Hey! BTW mk your notification emails are consistently getting spammed in Zimbra -- good fortune I checked my junk on a whim today.

I'm in LA, working for the first time since 2009 at a purpose-driven company, and it feels great. I'm a person who can derive a greater purpose from almost anything (a lawyer friend told me once, "You must believe your client to be a good advocate," and I took that to heart along with Indra Nooyi's advice on assuming positive intentions) but it's great to be in a place where everyone is on that page. I've found it very easy to live in LA so far. The weather is of course so fantastic that people poke fun at it for being so great all the time. The people are friendly. (Really, they are. LA stereotypes have been exaggerated significantly.) There's always something to do. ALWAYS.

Having a blast. But busy as hell growing a community of my own, so I've only been around others sparingly!

I don't mean to be rude, but is English a second language for you? If so it's much better than my French/Arabic/German/Spanish (I can order food in all those, but that's about it) but I still am having a little trouble understanding what you mean by "advanced." Do you mean like "make a romantic advance," or like "promote?"

In any case, on the subject of girls asking guys out, I always advise that when talking to girls who are having trouble meeting someone. You get a much better-quality dating pool of guys when you ask them than waiting for them to approach you.

I'm doing exactly what I would like to do right now. I manage communications, community, and social media for one of the UGC arms of a household-name digital media company. The CEO inspires me every time I hear anything about her or see her on a webcast, my team is fantastic, and it's led me to an incredible number and array of opportunities.

However, the fact that I love what I do does not mean there aren't other things I'd like to do. Most immediately, I'd like a higher-level role and to be managing a team and/or product of my own, in the community/communications/social sphere. I've been doing director-level work since my director left in April, and my title doesn't match that yet. Eventually, I'd like to get to the C-suite, either CEO, COO, or CCO.

After doing that for a while I'd love to take a break from business and pursue my love of politics, and later in life, at retirement age, I have dreams of directing nonprofits in the mental health and animal welfare areas.

My silent time is when I get to go to the barn for a long ride with my boy horse. My girl horse is very very new to riding and needs a lot of praise and encouragement, but my boy horse has been mine since he was three and I was 17 and we just understand each other in silence at this point.

He's such an athlete that he enjoys the exercise of a ride as much as I do, down to the point of enjoying fighting me on every little point. I've known, owned, and ridden horses so emotionally sensitive that arguing a point with them as intensely as I do with the boy horse would be abusive, and who would never disobey intentionally to provoke a quarrel like he does, but with the boy horse I can genuinely feel his enjoyment of challenging me and how much he appreciates the physical exhaustion he experiences after a hard ride. I understand him completely, because I feel the same way when he wears me out. He's so well-trained that if he feels like it he can respond to me just moving my eyes--while on his back, where he can't see my eyes--but he likes to test me for fun, and because he knows it entertains me, too (except when he catches me off guard and I eat dirt). The girl horse would NEVER do such a thing, and when she accidentally makes a mistake and realizes it, she's mortified.

Sometimes other riders will put on music, and I grit my teeth and don't say anything, but until I manage to tune it out it drives me crazy. That's my non-verbal communication time, and I NEED it dangit!

Really? I didn't hit that. Maybe it's a monthly limit for NYT? Do you read there a lot?

You're the one who declared sex transactional -- I'm only trying to describe it in your language. Your first response makes the following statements as if fact:

* Men do not want to have intimate, conversational platonic friendships for their own sake, whereas women do.

(I would challenge this one on the basis of "individuals vary more than groups vary," but I think you would agree but stipulate that we should discuss the majority when discussing the aggregate, so I skipped it. The guy I'm dating has more close, intimate, conversational platonic friendships than I do, though.)

* Sex IS transactional.

(I don't necessarily challenge this one in the way you use transactional although I agree that it is NOT transactional in the way the blogger uses it, e.g., there is no amount of friendship-investment that has "paid off" the cost of sex and now you are owed sex.)

I accepted your two statements because from past conversations I think we generally agree on most of the premise, although we would frame it differently, and proceeded to discuss the matter from a transactional perspective accepting both these statements as fact even though I could quibble on minor details of both. So your criticism of my transactional analogies is merely criticism of the parameters you set for the conversation and I accepted -- therefore I will discard it in responding to your rebuttal.

>This isn't a gender issue. This is a relationship issue.

