iprayiam3
18d ago
I'll say a few things.
-1 is having a family is far more detrimental to my ability to socialize than any and all technology. In my entire childhood, I don't recall my parents really ever doing anything social without it being related to their children. I at least hang out with friends about once a week. But with 3 kids, that's a ton!
My point here is that I think 'too much technology's is the wrong issue. It's young people not starting families that's changed. Any comparison between what single people in their 20s-30s are doing today vs 1985, is a weird comparison of we're not considering that they were having and raising kids in 1985.
-2. Have siblings close to you in age. Live nearby them as an adult. Built in social club. If you didn't get that, do it for your kids for fucks sake. Build a strong close knit family life, and provide whatever financial support you can to allow your kids to stay in the community as an adult.
-3. Get involved in your church. There's not a lot of substitute that get you a group of people who share your core values, orient their lives and worldviews around those values, ground them in a physical place visites weekly and build social clubs around this.
If you're a young adult get involved. My closest adult friends I met though young adult activities while single.
-4. Be a conservative, or more specifically a conservationist. Find something you believe in preserving and get involved with other people who want to preserve it. Maybe being an progressive activist can give the same thing here. I'm not sure.
-5. Run clubs.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
I certainly don't have the option of "reducing stress" as is advised, what am I going to do? Quit my job and lay about?
I mean, yeah... If your job's stress level can't be reduced below the threshold that it might permanently blind you, then yeah if we were friends I'd strongly advise you to quit or reconsider how immovable the stress level is.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
This is fantastic, compelling conversation. Not tedius at all. Tell me more.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
This is a good idea if you're regularly interacting with (or married to) someone into somethign you're not. But it's overkill if OP just wants more general conversational grease.
Moreover, unless he's willing to become a sportsfan all the way, keeping up on the latest talking points will be a tedius waste of time. And he'll still end up bored and anxious of being discovered a fraud in sports talk. Honestly if you want to make good sports small talk with someone, it's probably better to know nothing about sports than to pretend you care. Consider this opener.
"You know I haven't really kept up with college basketball in a few years. Which schools are doing well these days?"
You'll get the sportsfan talking! and you don't have to pretend you know or follow anything. Plus, a little understood phenomenon - you now have the conversation's steering wheel, while the other one gets to talk and like you for getting to talk. Once you start trying to demonstrate your own knowledge or insert your own talk tracks, you actually lose control.
Instead, you can take the converstaion where you want it to by asking questions. Like history? Interject with historical questions. Like strategy and theory, ask a question about that. "So how does a good team get good..." Like the culture war, ask about that. "You think ratings have changed since ESPN has gotten woke?"
Want to get off sports? Let them give you a little schpeel, they'll like you for letting them talk. Then play a game with yourself to see how many questions takes you to X. Say, X is crypto. Sports... Sports Betting... Gambling... Crypto.
Unless, like in your scenario, the topic is regularly the center of the activity, there's no reason to pretend to like it or to learn about it just to make small talk. It will actually backfire (without a genuine interest) because you'll be bored AND worried about demonstrating your boring knowledge.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
Speaking of other professions, I'm not a lawyer, but I've worked at a mechanics shop, and the perspective is similar. The more truth you tell us about how your car got broke, the faster and easier it is to fix.
I think my point was entirely missed by everyone who's responded. Which is clearly my fault. I am in no way advocating or justifying lying to professionals.
I am saying that the professional has a great deal of power over your outcomes, limited time and attention for you, unknown scruples/ levels of quality, and will conduct their work on your behalf behind a veil of your own ignorance.
These factors can lead to a lack of trust and a desire to influence the interaction. LYING is a BAD strategy to resolve these issues. But it is understandable how and why someone kind of dim might develop that bad strategy in this context. Especially if lying has been an effective strategy in other interactions with people they don't trust or want to influence.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
No, either you misread me or I was unclear. I've never lied to a doctor (or a lawyer or another professional). I've been over-eager / over worried about how much they like me,
iprayiam3
1mo ago
I find surface-level convos boring and tend to detach myself if we move down that path.
