stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Ohh, it just occurred to me that “trainer” was referring to “physical trainer”; I understood it to mean “dating/social interaction trainer”.
Yes, I already have a personal trainer who has, in the past 6 months, helped me put on a decent amount of muscle, reduce body fat percentage, improve my posture, and appear to have somewhat less belly fat (not that I had a whole lot to begin with; I’ve always been at a normal BMI, 22-24 depending on how much I’m working out and whether I’m keto-ing. Sadly, if I didn’t have any discipline about my diet and exercise habits, my body type would be the typical South Asian male skinnyfat. Even at the same BMI, I struggle with more belly fat than my white and, especially, East Asian male friends)
Definitely agreed that gimmicky exercises, supplements, etc. are to be avoided at all costs. I specifically chose this trainer because of his zero-bullshit, laser focus on the basics: a lightly modified version of the Greyskull LP, 1g protein per lb. of lean body weight, creatine, and sufficient rest.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
I find it sad because it means some demographics are going to have to shoulder blame. It would be much easier if the blame was diffused and we could blame and address society wide problems, but ones that are targeted are harder to solve because they elicit a defensive attitude.
I am torn on this.
On the one hand, the fact that offenders are disproportionately members of a certain demographic group makes it harder to gather the political support needed to crack down on fare evasion; this is, indeed, sad, sad because it is a reflection of how thoroughly the mind-virus of wokeism and its opportunistic infection of “disparate impact”-ism has infected the body politic.
On the other hand, what’s not sad is the fact that much-needed and even-handed punishment of fare evaders would affect certain demographics disproportionately. As I see it, the reputation or good name of one’s visible demographic group—race, sex, certain religions, perhaps class insofar as indicated through clothing and mannerisms—is a commons in the economic sense. However, unlike the economist’s favorite example of grazing land, the reputation of one’s demographic group cannot possibly be privatized to avoid the tragedy of the commons: liberals and wokeists (when tactically convenient) tend to argue for a form of “privatization”, viz. “treating people as individuals” and not stereotyping. But the fact remains that humans are too good at pattern matching and stereotypes remain stubbornly accurate in their predictions. And the brute fact also remains that some demographic groups do a good job of maintaining a positive reputation for the group, even at some individual cost, while others overgraze the commons and then complain about unfair treatment.
To be maximally fair, it truly does suck to be judged negatively by the color of your skin, or some other attribute you didn’t choose, when in fact you’re an upstanding pro-social citizen who bucks the stereotypes. The solution here is twofold:
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As the unjustly-judged individual, you should put pressure on your group—even if you didn’t choose to be a member of that group!—to do a better job of maintaining the commons, since it’s never going away.
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The system as a whole must punish all individuals swiftly, surely, and harshly enough that the calculus of “Well, I’m already going to be seen as $NEGATIVE_STEREOTYPE anyway; might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb” does not make sense.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
… right up until roving gangs vibrant urban youth groups start smashing the CCTV cameras for laughs. Or even just start loitering around the station until someone with luggage or a stroller comes, and then they swoop in and prop open the gate so subsequent thugs delinquents persons of alternative socialization can stroll right through
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Alternatively, seek out hobbies where you will meet eligible young women. I highly recommend auditing graduate classes at local schools, lord knows you have them around you, it'll make you interesting and insinuate you into those age ranges. Will people think you're weird/creepy/old? Yes. But you are rich, and people will value you paying for things more than they will resent you for those other things. Or at least one girl hopefully will fall for your bit.
Fantastic idea. I had the best dating success of my life while I was in graduate school in NYC
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Great ideas; I just went skiing with a group of friends last weekend in fact!
I'll look up some charity galas or similar events, perhaps relating to the Asian arts scene in the NYC area.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
- Sounds like some form of surgery (LASIK or PRK) is universally acknowledged as being a (nearly) free lunch 'round these parts; will definitely get on that next year
- Explained here
- Re: dating assistant/coach/fashionista, I'm absolutely willing to hire a full-time staff member to handle this stuff, provided they can prove they would be positive expected utility for me. Any recommendations along those lines?
- Are explicit sugar baby websites/apps even legal? I imagine these would run afoul of anti-prostitution laws but IANAL (which reminds me, I'm actually extraordinarily vanilla in bed-I do not, in fact, enjoy anal)
- Absolutely willing to shell out for a trainer but I'd need some track record of success/reason to believe it would be positive EV for me; again, do you have any recommendations?
- Sorry, not hiring remote employees at the moment
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Don't mind at all! I explained the ban in my previous comment here
Sadly contacts are not an option; I am constitutionally incapable of touching the surface of my own eye, though I weirdly don't have a problem with the eye pressure detector thing at the ophthalmologists, so I assume surgery would be equally doable for me.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Computer science/machine learning
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Where can I find this mystical Colombian connection?
