and able to endure a hardship or challenge of similar difficulty? Chad compensates for this by being very good-looking and very determined; there is a good chance he would do well in a war, too. But for us mere mortals? Our existence is legitimized and our desire for romantic relationships stops being completely base, disgusting, and hypocritical when we have proven ourselves worthy through being conscientious, dedicated, and determined enough to suffer greatly for no damn reason - even, perhaps, to die for no good reason. The poets of the First World War, and the soldiers there, died pointlessly but admirably for a few inches of mud; they embodied all that is admirable about masculinity and lost their lives in the mud of Passchendaele and Verdun and the Somme.

Every man, now, needs to choose their own struggle. It's like Fight Club, except you expect and are prepared for - as much as anyone can be prepared for, which may not be much - entering what is essentially Hell on Earth and surviving it. Once you survive, you are now worthy: you have endured, you are willing to endure, therefore you now have business asking someone to endure a deep visceral biological disgust day after day to make you happy, and for the good of the next generation. And you, too, will suffer, or may suffer. Maybe it's a dangerous job, maybe it's your wife shooting you and putting you in the ICU, maybe it's figuring out how to deal with it when your wife becomes a raging alcoholic, maybe you really do get the life of domestic bliss. But probably not - you're not Chad, and as such you do not deserve domestic bliss, much as your wife is very likely to be deeply disgusted with you and chooses this as her least-bad option, making peace with her inability or unwillingness to be Stacy.

  • -16

I do think that hardship is necessary for men and that a lot of men are too soft these days. But I don't think it has to be arbitrary hardship.

There is still plenty of useful hardship to be found if you look for it, and perhaps the issue is that our modern societies do not make it clear that there is hardship. While circumstances like disease and war use to take a good chunk of the male population out, there was still some competition and finding a wife or a husband was something that was emphasized throughout people's education. If you are serious about finding a spouse, having children, then what are you doing about it? If you do not want to go below certain standards of attractiveness, sanity, personality, and your current geographical area is not providing an adequate supply of potential willing mates, then have you tried expanding the area?

If you are too poor to travel, then here's your hardship, make more money.

If you are afraid of linguistic and cultural barriers, then here's your hardship, figure out a way to tolerate different mores or find a combination that suits you.

If you are afraid that an apparently willing mate is attempting to scam you, then here's your hardship, learn to make yourself vulnerable, get ready to lose everything and bounce back...

Overcoming hardship only gets you more women if the side effect somehow increases the pool of mates or your attractiveness. For example war campaigns take (some) men to war-widows ("love you long time"), colonization to riches, artistic struggle to fame, industriousness to stability, etc... Ultimate survival hiking might make you more attractive to some women, but they're probably going to be quite crusty themselves. Is that what you're looking for?

Women do not undergo pregnancy for the greater good or the good of their tribe. It's all to benefit their own genes. They choose men to benefit their own genes, too. For men, step 1 is be good looking. Step 2 is be high status. Struggling is not high status. Effortless mastery is high status. So is getting other men to fight, suffer, struggle, and possibly die for you.

Would you describe yourself as an incel, or something close? I don't mean to pry, but your ideas about gender dynamics are a bit alien to me, and I want to understand where you're coming from.

Hmm. I'm a 28-year-old virgin, although I disagree wholeheartedly with the self-identified incels' descriptions of having been wronged. I cannot point to a single person or group of people that have wronged me. If I was forced to say, I might put the blame at the feet of social media or whatever was leading to atomization, but even that is a stretch. I think I am probably just roadkill on the superhighway of progress, dead critter 8,201,974. Nothing personal about it, any more than the Luddites' complaints in their time. It looks like there's a kind of quiet forest fire clearing out the dead wood and the people that would have maybe done OKish under an agrarian patriarchy but suck in modernity in one way or another. Hell, if I was a Luddite, I would not have been a very good weaver - perhaps a passable one, but not a great one.

I don't intend to come off as misogynistic and mean to make it very goddamn clear that I do not blame women for doing what they are doing; I would probably do the same in their shoes. If I was an equally unattractive woman I'd probably be a somewhat bitter and misanthropic feminist writing about how society enabled men to suck and how current systems weren't very well suited for women (or unattractive ones); there would probably have been traumatic experiences as autistic girls and women are very vulnerable to piece of shit predators.

As far as effortless mastery: the Hock may provide this. If you've looked death in the face, been exhausted hauling a sledload of gear through the Arctic mountains, etc. your desk job looks like a piece of cake and you don't really give a shit about a lot of things. So too, "effortless mastery" may be very effortful from the inside...Olympic athletes make it look easy but they're working their asses off while they're doing backflips, professional dancers collapse and gasp for air when they go backstage.

Women do not undergo pregnancy for the greater good or the good of their tribe. It's all to benefit their own genes.

I know some biologists really hate the idea of group level selection, but I don't see how you can declare the idea to be so obviously wrong with such confidence.

It's not my area of expertise, so I'm not going to debate it with you. These debates have all been had at length online already. I would just note that the genes that reach fixation in a species must do so by increasing their own prevalence (by helping themselves or their kin), not by making their group survive. If there are genes for helping the group and they die with the bearer, that doesn't do much good for those genes. Seems tautological to me, but if you want more detail, I defer to the experts.

What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all?

If convicted felons can have romantic relationships that clearly indicates that moral worthiness is not a requirement for all romantic relationships.