Of course some people really are duller than others, or just worse fits conversationally for each other. Some people do like more or less substantative discussions, more or less argument, more or less critique, etc.
But taken too far this becomes a cope. And it's best not to self-frame like that. Almost everyone enjoys a good conversation. If you want to check out of a tedius or boring conversation, by all mean, it's your right, and might be the best use of your time.
But recognize internally that it's usually because you don't have the patience or interest in fishing, and probably NOT that the other person likes standing with his pole in the water not catching bites.
Two people go out fishing. Both are bad at it or are in an unfamiliar lake. They fumble around, leading eachother to different spots, as often moving on too quickly from a promising spot for other's taste or linger too long in an apparently bad spot. Neither one has the confidence, knowledge of the lake, or strategy to lead, so they keep stepping on each other's (and their own) attempts at catching something.
After an unproduction adventure they both walk away thinking, "It's too bad that guy didn't want to catch any fish. What a waste of time."
Maybe there's a minimum amount of "normie" (I hate that word, but you get the idea) topics I should keep up with?
Thinking they're being charitable and getting the entirely wrong message, the fishermen later say to themselves
"Maybe I should spend more time practicing puttering around in bad fishing spots, since the other guy seemed to like that."
No, that's not necessary at all.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
Thanks for the response. And apologies if my tone seemed overly combative, I was on a mobile phone and didn't have the patience with my touchscreen keyboard to edit for balance.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
He's not sneering. People really are this stupid.
Making fun of stupid people for being stupid is sneering.
If you fucking lie to my face about stupid shit that I know is a lie, and moreover this is a shitty dumb lie that harms your case, then I'm still going to do my job, but by God I'm not going to give you the benefit of the doubt or try and help you out of the holes you are digging for yourself.
Well this kind of proves the point that you're going to give a different service based on your perception of the person you're dealing with.
Now of course, lying is a stupid and self fulfilling way for you to lower your esteem and because they're stupid, they're stupid liars. But the premise that OP immediately dismisses as deluded, is proven out here.
My biggest problem here is the claim that it's deluded to suspect one might be treated differently based on perception of sympathy.
I know ymkeshout enough to believe that he wouldn't consciously do that. But have no reason to extend that to any given professional wouldn't. And I don't believe that ymkeshout or anyone doesn't unconsciously. Replication crisis and all that, but the principles of influence and persuasion aren't totally false.
Of course lying to your lawyer is the wrong way to deal with that, but the premise as argued is wrong.
This article is 1 part dismissing as delusional to suspect you might get difference based on perceived sympathy. 1 part the fact that non Lawyers don't know ahead of time what is or isn't a lever in the legal process and 2 parts laughing that stupid people make stupid decisions.
And consider that this whole discussion exists in a world where lying about something as obviously stupid as, your gender can get you put into a better prison. So...
iprayiam3
1mo ago
Part of my clients' clammed-up demeanors rests on a deluded notion that I won't fight as hard for their cases unless I am infatuated by their innocence. Perhaps they don't realize that representing the guilty is the overwhelmingly banal reality of my job.
Help me understand more clearly why this is 'deluded'? it might be wrong but deluded? You talk about your clients' poor theory of mind later, but don't offer any reason why, in their shoes they should know and beleive that you work just as hard for clients you believe are guilty.
I know it is a light hearted article, but the whole spirit of sneering and literal anecdotes of mockery and sarcasm with these people is good evidence that you might treat them psychologically differently. Maybe you really really would never work a little harder, polish a little more, fight a little better for a client you were sympathetic too, but that hardly seems deluded to assume.
When I recieved a serious speeding ticket, which I beleived was somewhat in err, the exact thought was in my mind as I debated how to discuss it with lawyers. Yes, yes, they're all going to fight for me to get out of it, and yes it's routine boring shit. But with even a chance of outcome unpredictability in the air, and knowing that I won't be there when the lawyer negotiates with the DA, is it really, not just incorrect but 'deluded' to wonder whether the lawyer, who's not getting any bonuses for better outcomes here, might advocate a little better for me if he likes me? (also I, a PhD, wasn't 100% confident exactly what the rules were about incriminating yourself to your lawyer. I can only imagine some level of lingering uncertainty with an uneducated criminal, especially if their lawyer talks to them with sarcasm and playful mockery that goes over their head.)
