The thal cognitive style is best described as a massive, interdependent system of hypotheticals. It is nonverbal and not strictly logical, because every sense impression and memory is assigned a probability when it is stored. It’s the summation of these probabilities that produces convictions and action. So let’s say I see a herd of bison going West, and I believe my eyes and figure it’s not a dream (99%). Last year, I saw the same thing and the herd eventually ended up at a particular lake three days later, so I infer that they will do so again (80%). I figure I can convince some buddies of this (85%) and we’ll have a high chance of success spending calories on a trek to earn a surplus of calories, with relatively few injuries or deaths. All of these probabilities get plugged into a heavily approximated risk/reward calculation.
Having determined that the cost of asking my buddies is basically nil, my brain produces the conviction to do so, which produces the action. This isn’t just a thal thing, obviously everybody who has any gray matter does this (otherwise they would be relentlessly obtuse, spergy narcissists…hmm…). The real difference is in scale- quantity has a quality all its own, along with some interesting emergent effects. When it comes to gray matter, it’s the volume that counts, not the cortical folding.
These hypotheticals are analogous to puzzle pieces, and sorting them into a holistic interpretive framework is a lot like the process of putting together a puzzle. It is primarily a task of perceiving, interpreting, hypothesizing, and back to perceiving again, with bursts of highly constructive activity. The outward appearance seems to be short periods of dithering (sorting into colors, perceiving individual pieces) and paralysis (endogenous pattern-perception) interspersed with frenzies of activity when a big chunk of the puzzle gets knocked out all of a sudden, because an overall pattern was perceived (“looks like I have all the pieces for the dog in the corner here…”).
The base state of dithering/perceiving looks like the ADHD brain scan characteristic of the ENTP personality. The eureka moments (all red) precede the bursts of activity, which are experienced as high-focus flow states (all blue, some small yellow eureka moments along the way). Generally, the all-blue input state which typifies melonhead observation is not experienced during this sort of task.
The moment of initial fascination is also notable, but it is something of a mystery to me. This is analogous to the moment of opening the box of a new puzzle, and getting excited by seeing all of the exciting, colorful pieces. It is like when we stumble across a new idea and beginning the process of red pilling. A problem naturally arises when we open too many new boxes without finishing any of the puzzles- hence the mythical tinkerer’s workshop full of unfinished projects and open work tickets. Thal-backs have to practice an information diet, although I have no idea what that entails yet. I have a method for finding out which is easily derived from the intuitive diet experimentation model:
I don’t have nutrition specifications. I’ve previously described it as “shotgun” experimentation, which is to say I try stuff and then see what feels good and what sticks.
1) What feels good- this refers to the feelings that follow after eating, rather than the feelings during eating, which can be deceptive.
2) What sticks- some foods you want to keep eating (complex carbs, particularly), some you don’t.If a food makes me feel good AND sticks, it goes into the basic diet until I start feeling sick of it. 1 lb of beef stayed on much longer than I would have expected, but I eventually backed off to 1/2 lb. So for whatever reason, that really, really helped me out.
I allow for the peripheral satisfaction of some cravings, but not all cravings, because eating nothing is better than eating poison. So once a week or so I’ll eat something out of the ordinary just because I feel like it.
Aeoli Pera 
Right. Quantity of the mental movies one can string together (seeing is believed, see bigger and you get bigger results) + quality of detail granularity (to test whether the movies actually fit together).
Failure modes:
Seeing things that are just not there because of ego and wanting to believe (example: conspiracy theorists).
Failing to chunk down details to low enough level, taking concepts on faith that should be unpacked more (example: Thal who falls who collects lifehacks but never does them).
Antidote:
-get laid and paid so ego needs quietens down, build self-identity as humble seeker, self-identify as a time-traveller (someone who is just visiting 2015, not meshed into sociosexual matrix)
-always be problem-solving, expend the mental energy to unpack things, and test relentlessly
Thal kids do this very well. Hence why they love science fiction. Big vistas unpacked.
Random book tip: http://www.amazon.com/Face-Reading-Chinese-Medicine-2e/dp/0702043141
Haven’t finished it but seems promising.
Two insights:
1) Mental pay-grade is determined by the level of problems at which one “settles” in life. Eleanor Roosevelt’s quip about simple people talking of people, mediocre people of events, advanced people of ideas. Lifestyle design activities like starting a business are the high end of “events” grade problems. Pick-up keeps a lot of smart people on the cusp of doing more interesting things.
2) People with low Discernment see logical thinking as a way to put essentialist labels on things, and hence don’t really trust logical thinking. To call someone a man is fine for the sake of everyday life to them, but what is a man really? There is no truth, yaknow. For someone with high Discernment, logical categories are mostly just a way to spell out how their mind chunks reality. A man is obviously what we commonly think of the word as meaning, because that’s what we were thinking of. If there is enough variation, the mind will chunk it differently, and come up with a new word. Discernment is a clustering engine that outputs words.