Sometimes in marriage you have to endure suffering "till death due us part", but that is a special case where you voluntarily are taking a romantic relationship to a higher level. Even then there are socially acceptable reasons to end the suffering via divorce.

Women do this through pregnancy and childbearing

Many women in relationships do not ever have children. Men still enter relationships with women who are past child-bearing age.

Every man, now, needs to choose their own struggle.

No. You just need to live a lifestyle and have a personality that a single woman finds attractive and worthy of a relationship, and you have to initiate communication and make her aware of your attractive traits. The idea that you have to endure great suffering will be off-putting to most women. Based on other posts of yours here are some suggestions of things you could focus on:

  • Become a local activist on a subject you are passionate about. This will cause you to connect with like-minded people who will find your passion attractive.
  • Become a local expert on something and start a group where you are the leader sharing your expertise.
  • Join a mental health support group where talking about your struggles is seen as an admirable quality. Additional benefits include: getting advice/support from people that struggle with similar issues and gaining additional perspective that allows you to see your struggles as more tractable than what some of the other people in the group are facing.

Yes: moral worthiness is not necessary or sufficient for a romantic relationship.

Also you don't have to endure great suffering - just be visibly capable of doing so.

Barring cases where there is some impediment to clear thinking, the main judge of your moral worthiness to be in a romantic relationship should be the person entering into the relationship with you. It would be an odd situation if someone were attracted to you but you dared not talk to them because you weren't ready for war, and you may be ready for war and still be morally disgusting to women in other ways.

Sure. It's like being extremely tall and trying your hand at basketball. You don't need to be seven feet tall to play basketball for Duke and there are probably seven footers who don't make the team.

Women do this through pregnancy and childbearing, which I have heard legitimately compared to frontline infantry combat in its level of hardship

Is it still that hard? I'm sure it was that hard back before we had modern medicine. But I gotta say, my wife is an extremely pain averse person (she either feels pain about 5 times as much as I do, or she's kinda wimpy about it and doesn't cope with it well), but once she got that epidural, birth was not too bad. It became more like something that took some effort to do as opposed to something harrowing.

I've heard an American physician make this statement about his wife's experience of being a new mother. The man was a surgeon and no stranger to hard work and long hours.

Indeed, but the man was also talking about his wife's experience. It could be accurate but a married man myself, I can assure you he was heavily disincentivized to compare it to anything less heroic.

Yeah. I've also heard it said that war was to men what motherhood was to women. I agree with the sentiment but it's not Ancient Rome anymore and we can't really win glory and wealth by pillaging and looting fertile farmland and slaves. Thus each man chooses his own Hock.

I think it is roughly correct. Historically only fraction of males reproduced sometimes getting as low a number as 1:17 compared to women. On the other hand even if women reproduced, they had at times 30% chance of dying in childbirth in their lives. So on average we really are in relatively similar numbers of men who were not able to reproduce and women that died after (hopefully) reproducing - if their child was not the first one and stillborn.

There is the saying that only women really are "being" and valued for what they are - the potential of being the mother. The men are "doings" and their value derives from what they bring to the table. It roughly corresponds to rites of passage: women have it simple, they were historically considered adult as soon as they experienced their first menstruation. Males often had to undergo crazy rituals involving pain and risk of death.

Now of course we do live in a different society for some time now, but I do think that the evolution really did not catch up yet. The general attitudes are still the same as they were thousands of years ago.

A minor quibble, the study you reference doesn't mean that only one in 17 men reproduced, as if there were a handful of men with giant harems.

Imagine that you have small groups of related men descended from a single patriarch, plus their wives and children. These clans would go to war with other clans.

If clan A defeats clan B, then all the men in clan B are killed and the women taken as war brides.

When clan A starts running out of farmland due to population growth, it splits and the splinter group goes looking for territory elsewhere.

Rinse and repeat these two processes, and you end up with a situation where someone alive today has far fewer male ancestors than female ancestors, because neolithic women did not face the same selection pressures as neolithic men.

It's also worth noting that weird, painful initiation rituals don't just exist for young men (although they are mostly for young men).

Well since you asked, I think it's retarded. I also said that in more words the last 5 times you asked.

More effort than this, please.

I can't say I disagree, you have to work very hard and think with all your brains to be this flagrantly stupid.

This is unnecessarily antagonistic, don't do this please.

I don’t disagree with you, but, uh, it seems like responding to single issue posters should come with a bit of leeway when it’s the 5th time.

Gotcha, though I hope it's clear that I meant no malice by it. Poor bastard needs a father figure to give him a hug, or better yet, a hooker.

I'm more exasperated at his Eeyore impersonation than anything else.

We're both in the healthcare field: we both know that human beings can habituate to an awful lot of disgusting shit and deal with it with a smile.

So basically the Hock is an example of unusually refined stupidity. 99.99 percent pure reagent grade dumbass, not like the 80 percent pure stuff a peasant gets drunk on.

My brother in Christ, you invented the "Hock". You have every opportunity to think of something 10% as stupid.

What would you think - as a person and a future psychiatrist - of a man who attempted the Hock and lived to tell the tale? Would you admire his strength and resilience, while condemning his stupidity? Would you find it amusing? The Hock is at least a testament to hard work and...brainpower, even if possibly misguided and foolish.

I believe that the Hock provideth for all who attempt it, either through victory or death.

condemning his stupidity?

Yes. That about sums it up ngl

The idea I got is that /u/SkookumTree wants it to be stupid, because it's noble to do stupid shit or something.

