Tollund_Man4
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User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
If you're only doing that because you want people to find you more attractive and not because the progress justifies itself I think there would be a problem. Would this stuff be worthwhile even if it didn't get you attention from women? It should be, and you're not going to surpass any heavy lifters if you're relying on a steady increase in female attention for motivation i.e. onlymenaremiring.png.
Another point the book makes, which I mentioned before, is that no strategy really seems to pay clear and great dividends
Surely the dividends of self-improvement are just that, self-improvement? If someone is only improving themselves in shallow ways to get girls then perhaps this would be better categorised as fraud. This point is more than a quibble about definitions, as women find the moral qualities (or lack thereof) which motivate men to be attractive or repulsive in themselves.
Lately I’ve greatly improved both my wealth and general status, and yet success has been sorely lacking
Wealth and social status certainly play a part in attraction but perhaps there are certain personality traits people fail to display which makes this all for naught, wealth and social status alone don't make it pleasant to spend hours with someone after all. Tattoo artists don't have much wealth or (outside of being the best of the best) social status, but they get laid a lot as spending hours distracting someone from physical pain while they talk about their life is great empathy training.
Tollund_Man4
6mo ago
and saying rich men won’t enter heaven
I'm not that well read on the Bible but isn't the point of that verse to say that even the rich (seen as the most blessed) can't get into heaven without the grace of God? If the point is to say that material well-being wins you no points with God, placing so much weight on a materialist philosophy like Marxism seems to be making the same mistake in reverse.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
These can be the same people at different times. In this framework nerds who are drunk or on certain drugs are low value low inhibition.
Though I'd say the nerd bit is far less important than the drink and drugs which make all types more likely to do something stupid or violent.
Tollund_Man4
11mo ago
Causes like communism, that moved hundreds of millions and turned the Earth asunder, are now just forgotten or reduced to cosplay attire.
Communism wasn't that big in the US in the first place, it seems like it being forgotten in the US isn't much evidence in favour of it being forgotten in the places where those hundreds of millions were moved.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
I really think this is a bad/unproductive framing. How exactly is it fraud if the quality of the good is raised, and not just the marketing of it?
There's no distinction being made between quality of a person (which has inherent value) and marketing is my point. If we judge things solely by the metric of getting women building bigger muscles is just a more effortful alternative to peacocking or practicing pickup lines, marketing and quality are just different strategies geared towards the same end.
Maybe I'm just being a poor decoupler, but in the same way that a Christian would be offended at someone saying that going to Church paid no dividends in their dating life I want to shout 'you're missing the point!'.
Tollund_Man4
11mo ago
The other thing to contemplate is the question of why misdeeds/debts should be carried forward to be paid back later by one's descendants, whilst positive achievements/credits aren't?
Positive achievements usually benefit the achiever's group primarily, and other groups only incidentally. Do we all still owe the British for sparking off the industrial revolution? Maybe we do, but then again history's largest empire is a fairly decent reward too. Misdeeds on the other hand are felt directly, they motivate people to demand redress far more than an Italian would be motivated to ask for compensation for his people's contributions to architecture.
There are cases where the credits of one group are carried over across generations, the memory of the Choctaw Indians donating money to Irish famine relief in the 1847 was the basis for a GoFundMe campaign to solicit a fairly successful fundraising campaign for COVID relief in 2020.
Tollund_Man4
5mo ago
I haven’t played Victoria 3 but my experience with other Paradox games is that you have to read a few guides and ask questions on the related subreddits to actually understand how to play. You could be 100 hours in and still not be certain about the workings of certain mechanics.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
What I'm trying to get at here is that real meaning is ill-defined and most philosophers do include some form of pleasure and hedonism as an intrinsic value.
Your examples at least don't show that it's ill defined. I think most people would say those pursuits are meaningless or even harmful without hesitation.
Perhaps you can't objectively determine the meaningful ahead of time but it becomes quite clear when things are compared.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
Other hobbies like engaging in politics, watching the news, or watching sports do not have any specific design for positive sum human enjoyment. They are much closer to zero sum games, where one person's happiness is offset by another person's disappointment.
