Christopher Hitchens as ultimate comedian

I have some friends that I’ll never meet.

I can’t confide in them. We can’t commiserate or rejoice or share experiences or silences. They can’t slice through my bullshit or pat me on the back.

They aren’t all good people, and that helps me to feel a bit more brotherly that no one quite is.

Recently I’ve discovered Mark Maron and his comedy work and his podcasts where he interviews comedians, and spends much pod-time laying bare his neurotic mind.

Through Mark I’ve been re-examining the works of comedians.

Youtube knows my interests, and so when I’m watching comedians, my other favorites will show up in the right hand play list option.

After Eddy Murphy and Robin Williams Hitchens will autoplay.

It’s the same thing, only better. What an improvisationalist! He blows away comedians who “improv” out of material they’ve been honing against an audience for years or decades. Wit.

To my mind, it’s a similar thrill. Wit is a tickle. I rarely laugh out loud, but like the slow steady tickle.

I have a growing list of intellectuals and scientists who have a capacity to tickle. That capacity is of course cultivated from many years of study and speaking and writing, coupled with an outstanding birthright.

Hitchens, among many others, is a stand out talent.

To me that makes him my friend. A type of hero – someone I want to study, emulate, learn from, and share the best parts of the human condition with.

Along with many other fathers, I’m a child of his legacy. Or aspire to be.

And it’s not about political aliance. It’s HOW he thinks and expresses, not WHAT he thinks and expresses.

Same with Mark Maron. That guy is a fucked up dickhead. But it’s HOW he’s a fucked up dick-head that matters. A lot to learn from Mark too.

Introverts think that books are friends, and they are. The writers are close to us and become part of us.

Must read Google memo on gender

Reply to public response and misrepresentation

I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem. Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber. Despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired. This needs to change.

TL:DR

• Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
• This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
• The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.
• Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
• Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
• Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

Background [1]

People generally have good intentions, but we all have biases which are invisible to us. Thankfully, open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document.[2] Google has several biases and honest discussion about these biases is being silenced by the dominant ideology. What follows is by no means the complete story, but it’s a perspective that desperately needs to be told at Google.

Google’s biases

At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices.

Left Biases

• Compassion for the weak
• Disparities are due to injustices
• Humans are inherently cooperative
• Change is good (unstable)
• Open
• Idealist

Right Biases

• Respect for the strong/authority
• Disparities are natural and just
• Humans are inherently competitive
• Change is dangerous (stable)
• Closed
• Pragmatic

Neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society or, in this case, company. A company too far to the right may be slow to react, overly hierarchical, and untrusting of others. In contrast, a company too far to the left will constantly be changing (deprecating much loved services), over diversify its interests (ignoring or being ashamed of its core business), and overly trust its employees and competitors.

Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies. For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation.

Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech [3]

At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership. Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:

• They’re universal across human cultures
• They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
• Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males
• The underlying traits are highly heritable
• They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective

Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

Personality differences

Women, on average, have more:

• Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).
• These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.
• Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.
• This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.
• Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

Note that contrary to what a social constructionist would argue, research suggests that “greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits.” Because as “society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality becomes wider.” We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.

Men’s higher drive for status

We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.

Status is the primary metric that men are judged on[4], pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.

Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap

Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech and without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:

• Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
• We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).
• Women on average are more cooperative
• Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.
• Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
• Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.
• The male gender role is currently inflexible
• Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.

Philosophically, I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women. For each of these changes, we need principles reasons for why it helps Google; that is, we should be optimizing for Google—with Google’s diversity being a component of that. For example currently those trying to work extra hours or take extra stress will inevitably get ahead and if we try to change that too much, it may have disastrous consequences. Also, when considering the costs and benefits, we should keep in mind that Google’s funding is finite so its allocation is more zero-sum than is generally acknowledged.

The Harm of Google’s biases

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:

• Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]
• A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
• Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
• Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
• Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]

These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology[7] that can irreparably harm Google.

Why we’re blind

We all have biases and use motivated reasoning to dismiss ideas that run counter to our internal values. Just as some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans > environment” hierarchy (e.g., evolution and climate change) the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ[8] and sex differences). Thankfully, climate scientists and evolutionary biologists generally aren’t on the right. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of humanities and social scientists learn left (about 95%), which creates enormous confirmation bias, changes what’s being studied, and maintains myths like social constructionism and the gender wage gap[9]. Google’s left leaning makes us blind to this bias and uncritical of its results, which we’re using to justify highly politicized programs.

In addition to the Left’s affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females. As mentioned before, this likely evolved because males are biologically disposable and because women are generally more cooperative and areeable than men. We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue [sic] affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and whiner[10]. Nearly every difference between men and women is interpreted as a form of women’s oppression. As with many things in life, gender differences are often a case of “grass being greener on the other side”; unfortunately, taxpayer and Google money is spent to water only one side of the lawn.

The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness[11], which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause. While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment.

Suggestions

I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

My concrete suggestions are to:

De-moralize diversity.

• As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the “victims.”

Stop alienating conservatives.

• Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
• In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.
• Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is require for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.

Confront Google’s biases.

• I’ve mostly concentrated on how our biases cloud our thinking about diversity and inclusion, but our moral biases are farther reaching than that.
• I would start by breaking down Googlegeist scores by political orientation and personality to give a fuller picture into how our biases are affecting our culture.

Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races.

• These discriminatory practices are both unfair and divisive. Instead focus on some of the non-discriminatory practices I outlined.

Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs.

• Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts.
• There’s currently very little transparency into the extend of our diversity programs which keeps it immune to criticism from those outside its ideological echo chamber.
• These programs are highly politicized which further alienates non-progressives.
• I realize that some of our programs may be precautions against government accusations of discrimination, but that can easily backfire since they incentivize illegal discrimination.

Focus on psychological safety, not just race/gender diversity.

• We should focus on psychological safety, which has shown positive effects and should (hopefully) not lead to unfair discrimination.
• We need psychological safety and shared values to gain the benefits of diversity
• Having representative viewpoints is important for those designing and testing our products, but the benefits are less clear for those more removed from UX.

De-emphasize empathy.

• I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.

Prioritize intention.

• Our focus on microaggressions and other unintentional transgressions increases our sensitivity, which is not universally positive: sensitivity increases both our tendency to take offense and our self censorship, leading to authoritarian policies. Speaking up without the fear of being harshly judged is central to psychological safety, but these practices can remove that safety by judging unintentional transgressions.
• Microaggression training incorrectly and dangerously equates speech with violence and isn’t backed by evidence.

Be open about the science of human nature.

• Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.

Reconsider making Unconscious Bias training mandatory for promo committees.