Needless to repeat, I disagree. Doing retarded shit isn't noble, it's retarded. When women do become attracted to a man after he did something retarded, it's in spite of retardation - it's because it was also cool (the "Hock" isn't) or netted him value (the "Hock" doesn't) or was noble-noble not "retarded-noble" (the "Hock" is not).

By the way, /u/SkookumTree, before you show your idea to anyone else, please don't call it some cringy neologism that sounds like one of the worst terms PUAs coined because they thought it's gotta be original and catchy.

When women do become attracted to a man after he did something retarded, it's in spite of retardation

I do wonder. Perhaps the Hock is Jackass meets Into the Wild; however, was Johnny Knoxville more attractive for riding off rooftops in shopping carts? I would think a high-school sophomore might be more attractive to his peers for doing so. A grown adult? Maybe if he makes a bunch of money off of it or becomes notorious. Then again: consider the fate of Eugene, Oregon's Nutsack Man, a man who suffered brain damage in a motorcycle wreck and then spent several years riding his bike around Eugene, yelling "Eugene Transit can suck my sweaty NUTSACK! NUTSAAAAAAAACK!" He certainly gained notoriety, although I have no clue if anyone was attracted to our hero. I heard tell that he had a girlfriend at one point - and this while sleeping rough and screaming NUTSACK at passersby.

Also, the origin of the term "Hock" is simple: Hock participants are chucked or Hocked into the Alaskan wilderness. "Hock" is a slang term that can mean "to throw".

You're also telling me that a solo cross-country journey in temperatures as low as 40 below zero, on skis, with a homemade sled and a bunch of gear, isn't at all cool? Hell, there are other people who did things like this, solo or in groups, in the same terrain...Andrew Skurka isn't cool for his journey? Chris McCandless wasn't noble or heroic for his ultimately futile attempt...and would it have been different had McCandless survived his adventure to return to society? Jon Krakauer was just a dumbass for trying to use a couple of curtain rods from a hardware store to protect himself from crevasses during his 1977 solo climb of the Devil's Thumb?

Perhaps the Hock is polarizing; I will also contend that the Hock produces a change in the character and personality of he who survives. The point isn't to go on the Hock and tell everyone about it; I suspect that if you survived the Hock you wouldn't talk about it much except perhaps with people who had survived similar experiences, and then only at certain times. The point is to alter your character and become Hock hardened.

"Hock" is a slang term that can mean "to throw".

Not sure if this is part of your distilled stupidity strategy, but no it doesn't -- 'hock' is either part of a pig's (or other animal's, but usually a pig's) leg, or the act of spitting up phlegm.

The word you may be reaching for is "huck" -- which can also mean vomit, so maybe you are on the right track -- in that none of these things are attractive to women either.

I've heard "hock" being used in this sense. Apparently at least a few other people have. The Hock spawning a slang etymology debate is an unexpected outcome here...

You keep tossing out "the Hock" with no explanation like it's common cultural knowledge. Yet Google returns nothing.

What is it? Where are you getting it from?

The Hock is my own creation. I believe that the Hock purges the weakness out of people's character through adversity and challenge; a necessary component of the Hock is the risk of death.

"The Hock" is an idea he is enamored with, where young people get dropped into extremely hostile wilderness conditions, relying on their survival skills, persistence and general strength of character to make it back to civilization without freezing to death or otherwise getting themselves killed. He believes that surviving such a challenge will make one more interesting at parties/otherwise increase one's socio-sexual market value. Most of his posts lately seem to revolve around this subject in some way.

Ah, seems pretty novel.

He believes that surviving such a challenge will make one more interesting at parties/otherwise increase one's socio-sexual market value.

In some way, yes. Leaving aside any benefit that comes from surviving life and death struggle, consider what a person who boards the plane to embark on the Hock is like, compared to how he was a year ago:

He is more physically fit, having worked at strength training and aerobic conditioning.

He has carefully considered his selection of outdoor gear and equipment, building his planning and preparation skills.

He has made peace with his own mortality and considered deeply what was meaningful in his life.

So too: the Hock tests. Those who have garbage conscientiousness, or who are physically unfit, or who lack a certain relatively low level of intelligence...do not survive the Hock.

Therefore, I would argue that the median Hock survivor would be more attractive than average...or at least, this would be so if you simply rounded up a bunch of random people and offered a million bucks to those that survived, or just forced them to Hock but gave them time to train.

People who have been revived from an opioid overdose with Narcan have survived a life and death struggle. They too have often made peace with their own mortality. The fact that they survived does not make them more attractive, instead it makes them less attractive. It signals that they do not exercise good judgment and are unable to find a healthier way to cope with the problems in their life.

I feel like surviving the Hock will not have the attractiveness increasing benefits you are predicting. Instead, people will question why you feel the need to engage in such risky behavior with such a minimal payoff. If they deduce that your participation in the Hock was due to your inability to find healthy solutions to the struggles in your life then they may question what crazy thing you will do next time you face a struggle.

Instead of the Hock you would get more benefit from the socially acceptable forms of extreme fitness like: Ironman, CrossFit, triathlons, etc. They have the added benefit of having existing social structures where people can help you train and provide motivation. Technically, they are life and death struggles since people have died while participating in them.

But. If you OD AND THEN GET CLEAN you might have perspective and wisdom and maybe be more attractive. I think it would definitely hold true if heroin dealers only sold to those that had first climbed a mountain or run a marathon in a decent time or something. Have to have done at least one Feat to buy dope. A clean former mountain climber might be okay.

