site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4451 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 19, 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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It will potentially make me more conscientious: the attitude that lets me survive the Hock might let me pay a shitload of attention in social situations so I don't miss anything.

There is no reason to think it will do anything like this. if you want to become more conscientious, go do something extremely social for 3 months. Go be a missionary in Uganda.

If not net 0, the Hock will make you more detached and withdrawn in social situations. Consider the soldier who comes home from war, and has trouble adjusting back into civilian life. If not nothing at all, you're going to mostly experience a wall between you and others.

Imagine you're at some social event, say some meet-up at a bar. You're standing there, drink in hand, watching everyone else, seemingly mingling effortlessly. Why not you, dammit. You're hyper-conscientious about your own milling around, you try to stand next to others talking to eachother, but feel unsure where and how to jump in naturally. Damn you feel awkward. Still! What's more, now you feel resentful, angry even at the frivolty of it.

3 months ago, you were struggling to get a match lit with your half-frost bitten hands. It was a race against the cold and wind, and you were losing. Once that fire was roaring, your body was still in freezing agony sore all over, but hell, the relief and triumph was simultaneously better and worse than anything you'd ever known.

Back to the room. Fuck these people. You survived that night, and so many other after it. Something significant, something none of these people will ever know. What are they talking about now, some twitter drama? So shallow, they have no idea. Your triumph would humble them if only, anyone cared to ask. If only there was a way into the conversation... fuck it, these people have nothing in common with you. You've been through so much.

This is the optimistic way of it playing out.

Survivormanning alone in the woods will not address social competence in any kind of a positive way or provide any useful frame for engaging social scenarios more healthfully.

Yes. The Hock is going to freeze most or all of the hypocrisy off of me,

I don't know what this means, so I'll reiterate. In small, very temperate doses, it will make you slightly more attractive to women, but not anywhere near proportional to the effort you are putting in.

I'll end by granting you that on some deep level, it's quite possible this will improve your self-possesion and perspective in a way that will manifest much deeper into a relationship in a much more nuanced way. But these effects will not appear (and may appear counterproductively) on a group-level or in initial and high level interactions.

Again to the soldier analogy. The things he learned and survived in the hellishness of war may make him a demonstrably better father, with deeper values and worldly detachment. But those are mostly going to come at the cost of social grease and 'gracefullness' and connectedness to the people around him.

I suppose if he does go ahead with this (hopefully in a shortened version that is better planned) it will indeed do a lot to change what he worries about; as you say, getting twisted into knots over a silly conversation at a routine party will be less of a thing when compared with "I nearly froze to death that time and had to save myself". So that may work to reduce social awkwardness because the stakes will be, by comparison, so trivial. Not caring about "am I coming across as too needy?" may indeed help him over a lot of social barriers.

But he has to be alive to do that, and so far this trip is sounding like an elaborate form of suicide. Taking risks because there's no way to reduce all risk is one thing, taking risks because you want risks that are literally life-or-death in order to achieve some psychic transformation is quite different.

The Hock is basically a homebrew form of psychological chemotherapy. Its aim is, among other things, to kill the neuroticism before it kills the human. Of course, chemotherapy administered and brewed by random jackasses is best described as 'risky as all hell'.

Hmm. Let me say something about my reasoning.

When I was 11, I feared [redacted] happening to me - a fate which most of you on the Motte would agree is a terrible one. I believed that skill at public speaking and rhetoric could reduce my odds of suffering this fate, so I practiced diligently in front of a mirror. I did this for a few years.

I was never nervous about any presentation I ever gave after that. Why would I be? Blow a school presentation, and what's the worst that happens? I get a C? If I'm really unlucky, a fistfight with some asshole bully that's probably going to leave no more than bruises? Laughable. I also became an excellent public speaker - better than say 99 percent of high school or college students. Any time there was a speech or presentation that needed to be given, my classmates and the faculty would agree that I was the best in say my classroom of 25, and by a pretty decent margin.

I had just been training in earnest for a goddamn rhetoric Hock, and it had benefits in other areas - such as being genuinely confident and unafraid when presenting and public speaking. Also it made me a decent if overwrought writer. Why fear being rejected or making a fool of yourself, when you've just stared death by avalanche or hypothermia or wild animals in the face day after day?

As far as frivolity: that is the point. The Hock is just pointless Twitter drama writ large and played out in the Alaskan wilderness.

I do have a question for you - have you ever survived any kind of life and death shit like war or something like that? I haven't, and I'm sorry if the question is offensive. If it is, it's probably offensive for its trite meaninglessness and dumbass attempt to ask about shit that you have to be there to know anything about.

Why fear being rejected or making a fool of yourself, when you've just stared death by avalanche or hypothermia or wild animals in the face day after day?

