Woman: All Women are Liars

From the Daily Dish:

I am a physician and absolutely do not believe the Palin account of Trig's delivery story. But I am also a woman, and your shock that if she would lie about this is simply a man's perspective. Women lie about pregnancy/birth/parentage all the time. Women withhold the truth when they get abortions and don't tell the potential father. Women have babies and lie about who the father really is even when they know. So what seems like a terrible lie to you doesn't even come close to lies women tell on this subject. This is why I think you overstep on the Trig issue.

The lie about Trig likely came about to feed her ego that she is a hero; she is a martyr for even having him. But I, and I suspect other women, see this as an intrusion. So even if you prove what is likely true - that she is lying - it is neither unique nor crazy.

Legitimacy

Devil's Advocate and I agree on this: the current elite do not really deserve their high status in any meaningful way, as in having extraordinary value, worth or accomplishments relative to others who are not as high status.

There are very good arguments for this position. One issue is, of course, luck. Many extremely successful, rich or famous people are that way, as opposed to merely respectable or well-off, because of luck and not because they are intrinsically better. This can often play out in winner take all contests: 1000 people compete and only 1 or 2 win get all the rewards and glory, while the others get chump change and have wasted their time. If you ain't first, you're last. When this dynamic plays out because someone gets their first by a small margin,
you can't reasonably claim that the many people who were close deserve penury and obscurity while someone else deserves his billions.

Another issue is value transference, which Half Sigma outlines very well. Often times, you possess something extremely valuable and rare, called capital, that you can leverage to bring in tons of dough. The factory owner pays his workers pennies because their labor is worth little without his machines. Similarly for social capital.

And, of course, you can combine them, like when you inherit a factory.

(I pointed him to Half Sigma's blog, particularly his posts on winner take all contests, and I should have pointed out the series on Post Marxist class analysis and Value Transference. But he seemed dismissive of the HS, probably because HS talks about how stupid people are, in fact, stupid.)

We could talk all day about how the main factors affecting extreme success are not the same as how we would like to apportion praise and status.

We disagree, I assume, on whether anyone actually deserves such high status. His point in this Cleverness is not Intelligence series is to destroy the legitimacy of one group of people holding elite status, presumably because he feels there are other more deserving people we should elevate instead. He thinks of himself as the righteous vanguard of progress, an agitator who will bring down the current system so that we can build a new, better one in its place. And most likely, as humans are wont to do, he thinks he will be more respected when this new perfect world arrives. And posts like these are excuses for his commenters to shit on others and feel superior, if only for a moment. Of course, this is just conjecture and I could be wrong about his motives.

Personally, I don't like talking about legitimacy because it is an emotional issue, a feelings issue, that has a counterproductive relationship with truth. Arguments over legitimacy are arguments about who we should defer to, whom we have obligations to, who is above us and who is below us, who we should feel inferior to and who we should feel superior to. If a man has legitimate power, that means (almost) everyone accepts that he is superior to them and will not contest that. When you want to usurp the king, you need to attack his legitimacy just as much as his army and build your own legitimacy as much as your army so that the people won't reject you when you take over.Arguing about legitimacy is an argument about how we should feel about certain things and people. It has a counterproductive relationship with truth seeking.

Which means that you can't really understand the status game when you are worried about legitimacy. And it is a certainly a game. When you realize this, it's like if you thought you were a real estate tycoon, only to wake up and realize you were only playing Monopoly. The status game is just as shallow and silly and pointless as Monopoly. As such, you can learn to play the game to win it. But only if you can restrain your emotional involvement in the game. When you understand that status has nothing to do with deserving, you can play the game well.

Now, we all have emotional needs. We need recognition, human interaction, relationships and a sense of community. So you can't get completely outside of the game. But you can see it more clearly (This is commonly called "being cynical").

So, I think arguing over legitimacy is silly, because it is the same as allocating Monopoly money among the various people playing.

Coming Up
-More on status
-Why you should be idealistic when it comes to absolute goods and a sociopath when it comes to relative goods

Don't Be Embarrassed

In a comment over at the Devil's Advocate, I wrote

And convincing the plebes that status is unimportant/unjust/evil is one way the high status maintain their position, because then no one is thinking about how to unseat them.

I just realized that I stole this nugget of wisdom from the Godfather. I know that there is a Godfather quote for anything a man could need and you've probably heard them all, but I hope this is new ground since the quote comes from a deleted scene in Godfather II so hopefully you've never seen it.

This is from the beginning of the movie, when Michael is hearing requests from family and friends during his son's first communion party. Watch from 3:00 to about 5:00



His niece, Sonny's daughter, and her boyfriend come to get his blessing before they get married. When Michael asks how he will support his new wife, the boyfriend replies,

"I'm embarrassed to say it, but I'm a major stockholder in the family corporation."

