I've done a little cliff diving so I already know the "stepping off of something high up" sensation. Is the bounce back up a big part of bungee jumps?

But ya, I have a really hard time not trying to be perfect at anything new I do. This don't stop me altogether but it slows things down a lot.

I fail already. "Do anything" absolutely paralyzes me because I have to make sure I've thought of every option so I will pick the best one. "Anything" is infinite so it's going to be a good four months before I decide I'm not going to think of anything else that's good.

I actually intended to get a haircut this week but I keep convincing myself it will turn out horrible if I try something new.

Mentioned that earlier in the thread. I've tried several styles. The one that's got the most responses is asking them something about themselves.
*asking them to go into more detail about something doesn't seem to work at all though.

That makes me think of a little telekinetic child and pedophilia is a real turn off for me.

Yes and no. I know my first interpretation of the things people are telling me is wrong so I've had to step back and ask them about that. People hate being asked that apparently.

*well, either I'm reading it wrong or they were wrong because it hasn't helped. The big problem with giving people advice has always been that you don't have the same problem. The way you do whatever you're describing worked the way you do it so you may have never even been exposed to all of the ways it can go wrong.

I've "just taken" advice before and it doesn't solve my problems. From optimistic adults thinking they know the shortcuts to getting bullies to leave you alone to my best friend telling me to say something to someone that made things much much worse.

Well that's all quite a ways in the past. Most recently I made my profile into what was apparently a disaster by following an "expert's" advice.

Following the advice in here (aside from what I already know doesn't work for me from experience,) looks like it's made a good improvement but-

Well, following "be positive" has had me saying things that are negative, off putting, and worse of all boring and irrelevant. I DID THAT. That was me following advice and I could tell it didn't work right.

"You weren't trying" is what I imagine people saying to that. To anyone saying that it sounds good because they KNOW I wasn't trying hard enough and that that is the only problem. To me you're telling me that a huge effort is nothing at all and by proxy that I am a worthless person for not being able to do better.

But I'm at least somewhat aware of other people's view points so I don't let that upset me. What I have let upset me is people ignoring what I say. I've even tried to find ways to stop that from happening but people told me I was being so insulting about that that I was almost evil so I decided not to even try that any more, and this is what's left.


Absolutely. In fact I've been practicing that this entire time, aside from the slight depression I started this thread with.

The quick conclusion we can get here is that me thinking success hasn't been enough. Now, would you like to look at my profile and say something aimed at me instead of a generic message you think applies to everybody?

-

I'll say this again: please ask me questions. I am apparently really unpleasant to talk to when you straight up tell me to do things to fix my problems. I can't put my finger on what's nasty about it (except that I'm telling you your solutions are wrong,) so it's not going to just fix itself and suddenly have everyone like what I say to them. This looks like the way I have to talk for success to me.

Ya, weird. When I know who I'm talking to I manage balance but that sort of goes out the window with the effectively anonymous audience of you guys and the genuinely silent audience of people looking at my profile... not so much.

Hence the "how do I manage to sound like I'm talking to someone when I'm not?" theme to most of my complaining/arguing/whatever.

Naw, just get the crappy places on Earth to develop industry while places like China transition from industry to finance (leaving the US to probably have to transition straight to advance technology research,) and everyone will be part of the system that gets us more than beating each other up.

We're closely related to bonobos and they're really peaceful. The only big difference between them and chimps is that they have a wider diet so they didn't ever have to split up to get their daily meals and weren't vulnerable to having three rivals show up and smash their heads in.

Or in other words if you wanted to fight them it had to be the whole group vs the whole group. Violence had to be a much bigger gamble (there would hardly ever be a group three times the size of an enemy group and that's about the numbers advantage you need to have a good shot at not getting seriously injured.)

Now, the important thing is that you can look at the people around the world and see that we don't just up and start fighting for no reason- we judge if it's worth the risk. In places where it usually isn't there's a whole lot less violence.

I think Vega should hurry up over Deneb to meet with Altair~

Is there a meaningful difference between complaining and informing people that they aren't saying useful things?

I wrote no. If there's something wrong with that explain to me what it is and maybe point out a few other things I should avoid.

