r0ckyreed

So, I have heard of this book by Esther Vila called The Manipulated Man. I have never read it, but I saw a small post about it on Facebook that really seemed intriguing and made me question my views around feminism and the patriarchy. It helped me realize that as long as I desire women and sex, I will never be free. There was a lot of truth to what Esther Vila argues in that women manipulate men into making men feel obligated to protect and provide for them, where men are the breadwinners and women are the beneficiaries. Of course, I am not denying that men also manipulate women, perhaps even to far more harmful degrees. But I just wanted to share how this made me feel more comfortable and empowered in being single, virgin, and childfree. I have been feeling a lot of guilt for being a virgin still, but I do not much anymore. I realize that it is better for me to be free from sexual desire than to be consumed by it. Maybe me being a virgin still is a gift. I imagined I would become sexually addicted if I ever did have sex. In my last relationship, we were more intimate, and I realized that I lost myself in that relationship. Intimacy can be a wonderful thing but can be dangerous if I am operating from a place of sexual desire/neediness. Leo's story of him missing a chance of getting laid by splitting the bill got me thinking about this issue more in the degrees to which women manipulate men. Women argue for equal rights, but in reality, they inhabit a lot of double standards. If women still expect men to make the first move and to pay for everything, how can feminism be possible? How can a man fully respect a woman to be independent if she is still holding onto conservative social norms and gender expectations? You see this double standard and contradiction? I am trying to be as nuanced as I can, and please do not misinterpret this as red pill, manosphere bullshit. I am trying to articulate what I have noticed as a man, and the apparent double standards and games that women play, and this book seems to be insightful on what I have noticed. EDIT: I think they need to do a Ken movie based off of the pressures men have to face. It is moronic to me that men's issues are swept under the rug because we are the "privileged" gender. For instance, look at body dysmorphia. That is so common amongst men, but it is more hidden than the depictions of women's bodies and ideal beauty. The media portrays men's bodies to be 6 pack and muscular to such unrealistic standards that it encourages such an unrealistic ideal for men. Anyways, I am going off on a tangent. Anyone else familiar with Esther Vila's work? What are your thoughts? Thanks.

I have used both and have paid for subscriptions for GPT-4 and Claude 3.5. From using both for the past few months, I have to say that ChatGPT is superior in many ways. If you are looking for an all around decent AI, ChatGPT is the way to go. Here are my reasons why I like ChatGPT better than Claude: 1. ChatGPT is connected to the internet and can cite you links to the sources it used. This is good for research. Claude cannot do this. 2. ChatGPT remembers your conversations. Claude doesn’t. 3. ChatGPT I have noticed gives more detailed answers. I ask it for lists and it comes up with more than Claude does. The only thing I have found Claude to be superior to ChatGPT at is in terms of writing. It is really good at logical reasoning, discussions, and analyzing writing. I often find myself using GPT first and then I double check with Claude. I have found that ChatGPT sometimes overlooks errors in writing and logical reasoning whereas Claude is better at noticing that and providing nuance. I like how Claude also is more direct, whereas GPT can be highly agreeable. Both apps are good. But if I had to choose one, it would be GPT. Which do you think is better?

Do you have to take a pill every day for life?

Thanks guys. No hard feelings. It was an emotional moment this morning going to the dermatologist and having it be confirmed that I am balding. I still have a lot of hair, but it just sucks to see my young self slowly die. I am gonna research if that medication will affect my dick. I have never had issues with my dick and don’t want to cause any with hair growth medication. I will try to decide whether to take the medication now and catch it early or to let my hair just do what it naturally will.

Have you ever tried any prescription medications for hair loss?

Aging has nothing to do with a socially constructed number of years around a sun. Aging has to do with change and decline. You can be 27 and have cancer and that is aging. Don’t be naive. If you lose your hair your vision, you wouldn’t be so dismissive. I probably made a mistake in making this post, but I’m here for support not for criticism.

I think I’ve found a better metaphor than Leo’s Crocodile. As I was walking through nature, I ran into a spider web, and it got me thinking that Spiders spent many minutes and hours during their day to build traps. The wind may blow them down or humans may destroy the traps, but that is how spiders survive. Many species build traps to catch their prey, but the spider is so deceiving. Even female spiders will trick and eat the male spiders to survive and take all the male’s resources and that’s why that call it Black Widow. I think I’ve stumbled upon a better metaphor than the crocodile. But I can see the objections that a crocodile is more emotionally charged since a crocodile is more threatening to humans than spiders. I will give you that, but you don’t appreciate that a spider spends its day constructing a web to catch prey. Whereas crocodiles hide in the water. I think the most intelligent trap goes to the spider hands down.