Is the Hock addictive?

You keep posting the same thing. The fact is, there are many happy couples with very below-average looks. The wife of an ugly man is not, on average, 'deeply disgusted' with him. (I'm not sure what effect this has on e.g. cheating, any observations will be very confounded by the association of unattractiveness with other things).

You're a decent writer, you seem capable of having interesting ideas. Do you have anything else you might be moved to write about? Why not try that? Maybe just vignettes from your life like george_e_hale, maybe some interesting technicality from your job, perhaps a commentary on ancient philosophy. Just anything else.

Unattractiveness isn't just physical. And it isn't always the case... it's just a good deal more likely that an incapable chump has a partner that is disgusted by them.

Its almost entirely physical.

Consider Elliot Rodger.

Imagine if he was 6'2". With the same personality.

Is our hero now average?

He wasn’t ugly even at his height, his own manifesto makes clear that the reason for his loneliness was that he never spoke to women his age and so never created or found the possibility of dating one.

Yeah, agreed.

EDIT: I do think that he would probably have been better off had he attempted and survived the Hock. He at least would grok that he needed to work for things, confronted his own mortality, learned that Nature doesn't give a rat's ass about Daddy's money, and become physically fit and determined. Military service might have been even better - especially if he saw combat and got back in one piece and able to hold down a job. These things only work well if they're more or less freely chosen...I don't know how well drafting this dude for Vietnam or something would have worked out.

Disagreed, unless your definition of physical is very literal.

Rather abstracted to unattractive/gross behavioral tendencies plus or minus mental illnesses like schizophrenia and...pretty much every invisible disability to boot. Pretty conceivable that you might look pretty decent on the outside but be garbage on the inside. Case in point: Elliot Rodger. I don't think he'd have done that much better if he was 6' tall, either.

What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all?

I think it's a bizarre concept. It's not even masochism--the masochist presumably at least takes some pleasure, sensual or otherwise, from the punishment and degradation. What you're describing here seems to be somewhere in and among original sin, serious self-loathing, and a deathwish.

It's also not entirely clear to me that once one passes this what you're describing as Hell on Earth, that to be in this same person 's presence romantically would be to endure a "deep visceral biological disgust."

much as your wife is very likely to be deeply disgusted with you

That seems like a big assumption.

It's Skookum, that's just one of his axioms. It seems that his goal is to create a pill so black that light cannot bounce off it at all, and then force himself to swallow it. Why? I cannot tell.

It does conflate the life of the average man with that of the unattractive one, and ignores the role of habituation to disgust that people experience.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I love this poem, and I've just noticed that Owen rhymes "drowning" with "drowning". Seriously, Wilfred?

I wanted to excuse it with the line break, but it really has to be paired with the preceding stanza. And then you’ve got the 12-line conclusion. Maybe there’s some printing artistic license involved…it’s impossible to tell from the manuscript.

This is one of my favorite poems. I like and admire the aesthetic of these men, who sacrificed so much for so little. In the end it is one of the reasons why I like the Hock and believe in its transformative power: the Hock, freely and willingly chosen, purges weakness from the soul. Sometimes the body dies, too much weakness entrapped within it. Everyone chooses their own Hock - or not.

Hock my balls.

If you really believed these men were noble, you would listen when they told you that you were buying in to a lie. Really listen, instead of mining their words for what you already believed.

They may well be some overlap between “necessary” and “dulce et decorum”. Trench warfare ain’t it.

It is meaningless. These men believed that what they were doing was glorious, but instead they got ground into paste in the trenches for a few inches of mud. I contend that freely and willingly entering this Hell is itself noble, admirable, pointless, and perhaps idiotic.

I contend that freely and willingly entering this Hell is itself noble, admirable, pointless, and perhaps idiotic.

What about the soldiers who were drafted?

As I understand it people were quite enthusiastic about it for the most part. Draftees that were ambivalent or worse were just unfortunate people in a terrible situation. The Hock is best if done willingly and freely.

I think it's dumb.

I think suffering as a human emotion is an over rated experience.

I dislike that shared group suffering is a consistent cheat code for unlocking group cohesion. I was always suspicious of groups that employed this method to bond their underlings.

Certain levels of suffering and pain are my personal proof that a good god does not exist, and never existed with any amount of power over this universe. The suffering present by default in nature is horrific and often purposeless.

Worshipping suffering bring to mind goths that would cut themselves in highschool. Lauding it as a method for social cohesion makes me think that the person is bad at normal human connection and is looking for a cheat code.

So basically the Hock is a cheat code cooked up by a lonely probably-autistic man looking to trade out the pain of loneliness for that of physical suffering, ideally shared.

On the goths: those fuckers formed strong as hell bonds due to the shared intensity of their experiences - arguments with parents, occasional psych unit stays, running away from home to escape said psych unit stays. The bonds lasted a while after high school but five or so years later they frayed after they got the money for sleeve tattoos and decent therapy and grew apart.

But: does this dumbness have a political slant to it at all? If it does, what quadrant is it in politically?

So basically the Hock is a cheat code cooked up by a lonely probably-autistic man looking to trade out the pain of loneliness for that of physical suffering, ideally shared.

I don't think the trade will be successful, they will wind up with both the suffering and the loneliness.

Men don't come back from combat and war and feel that they are no longer alone. They come back missing the level of camaraderie they had. Many of those same men went in relatively fine too.