This seems like a fairly pessimistic view on politics. Do you not think that political problems can be ameliorated? I'd say the difference between war and peace lies in that realm.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
Right, maybe that discomfort is also the feedback by which people are motivated to stay in shape. If I go for a cycle and feel terrible, the cycling itself won't have done much for me but it will be a wake up call for me to cut down on smoking/drinking/gaining weight (or if I'm feeling lazy, a wake up call to quite cycling).
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
Okay, so it's theoretically possible for this to not poison the well or destroy the myth/hero which forms part of the identity the person you're talking to, now what?
I don't need to argue that it's theoretically possible to avoid destroying the myth, just that destroying the myth behind a person doesn't discredit whatever lessons you might draw from their writings or actions.
if the point was to discuss their "still" worthwhile ideas, why didn't the discussion start there? because the destruction and poisoning the well is the point of this sort of comment
The mythology itself can be an obstacle to discussing someone's ideas. "I'm a follower of Jefferson because he was a great man" is no foundation, "I believe in the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence" is more substantial even if you admit the moral failings of the author.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
instead of faffing around on a child's toy?
Is this a jab at the Europeans who cycle to work?
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
Even in very walkable cities, walking just takes forever.
Walkable usually goes hand in hand with cyclable no? At least in Europe this is the case. 15 minutes on a bike covers quite a lot of useful area if you're living near the city centre, even when I lived in what was considered an isolated outer suburb in an Irish city it took 20 minutes on a bike to make it into the city centre.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
You can get rhyming translations that try to maintain the spirit of the poem while making it amenable to English ears.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
and they follow American politics to the exclusion of their own.
While I agree that American politics often spills into Europe (see the BLM and Women's marches), I think this is taking it too far. People in Europe are invested in the really big changes in America (e.g presidential elections or important supreme court cases) and to some extent the gossip and scandal surrounding individual politicians (though I could say the same for the Royal Family).
They neither know much of nor care about anything smaller than that, even if objectively the goings on in a state of tens of millions are as important as the goings on of a European country, but the smallest details of domestic scandals are regularly found on the front page of European newspapers. I've been living in France for the past few months, in April even if you avoided every newspaper and TV station you'd still hear about Macron's pension reforms from the man on the street.
Tollund_Man4
11mo ago
So from the perspective of you, as an individual, do you inherit both the benefits of an advanced civilization AND the penalties of a history of oppression? How does that balance out in terms of what you're 'owed' in the present?
Thinking more on this it's clear that evaluating how things 'balance out' has a utilitarian presumption behind it, whereas I think the most plausible case for treating historical grievances with importance takes a more traditional view of specific 'crimes' commited which demand redress (greivances based on systemic inequalities where there's no obvious unjust act are a more recent innovation). So, as would be the case with any crime, you demand redress for the specific wrongs done and ignore the question of whether you'd be better or worse off in the counterfactual. Breaking into someone's house is still breaking into someone's house even if you leave a bag of money in their living room.
The most straightforward cases of this in history are the demanding of an official apology, the return of titles, legal rights, or land. The discourse of monetary reparations already veers too far into the murky waters of utilitarian calculations to be workable in my opinion.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
The purpose of getting someone to admit their hero/myth is flawed is because you're trying to signal to others WARNING: HERETIC and poison the well. If it didn't affect the idea, a person wouldn't lead off a discussion with "this guy is a racist, though, right?"
I'll grant that this is often a reason. I do think we have other genuine reasons of it not being an attempt to poison the well, I've brought it up before but philosophy professors will often start their attempt to impress the value of a thinker upon their students by admitting all the terrible and crazy things about them history has revealed.
When it comes to an adversarial discussion, you might be poisoning the well by referring to a thinker's past crimes, you might also just be seeing if your interlocutor holds any insane beliefs resulting from hero worship or ideological blindness. Ideally they come out of it having established their credibility as someone who will admit fault when he sees it but still give praise when he thinks it's due.
Depending where the debate is on the scale of rap battle to Oxford debate you might be able to trust the audience to make distinctions here.
