Reference Points and Changing Worldviews

I'm being driven nuts right now about a discussion I'm having with my girlfriend about something we've already discussed and I thought was settled. It has to do with a difference in belief systems; I show her solid evidence and research from the West proving my position, she returns to hearsay, word-of-mouth, and ingrained beliefs she's getting from friends in the East who aren't actually informed on the matters at hand but have firm beliefs on them nonetheless.

She's normally a very logical, rational girl, but this specific matter is driving her uncharacteristically batty, and she's falling back to fears refuted by science but given weight by popular opinion. Understanding why this happens to otherwise sane, rational individuals is key to understanding how people's views of the world are built and maintained.

It's similar to the autism-vaccine "debate" that's going on in the States right now, or the electricity-cancer "debate." No matter how much research is done to show that there is absolutely, positively, no link whatsoever between vaccines and autism, or power stations and cancer, people continue to believe there are causal links anyway, because they've seen and heard sources that support their position.

The worst part is, it doesn't matter where those sources got their information from. It doesn't even matter if the sources outright say, "I just know it." The only thing that matters is that there are, indeed, sources that support the position.

Enter reference points: something I've mentioned at times on this blog but haven't devoted an actual post on (see "How to Get Real Girls" and "Social Status: Building It and Using It" for the latest posts that mentioned these). Reference points and reference experiences are what we use to define our belief systems, worldviews, and ideas about reality, and they're absolutely crucial to the way we see life on Planet Earth.

The thing that sucks about reference points and experiences is that someone with faulty reference points and experiences is going to have flawed, erroneous beliefs.

The thing that kicks ass about reference points and experiences, though, is that once you learn how they work, you can use them to accelerate your progress in developing your skill set. Because, once you know how reference points work, you learn how to control your own core, fundamental belief system.

In other words, you have control over your own most deeply held convictions – and thus, control over your own destiny.

Defining Reference Points and Reference Experiences

Reference points and experiences are:

• Anything that influences a belief of yours about the world and your place in it
• Anything that supports or challenges a belief you hold
• Anything you can look back on in your memory and draw upon to reinforce or cast doubt upon something someone else says or does

It's important to note that reference points and experiences have different "weights" depending on how certain you are about something, and how much authority you give the person who's relaying this information.

For instance, let's say I walked up to you and told you that with this one new seduction technique, you could make women go home with you within ten minutes of meeting you, consistently. Works 40% of the time, guaranteed.

Skeptical? Maybe a little bit. But I'm willing to bet you're a little excited, too. Sure, you have few to no reference experiences of women going home with you in ten minutes – yet – and maybe you've never even heard anyone say that's consistently possible. But, you are here learning about socializing and seduction, and you are reading my stuff, which means you probably assume I know at least a little about what I'm talking about.

So, even if a couple of your buddies say, "Dude, trust me, there's nothing that will let you pick up chicks in ten minutes," you're still going to be at least a little curious about hearing what I have to say, and maybe checking it out.

Let's now say I walked up to you one day and told you humans can fly. You'd probably tell me that's ridiculous and utterly dismiss the idea outright as nonsense.

But why? Why dismiss human flight when I tell you about it but not the Ten Minute Seduction Secret?

The reason why is because all of your reference points say, incontrovertibly, that I must be mistaken. It's a firmly held belief you have, because you have a number of reference points and experiences standing to the contrary of it.

People can't fly. You know that for certain.

You've fallen down and hurt yourself. If humans could fly, that wouldn't have happened.

You've seen and heard of numerous people falling to their deaths. If humans could fly, that wouldn't have happened.

You've flown on airplanes. If humans could fly, we for damn sure wouldn't ride in tin cans with wings (God, if only I could avoid the cattle lines and the calculated "bumping" off the flight because it was oversold...).

I'm also not someone you view as an authority on the subject, so you aren't going to put much weight into my assertion that humans can do self-powered levitation.

I might shoot you a link to some information on Joseph of Cupertino and how hundreds of people had signed sworn statements attesting that they'd seen him fly into the air on numerous occasions, and now you might have a little bit of doubt about your previously absolute beliefs, but you're still going to think humans can't fly.

Then I might send you information on the scores of Catholic saints and Hindu yogis who've supposedly mastered levitation, and you might find that interesting, but still, your reference points will hold.

No one around you believes in levitation, and you'll feel confident that you're right: humans can't fly.

But if you are living in rural India, and you are Hindu, and everyone around you believes that yes, humans can fly, your beliefs are going to be very different. There, even if I ask you, "Seriously, have you ever seen a human lift up into the air?" you're still going to believe people can fly. Even if I show you the latest research into physics, and that scientists have proven self-powered human flight is impossible... you're still going to believe it is possible.

And that's because your reference points – in this case, the people around you, and the stories you grew up hearing – all point to human flight being reality.

Reference points determine the reality in which you live. Different reference points, different beliefs, and different view of the world.

The reason why we need to rely on reference points is that we simply need to process far more information than we can investigate ourselves. You know that the sun is a great big ball of burning gas millions of miles away, right? But have you been there – have you seen the sun up close and verified that it's actually burning gas? Have you taken a rocket ship ride through the corona? Have you worked on any of the physics behind it?

No, of course not. Instead, you rely on what other people tell you about the sun. You rely on astrophysicists to tell you about what the sun's made up of, how old it is, how far from Earth it is, etc.

You can't investigate everything yourself. So, you must rely on other sources of information do flesh out your understanding of the world; thus, reference points play a vital role in shaping your view of reality.

Understanding How Reference Points Affect Others

It's important to have a good understanding of reference points and to recognize that other people may have very different reference points and experiences to your own.