• We haven’t been able to measure any effect of our Unconscious Bias training and it has the potential for overcorrecting or backlash, especially if made mandatory.
• Some of the suggested methods of the current training (v2.3) are likely useful, but the political bias of the presentation is clear from the factual inaccuracies and the examples shown.
• Spend more time on the many other types of biases besides stereotypes. Stereotypes are much more accurate and responsive to new information than the training suggests (I’m not advocating for using stereotypes, I [sic] just pointing out the factual inaccuracy of what’s said in the training).

[1] This document is mostly written from the perspective of Google’s Mountain View campus, I can’t speak about other offices or countries.

[2] Of course, I may be biased and only see evidence that supports my viewpoint. In terms of political biases, I consider myself a classical liberal and strongly value individualism and reason. I’d be very happy to discuss any of the document further and provide more citations.

[3] Throughout the document, by “tech”, I mostly mean software engineering.

[4] For heterosexual romantic relationships, men are more strongly judged by status and women by beauty. Again, this has biological origins and is culturally universal.

[5] Stretch, BOLD, CSSI, Engineering Practicum (to an extent), and several other Google funded internal and external programs are for people with a certain gender or race.

[6] Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.

[7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”

[8] Ironically, IQ tests were initially championed by the Left when meritocracy meant helping the victims of the aristocracy.

[9] Yes, in a national aggregate, women have lower salaries than men for a variety of reasons. For the same work though, women get paid just as much as men. Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employees sacrifices (e.g. more hours, stress, and danger), we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power.

[10] “The traditionalist system of gender does not deal well with the idea of men needing support. Men are expected to be strong, to not complain, and to deal with problems on their own. Men’s problems are more often seen as personal failings rather than victimhood,, due to our gendered idea of agency. This discourages men from bringing attention to their issues (whether individual or group-wide issues), for fear of being seen as whiners, complainers, or weak.”

[11] Political correctness is defined as “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against,” which makes it clear why it’s a phenomenon of the Left and a tool of authoritarians.

 

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Background: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywpamw/internal-reaction-to-google-employees-manifesto-show-anti-diversity-views-have-support

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Update: The author was quickly fired.

I had no idea things could possibly ever get this bad. Fired?

That just blows me away. I do not understand the human condition; I can’t possibly understand it. He could not have been fired.

I find the writing instructive; and not because it points out red or purple or green or blue or yellow pill truths. But because it aims to be and I think does an exemplary job of being balanced.

I find it to be very fine writing, and I’m proud to be of the same species of someone who can write like that.

Introduction to maitri

I just woke from a dream where I was explaining the meditation practice that I’d been doing.

“I was feeling sweet in my heart, like sunshine, but while you are safe in your room. Sweet like Winnie the Pooh.” In the dream the image flashed to seeing a crib by the window, and I was taken back to innocent carefree memories of feeling safe and loved and self loved and sweet.

I used to hang out in large crowds of Buddhists who practiced Tonglen, and studied about Maitri, Bodhicitta, Vipassana, and Prajna. During the daily Tonglen practice, we would breath in and feel in our hearts various negative feelings, and then breath out the most positive. People were taught to breathe in the negative feelings of other people, and help them by transforming them to positive ones that were given out, but I never quite saw the point of that. I just did it in the abstract; the emotions were mine and I had no pretensions to be saving the world with them.

Many years later I came to the conclusion that all that fine feeling into breathing in the bad feelings was over-doing it, and reinforcing circuits of feeling bad. It’s great to be sensitive to your heart, and great to have abilities to conjure up and quickly transform and change moods within that felt emotional organ, but creating and maintaining intricate castles of negative emotion over and over is kinda dumb.

Later I learned the Chi-kung (as far as I know all Chinese meditations are called chi-kung, just as all Indian meditations are called yoga) of the inner smile. It was tonglen without the in-breath. You simply focus on the heart and feel a smile there.

At age twelve I had discovered the hypnosis section of the library, and after much study and practice of self hypnosis created some of my own self hypnosis tapes. They were about feeling love in various parts of my body. I distinctly also recall that masturbation at that time was often very loving.

At age 11 my Grandparents flew me out to visit them. Meeting and spending time with my Grandma was a life changing – whole being changing – event. She is literally incredibly loving. For the first time in my life I could share strong love with a maternal figure. That’s how it’s supposed to be! So obvious, so natural, and absent my whole life! God, had I craved and missed that, year after year.

At age 6 I sometimes would cry myself to sleep out of want for maternal love. Even explaining that to my mother at the time had no effect. She could see my tears and I was quite articulate and precocious and explained perfectly well why I was crying.

She just wasn’t capable of love.

There are some evil memes in the manosphere. Truly evil.

1) Alpha fucks and beta bucks
2) Dark triad traits are useful to incorporate into seduction and by extention life

Recently burned or forever spurned impressionable men externalize their suffering and blame women for only really being sexually attracted to “thugs”, and feel undervalued for their family oriented concerns.

It’s FUCKED!

Genuinely EVIL.

I’ve explained in this blog many times why the ideas are more wrong than right, so I won’t repeat here.

I have met many people who chanced upon meeting some Tibetan lama in an airplane or somewhere, who were so blown away by the Maitri emanating from the man that they had full body mind expanding and blowing experiences that not only altered their conception of reality but caused an immediate and dramatic alteration to the course of their lives.

Loving kindness is HUGE!
Imagine if you had just 1/10th of the power of loving kindness that those great Tibetan masters had? How much more helpful for seduction than narcissism, psycopathy, and machiavelianism would that be?

I can tell you with authority that many Tibetan teachers get laid like rock stars. Of course the status of the position is a big part of it, but they honestly believe, and it can be honestly true, that they are teaching at their highest ability lessons of the highest caliber during sex and relationship.

If I could bottle just the fruits of my 30 years of kundalini and chi-kung practice, I’d be wealthy beyond measure. You can’t buy a drug that allows you to shoot energy up your spine at will. You can’t download a video movie, game, or porn that fills the heart with a precious jewel. There is no mechanical sexual technique and not even the hottest and most expert sex partner will bring about the 1000 times more powerful strong intense ecstasies of chi-kung sex.

Imagine a girl who was incapable of love, and incapable of any relationship other than physical flings or using guys for reward. It won’t be hard, and I’m sure you know her name.

Are you that girl, with a dick?

Imagine your dream girl. How does she behave around you, your friends, parents, and children.

Are you that girl with a dick?

Your dream girl is complex and evolved. If she was not well brought up she had to do a lot of work to bring her self up and fix all the broken pieces and put them together properly.

She is loving, highly erotic, friendly, and fun to be around.

People are extremely good at picking up on subtle cues. Being loving is a profound ability. Most people not only can’t do it, but have no idea what it would even begin to feel like.