Michael then says,

"Don't be embarrassed. This contempt for money is just another trick of the rich to keep the poor without it."

And he grants his blessing to the joyous couple.

The Absurd

Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions:

I would argue that absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics. Like skepticism in epistemology, it is possible only because we possess a certain kind of insight - the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought.

If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation (even though the situation is not absurd until the perception arises), then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? Like the capacity for epistemological skepticism, it results from the ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics, even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

Discipline

Many talents are like easy credit. They can amplify the benefits of your actions but often people abuse them and without discipline, you can fall into a terrible mess. I have always looked down on people who just didn't understand "Spend less than you make," and pile up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of credit card debt. On the other hand, I have consistently avoided developing self-discipline yet somehow managing to get by. Eventually the house of cards must fall.

Steve Pavlina makes a fantastic point separating industry from hard work from willpower. Many people conflate them together. The first means putting in the hours, often of tedious tasks you cannot automate or delegate. The second means tasks that challenge your abilities. There are times when I can do lots of little tasks but avoid the hard ones and at other times I will try to tackle all hard problems and let the little tasks fall apart, creating new hard problems. Finally, willpower is a commodity. It's what allows you to do hard work but you only have so much of it so you must deploy it strategically. But knowing how to deploy it strategically is a hard problem itself:

Research shows (see for instance Your Brain at Work) that prioritizing is one of the most advanced brain functions, and a huge energy suck. In other words, we use the most recently evolved (and therefore energy-inefficient) parts of our brains, and it is hard work.

On the other hand, prioritizing doesn't feel like work at all. It feels like metawork that produces zero output. If you use workflow ideas like GTD, you know it takes significant creativity to look at the stuff in your inbox, recognize what they mean, and decide what to do about each item, and then pick one to process. Not prioritizing the whole darn list. Just picking one is hard.

Which means you should reserve your highest energy/top-gear brain time for prioritizing. For your weekly GTD review if you can produce that energy state reliably at the same time every week. But it can feel like a waste of your best brain time. You feel like you should be writing, coding or composing music with your best time, not processing to-do lists.

On a final note, Pavlina's number one pillar of self-discipline is acceptance. I've found that accepting your limits is enormously freeing, because you stop flailing about at things you will only rarely accomplish. But this is by far the toughest part of developing self-discipline for me, especially as a young guy. I feel a constant need to push through by boundaries, to test how far I can push my abilities. Accepting my limits is hard on my ego, equivalent to the pain a 38 year old woman feels settling for Mr. Only-Guy-Willing-To-Talk-To-Me.

Feminists Rally, Men Stare at Boobs

In Maine, a group of feminists rallied topless to help erase the awful double standard that allows men to walk around without shirts on while women are forced to wear burkhas and ankle-length black robes that camouflage their curves.

PORTLAND – About two dozen women marched topless from Longfellow Square to Tommy's Park this afternoon in an effort to erase what they see as a double standard on male and female nudity.

The women, preceded and followed by several hundred boisterous and mostly male onlookers, many of them carrying cameras, stayed on the sidewalk because they hadn't obtained a demonstration permit to walk in the street.

Two intrepid National Geographic reporters (red arrows) used 100x magnifying zoom lenses to capture a scene straight out of an Amazonian tribal custom while an aspiring Maine PUA (blue arrow) racks up a few dozen day game approaches ("call me").

SWPL

I've been seeing a waitress. Since its been a month and she had Sunday off, I rewarded her by taking her out to for breakfast the morning after instead of kicking her out for a walk of shame at 7:30am.

She doesn't have money or time for internet access so I get to clue her in to all the great things we have on the intertubes. I mentioned Stuff White People Like and summoned it on my iPhone. I started reading off some of the entries and she wasn't laughing. I thought maybe she's taking this a little personally. Some people are like this. Some people aren't. I showed the site to my straight-edge vegan grad student friend who just bought a mini, eats cliff bars and goes camping and he loved it. But it wasn't that. It just didn't register with her. She didn't find it funny because she has never been around these types of people. Anyone with an education from the northeast – NYC, DC, etc... - sees hundreds of these people a day, and familiarity breeds contempt. But down here in New Orleans, people actually like jazz music, there are poor black performers playing trumpets on the streets. Jazz is not a once-a-month put a CD in the Bose with a glass of wine get tired halfway through experience. It's a dance in the streets, weekend festival, authentic experience that no one would adopt as a way to feel superior to the uncultured cretins around you. Down here, its the uncultured cretins who like and play jazz.

Down here, people have a different way to feel self-righteous and superior to their neighbors. It's called Christianity. Up north, they would be the wrong kind of white people, the uncultured, scientifically illiterate bible thumping cretins.

Some things just get inverted when you travel south.