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Gentlemen (and ladies), it is with great pleasure to inform you that it is Wellness Wednesday, and with mild displeasure to inform you that I am once again asking for your dating/romance advice.
I previously asked for suggestions on how to deal with being banned from Hinge. Quick recap of my situation:
- Early 30s American male of South Asian descent, living in the NYC area
- Looks are not great, not terrible (
3.6 roentgenexactly average height for an American male, somewhat nebbish-looking due to glasses) - Elite undergrad and grad degrees
- Making very good money (low 7 figures) in finance
- Interested in mid-late 20s Anglophones of East Asian descent, of similar class and educational background
Since my previous post, I have started going to the gym 3 times a week. I can already see some improvements in my physique. On the social side, I've started reconnecting with friends more, going to more parties, karaoke nights, etc. and I've become a "regular" at a couple of good date spots. I've been off dating apps the whole time. In the past 6 months, I met 2 prospects IRL and got 1-2 dates with each, but was rejected both times thereafter.
Honestly, I want to try meeting folks IRL for a little while longer. I've forgotten how interesting "day game" can be, since I've been using dating apps for so many years. If nothing materializes by March or so, I might go back to using apps.
To that end, there are 4 things I'm curious about:
Location, Location, Location
I lived in Manhattan for 5-10 years but moved out of the city for tax reasons around the time of the pandemic. It's still a convenient 20 minute commute to get to Lower Manhattan, but perhaps I'd be more attractive to women, or have more opportunities to meet them, if I actually lived in (a desirable neighborhood of) Manhattan.
I really don't have a great sense of how important this is; as I said, I left Manhattan around the pandemic, so it's not clear whether my relative lack of success in meeting women IRL is due to leaving the city, pandemic-era cultural shifts, becoming less attractive, or something else entirely.
Clubs
I know nothing about the nightclub scene in NYC and to be honest I don't really see the appeal of being surrounded by strangers in a dark, sweaty room where it's too loud to even have a decent conversation. But there is one aspect of clubbing that, in theory, intrigues me: a literal market where dollars can be exchanged for status and sex. To what extent is that a thing?
My career is going well enough that I would definitely be willing to spend ~$50,000 in a single night if it would guarantee me sex and/or a 50+% shot at a long-term relationship with an attractive woman who is my type (see above). My gut sense is that it can't just be as simple as spending a ton of money at a club, at least not with my average-to-below average looks. I am also aware that the kind of women who would make a good long-term partners are, shall we say, unlikely to be hanging around clubs and putting out for anyone who spends enough dough; however, I would be fine settling for hookups/casual sex with good-looking women whom I encounter in such situations while I search for a higher-quality partner elsewhere.
How much benefit in terms of sex, dates, and relationships can be purchased in the NYC club scene? And operationally, how does this work; do you just book a table/bottle service and then the employees bring girls to your table? I am totally clueless here.
Drugs and Augmentation
I cannot in good conscience write a post in a rat-adjacent community without throwing a bone to the transhumanist crowd:
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Testosterone/anabolic steroids. I don't believe I have a testosterone deficiency or anything, but T or steroids could give a boost to my physique, height (slightly), and confidence. Has anyone completely turned their dating life around using these? Curious to hear about your experiences.
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Laser eye surgery. As mentioned above, I wear glasses. Probably this detracts from my attractiveness somewhat, though it's hard to tell how much (FWIW, multiple women have told me [during glasses-off pillow talk] that I have beautiful eyes and eyelashes). There's also the benefit of having better vision than I currently do, and without the mild inconvenience of carrying glasses everywhere to boot.
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Limb-lengthening surgery. Could make me a couple inches taller, but I'd still be under 6'. Worse, I think my friends and family would find it really weird if I did this. Honestly I am just including this one for the sake of completeness; there is very little chance that I'd actually go through with it, unless someone can convince me that the results are so life-changingly good that the expense, loss of QoL during the long recovery period, risk of complications, and mild social stigma are all worth it.
Matchmakers/Outsourcing
I am aware that soliciting a matchmaker rather contravenes my stated preference to swear off dating apps for a little while longer. Nonetheless, I am fascinated by the ads I sometimes see for so-called "elite" matchmaking services. They always set off my bullshit detector, but I suppose there is a chance that they really do work as advertised. Do quality women actually use these services? What's their success rate like?