Even if that's not a conscious thought, we all want to ingratiate ourselves to people who hold some sort of power over us. You might see yourself as 'working for' this guy, but every time I interact with a doctor, a mechanic, or much less often a lawyer, I have a strong pang of recognition that my outcomes are somewhat at the mercy of this busy stranger's scruples. I become over eager to prove myself worthy of their esteem and extra consideration. Is it stupid and often counterproductive, sure. But your sneering about it to strangers on the internet only reenforces my perception that professionals are contemptuous of a lot of the pleebs they have to boringly 'serve'.
Critics are out in force, arguing that...the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts... I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help
Object level conversation already lengthy below, but want to take this in a tangent... about this reverse moral proscriptive perspective of government. It's not quite horseshoe theory because it inverts around pure liberalism.
On the one side, you have this idea that the government can prohibit or regulate certain behaviors. Rules against drugs, prostitution, gambling, buying alcohol on Sundays, etc. have traditionally existed within a concept of appropriate government power. These things may be associated with social conservatism, but more broadly the whole range of government's regulatory power is not broadly understoods as allowed only narrowly through a liberal perspective but as a (varyingly constrained) right of the democratic government to govern.
In the middle you've got a liberal ethos, where we should be maximizing personal freedom, only intervening where it threaten's another's freedom. Here most government regulation would be understood as only justified through protecting freedoms.
But then you get to the other side where you allow behaviors but demand socialized payments for the costs of those behaviors. Here the idea is flipped from the right to regulate to the obligation to provide additional services. Instead of saying, 'hey you can't gamble" to the gambler, we say, "hey, you have to subsidize the externalities of his gambling" to his neighbor. The druggy has the right to drugulate, but I don't have a right to not pay for the addict's access to hotlines, resources, etc (let alone the costs I have to pay for the infrastructural externalities).
I'm struggling to find the right words to describe this framework, but it's definitely a phenomenon.
And I want to add that very rarely would any individual be maximally inside one of these three frameworks across their political beliefs, but rather it's about the proportion and scope. All forms of general welfare do exist inside of this third frame, but it's traditionally seen as something to be limited and something that ideally comes from true disadvantage and need, not as a ballooning response to greasing self-destructive 'freedoms'.
To go full circle:
I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help
I completely disagree, and this is a runaway bad idea. If you want to make something legal / unregulated, then it stops being the government's job to prop it up against it's bad effects. Leave that to charity and NGOs.
If drugs are illegal, then I'm all for also pouring tons of money into helping people who use them. I'm all for a flexible justice system that can substitute help and supervised second chances for punishment and imprisonment. But if drugs are legal, then suck it up and use your freedoms responsibly. Don't demand the rest of the public to pay for the government to be the 'cool parent' who bails you out for the rest of your life.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
So, separate a couple things out.
-
The fact that she was deviant and horney and naive enough to do this, is certainly a flag. "Youthful indiscression" is a bit of a euphemism or handwave or cope, because most youths don't make that kind of indiscression. I would be wary that this kind of outside-the-norm behavior is not some isolated trivia but representative of unreliable behavior traits that could be easily avoided in most other women. I'd be curious whether, aside from this she really is super normie now and what exactly that means. Sex norms and appetite vary widely with young women.
-
What's exactly her disposition now? Does she find prostitution morally wrong? (does Bob)? is this a repentance situation or a "not for me" scenario? These are very different starting points. Has she done actually 'work' to change? Has she had a transformative epistemic outlook, or was it more like, whoops! that went to far, etc? Would she disapprove of her daughter doing the same? If she's "reformed" and frames her past perspective as a moral failing and a cautionary tale, I'd probably leave it alone with Bob. Sinners deserve forgiveness. If she's still open-minded and women's choicy about it, but it's just not for her... I'd really talk Bob out of this one.
-
On a personal, disgust level, yeah I wouldn't personally be able to handle it. It's possibly worth mentioning that to 'normalize' the disgust reaction and give Bob an out to interrogate whether he's accurately evaluatoin his own. But I wouldn't take it to far.