Love is not a want for attention. It isn’t being jealous. It isn’t longing. It’s something that you can feel when you are completely alone, with no object to love – not even a teddy bear. It a feeling in your heart, an inner glowing smile, that is sweet, and a bit sad. That feeling can grow until your heart can no longer encompass it, and it spreads out past your chest and down through your arms into your palms, and out your eyes, until it seems to come back at you from the colors that are all around.

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I’m recently recovering from psychopaths working to steal from and ruin and persecute me. And hanging around too much with unworthy women. I actually needed to shut down and not feel so much. I did a lot of drinking and some pharmaceuitcals to take the edge off at first.

I stopped all drinking three months ago, and have better companionship. The psychopaths are at bay, and I’m living semi-retired while I slowly convalesce and get my nervous system towards normal.

Now I’ve taken up chi-kung again.

It’s always freshly dramatic and amazing the differences of being embodied in a chi-kung body compared to a normal one.

If I tried to explain it it would be so far outside of others experience that a good percentage would think it was pure fabrication. Another good percentage would blow it off as the self indulgent hallucinations of a talented mad man.

Squeeze your thumb right now, 70% as hard as you can. That is how much sensation I currently feel, while typing this, at the base of my spine.

And that’s nothing; that’s just sitting here. If I were to continue my practice deeply for three months I’d build up complex systems of fantom limbs that were wired in through the kinesthetic sense to map onto using synethesia many aspects of what is normally subconscious. Very fine emotional and energetic control, and profoundly more present being and feeling.

I don’t like to be that way unless I have access to lots of high quality sex with partners who are up to it. When you get that plugged in to energies, you don’t go through periods of getting sexually aroused, and then release. There is no off switch. You are always horny. And the chi-kung starts to continue even during sleep.

It’s not good to feel strongly when your life is pushing you to feel bad. I need things around me to be in order for all of that, and they pretty well are now.

I used to fear that I’d die without ever passing any of this info along. Luckily one of my interns was a quick study student. I gave him a nudge in the right direction, and his self learning took off.

It’s a shame that the seduction community has not picked up on the meditative technologies.

The meditative techs usually work by amplifying ancient evolved mental circuits. In particular there are devotional meditations, which hijack our wiring to love parental figures. There are loving kindness meditations, which build upon the foundations of feeling paternal love.

And Tibetans have some secret meditations that incorporate hot young bodies and lust.

It’s quite a lot easier to incorporate love into life with a woman. Love plus lust is powerful. Women love to be looked upon with a gaze that eats them up in appreciation by a man who emmanates both dangerous self interest and a profundity of warmth.

How noticing how grief works can unlock your inner potential

From this thread:

Yes, if you read my post carefully, you’ll see that I took pains, many times, to say that fucking other girls lowers grief and speeds up the grieving process.

So ya, you seem to want to make this black and white and then argue against a straw man.

However there are still areas in which we disagree, and I thought I was clear about them in the post. I don’t think you can sidestep the disagreements with semantics.

Your semantic argument is that on the continuum of amplitudes of grief, the lower levels are so qualitatively different as to merit a different mental category, and therefore different word.

You then take that as the jumping off point to leap to saying that low level grief is unimportant of any consideration.

So with semantics (deciding what words mean what) you hand-wave away the fundamental issue that I’m addressing, which is:

Grief is relative to
1) the strength of the relationship bond
2) how unique the girl is to your life

You are arguing that no girl can be unique to your life.

I made quite the bold prediction. I said

Also, if you have not yet experienced grief with a girl, or not yet while you also are fucking other girls, don’t get too cocky. You will. Sooner or later, you will.

Strangely enough you replied

No you are wrong. I experienced grief.

Which again shows that you are not reading for comprehension. Must be an emotional issue for you.

I never said you have never experienced grief.

I’m not sure how many re-reads it would take to understand what I said. I won’t bother to copy the same sentence over and over, but will trust you can this time read for comprehension.

Now that we know that you have experienced grief before, it gives me more confidence in my prediction. Sooner or later you will experience grief over losing a girl, even though you are still fucking (or can easily find and fuck) other girls.

The reason I can state this with some confidence is because:
Grief is relative to
1) the strength of the relationship bond
2) how unique the girl is to your life

Sooner or later you’ll date a girl who is hotter and funnier and younger and more into you than other girls. You’ll have stronger emotions for her. If you fuck her quite often, you’ll be more bonded to her than other girls.

You’ll quickly realize that your emotions are not broadcast homogeneously onto all females, but that you have unique relationships with individuals. You’ll feel loss for a specific girl, even though you still have other girls. Because they aren’t the same girl, and they are not the same relationship.

How long have you been spinning plates, and how often do you fuck the girls that you date?

I suspect it’s only been a few years, and that there is no girl that you fuck all that often in the time that you’ve been dating around. Or that if there was, you weren’t really all that into her.

There is a reason I’m taking pains to make this point. Your life will go better for you if you accept the reality of who you are and how your mind and emotions work.

If you truly don’t want grief, then you’ll need to do more to avoid it than simply having many women in your life. You’ll need to avoid:
1) growing strong relationship bonds
2) girls who are unique to your life

The mind and emotions have some broad cause and effect rules. Drop a ball and it falls, every time. Lose a unique bond to a loved one, and you’ll feel (some level) of grief, every time.

The other reason that your life will go better if you realize this inevitable cause and effect nature of how your mind was evolved to work, is that your relationship to emotions will have a subtle seismic shift, and you’ll approach your own emotions at a different angle.

You’ll come to see emotions not as something to dominate, but as something to co-operate with.

You seem to want to have so much control over your life that you can avoid grief altogether.

That’s almost nonsensical. The mind just doesn’t work like that. We EXPERIENCE emotions, much more than we create them. We are in partnership with the part of mind that emotes, and there is no meditative or life crafting technology that enables ANYONE to CONTROL emotions.

That’s actually quite important to not only realize, but to incorporate into your personal relationship with your self.

If you begin to learn how to make friends with your many subconscious processes, you’ll empower those processes to speak to you directly and in a friendly fashion. There is incredible power in your mind, and it is a beautiful lifetimes work to integrate the mind to allow these powers out. The parts of your mind that have vivid creative dreams can speak to you and surprise you while you are awake.

But if you continue to take this adversarial stance against these parts of your mind, and continue to enthrone the seat of your “self” in a fixed position in a very tiny little corner of your mind, which is your conscious narrative, then you’ll not begin to unlock your full creative, insightful, massively multi-parallel processing systems.

If you want to CONTROL your emotions, you want to shut up and turn off and segment amazing and useful parts of your self.

