Steve Sailer writes: I don’t have the patience to listen to talk when I could be reading.
Comments:
* No offense, but since you are a Baby Boomer, I feel compelled to ask: were you aware that you can download podcasts on your smartphone, allowing you to listen to them while you’re doing some otherwise dreary and time consuming task like commuting, walking, doing dishes, et cetera?
Because I share your preference for reading over audio when possible, but I think the reason that podcasts are so popular among what Tyler Cowen calls “infovores” is that they’re a way to get extra information when you’re doing something that’s boring but you can’t read a book while you do it.
* I have a job where I can listen to podcasts all day long. Then I walk to the gym (takes 50 minutes), lift weights, walk back home, all while listening to podcasts. I also listen while walking the dog, doing housework, working in the yard, etc. And then there’s bluetooth in the car for more listening. That’s a lot of hours of podcasts in a typical day. Much more efficient for me than reading.
* I check in regularly at Vox Day’s site as he often has interesting things to say, but his current all-out assault on Jordan Peterson displays some of the flaws in his own personality: his compulsion to indulge in petty squabbles and need to constantly assert his own preeminence.
* I have to imagine that Professor Peterson’s public reach is an order or two of magnitude above Vox’s, which I suspect is a source of jealously and frustration for Mr. Beale.
* Unfortunately, in one his genuinely more illuminating recent posts, he explained how the only person who never really failed him was Tolkien, but Tolkien is dead, so he’s not going to give personal advice. Vox obviously reads Sailer, so if he reads this I urge him to seriously consider whether he has gone off track. Ditch all of the petty squabbles and self-assertion. You’re doing good. You don’t need that stuff.
* I enjoy reading him, but he seems unhinged. Like Roissy (apologies, as you are probably on this thread, and you have made some intelligent posts that I have commented on), he is obsessed with proving that everyone who opposes him is a gamma male and everyone who agrees with him is an alpha.
I also find his habit of calling Trump “the God Emperor” a bit weird.
* On the PUA scene, the alpha is the guy who gets to bang a reasonably attractive drunk woman after the bar closes, but he may in all other aspects of his life be a loser. When I worked at a large ad agency there were two good-looking young guys who did very well with the ladies. However, they were at the bottom of the totem pole in the corporate hierarchy. No one took their opinions seriously. So they were alpha in one domain and nothing much in the other.
* I think that there is a rational but unspoken reason for women to object to pick up artists. For most of human history if a woman wanted to identify a man who could take care of her children, self confident behaviour around other men was probably the best tell. There were well built men who were slaves, men with genetically good looks who were young and powerless, men who had all the outer appearences of success but whose position was insecure and so could not afford to act confidently as they might annoy other men who they were dependant on.
Self confidence was the best single measure of how well a man could take care of you, if a man acted this way around other men and did not have the power to back it up he would quickly be put in his place.
In a modern, urban, law abiding state where people meet and may not see each other again there is now little danger for the even the least powerful to behave convincingly confidently in public and this can be consciously learnt by PUAs. Many women still have an irrational attraction for this behaviour, the way a cat cannot control itself in chasing a laser pointer.
