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The Swagger #3
New Name; Yin/Yang Logic/Feelings; Other Apes; Autonomous Robotic AI; and Proper Anecdote
Richard Nikoley
March 14, 2024
Sponsored by
... Well, if you're going to change something, you best do it quickly.
And so I have. I won't bore you with the details, but the previous name of the newsletter wasn't thought through very well. Whether, or not, that's the case now, welcome to The Swagger anyway.
The 2nd change is that you may have noticed this is coming to you, not on its regular Tuesday, but Thursday. For reasons that, again, I won't bore you with, the actual and potential length of a 5-article newsletter transmitted over email primarily, argues for splitting it in two. So rather than 5 articles once per week, it'll be three articles twice per week. That's one additional article to write, but splitting the task into two makes 6 total articles feel easier than 5 if that makes any damn sense. With that, I get a lot more length flexibility, should I go lengthy. It'll also be easier to toss a Free Bonus! article in the mix, like today.
So, each Tuesday and Thursday morning NYC time, you'll get 1 free practical knowledge article geared to be substantial, and two articles behind the Premium Subscriber Paywall. Premium subscribers end up with the additional article each week (thanks for the steady inflow of 1 Starbuck Subscriptions), so a total of 2 substantial articles per week for the free-is-best crowd, and 100% more for the get-what-you-pay-for crowd.
This Thursday:
The Yin & Yang of Messaging With Logic or Feelings
Free Bonus! "Just Like Other Apes"
We Have Autonomous Robotic AI And You'll Be Blown Away (I thought this was years off; it's here)
How to Make Anecdotes Proper and Relevant (different than just, "my story")
1. The Yin & Yang of Messaging With Logic or Feelings
In the first issue of this newsletter in its current configuration, one article was entitled What Five Months of Hyper-Dating in Thailand Has Taught Me About Female Psychology. Probably most people saw that and thought, 'oh, bragging, again!' and who could blame them? But remember what I said. The articles for this newsletter are to be in some good measure, practical knowledge stuff...stuff you can actually use. So in this case, while the backdrop might be bar girls or freelancers in Pattaya, Thailand (and not always), I assure you that the lesson(s) gleaned will be measurable in such a way that they'll play in Peoria. Right there in your home town. Main Street.
This serves as kind of a follow-up to that, and I'll start off by admitting two things. Number one, I've been wrong all my life about this one thing I'm about to reveal to you. And number two, the girls have been right all along. I don't know how I missed it. I guess it's the inherent built-in arrogance of being a man, and they're just women.
I think the banter back-and-forth, kind of poking fun or ribbing on our idiosyncrasies, is healthy. It serves to always keep in mind that we are very different. But just because we're different, that doesn't mean we can't learn or observe the sorts of techniques the other side uses, evaluate them as techniques or methods, and even experiment with them to see if they work better for us.
So that's exactly what I did. I'm going to lay it out for you, but let me explain what I mean. It's not a revelation to say that, largely, women tend to think, evaluate, judge, and solve for feelings and emotions, and then they might backfill with reason. They decide based on their feelings, and now it's time to backfill with reasons and some logic—if they're inclined to account for that.
That's what men are supposed to do from the get go: A is A and B is B, and A plus B equals C, therefore 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; ergo, such and such a chain of logic, a hierarchical chain, eh voilà! And if you do it right, you can reduce all of it to reality, and you can point to it, and you can pat yourself on the back because this is true, correct, and by damn, it's right.
So then, when you get into a conflict with your girlfriend, spouse, significant other—whatever you call them—you say, "Ha ha ha, she's wrong, and I can prove it," and you go down the line, and it goes in one ear and out the other. You've used the wrong language. You've used your man-to-man language, not the woman-to-woman language.
So, if you want to get across...and I can't tell you how many times I've used this and how unbelievably powerful it is. ... I'm going to tell you the trick that really makes it work, unbelievably.
First, you have to learn their language, and the language is simply to talk in terms of feelings. So rather than say, for example, "Well, you did this, and this, and this. You said you would do this, but you did this," and so on, and these are all objective facts—you're unassailable, you're right—but the thing is, now you're accusing her of doing something wrong, and this is exactly what she did wrong, and she needs to account for that, make amends for that, correct her behavior, or undo that, or whatever it is.