It’s much more pragmatic to make friends with them. Consider your mind as if it were a group of people, each with specific talents. As with any group, there must be a fine balance between co-ordination and free-flowing contribution. You can’t maximize group progress with a heavy handed dictatorial relationship. It falls apart and does not work.

All of us have experienced being overwhelmed by emotions. A sign of a kindergarten rank-beginner level of driving ones own mind is being so fearful of wallowing that a fight or flight level reaction of shutting down happens. Repression.

You don’t have to gas your inner Kurds, and you don’t have to run a strong man government.

You can mature and let emotions happen, even strongly, without risk of wallowing or being unduly incapacitated. It’s a matter of developing circuits of amplification, repression, and feeding the circuits into many different parts of the mind, including the neocortex. Emotional regulation has actually been studied at the level of seeing neuronal circuits, and there is a physical feedback loop between the amygdala and frontal cortex.

Those circuits will forever remain at kindergarten level until you go through the painful process of building them, and you start by feeling into what is there.

Minor grief is one among endless opportunities to shift the seat of self away from the frontal cortex and into the connections between the different mind modules.

Why I love the idea of marriage, and never will.

Nash said:

— Most marriages end in divorce
— Most married folks don’t have sex
— I like variety
— I’m not excited about watching my “hot girl” get old, and not so hot
— Most married people live boring, “married” lives

I had a mate who I was noticeably more happy with; it was a standout year of a quality never seen before or since. That was K, the now still dead girl who would orgasm spontaneously at the grocery store checkout line.

I had plans to give her a baby and a house that I would sometimes visit, after we were finished with our honeymoon period in a few years.

She understood when I explained to her that the main reason that I did not want to marry is because marriage kills passion. I didn’t spend a lot of time explaining the mechanics of how and why this happens, but just asked her to think of all the married people she’d ever met.

Girls WANT to believe that marriage can be passionate, but that simple mind exercise makes short work of the fantasy and replaces it with image after image of a gruesome, sad, boring reality. Marriages are not passionate.

I like passion.

People who prefer marriage can explain to me until I’m nauseous that passion is just a relationship phase. I don’t care about “growing up”. I care about passion.

I know lots of tricks to extend passion as long as possible. I’ve done it for well past the usual cut-off date of six months. With M we had a growing very strong passion for over 4 years, and then a few years of declining passion after that while we were apart and seeing others. At our peak, four years into it, it was 2-5 times a day orgasmic and multi orgasmic tantric sex passion. And just holding her hand in the taxi cab amplified and reminded me of the love that infused my life. She still laughed with puppy dog eyes at my jokes.

If we got married her body would have no reason to seduce me with that. She’d get lazy about keeping me. She’d be out of “aquisitive mode”, and be into complacency mode.

Fuck that.

Marriage is a great idea; as a carrot. Even when I explain that I’ll never marry, most girls refuse to believe it, and so remain in acquisitive mode. I thank the concept of marriage for that.

I like playing house, and I like everything that could be good about marriage. And I often get all of it.

But it’s a sand-castle, and the surest way to call in the rising tide is to actually get married.

Is grief avoidable? The case against find and fuck.

Having friends, the support of a rounded lifestyle, other women, and a steady supply of regular sex all helps us tremendously when facing the inevitable rough patches.

It does help to find and fuck other girls, after troubles with one. Or better yet to have more than one on tap at all times.

Still, I find something disingenuous and philosophically troubling about the idea that if we find and fuck other girls, that this is a cure for heartbreak.

First off, because it’s a lie.

Even if you are doing everything possible to not fixate on a girl you have formed healthy (or unhealthy) strong bonds with, grief is going to hang around for a while.

It’s not a sign that you’ve made a mistake, or that you are making a mistake.

I think it’s not a straightforward healthy relationship to life to see suffering as a mistake. It’s not.

Nor is it required of anyone to form bonds and ruminate over loss. I’m just saying that grief is a process that happens. It is what it is. It’s not a matter of judgement or repair.

Of course no one wants to feel bad, and feeling better asap is better. If anything at all is bad, it’s got to be suffering.

But my experience says that to love is to lose is to suffer. It’s like a law of gravity. You can’t repair gravity with an attitude or lifestyle. It just is.

I can’t yet put my finger on why I’m feeling there is some profound importance to the distinction that speeding up and taking the edge off of grief is great, but is NOT A CURE for grief.

Find and fuck other girls speeds up an INEVITABLE grieving process. It doesn’t cure grief.

You can’t cure grief.

Let’s look at it from the point of view of broken bonds. When parents lose one of their children, it’s common for strong grief to last many years, and even forever. No matter how many other children they have. No matter how rich their social and other lifestyle supports.

And so it is with girls; you might be dating three, but losing one of them can still be huge, for a time. Having others doesn’t fill some hole in our soul – the loss of a bond is unique and particular.

If that’s not your own experience, that’s cool. I’m not about telling anyone what to feel. I’m not omniscient, and I’m not everyone else.

The health industry is learning to tailor medicines to genotypes.

I predict that relationship advice will eventually discover that the human condition is as homogeneous as the human gene pool – we’ll need tailored advice to match our emotional genotypes.

My pet peeve is that red pill concepts that initially were based in reality have become traded around as icons and lost touch with reality. The territory has become a map. People now trade around ideas about ideas, instead of talking about their real lived personal relationship to life. That can lead to living a religious fantasy. It reminds me of a talk I witnessed at a Catholic University in Thailand where the subject was the nature of the holy Trinity. Once the professor had his premises, he could masturbate publicly about how his ideas related to each other, with no relationship whatsoever to the physical world. It disgusted me that he had an audience at all, and many in the audience found him laughable. Mind wank.

When mind wank claims to offer life solutions, it distracts from effective solutions at best, and is poisonous at worst.

As long as people ground their ideas in personal experience, then that’s scientific.

Once we start trading around dogmas, we start spinning off.

So when people claim to have found a cure for grief through the lifestyle of find-and-fuck-other-girls-then-you’ll-realize-that-it-was-all-just-in-your-head, I call bullshit.

I disagree that real bonds become less real by being multiple. And I posit that real bonds are inherently bound up with real loss and real grief, inevitably. There is no love without the real pain that comes from loss of love – no matter how much other love is also there with other girls or sources.

And I’m not laying down head trips or judgments; not everyone wants to, is in a position to, or even can form bonds strong enough to hurt for long. I’m not talking about what should be. I’m talking about what is.

Grief is. No matter what, if you form bonds that matter to you, and then lose them, for some length of time the grieving process will happen. There is no cure or off switch. There is a very big difference between speeding up and taking the edge of of the grieving process to declaring grief a pathology and sign of living life wrong. There is no vaccine to inoculate yourself against grief, and no pill to CURE it once you have it. It’s going to run it’s course – whether it’s a long or short course – it will run a course.

