The commonality dilemma

Post Reply New Topic

What I meant was people won't just do something because they're told by thoughtful people that it's the better way to do it. They'll do it if they see that other system getting bigger, and that's especially true with something like a dating regimen built on more thorough attempts at trying to match people - the number of people interested in that needs to be enough for people to want to join, which is a bit of a catch 22 already because people won't join unless there's people there, etc.. Also the evidence that people who live in the center of the bell-curve in terms of personality would care for something like that enough to boost its numbers or make it profitable is another concern.

I don't think a competing platform could quite be enough to do this, or at least to the degree to which EHarmony and other sites with long questionnaires should have solved this problem we have to figure out what they missed, what element of their design caused that attempt at better matching to not create a much more viable, enjoyable route with better results and appeal than Tinder and sights like it. My pessimistic instinct on this would suggest that unless you're an outsider Tinder's great for your purposes (in which case partners sort of are a vanilla/generic commodity) and if it's not broke, for who you are at a given level of depth at least, why fix it. IMHO if Tinder wasn't just what enough people wanted it wouldn't have been competitive.

It's not that we shouldn't try to find solutions to this or at least for the long-tail audience of odd-bods, atypical NT's, ND's, etc. but we can't assume that what fits us is what fits other people or what we'd want is what other people would want, otherwise we start making significant mistakes and wasting a lot of effort (and motivation) on finding out where we over-extrapolated ourselves on the rest of society.

Even EHarmony is still a mass mutual slave market, just a more sophisticated one, and more oriented towards helping people find relationships rather than just sex. I would still expect even most normal folks to find the whole process very stressful and dehumanizing, but they just don't have any better way.


It's competitive because there's nothing better, not necessarily because it's anywhere near ideal for anyone.


Agreed that we should seek solutions just for our own natural odd-bod communities. If our solutions work well for us, we can then publicize them to the larger world, and then other people might be inspired to adopt similar-though-not-identical solutions that work better for other people.

It's mostly a good thing that these tribal instincts of NTs have been suppressed and redirected to team-sports and similar activities.



I really hate that kind of thing. I'm going to such an event tomorrow, but I'm cool about it and won't stay for the partying & drinking part of it.

No - that is a fantasy.

The next time you go to the mall - look around you - most women are dating/married to fat, ugly guys.

Most people who blindly believe everything that scientists say push the fantasy that women compete for attractive, successful men - they don't.

Most women demonstrably are actually masochistic and could care less if a guy is attractive or even successful.

It is true men compete for attractive women - but the opposite is not true.

Also, attractive prestigious men don't do barbaric things to women that the women themselves do not want.

The real dilemma is that 95% of people out there NT and AS are being brainwashed by fallible-scientists to believe things that easily demonstrated to not be true.

That is where all the confusion stems from.

I've never met a woman who wants "barbaric" things done to them in real life.

This is interesting but this is sort of rearranging cause and effect. I saw this a lot in my area, a sharp social caste system mostly on socioeconomic status but also looks, athletic prowess, as far as aggression or power how many demons you can claim have on a leash without losing to them, and I watch male and female dating for the most part ride that with a good deal better than 50% accuracy, closer to 70 or 80%. As far as heavy-set guys most of the ones I know who are in relationships are with women who look quite a bit like themselves and the rest for the most part are single. If I read an article on sexual economic theory and it didn't match my observations at all across a lot of social settings and across a lot of other guys I've known who were to varying degrees similar to each other and with similar outcomes (trying to weed myself out as a stakeholder because I know that can skew things) or barely matched my observations I'd probably myself be thinking it was half-baked. Most of the consistency I've seen it it has been accidental, has kind of cropped up in places I wasn't expressly looking for it, etc.

I have noticed some variants like very attractive guys dating geeky girls, same vice a verse, I've seen very alpha women go for more feminine guys, I've seen uber wimps do well as long as they were really prissy and judgmental, there seems to be some area for novelty but over all the main thrust seems to suggest that people are looking for financially stable significant others (guys maybe slightly less that than looks but the more equal the economy gets the less they feel like they can 'float' another person on their paycheck unless they're really doing that well), an upper middle class girl's parents are going to care a lot about what the guy does and she's often mindful of that, and there's probably a lot more I could get into about how much people care about what their friends think of them, of who they'd date, of what effect their partner would have on their social status or with their family, etc.

