Matthew Royal > Recent Status Updates

Every time he says "Fem-centric society" or "the feminine imperative," it reminds me of Piers Anthony's underage characters talking about "the adult conspiracy" from which they're excluded. Very childish way of seeing the arbitrary rules adults impose on kids, kind of silly, a little endearing when out of the mouths of babes. It's less cute from a grown man.

He talks about women like they're part of a wide-reaching conspiracy -- very powerful, but somehow not rational. It reminds me of American fear mongering that cast Chinese-Americans in San Francisco as a sprawling hive of subhumans that was somehow also deeply wise... and inimical to mankind. Now and then, this view of "the other" group is contradictory and wrong.

Reading this book as a gay man is a bit like watching the ritualized mating dances of tropical birds: surprisingly complex and ultimately pointless.

I am sympathetic to his critiques on monogamy and soul mates, but reject his thesis that men are naturally rational. Tomassi positions himself in the "manosphere" primate dominance hierarchy as a data-driven philosopher far above mere behavior-mimicking Pick Up Artists.

So far, I'm loving this book. Great framework for thinking about skills and expertise: a field cannot develop good intuition in a person's system 1 associative brain if there's not a tight feedback loop.

This one has been floating around my TBR shelf for a while now, and I hesitated, because I had a Malcolm Gladwell overdose, and this looked similar.

Glad I started it! It begins by presenting valuable insights into how human intuition works -- by resemblance to past experience, which is a poor predictor in most cases: Such as the case of judging a book by its cover!

Then would Evangeline answer, serenely but sadly,--"I cannot!
Whither my heart has gone, there follows my hand, and not elsewhere.
For when the heart goes before, like a lamp, and illumines the pathway,
Many things are made clear, that else lie hidden in darkness."