Well actually a mix of capitalism and socialism seems best. Socialist necessities and then capitalism if you want more than minimal living (and everyone does.)

So you are saying that "I'd prefer not to be killed by my neighbors" isn't absolute and the same with "I don't want to starve" and so on.

How far are you going to argue this? Do you think that getting shot by bullets is subjective? That people only bleed to death because of what they thought about guns? What does absolute even look like to you?

The gain in children is that your genes stick around. This isn't necessarily the meaning of life or anything but there's that easy to grasp logic that the genes that don't get passed on don't stick around. Obviously having such long lineages of people who passed on their genes it's something we usually try to do, only because the people who don't try eventually get squeezed out of existence by everyone else.

Children are awfully expensive so if we didn't almost universally want them people wouldn't waste their time, money, and effort on them.

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No, I meant greater as in many transactions instead of just one. Numbers bigger than one are greater than one. Simple math.

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No, that's not relative. Foraging in the woods is not as safe as menial work in a city. Whether you have nasty neighbors or not you are flat out less likely to be killed when there are police to protect you instead of just yourself and close family. You are less likely to starve when other people devote themselves to food and you get it in exchange for some task they don't spend their time on. You are less likely to be injured when you can specialize in a single task instead of having to do everything necessary for survival on your own.

But hey, if you want to argue that a significant group of people don't care about starvation, protection, and accidental cripplings then I guess there's not much point trying to convince you otherwise.

-

I doesn't matter how much people value these things. As long as they can see that something is better than something else it does not matter how much better they think it is.

Well actually no, if they think it is better when it is not then they go out in the woods alone and die and we're left with only the people who value things close to how much they actually help them stay alive and produce children that follow in suit about as much as they actually help them do those things.

If there's excess we move that back into the making babies thing because you typically want to find someone who displays that they're about as good (physically and mentally) as you. Instead of merely staying alive we're expected to have an education now and earn more comforts to help deal with the stress of having been educated and doing heavily specialized work.


...I know that people have a lot of resistance to anthropology. Being reduced to numbers is almost incompatible with our values of individuality. Individuality is one of those subjective things but this is why it's not a universal trait of human cultures. If you study people you find a lot of things that are in EVERY culture.

There may still be some subjectivity in those things but there are objective if you understand that everyone that didn't value them died. There is something functional there, whether we can put our fingers right on what it is or not.

Alright. As of right now our society isn't structured towards giving people incentive to behave better than that. We've probably progressed away from it about as much as we have by luck.

Many of the controversial issues of the day have solutions on one side that work against the nasty mode of life. I think a lot of liberals ask for things that are excessive and unrealistic but the general idea of extending support systems to help people in desperate situations would go a really long way. We could cut violent crime down 10 or maybe 100 times.

Cutting down war is a little bit trickier because by supporting local people you often hinder businesses (but if the hindrance is getting sued for allowing your employees to be electrocuted thanks to exposed wires in the shower I don't think anyone in their right mind would just let them do that to drive down costs.)

Japan mostly figured out that quality was the key to long term success and that quarterly reviews were garbage, way back almost on the radioactive death gasp of their war effort. We've been much slower to realize that. We still offer incentives for abstract thinking in the face of research showing that hinders productivity and we've had to learn several times that building fake value ends almost tragically.

So I think there is a solution on the global commerce front as well, and if we got all of the countries of the world involved in the upper end of that you'd never want to go to war just because of how badly it would screw up consumer products- shooting them would basically be the same as shooting yourself.

No, it's not. Having children that survive to have more children is a very discrete measure. We don't usually work out equations in our heads and come up with a number for how much we think any particular thing will impact that, but we behave as if we had most of the time. Dogs don't calculate lift and gravity when they go to catch a frisbee either, yet they go to grab it right where those equations say it will be.

