aurum

Watch this if you want to challenge your fantasies about where the most attractive women are. This is the kind of thing your 10 is doing while you're at a dive bar having deep conversations with old people: https://youtu.be/qysTp512dfA?si=K3oe6NqveYJNAh-s

I agree getting the hottest women is not the problem for most guys. I don't even think they will succeed in that endeavor. I also agree that Joshe's advice was mostly fine. I don't really have a problem with what he said. I'm pointing out the limitations for the minority of guys who might be interested in that, and to disrupt any fantasies there are about dating the women typically considered the most attractive. If a guy thinks that going out to dive bar is going to get him the hottest women, that's a fantasy. And he needs to pop that. Also, I think you might be misunderstanding the order of operations for pickup. You do pickup precisely because you don't have a social circle and need to meet people. That's exactly what it was like when I moved to Miami. I knew absolutely no one, and so I had to approach a lot more people before I had the luxury of coasting off a group of friends. Because these guys are often socially awkward, they're not going to have a social circle. I've meet many of them. So are they supposed to just wait for a social circle to materialize? They have to initiate lots of conversations. You don't have to think about it as pickup per se. You could think about it as social circle building. But pickup is motivating for many guys. Young guys are mostly immature and aren't motivated by community. They want to meet women. That's the carrot for them. Also, often pickup becomes a great way to meet other guys in your local area. Your "pickup friends" become your actual friends, through the shared bond that is the hell of cold approach. Guys bond well when they have a challenge to tackle together. So there's the start of your social circle. I know guys who were originally "pickup friends" who are all friends years later and in each other's weddings. That's the kind of real bond you can form.

To be fair to him, I don't think his advice was meant to suggest it would attract the hottest girls. Just that it will get you laid and help you overcome social anxiety. Which I agree it could. Most guys are never going to seriously go after the most attractive women. And for good reason. They will not succeed.

I think your advice is good for most guys if they're just looking to overcome social anxiety and get laid a bit. It's a question of what your goals are. If you want the most attractive women, it's hard to escape going to nightclubs. These kind of women just don't go to local dive bars typically. They're usually at some exclusive section at a nightclub you can't even get into. And then after they're going to some private mansion party. Or she's working the club, and she's just going to go home after it closes and you're long gone. The competition curve for these women is not linear, it's hyperbolic. You're not longer competing with regular dudes, you're now competing with celebrities, professional athletes, influencers, high-level promoters, rich trust-fund kids, famous musicians, socialites, hospitality insiders, foreign billionaires etc. It's like going from playing football with your neighborhood friends to playing in the NFL. And yeah, most guys are never going to be able to play in the NFL. So you've got to know what's realistic for you. In that sense your advice is probably better. Succeeding in these kind of environments typically require you to build a social circle. Similar to how you did at your local bar, but now within those top nightclubs and other ancillary events associated with that social scene. So it's not just cold-approach pickup. Basically it's about applying the principles you suggested, but now in extreme high-status environments.

Courtney Ryan is also good to get a woman's perspective: Take advantage of her fashion advice as well if you're older, she has experience in that area.

No country is going to be able to take on unlimited climate refugees. There will be limited spots people will have to fight for.

ManTalks is solid: His whole channel is a good resource for building mature relationships from a masculine POV.

Finally got around to the David Pinsof political video. Some thoughts: First off, it was very good. Pinsof gets a lot right about of political situation and how we rationalize our positions to fit our needs. I felt the bit about moralization was particuarlly insightful. The only real critiques I would have of Pinsof are that a) he flattens development and b) he does not understand a perspective beyond evolution. Flattening development is problematic because it assumes that everyone bullshits equally, and that some values are not actually higher than others. Rather, he just assumes equal development and that any perceived differences in development are just more rationalizations. So his perspective becomes reductionistic. Not understanding anything beyond evolution is also a problem, because then your worldview must be based in materialism. Evolutionary psychology becomes your sense-making box you try to force everything into. But of course materialism itself is untrue, and evolutionary psychology is just a subset of materialism.

Stop expecting unconditional love from humans. This is a foolish expectation to begin with.

