Pods and Ends

Round up of podcast appearances and reflections on previous posts.

Second Person is celebrating seven weeks, ten published posts, and three podcasts I was invited on to talk about why dating sucks and how to unsuck it. This auspicious occasion calls for a roundup episode — some quick reflections and addenda on all the content so far and a teaser for what’s ahead.

Podcasts

The links below are to the video versions, but I don’t think you’ll be missing anything by looking for the audio version. If you wanted to know what I look like at 720p from an awkwardly high camera angle, here it is courtesy of Serene Desiree:

The podcasts covered similar ground to some extent, but each had a very distinct vibe.

Serene Desiree Podcast / How to Attract Women Without Playing Games

The most bombastic title card and most fun banter on everything from cane toads to crotch goblins. Aside from dating, we talked a lot about communities and places I come from: Israel, LessWrong, Twitter, New York City. This was the most personal of all the podcasts I’ve done so far.

Hope Axis / Dating, Fertility, Polyamory

This is very much the Anna Gát show; I was mostly along for the ride. We do eventually get to dating, mostly discussing topics I’ve written about on Putanumonit like why rationalists are polyamorous and why women are hot. Our pace of speaking and interrupting each accelerates as the podcast moves along, but that’s just how eastern Jews bond.

Moral Mayhem / Dating and Discourse

Regan and Vaish did a lot of prep for this episode as we sent each other dozens of notes and suggestions. This is the most in-depth discussion of the themes Second Person is about, including many topics I haven’t gotten to yet in writing. It felt the most like thinking out loud together, as opposed to rehashing ideas I’ve written about before.

Posts

Welcome to the Second Person

Most Substacks you’ll read jump to random topics, as did Putanumonit. But Second Person is a book. We’re in the middle of just the second chapter out of more than a dozen, each chapter comprising several posts that explore a topic from different angles before moving on.

This is somewhat confusing for new readers, so I want to create a new pinned post with the table of contents and FAQ for new readers. New readers: send me questions!

Not a Dating Cookbook

In a comment on the Moral Mayhem episode, Wesley complains that I don’t give advice and that “gurus” like me drive men who want straight answers to pickup artistry. This comment made me feel much better about spending an entire chapter explaining why dating gurus are fake and the search for general advice in the form of simple instructions is pointless.

Wesley suggests I tell readers to “just ask people out”. Is that useful advice?

It’s certainly useful advice to follow. Asking people out is indeed the surest way to get them on a date with you. If you’re single, you’re almost certainly not asking enough people out.

But it’s not very useful advice for me to give. The reason you’re not “just asking people out” isn’t because you’ve literally never read this advice on your screen. Perhaps you’re not sure whom to ask out, or how. Perhaps you have deep-seated aversions, born of imagined fears or of real experience. Each person’s path to “just asking people out” is all their own.

I hope Second Person leads you to a place where you won’t need facile reminders like “just ask people out”. But that’s going to require more work than just telling you to.

Writing that Changes

From The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young, a major inspiration for both my life and my writing:

When we describe spirituality as a path, it immediately sets up all kinds of craving, aversion, confusion, and unhelpful comparisons. People wish they were at some other place on the path, and they struggle to get there. When we think about spirituality as a path, we create the idea of enlightenment as an object out there in the future, separate from ourselves.

As teachers, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. If we describe a path to enlightenment, it leads to the aforementioned problems. If we fail to describe a path, people won’t have motivation or direction, and they won’t be sensitive to benchmarks. They won’t know how to make optimal use of signs of progress. They won’t know how to recognize windows of opportunity.

Thus, to teach about enlightenment is to mislead people. On the other hand, to fail to teach about enlightenment is also to mislead people.

Love is Love, Science is Fake

I put together a talk on social science denialism which has proved quite controversial. People insist that there must be some value in psychology research, to which I suually give Adam Mastroianni’s retort: people don’t feel the need to unlearn anything when entire chunks of psychology are retracted for fraud. So what did it ever teach them?

A response I got a few times is that while social science doesn’t teach you many load-bearing facts, it raises good questions and serves as inspiration to look closely at our own beliefs and behavior. I agree completely. But: so does fiction!

Fiction has its place, but it’s not science. Importantly, we haven’t been conditioned to look for a particularly inspiring movie when faced with a personal problem like we’ve been taught to seek academic answers. I’m happy to treat social science mostly as an exercise in creative writing. Some of it is quite creative indeed!

Review How to Not Die Alone

I concluded the review by suggesting that the best antidote to insecurity is noob mindset, treating each setback as an opportunity to learn and improve. Ironically, I think that this comes harder for women.

Young men get frustrated and rejected a lot; they know exactly how low their dating skill level is. Young women always have more interest and more opportunity to get into relationships if they want them. They may think that they have dating figured out.

But usually they don’t. As time passes, they start to look for different relationships with different men who have different expectations of them. These require new skills and habits. And most of all: the wisdom to know how much you have to learn.

Discourse Against Dating

I wrote about how silly Tolstoy’s maxim is about the similarity of happy families. On the pod with Regan and Vaish, we discussed another aspect of it: abnormally unhappy families are much more visible than unusually happy ones.

There are many couples, from acquaintances to celebrities, that you would know if they divorced or had a scandal. Absent a crisis, you can’t really tell if they’re just barely getting along enough or are madly in love. Aside from family members and close friends, it’s hard to tell an ok marriage from a truly great one. From anecdotal experiences, people in great relationships cluster together: you either know several such couples and don’t find them remarkable, or you don’t actually know if they exist outside of fairy tales. Even if you think you know: are you sure that what you know is as good as it can get?

And so, part of the negativity bias in dating discourse is simply that the very positive tail is missing from it.

Opposite and Equal

A common dating grievance for both sexes is the impossibly contradictory expectations everyone feels subject to.

Men want a girl who’s great in bed but also can’t deal with her promiscuous past. They want a mommy gf but are intimidated by competent, successful women. Women complain that men never make a move and also that they’re constantly approached by creeps, that men can’t handle their feelings and also are too closed off and unemotional, that they can’t provide and also that men focus on their jobs to the point of marital neglect.

But of course, these aren’t the same men and women who complain about each thing, and not the same men and women who merit the complaints. Some guys think your sexual past is kinda hot. Some women don’t mind that you’re at work all day. And some people can perfectly navigate the golden mean — but you don’t have to. You just have to find your own market.

Markets in Dating

Serene Desiree:

I know a really successful woman, 30, a doctor, she’s been on one date that year. She wanted a partner. And it was a difficult situation because it seems that women want to date across and up in terms of intelligence or career success. And if you’re a 140 IQ woman it’s hard to find a 140 IQ man. It’s significantly less than one in a hundred, right?

If you’re playing a lottery (e.g., Tinder), then 1/100 are lousy odds. If you’re playing a market, that number is completely irrelevant.

The slightly more relevant number is the ratio of 140 IQ men to women these men are interested in. They might be a bit more flexible than Serene’s doctor friend, but most of them are also looking for highly intelligent — and equally rare — women.

More importantly, it’s incredibly easy for any 140 IQ woman to walk into a supremely advantageous dating market. It’s not hard to find mostly-male communities that filter hard on IQ. Join a chess club, crash a STEM conference, attend a lecture series, get drinks with your friends at the bar across from your local tech company or quant hedge fund. My friend’s parents literally met at MENSA.

That 140 IQ men are rare means that filtering for IQ has to be your first step. Then, you can select among the whizzes for whoever looks cute and flirtable. But if you’re browsing through the general population and hoping to luck into a genius — maybe you’re not so smart yourself.

Black Ops 4B

lol.