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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Notes -
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?
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.
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