Thoughts?
3) A person’s biggest unsolved problems become mysteries/windmills/gods-of-the-mind to them, and they do not progress any more in lieu of drugs or other major intervention. Hence why guys pedestalize women, or fight a futile battle against the same drive in the pick-up community. If they were to approach it like a melon or crom, they would be disgusted and soon move on from the problem (or see it as a more mundane matter – akin to grocery-shopping). Don’t pedestalize the pussy, son.
s/in lieu of/short of/
4) The “simple solution” to Game, as I’ve arrived at it:
1. Women are generally the “inferior” sex. They are less logical, more easily duped, they go more by how things feel and how they look on the surface. They don’t desire consistency to the same degree, or at least they have an easier time compartmentalizing. Seduction used to be a bad thing for these reasons, today it’s (wrongly) assumed that women can handle such pressure.
2. Women like sex but will not admit so in polite society. Buying into this: feel creepy for wanting sex with asexual woman.
3. Women crave attention, but from non-sexual males it becomes a source of ego validation. Kind of like how a man might like having yes-men around. From sexual prospects it becomes invigorating – “I am on his level”. Notice complete flip-flopping of emotional response based on who is giving a compliment.
4. Women are impressed by looks, alphaness, capability, popularity. These things can be improved. Most important things for sigmas are looks and alphaness. Alphaness comes down to grokking that You Are In Charge Of Things, ie not mentally adding a question-mark to every thought you think. Sharp and dull minds can arrive at this, the Clueless are in trouble.
5. Getting women will always be messy. There will always be rejections, craziness, and drama. Game is a weird thing, and it doesn’t really work that reliably.
6. Validation-seeking is caused by not being horny enough for the women. Be horny, see women for what they are. Seek validation, be confused.
7. Women’s “shit-tests” are caused by 2 things: 1) her being confused about reality and needing someone to clear it up 2) checking if you are confused about reality. Notice how a man who sticks to reality and mercilessly mocks the woman for her folly usually gets the girls. Women find it REALLY cool when you get them to laugh at themselves. This requires internalizing point 1, of course. Shit tests should properly be called “reality requests”.
Someone who fails to get all of these is at risk for descending into the PUA rabbithole, burning productive years on a silly problem of the “people” grade of difficulty. You’ll notice that for each of these, it’s the Clueless midwits who struggle. There’s your market for PUA products, incidentally. People like Good Looking Loser are Sociopaths in that regard (he chooses to peddle penis pumps instead, which is more honest).
The Mystery method really had it down:
Attraction: demonstrate you see through her act. Get her to qualify herself to you. Show interest once you ping at the same level.
Comfort: stop bantering, become a team, share some secrets.
Seduction: express non-judgementalism toward her secret sex life.
It’s really a micro-cosm of r-selection: impress her, romance her, seduce her.
And of course, any melon would say “yeah, that’s obvious”.
Mystery Method may go down in history as one of the great books (for men :-P). It is like the advent of lifting weights for fitness- once you have the basic ideas, it is 50% consistency and 45% being not-retarded about it. Thards who pursue it have to expect more pain per gain for that reason, but I would flatter us by saying we are also tougher.
My points about pick-up summarized as:
1) Go with your gut if it tells you she is a damfool. Assume there is no depth to her tricks.
2) Get your brain to understand that women like sex. Maybe this is experiential-only for Thals.
3) Attention done in the right way is an aphrodisiac. Heartiste’s “aloofness” is a subset or cousin of this, which aspies do not grasp.
4) Work on those things. Taking charge of life will lead to good effects. (But don’t go full Clueless and create your own lifestyle design religion).
5) Assume it will be messy.
6) Be horny. See validation-seeking for the Cluelessness it is.
7) Always stick to reality. This is better than “keep your frame”, which is always subjective anyway. Her frame: “me semideity, you loser”. Heartiste frame: “me narcissist, you loser”. Reality: “me Tarzan, you Jane”.
If you fail at any of these, you will spend much more time on this “problem” than is required.
>1) Go with your gut if it tells you she is a damfool. Assume there is no depth to her tricks.
I’d modify the latter to “assume everything she says is exactly one step removed from what she’s talking about”, like a joke. I bet learning to suss out the truth contained in a joke is good training for learning to interpret womanese.
>2) Get your brain to understand that women like sex. Maybe this is experiential-only for Thals.
Would love to run a poll on this, but many are virgins.
>3) Attention done in the right way is an aphrodisiac. Heartiste’s “aloofness” is a subset or cousin of this, which aspies do not grasp.