But if we make the difference between options greater you'll very easily be able to say which one offers the better conditions for child rearing: living with one mate and however many children you can support in the wild gathering any edible plants nearby and hunting animals with whatever you can make from plant materials and rocks and defending yourself from more desperate people who hope to live another day by stealing any animals you may have killed but not yet eaten
vs
living in a shack someone else built by shining other people's shoes in exchange for coin with which you can buy foods other people have prepared and giving up some of that coin to people who are prepared to defend you if someone else tries to steal your livelihood.

Both are still rough living but one is much better, and at the level I described you should be able to see how a bunch of people living the first way could just about go straight to living the second way by making frequent exchanges.

People talking freely doesn't really "fix" anyone who has learned about the world in an ignorant fashion. What people do most with internet forums is deposit their opinion as if they're dropping it into a ballot box.

Evaluating anything that disagrees with what you already know is barely existent in these settings.


Then how about what I've been saying?

If (wo)men are left to their own devices they will do whatever works. In our old setting war and that sort of thing worked but in a well constructed society those do not work very well.

Well actually I'm (supposedly?) up there from the female perspective as well.

I don't think it's that they're looking for royalty, just that when you don't know what you're looking for it's too much trouble to decide unless the person is a level above what they expected they could find.

I'm plenty familiar with the streets paved with gold perception thing but I don't want a trophy, personal servant, or mix of the two.

So I'm nobody's type?
Mmmmm, no. I know better than that.

Most people would, in person, hold at least a small conversation and judge if they were each other's type based on how awkward it was. Not necessarily all kinds of awkward- the deal killer is when someone shows they don't have the capacity to be less awkward, as if they are defective. Based on where people hold their standards any number of other things can also shut the book.

An important one of these is how many people approach the other person. (Decent) Women at bars will only ever be swayed by people that are basically masters of picking up women because they're getting so many people approaching them.

The same thing probably plays in to these sites but I haven't been expecting the people the get that kind of attention to respond to me, or at least not hardly ever. Unless even very average looking girls get dozens of messages a day this this shouldn't explain why so few respond to me.

300 messages. 1 year. Not just this site. Usually between 2 and 5 a week, occasionally more, only once being around 20. I read people's profiles and then think about what I am going to say so they're not ever sent back to back.

Alright.

It's going to take me quite awhile to think about how to describe that in profile-speak. Anyone got any tips that could help me speed that up?

I've been sending messages left and right- around 300 by my estimate.

I avoided saying we need to agree on purpose. We need to make the personal gains not just a matter of opinion but actually tangible. If it were just a matter of agreement we would be twisting perception in order to make unfair exchanges seem generous in both directions while I am saying that we should make sure everyone actually gains something of quality for lesser expenditures on their part.

As for having a bigger entity that will punish you for stepping out of line, it doesn't really have the flaws people think.
The flaw it does have is that when people have some behavior that has been criminalized and thus cannot approach the law enforcement entity to minimize the damage from abusing interactions they must take up arms for themselves and are no better off than if it did not exist. It's still big so they keep hiding from it just as before.

So when you think of groups like the Mafia that is what you get in the absence of that arm of the state that is an unbeatable behemoth. In societies we are familiar with that absence is only small gaps among certain groups but if you look at history such a system has been absent to many people in various nations and the way they react is the same, aside from some minor formation details that vary by culture.

Well actually if you look at an iguana or such they have a little round white located around the lower rear area of their skull. I've been told this is their auditory organ though I don't know the first thing about it's internal anatomy.

At least hearing this in the face of what I've been saying reaffirms that it's not anything people are used to hearing.

Well, in case you decide to start reading the posts in this thread here's the gist of it: we don't need to agree, we just need to gain more from working with people we disagree with than we can physically take from them.
And the good news is that we're getting there.

Well violence are wars are things people do when they think they have something to gain.

As chimps in a forest killing and over wise driving off nearby groups gets you access to more ripe fruit (plus finding ripe fruit isn't something you can do as a large group so they have to spread out enough to be vulnerable in the first place.)

As a subsistence farming group with a weak government killing neighboring groups gets you a comparably stable life, even with them wanting to kill you too.