It’s normal, and I think everyone knows this. We don’t get special dispensation from that by being within a community of insider red-pill secrets.

Lately I’ve been listening to some of my favorite luminaries, including Stephen Pinker, and Robin Hanson. They echo some of my own ideas about the agendas that underly our own emotions. One idea put forth was that falling in love was an evolved guarantee to enhance our bargaining position to sweeten the offer of being in a relationship with our self. After all, we all want to secure the smartest, richest, most attractive mate we can get, and after we settle and something better comes along, it’s tempting to trade up. If we are in love, the evo-psych theory says, then we are bargaining from a stronger position, because we are showing that we can’t stop being in love, and so are less likely to trade up.

So It’s not necessarily particularly noble to bond. It just is something that happens, neither right nor wrong. I find it the best drug available. A peerless high. Combined with a lifestyle of serial and parallel monogamy, it can be a relatively sustainable high. For purely selfish reasons, love is fantastic.

But the game of love, I have found, will always be bitter sweet. You can’t just pick and choose the silver lining; you get the whole cloud. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

That’s built into our hard wiring, by evolution.

I think that it’s important to face that fact head on, without avoiding it. It might seem a trivial distinction. In practice whether you look to cure your heartbreak, or simply speed up the grieving process looks exactly the same and has the same outcome, so what difference can it make to change the perspective?

Because if you think grief is a sign of doing it wrong, you are already doing it wrong. You have lost an honest relationship to yourself, and to your emotions. Grief sucks, ya, but it’s not totally useless. You can’t box that part of yourself into a garbage pile. That’s part of what needs to be embraced and given space. It’s the source of so much music and art, and melancholic beauty. It’s the human condition – and our human condition is what we share with each other.

Being able to embrace that helps to seduce our other and next girls. Really, it does. Being able to feel is being able to love is being able to bond is seductive.

Then we are in a better position to keep the drug alive; to remain in love with other and future girls.

As soon as you need to shut down and avoid heartbreak, you also immediately need to shut down and avoid falling in love.

Growing sexual chemistry

Last night I watched the biography of Heath Ledger.

Heath apparently was a very talented and smart guy who generally navigated towards a successful and happy life. One standout part of his life was how he magnetized and fostered strong and lifelong friendships with a vast number of people. The people seemed high quality, open hearted, good people.

My Dad was a great influence on my personality, and I suppose the number two influence was my mentor in my early twenties. Both are very social, cheerful, positive and open hearted people. I’m far more introverted, and envy their social circles. My social talents usually focus on one-to-one relationships with the women in my life. However the style is similar to my Dad and mentor; I like to make people feel good, and can at times be seductive and magnetic and fun.

However I’ve recently come to realize that I’m more fragile than I knew. In this world we have narcissists, sociopaths, people with BPD and other personality disorders. Narcissists are not healthy to be around. When insecure or triggered they prefer if those around them are miserable, and so can’t relax until they provoke negative expressions and even outbursts of rage.

Sociopaths can put on a face and all the time be plotting to steal from you and ruin you completely.

Some of us have an artistic temperament, and have emotions integrated strongly with our lives; we can feel deeply, and prefer to. These types of people are easier prey for emotional vampires, because we have emotions that can be manipulated. Our empathy and desire for communion can be weaponized against us.

Some months ago I was victimized horribly by some sociopaths. One of them is truly insane, and continues to try to persecute me. A former employee. Three of my last four main squeezes are fundamentally fucked up people. I don’t want to wine; largely I think I had managed to craft a decent and joyful life with them around, and they had a lot to offer and did give a lot.

But I could never have a Heath Ledger lifestyle with them; communication was deeply flawed.

I had a several months long depression not long ago influenced by sociopaths, and was going out of my mind when limited to hanging with two female nut-jobs.

There are some EXTREMELY hazardous memes being accepted by impressionable men of all ages in the manosphere, and one of them is that attraction is a given, and that if you don’t immediately have it then move on to someone who is attracted to you.

That’s not my experience at all, and I can state with authority that this is a defeatist meme.

With M our chemistry was initially quite poor. It took about two years for our sexual chemistry to reach potential. At our peak it was extremely good.

I’ve been dating my V for a few years now, and I’ve always liked her. Which is a relief and a great change. I actually like her. I’ve written here many times that our chemistry wasn’t as strong as with other girls. Some of that might be because her body type doesn’t match some of my fetishes.

But that’s changed.

Chemistry, SEXUAL chemistry, can grow, for both men and women.

I haven’t had a girl I had chemistry with who I actually liked since my dead Kiki. Six or seven years ago. And before that it was a six week fling four years previous.

Of course I always knew it was a problem, and wanted to improve things. I figured much of what was going on was a simple trade off of youth and beauty for brains and personality. I liked the bargain, overall.

But now I see a big contrast. V and I are simply kind to each other. Both cheerful, by constitution. Even when irritable, both of us slow down and choose kind words. Not once has she ever put me into the role of being her enemy. Not even when broken hearted. In my experience, unfortunately, that’s quite rare. It’s the way it should be.

Just simple, easy going, kindness and appreciation. And a slowly growing sexual chemistry.

Two years ago I had some interns out here, and we also had quality chemistry. Really fun guys to be around. Mutual respect was a simple given. One of the interns invited out three of his friends from the UK, with the idea to test the waters of a mutual interest to work together. I was quite impressed – almost shocked – at the bro-bonds those guys shared. They grew up together, and it was amazing to see how well they got along. They were almost like lovers. Maybe that’s not a good analogy as so many relationships are fraught with drama and dissatisfaction. They really liked each other, and clearly loved each other too.

The broken people in my life were not 100% broken. It’s troubling and sad that they were and are permanently deficient. They can’t have strong healthy relationships with their girlfriends, or me, or anyone.

Some people seem to be able to just drop associations and get new ones. I wish I had the endless social connections to be so choosy. Other people seem to meet people all the time and easily form friendships. I’m glad that through my business I at least got a taste for some healthy bro bonds, and I’m very appreciative to again have a healthy relationship with someone that I respect.

My mental health is much improved.

I like being open around open cheerful people who have each others backs. In Canada I think we take that kind of thing for granted – we’re a laid back people, and put a strong emphasis on trustworthiness and self awareness.

I’m writing this for myself. Probably others will also have similar experiences, and will like to see someone else going through the same human condition.

Alcoholism is a thing

It’s oddly controversial. It’s been said that only an alky or former alky can know what it’s like.

I guess we all really like to hold tightly to the concept of free will. And it’s a gigantic bitch slap to even hold the idea in mind for 1/10th of a second that free will isn’t easy.