I agree that I don’t grasp it. Is it the same as the amygdala shake? https://aeolipera.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/why-confidence-works/
>4) Work on those things. Taking charge of life will lead to good effects. (But don’t go full Clueless and create your own lifestyle design religion)
Little close to home there ;-).
>5) Assume it will be messy.
Good advice in general. I’m going to cross-stitch that on a throw pillow.
>6) Be horny. See validation-seeking for the Cluelessness it is.
I think you mean something like “eyes on the prize”, yes? Because simply being horny often makes the awkwardness worse.
>7) Always stick to reality. This is better than “keep your frame”, which is always subjective anyway. Her frame: “me semideity, you loser”. Heartiste frame: “me narcissist, you loser”. Reality: “me Tarzan, you Jane”.
Oh, I like this one a lot!
Thanks for the insights. As a socially-awkward recluse this is helpful.
I had a dream where I took a girl out on a date and it felt completely natural, the awkwardness from real life wasn’t there. I’ve had dreams like that few times in the past 2 years. Brain reaching maturity late.
W.r.t. point #7, when I woke up I thought of Bladerunner. I realize I’ve always seen myself as ‘off’, like a replicant trying to convince a human that I’m human. In this analogy dominance = simulating Turing-completeness (perhaps not the most healthy way of looking at it, I realize). In the sense of thal-front emotional hardware trying to emulate mainstream social algorithms this may have deeper implications.
Anyway, after I thought of Bladerunner I considered what ‘dominance’ or ‘mastery’ would have meant to a thal. I thought, perhaps it most closely resembles the initiation rites used by primitive tribes around the world. E.g. the young man is made to confront a dangerous wild animal and kill it. This provides mastery over oneself and over nature, and therefore the confidence to pursue women through the archetype of Tarzan, master of nature.
So in that context perhaps the crom ‘eternal high school’ paradigm is a low-cost, long-duration psychosexual initiation rite.
The next question becomes, hunting megafauna is obsolete in the cosmopolis. Instead of hunting wild animals, what is the cosmopolitan male called to confront????? Yes — the apex predators of human males: Human males of other genotypes. Intraspecies predation operates through reducing the sexual and financial opportunities of other males, and increasing one’s own. “Business is war.” On a long enough timeline, the SMP is genocidal warfare, and certain genetic lines are ‘endangered species’ — take that, conservationists. (Digression: Perhaps leftist societies failed due to the inescapable need for there to be SMV differences to facilitate sexual selection.)
A lot of modern-day thal males drop out of the rat race because (1) they are genetic hybrids suffering physical flaws from non-optimal genetic recombination and (2) on a spiritual level (perhaps MTs do this more due to the M-back obsession with ideals), they refuse to buy into the bare-metal reality of male disposability, female aloyalty, and general amorality. (Crom males are simultaneously the nemesis in the initiation process and a sexual prospect for thal females if the thal male undergoing initiation turns out to be a weak loser.)
In contrast to a primeval small-tribe setting, the initiation never really ends until a male snowballs far enough ahead in SMV that he can handle being amogged and shit-tested by his competitors and female QC inspectors with ease. As an MT this is especially problematic because an MT is more likely than a TT to epigenetically express submissive, self-doubting traits when he perceives over a duration of many years that he is a sociosexual loser. The M back isn’t as stable or grounded as the T back; it wants to climb the social hierarchy and it goes through the phases of rage, hatred, and finally resignation when it fails. In esports terms this is called ‘playing on tilt’. MTs burn brighter at times and have less psychological stamina over time compared to TTs. The crom ‘eternal high school’ paradigm poses a formidable challenge to this type of neural hardware. (I am aware that I am understating MT strengths in other areas.)
MTs are hard to watch because they are probably the farthest from their desires and the least likely to achieve them, and by virtue of deepsock they think about nothing else.
Have you considered getting a dog? That might be a good prerequisite for MTs who are interested in Game.
“I had a dream where I took a girl out on a date and it felt completely natural, the awkwardness from real life wasn’t there. I’ve had dreams like that few times in the past 2 years. Brain reaching maturity late.”
I’ve had those dreams too. I’ll try to to explain what I think they are:
There´s a PUA guru called Rion Williams who talks about how Western women today are in their Social persona. They are into status and surface and they put out a vibe that (most) men are losers. (He seems a bit creepy, and his suggested remedy is staring for hours of videos of Thai women.)
He also talks about how there is a Natural persona, which is the default unconditioned state. In this state, the woman is drawn to a man just for the sake of him being a man, not because of his social rank. Here there is unconstrained magnetism and appreciation between the sexes, ie what you saw in your dream.