In sum, the current nature of her today and her position on her past mistakes is super important to judge the context. Plenty of people are repentant of their past and it's good that they find people who can forgive them. Other people get fucked by overlooking severe lapses in discernment. Overall, I'd consider how she feels about prostitution in general today as more important than what's she's done in the past. Based on what you've written it's impossible to tell which is which here.
If forced to choose, I'd rather marry a hardcore born again trad-wife who stood firmly against sexual misconduct but had dabbled in the past and repented than a progressive minded virgin, who was outspoken about the right to sex work and rejected sexual prohibitions as patriarchical and unjust.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
I believe this in many cases, but it is overstated. Dog HBD is real... And some early life traumas like premature mother separation don't seem overcomeable imo
iprayiam3
1mo ago
+1 to @AhhhTheFrench. We had a high anxiety dog like that who had been poorly bred and separated from his mother too early. Lots of expensive training, lots of systems. Nothing really fixed it.
We tried drugs, and it made him no less anxious but essentially drunk. He'd run into walls. Had to rehome him once we had kids.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
It seems much easier for Satoshi to simply also have a second (or third fourth and fifth etc) wallet with enough millions in it that there's no need to touch the original for most values of living large.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
Every month I begin to see some of my female friends and acquaintances, generally middle-upper class women, getting married and having children (age=27 - 32). After the birth their social profiles become typical of a mother with a child; continuous social media posts of their children, mom's initiatives, kindergardens, lovely picture with their newly wed husbands etc.
I think you're compressing too much into a single life stage. There's no reason to think that the stage of life of newly-weds are much like mothers of babies, are much like mothers of school children. I got married in 2016, we had kids quickly, and my first only entered kindergarten this year. That's almost a decade of life and 80% of my wife's time out of college, to sweep together into one motion.
I wouldn't expect being newly married to change much at all, compared with having children, so mixing those two together seems confounding to whatever effect you're noticing. As a mother of 3, she has nothing in common from a 'stages of life' perspective with newly weds. I would consider a newly married woman to be much more similar to a single woman than to a mother.
If your pool of new moms is too small to notice a trend without also including newlyweds or mothers expecting, then I suspect you don't have enough data beyond an anecdotal impression. If the trend actually reverses or moderates if you look at only mothers, or only mothers of children older than 3, then there's your answer. If the trend seems just as strong without newly weds, then I see no reason to combine them in your observation.
iprayiam3
3mo ago
Reminds me of an observation I read, probably shared on Reddit:
One day, your parents picked you up and put you down, and then never picked you up again
That hit me in the feels dawg
When my son was younger he liked me to play this game with his stuffed animals with him. Once it hit me profoundly that one day it would be the last time we played it. For a little while I was really conscientious to play it with him, but you know, you forget.
Anyway, 2-3 years later he still asks me to play and the game has simply evolved with his age. My misjudgment on the fleeting finality of a part of our relationship helped take the edge of this sentiment overall.
It's still sad and life is short and you don't get the stages back and all that. But.. life's a series of concentric circles that slowly bend into and inside of and around one another more than it being a line with checkpoints.
iprayiam3
3mo ago
I get it... It's sad because she didn't give him any grandchildren, right?
iprayiam3
3mo ago
Buy a very cute dog of a smart breed, and train him to, on a subtle cue, 'accidentally' get the leash tangled around a woman and her dog. Then take him to a crowded park / trail and troll for hotties.
iprayiam3
3mo ago
I can tell you the honest perception of my in-laws, is simply that Trump did a very good job as president the first time, and would have 'gotten the job done' if he had a second term.