The advice to find a quote I like a few posts back did not do things for me but gave me a very clear direction to go and I can tell you it had never occurred to me to use quotes I like.
I am going to start actually doing that just as soon as I get a chance to sort through some of my favorite quotes for something I think would be useful as a headline.


I realize I'm doing a bad job of selling myself but as usual your advice is basically "stop sucking at this so bad," (in addition to "turn into someone good at picking up chicks in person.")

If I was having trouble with math problems and I asked for help understanding what I was doing wrong would I be in the wrong to not be very pleased when people told me "oh, well the problem is that your answer isn't the right one. You should make that be right" and when I ask people how I am supposed to figure out what the right numbers are would make any sense for them to respond "hey, I'm not going to write the right answer down for you. Stop being such a child and just do what I told you to"?


I started signing up for these sites a year ago because I was unhappy with how often I meet people in person. No, I didn't say chicks there Mr Salesman. I said people. The problem was that I don't meet anyone anymore despite my being out and about in the busiest city in the state every day.
I tried resolving to actively acquaint myself with people as often as possible but I stopped seeing people in any of the settings I'd have been any good at talking to them in (stopping people walking by on the sidewalk seems like a bad idea because they're busy going somewhere, or should I drop that line of thinking?)

Well, I'm probably pushing the limits of how much you'll tolerate (fuses seem short here,) so before you decide never to bless this ingrate with any more advice can you answer a question for me? If there was a fellow salesman having trouble making any sales, largely because he didn't know what sells, and for whatever reason you found yourself telling him how you do it what would you say and do you think he could just pick it up any just do it if he really intended to?

Well that averages out to 1 a year so the percent you're beating me by is infinity :/

So about how many people have you sent mail to/replied to in those two years?

Well I kind of like to not have to travel 500 miles to meet people face to face. There is that one forum for just people in my state but looking around that has shown me that Utah is apparently full of 50 year olds talking about the weather and that there are a few people way on the other border of the state my age commenting on how people in this state don't seem to reply very much.

Well, there's also the woman with an angel picture that seems to post in every thread but even she says there's basically nobody in there.

I'd probably have a better shot finding people in my state in the "under 30" board but that's mostly because I haven't looked in there and like to hope for the best.

Or does storming the forums mean something entirely different?

Interpret what poorly?

Vaccine Shmaccine, it's a piece of cake to insert any DNA you want into cells these days (except maybe full chromosome transfer,) so you just break the needle a virus uses to get into cells in nine different ways so there's no hope of fixing itself by luck and then have a cell make a bunch of those and squirt that in someone's nose, or eyes if you're upset and want to take it out on strangers.



Now that, that's more the tone I want when writing about myself but I don't know how to do that while describing preferences and hobbies.

Because I was given the very vague advice "change it" and nobody ever got back to me about that. I've even asked if people were just not saying anything because it somehow worked.

"You need things you can't reasonably get to attract women who are jaded" is a better description of it. Anyone that gets hit on over and over all day long is going to start to just ignore most of it unless someone really stands out. Most guys don't relate since we're the ones expected to do the asking but I'm been listening to researchers talk about how humans react to modern society a lot.

It does seem like most black women are eager to respond though. Too bad Utah is white even in comparison to the usual white majority areas.

Tragedy of the commons. "If I don't take advantage of these people somebody else will so not doing it only hurts me" sort of thinking.
Well, it's nastier how I put it while the idea is more general.

I want to be treated according to my mood. If you thought the golden rule ever meant you should stick bandaids on people when you've cut yourself you must be trying to interpret it poorly.

Sure but there was a point in the lives of any masochist before the adult appreciation of aversive stimuli. Instead of just flat out "feel pain" it's then "when I appreciate pain feel pain" and if you put that through the golden rule then you're treating everyone the way you want to be treated, it just takes recognition that you have to pay attention to their mood at the time of treatment.

So I think I work better with being asked questions than I do with being given instructions. Would anybody else like to give this a shot that way?

But people won't value that equally so there must be some that would be hindered by preventing wars.
OR
You've had no reason to keep complaining about how much people value things. I'm saying that when we exchange a lot (and as mentioned earlier we only make exchanges when we think they do something for us so we can't say how much but we can say it's positive value change rather than negative,) the benefits from lots of exchanges add up, eventually, to more than you could possibly gain by taking things from your trade partners by force.

