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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does your significant other know about your use of The motte, and if so, what do they think about it?

No significant other but ill express my onion.

Isn't sharing what forum you pseudonomously post on playing with fire? Unless you are a "open book", Id guess writing such that I dont potentially incriminate myself as an uber bigot, in the motte! Would feel very restrictive. If your partner is nosy they will easily find your account, no snooping required. And no its not all that fun explaining why " you think blacks are dumb".

Why would you have any interest in trusting someone with your heart, if you can't trust them with your political views?

Because of https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/inferential-distance

For example, I have spoken about how I think the status of women in societies that place much status on a college degree is inflated because of subsidizing universities and job title inflation. 2 of the literal 3 self-identified women on the motte went did not take to it kindly, even though the proposals explicitly stated no rights would be taken away, but instead changes made to culture. That kind of shit would "scare the hoes."

I hate read /r/readscarepod sometimes, and there are gender war discussions there but as opposed to the motte, the majority is in favor of women. The men there who bring up even marginally "red pill" talking points get met with extreme prejudice. So my mental model is that men showing any sort of dissatisfaction or cynicism about the other gender is taken as a tremendous red flag, independent of how true or understandable their cynicism might be (shitting on men is tolerated btw).

That for example would immediately raise a red alert on my current account with a potential partner.

To quote Bennett: If she's still a feminist, you're not the guy. Read the whole thing, but a relevant quote that follows a discussion of what women are looking for in men:

And this is perfectly understandable: if she’s going to surrender, it should be to someone worthy, who will take her somewhere worth going. It would be humiliating to do this for some pothead, some clown who just wants her to scrub his unrinsed dishes. There’s dignity (for men & women) in swearing fealty to a righteous King, but not a petty bureaucrat.

This phenomenon sometimes get oversold by guys who are mad about it - you don’t have to tick all the boxes - but you will find that as you tick more & more boxes, the world becomes less & less feminist & postmodern in a 20-foot sphere around your person.

This is my personal experience, and I want you and all my friends to have that in your lives, not a pale imitation where you're constantly on eggshells or hiding parts of yourself. When you're in a genuine relationship of Eros/Compassion/Care/Empathy with someone, when your partner is really into you physically/romantically/emotionally/spiritually, their/your political views become much less important. You'll probably change each other at the margins anyway, but you'll interact on a level where political controversy is simply unimportant. When you meet the right girl, it won't matter if you're Right or she's Left, you'll be right for each other. Concealing your power level* is either unnecessary or actively harmful to you finding a mate; either she would accept it if you told her and it is unnecessary, or she wouldn't and you shouldn't be with her anyway.

So in a sense, all your prior interactions mean is, 2/3 women** on themotte aren't actively in capital-L Love with you. I would have bet on that regardless of what you post!

NB: Possibly my ideas are more mainstream/"ho friendly"/feminist than yours, but I've also had love affairs with women who are/were far to the left of mainstream (and wayyyy left of anything you'd even consider) and it's held up, so shift you an inch to the Right of me and if you shift your potential lovers an inch to the right you'll still have plenty of options.

*In a long term relationship. Don't bring it up on a first date, or in a Tinder profile, but if you're still pretending to be someone else months into it then you're making a mistake.

**I wouldn't bet on the third one either.

*In a long term relationship. Don't bring it up on a first date, or in a Tinder profile, but if you're still pretending to be someone else months into it then you're making a mistake.

I think you might be misunderstanding me to a certain extent.

The core reason I personally would not share my pseudonymous account is primarily because of the inferential distance, not the spiciness of the beliefs themselves. You propose that no belief is too spicy for True Love/Attraction, I agree, but with terms and conditions. I will come back to this later.

A secondary motivator for me is mere, "I don't want to", or "I don't feel the need to", because it can potentially bring downsides (yes yes I know you think otherwise) but little upsides, and I minimax upsides/downsides in just about everything because the math checks out, even if its sharing beliefs. I am not guided by an excel sheet here, but just intuition. It's more along the lines of how you don't call your wife fat even if she gained weight and is technically fat in your mental model, you sugarcoat it.

Similarly, I would want a potential partner to see my views come out of my mouth in a way that is designed for her to digest, understand and accept. Not in the way I express them to a bunch of degenerates on an online forum in specific lingo and with layers of irony and much-shared context and conversational history (the motte by all definitions is a very high-context culture that pretends to be low context).Think of it this way, if my wife was fat, I would just state as much when I make a pseudonymous most asking for hypothetical advice, but in real life, I would probably invite my hypothetical wife to go on cycling rides with me, and slowly drip feed her the information that she is getting fat.

I also have buckets of thoughts and ideas that I only share with specific people or no people at all and these boundaries are hard boundaries, a violation of this is a violation of privacy in my eyes. My sexual partner and my sexual partner is the only person who will know about all my kinks and fetishes, and this won't change no matter how friendly the half-drunk conversation at a dinner party is. Similarly what I write through a pseudonymous account is only for me and the readers, if I wanted otherwise I would have written it through a real name, why wouldn't I associate thousands of words and potential insight to my real name for free?

This is my personal experience, and I want you and all my friends to have that in your lives

I have experienced this. I eventually turned a girl from covid sympathetic to full-blown covid skeptic through the power of ranting about it nonstop. She did not actually understand the arguments I was making but she adopted them anyways. (our overton windows diverged in many other areas as well)

I did not see this as a sign of true love or admiration. I know it's a fairly common feature of women to eventually mold into their partner's attributes, but I don't think this is a feature of a strong mind rather just something that is. In its extreme circumstances, it's called Borderline Personality Disorder. The Last Psychiatrist talk where he touches on this line of thinking. https://youtube.com/watch?v=l8lQqTFaFS0

So being able to experience that is nice for you ego in the sense that "oh I have the power to do that, nice", but it's not something that you should try to do or even optimize for, it's a proxy, optimize for the things that produce that result, fortunately there are a thousand other proxies to know if you can actually do that. I hate to be condescending/ungrateful but I think wordcels like the guy who wrote that substacks source material are prone to fall for failures of pattern matching such as this one.


Finally back to why I think there are downsides.

I already said that different views are phrased differently for different audiences, but there is more to it. Views are signals.

In the simplest of cases, not having mainstream views classifies you as an outcast in some shape/capacity, this is hardly harmful in a majority of the cases.

What does all my gender war talk imply? That at one point in my life I was pissed off with girls enough to actually study about it! Who do you think is out there discussing the gender war without a horse in the race? I DONT WANT to potentially reveal that part of my intellectual history. I literally cannot see a single upside to doing that

Or what about HBD? That I was jobless enough at one point in my life to read about skull sizes? What is the connotation of someone who discusses HBD online?

In simple words, I don't want my views to slap the person in the face, I can drip-feed them over time as I see fit, if I do at all.

On a similar note, I actually don't care about the body count of my potential partner if there is a reasonable guarantee that number won't go up while we are together. I won't like hearing about that number, so whats my solution "Don't tell me, I don't care". The process that led to me having certain non PC cynical views is the same, it's my history and I don't want to know or tell. I will forfeit knowledge for privacy.

Good post, I agree with you.