It’s an interesting model. It would then make sense to say that PUAs like Heartiste are in constaint pain over how these Social women deny them true validation (ie being valuable just for being who one is), and thus try to defeat them by beating them at their own Social game in lieu of truly getting what they want. But their egoic perspective just creates bitterness.
The goal IMHO is to see women as women, and stop seeing mating as such a huge problem. I honestly believe that getting that need for validation solved is an IQ-booster. Why? You have a lot less ego when you are getting laid. Ego creates knots in the web of thoughts, places you don’t want to go, which obstructs the natural flow of conclusions.
PUA is like crack to Thals, because it promises them a return to innocence framed as a giant puzzle. Cue RSD with their endless aspiecrack videos around the same topics.
>Ego creates knots in the web of thoughts, places you don’t want to go, which obstructs the natural flow of conclusions.
Whenever I hear gurus speak about the “ego” this way I wonder if it says more about the specific kind of people who end up becoming gurus than the general population.
What “girls” means to the different edeno-things:
-Thals: return to innocence, end of being a haunted ghost, find my muse so I can stop wandering
-Melons: be the cool guy, acquire playthings, extend the family line (see: Cedonulli)
-Croms: women come and go
Conclusion: “get the girls!” is a hypnotic phrase to Thal aspies.
That’s good shit dog. You are really sharp on this subject. There are a lot of TTs out there (in particular) who would be interested to hear this stuff.
I’m thinking about your suggestion to open the blog up to guest writers. This seems like a good thing.
PUA Feynmann: http://www.roberttwigger.com/journal/2010/9/16/richard-feynmans-pick-up-technique.html
This story was also in Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman.
I wonder if that collection also includes the reason why Caltech decided to settle with Mr. Papp out of court.
Probably not.
Nope, wasn’t in there, so no idea what you’re talking about without a Google search.
“But here is the central problem with Feynman’s analysis (which has many other errors of fact and logic embedded in it): There was a court action against Feynman by Papp and his backer, Don Roser of Environetics, Inc., as a result of Feynman’s inept attempt to disprove the Papp engine with his unauthorized pulling of an electric control-circuit wire that Feynman egregiously imagined had to be powering the engine. It was unfortunate for Feynman that the wire’s gauge was far too thin even had there been a secret electric motor within the retrofit Volvo engine. Furthermore, as you will read, the engine kept running even after the flimsy wire was removed. Feynman asserted that Papp most likely had deliberately planned to blow up his own engine to avoid subsequent discovery of the “fraud”! And, Feynman acknowledges that there was an out-of-court settlement with Caltech. Surely, had there ever been the slightest piece of evidence that conventional explosives blew up the Papp engine that day, Caltech would most certainly not have had to settle. Papp would soon have been charged with manslaughter, no doubt, and Feynman would surely have cited this evidence publicly. He was not one to shrink from dramatic gestures. Caltech also had the motive and the means to skewer Papp with the kind of evidence that is routinely gathered by police departments and crime labs following explosion accidents.
However, all records of the investigation into the accident appear to have vanished down some kind of a memory hole. I believe they exist somewhere, but we have not been able— yet— to obtain them. On June 29, 1998, Caltech’s very helpful Associate Archivist, Shelley Erwin, faxed me: “Well, the mysterious affair with Mr. Papp/Papf continues to remain mysterious. I have found nothing in the Feynman papers that refers to it. Nor is there any obvious reference to Mr. Papp or the lawsuit in administrative or publicity papers from the time. We do not have a clippings file for the 1960s, so that is one type of resource I did not investigate. . .I think I have done all I can here, without any useful result. We would be interested to know how your search comes out— if indeed this is a true account. I wish I knew.”
I made more recent contact with various Caltech offices, which could not provide me with any records— not even its public information office had newsclips, and efforts to locate official accident reports in California have come up dry. Some of these may have been destroyed, according to some police departments contacted. After all, this is an accident that happened thirty-five years ago. But the point is that nowhere, so far, do we have any evidence that the explosion was a result of illicit explosives. Failing such direct evidence of hoax, the proved violence of the explosions— the November 1968 and the October 1968 ones— strongly point to the reality of the Papp process. But we also have the contemporary laboratory work that establishes convincing evidence— visual and by instrumentation— that noble gases can be made to explode and achieve over-unity. Heroic work on a shoestring budget over the past few years is recounted in broad scope by researchers Mark Hugo and Blair Jenness in Minnesota (p. 51). We hope to feature their work in greater depth in future issues. Heinz Klostermann of California, whom I met two years ago, has been of great assistance in assembling some of the information that went into this issue of Infinite Energy. On p. 55, he discusses his broad knowledge of many of the groups working in the U.S. in the past and today in the effort to recover the Papp engine technology. He has begun his own independent initiative.”
http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue51/papp.html