No.
Everyone on the planet.
So you think everyone isn’t on automatic pilot, that everyone really knows what they are doing?
I don’t think so myself. Many people do lots of stuff automatically. Like leaving doors open even when the air conditioning is on… mental processes are going on in the background…
A question of degree… think of a spectrum instead of a simple black-white division… I’ve asked clinical psychologists about this matter, the rough consensus is that “equivalent emotionals” are attrracted… this is big business and appropriate budgets are set to market all manner of things based on various scales of evolved vs. unevolved… not the least being Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs… the bulk of marketing, advertising, selling IS framed on post-Maslow theory… and good people, when you’re out there in the mix you’re also ummm… marketing, advertising, and selling your bill of goods…
Our amigos at the Stanford Research Institute have the VALSII (values and lifestyles) metric…:
VALS assumes two upward slopes, based on “resources” (this could be a lot of things… not just money) and “innovation”… I’d look at innovation as something like the capacity to imagine one’s life or the state of the world as different from the way it is currently presented…
So VALS splits the public into those driven by ideals (anything from Greenpeace to Neo-Cons hanging out at a Washington bar) in the first bin, to achievers, who won’t be so ideological but measure life in concrete personal gains (your competitive types, athletes, management dudes, trophies and diplomas… matter… a lot…), and third-ish, experiencers… we’ve been drifting heavily into the experiencer camp, if you’ve noticed, restaurants and hotels are now “experiences”…
Now, personally most pre-packaged experiences leave me so bored I’m glassy eyed, yet I know plenty of people who seem to live for these carefully designed, randomness free moments of perfection… Sometimes I can drop into an experiencer frame of reference, but I’d go stark nuts doing that every night… as for rabid idealists… ever been with a really sexy wonkette for whom everything required commitment ???.. like, there was something basically wrong with people who weren’t “into the cause”… a cause, any cause… as long as the is injustice in this world ! Gaaaaaad…
Sure, for us achiever types, we can be healthy sorts as long as we don’t become destructively competitive, and also, one can appreciate the energies of the idealist… one should have a little idealist of you’re just a weird drone, and one can appreciate the curiosity of the experiencer… but we’re not going to be fundamentally turned on by those not focused where we’re focused…
I’ve also seen an excess of these “win everything, every time, every argument, every point, at all costs” sort of people… they have this grim, sort of adrenalized neurotic worldview of Beautiful People vs Assholes model of existence… perpetually terrified of being associated with anything Asshole… they’re the ones at the cocktail party with the very stiff necks that turn sideways so as not to make egalitarian eye contact when talking, or snubbing… or scanning for bigger fish…worthy of … THEM!
Don’t think women who grow up in rich, competitive, zero-sum family systems don’t come out of these dynamics loaded for bear ? There is a well funded divorce industry that caters to exactly this type, as thoughtfully marketed as the Bently or Rolls… errrrr… “marque”… ech… at that mmmm… “rarified level” they don’t have brands… brands are for the potato eaters, they have marques… or something even more mysterious, something you will never know… and only those with the Ytterbium Card can gaze upon the Unctuous Plasm… you go girl !
Not for me, thanks… anything that unbalances my serum cortisol or raises my blood pressure is no fun… alpha head games are just more bad theater, I mean, if you want to go contemplate bent out of shape alpha there’s always Neil LaBute and David Mamet…
Those guys observe and report on social patterning in some depth… not alwys the prettiest sight…
So what’s with this Nice Girl meets Bad Boy thing, is it as easily reduced into some form of oversocialized meets undersocialized… your swaggering id seeks my prim superego, or is you desperate need for structure meeting my desperate need for release… down to the nitty gritty, to what extent can offsetting differences be a turn on and a shot of growth energy, and where do they become distracting, tiring, annoying and not one’s life path ?
In my model of things, whatever your personal style, it can be evolved or unevolved… and two evolved people can be coming from really different perspectives… or more like, the greater your state of evolution (or emotional development, or psychic growth… ) the wider range of people unlike yourself you can hook up with, yet paradoxically the fewer one feels the need to hook up with… in plain english, the emotional simpleton wants to bang everything in sight… I suppose an achiever feels the need to do this out of achievement demends, out bagging trophies for the collection… and the experiencer will be looking for… experiences… “she hung me up by fuscia rabbit fur cuffs”… damn if I know what
Idealists do for kicks… earnestly write ther congressmen, chant Vedic things, bathe with glycerine soap ?