But: does this dumbness have a political slant to it at all? If it does, what quadrant is it in politically?

No, plenty of things don't have a political slant. If it does have one it is probably an artifact of demographics. Whichever quadrant young men are in is going to be where this is at.

What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all?

What I think? I think you made your own personal religion worshipping suffering for its own sake as holiest thing ever, and try to preach it here, with little success so far. Do not let it dissuade you, keep up the good work.

Does this homebrew religion have a political slant? If it does, where is it on the political quadrant?

I tried some "rejection therapy".

Spoke to some girls on my walk home. 2 average conversations. 1 great conversation. 1 really bad conversation.

0 numbers.

Im not going to lie, the great conversation was a really cute pharmacist I would have loved to get to know more. "Im seeing a guy" felt like a small death. Part of me wishes it wasnt a just a white lie which it most likely is. On net it was a good experience, the rejections gave me more energy not less.

I can see this working out. Not in that anything will come of it directly, but even after 4 attempts social interacrions that felt daunting in the past feel like small fry now. It can be a valuable skill when I will really need it.

I plan to become numb to rejection within a few months. Im gonna do the whole a rejection a day thing.

Im not going to lie, the great conversation was a really cute pharmacist I would have loved to get to know more. "Im seeing a guy" felt like a small death.

Hah, I think I know that feeling. In my case it usually manifests as a small surge of jealousy/envy because (if we assume it is true) some other guy managed to snag her attention and keep her around and my general sense of honor demands that I back off, which is to say I have to garner up a huge amount of confidence/motivation to take the risk, and now I have to shut all that down and suppress the urge to just go full caveman, which is a tricky thing to navigate, emotionally speaking.

Also it prickles the pride (for me, anyway) because now I'm automatically comparing myself to this guy I've never met, and wondering if he's better than me? Because if he isn't then she's clearly making a mistake! She needs to dump that loser and get with a REAL man!

But if he is better, does that mean I'm just not up to snuff in the dating market? What has he got that I don't got?

One of the more difficult paradoxes to resolve is having the pure unadulterated self-confidence to believe that you're a great catch, worthy of getting a high quality woman, and really believing it, and yet also being 'happy' for another guy who ends up with a high quality woman you were eyeing.

Because yeah, if he's better than you, then he deserves it. But if he's better than you, how does your ego deal with that hit? How do you avoid immediately viewing him as a rival?

I've had a fair number of women I've been into and the very second I step into the realm of suggesting a romantic connection they drop the "I have a boyfriend" bomb, and I admit it usually stirs a very basic territorial instinct. "Well have him come over here and we'll duke it out and you can pick the strongest of us as nature intended!"

Most of them, as far as I can tell, are married and often with kids now. Which is to say, they picked well.

One of the more difficult paradoxes to resolve is having the pure unadulterated self-confidence to believe that you're a great catch, worthy of getting a high quality woman, and really believing it, and yet also being 'happy' for another guy who ends up with a high quality woman you were eyeing.

A possible resolution: you are fundamentally disgusting but also an exceptional individual, very conscientious and determined and also caring. As such, your exceptional personal qualities mean that you are in theory worthy of a good relationship with a good woman. However, you also understand that ordinary Joes, lacking both disgust and exceptional characteristics, are also worthy and admirable. Also, you feel that your existence and whatever disgust your kids will inherit is partially a burden on the commons, which you repay through hard work and altruism; it is admirable if Joe gets the girl (meaning that she doesn't have to endure disgust) and if you do (because you have managed to through sheer strength of character to inspire someone to endure disgust to make you happy, and because she is willing to endure as you are for the greater good).

To me it is a little easier to recognize that people have different strengths and weaknesses and that it is impossible to reduce them to a single metric that encompasses everything that might make them attractive.

Guys tend to get overly focused on certain metrics like "how much money he makes" or "how much weight he lifts" or the obvious "how tall is he."

When really, a guy could be strong in some areas and deficient in others, and this doesn't make him 'better' than you, but it might make him a better fit for a particular woman, or it might mean that you would defeat him in most arenas but he's so good at a particular skill set that he would beat 99% of other contenders there, and that counts for a lot but doesn't discount your own strengths.

Like, just because Lance Armstrong could crush me in a cycling race (even sans PEDs) I don't have to consider myself 'lesser' than him. I could probably beat him in a boxing match.

That said, it is still a blow to the ego, since you wonder if you've been maximizing the wrong traits. Also, of course, having a high income/net worth mitigates a LOT of negative traits since, unlike height or strength, it has no strict upper limit.

In my experience, you shouldn't ask for a number but just give yours (or social media tag). Whether the content of the rejection is true or not, it opens up the possibility she saves the contact info and contacts you if things change. Or maybe she is close but needs a little more social proofing to see that you're valued. Even after rejection, you could say you come here often for [insert fun thing here] so hopefully you'll run into each other again. All of the above have worked for me in various contexts.

I plan to become numb to rejection within a few months.

Not being afraid of rejection and not allowing it to fuck with your emotionally state is a hugely advantageous skill which more people should develop. If you're not being rejected in most aspects of life, you're not trying. Good on you!

This seems logical to me. She can actually google you, maybe look you up on LinkedIn before giving her own info.

In my experience, you shouldn't ask for a number but just give yours (or social media tag).

I'm not so sure about this, I've participated in a couple of conversations where the girl hit it off with a guy but then he gave her his number instead of asking for hers. In both cases the girl resolved not to reach out.

