Tyler Cowen Still Scared Of Me

The utopian libertarian economist who would throw open the borders for the experience of an authentic chalupa once again summoned the Krakon by posting a comment from my site without proper attribution. I understand in the hothouse nerddom of internet protocol this is considered a major breach of etiquette, so I feel it is my duty… nay, my honor… to call out his beta ass. Here is the comment in response I left on his blog Karl Marx Was An Academic Too:

the quote cowen pulled and attempted, weakly and with great passive-aggressive betatude, to hide the source of, is from my post “the sixteen commandments of poon“:

XII. Maximize your strengths, minimize your weaknesses

In the betterment of ourselves as men we attract women into our orbit. To accomplish this gravitational pull as painlessly and efficiently as possible, you must identify your natural talents and shortcomings and parcel your efforts accordingly. If you are a gifted jokester, don’t waste time and energy trying to raise your status in philosophical debate. If you write well but dance poorly, don’t kill yourself trying to expand your manly influence on the dancefloor. Your goal should be to attract women effortlessly, so play to your strengths no matter what they are; there is a groupie for every male endeavor. Except World of Warcraft.

obviously, there are some endeavors, like video gaming, that are utterly repulsive to women and won’t do a man a lick of good to master. but for the most part, there are enough niches that a good number of men can exploit that will increase his lay ratio by a non-trivial amount.

game, btw, is not about successfully playing a classic beta strategy. it is about systematizing and mimicking alpha male behavior to hit those attraction buttons in women that natural alphas do unthinkingly. and, yes, game also serves to help men handle other males (AMOGs in the parlance of the PUA community: alpha male other guy).

If Cowen wants to actually address my original post instead of tangentially hinting at one of its recommendations, I welcome him to try and refute the wisdom inherent in the poon commandments. I suspect his reflexive bias against my collected works has less to do with its truth content than it does with his decades-long resentment of all those guys who thumbed their noses at joining the ivory tower tribe shackling themselves to years of peer-reviewed servility chasing credentialist pats on the head BUT STILL GOT ALL THE GIRLS.

As for the quote in Cowen’s post from commenter Sebastian Flyte addressing my XIIth Commandment, I think it’s clear to anyone who’s lived a day in his life that there are some womana non grata male endeavors that won’t bring the pussy stampeding no matter how skillfully mastered. Video gaming, computer building, anime critiquing, and airplane modeling come to mind. But the general principle — that in a capitalist society there are enough market niches to afford most men the opportunity to excel at something that will draw at least a little more female attention than what they would get just sitting around doing nothing — holds true.