A man being a great man is the best foundation to follow him or be a follower. I sincerely do not understand what would be a better reason. Without men, ideas are irrelevant.
A better reason would be that you follow his ideas because they work no? There are lots of great men of history that would be hard to follow in any political sense because their ideas are either inapplicable in the modern day or obviously terrible. Jefferson is remembered because the constitution he helped design worked well enough that we still consider his political thoughts relevant (in more than a purely historical sense).
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
Here's a hard bullet to bite: perhaps things don't usually get better.
I haven't actually said they will get better. Dropping out of adult life has a cost, someone might have squandered most of their opportunity by the time they decide to change. My point was just that the addictions we associate with 'checking out' come first (whether or not they're causative).
If you wind up reaching an adult height of only 5'1" and realize that you don't have what it takes to become a billionaire, you're going to be making some frankly rather nasty compromises if you want a partner.
There are guys who are 5'1" and there are guys who are so ugly they are hard to look at, but even amongst guys who don't have romantic success or were bullied in highschool, these people are the minority. Even amongst the cohort of sexless young men they are the exceptions.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
I don't disagree in general though I'd say that some people don't ever acclimatise, or else it happens as a result of strong social pressure that allows them to rationalise the decision (I'm in my 30s and need to find a wife/husband before I get old!).
Some of my friends and I have had some long dry spells before we found women who we were really attracted to, of course there's social pressure against introducing an ugly partner to your friends so maybe that was in play too.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
I've only read the first chapter but I just bought No More Manifestos by Eisel Mazard based on what I've seen from his Youtube channel.
On paper he should be very off-putting to me: a committed vegan and atheist who argues that the American continent is built on genocide and it all needs to be rebuilt from the ground up on Greek democratic principles, with an often dramatic presentation in his Youtube videos that can come off as cringey. But the positives are too intriguing for me to not want to read this book (and even buy it a second time after I lost the first copy):
(i) Very well read in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.
(ii) A degree of commitment to his political goals and personal asceticism which gives him the motivation to learn dying languages and live in 3rd world conditions to really see the inscriptions on the temples in Laos and Cambodia and really talk to the monks that live in them instead of having a substandard education in a university.
(iii) A degree of skepticism that allows him to reject the modern study of Buddhism as being full of frauds and religious partisans after sinking so much into it himself, reject his hardcore communist upbringing and become a harsh critic of that ideology, and criticise the vegan movement as practised despite agreeing with its goals.
This skepticism also makes placing him into a leftist box a very poor model for predicting what he is going to say next: very pro gay-rights: very opposed to trans surgery, very atheist: acknowledges that religious people are some of the closest to himself in adhering to strict standards of personal behaviour and doing the practical humanitarian work which he sees as so important, very sympathetic to American blacks and natives: harsh critic of BLM as a movement and charity.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
If I'm understanding you right you're arguing for race based admissions on the basis of efficiency. My counterargument is that efficiency isn't that an important factor if something is cheap in the first place, and so to answer your question this leads to the claim that it's unfair and unwise to exclude otherwise qualified people for the sake of saving some small amount of time and money when they would likely contribute much more to the country than that initial cost.
You're cutting costs when you streamline the immigration process, but you're also getting fewer quality migrants as a result (and there might be a separate argument for this being a good thing! But I don't think it'll hinge on the efficiency of the immigration process).
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.
It might be more efficient, but is the thing you're improving efficiency on really that much of a constraint in the first place?
Like it would take X amount of time for 100 immigration officials to thoroughly sift through 1000 applications. You're suggesting we save those 100 people a lot of time by implementing a race based admissions system, why not just double or triple the amount of immigration officials? It's not like they're a big item in any country's budget.
I don't think protecting safety precludes protecting freedom. We cage people for coercing others i.e unjustly limiting their freedom, even in cases where the victim's life or health hasn't been injured. You could say coercion implies the threat of violence and so this is really about safety but the concepts have melded together at that point. You've also got cases like blackmail where you're unjustly constraining people's choices without the threat of violence.
Does it matter if it is? It being real just means something unlikely happened to someone who is nobody to you.
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