Nature is very revealing. Nature is full of traps! You still have time to post on your blog about it. I won’t complain. A spider is a trap machine. That would be scary if the one from Lord of the Rings existed. But even scarier is The ultimate spider which is my mind and how tangled it is in webs of deceptions.

I love it! 😍 😂

Even if we didn’t care, why would that matter? Post whatever you want. It’s like what you said in your LP course, live your life as if you were the last human alive. If there were no humans, would you still post?

Is there a way you could please change the name of the bot back to Womanizer? Wahmenizer just seems a bit lame and cringe. Thanks. Better yet, if there is a way I can change the name, please let me know.

What transcripts did you use for womanizer if I may ask? The bot seems very amazing and gives good feedback. This is incredible.

This is absolutely amazing man! Thank you so much. This is helping me get my social confidence back!

That is concept and imagination! Jesus is a hallucination of your mind. No more real than Santa clause.

Ever thought that a girl might want to make out with you, but was nervous to make that first move? This is women 101. They rarely ever make the first move. She won’t just sit on the couch right next to you on the get go. This was her way of making herself feel comfortable. I would have done the same thing if I was her. And it doesn’t matter if you are Brad Pitt. You have to consider that women might have sexual trauma that might make them slower to engage in intimacy. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t want it.

How in God’s earth did you make this kind of AI? This is absolutely amazing and terrifying!

There is no unless. You don’t experience reality directly; therefore, you can never know anything. This is why we have the scientific method. Scientific method is one of the most reliable ways to know most general knowledge about the world. If you cannot repeat something independently, then it may not be true.

But how could someone believe that without some form of closedmindedness? If someone is really openminded, they wouldn’t think they are above others. They would realize that all is relative. All is perspective. Postmodernism is the openmindedness and modernism is the arrogant closedminded scientist. Arrogance and closed mindedness have to go together.

Have an insight into no-self and impermanence. Then you’ll realize how futile all of this self-torture to become “somebody” is.

I would define meta-rationality as thinking about the limits and strength of rationality. Post-rationality, I would define, are features of consciousness outside of rationality. In other words, there are certain limits in rationality/logic and there may be levels of thinking beyond rationality. But what is rationality really? Rationality is using reasoning and logic to arrive at certain conclusions. It uses chains of reasoning, consistent structured, critical thinking to arrive at certain conclusions based off of the validity of the premises/evidence. I would say that rationality is a higher form of thinking than strict empiricism or observation. Empiricism/observation/experience is the foundation of all knowledge. Without observation, there could be no knowing and no rationality. Rationality is dependent on what we observe. But knowledge does not strictly stop at observation. Rationalism is the view of knowledge that suggests that we can derive knowledge from rationality. We can use mathematics and logic to figure out truths that we may not be able to get a direct experience at. For instance, the fact that humans knew that they had to invent space suits to go to the moon. They had no direct experience of this, but they arrived at the conclusion based off of reasoning. Rationality has its strengths, but there are limits. Post-rationality suggests that rationality is one perspective out of many. One of the main objections is that rationality is based off of certain assumptions that were not itself rationally justified. Rationality discounts that logic, reasoning, and evidence are highly subjective and contentious. Context plays a lot in rationality, and rationality may not be flexible enough to understand deeper implicit and intuitive facets of understanding and reality. Understanding itself is a highly intuitive process. Rationality also faces the issue of how to discern and differentiate the differences between what is rational vs. irrational. Everyone thinks they are rational, so who is right? Whose method of rationality is actually rational and how do we decide what is more rational than another? Is there one way to be rational or many? Also, how do we know that rationality is a valid method for deriving knowledge without self-justifying it with rationality? Rationality may not be able to handle self-reference, which entails contradictions and paradoxes. But the Universe is full of contradictions and paradoxes. Contradictions may be a feature of reality and not some fallacy as rationalists might suggest. Of course, we are not going to abandon rationality. We are going to take the good parts of rationality and incorporate them in post-rationality. Post-rationality will encompass intuition. But you see the issue right now is that I am using rationality right now to discuss the limits of rationality! Even to argue with me about rationality is you also using rationality. We really cannot escape rationality, but the most rational form of rationality I would call post-rationality or meta-rationality, which incorporates rationality with what normie rationality misses. Rationality without encompassing intuition and without self-observing its own biases in terms of its limits is itself an irrational system! Of course, I am using rationality to make this post and you will respond with rational reasons for why rationality is irrational. But this is the standstill we are at. In some ways, we can go beyond rationality, but we could never explain those means without using rationality because rationality is the means to which our minds are able to make the implicit explicit.