Then there is this VALS group “innovators”… it would be a mistake to say there is a clear innovator vs. everyone else line in the sand out there… it isn’t like that… to the degree that one is moving in the innovator direction, one probably understands that the lower VALS categories are perspectives, which come bundled with attitudes… and the perspective-attitude bundle that one is immersed in IS the result of a number of circumstances…
So where is the development arc here… ? I think it is toward a greater appreciation of oneself as being the product of specific circumstances, the nation or tribe, the family, the physical qualities of one’s environment, the language, history, myths and dramas which give one meaning and identity… it’s a subtle but powerful distinction, on one hand saying “I AM this or that” (therefore, on an unconscious level, you ARE my… some figure from the past) and on the other hand " I am OF this or that" (therefore, I get that you resemble, perhaps only superficially…)
How does this distinction play out ? If you are hard core in the first box, you’ll do a heck of a lot of what psychologists call “projection”, and the natural result of projection is… psychodrama ! 
(quickie test for the presence of a psychodramatist… they love to exclaim-inquire “why does this always happen to me” ??? as if the world at large has a special project just for them…)
Psychodrama is boring, psychodrama is sucky, and psychodrama is more addictive than crack… you’d think we’d learn by now, but then, you’d think people would have wised up to dope by now too…
Let’s move over to our non-existent box 2, where things are different at the identity level… this one processes more like, this is the hand I’ve been dealt, and I will have some mental crap going on, and my circumstances may require presenting myself as XYZ, and maybe I like to excel at this role when I need to, but I have a number of other possible choices…
Now we have a novel scale that ought to be given by every marriage/realtionship counselor, IMHO:
“Emotional Thinking refers to a generalized inability to distinguish emotions and thoughts. For some, strong emotions tend to interfere with balanced and realistic thought processes and can result in distorted views of situations and relationships. The Emotional Thinking Scale (ETS) is a completely new and improved version of the Globality-Differentiation Scale (Mehrabian, Stefl, & Mullen, 1997). Reliability and validity data on the Emotional Thinking Scale were provided by Mehrabian (2000), showing that Emotional Thinking is a highly relevant negative predictor of life success. With reference to the conventional definition of emotional intelligence, Emotional Thinking relates to low emotional control, inability to manage stress and life difficulties, inadequate communication skills due to distorted perceptions of others, and low impulse control”…
and this juicy bit of thought food:
Persons with higher General Emotional Intelligence Scale (GEIS) scores, compared with those with lower scores, have been found to show:
- higher self-esteem,
- higher optimism,
- lower trait anxiety,
- lower depression,
- lower emotional thinking (i.e., selective and distorted thought processes due to excessive emotionality),
- higher achievement and success orientation,
- higher disciplined goal orientation,
- higher affiliation, sociability, and friendliness,
- higher social competence
- higher self-actualization (i.e., capacity to develop to one’s full potential),
- higher adaptive coping (i.e., deal adaptively with everyday life stressors),
- higher integrity and honesty,
- higher IQ (general intelligence)
Soooooo… who do you think is going to hook up with whom, anyway???
These conceptual models are interesting and valuable.
The psychological theories of “influence” and “fixed action patterns” also give a different perspective on “autopilot,” one that is often used in one form or another by many of the posters on this board.
However, these useful psychological models, and all the others, are models, and not reality. They can be useful in manipulating reality.
Whenever I’ve started believing I was “more evolved” than other people I set myself up for a “correction” by the cosmos. Those corrections can be more or less painful/fun/enlightening, depending on how they are administered and how they are received.