Because it won't make you fearless, it will make you resentful that it didn't work.

Notice in your "presentation Hock" comparison, the thing that made you not fear public speaking was practicing for public speaking? There is no analogy skill transfer between wilderness survival -> improving social awkwardness. You are comparing practicing something that directly improves the thing it applies to, to doing something completely unrelated in hopes that it will reframe you into being better at it. IT WON'T WORK the way you are hoping.

I do beleive that if you went and worked as a mission in a 3rd world scenario, surrounded by others, it would, in fact improve your socialization.

The Hock is just pointless Twitter drama writ large and played out in the Alaskan wilderness.

So three days into your Twitter drama you get yourself killed and your remains are not found until the summer thaw, if ever. If you are the only person in your world, that's fine. But if you have family or any one else involved with you, be that work or life, it's shitty for them.

What's [redacted]?

I do have a question for you - have you ever survived any kind of life and death shit like war or something like that?

I dunno about the guy you’re replying to, but I have and I agree with him. You can read the rest of my advice in replies to your ‘hock’ posting.

I don't know what this means

Skookum has explained to me at length his theory that women suffer greatly as a result of voluntarily being in relationships with socially awkward men who aren't especially good-looking, to the point of believing there's a 1 in 20 chance that a woman in a relationship with such a man suffers more than a woman in a relationship with a man who literally beats her up (yes, really). He hence thinks it's hypocritical of him to ask a woman to suffer for his benefit without him having suffered a comparable degree beforehand. Completing his stupid hike is his way of demonstrating his willingness to undergo pointless suffering for nobody's benefit.

If this chain of reasoning makes no sense to you, that makes two of us.

1 in 20 chance that a woman in a relationship with such a man suffers more than a woman in a relationship with a man who literally beats her up (yes, really).

No. I said I was like 95% certain that a woman in a relationship with such a man suffers much less than a woman in a relationship with a man who literally beats her up. The other 5 percent is basically some devil's advocate stuff like "maybe he is so incompetent socially that he makes her isolated and miserable, and that's worse than being beat up" or some stuff like that. It most definitely can be very charitably considered a stretch; I'm simply leaving the option open that there is some very non-obvious way that Awkward Andy is a worse partner than that Henry guy from Radicalizing the Romanceless. Personally, I'm stumped, Andy's got to be better as a partner than Henry and Henry's just a fucking con man to Andy's crap marketing. However, I was sort of hoping that someone here would come up with some eloquent argument for how Awkward Andy sucks rotting donkey balls as a partner in a way that is very much not obvious at first glance. I can't think of it, to be honest, although admit to perhaps being unable to grok just how Awkward Andy might suck in some sort of weird illegible way that ultimately cashes out to worse than being in an ER with a black eye and broken arm courtesy of Henry.

Really struggling to see how what you just said differs in any way from my gloss of your position.

It's a subtle difference: you'd said something like "1 in 20 women in a relationship with Awkward Andy are as bad off or worse than those being beat by Henry"; I'm saying "Dude, Henry sucks and is a terrible partner, but I'm open to the possibility that Andy sucks donkey balls in some weird way and is just as bad. Although exactly how has me fucking stumped."

I explicitly didn't say "1 in 20 women in a relationship with Awkward Andy are as bad off or worse than those being beat by Henry"; I said:

to the point of believing there's a 1 in 20 chance that a woman in a relationship with such a man suffers more than a woman in a relationship with a man who literally beats her up

Which means exactly the same thing as what you just said.

You can throw around the phrase "extremely non-obvious" as much as you like, it doesn't change the fact that what you're arguing is grotesque. You're so myopically mired in self-pity that you actually think there's even the remotest chance that a woman would rather be in a relationship with a man who beats her up than you. You shouldn't be "open to the possibility": it's preposterous and a grave insult to every victim of domestic abuse in history.

When you qualify as a doctor, I pity the poor women you'll have to treat whose shitty boyfriends land them in the ER. Knowing you, you'll be too busy asking them "but was he handsome tho??" to set their jaws properly.

You're so myopically mired in self-pity that you actually think there's even the remotest chance that a woman would rather be in a relationship with a man who beats her up than you. You shouldn't be "open to the possibility": it's preposterous and a grave insult to every victim of domestic abuse in history.

I have no disagreements about how pathologically self-pitying SkookumTree is in his comments, but I don't think the rest follows. The revealed preference of many a woman is to be in a relationship with a man who beats her up rather than with someone who's awkward to the level of what SkookumTree believes he is. It's possible to discuss if those are her "true" preferences and what she would "truly" rather do, and there's room for such factors, but I think the pudding they actually choose to eat is where the proof is.

