In my last post I mentioned that a reader responded to my gushing over Jordan Peterson with a link to a video in which he ridicules MGTOWs as “pathetic weasels”. That reader just posted the link, not providing any context. I’ll briefly talk about why that kind of behavior is questionable at best, followed by an observation I made in the working world, and one in the dating world that puts it into wider context.

The issue with leaving a comment like that, be it a link or some copy and pasted quote is that you, dear lazy reader, expect everyone else to do the work you were unable or unwilling to do. You want us to figure out what you were trying to say. Is the link supportive of my article? Does it contradict a statement I made? Do you think the source makes a seemingly plausible point but is wrong? The correct reaction to that kind of feedback is to simply ignore it. (There is a fairly steady stream of reader comments like that, which never make it through moderation.) Outsourcing doesn’t really work like that. Instead, you will only annoy people. Let me illustrate how this plays out in the real world.

Example 1 is from the working world. I once had a colleague who would, after having technical discussions with me, send me a link to a blog post or paper, without any explanation at all. Now, watching a two-minute clip is one thing, reading a lengthy blog post or even an academic paper that may or may not contradict a position I’ve held, on the other hand, is downright ludicrous. Once I probed a bit, and learnt that he had barely skimmed the stuff he sent me, so it was apparently the lazy man’s attempt to appear interested and educated. So, what do you do with that kind of email? Right, you ignore it.

Example 2 is from my dating experience. I was once seeing a girl who sometimes tried engaging me in debates. She was of course nowhere near as smart and educated as me, so she didn’t really get anywhere. Normally, I would listen to her for a few minutes, don’t even say what I think on that subject, and simply point out the first contradiction she made. She would read some crap on a blog or tumblr even, and simply regurgitate it in front of me, to the best of her rather limited abilities. Sometimes this was ludicrous nonsense like “rape is a weapon of war”, so you would point out that once you’re at the point that women get raped, the war is essentially over, and the men are either dead or POWs, which then triggered the response that “rape is a fate worse than death”. Man, read up where that quote comes from and cringe. From her I also learnt that women are stronger than men (LOL), smarter (chess?), and are underpaid. From her I also learnt that it is “rapey” when guys approach girls at a bar. Anyway, you point out where the argument falls apart, she shuts up, pulls out her phone and frantically looks up crap online, sending you half a dozen of links or paste entire paragraphs without attributing a source. I should apparently read all of that and figure out how her argument could be salvaged. (That was the low point of my dating life.)

The message to lazy readers is therefore: I don’t even read links without context when I’m on the clock, or when it comes from a girlfriend. I fixed both aspects of my life, by moving on to a place with high-IQ people all around, and dating a woman who is not only good-looking but also intelligent. On my blog, the fix sending such comments to the trash. So, if you’re the kind of person who shows that kind of behavior, you’re wasting your time and everybody else’s. If you’re in an environment in which people hold you to a higher standard, you will have a hard time lasting, so you better be the nephew of the boss or something like that.

The message to my smart readers is, to make this post more relevant to my audience: if you find a girl who acts like that, you need to go date smarter women. One of the big insights for me, when I started dating, was that there is an enormous number of morons out there. For instance, there are people who communicate by sending memes back and forth, and that’s more or less all they do. When I first saw a girl doing this, I asked myself how I ended up dating such a moron. That was also when I realized that “college” means nothing. Have some self-respect and don’t put up with it.