He's from South Africa right?

Sometime in the next day or so, a Bootcamp is going to go up for Johannesburg, South Africa.

After the awesome success of our Glasgow and Dublin Bootcamps, Cajun and I are interested in getting our travel on, and visiting some new and far-flung places. We figure South Africa is about as far as you can get.

This is going to be our first bootcamp in Africa, and this is probably going to be a one-time-only event. There are only six seats available, and they’re probably going to fill up fast, so make sure to sign up now.

• Bootcamp in Rio! (Updated July 29th)
• Thoughts from Glasgow
• How to piss off a Bartender in Dublin
• Back in Toronto
• Cajun on Keys to the Vip

Right now, I’m losing to Cajun and Fader, and am nearly tied with Braddock. Personally, I think it’s embarrassing that they’re even considered in the same league as me

Anyway, one of my defining characteristics, and something that has helped me immensely with my game, is the fact that I have no shame. So I’m not above trying to stack the deck by begging my blog readers to log onto The Attraction Forums and vote for me.

In return? I offer you a follow up to my “Is Rational Intelligence is a Spandrel” article from earlier this month.

It’s called : Embrace Magical Thinking

First of all, for those of you who don’t believe in magical stuff, please give me a chance before you reject this notion. I’m not going to blow sunshine up your ass, or give you some kind of wu-wu new-age energy field you can manipulate to help you solve your life’s problems. But I will explain to you, in an entirely scientific and rational way, why “magical thinking” make sense sometimes, specifically in social situations.

I mentioned earlier that the human mind is designed primarily to understand other human minds, and that our ability to understand the natural world is actually secondary to that first purpose. Well, magic, and peoples belief in magic, is partially a result of that.

Magical thinking and superstition come about when human beings mistakenly try to apply the rules of social intelligence to the natural world. Think about the following situation:

You’re heading out to the countryside with your friends on a long weekend, and you say to your buddy in the passenger seat “Oh man, traffic is looking good, we’re going to be at the beach in an hour”. Your buddy says “You shouldn’t talk about that, you’ll jinx it!!” You wind up at the beach in an hour, because what you SAY doesn’t affect traffic.

You’re heading out to the countryside with your friends on a long weekend, and you say to your buddy in the passenger seat “Oh man, we’re going to be at the beach in an hour, and I am totally hooking up with that Mary girl. You guys are going to need to find something else to do this evening, because if the house is a-rockin, don’t come a-knockin”. You wind up at the beach in an hour, and your buddies give Mary a funny, knowing look as they step out of the car. She suspects you’ve been talking about her, feels creeped out by it, and you don’t wind up hooking up with her.

Jinxing is real, it is not a superstition. It’s only a superstition when it’s applied to things that are governed by the rules of science. When it comes to human social situations, jinxing is a very real thing.

Here’s another example:

Perry Trotter, the famous boy wizard, is trying to cast a spell. He says “Abrakadabra”, and nothing happens, he says “AaaaaaaabraaaaKadabraaa” and suddenly a bright flash puts a hole in his book and singes off his eyebrows, and finally he tries one more time, says “Abracadabra”, and his book floats in the air just as he wanted it to.

Larry Trotter, no relation, is trying out a new opinion opener in a bar. He walks up to some cute girls by the bar, and tells them a funny story about how his little sister has a crush on David Bowie. At the end of the opener, he teases the girls for liking “old guys”, and they pretty much ignore it and keep talking.

The next set he does, he says the same thing, and the girls get offended.

The third time, he tries once more, and when he teases them at the end, all the girls start laughing and invite him to join their group.

So, while magic and superstition are not actually true when applied to the natural world, they do give us insight into the way that the social world works, and more importantly, we can use “magic” as an analogy to help us understand how social interactions work.

I can’t give you a magical spell to make people like you, I’m not going to pretend that there’s some new-age wu-wu thing that will give you the life of your dreams, but I will tell you there is a way to radiate, through your mannerisms and your bodylanguage, an energy that will influence the people around you, and you can control this energy. Using this energy you can make people feel comfortable, make people feel excited, make people have fun, and make people come along with you for a good time. Oh yeah, and you can make women attracted to you. I almost forgot that.

• Is Rational Intelligence a Spandrel? (Warning, Long)
• Dealing with your buddies.
• Socal V. Rational Intelligence - Part II
• Social V. Rational intelligence
• ROCK SOLID INNER GAME!