A bachelor is a concept and is not something that actually exists outside your mind. You wouldn't even know what a bachelor is if you cannot observe anything. I am claiming that you cannot form concepts without your senses. If someone has always been blind, deaf, then how could they form concepts about sight and sound? Your rationality is slave to the senses. I will coin that quote there. It is like rationalizing about what color is when you are blind. If you cannot observe something, you can't rationalize about it. And bachelor is also technically a social construction anyways, so it is true only under relative conditions. Seems pretty clear and straight forward to me. Who is more rational, a flat earther or a round earther, a trump supporter or a liberal? How do we know? Rationalists definitely have metaphysical biases. The world isn't just rational as a rationalist would have you think. The world holds many contradictions that may not be suited for a rationalist approach to epistemology. Remember, epistemology is always about metaphysics in someway shape or form because knowledge is always about the reality/existence of something. Sure, you can ask how do we know what is right or wrong in the context of morality, but it is easy to forget how much our metaphysical biases shape our worldview. There is a reason why worldview is called world-view.

But it is a contradiction because there could be no hallucination without a body. For instance, to hallucinate a human experience presupposes a hallucination of a human body. Part of that hallucination is hallucinating that a brain causes your hallucinations. How could you experience at all without a body? What would you be experiencing?

How is definitive knowledge possible? Knowledge is such a tricky beast. There seems to be no reliable way to discern and differentiate truth from falsehood. Rationality can lead you astray, science can lead you astray, your own senses can deceive you, other people can deceive, and of course my own self, intuition, and emotions deceive me. I can even be deceived through "false insights." So how can I know that any "insight" I have is true understanding? I can smoke 5me0 or meditate and attain an insight or a feeling of conviction that I understand something completely when I don't. A lot of the times when I bring up this problem of knowledge, people say, awaken and you will find out. But this begs the question. How do you know you are awake when every facet of your mind and reality is against you to deceive you? I hear people claiming to have awoken to this or that, but what I am really seeing is that they are very confident that they understand something deeply when they actually might be mislead by their emotions. When a person claims they have awoken, I feel like they are being deceived by their feelings. How do you know that you have totally understood something to the deepest level? How do you know you are not being deceived at all by your insight? What method did you use to discern truth from falsehood and how did you counteract self-deception? You can take 5me0 or meditate and still be deluded, so even meditation and psychedelics aren't a reliable pathway to truth and true knowledge. To fully awaken and reach true knowledge, I think you need to answer definitively of whether anything can exist independently of the mind. If there is such a thing as a mind-independent phenomenon, then notice that you could never awaken and know definitively because all knowledge and awakening are mind-dependent. The feature of knowledge is that it is mind-dependent. It is impossible to have knowledge of anything outside of your mind because the function of knowledge itself is dependent on the mind! But this does not mean that what you do not know doesn't exist. I find it interesting that there seems to be things that exist independent of my knowledge of them even though my knowledge is dependent on my mind. For instance, when I learned about cults for the first time it is implied that they have always existed despite my mind not knowing about it. There can in fact be things that exist right now that I do not even know now but yet still exist it seems. The earth was still round even before I knew anything about it. However, there is no escaping that knowledge is dependent on the mind. But we should not mistake the limits of knowledge for the limits of reality. What if reality is larger than our mind? What if there actually are mind-independent phenomenon but we could never know of it because it is mind-independent? Could you conceive of that possibility? In addition, we also have to take into account that relativism also presents us with another problem in that how can we know anything definitively if all of our methods of trying to know the Absolute are themselves relative? Meditation is relative to the mind, so are psychedelics, and so is contemplation and rationality and science. In fact, you can use all those methods listed to delude yourself into conspiracy theories and nonduality nonsense. But if reality is absolutely relative, how could we say that conspiracy theories are false? I understand that at some degree radical open-mindedness defeats itself because then you expose your mind to all kinds of nonsensical worldviews and toxic ideologies. At some point, you need to close your mind off to perspectives you have definitively understood to be false. But the method for knowing something definitively seems itself to be undefinitive. How do you reconcile this problem?

Very insightful post. I forget how good I have it as a man. But it is nice to have a woman approach as well. My perspective is that someone approaching me makes me feel like I am seen. Whereas when I approach, it makes me feel like I am desperate or that I am invisible to women. Like I have to talk to her first in order for her to talk to me.

I’m curious. How so? Loa says it is different from wishful thinking. Loa is about thinking about the highest vision for yourself and making that clear in your mind. Maybe the BS is overemphasis on thinking rather than action?