Instead, use three words, and you still have all those facts behind you. All and everything you say is:
"I'm not happy."
And you leave it at that. You don't elaborate because it doesn't matter what's technically, logically, rationally, or reasonably right or wrong, or what event happened, or what fact occurred. You've just told her that you're not happy, and she can't dispute that. If you're not happy, you're not happy. She can say, "I don't care," but that doesn't get you anywhere and presumably, there's a relationship so you've got to get somewhere.
So if she wants something to be resolved, to move forward, she has to figure out how to either make you happy or assuage those feelings in some way. And if she's a good woman, she'll probably figure out what it is she did and what she needs to undo or whatever.
In other words, it gets all the way back to what you were trying to do with your whole logical layout in the first place. Do you see what I'm getting at?
... No, I don't just use one simple phrase to express discontent. When I'm not happy, there are numerous creative expressions of feelings and emotions that one can use instead of plainly stating, "I'm not happy." You could say, "I was hoping for something different," or, "I don't really like that." You might express, "This doesn't feel right to me," or suggest, "I'd feel better if..." You get the idea.
However, it's important to note that you don't have to completely abandon reason, rationality, and logic. Don't make the mistake of thinking that women operate solely from a place of emotion. They're calculating, too; they're just masters at emotionally charged communication. By playing on their battlefield, they'll recognize that they've been mathched or outplayed because they understand how ultimately weak it is from a factual reason standpoint. Yet, it's very powerful at the same time because you're dealing with another human being, and human beings are emotional creatures. Regardless of what's right or wrong, if a person is not feeling good about something, and it's someone we care about, we tend to empathize with their discomfort.
Let me give you an example. Imagine two women who are friends have some sort of dispute. They hash it out in whatever way they do. Now, picture it's you and this woman—whether it's your wife, girlfriend, or whatever—and the material nature of the dispute is exactly the same. You did the exact same thing to her as her friend did. But instead of hashing it out like she did with her friend, she acts differently towards you, perhaps pouting, or even shedding a tear or two. Why didn't she just hash it out with you like she did with her friend? Because she knows emotional appeals can be effective. That's why.
So, you have two choices when it comes to employing rationality and logic in these emotionally charged conversations. You can either honestly tell them how you're feeling, using emotional language to convey your authentic feelings rather than analytical language, or you can choose to be manipulative about it. Considering this black hat usage gives you insight into when women are using their "feeling language." It helps you discern whether they are being "white hat"—in other words, honestly expressing their feelings—or whether they're being manipulative.
This insight to understanding will help you identify when they're probably fucking with you, and not in a good way.
2. Free Bonus! "Just Like Other Apes"
I've been having a little fun in that fucking Facebook place recently. Not too much. Simply trying to re-grow a few followers and get some synergy flow back with the whole social media thing. Very measured in terms of time spent. Same with X, really. To the extent people give up time on social media to socialize in real life, I'll be a happy camper.
So, essentially, what all this amounts to is that things are pretty much where I left off some years ago when I deleted everything. In the health and diet sphere, same topics, same arguments, all the same bullshit—it's just that the players are lots of new people who think these revelations were discovered about 2 weeks ago. I've been dealing with a few of them and my lead article in #2, You start burning fat immediately, is a result of one of those discussions.
Another is this idea advanced by may low-carb and keto diet peeps, and most if not all carnivore diet people, that we're primarily meat and fish eaters because there wasn't much vegetation to be had. It's a bogus claim on its face, but whatever.
A Facebooker, Matt Talley, summed it up nicely.
The idea that ancient humans subsisted solely/mostly on meat and had little if any carbohydrates in their diet is a myth.
First of all, bread and rice have been a part of human diets for approximately 10,000 years, maybe longer. The widespread cultivation of carb-heavy crops has played a large role in the rapid advancement and growth of human civilization over the last several thousand years.
If that's not ancient enough, consider that many modern hunter-gatherer tribes who have been largely isolated from advanced civilization until relatively recently have diets that contain a substantial % of carbohydrates, sometimes as high as 80%. They eat plenty of starchy tubers, fruits, honey, etc.
There's no reason to think that these kinds of sources haven't been a part of human diets stretching back MILLIONS of years, all the way back to early hominins shortly after the evolutionary chimp divergence (when our ancestors and chimp ancestors started splitting off from an ancient common ancestor).
