Saturday, June 27, 2015

Too Boring

Alpha Game currently features a series of posts on becoming Delta. Commenters express confusion: Delta means mediocore. Why strive for mediocrity?

One commenter notes that the Delta Author does not enjoy life:

It's plain there is zero excitement in life for a delta. You can hear it in the bland tone of these pieces in the delta series.

This is not a fair characterization. Men often speak in a dull tone, doubly-so for academic text. Reading Rollo or Vox reminds me of the Federalist Papers. Lord help the man who powers through Keynes or Friedman, or any dry academic text.

Do not confuse the absence of overt emotion with the absence of life. Beige prose deserves recognition as part of the American's man literary arsenal, and demands for Romanticized accounts of normal life generate unrealistic expectations for the ordinary man.

I quite enjoy my life. Here's what I did this morning:

-Woke up
-Walked to the village library
-Picked up a book on pre-revolutionary France
-Watched a few episodes of Evangelion
-Baked a turkey casserole
-Bought groceries
-Cleaned my house
-Properly made love to my fertile young Wife
-Played guitar
-Read a National Geographic book on Medieval History
-Wrote this blog post


Dry? Uninspired? If you say so. I enjoy sitting beside my picture window in the home I have purchased out of my legitimately earned market wage and maintain through the sweat of my brow, learning the history of the Anglo-Saxons and Carolingians that gave birth to the current A Definite Beta Guy.


Next, I'll grill some ribeyes, and if I am lucky, a swift summer storm will roll over my village before I watch the new Hunger Games film, rented at convenience from the local Redbox for a nominal fee.

This is a life my ancestors, fleeing the Thirty Year's War, would have envied, and for which they have created entire nations.

No, I don't need a damn jet ski, because I'm not a spoiled princess.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

An Egalitarian Competition





Watch this Ted Talk first:

Isn't it grand? Great teams collaborate with each other. They encourage each other, use everyone's ideas, let everyone have a say, and cannot even identify stars. Doesn't that sound like a great place to work?

A small tear came to my eyes, as I splashed this woman's utopian workplace against the backdrop of my favorite Spielberg mini-series:


Let's have a brief interlude for the moving soundtrack:


Finally, someone who gets it. Someone who understands the root of so many of our problems comes from the lack of respect as an individual, the lack of care for people as humans, the lack of inclusion, the lack of respect for the hard-work other people put in for the common good, the lack of...




Wait, stop a second. Where else have I seen Band of Brothers this week?

Right! When I caught up on my Manosphere reading, I glanced at Alpha Game, and saw Vox Day proclaim Band of Brothers the ultimate Delta Ideal:

Men of various strengths and weaknesses, from all walks of life are brought together to train, fight, and ultimately go back to whatever normalcy is possible after overseas combat in a horrific conflict. While it is fair to praise the show for the technical and artistic merits I believe the lasting appeal is that millions of regular guys can relate to the characters and know that they could have been right there with them.
 Goddam.

Just.

Goddam.

If you do not know why I curse this finding, here's a summary of Delta's where men struggle most, romantic relationships http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual-hierarchy.html:

Delta: The normal guy. Deltas are the great majority of men. They can't attract the most attractive women, so they usually aim for the second-tier women with very limited success, and stubbornly resist paying attention to all of the third-tier women who are comfortably in their league... In a social setting, the deltas are the men clustered together in groups, each of them making an occasional foray towards various small gaggles of women before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and engaged responses are not forthcoming...Deltas like women, but find them mysterious, confusing, and are sometimes secretly a little afraid of them.

This archtype holds no appeal at all for the majority of men. Men, the basic ordinary men, want to be something more like this:

Fast cards, hot women, great dress, no real work, lots of booze? Yeah, sign me up. Most young guys instinctively dig this lifestyle, and aspire to something like this. They might dig the espirt de corps over in Normandy, but when they come back to America, they want to live the Vin Diesel life.

Fortunately, the good Lord stacked the deck at birth, and those cards simply never come up for the majority of men. This probably is in no small part because a society of hormone-crazed, over-sexed men never would have the strength or will to construct this building:

Nor turn this harshest of landscapes into the breadbasket that feeds over a billion people:


No, incentives align like predestined stars, so that the average man can fulfill a role still needed. And, increasingly, the average woman.

There's really no problem with our idealistic Ted talk, except a question of implementation, particularly with respect to performance in romantic relationships.  Can you think of this applying to, say, OkCupid?