As a count or duke or whatever it gets you gold AND it helps cut back on a population that's expanding much too quickly for people to keep dividing up their land to their children. Additionally at around that point prestige starts to play a big role and the "we'll get out of the depression by creating demand for weapons of war!" sort of mechanism starts to work.

As imperialists it secures all manner of resources that allow for better products of all sorts.

As a democracy? Well with where we are now it almost costs us more to secure resources ourselves and the demand to prepare for war thing sort of doesn't work when we were already spending billions to support the best army on the planet. With mass media people get weary of war almost before it's even started and prestige drops through the floor as soon as people bring up how many sons and daughters died in a war nobody wanted.


War and violence in general DO make sense. We wouldn't have ever started that behavior if it didn't work in some situation.
Thing is we're moving out of that situation and it's becoming rarer and rarer for war to actually be a good idea for any party involved. If the 3rd world all got industrialized (and eventually it will,) we'd almost ever have reason for any more war.

Just take a look at the countries that want nukes and such now. Why? So they can strike first -if they need to.- They don't have such a strong economy that they stop gaining things by interrupting it to flat out take things from their neighbors. It's still zero sum for them and that means that they don't only need to be able to strike first but that given the chance they will. If they didn't have that kind of thinking they would have been wiped out long ago by people who did because it used to work really well.

What we have now is something that works better, and interrupting it with wars sucks for us. They don't have it and at least the people in charge in those places are in zero sum thinking so they want to take from their neighbors so that they can get big enough to take some of that prosperity from us. That would work for them for awhile but everyone in a trade based society understand that by just dividing the spoils of war out like that you'd never even get to as good as we have it right now.

People are smart. Now don't get me wrong, they'll also as dumb as dirt. It's just that they're smart enough think about how much something will cost them and what they will gain from it. They don't always judge them perfectly but if they definitely can't gain anything from war they don't decide to go to war.

With the growing benefits we get from times of peace everybody gets more by not going to war. We hardly ever do it anymore.

Now, if we're smart about it in the coming decades we can make it so that people don't gain very much from this sort of thing on local scales. People make poor judgments when they are desperate so just having support systems for life's unexpected turns has already helped to reduce this kind of stuff a lot. Mass media and people with certain agendas have gone a long way to make people think otherwise but it's as plain as day if you know how to look.

That's exactly where there's not added value. In that exchange you get more but the other person gets less (from your own view.) The sum is still the same.

The thing about zero sum thinking is not about "how much do I have" and "how much does he have." For zero sum the thinking is "there is X total and if I want more someone else must have less."
With out more advanced interactions we know that by making exchanges we increase the total and more frequent exchanges make this effect stronger.

In the past we measured out economies based on if our value was growing or shrinking but we have transitioned more into such a point or progression where we instead measure if it is growing faster or slower.

We make exchanges so often now that this single exchange thinking no longer has much relevance. In the past an exchange could have an impact on how much work would get done but now in many cases the exchanges are the work themselves.

The old form was a reason to loot and plunder your neighbors but with the wealth of non-zero-sum interactions our lives are now built upon that kind of behavior is becoming less and less viable as a way to actually improve your situation. We are transitioning to a point where greed requires generosity.

In the series they have greys as the Norse gods. They had some potent technology but I just don't see Norse myth as being symbolic enough to not have the literal meanings also hold up.

Ah, but why would you ever make equal exchanges? If you don't think you are gaining anything then you are just as well off as if you had not made the trade.

Yet there is the problem of when anyone knows about how we accomplish more by specializing so that other members of the group can do things for us. With this knowledge we must recognize that any desirable trade grants us more than we had before and only a very bad trade could accomplish so little as to leave us in the same position as we were prior to the trade.

Exchanges that leave us worse off than we were are not voluntary and require at least some form of coercion and such exchanges are deemed criminal in all major societies. Are you only speaking of such trades as these?