In architecture, a spandrel is the space between two arches, or the space between an arch and it’s enclosure. The remarkable thing about spandrels is that they do nothing, and serve no purpose, but you always have to have them. Nobody intends to build a spandrel, they’re just the consequence of putting an arch inside a square structure

A really pretty spandrel.

Eventually, architects decided to do something with all the spandrels they were building, and started putting pretty designs on them. And spandrels became pretty things, and people liked them and maybe even decided to put more spandrels in their buildings. By becoming a canvas for craftsmen and artists, spandrels found a use in art, despite being useless in architecture.

In biology, a spandrel is a word used for an evolutionary adaptation that came about as a side-effect of a true adaptation, but which is not the original purpose of the adaptation. While an Elephant’s trunk may be useful for washing parasites off it’s back, the trunk did not evolve specifically for that purpose, just in the same way that a human nose doesn’t exist to put your glasses on.

So, what does this have to do with human intelligence?

Well, I want to make a controversial argument about human intelligence. I’m not a scientist, and maybe someone else has already come to this conclusion, but I want to throw it out there anyways.

The argument is: maybe human brains aren’t any more designed for rational thinking than an elephant’s trunk is designed for taking showers. That our ability to do math and physics, our ability to understand complex logical systems such as the physical world around us, is really just a side-effect of a brain that was designed to do something else.

So, what were our brains designed to do? What were they good for, if not for thinking rational thoughts and exploring the world around us?

And the answer is: they are for understanding other human beings.

Our brains evolved, not to help us build spears, or to build huts, or to learn writing, but to understand the people around us. We evolved big brains so that people couldn’t trick us and steal our resources or our partners. We evolved big brains so that we could trick others, and survive when times were lean. We evolved big brains so that we could know when our spouses or our allies were cheating on us, or lying to us, or planning to betray us, and so we could prepare an appropriate response.

Obviously, that’s a complicated, and difficult task. It required the human brain to be capable of recursion (aka, thinking about someone thinking about what you’re thinking), and to be extraordinarily flexible. People, after all, are tricky things. Compared to the complexity of people and of tribal politics, building a spear was probably pretty easy, and so it was natural that our flexible, brilliant brains would start figuring out the natural world in their spare time.

And so, rational, logical intelligence in humans (as distinct from social or artistic intelligence) evolved as a spandrel, the side-effect of a brain that had to be both extraordinarily powerful (in processing power) and also flexible.

Before we go any further, I’d like to make a disclaimer: I know I’m over-simplifying things. Obviously, it’s not like human brains evolved *purely* to understand people, and that the ability to understand the physical environment was of no importance. I’m simply arguing that understanding people was the major evolutionary imperative, and that understanding the physical world was of comparatively minor importance.

I think this theory has some good explanatory power, and has some evidence to support it. Here’s some of the evidence that led me to this conclusion.

Human beings aren’t really very good at logical thought.

Without education, the average human being would barely learn to count by themselves. Even well-educated individuals often have a hard time with math and logic, and can’t perform these tasks without assistance. However, even a completely uneducated individual can learn to be very eloquant, can learn several languages, and can learn to deceive and manipulate extraordinarily well.

Similarly, when you compare a human being to a computer, we have the mathematical ability of an 8 bit pocket calculator from 1978, yet we can identify a lie better than all but the most advanced computers.

When human beings make errors in understanding the physical world, their errors often appear to be an over-application of “social logic”.

Throughout history, human beings have tended to treat physical problems like social problems. Religion and superstition can be explained by the application of socially primed ways of thinking to rational problems. Aside from the obvious examples of religions that represent physical phenomena with imaginary persons (the sun god, moon god, etc), there are many other examples.

- The belief in “jinxing”, for example, can be seen as a parallel to the social problem of hubris or pride. You can “jinx” your relationship by taking it for granted that your wife will always love you, but you can’t “jinx” your ride home by taking it for granted that traffic won’t be bad.

- Conspiracy theories, as well, seem to be a result of a preference for social answers to questions, rather than accepting more complicated, rational answers. These theories may be the result of a preference to blame hard-to explain events using human motives and psychology, rather than more complicated and rational arguments, such as economics, game theory, and probability.

- Popular political beliefs may be a result of the preference for social thinking over rational thinking. For example, the support of harsh criminal penalties which may persist despite evidence that they do nothing to prevent crime. Or the belief that an state, organization or corporation has human-like intent to harm people or achieve a goal, when a logical analysis shows that they are simply acting in their reasonable self-interest.