We're used to talking about stars. So I started to wonder, well, if we start working this way, does that mean no more stars? ... when I went to visit companies that are renowned for their ingenuity and creativity,I couldn't even see any superstars , because everybody there really mattered.
Obviously, this does not apply to OkCupid. We know that men in general really don't receive a lot of messages from women (even the stunningly attractive ones), we know that majority of women rate 80% of men as "below-average" in terms of attractiveness, we know that the few men who rate "above average" in women's eyes receive the lion's share of women's attention, we know that more attractive men have more sexual partners on average, etc.

Hypergamy doesn't care about egalitarianism. Hypergamy evolved to distinguish lesser men from greater men, and hypergamy does its job very well. That's how we emerged as the dominant species on the planet, after all.

I am happy that certain workplaces created flat hierarchies that encouraged growth and creativity, but expecting the entire world of men to sign up for something like that becomes a losing bargain in a world where open hypergamy runs wild. Sure, the working world is separate from the romantic world, to some extent, but our monkey-brains carry personalities and habits from one world into the other.

Look at it this way: It's not a major surprise that the world's most creative companies can create more egalitarian workplaces: everyone is a winner already, and those people tend to have greater degrees of trust and social capital built-in. They came from largely intact two-parent homes. They came from low-crime communities. They came from school systems where teachers did not molest students and did not fall asleep in classes.

Now imagine taking the Bloods and the Crips and throwing them together around a Google supercomputer. Ask them to create a flat hierarchy. They'll probably figure out how to run the super-computer first, because they have a lifetime of cultural learning that does NOT involve the kinds of high-trust, high-social-capital, high-egalitarian learning prized by yuppie kids that ride bicycles in San Francisco.

Speaking of which, how do Google employees get along with the rest of San Francisco anyways?

Looking at singular problems in isolation doesn't really do a damn lick of good. Here's a more realistic portrayal of how to build a functioning society:


That's how the US military structured nation-building in Afghanistan. Needless to say, didn't work out too well. But that's because nation-building is pain-staking, bottom-up work that people halfway across the world cannot impose in a matter of 10 years.

Similarly, if you want to create a more egalitarian society, you need to start seriously considering other people's perspectives, and pay attention to the numerous indicators that show men dropping out of society. Otherwise you'll find your service-and-tech economy plummeting through a gaping hole as an unserviced foundation cracks and yields all of human creation back to the soil from which we came.



Sunday, June 7, 2015

You Can't Go Home Again

I.

Progress marches onward. There's no turning back the clock now. We have full rights for huge and ever-growing swathes of the population. Every day marks another huge roll-back of the social injustice perpetuated by the dark spectre of our past, whether assuring equal access to the disabled, punishing cat-calling, our recognizing true courage in its most noble form:



We're told there's no going back now. We hear loud proclamations of permanent victory in the Manosphere part of the web. A lot of Social Justice Warriors, falsely assuming all men want to force women back into the kitchen, gloat that advanced rights for women can not be reversed, that their advanced position in society remains untouchable, a cultural foundation deep enough it may as well run to the Earth's Core.

They've come a long way in such short time. In the 1800s, women protested for quite basic rights. So called First-Wave Feminism (an early movement roughly concurrent with the extreme abolitionists and the collapse of America's slavery compromises) focused on relatively straight-forward issues, like allowing women to refuse sex with their husbands, allowing women to inherit property, allowing women shared custody of children (used to be husbands got kids in the divorce), allowing women the right to retain earnings in the labor force, etc.

They've come so far since then, haven't they? First-Wave Feminists struggled with issues of universal franchise: not all women believed women should have the right to vote. These days not only is it obvious women should have the right to vote, many nations consider "obvious" women should be allotted minimum number of seats in government. 

If you want a patriarchal society? Tough. There's no going home again.

II.
Have you ever read The Diamond Age? Neal Stephenson pens fantastic Cyber-Punk works. He weaves together a lot of optismtic technological trends, warps society to an unrecognizable format, and shows broad chains of events that change the course of future history.

The Diamond Age is set in a futuristic Shanghai, based loosely on the colonial Shanghai of the 1800s. Small city-states have emerged to dominate the landscape, much like colonial powers America and Britain divied up Shanghai between them in the 1800s.

Oh, did you not know we had a colony in China? Why do you think the Chinese feel so humiliated by their recent history?