I’ve had many periods in my life when I drank too much. As a younger man I was often a high functioning alcoholic. Then in my forties there were times when I’d struggle with moderation, and my motivation, mood, and capabilities were hampered. Then I stopped for 5 years. Lately if I drink too much its crazy embarrassing how stupid I get. The scariest part of it is I can’t tell at the time.

So even for one person, the relationship to booze can change. As I’m getting more senile, I’m not as sharp generally, and scary stupid inebriated. I’m desperately trying to get young-blood infusions, as this is a proven anti-aging technique that could very well help reverse the early onset dementia.

Early this year I had some desperate times brought on by betrayal by partners and employees. A horrible story I may never share here. And before that I also had a few spells of drinking often.

Here is how it works for alkys, and why I now believe that alcoholism is a real thing, and not just a matter of habit. You have a drink. Fine. Then you feel better – good even. Fine. Then of course you want more. Ok.

But then in the morning come the cravings. You just need a taste to take the edge off – to feel normal again. And bam, you’re on the circle. The vicious circle.

I’ve had it happen many times, and usually the attitude I would take is to just ride it out. Sooner or later I always stop. Somehow the circle has it’s own end.

But the last circle just wasn’t worth it. I had a great time, truly. But I also did risky things and said stupid things and hurt those that love me. And I couldn’t work effectively.

It was difficult this time to quit. I let valium help a bit, but had to eventually watch all intake of drugs carefully, including Ritalin. I imagined what it’s like in rehab. Cravings came often, and were easily triggered. The sight of a Circle-K reminded me how much I wanted a good beer. Evening time reminded me how nice it would be to relax and have fun with a drink. It took a few weeks of hard NO to every craving before the cravings died down.

And now I know that if I have even one drink – just one – I would put myself at risk for another circle.

I’ve heard that story many times. That’s a thing for a lot of people.

It’s helping that general stress levels are down, and that I’m no longer only surrounded by annoying and stupid people.

Which brings me around to another subject. The quality of sexual mates.

In my past I’ve been able to maintain interest and attraction mostly based on lust. It’s always been the case for me that crazy or damaged or mentally deficient young and obviously attractive girls are more likely to date a much older ugly man. I’ve not ONLY dated airheads, but I’ve held on to twisted girls and liked it as a general life strategy.

It was driving me crazy. With no Westerners in my life, and only airheads as confidants, I was going out of my mind.

Now I’m closer to an intelligent 26 year old. We’ve been off and on for a few years, and time has allowed her to blossom into someone I appreciate even more. We’ve been able to find our chemistry despite the fact that she’s not in the top ten of the hottest girl I’ve ever had. She’s quite in love with me, but despite that doesn’t play head games or deliberately try to annoy me. Very patient and kind, funny, generous, never the slightest risk for infidelity, hard working, likes all role play (especially hard core), and for 10 bonus points she even squirted for the first time recently.

This actually has quite a lot to do with drinking.

With a life more satisfying there is less need to escape.

It took time to be fun to be around when sober. The first month I was a miserable joyless ass. The quality of companionship makes it much easier to find joy without drinking it.

***

Some interns lived in my building, and could hear the various screams. Usually they were sexual, but sometimes I’d scream at a girl too.

It happened often enough that I had to ask myself if it was me.

I’ve never once come close to screaming at my formerly virgin V. It wasn’t (all) me. Some girls push buttons and sabotage communication as incurable habits.

It’s SOOO good not to deal with that anymore!

As good as it gets

Living in SEA I’ve grown fond of the phrase “third world problems”.

Which can be applied to such situations as having a wild fling with a super hot teenager who neglects to tell you that she is engaged and using you for fun while waiting for her man to return from overseas.

The older I get the more the term “as good as it gets” starts to seem less negative.

When your life really hits the low points and you look back in nostalgia at times when you were having neurotic third world problems, “as good as it gets” starts to sound like a positive.

We are both neurotic people – you and me. We have moments of pure carefree joy, and great highs, and great lows. Our garden blooms, fades, freezes, composts, over seasons and many times a day.

No amount of philosophizing about it makes us truly deep down accept and embrace the truth of suffering. But age takes the edge off.

My next step is to realize and forgive other people for being such shitty human beings. As good as it gets is all around me.

LSD will make you more creative, and more insane

Many people in my meditation communities became introduced to introspection through drugs. Those are interesting communities. Mostly wealthy, in the long run, even if started from hippies.

Old meditating sort-of-ex-hippies have the best stories. And are good lays.

LSD probably makes permanent or at least very long term brain changes. That’s my informed opinion; I’m not aware of studies.

LSD will make you be like I once was. You’ll read Carlos Casteneda and not think it fiction. And the walls took years to stop moving when looked at closely.

I used to have the most strange concepts back when I was doing LSD. And for so many years afterwards. Embarassing to mention now. I wasn’t dumb. I was very smart, like so many are who are drawn to push boundaries. I had weird thoughts like that you could hide objects inside sound waves. Or that my brain was able to “intuit” things, as if connected to a radio antenna to pick up subtle signals no one else was connected to. I once was convinced that I had inside knowldege that a friend that I not heard from in a a while was dead. Pro tip: It’s not a good sign of mental health when you have ESP.

Yet to this day I’m probably still creatively improved – LSD most likely permanently makes you more creative. But it can fuck you up. Make you a bit messed up in differentiating categories.

People don’t tend to have regrets. We usually appreciate what we learned from our mistakes. I don’t think LSD should be illegal, although I do believe it can and does cause harm. And can and does cause benefit.

Should I create a dna customized super-baby?

I bet the knowdledge and science and tools are already here to ensure that a baby is coded to become a high level genius. I’d need to spread a bunch of money around, but I think it’s do-able.

I could have the kid dragon-mom raised up to be a super computer programmer. And musician.

I suppose there could be ethics to consider, but putting those aside for a moment, and considering simply effort and expense vs income, I bet this plan could have extremely high returns.

IQ tests came from noticing precociousness. Apparently there is a new human genus of genius.

I’ve met people who are quite a bit smarter than me. It’s a bit uncomfortable. Nobody likes every reference to go over their heads at worst, or to take 5 seconds too long to get at best. It’s uncomfortable to be in a crowd talking about a subject that I not only did not study, but felt was above my ability to study.

My father talking to my cousins makes me feel very inadequate.  They talk about math like it’s gossip.  He watches the concert grade pianist show off a composition and keeps saying things like “I see what you did there.”  He’s obviously smarter than me, but I’ve met smarter; too smart for me to even guess how smart they are. I mean to be able to know what it means.

The bell curve extends to the far right far past what I will ever be able to imagine.