So what does this mean for your game?

For the most part, this article is pretty off-topic, I’ll confess. I just wanted to write it. But it does have consequences for game. Here are some conclusions that you can draw from this theory that will help your game.

- Your brain is DESIGNED for social intelligence. That is it’s first function, and if you just LET GO of the way of thinking that has been instilled in you by years of education, your core intelligence will guide you. Trust your gut!

- Learn to distinguish your socialy based intuitions from your rational thought processes. If something is governed by social logic (a relationship), trust your “gut” over your rational mind. If something is governed by rational logic, be cautious about listening to your gut. For example, George Bush’s “gut” probably served him well in running for office and in forming relationships in business. But when it comes to invading a country, he should have put his gut instincts aside and looked at the lessons provided by history and social science.

• Socal V. Rational Intelligence - Part II
• Social V. Rational intelligence
• Poll: Who is your favorite Lovesystems instructor?
• Is divorce good for women?
• Inner Game - Turn off the Video Camera

Anyway, I got busy with school, and the product idea kind of got put on the shelf. We’ve been sitting on the video for a while now, so I decided to just take a few clips and release them free to the interenet. These videos are pretty basic; the target audience is more a newbie who wants to see what good kino + bodylanguage looks like rather than advanced pickup guy. But considering all the crap pickup videos out there I thought I could do people a service by putting something out there that doesn’t suck… in any case, we have some better footage that I’m still holding on to in the hopes of making a pickup product out of them.

Anyway guys, I’m interested in hearing what you guys think of this, and if you have suggestions for something that you’d like to see in a future video, Cajun and I will be going out and trying to get more footage this winter.

• New Opener - Tenmagnet’s Retard Opener
• Cajun is on Keys to the VIP
• Tenmagnet and Cajun on Pickup Podcast
• Cajun is coming to Vancouver!
• More Infield Video

Anyway, I want to make sure everyone knows that Mantalk is still going on, and since I haven’t done the draw yet, I’m going to keep the contest open for another two weeks, until October 27th.

Also, I’ve changed things around a bit, so now you can browse the forums without logging in, if you want to have a look before you register. Also, we were getting a bit of spam, so I got a better captcha registration process that should fix that.

Hope to see you there!

• Contest Rules
• Calgary v. Toronto
• An All-Canada Message Board
• Canadians! Win a free Lovesystems Seminar, or two hours of phone coaching!
• Concours pour Mantalk.ca

Siamese Chicks!!! HELP!!!!!

Ok, so I meet two HB (Hot Babes) 8.5’s…they’re siamese. We met at a campus club, and they’re connected at the waist. Here’s the thing, I DHV’d (demonstrated higher value… aka, acted cool) Toward the Obsticle (the left side)whilst negging the target (right side) But the obsticle now likes me!!! Fuck!!!

SO I have a few questions: First of all, If I do hook up with them what does that count as, score-wise? 1 f-close or 2?

First of all, congratulations on being open enough to hit on Siamese twins, while also being picky enough to fine one of them unattractive. I mean, everybody has standards, right?

As for how this counts, score wise, I think it’s a bit of a philosophical question - you might even be having your first threesome! Personally, I would go by the number of vaginas involved. If she has two, you can put two notches on your bedpost (or maybe one big two-headed notch, like a Y), if there’s only one vagina, I’m afraid you can only add one notch. Those are the rules, I’m afraid.

If you’re curious (I am), you should ask her politely “how many vaginas (vaginii?) do you have?”. Try not to look like a creep as you’re doing this.

Certainly, it’ll be a good story to impress your friends!

Pics or it didn’t happen!!

• The Second Worst Voicemail Ever?
• Contest Rules
• Be a Risk-Taker!
• Text Message Game
• Picking Up for Beginners - Part 6

Glasgow has been a great experience. And I thought I’d pass on some things I’d noticed about Scotland.

1 - Bars and Clubs don’t seem to play that house music bullshit that has infected the rest of the world. I was pleased to see that Glasgow is a city where people actually DANCE to rock music.

2 - The girls in Glasgow were hotter than I expected… but my expectations were low. It probably helps that I like the rocker look, which 2/3rds of the women in Glasgow under the age of thirty are sporting.