As an aside, there's a constant back-drop of barbarians from the Chinese inland throughout the book. These neo city-states possess matter replicators and nano-machines, that make their city-states practically impenetrable. The inland barbarians constantly harrass the settlements, only to have their hordes beaten aside.

That is, until the end of the book. They figure out how to disrupt the Feed, a sort of resource super-highway that supplies the colonial city-states. This throws the entire society into chaos, and the barbarians take over the Shanghai settlements.

Then society....regresses? Progresses? I guess that depends on your point of view.

Fantastic story, right? A group of primitive dwellers overthrowing technological superpowers. Impossible in the real world, right?

This, however, is an actual story of Chinese history. The backdrop draws heavily from the Boxer Rebellion,  when Chinese peasants and local leaders did rebel against imperial rule. The imperials, of course, won, not in the small part due to the deployment of American soldiers at the critical battle of Peking.

Wait, you didn't know that Americans shot Chinese peasants? Who taught you history again?

III.

Here's the long story. The Chinese peasants won. Eventually. The Chinese peasants radicalized more and more over the coming decades, until a little guy named Mao led them to drive out the Nationalists (themselves no friends of the imperialist overlords).

Mao led China to such grand cultural achievements as the The Hundred Flower campaign and the Great Leap Forward.

See, history went "backward." By which I mean, history evolved in a way that eroded the civil liberties of the average person, in stark contrast to the cultural narrative of ever-expanding rights.

This isn't exactly uncommon, or unique to the Third World. We remember Nazi Germany because, at the time, Germany was a cultural and technological envy of the world. Germany (including Austra) produced Einstien, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. Germany produced the world's first universal education system. It's first pension system. It's...

Well, Germany was a lot of firsts.

It was also the world's first total fascist dictatorship, more complete than even Mussolini's the South. Nazi Germany wiped away the political "advancement" of Germany, and its "achievement" of multi-party democracy (an end state according to Fukuyama), in a few short years, before waging the world's most destructive war.

The Soviet Union is much the same story. Russia since the time Peter the Great strove to modernize, to include itself in the Western tradition. Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs mirrors almost exactly Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves

The Tsars slowly allowed more democratic government, not unlike Britain's slow concessions to Parliament or Germany's steady march towards parliamentary democracy. Didn't matter. Lenin rose to power, abolished the legislative branch with great elan, ensured equal rights for women to boot, and installed the world's greatest police state.

History gets rolled back all the time. 

IV. 
Here's the part where I jump into economics and my own personal life for a moment.

It's no secret that I've bought my first house. That means recently I've watched a lot of these guys:


This twin brother team features one real estate expert and one independent contractor. They take couples around to beat-up homes and fix them up to a modern a feel.

Pretty interesting showing, I would recommend a watch on a Sunday morning while getting ready for Mass. Makes interesting lunch conversation after Mass as well, definitely better than going over the week's Homily.

Anyways, one of the most popular homes for first time buyers is the so-called Crafstman-style home. At first, I had no idea what they meant, anymore than I knew the difference between a bungalow and a ranch and a split-level.

 By the way, those homes each sport their own unique style and feel.

Craftsman style homes are in demand because of their unique blends of material and hand-crafted. Crafstman homes grew out of the Arts and Craft Movement of the late 1800s. People of the time carried no love for the cheap manufactured products flooding the market, and higher class folk demanded more "honest" and "authentic" work created by individual artisans.

Obviously that meant homes with a lot of hand-crafted pieces, unique designs, elaborate construction, etc.

That was the predominant design thought process in the Gilded Age.

But how did we get from Crafstman homes to this?




Economics, of course. Hand-crafted homes require a lot of work, and a lot of work requires a lot of money. After World War II, America homeowners demanded cheap housing, and builders churned out entire neighborhoods full of Type A/Type B/Type C split levels.

These days, of course, we are trying to become more "authentic," but this supposedly new-found authenticity was in fact an entire movement, long before most of us drew breath.

In the end, economics tends to win. Societies operate through a process of Darwinian selection, where certain people and movements accumulate more power. The traits that yield power always tend to become more prevalent. Economics reflects the basest incentives and thus the most important power levers revolve around who controls money and commerce in the economy. This is why Marx could found an entire theory on the "means of production," and suggesting all of society was structured on the same fundamental struggle, played out through the millenia.