It is a gender issue because it is an issue men bring to the table and place on the shoulders of women in every conversation about relationships, masculinity, patriarchy, and society. Men consistently demand that women solve what they perceive as women's "problem with nice guys" before men will acknowledge that being a bad person isn't a good trait. It is not a matter of opinion that online dating is something an attractive woman literally cannot experience without receiving vitriolic, profane diatribes about what a cunt she is for not liking a nice guy like this SO SO NICE guy calling her a cunt. Men have negative relationship experiences, but in the aggregate, accepting that exceptions exist, nice-guy issues are an issue of men pursuing women in unacceptably aggressive ways and then complaining that they did not get what they wanted because they are so nice.

>I fathered a kid with someone who didn't want to have sex with me when we met.

And Al Roker caught his wife by stocking her apartment with food while housesitting for her after she'd "friend-zoned" him, but that doesn't mean much other than that there are success stories out there presenting enough variable reinforcement to convince men who are less attractive, less savvy, or simply pursuing a woman less interested that they, too, will eventually marry the woman currently turning them down.

>Presumes these activities are mutually exclusive, as if one can't be bummed about being friend-zoned by one girl while also banging another.

Negative. He can be bummed--but still valuing the friendship enough to keep up with it without being a jackass about it--while banging someone else. It's much less likely he'll be a non-jackass if he's bummed and sees the person who bummed him out as his only possible sexual prospect.

>Then your relationships are shallow. Sorry, I know that sounds harsh. It is nonetheless true.

Bullshit.

I'd accept if you stated that this indicates that the way I see sex is shallow, because I certainly don't view it as the earthshattering be-all and end-all to human intercourse that some people do. The relationships that do or don't generate sex, on the other hand, aren't. If a heterosexual male and a heterosexual female are platonic friends for a long enough time, there is likely to come a phase of the friendship where one or both are sexually attracted. You either deal with that as a game changer or as something that's just part of choosing to have attractive opposite-sex friends. It's shallow to let something as normal and expected as sexual attraction ruin a friendship.

>You keep coming back to this "if you're asking for sex from me you aren't asking for sex from anyone else" canard that has no basis in the discussion at hand.

Strawman -- didn't say that, didn't imply it, don't know why you inferred it.

>My objection to the article is that it claims to present "hard truths" when in fact it simply obfuscates the problem further while also conveniently absolving the author in particular (and - the root of my objection - women in general) of any mis-steps or wrongdoing.

The audience is men. One could suggest the author write a follow-up post giving advice to women or talking about her own relationship mistakes. This post is intended to give advice specifically to men who are unhappy because they believe they are "friend-zoned" for being "nice guys." This is not a problem for which women are at fault. Individual women can and do behave badly, but in the aggregate, this is a massive issue with dating today and is the fault of men who are unable to be clear about their desires and expectations, unable to evaluate their own appeal, and unable to moderate their emotional investments appropriately.

> I can't be the only guy in the world to have friend-zoned women. I don't pretend for a moment I'm doing anything but. I also don't act as if the women I've friendzoned could do anything about it, and I don't pretend they're idiots or unworthy for being upset over the outcome.

Sure, I've been so-called-friend-zoned, and my guy friends have been on that side of it, too. But you notice how women get upset over this individual guy who won't fuck me, while men end up believing that all women just hate "nice guys" and love "assholes."

There's a female equivalent to this, too: The woman who doesn't hold up her end of the relationship other than being attractive, and then goes "men are shallow and just want a dumb blonde with fake tits!" when her boyfriend dumps her after she ages or otherwise becomes less attractive. Because she 1) chose a guy who didn't expect anything of her besides being attractive and 2) then proceeded to become less attractive without adding anything to what she offered to the relationship, she draws the conclusion that all men are shallow, not the conclusion, "If I want a relationship based on more than looks, I can't expect my looks to be a get out of jail free card for any and all bad relationship behavior." I could write thousands of words on that one, too, but that isn't the topic at hand. The topic at hand is male responses to female rejection, which are often uniquely vitriolic and generalized toward all women, and on the specific, incorrect theme that women just don't want a nice partner and would prefer an asshole.

>I'm not sure what your point is but it's pretty clear we've struck a nerve. Recognize that you're essentially saying "even in a world where you can buy cars on Craigslist for $100 some asshole is still going to want to drive a Ferrari."

