I choose to sound angry when people give me advice I already understand. When I was younger I was very polite and just let everyone think that they were being helpful but I realized that wasn't really useful to either of us and decided to try to be more honest.

I've got possibly the worst track record of "stop trying so hard and it will just happen" possible and I can say that because I have not tried at all until starting one year ago. A variety of things I'm well aware of have made me prone to social anxiety so meeting entirely random people never happens for me, ever. The only way I ever made friends in the first place was being introduced by other people I knew but right at this point in my life my social circles have dead ended.


Now, I'm not asking people to tell me who I am. I'm asking how to say it in a good way.

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I live in Utah so I am perpetually bored. I know this is not a good way to advertise myself.
The boredom is well enough justified if you know what Utah is like. There is really very little to do so if you don't feel like playing basketball, going to the same pool every day, or walking around parks (and apparently nobody attractive likes parks in this state,) then you do things at home.
When I got bored I found weird Japanese media to consume but as we're all aware mentioning those at the forefront of who you are basically says "I'm nobody."

This isn't a big problem because I am a lot more than that but I can't think of how to describe it.
I'm smart. Not in the pocket protector and don't know how to talk sense- I've got a great sense of the timing needed to be a good comedian and I've got a strong memory so once I know what someone will laugh at I am enormously entertaining to be around.'

I'm not a clown though. I am very much an intellectual but I make people laugh and try to talk smoothly because I'm not "too smart" to function socially. Am I a dork? Yes, but only to the same degree as whoever I'm talking to.

I'm artistic and creative. I've got impressive control over fine movements of my hands and a knack for design. I'm always finding new ways to express that and the things I put on paper are dwarfed by the mountain of ideas I've fleshed out well enough in my head that I could put them on paper.

I'm opinionated. I make up my mind about current issues quickly but unlike a lot of people I can support my opinion and I'm actually open minded enough that a well thought out argument can sway me.

But I'm not only good at mental types of activity. I'm a natural skier, though not very skilled because my mother was a spoiled sport and never wanted to go when I was younger. I'm good enough at sprinting to catch animals when the rest of my family have decided that running after them would be a futile effort and my legs also have the endurance for hiking. My high pain tolerance probably plays into that sort of thing because I get tired like anyone else but the distance between tired and exhausted looks to be much greater for me.

So I'm asking you not to say these things about me but how to say them about myself (or to give me any guidelines for how to take more pictures of myself without just taking the same picture 9 times.) Can I just copy and paste most of this into my profile or should I rephrase it? Is there something I can do so that people won't read it as anger but instead as enthusiasm? Are there other things I should talk about? Is my writing style too challenging for most people's reading level? Is this too much information?

I'd never have decided it myself. I feel weird getting complimented about things by people I didn't think were my friends but it happened a lot so I started to accept it.

But I don't ever say it to other people. It was difficult even thinking of those words in relation to myself and I was intentionally trying to give bad examples here so people would have something to not just say "No!" at but alter.

My mental filters keep me from saying that kinds of thing but they also keep me from saying much of anything which is why I had trimmed my profile down to a state of uselessness to begin with.


Now, right here you can tell that I sort of understand how to make things better in that I changed saying "people like me" kind of excess self praise into other people saying positive things about me but I don't think I could just rant like this in the profile. There's not a previous voice in it I can argue against and without that I don't know how to describe people at all much less describe myself in a detailed way.

So THAT is what I want help with. Can I expect anything like that here or do I have to suffer the "don't do that" "do this better" kind of critique that makes everyone look like they really don't understand how to view things from any perspective but their own?

I agree...
except that that is if people were having conversations with me. Most people won't and when I'm talking about hundreds of people, most of whom were new or active members when I contacted them, I'm well enough convinced that I need to send a different kind of message or that I need to have a different quality to my profile.

I've worked on the messages starting from day 1 and by putting up all nerd interests and vague description I can say that having my profile like that definitely made things worse.

And being myself? Being myself is not talking about myself at all and that sort of seems like it doesn't work well for introductions.

That makes it sound like you didn't grasp a word of the nonzero sum mechanic.

Not oil. Fusion fuels would be much more useful and they should have worked out the monopole magnet style version within at least a few million years.
Land? They could just touch down and say they were taking the Brazillian rain forest. If they told the hippies they weren't going to bulldoze any of it but would try to build infrastructure so the locals could make a living from something other than slash and burn agriculture I don't think the world would have any objection beyond trite little legal issues they should be able to work out.

