I keep getting a bit of a backlog of essays on here as of late, because I have a planned posting schedule, that I interrupt on occasion when I get inspired to write something else that I think should be pushed out right away. In this case, I was sitting around on twitter thinking about a twitter thread I wanted to do, on how someone needs to make a TV show in the style of “The Most Evil Men in History” called “The Most Basic Bitches in History“. However, before I could compose that thread, this old statement I heard from Christopher Hitchens popped into my mind, I’m not sure if he was quoting someone, but the statement goes something like

“Which is more likely, that the whole natural order was suspended or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie?”

I was unsure of why this statement stuck in my head, but over the course of a few days it became very clear to me. I wrote a long series on women with narcissistic, borderline and anti-social personality disorder a while back. This series was largely fueled by my own experience with such women, but also the experience of other men with whom I’ve spoken about their experiences.

A major characteristic of people who suffer from these disorders is to create alternate realities into which they draw their targets. Bernie Madoff drew his investors into an alternative reality he created, in which they were making massive returns on their investments. The trappings of his lifestyle, his behavior, the flying monkeys that surrounded him, and indeed many professional journalists reinforced this reality, so should a person develop doubt, they would question their own powers of observation, rather than the reality Mr. Madoff created. This could be explained as industrial-strength gas lighting.

Charlie Manson, of whom I spoke in “Of Lobsters and Serial Murder” did much the same thing, he created an alternate reality for his following, in which they were the bastion of hope for humanity’s salvation in the coming cataclysm that existed only within his mind, and as a collective delusion among them. Any opposition his group faced was explained through this paradigm.

This is very advanced frame game, where not only is the person in control of the frame capable of maintaining frame control, this is not that impressive of a feat. It’s much more impressive that they were capable of creating a frame in which every action, word or deed that contradicted their frame would be interpreted by their targets as being within the frame, thus re-inforcing it.

They construct such strong frames by creating narratives that stretch much beyond a normal frame. To exemplify this, the classic “chase frame” is a move in which a man flips the script on a woman he is pursing and frames the interaction as if the woman is pursuing him. A Manson level version of this frame would being able to maintain a frame around the woman, where she interprets every other woman as pursuing the man, regardless of what is really happening, and every action any person takes is taken as confirming and re-enforcing this frame.

This would not only build a reality in her mind where she is chasing him, it would also be built-in dread game and social proof, meaning that if he was aware of her being in this frame of mind, merely smiling at the cashier could have massive second and third order consequences. Continue reading →

This is in no means an extensive and exhaustive review or introduction into how one goes about conducting research. It’s a rather quick overview of the various steps taken when conducting research, and how one can utilize and apply the conclusions of such research when forming one’s own view of a subject.

A while ago Illimitable Man wrote a great essay entitled “Critical Thinking & The Citation Needed Fallacy” in which he explored the question of whether one can justify holding a particular view on a subject without peer-reviewed academic studies to support it. This was without a doubt born from the realization that to most people, a well-reasoned, and researched empirical observation explored through logic is no longer admissible in discourse without academic studies to back it up, studies which are in turn dismissed for a variety of reasons.

This came to to me while I was watching a youtube video that can be summarized as “If one has none of the symptoms of low testosterone, in fact one’s physical manifestations indicate high testosterone, yet one’s blood test shows low testosterone values, does one have low testosterone?”

In this case, one has two contradictory observations. On one hand, if a man is carrying a lot of muscle mass, has a ton of energy, a high libido, no signs of depression and low body fat percentage, plus is performing very well in athletics, these are the antithesis of the symptoms for low testosterone. On the other hand we have an empirical observation using a quantitative, positivist method, interpreted according to the optimum range or reference range. Do we put this person on TRT or not?

Continue reading →

One of my major areas of focus is in self-improvement. Every year around my birthday I sit down with a tumbler of good scotch and close the books on the preceding year. This means that I’ll look at where I was last year, look at where I am now, and use that to make decisions about there I want to be next year. This is in essence breaking down the “past, present and future” paradigm into smaller chunks that can be measured. A major principle I tend to adhere to is the old statement by management guru Peter Drucker, “What gets measured gets managed“, now some things are very difficult to create metrics for such as level of confidence, anxiety or depression. Other things are very suited for measurements such as number of workouts, lifting progress in volume or intensity, sleep, diet and many others.

One reason of the reasons why I implement such metrics is simply because it keeps me accountable and I find that I do better if I schedule and plan things out in advance. It’s very easy to fall into “I’m tired today, I’ll get to the gym tomorrow“, “I should do some work, but I had a 14 hour day yesterday” and similar traps. If you’ve got everything planned out and made into habits, you will feel antsy if you don’t do them. However, the major reason why I track and measure things that I think are important in my life is that if you are not tracking your journey from point A to point Z, how do you know when you’ve arrived at point Z? How do you know if you are off track, or even heading in the wrong direction? You don’t.

I’ve named this essay, the mathematics of self improvement, because I’m going to be talking about the various mathematical principles that many people misunderstand when it comes to improving their life as a whole or parts of their life. Continue reading →