I'm not sure what's so clear about that? You know me, you know that I use colorful rhetoric on pretty much every subject. I have no issue related to this in my life right now, and the last similar situation I was involved in was a long time ago and I was the one being rejected. I woke up, browsed the Web in bed, noticed my furnace was broken, typed some stuff on Hubski, tried the furnace guy again, yadda yadda. I mean, I can't convince you with words on a screen not to make assumptions about my emotional state, but if my word counts for anything with you, you're incorrect. I am passionate about relationship issues, as you know. I work with victims of domestic violence and other crimes, as you know. I am interested in gender and sexuality in general, as you know. Of course this topic elicits a high word count and colorful metaphors from me.

The rest of your rebuttal is based on my transactional analogies, which, as stated, are made to work within your framework established in your statement that sex IS transactional, so I'll leave that alone except for this one piece:

>The issue at hand is not "I've invested 70% of my available free time in you, I deserve a shag" the issue at hand is "I am more emotionally invested in our relationship than you are and resent that you cannot adequately explain why."

I think you're making two erroneous assumptions here:

1) That so-called-nice-guys DON'T think that way. They do, and I've heard them complain exactly in those terms: "It wouldn't cost her anything to just have sex with me once in a while, and I've spent hours listening to her problems in the last week alone. She has sex with guys she meets at the bar, why wouldn't she just have sex with me now and then?" If that sounds a bit pathetic, it's because it is, but I assure you, there are literally millions of men in the US alone who think exactly that way.

2) That emotional investment requires sexual attraction. He's emotionally invested and sexually attracted. She's just emotionally invested. The friendship might be important enough to her that she'd turn down sex with an attractive crush if she knew it would hurt the friend, so her emotional investment in the platonic friend is GREATER than her emotional investment in a sexual attraction.

I have a bunch of those! I stick them where I see Reddit stickers.

Oops. Now look what I did, pointing out that tags were basically subreddits already... :P

Seriously though, I like the speed of change here, and unshared should encourage more discovery and sharing. On the other hand, taking away tag-following without replacing it with this mysterious new functionality will probably reduce discovery for a time, unless people start using popular and unshared more as a result. I look forward to seeing what the new features will be.

Oops. Now look what I did, pointing out that tags were basically subreddits already... :P

Seriously though, I like the speed of change here, and unshared should encourage more discovery and sharing. On the other hand, taking away tag-following without replacing it with this mysterious new functionality will probably reduce discovery for a time, unless people start using popular and unshared more as a result. I look forward to seeing what the new features will be.

That's why I put it in quotation marks... it's an imaginary concept and should be treated as fiction.

If users consistently make a mistake that is jarring to their experience, it reduces their willingness to interact with the site. IMO, it's too difficult to get to all posts for a certain tag already, but I can see forcing it to take two clicks as a reasonable way to promote a more comprehensive view of the site. However, that seems like it would also have the effect of reinforcing the popularity of highly-used tags and the unpopularity of less-used tags. If someone sees, say, a post tagged #cephalove (my pet tag for cephalopod posts) and it takes them two clicks + a detour through unsubscribing to get to an all-posts page and see how many other posts they might have missed with that tag, they're less likely to check it -- and less likely to click, read, and submit posts with that tag.

Seconded, but I request it be "fewest" shares so we don't have to change it again when Hubski gets enough users that most new submissions have at least one or two :)

Yeah, if I had to answer this myself I would say that being even slightly open to religion as a positive factor in human lives is probably my most controversial opinion, because I'm so on the fence there that the Internet hates me for kind of liking religion, and the Bible Belt would consider me a heathen for not being sold on it entirely. That and my own brand of religious experimentation is explicitly interfaith, so if you hate Christians, Jews, OR Muslims you're not allowed to like me!

Nuts, on the other hand, should be given brownies whenever possible.

Words are the thing that I love the very most in life. Not because of how they look or sound, but because they convey meaning. They do the seemingly impossible, taking a thought out of my mind and, if I use the right words in the right way, putting it in someone else's mind. Or, I can take words from someone else to add their thoughts to my mind. I can discover things that I never knew, simply because someone recorded a series of words. I can experience things that ARE impossible, like being on a spaceship or being a mouse, if I view the right series of printed words.