Variance from totalizing social conformity seems like it happens when people have had an atypical or disruptive experience of some kind and without that happening they're lined up for top 40 music (ie. music only as clothing or social currency and not music for it's own sake), tightly following what's on TV, which sports team is beating which, and most of the rest of the conversation is about guns, cars, grills, comparing golf games, where you like to shop, etc.

I'm sure there could be some nuances that are getting underrepresented in what I mentioned above but I really doubt the pattern is whole-cloth fiction, it could just be significantly worse in the places I end up and it could be that there are places in the US where you see a bit less of it. I'm willing to concede some of that but to concede all of that really requires a couple things: one, is the request for concession based on how people actually treat each other? Is it based on some alternate interpretation of evolutionary psychology considering the averages of social emergence in a much more complex way (ie. if sexual economic theory is something like a Communism-level oversimplification) or is it rooted in something like an Annunaki creation mythos?

It seems credible that the stresses or pressures in some places could downplay this and a person in one city could say 'Yes! That's exactly it!' and another 'Meh... I see a little bit of it maybe but not enough to call it everything?', but calling it fantasy or whole-cloth fiction seems like a very different level of commitment.

Indeed. My younger brother is also athletic, is in the medical field, and has a child with his wife who chose him over the hip-hop thugs and rednecks. He never hurts her and he is certainly not “fat and ugly” so to suggest that he is I find very insulting.

I am always going to trust credible scientists over people who use unfounded extrapolation. Unfounded and irrational thoughts lead to horrible things like this: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressi ... 7LfKvhKx9U

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressi ... H9S9zZG-4A

Sorry if I would rather listen to scientists instead of warped people who try to justify raping young children and destroying property that they think comes from “devil worship”.

Secularism is going to win:

I disagree with the premise that you need common interests to form a relationship. If this was true, far fewer couples would be created than we see today. Interests can always be discovered and grown over time. What matters are compatible personalities, and that is where people on the spectrum can run into a lot of trouble.

As a man with Aspergers, I tend to prefer a style that is very direct and to the point. I expect logical cohesion in both the writing and verbal communication of others; every point must be clearly justified and explained. This makes me, contrary to stereotypes, effective in a professional setting, as I can explain specialist topics (like how to compose a piano sonata, or the process of fermentation) to the wider public. But it also means I have very little patience for conversations that are not directed towards some end.

This can be a fatal flaw in social situations, because what I've found is that most people are more interested in talking about what they are doing and who they know (or worse still, have done/were with in the past) than why they are doing it/associating with X or how you can do it, which is more inclusive and open to exploration, and thus provides much more useful information to fuel my curiosity.

So this is the irony of the situation, it's being able to deal with their intolerance of someone being 'different', in any way good or bad. Agreed that you don't need to have all of your common interests line up in a row but you have to be with someone who'd at least respect you and respect them as similarly you'd probably prefer to be with someone whose interests you could respect (ie. real hobbies and interests rather than keeping up with the Kardashians or whatever else). In my 20's I thought this was perfectly reasonable, I've since learned it's quite a tall order not only considering what most people are but the confines of their cognitive and perceptual limitations and how all of that seems to work.

Life's pretty much been an inward journey for me, seeing a lot of the bickering reminds me of why I've tended to put my efforts into truing things up where I knew I could do something - ie. internally, rather than trying to straighten out the social and political world. You can try making sense, hope that much is contagious, and I'd admit I'm far from perfect - seems like every five years of my life or so has plenty of new insight that I lacked before and I have no reason to doubt that I'll say the same thing in another ten, twenty, etc. years.

I think where I learn the most though is when ideas I'm chewing on get hit from some new angle and when I realize that a model I was holding was missing a range of octaves or scales and I'd consider everything that's consequential to be in the domain of the 'real' at least in a derivative sense if not direct. I don't think the point of bringing these up is any hopes to sow division, rather I think we just set ourselves up for failure if we don't bring the right tools for the job, have the job sized right, etc.. If anyone says this stuff is 'simple' I think they're still gliding on the graces of their own subconscious calculations, the luck of good circumstances, and they haven't seen what's its like when you have a social structure fail and you have then pick up the pieces that are in front of you rather than inheriting something from your elders, friends, etc. that's functional.

We need a fire extinguisher emoji.

^ thanks , I used it

Thank you. Hopefully that will make her leave me alone.

Another case of irrational thinking causing harm (In this case, death) when science would’ve prevented it.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressi ... n2QXgoBxdI