Drugs? Well dag yo, it sure would be hard to grow plants since they take so much water and steal so much sunlight from the dirt/rock. With that habit we have of trying to burn those crops to the field and busting into kids' meth labs before the place explodes production of drugs outside any Earth jurisdiction should work much better and they wouldn't even have to deal with paying any humans for them.
Or better yet genetic engineering to just stick the gene for the chemical they want into a plant they could farm even more easily, or maybe into animals so they could smoke a pig or snort some ostrich.

Weapons. Really? You think replica swords and pressure propelled chunks of metal should have any interest to anyone that could engineer a railgun? We already know how to make them just at sizes that aren't so portable but for aliens? Well even if they haven't worked out the miniaturization thing they could just stick a bunch in orbit and then warn us that Earth was going to pass through a "dark shower" and laugh while we scrambled for bunkers to escape what we thought was a natural disaster of ultra speed projectiles that would probably rip through most bunkers anyway. And things like that are just if they are too brain dead for ideas of their own.

It's been awhile since I've done the calculations but with energy being e=mc^2 and acceleration being m/f
*(f=ma)
the cost of transporting people to another star system is... astronomical.

Unless something about being raised on Earth was critical and unfeasible to recreate they should have been able to just pluck a few vagrants off the streets a little ways into Winter and then set up a breeding program in any climate controlled building on a planet with similar gravity. If they knew about the selective breeding basically pushing African Americans towards the athlete phenotype and this slave labor was for physical work they might have focused on that race but poor black people in ghettos aren't rare by any means- to be honest I think they'd have to raise a huge fuss before most local authorities cared about the missing persons.

Now, even just stealing computers from mafia type organizations in the orient should be more effective for most of the thinking labor you could make slaves perform though it's hard to imagine a race with interstellar travel without computers that vastly outperformed our own.

...and energy is readily available as soon as you can build a sphere of solar collectors around your star (probably make the sphere just a bit bigger than the distance out to your planet so it still gets that light but loses night constellations unless simulated.
Oil is just a concentrated energy source (though with interstellar travel they should have more compact ones.)

Gold... well a mining operation not on Earth but Mercury would net a LOT more gold.

We have lots of violent criminals. Many other countries around the world have magnitudes fewer violent criminals than us.

Therefore it is possible to reduce that behavior a whole lot.

We can rule out genetics for the most part because people mostly fit the violence profile for where they grow up.

Is it culture? Probably a little bit but a lot of countries were very violent in some generations but much less in others.

Well, this is getting annoying so I'll rush to the end: Canada is very similar to America in most of the ways you would think matter but they have much less crime. What they also have less of is a difference between the most wealthy and the most poor, or in other words the do more dirty socialist stuff like that medicare our old people like so much and that whole "poor people can get medical treatment" thing.

It like if everyone thinks they are for some reason they stop mugging each other... oh wait, no, haha, I see now.
It's a trap!

My thinking is too abstract. I guess I think of people almost entirely AS emotion and as I actually experience my own emotions first hand that's an awful lot to try to convert into words.

I'm interesting and well liked by the people I know (except a few times when I decided I should make some enemies,) but unless what I've got right now is good (and it's not, I need to figure out how to redo the intelligence part,) I really don't know how to show that in writing- or at least not in giving a summary of myself.
In arguing a topic I do much better because negativity has a place there.

So do these topics usually burn out by the time about this many faces have seen them and stop returning or has my "things instead of categories" approach chased everyone away?

Attracting what you want is the preferable option when you can afford to lose because taking what you want is dangerous. This if those mating rituals just went until one of the two was too injured to continue.

Whereas with the relatively nonviolent competitions they can walk away and potentially compete again as soon as they find another female to compete over if they are physically incapacitated they have either died and lost everything or have suffered a lesser injury and lost the weeks it would take to recover, or in some cases the injury will never fully recover and they are permanently handicapped to some degree.

Even in the case of choosing to trample the opponent that falls down there is only a chance of crippling them and from that point they have no reason not to retaliate with the same force so the gain from acting by lethal intent first is small and there is a nearly equal chance that the opponent will instead be the one to cripple you. This is especially the case in animals that can assess their opponents because in stand offs where one animal is a much fitter competitor than the other the weaker of the two will just give up right away instead of wasting time and energy that could be spent looking for an opportunity where there's a good chance of winning the competition or perhaps even finding an uncontested mate.

Again, it's only when the reward has become everything that the scales tip and lethal fighting becomes the better strategy.