They were Hispanic women though so maybe the gender politics were a little more traditional.

Yeah, that's a good point. My experience is mostly in big US cities with white girls.

I thought about it some more and I think it's more of a backup option in case you aren't sure she's really into you or gives you a changeable reason for rejection, e.g., she has a boyfriend. If you guys are hitting it off, it's probably better to just ask for a number or ig tag. If she says she has a boyfriend, you can give her your number or social media.

Which country are you in? I think this is pretty culturally mediated. I don’t mind speaking to polite strangers, but it’s rare in Britain and mostly only happens when people are trying to sell you something (donations for charity, begging, and religious proselytism from large mostly-African or Filipino evangelical megachurches in my experience). In the US speaking to strangers is extremely normalized and seems to happen all the time, even in NYC which has a reputation for being cold or unfriendly by the standards of American cities.

The best thing for social skills is to work in sales for a while. If possible I’ll definitely pressure my kids into taking a summer job in some kind of retail/sales environment as teenagers because all the people I know who did built the confidence there to deal with a lot of different shit in adult life. Smile, look people in the eyes, approach strangers, try to earn a commission, be polite, recognize social cues, it’s all stuff you learn selling shoes or whatever.

I couldn't agree more! I did my time as part of a crew which went around during the summer and painted houses. If you pitched the sale, you got 10% of the contract. I have to admit it was a rough start, but I ended up paying for all my living expenses for college doing it.

Then there's the idea that learning sales frames the world as a sea of marks or buyers to be maneuvered and manipulated. Maybe I'm biased against sales as I saw my dad do it for years and it eventually left a bitter taste. To be a good salesperson requires social savvy, sure, but when you dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change, the devil changes you.

Peripherally relevant but one of my old favorites.

Sales is the worst. Once you really get into the methodology, it changes the way you approach every conversation/interaction.

It's a bit dramatic, but I do believe that learning sales/manipulation/pua techniques is a modern equivalent of selling your soul for worldly gains.

Great. A Faustian bargain where - as is customary - the Devil actually holds up his end of the deal. If pressed, I would suspect that the very popular and the very social have just as cynical views about humanity as the isolated neckbeards, if more measured and refined. However, that is basically just pulled from my ass as well as conversations with friends that knew politician types.

I don't think this is accurate. Unless you're a total sociopath, cynical manipulation can only get you so far. For the most part popular and social folks are just happy. When other people are truly happy you really are drawn to them!

A big part of sales and pua tactics is 'abundance mindset' or basically faking being happy when you aren't.

I have no evidence but I have a very strong hunch that the practical aspects of PUA were almost directly ported over from sales.

Actually I do have a piece of evidence: the way early PUA schemes were marketed showed a marked influence from the web 1.0 sales landing pages (single page, very long, repetitive endorsements from customers, repeated prompts to enter an email for the free book, etc). Also the use of sales terminology like "opening" and "closing".

I suppose it makes sense. You have young men doing sales, making decent money by using a few choice manipulation mechanisms. They decide first to switch to selling their selves to women, and then when it's shown that it works proceeding to selling their techniques back into the market. I think the innovative part of PUA was incorporating evo-psych to explain and contextualise why and how it works.

I think that's what makes FDS such an embarrassment; they show zero curiosity for figuring out what works, why it works, or even whether it works. They're stuck in a blend of basic "diet + cosmetics" magazine tier advice mixed with an internet flavoured radical feminism of pathologising, well, not even masculinity but more the failures of masculinity (porn brain, erectile dysfunction, general "scrote"-ness etc). For people who spend so long in front of the mirror they show a distinct lack of self-reflection. PUA tells men to stop doing what they're doing and do the difficult things they've been avoiding. FDS tells women to keep doing the same thing only more so.

Half the value of PUA is in simply learning what to avoid doing. You don't necessarily have to sell your soul, you can make a big improvement by ceasing to sabotage yourself with rose-tinted romanticism.

What the hell would an effective or valuable version of FDS look like other than simple-but-nontrivial stuff like "be thin, don't be addicted to drugs or alcohol, don't be batshit crazy, have self respect, have a job"?

I have no idea, that's the question isn't it. But if you can entertain the idea that there are women who aren't doing as well as they could because some women are social fuck ups too then it stands to reason there should be practical measures they can take to improve their outcomes. It could range from acknowledging the fertility window, to the poor dating prospects for single mothers, to making an effort to understand what most men want and don't want, through to basic stuff like how to flirt (put the damn phone down!), how to write more than three words on a dating site, and, like I said about PUA, what not to do.

Somewhere out there are women who think that collecting rescue animals, wearing dungarees, spending all day on tumblr and exclusively using photos of themselves in a group of 8 isn't hurting their chances. Moaning about the fact that men like looking at naked women on the internet isn't helping them. Neither is holding on to the idea that there's an athletic, high achieving career focused man who is yearning to take a single mother and her children on an all expenses paid round the world adventure, if only he'd hurry up and find her. "Men are even worse than you thought" is not what they need to hear. Otherwise they'll fall into the MGTOW cope trap where they spend 24/7 thinking about how awful the opposite sex while claiming they've forsworn any interest in them.

The best thing for social skills is to work in sales for a while. If possible I’ll definitely pressure my kids into taking a summer job in some kind of retail/sales environment as teenagers because all the people I know who did built the confidence there to deal with a lot of different shit in adult life. Smile, look people in the eyes, approach strangers, try to earn a commission, be polite, recognize social cues, it’s all stuff you learn selling shoes or whatever.