In all honesty, though, more than a matchmaker, I would be perfectly happy to pay for a service that constructs profiles for me on all the major dating apps, takes my preferences into account, and then goes through the long grind of swiping for me so that I don't have to. Literally just an API where my photos go in, and matches with attractive women come out. How is this not a startup yet? Call it "Cyrano", slap a cool logo on it, and you'll be rolling in VC cash.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Stanford
Uh, how exactly is Stanford un-woke? They have the full slate of grievance studies departments, plus a DEI commissariate installed in all the real departments (read: the School of Engineering, basically) providing mandatory political reeducation and enforcing the party line. Perhaps they’re un-woke in comparison to their rivals across the Bay, but the same could be said of virtually every university in the Western world.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
At least we got this banger of a tweet out of the incident (movie title: New Yorkshire)
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
It’s intended as written: the claim is that Japanese in Japan have lower life expectancy than Japanese-Americans, despite Japan having nominally better healthcare than the US (n.b.: I have not verified whether this is actually true)
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
sceptic systems
Surely a true sceptic system would require RCTs to determine the efficacy of dowsing?
Alternatively, 'It may or may not work, but I'm still gonna use it'.
I am reminded of the apocryphal tale of Niels Bohr’s horseshoe
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
My semi-educated guess as a non-Christian is that they would draw a distinction between divine forgiveness and temporal forgiveness. “Kony embraces God and he’s alright” is the wrong framing: he may be forgiven by God (though of course we humans can never truly know that), but we are under no obligation to forgive him for his heinous acts as a matter of Earthly law. At least not forgive him immediately and unconditionally.
See also: rendering unto Caesar
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Hear, hear. US health “insurance” is really a kludgey hodge-podge of at least 3 things that can and should be completely independent of one another:
- True insurance (for catastrophic events that are costly, rare, and difficult to foresee in individual cases, but follow a well-known statistical distribution)
- Health savings scheme (for medical expenses that will very predictably affect ~everyone who lives long enough)
- Welfare
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
A consistent harm reduction-ist would say yes_chad.jpg; if a junkie robs a convenience store to get his fix, the crime is the robbery, and the drug addiction is irrelevant.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Arguments that taxation is not theft generally advance the view that the “harm” caused by taxation is, in some sense, consensual*, and therefore not evil per the definition above. So, my imagined “harm reduction”-ist would say, we face a tradeoff between two personally risky things (namely, drug users using drugs and taxpayers having to pay taxes—both of these are consensual, but have their downsides). How we optimize between both sides of this tradeoff is a matter of administration, an implementation detail; there’s no fundamental inconsistency here.
Look, this is all my attempt to pass an ITT, to steelman a view that I don’t even hold. I just happen to think that this particular case is a values difference, not an instance of one side or the other being irrational/inconsistent.
*There are better and worse arguments out there for the “implicit consent”/“social contract” views of taxation, and I agree with you that the Rawlsian one is not without its shortcomings. FWIW I am in reality much more libertarian than the median American, so it’s hard for me to give more than a halfhearted defense of this take.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
The Mishima-pilled American, truly a rare phenomenon
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
I’m not a “harm reduction”-ist myself, but if I had to provide a steelman here I would point out the various arguments for why taxation is not theft (the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, for example).
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
OK, I guess we have two different notions of “harm reduction”-ism in mind.
The one I was thinking of is internally consistent, because it is as follows: Call an act personally risky if it is performed with the consent of its actor, and poses a risk to life or limb of that actor, but not to any other party. Call an act evil if it harms (or threatens to harm) another party without that party’s consent. We should endeavor to reduce the harm/risk of harm faced by people who engage in personally risky activity, without requiring them to refrain from the act entirely, but we should not tolerate evil activity.
Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky. Domestic violence must be cracked down on with the full force of the law because it is evil.
In other words, my imagined “harm reduction”-ist is not a pure utilitarian/consequentialist. His consequentialism is conditional on the acts in question not nonconsensually harming anyone.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Well, that and his skin color means that he can pursue (relatively) “tough on crime” policies without being tarred as a racist
Ehhh… I see the point you’re trying to make with this, and in one sense it is valid (namely, that “harm reduction”-ists don’t see drug use as an inherent evil), but I also don’t think “safe DV sites” are equivalent. One could, with perfect moral consistency, be in favor of safe needle sites and against “safe DV sites” on the grounds that using drugs does not intrinsically and non-consensually harm anyone else, while DV definitionally does.
Of course, one can object to the framing that drug use only affects/harms the user, but that’s a difference of values, or of how you define “harm”, not a matter of moral or logical inconsistency.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
An underdiscussed downside of the renaming of Twitter to X is the added mental difficulty of interpreting sentences where “X” is used as a variable, like this one
Accountability, plus critiquing my form/suggesting ways to get past a stubborn plateau. I’ve always had terrible “body sense” so it’s hard for me to tell by myself if I’m, say, not bringing all my leg muscles to bear during squats because my stance is slightly off.
Now that I’ve got the basics and the routine down, I see my trainer once a month at most.
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