If a model helps you think better or do your thing better, its a good model… everything we know is a model… you can’t experience reality directly, the brain has to make an internal depiction… which is based on primate evolution… so a dog can make a highly accurate internal depiction too, but it won’t look-feelsound-smell anything like a human model… his model helps him succeed as a dog, ours helps us succeed as a late stage primate… with these higher abstractions, like VALSII, its like having a pretty decent map of the general terrain… you won’t know the position of every rock… having said that, sitting around and meditating on what’s worked and what hasn’t, through the VALS prism, I can see where me + a hardcore experiencer are going to reach a limit, and I can go easy on my experiencers, knowing that they are put together that way, its not a curse from above, just a sytlistic shading… I also (now, finally) get that I’m simply going to need a certain achiever mindset or my fire isn’t going get lit… there’s got to be some upwards drive in there… underline the concept of “drive”… which, by way of nuance, I don’t exactly equate with “driven”… like, I knew this guy with a tiny penis, itty bitty little thingy that looked like a probocsis one one of those nocturnal mammals with big sticky toes… and boy, can you spell o.v.e.r.c.o.m.p.e.n.s.a.t.e. ? Whew… about worked his little dick ass to death trying to get over his little dick… guy looked like some kind of mummified shit by the time he was fifty… so “driven” might not be such a good thing, driven before the lash, driven to madness… no gracias, driven people scare me because there’s always other figures present (for them) that are invisible to me… I especially don’t like getting into fast cars with such types… having something to prove at 120 m.p.h. can be a problem… or the equivalent thereof… where “drive” appears to be the consequence of a childhood of encouragement and positive reinforcement, so there is an active, constructive hunger for life minus the defensive, reactive element.
I also believe that the nut of what things work like magic or go south like a bag of lead shot dropped into the Hudson river is this engaged, proactive mentality… or so MY mind works… and I didn’t always get that central point… My mind is hopelessly hooked up to look at things like that, but I can’t assume that everybody else will share the same frame of reference… and a model like VALS helps me see that this is not everyone’s style… idealists often seem (to me) to be airheads, whiners, guilt trippers, babbling ideologues… but I see that they are probably genetic fits to slot, descended from the lookout monkeys that let out the warning whoops when a hungry snake was spotted, and the experiencers, I guess they were the monkeys figuring out which berries were good to eat and which one caused you to drop dead in 20 minutes…
But as for useful ? Here and now ? If a girly girl starts making hit lists of the 8 restaurants we MUST go to I’m already onto the typology… ahem… experiencer… and if she starts talking about all the horrible things wrong or how we should this, should that… hoo boy… something about the imperative nature loaded into “should”… one should be particularly careful of shoulds and other imperatives that have any missionary element to them… unless you’re a cause junkie…
I suppose that achievers have their own sort of idealism, that each person doing their own dumb little thing really well and not wasting any energy on factors one cannot directly change, ultimately like a hive of bees, all those little contributions have the deepest net positive effect after all…
Heck, if I’d known that 20 years ago I would have spared myself oodles of energy trying to turn sow’s ears into silk purses, which ain’t going to happen no matter what you do…
I don’t want to disrespect those on this board, but the responses to this thread are definately from social conditioned mindsets, saying whatever you feel deems you to be in the right position on this matter. I don’t want to say it, but it’s a “politically correct” stance that most of you are pushing here by attacking the dialogue of the post, rather than the meaning behind it. In my experience, women say things, then act another way (as do men). Yes, we all live our own subjectively, and thus I believe not every woman seeks a “bad boy,” but a man with a backbone, so there is truth in the matter that “nice guys” DO end up with the shortest straw. It’s a matter of fact in my experience, and with the many other “nice guys” out there who succeed only a handful of times while these “naughty boys” ARE getting laid more frequently. If you tend to bicker with that, then you are in denial. For the ladies, nobody is attacking your ego, so it’s pointless to take a personal slant on this issue. As far as the seduction/dating email thing is concerned, it is all a marketing ploy, and it’s evident in the way that it’s written.
The best way I state this as a “nice guy” is in the fact that you meet what seems like a “nice girl” only to find out that she was stringing you along, dumping all of her emotional baggage (please, do not try to refute this… it happens EVERY time, and I’ve talked to every kind of girl out there, including mature women) onto you, playing the flirtatious role, and then BAM!, she freezes you out. What happened? “You are a REALLY nice guy, but let’s just be friends.” Gee, thanks. In comes the barhopping junkie with his harley davison leather jacket and bandana Didn’t you just tell me that all men are dogs, and only want sex? Didn’t you just tell me that you want a man that can understand your feelings, and provide you with everything that is mental, sexual, and sensual? Did you not see those traits in me? Were you just spilling a bunch of bullshit? In her case, YES, she was spilling a bunch of bullshit.
But, y’know what? I also see the man with a backbone who owns his reality, and guess what? He gots that girl who rolled off with the jackass in the previous paragraph. As a matter of fact, he STOLE that girl from that very same jackass, because a woman wants a man who can own his own reality.