V.
What does Jenner really bring to the table? I can see why bringing women to the table helps power-brokers: the Democratic Party would have ceased to exist without their votes, and many businesses might shutter without their labor flooding the market. I can see why emancipation and inclusion of blacks would help: more soldiers for the army, more workers in the factories, more tax dollars flowing into the public treasury.

Societies which encourage inclusion of women and minorities might have significant advantages over those that do not. You might roll back any of these changes without severely impacting your national economy, national government, national military, national education, and national health.

You really can't go back to the 1950s, then.

Friday, June 5, 2015

A Week Recap: It's Enough, and There's Always Room to Improve

Do not complain about work. I want to achieve zero complaints in the coming week. Not by making work perfect, but by bitching less.

Does the whining ever really accomplish anything? Not really, from what I see. The words you speak become the reality-defining truth. Every sentence, every verb, every noun erects the world around you. The more you rely on vile and venom, the more poison seeps in from the ducts filling the little psychological cottage you make for yourself.

Control the narrative, first by controlling the words you give your life. If I say my work is awesome and cool, maybe, increasingly, I'll come to believe it, whole-heartedly.

I'm not going to lie, YaReally over at Rollo influenced my thoughts pretty heavily on this. His comments on Inner Game really put an easy-to-recognize veneer over the entire concept, and turn the idea of Inner Game into something any man can recognize.

Here's one of his comments:

Go out and approach girls for 6 months and tell them you work at Taco Bell. Tell them as if you hate it, tell them as if you’re passionate about it. Tell them you work as a doctor. Tell them you hate it, tell them you’re passionate about it. Go out with ugly clothes and approach them and do what Julien’s saying where you just dismiss them giving you shit about it.
They really DO accept whatever frame you set. The strongest frame always wins, especially with women. If your frame is that you don’t believe you’re low value, they’ll pick up on that and won’t believe it. If you believe that whatever you’re doing, thinking, wearing, being, etc. is awesome, they’ll pick up on that and believe it too. It’s literally how social proof and pre-selection works: women pinging off their environment for how to feel. It’s the same reason why if you say something offensive and apologize and backtrack the girl will get charged up about it and even more offended because you told her it’s something that she SHOULD be offended about, and why if you brush it off as no big deal she’ll lol and back off and it won’t be a big deal to her. This is the exact same concept.

He concerns himself with picking up girls, but there's another recurring thought process. YaReally consistently talks about society's conditioning effects on men.

You know it’s been internalized when you stop comparing your value to other men. When you’ve internalized it you’ll understand that other men are all, by default, no matter what anyone else thinks, lower value than you. This won’t make sense till you get there because you’re still caught up in society’s socially conditioned value system and figuring out where you “belong” on CH’s +/- charts and needing your value to be “justified” or based on some socially approved construct instead of just internally believing that you have high-value even if you’re penniless and 300lbs with a face like Shrek.

He's got a point on frame. A lot of people have been conditioned, and a lot of people accept a rather negative frames about their life. I'll take the conversation away from pick-up for a second and sit down at the family dinner table.

My Brother and Mother Dearest work at the same company. This meant that, during dinner time, our conversations often devolved into the two of them bitching about their colleagues, sometimes up to 40 or 45 minutes, while the rest of edged in a meek phrase or two about Game of Thrones.

Society conditions us to complain about jobs consistently. Why even Carlin agrees!





But, again, does this really....you know...help?

Not in the least. Most complaints do not resemble constructive criticism. Employers can't take it, employees can't give it: that's 90% of the "soft skills" problem right there. Lack of criticism, or complaining just to complain, prevents real information about real problems from filtering through the organization.

Now I can't change the culture of American business, and I don't want to try. But what I do know is that my tendency to bitch about my job is a socially programmed condition. It's a venting thing that society says is acceptable, it's a least common denominator, and therefore venting becomes a habit, a sort of go-to super-weapon with every person I meet.

But that pill bears a heavy cost. Around me arises a towering mauseloum of hate, and the scarcest drops of warm sun come through.

Who wants to live like that?

I need to control frame, but I need to control frame in my own damn head first.

Some successes...
1. We're getting those missing payments reissued. See the $17,000 post.
2. We identified well over a million dollars of deductions as CMS deductions. This matters, because now we can CONTEST the deductions.
3. We're working out an offset as part of a legal settlement that mitigates our write-off.
4. We're coming up with some new mass adjustment files that should knock about 8,000 man-minutes of work out every month. What's that, like two entire weeks of work? Awesome!