The idea of trade is less useful in looking at nature because of the scarcity of societies that make much use of it besides our own. Once again imagining bugs it's easy to see the simplicity in the "am I gaining more than I am losing?" thinking and how it requires very little comprehension of what the other participant is doing. It would be much like what we would think if we frequently encountered simple robots with small behavioral patterns we had recognized- it's mechanical, do this get that.

It's only even in the last few centuries that humans have picked up on the reality that through this kind of trading action is not zero sum. Today it's common knowledge that by working together often both parties end the task with more than they had when they began but ages ago people thought that in order to gain any anything someone else must be diminished.

Ok, that view is actually still kicking around quite a bit today but for people lucky enough to receive better information or who have actually had a formal education on economy matters it's immediately clear how wrong that is.

Yet economy so readily and repeatedly proves to us that we had no idea how it works. The monarchs of long ago hoarded their money in castles instead of having it flow around and be exchanged for things. Early on the British would impose intense taxes on their many colonies to try and pay off bonds early (that's like paying off a loan early and not having to pay as much interest,) and then we lent money to countries that wouldn't be able to pay us back* and we did things like trying to spend less while printing off more money and then recently we let computers automate the stock market to wring money out of stocks when there wasn't really any change in their value and, well, basically every time things go terribly wrong we learn that way to make money that didn't seem to have consequences basically make the castle of cards fall flat.

*speaking of that I guess that means if our country tanks at the right time China will have a depression...

Ya but you said it was because they are territorial. Territory disputes clearly do not initiate war and crime activities alone.

If you act like humans got to be this way from some common simple trait the people who are rational but don't just trust science by default can tell that there is something wrong: many, MANY species should have wars and there should probably be other species around with big brains, societies, tools, etc.

And besides, other primates are territorial but without the whole raiding party behavior. Gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos are the main apes to be concerned with when looking at humans, and gorillas only make it onto the list because of all their differences making them useful as an outgroup.

You seem hurt enough by the truth.
Looking at the full behavior of the Bush administration it's clear that they were just stupid. That is certainly a kind of corruption but you need to dial down the evil intent about 90% and recognize that poor judgment was at work there.

Yes, he graduated from a prestigious institute of higher learning but that cannot counteract the supreme ignorance of the "God is on my side" mentality. There's not a single word of praise to intelligence in the Bible but that doesn't give leaders a free pass to abandon it, Christian or not.

So solution? Don't elect people for saying they have Christian values- elect them for good judgment, clout, or anything else that has to do with leadership and elect people with policies that are in your best interests instead of just promising that they'll spread your religion.

I'm going to try to get off of the bitching about religion track though. I've probably said enough about that by now.

You're a fascist. Don't like the truth huh?

See what I did there? Negative word to describe people branded on you without it having anything to do with what you stand for.

I'll make this simple for you. EVERYONE ELSE IN THIS THREAD THINKS YOU SOUND CRAZY OR STUPID. Instead of reading those capitals as shouting read them as me talking slowly with emphasis on every word.

Repeating that is not going to change anyone's minds. We're rational thinkers so instead of trying to convince us that you feel so strongly about this that we should agree and feel strongly the same way what you need to do instead is present your reasoning every time and then we say things like "there are gaps in your logic" you can go into detail there and at the end there will be a very convincing argument and we will have run out of good ways to resist it.

I know that the reason you can't do that is that people you trust, probably close friends and authority figures, gave you that idea and if they were talking to a lot of people they had this kind of argument and nobody around could keep fighting it. They won and you trust them so you agree with that. The problem is that you didn't remember their argument and even if you did we're probably not raising exactly the same objections to it so the full comprehension of the person that your idea came from was never even shown to you except in that they were able to defeat all challengers back then.

Go learn WHY they are terrorists or give up because we're deaf to what you're doing right now.

Not exactly. All kinds of animals solve those disputes with less extreme contests than outright violence. While rams butt heads they don't try to trample the loser if he falls down (and even wait courteously for him to get back up to continue.) Others don't even so much fight to that degree instead performing dances at each other to just display that they are tough. In both cases the contest shows who is stronger and the loser gives up territory/females (or in rare cases females give up males,) and lives to try again another day. This is how most territorial animals handle it.

There's a much smaller group that will hit an opponent when they are down and otherwise act homicidal, or whatever type-of-animal-icidal. To try and summarize it the species that don't get a second chance at reproduction do this. That's easy to understand with insects who only have a few weeks to live as adults before their generation dies off but not so easy to understand with humans since we often reproduce anywhere from our teen years up to late forties (mostly around the middle of course.)