Yeah sales jobs are practically getting rejected for a living. Even though I think asking for numbers is turning that up to 11 because that has to the potential to hurt on a personal level as opposed to "maybe my employers product just sucks".

But for those who don't want to dive into the deep end, it's a good enough compromise, money notwithstanding.

Which country are you in? I think this is pretty culturally mediated. I don’t mind speaking to polite strangers, but it’s rare in Britain and mostly only happens when people are trying to sell you something (donations for charity, begging, and religious proselytism from large mostly-African or Filipino evangelical megachurches in my experience). In the US speaking to strangers is extremely normalized and seems to happen all the time, even in NYC which has a reputation for being cold or unfriendly by the standards of American cities.

In just about one of the worst places in The World for this. Dubai.

Too many different language barriers and cultures to navigate.

But yeah the US is pretty nice in the regard. I was striking up conversations with Americans in the gas station, game store, street when I was visiting, including in NYC.

Yeah, I like that as an idea. Also aristocratic tutoring in networking and social skill by the most graceful political motherfucker you can find. And life and death struggle, especially for the boys.

Why don't you recommend he try the Hock?

@f3zinker has seen the Hock and is undoubtedly aware of it. The Hock is best when it is freely chosen to freeze weakness off of one's character or soul and allow a person to become Hock hardened. Every man should consider whether or not to Hock and if so, what his Hock looks like. Not everyone's Hock takes place in the Alaskan wilderness. There may be many Hocks, but the Alaskan Hock is mine.

Where did the work Hock come from btw? Is there some real etymology or do you just like the sound of it?

I heard "hock" used by my father as a slang word meaning "to throw": he once told me "Son, you can't just hock that wet log onto the fire like that..."

Of course, I also like the sound.

Emirates flight attendants are the conversationalists you seek.

Aren’t they all hookers?

(Coughs) Well. No. Whatever gave you that idea? I only speak with some degree of knowledge in that I've known at least four of said CAs, one of whom I consider a dear friend, though she quit last year.

But seriously what makes you have that impression?

Aren't we all...? /strokes beard

They are too high end

How are you initiating the conversations?

Find someone who looks free and is standing around doing nothing.

Ask a random innocous question like point at a shop near by and ask about that, followed by a personal question like do you work around here. She will probably ask the same back, if not leave.

Theres a lot of work to be done in that department I agree.

I've been attempting things like this. I'm from the US and living in France for the next few months. So far something I've had some success with is: go to a tourist site of some kind, approach a pretty girl who's by herself, say hi ask her to take a picture of me (in French), offer to do the same, apologize for my accent, and then see if she's interested in chatting. At that point, she can obviously ask me about where I'm from, what I'm doing in France, etc. and I can ask similar questions.

I've tried this a few times and twice it led to us getting coffee or food together after (but nothing beyond that).

I'd like to learn other ways of going about it though.

"Im seeing a guy" felt like a small death.

Back when I was doing this sort of thing, I was genuinely happy to get this sort of response from a girl. Particularly when it was after a great conversation and connection that was pretty unfalsifiable in terms of being genuine. I felt that I had been acknowledged as a man and as being attractive. Her being unavailable was irrelevant. Really encouraging.

I had the same feeling when I was involved in a long term relationship and had a similar conversation with a single bridesmaid at a wedding. I was in a different country at the time. Same great conversation and acknowledgment of each other as attractive and I was upfront about being in a relationship. No hard feelings at all on either side.

Don't let this sort of response get you down at all. It's not the same sort of 'rejection'.

I felt that I had been acknowledged as a man and as being attractive.

I don't think it implies an acknowledgement of attractiveness (only lack thereof).

I'm under the assumption some girls will entertain the conversation just because and the signal for attractiveness is actually giving the digits.

I'm seconding @CertainlyWorse here, getting to "I have a boyfriend" after a long conversation is probably best thought of as an intermediate stage between being shot down completely and getting the number. She needed to reach for a better excuse. If you were just creepy or unattractive, she wouldn't need that reason.

So what's the optimal move when "IHABF" follows a good conversation? Carry on talking and then proposition again?

In my experience, in a different place at a different time with different people, put it on the backburner, friendzone her if that's something you don't mind doing.

I've continued hot pursuit and propositioned again later. This had a high chance of her going on a date with you, only to swerve you when you try to kiss her after the baseball game leaving you sunburned and sniffling. Or at least that was me at seventeen, I've never forgiven the Atlanta Braves.

When I've put it on keep warm, chatting on occasion but keeping it light, there's a decent chance the bf disappears later. Either because they break up on their own, or because she realizes how awesome you are. Either way don't be too invested, follow George's advice.

Always, however, make sure they are really thoroughly broken up, or at least that she very much realizes what she's doing, before she hooks up with you. Post hook up guilt trips have gotten me into the kind of trouble I'm not going to talk about outside DMs; a girl who recently had a bf should be approached with caution, make sure she affirmatively wants to do everything, don't take the glide path.

In my experience it's a segue to sn end to the conversation, but not always. As with everything, it depends. I've had girls drop this but seemingly want to not only keep talking but meet again. The Rule Above All Rules is to roll with it, to show no hurt or disappointment. No need to be funny unless you're naturally so, as that can seem try hard. End of the day, nothing wrong with enjoying a platonic conversation with an attractive woman.