Public speaking is the very most fun use of words, because it can cause a group of people to collectively experience the feeling that I want them to experience. We're all having an experience together, an experience that I orchestrated, and everyone feels good after we've had it! Maybe they're going to go home and start a blog. Maybe they're going to go out and knock on a door for a candidate. Maybe they just realized what they were contributing to a problem in their relationship. Maybe it later helps them get a job. Or maybe they forget it entirely, but, for a few minutes, they let a selection of words, spoken in particular tones, accompanied by body language and perhaps visual aids, trigger them to have a collective experience with a room of other human beings having the same experience.

That's exciting to me. To me, that's being able to do magic in real life. That's hypnosis and telepathy rolled into one. If I'd been born a man 100 years ago, I'd probably have gone into ministry. I've always loved the concept of collective emotional and intellectual enlightenment, and the thought that perhaps we really are all conscious together, rather than separately. I wasn't raised in any particular religion, so an obsession with the specialness of being a conscious organism is the center of my individual spirituality.

Yes, I like receiving attention, but if that was all it was, I'd go into porn, not public speaking.

Nope. I love it. I will speak where the fuck ever and when the fuck ever I can get an invitation/permission to do so. I would do it for a living if I could get enough willing listeners.

Of course, the underlying idea of forcing birth on women without offering any social safety net for mother and child post-birth is very much rooted in right-wing religious "values" of sanctity and morality. If you're pregnant, you had sex (or were provided with a "gift from God" via rape, if Santorum is consulted). If you had sex, you should have been happily married and making enough money to support a child, and you should probably have prayed about it first. If you had sex while happily married, middle class, and pious, then you're probably part of a church community, which--credit where credit is due--will indeed help members of the congregation if they are suddenly faced with something like $200,000 in medical bills for a child with a "God-given" heart defect.

But, if you have sex outside of the mold where you're a churchgoing, married, middle class or above family, you'll either need to go get "saved" and hope for help from a Catholic charity or similar, or you can appeal to the doctors directly to write off the costs of care for your child, or apply to secular charities for help.

Being liberal myself, I see this as a problem and contrary to the entire concept of government, in which, ideally, a system is set up that protects the weak from the tyranny of the strong and the minority from tyranny of the majority.

Conservatives would probably see this as only fitting, and the proper way to encourage "personal responsibility" and discourage the use of children as a substitute for an income. (Never mind that there's no such thing as "welfare" anymore, and temporary assistance programs are so limited now that nobody can realistically just keep having kids and expect the government to pay for their upkeep.)

Also on the theme of credit-where-due, my roommate recently had $17,000 of medical bills written off by a Catholic women's charity, even though she is not an active Catholic herself.

I don't dispute that certain innate differences exist; however, as Pearlson cautions, it is unwise to assume that we can differentiate between the capabilities of individuals in the same way the we can predict patterns of ability in very large populations. Nor does it mean social factors don't play a role--women may be better (statistically, in very large populations) at language skills and empathy, but how many women psychologists or authors were there at a time when the employment of women in fields outside nursing or teaching was socially unacceptable?

There's a relevant XKCD I'm sure you've seen -- "You're really bad at math!" vs. "Women are really bad at math!"

I think you're doing a little bit of the same thing here: "My daughter proves that women are inherently more talkative!" rather than, "My daughter is very talkative! On average, when studying large populations, women are much more talkative."

Not nearly as dangerous, but again I would caution you to keep Dr. Pearlson's statements in mind when generalizing about gender differences. In nearly all cases, individual differences (like your difference from your wife) will be greater than the difference between the averages of large populations. It is unlikely that any individual's abilities in any area can be meaningfully judged based on studies dealing with an average of thousands or millions who happen to share their gender.

Source: http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n11/mente/eisntein/cerebro-ho...

"Hey. You're being a dick. Knock it off."

"Excuse me, but I don't think that was called for. I understand that you're feeling upset because I didn't acknowledge your email yesterday, and I apologize for that, but I don't think that name-calling is warranted here. Can we talk about this?"

Can you hear many women saying the first, or many men saying the second?

Why is that, do you think? Numerous possible explanations exist, but I would posit that the woman is "covering her tracks" and pre-emptively apologizing and acknowledging the validity of the (probably male) other person's feelings BECAUSE she is accustomed to being gaslighted when she expresses displeasure.

This could easily extend to other scenarios -- extra word use when giving an opinion to ensure that she's acknowledging that others may have different opinions, extra word use when making a decision to guard against being told that her decision is crazy...