They believe that he did build the wall, and did deliver on every other promise. Even arguments that he tried to deliver on X but the deep state stopped him, have been met with an insistance that he did deliver and that he will be smarter against the deep state this time around. There's no hatred here, there is percieved in justice, but that's not the driving force for them, and you could call it personal loyalty, to a degree but in their minds it's loyalty to a job well done. My in-laws beleive that Trump delivered a great first term and that the following are true: Trump:
- built the wall, and was well on his way to fixing immigration until Biden
- fought valiantly against lockdowns and Covid authoritarianism
- appointed good judges
- gave us the best economy
- kept us out of foreign wars
- had great foreign policy
- started to drain the swamp (I'm not 100% sure how hard they would go on this point)
Some of those things are more true than others. But to answer your question, I think some of voting for Trump is simply believing he was a known, great president, and while I think that's wrong, it doesn't need a completely different explanation.
iprayiam3
3mo ago
are early alert pregnancy tests creating a problem of people being upset over miscarriages they would never have been certain they had before?
We're expecting our fourth. When she was trying, she (probably) had a very early miscarriage that, to your point would have been just a slightly late period and never known. My wife got more bummed about it than I had expected.
But I will hypothesize that rather than your friend having a bruised ego about ease of conception, it's probably something more like the actualization of her existing child and observable uniqueness projects more intensely on the 'what could have been' of the miscarriage.
I think you're more intensely aware of, 'this is a unique, non-fungible individual'.
iprayiam3
3mo ago
My parents homeschooled several of my siblings (but not me). My sisters homeschool their children. It's all mostly unschooling. And the kids /adult so far have developed completely comparably with (occasional knowledge gaps here and there). My son is in school, but can do mathematical laps around his cousins a few years older than him. He didn't learn that in school, he's just precocious mathematically. I honestly think schooling mostly doesn't have a large variance on the average in terms of well-rounded development. It can have differences in social development and on the margins of any specific subject. The more you focus on outcomes based on subject matter, or social grease, the more I think schooling will have an observable statistical effect. The more you look at broad variance of human development, the less, imho
Not buying it. That's an extremely idiosyncratic and unituitively gerrymandered way to describe it.
Are you suggesting that polyamorous refers to the relationship model and the relationship model alone?
People describe themselves as polyamorous all the time. Proportionally moreso than people explicitly identify themselves as monogamous. So we've got 3 options
- The word polyamorous should now have an extensively different definition when describing a person as when describing their relationship.
- People identifying as polyamorous should fit Aella's definition.
- People identifying as poly are essentially stating they are looking for a poly relationship via Aella's defintion
#1 upends the idea of "clean" defintions proving my point, #2 makes your objection moot, and #3 is observably false. The central concept of a person looking for a poly relationship, is not general permissiveness that the other person might seek outside relationships. (Yes some people have a cuck fetish, but that's not 1:1 being polyamorous and it's not even what Aella's defintion describes)
You might further object then, that the polyamourous person is seeking a reciprocal relationship of Aella's model defintion. But
4 Aella didn't describe reciprocally in her definition. She used you pronouns, which linguistically imply a personal defintion not a relational definition.
The definition of 'polyamorous' that I find cleanest, for me, is not forbidding your partner from having extra-relationship intimacy. should be:
The definition of 'polyamorous' that I find cleanest, for me, is not forbidding eithe partner or "one or both partners".
Describing it as your partner makes the claim that it's describing a relationship rather than a person suspect.
Regardless, even if Aella just used poor wording, her defintion isn't described reciprocally, so again should we take it as implied or not necessary. If not necessarily reciprocal, then we're back to the issue with #3. The "cleanest" way of defining something doesn't even capture the core part of what many people are looking for in a poly relationship.
5 If it is necesasrily reciprocal, beyond Aella not describing it that way, it's now fails to capture many actual polyamorous configuirations. Is 'mormon style' polygamy now not polyamorous? Or even worse, the girlfriends who have only the one partner are technically polyamorous, but the man with multiple partners technically isn't? This is a very backwards definition.
At the end of the day, wouldn't it be much cleaner, to, instead of hi-jacking polyamorous to mean something ideosyncratic, describe the relationship model with the already existing word, "open relationship"?
No? Because Aella isn't describing an open relationship, she's producing nonsense.
Dude, you went less than a week. That is not enough time to update on how much social media affects you. I know it's oversimplified, but remember the saying - it takes 21 days to form a habit. Point is, id give any lifestyle change a month before speculating on how it affects you.
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