There is a fraction of girls that will sustain an engaged conversation with indications of interest with a man they do not find attractive purely for attention/out of boredom/maintaining social harmony, but I think that percentage would be relatively small. In my examples above, I have experience enough to know that this was (almost certainly) not the case.

Conversely there are girls that will have conversations with men they find attractive, show genuine interest and who will still not give out their number (for whatever reason). Actually having a boyfriend/husband, but being flattered by attention is a really mundane and common scenario that I would be surprised that most men haven't come across.

Getting a kiss/phone number/sex as the only determinants of attraction (while the metric of choice among Lotharios) is a pretty poor thing to base your self esteem around.

Edit: After thinking about it, the time's where I did feel bad after finding out she had a boyfriend is usually when the girl was hiding that fact in the conversation for one reason or another. Then I'd realise she either didn't know how to tell me, or kept the conversation going without telling me for attention. Feeling lousy after the conversation is probably a good way to tell the girl wasn't attracted.

Not only that...it's a very nice way to do things. At no point does he recount being seen as transgressive or anything for his actions; nobody called the cops on him or tried to beat him up or anything like that. He's pretty lucky and should run with it.

I feel as if you must have either immersed yourself in some really angry, fairly unrealistic online discourse regarding the dating scene, or that you yourself have had some fairly horrible experiences in your romantic interactions with women. I am not suggesting that terrible outcomes are not possible, but the likelihood of being beat up or having the cops called on anyone for approaching a woman seems exceedingly low, unless of course you are doing something very, very wrong (I mean like wearing a shirt covered in blood level wrong).

I once had a woman approach me at a New years party at a geek bar, talk about how she couldn't find her friend, ask me if I'd like a drink. Tiny, dark hair, amazingly defined upper back.

Then while she was in the bathroom, an unaffiliated fat redhead got in my face and demanded to know who I was and if I knew her. I said "Her name is *****, we're looking for her friend or something, I'm waiting here while she's in the bathroom, oh look, there's *****. Bye."

10 minutes later we're dancing. 12 minutes later, security has separated the two of us and is interrogating me while a fat redhead screams in my face as the new year gets rung in. No idea where ***** was taken.

That seems extremely atypical and I wouldn’t base much about that - did you get kicked out of the bar?

I left of my own accord because security kept talking me in circles, asking who I was with (no one, I had just moved to Milwaukee and was there to meet new friends) and not letting me go find wherever ***** had been taken.

Not terrible - simply "it could be worse, and occasionally is for some rather unlucky individuals". If you're a middle-class grown adult in a middle-class area and there's no bullshit going on that makes you a harassment magnet for local cops, it's pretty damn unlikely. They don't go to school or worse yet, work with him; the worst they could do is blow up his social circles and make it so he has to find new friends, and there would need to be a fair amount of motivation to do that. He'd have to transgress somehow - which he has clearly not done.

Not just that. Nobody called the cops on you. Nobody tried to get you maimed or killed - or even beat up. Nobody tried to get you fired. In fact...I'd guess that the "really bad conversation" wasn't terrible - they didn't call you a rapist or something or make a scene. You're not unattractive, bro...keep up the good work.

That doesn’t even happen to schizophrenic bums who threaten people- the chance is pretty much 0%.

As one black pilled man to another, you are not blackpilled enough if you think those things are failure modes. For me lack of a number in and of itself is.

Nevertheless, It's a failure to get numbers, but a success in getting a rejection, which is my entire intention. I'm training myself to act fast when there is a short window of opportunity and brush of the most likely rejection. My goal is that the no fucks given attitude I practice in the streets will be useful in places where I am more likely to actually get any better responses such as within my network.

There is failure (small, expected,cost of doing business) and then there is catastrophic and unexpected failure. It's the difference between a WallStreetBets ape losing a few hundred bucks on the stock market and that same ape being kidnapped, tortured, and ransomed for the contents of his bank account.

I meant to say basically:

"Congratulations! You aren't exceptionally unattractive or otherwise vulnerable[1]! Keep up the good work - and if you're afraid, have some perspective. It can be far worse for some people - but even then, risking that in order to be in a relationship may well be worth it."

I think that it may well be a feature, not a bug, if these things happen from time to time to awkward or disabled or very unattractive men - and it's valuable that they risk these things in hopes of having relationships, too.

[1] Vulnerable: could be disabled, deformed, something like a minority in a racist area hitting on girls that aren't his race/ethnicity/religious background.

For what it is worth: I know a couple of autistic guys that had their partners try to stab them. One was able to block the knife; another almost died to blood loss. The autistic women I knew...several have told me about at least attempted rape, physical abuse, crap like that. They're all in seemingly-healthy relationships, so it was worth it...but these people went through Hell; at least the guys can be said to have gone somewhat willingly. That he isn't experiencing this crap is valuable.

And yes - I'd think it would be reasonable to congratulate an autistic or perhaps simply very unattractive woman on "successfully completing a date without getting treated like a prostitute, roofied and raped, or murdered and dismembered".

"Congratulations! You aren't exceptionally unattractive or otherwise vulnerable[1]!

Not sure if I'm operating at that low of a level lol.

Not just that. Nobody called the cops on you. Nobody tried to get you maimed or killed - or even beat up. Nobody tried to get you fired. In fact...I'd guess that the "really bad conversation" wasn't terrible - they didn't call you a rapist or something or make a scene. You're not unattractive, bro...keep up the good work.

Had any of these things happened to you?

No. Did get ostracized in college for a couple years until I said I was dedicating my life to science and the practice of medicine though.


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