That’s the way I’ve experienced and observed the male-female dynamic. I didn’t read that in a seduction manual, although it IS in the seduction manuals. I’m going to sum this up the way Neil Strauss put it, “If you’re a woman reading this, of course it wouldn’t work on you!” But, it does work on women, otherwise the human species would have died out ages ago.
heh heh … make sure you’re fishing in the right pond… the women that do display these selective… errrr… inconsistencies tend to be, mmm… not exactly first rate stuff… azza matter of fact… inconsistency and trashy seem to be correlated.. 
learned my lesson real good… don’t get mixed up with people with screwed up character… if a figure such as a “biker junkie” has any part of it, I’d rather be so far from the whole shebang that I don’t hear one more peep… IME… the thing that signals a problem, or a rats nest of problems on a whole lotta levels, IS inconsistent behavior, giving out different versions of the truth, being moved around too much by moods and impuses. Flighty people are (for me, were…) maybe more stimulating in a way for while, but the energy costs of dealing with the instabilities or flaky values are awfully consuming after a while… I went through a phase with a buch of art school girls who were… well… not parsimonious with their yonis… all that bohemianism and blurred boundaries eventually ran them into the ground or they got out and straightened up… my bad boys could score on the cheap end of the scale, and score they did, then they tried for higher level women, and they couldn’t get to first base… there they were in their bar-club-smoke a joint-go nowhere existence and they weren’t getting out, and the hot girls who could leave had long since left… t’was a painful sight, aging hipsters trying to keep it together…
…
LOL, sshhh mindset, didn’t you get the memo? You are supposed to be parroting the official correct line of thinking. EVERYONE’s contributions are all equally important and valid because there is no such thing as objective truth, merely feelings, and as we all know, feelings can never be wrong.
Quick question, is it actually lying when the person speaking actually believes the lie they are saying? The human capacity for self deception is endless. Society still attaches some stigma or surprise against women being promiscuous (note in this very forum section a thread on Jessica Alba and no-string sex.) Hence the common incongruence between claiming to want nice guys and (what really matters) the woman’s actions. The individual must deceive themselves that what they want is the so called nice guy otherwise it would be a threat to their self esteem. Of course once you lie to yourself it’s a simple matter to project that lies to others.
That’s why, all things being equal, I always take the opinion of the marketer over that of the academic. So many countless surveys/reports are done by academics and find themselves all over the internet. Academics don’t face nearly the pressures to be accurate as marketers do.
One on the internet I just saw was about the number of sexual partners. The academic claims the results MUST be true, after all, it was an anonymous phone survey, so why would people lie? The marketing researcher (should) know that people lie to themselves, don’t trust it is anonymous, resent the phone intrusion and lie, so on and so on. There are too many internet postings on the findings of academics. Market researcher screws up and the company will find out quite soon that the demand for a product wasn’t so great as thought. Greater accountability frequently leads to greater accuracy.
Ultimately nothing a person says or thinks ever matters, only actions matter.
With each decade of life, the quality of the people you associate with becomes about 10x as important… low quality people CAN be entertaining but they suck the energy out of you, their word isn’t worth a heck of a lot, they’re always getting into one fiasco or another that needs a bail out, they’re balancing a couple of screwed up relationships… poor self image or something… however, I’ve know porn stars made of better stuff than many lawyers , so you can’t assume who’s the good item from the surface layer alone… and then there was this rich psychologist who didn’t know squat about the way a relationship worked… what is she doing advising people about relationships, anyway ? So there’s sorta two sides, a good run of crazy love, wild sex teaches you one big crate full of reality lessons, and education, self discipline, mindfulness teaches you another… :o … category A has a secret craving for respectability, their biggest hang up is the thought that they are no so much creative rebels as laughable… … and category B would love to act out a little rebellion and doesn’t have a clue as to how one goes about this…
I really enjoy reading your posts tacitus
I’m gonna go with average porn star > average lawyer at just about everything.
As I do too…
Date.com has posted an article on the topic of this thread!
Date Info - The webzine of Date.com
Just a thought tacitus and everyone else, could p83 be a part of “bad boy"ishness? I wonder.. Does adding it to our mixes, give a certain " powerful GUT LEVEL ATTRACTION” like they feel for “bad guys” (quotes from the article) ?
food for thought…
From the article
Yesterday I met a really good girl.. she was not attractive physically too. There really was no connection at any level…half the things I talked about she couldn’t understand.. felt quite bored…
Myself I prefer Cinnamon Girls…
Hmmm..I wonder what language you were using!! So, I guess she was the third girl you dated in a week, eh? Actually, I just noticed that you started this thread! May God bless you with many, many good girls, Phoenix!!
thanks!!! same to you!!
