Social Commentary

I’ve been relistening to Nassim Taleb’s wonderful book Fooled by Randomness, which is a probabalist’s dream read. And if there’s one thing that picking up girls turns you into, it’s a probabalist.

Reading it (or listening to it on audio, as I am), you see a great many parallels between stock trading and seduction. And you also come to understand why some men succeed at picking up lots of different pretty girls, and why most men never will.

In many things in life, but especially in trading and in pickup, there is what you’d call an asymmetric distribution of returns. And that means that by participating in trading for stocks or picking up girls or anything else with an asymmetric distribution, you’re opening yourself up to asymmetric returns.

But the mind does not take well naturally to asymmetric returns. It doesn’t grasp them. It isn’t built to work that way.

And the result of this is, an endless abundance of great returns for those few souls willing to go against the grain, fight the emotions that go with it, and chase down their asymmetric returns in spite of their struggling and fearful or frustrated brains... and an endless source of frustration and disappointment for the majority of souls who just go with the flow.

At the start of the new year, there was a thread on the boards with suggestions for new articles this year. Zac suggested one on the tendency of women to always have men in their lives... and that this should never be an obstacle for you when meeting new women.

It’s a curious thing for me to think about. This concept is one I spend zero thought cycles on myself, and it always strikes me as a little odd and funny when I see men talking about it now... mostly guys on the boards talking about their concerns about approaching: but what if she has a boyfriend?

Not just boyfriend, though; but what about that guy she’s talking to? Or, yeah, I see her by herself right now – but what if there’s someone else nearby? What if she has a lover and I don’t know it?

The fact is, EVERY woman you meet is going to have SOME guy in her life, in SOME capacity. There is some man who is important to her who is “limiting” her choices in men in some way.

The thing about approaching though is this: you’ve got to learn to disregard these men as abstractions and approach away, anyway.

340Breeze poses an intriguing “What if?” scenario over on the article about astrology:

“An interesting question is how do you think women would behave in general toward men (in terms of their attitude, expectations, submissiveness, physical attributes (caring about being fat vs slim), etc) if the vast majority of available men were completely unwilling to trade (access to resources, money, etc )for hopes of sex? I know this is unrealistic since clearly women have choice in men because: (1) men are the agressive sex meaning women have lots of suitors just by being a woman; and (2) men seem to want women’s vjs more than women want what men have to offer.”

I think this one’s worth addressing because I see a lot of frustration from guys on various corners of the Internet about desperate men trading their time and energy to women in exchange for the hope of a chance to maybe possibly someday if they’re lucky have a shot at entering said women’s vaginas.

The talk is that these desperate men make it harder for everyone else to get laid, and/or that women are becoming overly entitled as a result of it.

And to some extent... there’s a nugget of truth in there, yeah.

But to a larger extent, this is looking at the problem all wrong, with blinders on to the real setup – and the real solution.

Lately I’ve been writing a lot of posts alluding to various aspects of the female psyche. This is mostly the result of a lot of deep diving I’ve been doing with lovers and female friends. So, I decided to write a comprehensive post about how women think about their own entire world – about life, love, and of course… sexy men.

Getting into the mind of a woman is no easy feat; it can be really difficult for guys to understand where women are coming from, because they do think much differently from men. And their social expectations are also much different from men’s. So I’m going to give you an inside look into the female mind, which I hope will help you understand how women perceive you, and help you take your game to the next level.

Nothing like a contentious topic framed by a loaded question to wake you up and bring out the strong opinions. So here’s one: what’s better, an independent woman... or a submissive one?

If you read “The 4 Kinds of Girls and Which Ones YOU Should Go For”, you’re familiar with both halves of the pie; for the purposes of this article, “soft” = submissive, and “strong” = independent. These are the same things, just described there in more neutral language, and here in more of the language du jour.

In today’s article, we’ll have a look at the merits of both kinds of women – the independent variety, and the submissive variety – and talk about what roles in what men’s lives each are best suited for.

Because while you no doubt have a very strong opinion yourself on which of these two women is “better” and which men should want... I dare say that’s going to vary tremendously from person to person and lifestyle and objectives to lifestyle and objectives.

Is the mating game fair? Do women have an advantage in the mating game?

These are good questions to ask; questions that many of you have probably asked yourself at one time or another.

I often see guys perceiving women as more privileged in the mating game. They get free drinks, lots of male attention, and seem to be able to get any man they want, whenever they want.

When we men see this, we may start envying them and calling out for justice.

In this post, I will discuss whether or not the mating game is unjust or not, and what to do if it is just.

Colt wrote yesterday on whether women really want to be treated as equals (or not), and it got me thinking about what men on the whole seem to want, and whether that's all that grounded in reality or not.

I talked before about my belief that most of the bitter women men think are out there are really just Internet bitter; in the echo chamber of the World Wide Web, it's pretty easy for one's thoughts to sound like extreme versions of themselves, and it's also very easy to treat others unempathetically, judge, excoriate, and attack, in spiteful ways online that we wouldn't dare do with even our worst enemies live and in person.

When you stop and think about it though, there sure are a whole lot of sensitive people right now ready to respond on a hair trigger with a vicious attack both online and (with a bit more subtlety) in real life, and there's a whole lot of lamenting about where all the "good men" and "good women" have gone, both from men and women. Why?

I'm going to propose here that there is a large undercurrent of wanting more than one's station in life among average men and women, without caring to elevate one's station accordingly. And that that undercurrent of wanting things without doing the requisite things to get them is what drives all this anger, torment, and strife.

It's simply a case of unmet expectations, played out at grand scale society-wide.