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?
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Notes -
I spoke to a friend earlier today. She could tell I was on the spectrum but found it hard to describe exactly what made it apparent to her. After talking a while, she said that I always paused before I said something, or before I smiled. It was probably that deliberateness that was a tell. She did make it clear that there was nothing I had done (or failed to do) that was offensive in any way, although I'm reasonably sure that there's proto-offensive shit that doesn't rise to the level of conscious thought and is difficult, but not impossible, to put into words. Ekman and his team might be able to do it.
I also don't think all that many people can put into words the things that I do or say that make people think I'm autistic, or that offend people. If I had to guess, maybe ten percent of psychiatrists or psychologists, and maybe one average person in a few hundred.
I still think that a true UMC gentleman - like aristocracy in ages past - has things that they are fundamentally willing to die over. Like, a lot of duels were fought over things like "honor". I'm well aware that there were plenty of off-ramps in the dueling process that allowed both participants to be satisfied gentlemen. In the case of pistol duels the duelists didn't always shoot straight, and dueling pistols weren't usually that accurate. Even so, quite a few promising young gentlemen met a premature end on the dueling ground.
As a Hockist: perhaps a decent ideal to strive for is better to die than do your utmost to be graceful. It seems fitting and proper for an awkward person to adopt this as an ideal...at least until he is no longer awkward. The Hock is an idiotic and meaningless way to prove that I've got a high level of grit and determination.
I'm also guessing that many of you would think that my view of the 'UMC gentleman' - or the 'petty aristocracy' he described of people with two college educated parents - is out of whack and some fever-dream cross between Japanese bushido and what we think Victorian-era gentlemanly conduct was. And that if pressed, maybe a couple of awkward UMC dudes in a hundred would go on the Hock even if they were guaranteed to not be awkward after.
What's your take?
(1) I too think that "honour" is a meaningful concept and not a figleaf for hypocrisy or 'good is dumb' or the rest of it. Sometimes I find myself reacting like an 18th century novel about "this impugns my honour!!!" and have to cool my jets
(2) You're planning to do something very difficult and dangerous. I don't know your reasons, but if you're doing it to impress women - women aren't impressed by stupid, and women do tend to think "endangering my life for funsies" is stupid, and the kind of women who are impressed by that stuff aren't the kind of women you want to impress
(3) If you do go ahead and do this, be careful. There's nothing dishonorable in "planning not to get myself killed when five minutes thought would have saved me". I don't know how old you are, but just yesterday I read a news report about four young men who got themselves killed and who probably never expected anything could go wrong. Don't be an idiot, I guess, is what I'm trying to advise you (but depending on your age, young men are idiots)
Can't speak for women but I imagine they're somewhat impressed by competency and leadership/status, and one route to that competency and status is to do things that no other man has been brave, foolish or pig-headed enough to do before and succeed*.
Once success is demonstrated the unorthodoxy cashes out among men as being a pioneer. And now hundreds of thousands (millions?) of men admire people like Rodney Mullen for something as pointless and trivial as mastering standing on the wrong side of a skateboard. It's the "people said it couldn't be done" factor. And that status among men is in turn what cashes out as making an impression on women.
In this case it would only work if Skookum can lever his expedition into the likelihood of consistently impressing men within the social awareness cone of women at a degree proportional to the risk of freezing to death. That's very dubious, and that's what really makes it
stupidsuboptimal. I mean, if he comes back with pics and maps to post and a gripping tale of high jeopardy that he pursued in spite of everyone here near unanimously telling him it was dangerously misguided, I think that counts as some variety of impressive. But that doesn't cash out easily oustide The Motte, and it all turns on a not inconsiderable "if".* If they don't succeed they often fail catastrophically, which I think is something like Skookum is pointing at when he brings up the honour factor of how in his eyes it might be a better society if socially unsuccessful men died trying, because at least they're trying and if they die then they die with the honour of pursuing some variety of success (and society has relieved itself of something it didn't value anyway). Very Gattaca.
"And succeed" being the salient part here. "Do dumb thing that is 99% likely to end up with my corpse becoming bear food" is not that thing.
If only socially unsuccessful men do things that they will die doing, then it won't be perceived as "the honour of some variety of success" but rather something more like "annual pest control". Nobody is impressed by the nobility with which rats succumb to poison. If this kind of activity is one reserved for "socially unsuccessful men" then it will be as low status as the rest of the social lack of success.
I don't think elaborate suicide makes you look better than quiet suicide.
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And how many women?
For skateboarding? Or for being a figure of narrow but significant acclaim?
For the first, who knows. Roughly as many as there are women skateboarders. For the second, tautologically more than without the acclaim, and they don't have to be into skateboarding because the people who are will provide the information.
To offer a less niche example professional sportsmen aren't swimming in top tier fanny because they moved a ball into a net, it's because men want to associate with them, recruit them for their team, and use them to put a ball into a net more than the other team's men can.
There's a complex blend of prestige status and dominance status involved (you can't fail to be the best if you're the only one that does it, etc) but both of them reduce to status, and status rests on a foundation of external validation. That's the vital difference between a hypothetical woman who sees a bunch of men being impressed by the guy who stood on the wrong side of a skateboard (or hiked across Alaska) versus the guy who thinks he will impress women if he tells them about how he can use a skateboard wrong (or hiked across Alaska). Show don't tell, yes, but there's a third way by telling a third party and letting them do the showing.
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