Controlling frame works better with better tactics. I'm reminded of the Marshmallow Experiment. The most successful kids developed methods to handle their temptation.  Same is true for me.

What's working best for me is Barker's Labeling Method.


When the thoughts arise, label them silently before letting them go. You don’t need very many categories. You might choose labels such as “planning,” “doubting,” “judging,” “fantasizing,” obsessing,” or “criticizing.” The particular labels aren’t crucial; what matters is using them to avoid being captured by stories or repetitive tapes. Once you label a thought, gently bring your attention back to the breath. If you find that your attention is repeatedly carried away by particular stories, try making up a humorous label for them. Give these greatest hits their own names, such as your “I blew it again” tape, “I can’t get no respect” tape, “I never get what I want” tape, and so on.

Works like a charm. I imagine the label helps a mind understand the thought process, and categorize it, and then decided whether it's invalid. Such techniques can be abused, of course, as labels can be dehumanizing: "you're just a bitter insecure balding middle-aged loser man" comes to mind.

But in this case, that's a strength. A major strength. You WANT to belittle your negative thoughts. You want to weaken them, you want to delegitimaze them, you want them under control instead of them controlling you.

So far, so good.

That's helping me focus on some of the smaller joys in life. I dig the smell of rosemary chicken. The sweetness just fills my kitchen. No lie, sometimes I let the dirty cast iron sit out a day or two, just so I can catch a whiff when I come home (yes, disgusting, I know).

Coming up this weekend. There's an art festival nearby, first farmer's market of the year, too. The Blackhawks play tomorrow, tonight I dine with a few old friends and watch Entourage, and I bought some pork neck bones for $1.50 that might make some damn fine Southern Soul Food.

Looking to be a good weekend.

Good night to you and yours.

-ADBG


I try not to listen to Luke Bryan too much, but this makes me smile:

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Real World Frustrations-Productivity Paradox

Why does no one do their jobs?

Are they too stupid?

This is my essential frustration with life. Back in high school, I slogged through tedious lectures, 8 hours a day or more, dealing with droning idiots who could not handle standard Algebra. Or identify a Halogen on the periodic table.

I thought college might be better. It actually was a step down. Most of my friends attended top-tier schools (Northwestern the largest around my area), while I enrolled in a mid-tier state university. Our first business calculus test, on which I scored a perfect 100%+extra credit, had a median score of 54%.

Someday, I hoped life would change.

It hasn't. Instead, I realize I have simply cosigned myself to dealing with these people for eternity.

Do you remember that missing $17,000?

Which we actually determined was $700,000? (Side-note: NEVER outsource your work if you can help it)

We have not seen a single penny of this money. Despite providing a complete list of all our missing checks, our partner insurance company has been unable to schedule a single replacement payment.

Most of my work problems boil down to a situation like this, one way or another. Honestly, I can see why companies would outsource their work: American employees often churn out crap, demonstrate no work ethic, lie, and look out for themselves. If you're getting that result anyways, hell, why pay $60,000 (once you include benefits)?

Work comes to define our lives, a lot. A lot of people have trouble adjusting to the full 40 hour week, I guess: I saw waist lines expand dramatically in the years post-college, among all my friends. Moods sank incredibly. Now a few years in, with some more money, and more time off, everyone has picked up their spirit somewhat, but that old youthful luster died.

When I look at my coworkers I shake my head, because they've largely become drones, burned from 8 hours doing nothing,  and seeking escape in anything. Smart phones, offering an endless stream of banal tune-out, have become their primary social release, and online rage-articles offer a cheap emotional validation and sense of purpose. It's the new religion.

People might think better of themselves were they to accomplish something more during their work hours, but rarely does that ever occur. Instead, even after identifying issues, creating action plans, and working with others, nothing gets resolved, life slows down and becomes a slog, and morale tanks.

I'm an Economics guy. And what concerns me a lot is the slow-down in productivity growth. The so-called Great Stagnation silently strangles entire unborn generations in the crib, robbing them of years of growth. No jet-packs, no matter replicators, no nothing.

I understand that academically.

But in practice? I see that low productvity stat in sagging eyebrows, defeated faces, and glum voices. Every corporate drone sulking through the queue is the victim of an unhealthy, unproductive workplace, and they carry that culture like a virus, and they spread illness to their friends and family.

Productivity, it's a health thing.