I try to avoid ideological debates for this reason. I don't want to debate with you whether Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism or no religion is right, because we're both likely going to be bringing very different reference experiences to the table, and we'll never reconcile those differences in a debate. I similarly don't want to debate with you whether the Democrats or the Republicans are better for America, or even if they're both the same or if they're very different. We're likely going to have different reference experiences here.

Every person you meet is going to have different reference points than you do, and if you clash over your ideological differences you will fail to get along or build a connection. That's extremely important to recognize.

One of the things I have done consistently throughout my life, and that I'd advise you to do, has been to seek out different and varying reference experiences. In America, I was a middle-class private school kid, who went on to immerse himself with a lot of people living rougher lives, who then went to a big party school, who then went to the nation's political and intellectual capital, who then moved to the nation's beach party capital. I took up music, writing, web design, acting, modeling, international travel. I immersed myself in learning the social and seductive arts. Now I'm traveling in the Far East and I'm launching startup businesses and I've published a book and I'm building products and learning search engine optimization and I'm building social networks with geographically diverse friends, and my reference experiences are expanding and growing and blooming dramatically.

And as your reference experiences expand – from meeting more different kinds of people and doing more different kinds of things – your view of the world becomes much realer and much less dependent on a few select sources of information.

Because, truth be told, most people get their worldviews from only a few information sources. And, no matter how good your sources, the smaller they are in number, the more prone to holes and flaws your worldview is going to be.

Most people you meet in life are going to have limited reference experiences and restricted worldviews for this reason. This makes it counterproductive to get into debates with them about their strongly held beliefs.

Keep this in mind about strongly held beliefs: strongly held beliefs come from either experience – if the person has been exposed to a large amount of data and personal experience reinforcing a specific idea – or ignorance – if a person has been exposed to a small amount of concentrated information supporting a specific position and has little to no personal experience on the situation. And in my experience, it's usually the latter – strongly held beliefs usually stem from ignorance, not from experience.

In fact, I've come to the point now where I internally question anyone who tries to convince me that something is absolutely, positively, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt true without his having extremely solid, concrete, reliable evidence that you can't shake a stick at. Otherwise, I'm of the opinion that you ought to at least say, "Well, I think this is true, based on everything I've seen... but I suppose there's a chance it might not be."

But the best thing to do when you find yourself in a conversation with someone with strongly held, ideological beliefs is to simply realize that she is arriving at her conclusions based on different reference experiences, and that fighting her on her beliefs will not do you any good – it won't win her to your reasoning and it won't make her feel like you "get" her. To the contrary, it will only push the two of you apart.

So, unless it's something extremely important, when people state their solidly held beliefs, I usually just say, "Hmm," thoughtfully, and I nod slightly a few times, as if to say, "I'm considering it." I don't engage them on it, because nothing good will come of it. This can be a hard lesson to learn, and you will need some restraint at first – it can be challenging to hold yourself back from diving into debate when someone presents beliefs that clash strongly with yours – but ultimately restraint allows you to get to know people far better, and helps you to get past the topics you don't agree on and get to the ones you do.

Using Reference Points to Change Your Worldview

Aside from helping you realize that ideological arguments are a Venus fly trap for your mind, what good does knowing about reference experiences do you?

A lot, it turns out. Here's why:

Understanding reference experiences enables you to use your own reference experiences to change your perception of the world.

The example I like to use is bleached blonde girls. Once upon a time, about three years ago, I felt like bleached blonde girls were an alien species. They didn't like me and I didn't like them. I thought them vapid and self-important, and they likely thought me arrogant and also self-important. And so, we never got along; when I'd meet them, I'd be cold to them and dismissive, and they'd be cold to me or at times verbally attack me or try to push me to the outside of a group we'd both be in.

Eventually I realized the problem was my own: I didn't have any positive reference experiences with bleached blondes. I didn't have any as friends; I hadn't had a bleached blonde girlfriend; they were just people who were "other" to me, and I realized I was treating them as "others" and that they were no doubt picking up on that and mirroring it back to me. So, I set my mind on making them not other.

I did visualizations of talking to bleached blondes and us having great conversations and being very warm toward each other, to build pseudo-reference experiences in my mind to make myself feel like we got along well. I took up acting and modeling and immersed myself in social circle activities to (among other objectives) put myself in closer contact with bleached blondes.

And I got to know them. I built up a lot of new reference experiences. And as I got to know them, I began to see them as real people (despite the bleach in their hair!), and my heart began to melt toward them. And as my heart melted toward them, theirs melted towards me. It got to the point where, eventually, bleached blonde girls reacted as warmly towards me as other women did, and I felt as warmly towards them as I did towards other women.

It wasn't because of them. It was because of me. Because I became warmer with them, and they began to respond to that warmth.

Having good, strong, positive reference points is incredibly important for your success going forward. Be honest with yourself: do you have approach anxiety? Are there certain girls you think won't like you – or that you yourself don't like? Do you have any beliefs about women, dating, or the world you'd like to change?

As soon as you realize you have some beliefs that need changing, you must set to work building new reference experiences to change those beliefs.

For all the talk on "inner game" out there, the good old approach of just getting out there and doing it is, in my opinion, the best way to build your "inner game." Getting out and building new, better reference experiences is how you change the way you see the world.

By actively seeking out new reference points through which to understand the world, you expand your understanding of reality. You "de-other" people and situations you previously didn't understand or understood only through stereotypes (e.g., myself and bleached blondes) rather than through actual experience and reliable reference points. Stereotypes are the enemy of reality. They're the inexperienced man's excuse for references.

Don't cheat yourself. Drop stereotypes, drop beliefs that are reliant on a few, select sources, and get out there and build real reference points in the real world. Your mind will advance, your worldview will advance, and you'll find the world a much less threatening, much more welcoming, much warmer place.

Cheers,
Chase Amante