I’ll be just friends if anything with this girl though.
I think education levels have a part in this too. I had a certain DHV to her too so that might have had an effect. Nope I didn’t use a314 or it would have been much worse.
ugh, Phoenix I was reading that link and the whole time thinking, “man does this sound like David Deangelo.” Then I looked up and saw the author, Christian Carter, a.k.a, David Deangelo a.k.a. hypnosis spelled backwards guy. Yeah sure, “he’s not actually David Deangelo, he’s just an associate.” Bullshit. David Deangelo isn’t his real name either, so why should people be surprised when he pops up with a different name for a different target market?
Look I have nothing against DD but frankly there are so many better people to listen to. Deangelo is second to none if you like theories (and man he has worked out some comprehensive ones) but my take is now there are just so many people trying to cash in on this area that anyone that doesn’t do live workshops should be ignored. Talk is cheap, people are trying to scam others for a quick buck, if you can’t prove what you say, you shouldn’t be given the time. Yes, I do think every man should read the double your dating ebook, great introduction to how things actually work. The section on the provider versus the lover is especially important in a time when society conditions men to “buy her things to win her approval.”
There are 2 common themes, warm dominance and cold dominance. Deangelo preaches cold dominance, the aloof, cocky type. The stereotype jerk falls under this category as well. For warm dominance see juggler method (alpha nice, not that he conveys this well), people like TheApproach and Vin Dicarlo. I’m pretty sure what I’ve heard of Pickup101 is playful warm dominance (particularly note the roles assigned in banter.) You’ve gotta go with what’s best for you, but I’m of the opinion that warm dominance is best for results and for yourself.
Well the predictable and responsible thing to say is relying on pheromones is always a bad idea and improving yourself is always a good idea. More to the point, if it is anything like -none you had better be prepared to act the part that p83 conveys. Otherwise it is incongruent, and if you’re at a crowded place sometimes women associate the pheromones with a nearby man that more closely fits the message. Their brain could go, “oh obviously it isn’t coming from him, must be the other man nearby.”
Why talk about things someone can’t understand? I would think that would be pretty boring to listen to (I’m just thinking of all the math classes I took, bored out of my mind because I never understood it.) Plus if you were bored, then it’s guaranteed she was bored. No matter what your state is emotionally, a woman will receive it. Depending on the study, women have 14-16 places in the brain registering the emotions of others. Men? 5-7. There’s a reason things like Seasonal Affective Disorder primarily affect women. You go up to a woman nervous, she picks up on your nervousness and she herself is nervous. Who wants to feel nervous? So she quickly gets rid of the nervous projecting guy. Ever hear someone say to talk about something you are passionate about? I don’t care if it is stamp collecting (hard to get more nerdy) if you are passionate about it and talk about it in a passionate way watch women light up. Men think “I can’t talk about that, it sounds lame.” Not realizing men care more about things and women care more about the emotion of things. You ask her what her passions are, and she says surfing. Stamp collecting and surfing are nothing alike, yet you are connecting. Boring = lack of emotion, so how can you having a boring conversation about each others passions?
Tell ya what, how about instead of reading things for women, you take a look at something like this: Charisma Tips Basically it helps flesh out juggler method, something that isn’t scripted or based on fake routines and you can start using in conversations right away. Start from the beginning entries (they’re more useful) because a lot builds on itself.
Scaro,
I actually did talk about the things I’m passionate about.. some of them actually.. but she couldn’t understand half of what I was saying..
Yeah, date.com has stuff by deangelo too.
I’m a warm dominant personality I guess actually… I go about it naturally and I seem to do fine..
Well, (as you said) this could be due to different levels of education, intelligent, mind set, etc, which could easily lead to communications breakdown. So, in order to have a better communication, we sometimes have to bring our levels down to theirs, and be a ‘bridge’ for them to “reach” us.
“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said” - Peter F.Drucker
You’re most welcome!
You are right.. but I can’t imagine doing this for the rest of my life (marrying such a person).. sorry but I need to talk with a woman too (ie not just do physical stuff)…