178. Dating Operating Systems (Dating OS)

I want to explain how dating, and our very culture, is changing. But to do that I have to explain how our brains are changing. This paper will set the context for future advanced dating analysis.

Social media is awash with content on dating. This is understandable because along with a flood of new tools to empower dating, the whole process has been accelerated and abbreviated. Going from 3 options to 300,000 options (or more) means mental frameworks must be adopted to quickly vet potential partners. Decisions that used to take months are forced into just a few minutes or even seconds.

Influencers are teaching viewers and fellow influencers new models and outlooks for evaluating others and paving the way for hyper-discriminatory lenses that allow almost instantaneous evaluation. Simultaneously, viewers are learning how to be hyper-discriminatory about which content to click on, as there are thousands of new daily options.

To aid viewers, most content is sorted into one of two batches:

1. Men Bad. Typically targeted at heterosexual cis women.

2. Women Bad. Typically targeted at heterosexual cis men.

Click on one or two of these pre sorted forms of content and The Algorithm knows who you are and what you want. It will continue to give you this sort of content until the day you die or disconnect from the medium. Is this cynical? Yes. Cynicism sells. Will it destroy your ability to get along with humans of the “other” gender? The answer would be yes if you still had this ability, but most people have already had this ability destroyed a long time ago.

Reprogramming

Humans are organic computers with legs (or not, I’ve worked with a number of patients in the past that didn’t have legs, I don’t mean to discriminate here). Humans don’t fly out of their womb knowing any of this. Knowledge that you do have when you fly out of your mother, or that can logically be deduced, is called “a priori”. Trying to change a priori knowledge leads to cognitive dissonance but is generally the goal of brain washing.

For everything else, “wetware” has to be programmed. Or reprogrammed if you change/update a belief or internal model later on. Programming is generally a combination of culture and personal experience. Typically we live within multiple cultures simultaneously, and these are often competing. This also creates cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance creates stress, lowers cognitive horsepower (“IQ”), and can trigger aggression or other “irrational” responses.

If people are now being reprogrammed by thousands of sources daily, does that mean an increase in cognitive dissonance?

Yes.

If cognitive dissonance is rising rapidly, does that mean humans are getting dumber?

Yes.

Is there a solution? Well, other than disconnecting from social media and other forms of Algorithmic learning, your options are limited. Most people are not self-aware or rational enough to self-reprogram. Those that are we generally call “free thinkers”. I would put that at 1 to 5% of the population. Out of curiosity I asked AI it’s opinion. AI didn’t seem to understand the concept of free thought. Which, I guess makes sense.

A free thinker basically is someone that knows how to “tiddy up” their own brain and remove all the crap that piles up if you don’t do regular synaptic housekeeping. What you know and how you think is the result of billions of synaptic connections that you have formed over your lifetime. Making new synapses or altering existing ones is called “neuroplasticity”. This ability declines with age so we end up less smart as we age. We make up for that, potentially, with a larger body of knowledge. But then if you have accepted a lot of false information as true, even that knowledge can make you dumber.

Bad actors can attempt to aggressively reprogram you, or even hijack your brain by putting malicious code in there. I talk at length about the process in my Mind Games paper. Increasingly this sort of gendered content is finding its way onto LinkedIn, where I do hang out. I challenge all of this Man/Woman Bad content when I detect it, and ask the authors to return it to TikTok or wherever it came from. They usually respond by trying to paint me as sexist, exactly as I describe in the Mind Games paper. This, like all other forms of projection, doesn’t work on me.

My Lens

In my lifelong quest to understand the human organism, I’ve tried very hard to learn the perspectives of both/all genders simultaneously in parallel. I don’t take sides on gender issues. For this reason I self-identify as “Non-Binary” though I’m happily male bodied. On gender issues, I think it would also be fair to say I’m “All”. I don’t write this on official documents as this might get me detained.

When I see political or gendered content and it seems clearly irrational to me, I don’t immediately see it as “wrong”. People generally act “right” within the parameters of their programming. If they are acting irrationally, that means they are acting Right using bad programming. Of course there are cases of severe mental illness or decay (like dementia) where the brain just straight out malfunctions.

But when I encounter someone with bizarre outputs, I generally try to ask more questions. Every human is programmed with basic rules/objectives that guide them. Due to my early (age 6+) military training, I generally call these “Victory Conditions”. If you can determine a person’s Victory Conditions, you can predict their behavior in any scenario at very close to 100% accuracy. This is what makes Psychometric Modelling possible, and so powerful/dangerous.

By asking enough questions, I can arrive at a list of Victory Conditions for the person that I’m evaluating that makes their behavior completely rational. I’m basically reverse engineering their programming. This can lead me to some pretty dark places, but it allows me to relate to almost anyone if I have enough time/inclination.

As I evaluate relationship and dating trends in future papers, I will be explaining the sorts of reprogramming that is being promoted on social media. Some of this stuff is pretty dark and might not make sense to you if you are not the target audience (i.e. not sufficiently pre programmed). Thus I will also be explaining the conditions under which it does make sense, so that you can see where this content is coming from and what it’s trying to do to you.

Generally a viewer would arrive at this content after dropping far down a Rabbit Hole which will progressively reprogram the viewer until more elaborate ideas can be installed/accepted. When Ubisoft describes layoffs as “Voluntary Career Transition Programs”, this sort of Orwellian doublespeak is fairly obvious. But some of the stuff people are being programmed with in the dating sphere is so multi-layered that targets might not realize what they’ve gotten into if they’ve previously undergone multiple rounds of Mind Games.

I try not to blame the victims. I try hard. I have a Large Tribe World View, so I do my best to treat everyone as my brothers and sisters, even the really badly programmed people.