Well, I'm going to try not shaving for a few days and see if that helps make me look less like a young teenage boy in a picture or three and I'm going to try and replace the one where I'm smiling with a scarf because it looks weird every time I try to crop that one guy's face out of it.

Despite the advice to be nicer if I wanted to keep getting any feedback I think it was already too late (or have the last few posts not had a much calmer tone? I might just be viewing things wrong,) but thanks everyone.

This has mostly confirmed that I know what "good" looks like and I'll just have to figure out how to achieve that or get lucky.

Well I just objected to a few things and asked a couple of questions. I considered it to be much more useful than most of the advice I've been given.

So 13 pages into other people's profiles it looks like most people don't break 1 paragraph and about half of them don't break 1 sentence.
There was one that was poetry and a handful of ones that were obviously bad such as writing in all caps.

I saw exactly one person listing interests that weren't extremely vague. I've heard some people complain about people saying "I like long walks on the beach" so I don't know what to think about listing generic obvious stuff in the interests. Should I go generic or try to find some kind of middle ground?

For pictures I saw the majority only have the single picture. I saw one guy's profile that looked ridiculous because he always put on exactly the same face for all of his pictures. With maybe just three like that it would have passed but by the fifth one it was becoming comic.

The variety that looked decent had used photoshop filters to make the pictures grayscale or sepia. I can't decide if doing that for more than one picture is tacky or not.

The other type I noticed was people sitting on vehicles. I'm not "thug" so I don't know if I should go that route but I also don't have any friends that like snapping pictures like that so unless people really recommend this it will be easy for me to not bother someone else to take those pictures for me.

Edit: and if I'm just not finding good profiles after thirteen pages I think people are going to have to go to the trouble of linking right to good examples. I'll eventually work my way up to something like 50 pages but negativity is creeping in already.

Editedit: I tried writing in better interests. What do people think?

So these forums don't seem to have any kind of search feature. Does anybody know where that post about photos by PacificStar48 was? I can check fifty pages deep into a forum if I have to but looking fifty pages into every forum is, well I'm not even going to use hyperbole, a totally unreasonable amount of effort.

You just said that they did and that's why you left them out.


I'll break it down. When -trade is not equal- -there are always consequences-
The first part is always the case, like the moon going around the Earth. If something is always a certain way how can you say it causes anything? You've never seen it the other way so it's not appropriate to say it is the cause of anything.

When is an exchange of items ever equal?


And it's the first good example. I was actually trying to do that. Because you've rejected it I'm left with much worse options for what you are trying to say.
Can you entirely rephrase the unequal exchange and consequences thing for me?

Because I jump around trying so many different ways I was called me schizophrenic -_-;

The only person that can make things worse in my head is usually me.
(In internet settings. In real life I have to put myself out there more but either way nobody needs to worry about that here.)

I've gotten much better about making things better in my head in recent years but there's still a wall I run into that limits it.

The indecisiveness and schizophrenia were worse before and people told me I needed more info x_x

For the better part of the last year I've already been trying to pick out things from the profiles to bring up. I get 20%-30% response to it with my profile pretty much like this and 10%-20% with it the way I had it to only be positive and not have so much personal information.

And straight up complimenting women... well, I haven't tallied things up but it sure feels like 0% response. I think even when it's a compliment about their personality it comes off as weak.

You might still be right but there would have to be something different between the way I do it and the way you do it.


1. I can't gleam out what's useful from that. I can't even gleam out what they're telling me to do.
Like I've said, I don't have the common sense. You read that and you fill in the blanks to get what they mean but I'm borderline schizophrenic so I can't do that.
Or maybe I do fill in the blanks right and these things just didn't help, but I'm trying to be at least a little more positive than that.

2. I agree that what I've said lacks direction. I've got no idea how to describe a living breathing person with some direction. So far looking at profiles isn't helping, I can't identify anything that I can use to give myself direction.

3. Ya, it's sit around on the internet sometimes watching video. I was advised not to draw attention to computer interests because listing that as an interest makes it look like I don't do anything else.

What's a better word than gibberish?