And that’s just this decade, when tech improvements are limited to cell phones and laptops. Everything is hardware. Meat can be upgraded too.

Much has been written about IQ. Today I took a relaxing work holiday to read peoples experiences about dating stupid mates. Unsurprisingly 35% of comments expressed hostility and outright incomprehention of of the frustration that comes from IQ differential communcation problems. INEVITABLE problems. Read for comprehension, stupid people – the smart can not dum down their concepts to you with vocabulary or slow speach. You can’t understand them. It’s not their fault. It’s not their arrogance.

The 160+ D15IQ person may often feel that they have made a compelling case, yet the listener is not convinced.  This may cause frustration in the the 160+ D15IQ person that may be perceived as different expressions to the audience, such as arrogance, condescension, etc.

There is evidence that there is a new species of human that has a gigantic head. And the IQ is well above mine, and most likely yours. They are innately and permanently isolated from society. It’s very difficult to be isolated. No matter how smart you are. Many studies of the extremely high IQ have shown severe social isolation. It’s not their fault.

This will explain better than I can:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/michael-ferguson/extremely-high-iq-characteristic-of-intellectual-and-community-isolation/10150118663524289/

… It also suggests that the right side fat tail may be the result of a secondary population with a mean R16IQ of 155.  The implied mean cranial volume for the population is 1,686cc.  This may be evidence of sympatric speciation caused by assortive mating with regard to intelligence.  A slight increase in mean cranial volume to 1,781 will result in a cranial difference between the H. megacephalus and H. sapiens that is identical to the difference between H. sapiens and H. erectus.  In other words, the next evolutionary step may already be emerging.

***

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being humble. I don’t even know what humble means. I think it means internalizing some bullshit and obviously fake ethos of trying not to insult people by making them feel inferior. Even if they are.

How nice. Let’s all get along, even if we are fundamentally inconpatible. Use small words so that you won’t be ostracised. Or slaned, as often happens; mass cultural extermination of the intelligentia. Pol Pot. Mao. Every dictactor or person or group who understood the real threat to their power and did something about it. Schoolyard bullies. We all do our best for power.

It’s the economy and population that’s allowing a new evolution of humans. Niven’s classic Sci-Fi tale Ringworld explained how population speeds up evolution time. The link below will re-iterate Heinleins idea about the Jews and money. That classes of people breed for money. Ya. He said that. He could get away with saying almost anything. Because he said it well. He even talked about incest. And no other human can do that.

I’m a low level genius, which is smart enought to know I’m that relative to some I have the mental capacity of a young child. I’ve known that for nearly ask long as I’ve known that I’m smarter than most. In some classrooms I wasn’t the smartest, and the smartest were obviously quite a lot smarter than me; a few looked down on me from clouds higher than I look down on the stupid average. I’m two or three or four standard deviations above average, whatever that means, and that kind of difference can keep happening above my head.

High school computer class exposed us. Some people coded as fast as they could type, and didn’t need to keep running their code to check for errors. Actually one guy blew the whole high school out of the water. Another was great. Another very good. I was merely better than most of the rest. Still a relative idiot. The superstar was in a world of his own.

***

This would be a good time to point out that the psycological tests for narcissism were written by midwits who have no concept that some people have an accurate self conception of truly being better. Only a politician could say “All men are created equal”, and only a dim to mid-wit could vomit and demand group regurgitation and re-swallowing of the ideal of democratic equality convincingly to the captive audience.

Not everyone suffers fools gladly

Another reader just doesn’t get the concept of “theory of mind”.  My recent posts about there being drastically different mental types flew over his head, and all he could think about was “ego”.

I read your original post. As you must know ‘Have you eaten?’ is a pretty common greeting in Malaysia and Indonesia. It is just a form politeness and manners in those cultures. You need to get over yourself fella. By the way what exactly has your huge intellect produced? If it is as big as you ego it must be a sensational corpus of work.

Ya, no kidding. It’s said instead of “what’s up”, or hello. But some people start at that level of banality and leave it at that, with nothing more to say.

Yes, I’m cantankerous and irritable. And for good reasons. I haven’t had a decent conversation with an interesting person in ages. It’s making me nuts.

A guy can’t be expected to hang around with idiots and maintain his composure forever. Yes, sooner or later he will snap. It’s perfectly normal.

By the way, have you eaten?

How’s the weather over there?

What do you think about our sports team lately? Go sports team!

Some people are easy going about such banalities. I’m usually easy going also. But fill up my WHOLE life with banality and I’m going to fucking snap.

And I’m not the first person to point out that there are well defined and well studied personality archetypes that fucking hate these banalities.

We really dislike them.

I’m accurately reporting my personal experience. I’ve read about studies about people with similar experiences. Do I have a gigantic ego for disliking banalities?

What difference does it make. Why aren’t you the least bit curious to learn that in order to interact harmoniously with people, you’ll have to expect that some of them will be just like me. And HATE banal talk, including all talk of sports teams. There are people like me who are constantly having thoughts that are interesting to them running through their minds.

We exist. Big ego or not, we exist. Accomplished or not, intelligent or not – this is how we think. It’s genuinely and truly very different than average.

If that’s insulting to you then whatever.

Get over yourself for expecting me to get over banalities! People vary widely. A lot of us really really really dislike these pointless banalities.

It’s not in the least bit uncommon. You could google it and find article after article about people like this.

Some people use conversation and information fundamentally differently. We don’t use it for polite hi-how-do-you do’s. We just don’t. We hate that. We always will hate it.

We use conversation to transmit interesting information.

Have you eaten?

Every single day of all my life, even as a kid, has been deeply mentally engaging.

Does that give me a big ego? WHO CARES how big my ego is? What does that have to do with the price of beans in Africa? There are a minority of people like me, who have highly active mental lives that never stop. We are deeply intensely curious, forever exploring, pushing boundaries, inventing. Whether we are good at what we do, or accomplish anything, or entertain anyone has nothing to do with nothing. It’s how OUR brains work. If you meet someone like me, you can’t change that by telling me to get over myself. I’ll still be thinking about something far more interesting to me than:

Have you eaten? Looks like rain. What’s your favorite football team?

It’s an imposition on my awareness to ask me these things. It’s stealing my awareness, stealing my precious brain cycles. I’m busy! If you are going to force yourself on my awareness, add value! Be interesting!

Lots of people do.

Those people are usually similar to me. I’m not unique. There are lots of people like me.

Maybe now that I’ve educated you, you’ll know who you are meeting when you meet someone like me. And won’t be so arrogant as to assume that you understand what they value, how they think, an how they SHOULD think.