So the more precise way of describing it is a little bit mathematical. Animals probably don't do this math any more than a dog thinks about gravity equations when he catches a frisby but they end result is the same.
So, animals are willing to kill each other when the outcome of the fight outweighs all future mating opportunities. Going back to the insects if your options are die tomorrow childless or risk dieing today with a 10% chance of getting a lucky blow on the other guy and mating with the fine lady insect watching... well, the gamble option is obviously worth it.

So, the reason humans fall in the range of this equation is obviously not some short reproductive window but the very long process of child rearing. The average woman will be going into menopause close to when their first child leaves the nest (there are very few siblings with a twenty year age gap,) and if they struggle economically they might not have favorable enough options to successfully raise a whole new heir from scratch, not to mention all the other pitfalls of having children near menopause.

So the way we were able to get the way we are started when the death of our children was worse for our survival than our own deaths. This also factors into why humans live to be grandparents (in most species death comes at the age of menopause. Eating food your children could be eating isn't a good thing when they no longer gain anything from having you around.)

With our preference for our own death over that of our children this causes the problem of children lacking parents. Aunts and uncles will often take care of such orphans but their own children take priority. Each grandchild works out to the same 25% of the DNA of a grandparent so there's no innate reason to disfavor the orphans.

Since these things popped up we've added some auxiliary functions since these are such large, complex features, but this stuff is pretty well the reason these things started happening in the first place.
(Though maybe the extra stuff that we do with these things are the reasons we stuck around while neanderthals and so many others perished.)

Well ya, that's why I took it out before and weeded things down to the joke of a profile I started this with.

Think about it. I've been trying the online dating things for a year approaching hundreds of women and haven't come anywhere near a date from it all.

I was happy to see someone who had the guts to say "everything about your profile is wrong" and I'm hinting that I want people to tell me how to describe myself.

Do you think that I can't tell how negative everything in my head is?

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That earlier bit about sending mail out to everyone in the 30 pages of search needs some more explanation I think. I went through all of those pages to check for people I hadn't already contacted. I think there were only around 15-20.

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If people really can't understand what I'm asking for just pick out three profiles that look good and I'll try to emulate those but unless you want to personally rewrite everything new I think to type in the next few days you've got to give me some other tool to fix the tone.

And I've never thought well when in categories. I'm a little lacking in common sense so "what do you want for dinner" has always seemed like "pick something out of an infinite number of options" and I know I'm not the only person who goes nowhere fast when they've got to make choices like that.

Even if I hate the examples people give they still work as a starting point and I'm a whole lot better at chains of thought than picking from infinity.

I thought that these lizardmen were doing this because we were supposed to be the predators while they want to get the planet by grazing and not letting us get them.

You are discarding your opinions on the side of the road as if this has been some personal form of idea masturbation for you.

Normally I'd tell people that you would have to be stupid to think the way you were broadcasting that idea would ever be effective but these forums seem to have a pretty high ratio of people who will believe anything compared to rational ones so fine, keep doing exactly what you're doing. I'm sure it will be satisfying and effective for you.

Are people welcoming me because I've got a low post count or is the forum crowd small enough that everyone recognizes the same faces?

That's more like what I wanted to hear, though if you want to be called brutally honest you shouldn't soften it as much as you did.

Trouble is I've forgotten how to advertise myself, or maybe never learned.

Maybe start off by explaining how I can phrase "you can't offend me" in an attractive tone?

- So I've set it back to more what I had earlier. I don't remember what the other paragraphs were about though so there are just the two for now. I didn't have it like it's been for most of my time here and on other sites my profile has dressed up my interests.
I actually had it like this at the advice of a so called "expert." I figured the interests were enough of a train wreck that someone should have pointed it out sooner.

So the first thing I asked was if there was how I should change my profile (if people thought that would help.)

MelodyGirl: Thanks, some substance to the suggestions feels much better.

I don't have much of a sense for photography (and although my sister does she hasn't been any help,) so can anyone recommend angles and poses (or should I just put on different clothing and find different backdrops to take essentially the same picture from?)

Sometimes my writing is fantastic but most of the time I just end up rambling about nothing and end up sounding weak and boring. Got any ideas about how I can avoid that?

What part of "I've mailed 300 people" gives people the impression that I signed up yesterday instead of, oh, the year ago you can see right under my picture?

Am I unreasonable to think that zero dates per year is a bit low?

I've tried a few pay sites. If there's some kind of mandatory wink phase a decent number do that but when it comes to actually writing something to each other it's this same story.