Our closest ape relatives eat plenty of fruits, roots and honey. Chimps go ape-shit for some juicy figs, and they go to remarkable lengths, including the clever use of improvised tools, to get their hands on some honey, much like some traditional hunter gatherer tribes that live in jungles and scale tall trees, risking many bee stings and a potentially fatal fall to gather large combs of honey for the tribe.
This idea that ancient humans not only survived but thrived on a carnivore diet, with little to no carbohydrate sources, is a myth that I hear often when someone is extolling the virtues of a keto diet and trying to argue that a meat-only or meat-focused diet is more natural and "evolutionarily superior".
If you're going to try and argue for a particular diet from an "evolutionary perspective", you need to get the basic facts right. Chimps, including humans (the third chimpanzee!), love and thrive off a diet consisting of carbs. We have been eating them for millions of years.
So I followed it up by sharing it and introducing it as follows:
The number of humans and pre-humans that ever turned down a natural carbohydrate source of food over the vast expanse of all mammalian history is precisely: ZERO.
I have no problem with LC/Keto/Carne diets in the context of their applicability.
How are they valuable and applicable?
Dietary hacks, typically short term (I do myself).
Goals, where they're the best tool for the job (e.g., body builders cutting before comp).
Broken metabolisms from eating too much too often for decades (not because of carbs...no such thing).
Fat loss programs where adherence is best on LC/keto/Carne as a personal preference (i.e., the best fat-loss diet is the one you stick to).
That's all fine. Where it goes off the rails is when people take a valid tool like this and pretend that they've found Jesus and now everyone in the world needs to hear the gospel, repent of their carb-eating sins, and be saved.
So something that's a valid tool, ideally for short to medium-term duration, gets inappropriately blown out of all proportion, such that it's the One True evolutionarily appropriate diet and everyone else in the world—including the 110 Billion or so carb-eating humans who've ever lived in the last 200K years—just have gotten it all wrong if they look crosswise at a potato or an apple.
... And incidentally, fruit is the one food that really highlights how ridiculous this whole thing is. Most plants have defenses to guard against being eating at all, or being overconsumed. We call these various things anti-nutrients when of a chemical nature (as opposed to things like thorns) and so there is a tradeoff to analyze, nutrients vs. anti-nutrients.
Fruit is the one class of food that "wants to be eaten" and is thus colorful, appealing, sweet, juicy, often low-hanging, etc. etc. It wants to be eaten because the seeds get consumed by animals, pass through digestion, and then get scattered far and wide...being eaten is their survival and proliferation strategy.
Accordingly, anyone who could access them did access them and ate them, going back millions of years. Adaptation to all of them is literally in our genes.
So look, if you have a broke-ass metabolism, are weak, or you screwed yourself up through your own chronic overconsumption of FOOD (in general) and kept doing and doing it for years and years even as the warning signs cropped up and stacked up as you kept munching, well, then, I hope you're onto something that works for you, you fix it, get better, carry on, and carry the torch.
But stop telling me and others who are not broke-ass and weak, or past total screw-ups, that you've found Jesus, seen the light, and all us sinners are going to hell unless we repent now.
That got picked up by someone else and shared, and then there was some comment action and the usual carnivore crowd coming to tell us there's just not much evidence that early humans ate plants that much.
... And so, I detected yet another thing that the carnivore diet crowd does...
Matt Talley "just like other apes"
A critical point that your regurgitating (he's saying the same things I and others were saying 15 years ago when we found the Paleo hammer and EVERYTHING was a NAIL!!!) interlocutor is conveniently leaving out.
He's limiting the context to humans, conveniently ignoring other omnivores and herbivores. It might be reasonable to ignore the grazing mammals...but we can observe the fruit and vegetable and tuber consumption of plenty of other omnivorous species, and unless we want to make the wild-ass claim that all these non-human omnivorous animals went from predominately eating meat and fish to eating plants, then it's a pretty big uh-oh because if the vegetation was around for them, it was around for us, too.
Also, apes do eat meat, opportunistically. That has always been the case too. But their diets are primarily vegetation. But if they can and do eat meat sometimes, then why not all the time, or a lot more?
The answer is because there's always a lot of vegetation to eat.
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