OS “Versions”

As people update their Dating Operating Systems some changes are minor patches. Others are very large updates based around a number of key interlocking ideologies. So the major versions might be Dating OS 1 and Dating OS 2. I don’t really talk about Dating OS 2.1 because there could be millions of different versions of that, but Dating OS 2 is pretty universal.

Dating OS 1.0

This varies a bit depending on the local culture. Here I will talk about Western OS 1 because that’s what I know. This is generally called “Traditional Values”. Meaning there is a bunch of proscribed behaviors, privileges, and responsibilities for each gender. And in OS 1 there are only two genders.

Generally in OS 1 the man is expected to be the provider and protector. The woman is expected to have high domestic skills, possibly even being a housewife, and is expected to ultimately have children and raise them.

Dating OS 2.0

The goal of 2.0 is to identify a target running 1.0 and completely exploit their outdated programming.

For a woman running 2.0, the goal is usually to identify a “traditional” man with high net worth/income who is naive or even unaware of the existence of OS 2.0. Then extract as much financial assets as possible. Long games can include using brief marriages or child births to “secure the bag”, followed by a swift divorce. Then the child can be withheld from the father, for a ransom.

For a man running 2.0, the goal is to convince the target that they are seeking marriage and long term commitment. Then proceed to extract as much sexual activity as possible and get out. If some money can be acquired also, that’s a bonus but usually a secondary objective.

Dating OS 3.0

The goal of OS 3 is to identify someone running OS 2 and exploit them.

For a woman running OS 3 this generally involves feigning traditional behavior (to lure the 2.0 in) and then making vague promises of sex while increasingly extracting money from the OS 2 target.

For a man running OS 3 they will act traditional (as a lure) and pretend to be high net worth (as a lure). Then they will extract sex and/or money from the OS 2. The 3.0 will act gullible/dumb to further lure the 2.0, typically pretending to be sitting on a lot of money, possibly an inheritance that is “illiquid”. The real experts will spend a lot of money up front to look rich, then make excuses for not spending later on.

Women running OS 3 are common enough that we don’t report on it. When a man runs OS 3 we get news reports of “Tinder Swindlers” and such.

My OS

Since I write my own brain code, I can run any OS I want. I can use 5.0 if I want. I could exploit anyone running OS 1, OS 2, or OS 3 at will. But the Vows I took starting at age 8 that are there to protect people from me prevent me from using my talents to exploit them. In my Victory Points, I lose massive points if I fuck someone over. I’m trying hard to get on the human all time high score board, so I don’t do that.

Since OS 2 and 3 are both inherently predatory, people running them are unlikely to agree to a parity relationship, so I avoid them. That means I’m avoiding 80+% of people when I date.

When I met my partner of the last almost 6 years, I was FLOORED to realize she was running OS 1. I’m from California, that’s just unheard of in modern times. Further, she didn’t want children. I couldn’t pass that up. Granted, it’s a bit boring, but it’s worth it to have a stable relationship where I don’t constantly have to deal with exploitation. I found her on Tinder and I got her off the app immediately. She had only been on the app a week and was already running into a parade of men running 2.0 on her.

Where did she grow up, some rural farm out in the middle of nowhere? Actually yes! I’ve been there many times (it’s in Thailand) and it’s very pretty. She was the first person in her village to graduate from college. She even spent some time in the Thai military so she’s not a pushover. She was training AI when I met her, she’s pretty smart.

I agreed to run OS 1 with her, which to be honest was/is a bit of a stretch. But it’s better than the constant OS arms race. She might be better off with a real OS 1 man, if any still exist. But she has a very strong personality and that limits her options to an even smaller pool of men who have stronger personalities. In OS 1 men are expected to be dominant. I’m a “switch”, I can be whatever I need to be.

I’m still philosophically non monogamous, because I think that’s the natural state for humans. But I agree to monogamy to make this work. Its worth it to avoid the stress of dating so that I can focus on my writing and research. As I’ve stated in other places, I’m on the asexuality spectrum. So terrorizing the countryside is not a priority for me.

Action, Reaction

Programming affects our behavior. It even affects our physiology. Sophisticated (mis) programming can even put the target into a logic loop that reinforces the (mis) programming. For instance if you had the following rules in place:

1. The other gender is not trustworthy, they will use me and throw me away,

2. The other gender deserves to be treated poorly because they are not trustworthy

This would cause you to be mean to someone of the other gender. Then they will try to get away from you. Then you will say “oh they ghosted me, what a piece of shit." This then justifies your previous choice to treat them poorly. You can enjoy that sort of destructive loop for the rest of your life and get to be Right.

You might think, “oh that’s dumb, I’d never do that.” But I had a very sophisticated friend who was a professional therapist go down one of these Rabbit Holes and end up doing that to all her male friends. I offered to help her figure out what the problem was on a call, and she ended up doing the same thing to me. I was happy I figured out her problem, but sad that she managed to hose a 5+ year friendship in under 30 minutes. Along with apparently many other friendships. These sorts of logic loops can ruin your life if you fall victim to them. In her case, she might even be harming her patients.

As I write future articles about Dating OS changes I may refer to gendered content to give examples. This isn’t me taking a side, promoting that content, or saying “Man/Woman Bad!”. This is me explaining how that content can ruin your life. You also need to be able to identify when someone is carrying that programming so that you will know what they are going to do next (to you). In some cases I might even be able to provide some counter code that could knock them off their programming so that the two of you can interact more honestly and productively.

If you end up realizing that you are carrying some of this bad code already, this will give you the chance to “catch and kill” it and get that shit out of your mind.

In the end, all behaviors have consequences. As I get into the various ways humans are being programmed on social media, I will expose the “logic” loops and talk a lot about how to identify them. Then I will talk about the consequences of having this or that logic loop.

I will refer back to this document often in future articles that include “Dating OS:” in the title.