Personally, I think this sort of thinking stems from a sort of "Just World Hypothesis" when it comes to romance, particularly that moral qualities that society in general sees as good in a man also translate to romantic success, and as such, if a man has romantic success despite having negative moral qualities such as beating his gf/wife, then there must be something that corrupted and manipulated the women who keep volunteering to be his gf/wife. When I think the more straightforward and also more correct explanation is just that there's only coincidental overlap between these two categories, and women, like all people in many contexts, often tend to be prefer things that are unhealthy for them over things that are healthy for them, if those unhealthy things provide other benefits that the healthy things don't.

For what it is worth, I think that by far the most likely explanation is that our abusive shithead is essentially functioning as a con man and being extremely dishonest about what his intentions are. Our spergy hero is mostly what-you-see-is-what-you-get; however, he is dogshit at marketing himself.

I freely accept the claim that many women get into relationships with attractive men who subsequently go on to beat them. I'm not for a moment claiming that a socially awkward guy who isn't much to look at would actually have an easier time getting into a relationship than a charming Chad who has no qualms about expressing himself with his fists, on the basis that the former man Respak Wimmen and the latter man doesn't. One of my most-upvoted chains of comments on this site was arguing that the advice often given to incels by feminists (namely "if you're an incel then just be more feminist and you won't be an incel anymore") is nonsense.

But I wasn't really talking about who has an easier time getting into a relationship (socially awkward autist vs. charming but violent Chad) - I know it's the latter. I was talking about who is more miserable in a romantic relationship: a woman in a relationship with a socially awkward autist, or a woman in a relationship with a physically abusive man.

The fact that women are far more likely to get into relationships with attractive men who subsequently go on to beat them up than they are to get into relationships with socially awkward autists - this does not imply that women in the former type of relationship are happier than women in the latter type. Sure, it's a revealed preference by women as a group, but that doesn't really tell you about how subjectively happy the person with that revealed preference is. Lots of people's revealed preferences (lottery tickets, gambling with long odds, drinking to excess) have a net-negative impact on their subjective happiness. In light of how utterly miserable and capital-T traumatised most women who escape from abusive relationships seem - well, I'm going to need a lot of evidence before I just accept the claim that women in relationships with caring but socially awkward men are even more miserable than that.

Fair enough in terms of happiness. I think that just shows that, for many people, including some subset of women, happiness just isn't all that important a thing to aim for in a relationship, and they would prefer to be in a relationship that causes them less happiness and more misery than one that causes greater happiness and less misery, since there are other factors in the less happy and more miserable relationship that make it overall more desirable. I'd agree that if SkookumTree thinks that women would be happier being in a relationship with an active wife-beater than with him with all his awkward shortness, then he is wrong, and not by a little, but by a lot. But I think there's a large chunk of truth to be seen here, which is that many women would prefer being in that unhappier and more miserable relationship than with him, as shown by revealed preference (I also think he vastly underestimates both the quantity and quality of women who would prefer the opposite).

More comments

Hmm.

I do know a guy who said he'd no shit rather be beaten by asshole parents than have rather manipulative parents that are in many ways disconnected from reality and full of shit as well as pathologically controlling, but generally well-meaning. Yes, that IS just one guy...but that guy was a real dude. What I am arguing IS grotesque, and I think that the chance is fucking small but present. Also, you don't think I could set jaws competently? Damn, thought 'spergs were s'posed to be at least decent at engineer shit.

So one guy in the entire world said he'd rather have emotionally abusive narcissistic parents than physically abusive parents. I presume his parents were neither physically nor emotionally abusive, so this was just idle uninformed speculation on his part and in reality he'd have no way of knowing which is worse. You're citing one random guy's idle uninformed speculation that he'd prefer to have physically abusive parents over emotionally abusive parents as a data point supporting your hypothesis that at least some women would be more miserable in romantic relationships with socially awkward autists than with boyfriends who beat them up.

Seriously dude, we're getting into "seeing Jesus on a piece of burnt toast" levels of casuistry here.

And while you're at it, you're conflating "emotionally abusive narcissistic guy" with "unattractive, socially awkward but fundamentally well-meaning autist". Well... wow. Maybe you aren't as decent and kind as you think you are.

Quick sense check: have you ever met a woman in a romantic relationship with a socially awkward man, and the woman seemed generally happy and at ease with herself? I have, dozens of times. Now, have you ever met a woman in a romantic relationship with a man who beat her up, and she seemed generally happy and at ease with herself? I have not, ever. I've met women in romantic relationships with men who were "merely" emotionally abusive, and they seemed, frankly, shadows of their former selves.

I've been coming at you with kid gloves for weeks, but at this point I have to tell you: you're revolting, but not for the reasons you think.

maybe he is so incompetent socially that he makes her isolated and miserable, and that's worse than being beat up

This doesn’t happen; women can manage their own social relationships just fine.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats