The commonality dilemma

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I would think atypical people will often meet and settle down with atypical people, and I notice it is quite often across cultures and ethnicities, which to me in some ways would further even fuse the understanding (in positive ways) that you both took a particular kind of leap to be with each other, there's a sort of pettiness of sameness with respect to culture and shared ethnicity (especially where it's predominant) that seems to help lubricate the 'you're replaceable' mentality where people end up divorcing too often even on as little as 'I'm just not feeling them anymore'.

Something you seem to be highlighting as well though is a great level of pragmatism and realism. In the US at least it seems like it's really common for everyone to want the moon on a stick and I can't help but sense that we haven't always been this stupid - ie. something's sort of baked into the culture that's ratcheted things up and I can't always say its even impossible standards, it's more like even if people's standards are reasonable the whole culture is against their acting as such.

I've been ingesting 1,000 of pages of ASD books recently, so am not clear exactly where I got it.

I have on hand "Asperger's and Girls"

The author states that she herself has a significant age difference in her relationship.

The other book I recall is "Nerdy, Shy and Socially Inappropriate" - the topic may have been implicit.

There are two other raising Asperger's Girls into adulthood and two other memoirs I have read, plus general Aspeger's guides, so not sure which of those may have mentioned the likelihood.

I don't readily find supporting (or not) material online.

No, I actually hadn't looked at Bret and Eric Weinstein. When preparing to write my response quoted above, I didn't look at all the people you mentioned, just maybe about four or five of them if I remember correctly, and it so happens that all of the ones I looked at turned out to be rather right wing. Googling Bret and Eric Weinstein just now, I see that they appear to be pretty centrist, maybe even a bit left-leaning although I'm not sure of that yet.

If you found four or five right-wingers in either of these lists I think my suggestion still remains the same. Maybe, at as stretch, one can read Vox about Sam Harris and try arguing that he's gone center right such as sticking to speech issues and criticizing the reactionary portions he'd deem 'regressive left' (I believe Majid Nawaaz actually coined that term) but aside from some very niche issues and interpretations it doesn't work. Robert Sapolsky is pretty much Alan Moore if he was a neurology professor at Stanford. Jordan, Jamie, and Dan are 'futurists' in an unusually practical sense and at worst they dabble a bit in Jung, spirituality-like frames of group emergence, and maybe that's gotten to be a flag of transference since Jordan Peterson's into Jung but - hard to say. The list of spiritual and Hermetic thinkers is even slimmer picking and about the best could do is say Mark is relatively conservative.

The reason I'm contesting any of this or why it matters - just saying 'Oh it's a bunch of right-wing thinkers' these days is a great way to torpedo anyone's credibility in a conversation, and it works. Thus doing so when that's not the case is sloppy and inconsiderate at best, underhanded at worst.

We can maybe try taking this back to the drawing board but it's really best that we resolve this one or if the people you're thinking of were in neither of those lists you can clarify what you meant.

Humans are more complex. Social customs vary widely. In many societies, marriages are traditionally arranged, so "blatantly chasing the female and showing off" would be simply irrelevant.

In modern Western society, people are freer to love whom they will, but expectations have changed noticeably within my lifetime. In particular, when I was growing up, heterosexual men didn't worry about their appearance much at all beyond basic grooming; only women (and gay men) worried about their appearance. That has changed only within the past 10 to 20 years, as far as I can tell.

One thing, alas, has not changed: The man is still expected to be the one to take the initiative. This is fine for extroverted guys, but puts introverted guys at a huge disadvantage, and is also, in my opinion, an onerous restriction on the freedom of women. Personally I've always resented the idea that I'm not allowed to take the initiative.

When I was little, my mother justified this custom on the grounds that men were expected to support their wives financially; hence, in marriage, the man was the one doing the bigger favor; hence it was appropriate that the man the be one to take the initiative in all possible steps toward marriage. But surely that idea is out-of-date in a world where women as well as men are now expected to earn money?

Alas, as far as I can tell, the expectation that the man must be the one and only one to take the initiative isn't just something that most women expect; it is reinforced to a large degree by men -- even introverted men. Many men, even many introverted men, apparently are turned off by, or even feel threatened by, a woman taking an active interest in them, and/or they regard such a woman as "slu*ty."

We need SOMEONE to create an organized subculture of women who don't mind (or who actually like) taking the initiative and men who don't mind women taking the initiative.

Anyhow, my current relationship did not arise from any standard dating ritual. It started as a business relationship, then it evolved into a friendship, then we became roommates due to him having to leave home due to a sudden crisis at home, then our relationship took a spontaneous erotic turn several months later, then gradually evolved into a longterm committed relationship.

I found them in posts of yours earlier in this thread than the ones you quoted just now. The first bunch of people you mentioned in this thread, before you subsequently added others, included:

Thinking-Ape:
Various misogynistic and anti-feminist "manosphere" stuff, including at least one video in which he advises men to "just not listen" to women.

Wandering Wojak:
Various misogynistic and anti-feminist stuff, including some claims I'll discuss later, below.

Coyote of Cognitive Dissonance:
An economic libertarian and climate change denier. (I don't find anything about his social views offhand.)

Monday Blue:
Generally right wing on various issues and identifies himself as "conservative," though critical of capitalism on the grounds that it weakens community ties.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 18 Sep 2019, 11:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

TY, that's the clarification I was hoping for.

So the thing I'd say about these guys that makes their stuff worth picking through, at least for me, is that they're straining at the walls of obversations on a lot of sociology topics and particular trying to sort out where there are either evolutionary, economic, or other 'walls' that cause limitations within human social mobility, human ability to relate, Wandering Wojak often brings up the issue of his having been badly cloistered as a kid as something that caused his development to have historical gaps that couldn't make up. He looks at social skills as a category that people have blown completely out of accuracy, which I'd agree with, I've often heard him split this out almost like immediate conversation skills vs. something like coalition and social-capital building (and while they do overlap there's a lot that goes into the later that can't be made up in totality by the former), and Wojak talks about the amplifying pernicious effects that increased numbers of setbacks have on a person't capability to be relatable or socially/economically succeed. As far as Coyote I think what I really appreciated was his ability to hone in on a lot of the malefic effects of various kinds of emergent patterns like intelligence pooling into vary small areas (like Silicon Valley) and causing such variances in the human race that the class divide could escalate to the point of a place like - say - the US, turning into alternating patches of 1st and 3rd world - I don't think that's entirely an unfair estimation of what something like a neo-feudalism could look like and it would probably come with much worse human rights. I remember Charles Murray (another guy who tends to get tarred for some of his work like The Bell Curve) was concerned enough about that problem that he actually decided to move to an old industrial area, something like western Maryland if I remember correctly, to live with working class people and try to gain a proper understanding of just how much disconnect is getting created. Monday Blue is really good for being the odd-one-out smart guy who observed a lot of strange emergent patterns in the culture around him, culture seeming to decay in terms of social capital (he's big on Putnam), and talks about social ghettoes (ie. small closed social networks that tend to remain stagnant) as well as the concern that the more affluent suburbs are going to be essentially better looking, more affluent versions of trailer park life and that while these suburban ghettos would have plenty of Chipotle, Starbucks, tech gadgets, and all the other nice stuff that decorates upper middle-class life that it would be socially impovrished and dysfunctional in most other respect, especially with concern for such an environment to turn out well-adjusted adults, or really the concern of the inability.

I don't know if the above helps explain my interest in them, and it could be that if these guys might in some way sort of sit in something like loosely center-right libertarian out to all out libertarian (perhaps with the exception of Coyote) but it could be that they have a specific bucket of issues they concern themselves with and it's something I hear discussed more by them and in more nuance by them than I find in a lot of places - hence when they are getting into the weeds on something interesting it tends to be worth the listen.

I might add as well - I was listening to Stefan Molyneux a bit for a year or two because I did like some of his rips into ancient history, systems and problems with current systems, he'd bring nuances of recent news that hadn't hit my radar to the front burner, I think he lost me though when he finally got to the topic of anarcho-capitalism and proved that people weren't just pejoritizing his stance as that but he was even debating a guest (Styxhexenhammer666) who's a minarchist that minarchy is too much, and at that I'd ask Stefan how that (anarcho-capitalism) is different from any other anarchy - ie. a power vacuum with about a maximum of 5 minutes of stability if it's anything larger than a commune of 20 or 30 very like-minded individuals and such a bubble could only happen in an expansive and rights-protecting environment such a republican democracy or liberal democracy where such an experiment isn't overstepping the lines of the law - without such a peacekeeper there is no law.

As for the manosphere stuff - I think the MGTOW stuff mostly deals with some combination of coping with alienation, seeing whats happening between and within the sexes that's making things go south, and I'm maybe going to say something here that could sound a bit explosive or too flirtatious toward equivocation but I think this is a big factor that needs to be considered - in both feminist circles and MRA or manosphere circles the problem tends to be mirror-image and perspectival. The feminist sphere for example tends to come up of either women talking about secondary and tertiary layers of depth into the female experience and often how their interactions with men and male social structures has ill-impacted them, they'll have a wealth of depth on their lived experience since they're immersed in it every moment of every day but it's equally true that they've never been men or if they have (MtF) they're still not coming from the same headspace as women who've always been women - that may make what they have to say about men seem pedestrian or difficult to listen to in it's resonance from someone whose been male from birth but I can't deny that their depiction of the female experience is worth listening to because it'll be incredibly esoteric understanding that they're imparting as far as those secondary and tertiary containers that they live in. I'm going to say a nearly identical thing happens with the more thoughtful portions of the manosphere - they're speaking secondary and tertiary layers of an authentic lived experience, the inconsistencies and oddities they're seeing in the world, and I think this is maybe where they may get into a lot of trouble - aside from showing an equally pedestrian interpretation of the female experience that women can't relate to they also seem to be making a lot of suggestions that they're oppressed as well - pretty much by the state of nature, and one of the concerns is that a lot of gender, race, and preference status inequality could be much narrower in certain senses and much of what a lot of activists are feeling (outside of quantifiable things like economic differences or overt discrimination in various places) is just how difficult life is for everyone in one way or another.


That was a much longer response than I thought I was going to give, some apologies for that. I think the point maybe is this - I'm doing my best to look at everything both politically acceptable and edgy, because I want to tease out where polite society might be burying critical things that are true as a coping mechanism and where more controversial thinkers on the left and right may have touchstones in that buried layer but also avoiding the excesses they may go to where they overinflate it. If I do catch someone skewing their observations for an ideology I generally tend to tune out relatively quickly because the honesty to crap ratio goes far enough in the crap direction that I won't feel like I'm learning enough once I pick through it to be worth the time invested to listen.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 18 Sep 2019, 11:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.

To bring this thread back onto a subject more on-topic:

The Wandering Wojak made a video titled "Dating and Attractiveness" citing various studies of dating behavior.

The studies he gives the most credibility to are ones in which the subjects participated in "speed dating" or "simulated speed dating." Supposedly, such studies demonstrate what people actually prefer, as opposed to what they say they prefer in studies based on self-reports.

In the "simulated speed dating" studies, it turned out that, for both men and women, physical attractiveness was overwhelmingly the main factor determining how well-liked one person was by the other. On the other hand, in the self-report studies, women put a lot of emphasis on personality factors such as sense of humor.

From this, The Wandering Wojak concludes that the women in the self-report studies were either lying or lacking in self-awareness.

I would conclude, on the other hand, that speed dating intrinsically encourages superficiality. It's just not possible (even for NTs) to learn very much about another person's personality or character, at least not on any deep level, in only five minutes.

Alas, we live in a society that encourages people to make snap judgments based on first impressions. We need to find ways to discourage this tendency, in my opinion.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 19 Sep 2019, 12:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

That's a good counter-observation and it's worth considering.


That also seems to be an emergent thing and it seems to have something to do with what having everything technologically at our fingertips seems to do to us, ie. turn us to optimizing machines on expedience without much consideration to other factors because the expedience is immediately evidenced and hence it gets addictive.

We may have to figure out, when the qualities of life that expedience tramples get too lacking, how we'll back out a space for those values to be part of the structure. That may have to happen further into the tech-rush or at the end of it when it seems like it's momentarily run out of steam for a while.

I just now noticed that "Monday Blue" has another, separate YouTube channel, "Monday FA Monday," which includes an interesting video titled How An Incel Is Created / How A F.A. Is Created. His analysis (in that video) regarding the social networks of young people makes sense to me -- MUCH more sense than the "it's all about looks" hypothesis. "Monday" himself is actually fairly good-looking, in my opinion.

One lesson I would draw from this video is that male-dominated cliques (e.g. "nerds") need to try to find female-dominated cliques with whom they have some overlapping interests and try to have joint social events around those overlapping interests.

I think the problem is not "expedience" per se, but rather a mass market mentality. In the case of dating, today's dating apps have led to an intensification of what I call the mass mutual slave market mentality, in which people both commodify themselves and treat prospective romantic partners as commodities.

Small, insular religious subcultures do not have this problem to anywhere near the degree that mainstream modern culture has it. At the other extreme, the more sexually liberated subcultures don't have this problem to anywhere near such a degree either, or at least they didn't back in the 1980's and 1990's when I was involved.

So I think the solution to the mass mutual slave market mentality is for a wide variety of well-organized subcultures to arise and provide their members with numerous mutual benefits including better, less dehumanizing ways of finding life partners.

I think the main problem with modern dating is that love & relationships are treated & validated according to business & economic models. When people date they expect to optimize their time usage, and they feel they need to "get something out of it", so they write long lists of requirements. People even think that transactional models for love are appropriate.

Indeed. All the softness and sentimentality seems to have left our global culture. I hate it.

Whatever would beat the slave market would need to defeat it on its own terms. Sometimes I think society needs to make a mistake for a whole generation or two before it learns sufficiently to change. If what I've learned (not even dating but just human boundaries of perception) online from watching a great many NT's is that agency in a lot of areas seems throttled, a bit like the story of the beetles in Australia that have females that are bright, shiny, and green, and they're dwindling on extinction because the males are attaching themselves to discarded beer bottles instead of females, I could maybe add moth self-immolation to this as well on a different axis, you end up with a similar homogenaity of response in humans - and seeing it can be downright frightening because you realize on just how many domains simple tricks from outside to our wiring can hijack whatever sense-making that our instincts possessed. It's like in seeing certain behavior I have to remind myself 'Ah, that's one of those axes where humans are like beetles'.

What's worse - in this sort of global model it's a bit like it's an international 'all against all' where the dynamics of the market would suggest that only the most novel, creative, and outlying 5 or 10% are really needed and the rest can go discover fentanyl.

This is where I think talk of Adam Smith or 'unseen hand' fails, what you get is emergence and emergence only seems to work when you have an acceptable tension between something like a couple opposing systems that enforce things that we need that are on their own mutually exclusive (like institutions holding authority in spirituality and human value on one hand, markets for optimizing quantity and quality on the other), without tensions like that you end up with emergence that simply maps to current lines of force in culture and when that's increasingly just globalist neoliberalism then most of what emerges will be a slide toward brass-tacks economizing of everything down to the value of human life if we let it go that far.

Not necessarily. It just needs to bring people together in a more organic kind of way. The problem is finding ways to create, and encourage people to join, groups that do the latter.

I think the most fundamental problem, especially here in the modern West, is that most people in today's world have simply forgotten the value of community. They still have tribal instincts that are aroused by the mention of a common enemy, or by watching a sports event if they happen to be into spectator sports. Alas, their tribal instincts don't translate into anything like a real sense of community among the people they do like, but only a desire to exclude and banish the people they don't like.

These days many corporations try to create a sense of team-based camaraderie among their workers, and do so in a way that may work well for most NT's (but not for autistic people, making it even harder for autistic people to fit in with corporate culture). Even for those who do manage to fit in, a corporation is not a real community, especially if the business isn't unionized (as most aren't, at least here in the U.S.A.). People forming romantic relationships at work is something that happens but is generally discouraged and considered extremely risky.

The idea of joining any other kind of group just doesn't occur to most people in our hyper-individualistic, atomized world. To anyone who suggests this, the response is likely to be, "I'm not a joiner!" (The one major exception, besides hyper-religious people and members of sexual revolutionary subcultures as mentioned earlier, is local business owners, who will join various groups for business-networking purposes.)

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 19 Sep 2019, 9:33 am, edited 1 time in total.