Bars are not superior to nightclubs for approaching. They are too small, unless you live in a city like Miami where even the bars are practically nightclubs. Also, the most attractive women are typically at nightclubs rather than bars.

It's precisely because they're too stupid. Government requires intelligence. Everything you point to as an example of an unconscious society is actually an example of emergent solutions from evolutionary intelligence. To address your larger point, such as society of enlightened people is impossible right now. Society requires many people to be cogs in the machine, not radical sages. Someone has to pick fruit, clean toilets, fight wars, cut down trees, deliver packages, stock shelves, do landscaping, drive Uber, work assembly lines, fix cars, load trucks, work tech support, be a bank teller, babysit kids, answer phone calls, package food, work McDonalds, etc. AI and other tech may replace some or even all of these roles eventually, but we're not there yet. And even if all these jobs got replaced tomorrow, people's psychology would not fundamentally have shifted. All that takes time.

That's exactly what is wrong. Which shows how biased your understanding of JP is.

@Ulax well said. Green does not understand freedom, oppression or emergence.

JP has become more corrupt, but he's not purely bad faith. Leftists are just ignorant, biased and pretend like the answers are obvious.

I think relationships are generally very good for your development as a human. They're going to force you to grow and mature. But it's worth making some distinctions between human development and awakening. Awakening is really trans-human. So there's overlap, but also distinctions. Personally, I've let go of the idea of needing my partner to be interested in hardcore consciousness. I think it's an unfair expectation and puts you in the bind of looking for a unicorn. Really want I need from her is just basic maturity and to be a good mother. As long as she supports me taking time for consciousness work, that's enough. She doesn't need to be Peter Ralston. Consider that dating a woman who is interested in hardcore consciousness will inevitably come with serious downsides.

There’s a difference between a model being misused by people who haven’t understood or embodied it, versus a model that is just misleading because of its internal problems. I’d argue MBTI is more the latter.

Which brings us to some very interesting metaphysical questions. Are the chakras “real”? What does it even mean for the chakras to be real? Does it have to be physical and 3rd person objective? If only a small percentage of ESP practitioners can detect them, are they real? Or are they metaphorical? Also, do they need to be real? Or is it enough that they just serve as a useful map? These are heavy questions that most new agers do not significantly grapple with.

But that’s not how it’s used. People do not even acknowledge that lack of verticality is a problem because they mostly don’t even understand that it’s missing. Or why verticality is significant. If you want to use MBTI as a foundation and build from there, I have no problem with that. I’d encourage it.

I've acknowledged it can have value from the beginning on this thread. What's much less obvious is how it's limited. Especially in the context of a forum like this, which is focused on development. The problem is that MBTI can't actually ignore verticality without making wrong assumptions, such as equal and innate cognitive preferences. Like it or not, MBTI is playing in vertical territory but without acknowledging it. This is fine if you're just a normal person who probably isn't going to do much development anyway. You get a cool, new, relatively fixed psychological identity and maybe get to know yourself a little bit better. But it's very subpar for what we are trying to do. So to be extremely clear, I think it's fine if you want to learn about MBTI. It may even offer some unique explanatory power compared to some vertical models, which could make it worth integrating. But I don't see anyone else here acknowledging these limitations. None of these horizontal personality models should be taken that seriously.

Well I disagree with your GPT on certain statements. Have it debate me instead of you

Of course. The only problem is really just taking it too seriously.

Smart

@Emerald There's two things happening at once with the chakras: 1) New age group-think, which does create some consistency as long as you stick with sources that share meaning-making. It often feels coherent, until you test it 2) Large amounts of inconsistency once you actually dive into the specifics of people's intuitions, interpretations, protocols, results and diagnoses. There's no way you can't really verify or falsify any of it This is also not limited to the chakras. The chakras are just one case of this larger dynamic within new age thinking.

That's fine. So let's say there is a surface-level, newspaper version of both astrology and MBTI. And there's also a more serious, deeper version of both as well. My point is that regardless of depth, they're structurally quite similar. And people use them to collect and stitch together various preloaded identities. This also holds for Human Design, Gene Keys and Enneagram. They can be fun or useful for basic introspection. But I don't personally take them seriously beyond that.

Verticality is about development. Self-reflexivity is about construct-awareness.