It's non-zero sum because they are also gaining OBJECTIVE value from the exchanges and right now all the societies doing much exchange have, in general, the subjective views that they gain a lot by it, which matches up with just about every objective measure you could ever think of.


SO- to have less war we do need to look at those people who do not place as much subjective value on trade. As it turns out the objective value they're gaining from it right now it petty, slim, or nonexistent so it makes sense that they would place little subjective value in world economy style trade. If we help them develop things so that they do start gaining objectively their subjective views will follow, unless we change the view first in order to get them involved in the first place (but trying to spread our ideals to others hasn't worked so well in recent decades so we should probably take a more direct approach in helping them get on their fee tso to speak.)

You obviously need to take a loot at the things people want now before you go giving them things but in my experience studying and otherwise seeing what's going on in other cultures the parts of the world most prone to war want the things global economy trade would give them. There are small groups that don't and in many places you'll have the equivalent of televangelical Christians preaching about how the changes are making things worse than in they were traditionally (and to be honest new evils they weren't used to do pop up but with a little preparation for it they won't be nearly so bad as the stuff they get rid of,) but let's help as many people as we can right now.

War requires some group of rich folk and a good sized group of average ones so just by taking this first step we would make it much less common to have both of those in a country that were willing to go to war. After having made decent progress in helping the easier groups of people in the world to help we could then turn to smaller groups and evaluate how we could best help them. There will be more overall wealth around them with which to work with and working off of what I said earlier about reducing local crime/violence by having inclusive support systems for the downtrodden setting up help for small groups benefits the people who are already doing well by making their neighborhoods safer.

Is this making sense?

You're the one saying that preventing war won't help everyone.
(Strictly speaking if Iraq had gone as planned preventing it wouldn't have helped certain members of the government but I'm talking about how we make it undesirable to even them.)

What does that have to do with making people suffer to gain happiness?

You're certainly arguing against me saying the opposite fervently.

Both, or all if there are more than two people/groups involved at a time.

If that works for you. From an external viewpoint it should be easy to see how they both have more than they had before.


The way I said it that you've omitted in this quote is direct enough that there shouldn't be more failures of communication.

"For me to be happier someone else has to suffer." To get more of something someone else must have less of it.
If you disagree with this you've totally derailed this to talk about some kind of undefined value that doesn't have anything to do with this topic.

If you agree with it then you're a nasty person (from an external viewpoint,) but hopefully this stuff I've been talking about will have a bigger impact on your life in the coming years and you'll understand that good things for other people can mean good things for you as well without having to mean an equal amount of bad on some other group, subjective, objective, or however the hell you want to think about it.

Well to artificially expand the implication he's saying that because everyone has their own opinion it doesn't make sense to say that people can make an evaluation of the total value of things around them so it's not possible for there to be more total after an exchange than there was before it.

As he's arguing against some part of my -"people have to suffer for me to have happiness" is backwards thinking- explanation but I can't quite tell what he is objecting to since he keeps tying this up in "this stuff is subjective and there's no way to take an objective view because we aren't capable of that."

Looking at this on the level of the individual is not useful because with a few billion people you've always got one who thinks Iraq is a made up country and that the moon owes him five dollars.

Well the two schools of thought of what they're up to know amount to
A: More unsuccessful mind control research that relies on countless people keeping their mouths shut and they do because world governments are very competent and sinister.
B: None of that because they know they're so incompetent that they can barely keep from plunging their countries into ruin and spend most moments of the day resisting the urge to do anything because they think they'll definitely end up making things worse.

From time to time I hear some convincing arguments for option A but more often it's hard to see how it could be anything but B, but maybe that's just successful mind control in action.

I'm talking culturally, not individually. Individuals that deviate from certain things just die off and if they didn't pass on ideas of genes before doing so they're gone almost as quickly as they showed up.

You can't point to any culture where starving to death at an undefined time is valued positively. There are a few "you're old so now go off into the woods and die so that we may prosper" types but none that welcome starvation whenever you happen to run into a shortage of food.