Really. It’s just fucking rude to go around asking random strangers who their favorite football team is. Taxi drivers in Thailand do that all the time. What an arrogant and ignorant assumption, that I give a flying fuck. Did it not cross your mind that I might be thinking about something FAR more interesting? Puzzling over something really entertaining and engaging? That you are stealing from me my attention from a more valuable task in order to bother me with trying to connect about something that I not only don’t care about, but actively dislike caring about?

It’s mental theft. You are hijacking my CPU to mine your bitcoins. Assuming that I’m not using it for anything valuable to me at the moment. CPU cycles have value.

It’s to be expected that people who are not in the habit of being mentally engaged will have no theory of mind about those who are. It will never cross your minds that someone just sitting there could be “busy”.

We don’t have to prove to you that our thoughts are valuable to us to have them be valuable to us. We ARE busy.

Sometimes I’m busy relaxing my mind into sensations, as an open eyed meditation. Silently expanding beyond thought into as much of the present moment as possible. Even that is WAY more engaging than “Have you eaten.” I’ll be in a taxi and the girl will try to fill up the airwaves with noise in order to engage. But she will have no concept about being interesting. You can’t just be banal and expect everyone to play along and enjoy the engagement. People like me will resent your imposition. Be interesting or shut up!

It’s really not all that complicated. Not everyone suffers fools gladly.

And as for what I’ve produced, well, this blog is something. A lot of people have told me that it’s been a huge influence and that they value it a lot. It’s very valuable to me. And that’s just the blog. My mind produces endlessly. People have given me way over the top compliments about what my mind produces.  Online and in real life the word genius has been used thousands of times. But that’s not a compliment, it’s a description. The over the top stuff is that I’ve heard many times from many different people that “just knowing that someone like you exists at all changed my life”.  That’s not my ego.  That’s other people talking to me.

YOU don’t have to appreciate the weird shit that goes on in my head. Lots of other people do.  *I* do.

This IS the planet of the apes. We ARE classes of gorillas and chimps.

There is a cultural aversion to noticing differences.  Men and women are supposed to be identical.  People with different heritages are supposed to be evolutionarily identical.  The politically correct thought is that we don’t live in a physical world and don’t have physical minds.  We live in “environments” and everything is nothing but thoughts influencing thoughts.  We could be anything if only we were trained that way.  There is no gender.  There is no genius.  There is only equality.

An extremely ill conceived and fundamentally stupid comment on my last post:

They were just checking to see if you weren’t hungry.

That’s a gesture that’s arguably more valuable than anything your creativity can give.

You could write hundreds of books, publish millions of songs, compose a thousand ballads, introduce people to any delightful fantasies, recall your adventures in Canada, and it wouldn’t even scratch the amount of pleasure/eutility that would be given to anyone else if they have had a nice piece of fruit while watching the sunset.

I wonder if you actually believe that, or if you are just trying to be contrary.

Let’s go with that you actually believe what you just said. Think of the implications.

It means that YOU don’t get much pleasure from books or music.

It means that YOU don’t get much pleasure from art.

Yes, there really are people like YOU.

And there are people very, very, very different than YOU.

I come across people all the time who not only don’t have an active mental life, but who consider mental activity boring to the point of painful. They are unwilling to even begin to imagine that some people get great pleasure in thinking. They certainly don’t get that pleasure!

It’s like talking to a wall to try to explain to such people that some of us think for fun. We actually enjoy it!

And we derive ongoing pleasure and satisfaction from the great works of others. Our life would be miserably impoverished without the science, art, philosophy, music and other great works that we constantly enrich ourselves with.

No sunset or pear can replace or surpass the richness of the mind.

Thank you to all the creatives! I’m very grateful. I’m listening, learning your science, and grooving along to your poetry and music. Keep up the good work.

Bro, do you even improv? Permanent puberty.

Ch ch ch ch changes. Turn to face the strange changes.

Time may change me. But I can’t change time.

A press release was widely re-written as original news throughout the mass media a few years back.  The buzz was about a paper published in some psych journal which claimed that introverts are introverted because they are smart enough to not need support from society.

It’s ironic that the paper got regurgitated without comment by all the “journalists”.  The irony is that each journalist, from the hundreds of outlets that chose to cover the story, had nothing unique to add.  They each added a touch of stylistic flair to their writing, but other than that…

They were writing about how creative people are different, and yet were not being creative while “reporting” about the subject.

—

A few years back I had smoked some pot and swallowed some tianeptine, and commenced to play ping ping with Aaron at my villa in Bali.  He thought I was insane when I started talking about how I was creatively hallucinating colorful patterns upon the speeding ping pong ball.

Bro.  Do you even improv?

When I was a child, I had to learn how to not wet my bed. The only option that I could think of was to learn how to lucid dream. It’s obvious. I didn’t read a book about lucid dreaming. I just didn’t want to wet my bed.

Most people that I meet don’t even remember their dreams.

That psych paper may have been fluff, but I think it was onto something.  There are different classes of humans.  We are really different.  The creative class is permanently lonely and alienated.  Unless they manage to somehow group.

When I’m half asleep, a massively insanely fast multi-parallel intelligence arises.  I’m 50 now, so it’s no surprise that this part of my brain can leak out even when I’m not asleep, after all this time.  Yes, I can have open eyed hallucinations that are under my conscious control.  To a degree, and at times.  Why not?

As a kid I noticed that other kids did not write fictional tales.  That was just weird.  I wrote them.  I can spin off tales like mad.

I can dream.

I can create new music endlessly.  I do that.  Every day.

I’ve noticed that great musicians talk about their accomplishments as if in the third person.  They are proud.  Without shame they are proud.  Becuause nobody knows or understand where the muse comes from.  This creativity is not owned.  It comes to us.  And for some of us it ALWAYS comes to us.  Constantly.

I’ve heard it said that introverts don’t like to hear other people talk to us, because other people are more boring than our own inner voices.

That’s mostly true.

The real truth is that we love to hear other creative people talk to us.  We just find that most people are not the same as us; most people don’t improv.  They are not worth listening to.

“Did you eat today?”

Over and over in Indonesia people ask me if I ate.  Shut Up!  Please shut up.  My own inner voice is far more interesting.  Your concern is an imposition upon my time and awareness.  Say something interesting or say nothing. Concern is not interesting

If you have nothing to say, then don’t say it.  Most people are just monkeys in a forest babbling out noises that mean little more than “I’m here.  I’m over here.  I’m still here”.

I don’t care.  I know you are there.  Shut up about it.  Yes, I ate.  Anything else?

Some of us are in a state of permanent puberty. Constantly re-inventing ourselves and re-discovering fundamental relationships to this world.

We are not same as  you.  We are not boring.  Don’t bore us.

Create something new, NOW, or shut up, now.