3 - Scottish chavs are called neds (Non-educated Delinquents), and are much more rediculous than their American cousins, “white trash”. We sat behind a family of neds on the flight from Dublin, and they were hilarious and obnoxious. The best part was the 8 year old daughter of the family, who had a rediculous fake tan, complete with orange hands, and was talking about some contestant on X-factor (think American Idol) and how she would love to “do” him. Priceless….

4 - Flights in Europe are rediculously cheap… troublingly so. I don’t understand how you can keep an airplane from falling out of the sky when you’re charging 1 euro for a ticket. Also, flights are cheap enough that Neds can afford to travel. I prefer the days when air travel was a bastion of the privileged classes.

5 - Scottish women have a really odd, dry, sense of humor. They’ll make fun of you even if they like you, and you need to hit back. I got confused a few times, not knowing what was going on as scottish girls teased me. But if you give it back better than they can (and I can be as mean and sarcastic as anyone), you win.

• Tenmagnet & Cajun in South Africa!?!?
• How to piss off a Bartender in Dublin
• Learn to Dance
• How To Approach Women
• Be a Risk-Taker!

Just when you thought that you couldn’t fuck things up more, the US Congress has gone ahead and demonstrated that they really don’t have a clue what’s going on. This is really troubling.

I’m not troubled by the fact that the bailout package failed - it was a flawed bill, and there were good reasons to vote against it. Unfortunately, this package failed for the WRONG reasons.

The bailout package failed, not because it was flawed, but because more than half of congress doesn’t understand shit about finance and economics, and it’s those people who are running the show these days. If they had voted the package down over technical details, or because they wanted more oversight, I would understand - but they didn’t vote it down for that reason. They voted it down because they are unable or unwilling to understand the consequences of the impending crisis.

For example Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, said to support the would be like placing “a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan’s coffin.” (What?) Or they’re against this bailout because their constituents don’t support it, which is also stupid because your average person can’t be expected to understand the significance of the problems the US economy is facing - this isn’t a simple problem that you can figure out by watching Fox News.

The US government needs to do something, not to bail out Wall Street, but to keep these credit problems from screwing up everyday life in America. We’re at a point where profitable factories are going to close because they can’t get the credit to buy their raw materials, one where you can’t buy (or sell) a car without $20,000 cash. Banks will go down left and right, wiping out people’s savings (only your first $100,000 in an account are protected) and crippling business.

Oh, and home prices will probably fall even further if that happens, which will compound the mortgage crisis and screw over everyday people even more.

A bailout isn’t about helping bank executives, or stockholders (though they may benefit), it’s about helping the innocent depositors, debtors and businesses that deal with the Banks. Yes, stockholders and executives may benefit, but government has to rescue the good with the bad. It’s as if we’re all on the Titanic, and the Republicans seem more concerned with ensuring the captain drowns than saving the ship.

It’s that kind of idiocy, more than any problem in the markets, that concerns me now.

• Be a Risk-Taker!
• I don’t want a relationship right now.
• Is Rational Intelligence a Spandrel? (Warning, Long)
• Canadians! Win a free Lovesystems Seminar, or two hours of phone coaching!
• Poll: Who is your favorite Lovesystems instructor?

Anyway, in the spirit of this game, I will introduce to you a 100%, guaranteed way to piss off a bartender in Dublin. It goes like this.

Bartender - What can I get you..

10Mag - I dunno.. do you have any local beers?

Bartender - Well, we have Guinness!

10Mag - No, I don’t want a Guinness… What’s that local beer you have… the dark one?

Bartender - Guinness!

10Mag - No, not that one… it’s really dark. I can get it at my bar back home.

Bartender - ??

10Mag - Heineken? Is that made in Dublin??

Then, continue to describe Guinness in as much detail as possible, all the while insisting that you’re NOT talking about Guinness. Eventually, give up and order a Corona, and then tell them how “we saved your ass in World War II”.

This joke was inspired by the Kids in the Hall skit below.

• Getting a suit made
• Canadians! Win a free Lovesystems Seminar, or two hours of phone coaching!
• Calgary Tragedy
• Easter Egg Theory Part II
• Anyone in Calgary?

http://hmatkin.blogspot.com John McCain gets BarackRoll’d at the Republican National Convention. By Hugh Atkin and Alastair Corrigall.

• Californication
• Text Message Game
• Time to take your money out of the bank?
• Calgary Tragedy
• Smart guys date in paralell