Well there is one thing to do in Utah I haven't tried: drug addiction. The church dominance here has repressed any kind of nightlife activity except in the capital and that's so so. Going to parties hasn't been any good for me- the noise level just shuts me down. There's camping but I'm not a hick so I can't stand doing that more than a few times a year. My step brother ruined sports for me because he had to prove he was physically superior to small children (I didn't have any coordination until I was 18 thanks to how badly he turned me off from every activity he could- he's not as awful of a person now but he also hasn't visited at all so I've got the old image and angst in my head.) I try to go to movies fairly often but my friends are only interested infrequently. I don't like bumming around malls. Wasn't able to do things like theme parks very often as a kid and then one year my alcoholic parents decided to drop me off at the park every time they wanted to get shitfaced so doing that frequently again is out. I haven't found a good place for getting myself drunk and doing that all the time sounds like a bad idea anyway.

So basically Utah is farmland, suburbs, and some city areas that are more oil refinery than anything else. Park City seems like it's actually got things to do but the roads up there are steep enough I'd wreck my car going very often and if it's snowing very much it's not safe (and that's in comparison to the dangerous roads in the valley I drive on regularly.)

The only places that people from around here like less are areas that are JUST farmland. And it's not just "the grass is greener." People from other places hate it here if they have to stay longer than a camping trip, except if they grew up here and have some kind of nostalgia tiding them over between trips to the bar.

But I won't argue that any further. It's not important and I do still find things to do, I just can see it.

4. My personality type? What kind of type?
I'm an idealist and optimistic but not outgoing. Does that explain it?

5. I'm glad you mentioned that something was vague.
The ideal relationship is one where I have someone to not just talk to but with. Sarcasm and not being easily offended are probably the main requirements there.
I'd like someone more excited about the activities available here and will help me get out and do more of it. This one I don't have any idea how I can ask for without ruining the impression of me in the profile but I figure it would work better later in conversation if I could get people to talk with me for awhile. A partner in crime/adventure also works because I know plenty of things that are enjoyable with someone else that enjoys that sort of mischief.
I'm not looking for someone especially clingy. I'm for women's rights and while I don't want to have anything to do with someone who is going to war with anything that is symbolically female I'm not turned on by the idea of having a house slave that lives to dote on me. Moderation is the key here.
Is there something else I should flesh out about this?

Right now is probably not the best time to try and think about what kind of dates I want to go on overall because I'm feeling intimacy deprived.

I'm sitting on a decent lump of money in the bank right now so I could handle paying for a lot of dates as long as it's not $150 dining all the time and if I'm working around when I expect to be I'd have actual paychecks before I ended up broke.

Drinking is acceptable for me but not necessary.

With sex I would probably be easily seduced but I'm looking for a long term relationship and sex there will happen if it happens. So it's not my goal but it's a plus.

6. If people have actually written anything that's not extremely vague then I always try to say something about it to at least show that I put some time in.

I've never had a response when I say I have interests in common with someone. Maybe girls with my interests are looking for something very unlike themselves or maybe I'd benefit from professional writing advice.

"Something that's not in your profile" is really vague. If you can't narrow it down please tell me what it is that makes this important.

I try to ask a question about the other person almost all of the time. I can't tell if it has helped.

7. What I'm not supportive of is advice that is vague and people telling me that there is something wrong with me for not liking vague advice.
As happy as I am to get a very detailed response I can't quite work out how to say what you've said to when what I've already got is too much personal information.

8. Respect I hear about a lot about but respect is not what people want. The people telling me to respect them always ask me to treat them like a small child who is easily upset and is selfish enough that they must be complimented for doing nothing. I "respect" people when I genuinely think they are stupid or have such a nasty opinion of them it is unspeakable. I take away from them any real interaction and hope that they will go away.

Other people get the real respect of me not lying to them. If they have said something inaccurate or un-useful I give them the chance to improve it (though I'm not perfect so if they know better they could always just explain it to me.)

You might still be right about that