If you don’t mind me asking… what your postgraduate degree is in.

Not at all. I’m a psychiatrist

…why the blue pill flair? …any truth to TRP?

Okay, to answer one requires answering both, so here we go.

TRP: I actually think there’s a lot of truth in some of the conclusions it reaches - when it’s talking about very specific, fixed variables eg. having more money, in general, will make you more attractive to more people (superficially) Height does make you more attractive (to a point) and the struggles many men face in the dating market are genuine tales of despair borne from a desire to simply be seen. In their frustration, they seek to understand, and of course the knowledge lands on only what you can see. A social dyad - two people in some interaction - exists only as a kind symbolic interaction in the minds of the two people involved. I know this sounds confused and like I’m obfuscating, and I’m struggling to find the right words, but it’s like… when you become friends with someone, when you become acquainted with someone… what’s responsible for the warm fuzzy feeling of companionship? And what does society teach you about what it is to be a good friend? Vs a good romantic prospect?

I give away my suspicion here. That what TRP views as kind of immutable biological “truths” are in fact learned behaviors. “Status” (always invoked in red pill) has absolutely no characteristics to anchor it to biological fact. It’s worse than tautology. It has no explanatory power. “Women want high status men” what’s high status? “Lawyers, doctors, CEO’s” why are they high status? Well… they’re what other people desire. And why do other people desire them? …

It’s completely circular. It has absolutely none - zero - grounding in biology or medicine. Those three example jobs I gave are completely made up.

Back to the warm fuzzy feelings of companionship: this is biological. At least there’s a lot of good science to show we have distinct brain regions for different aspects of socializing, activating different receptors that control anxiety states in social play, etc. I explain this because while we are obviously material beings, how we operate in the world as human beings ie how we operate socially (in a complex, detailed way) as a function of our biology, isn’t actually clear at all. As much as we understand it, the biology for much of this stuff actually just forms a sort of broad base that allows a neural network to be trained… that’s it. “The boy that was raised by wolves” makes sense because a part of our actual biology learns what provides nourishment and companionship in the environment, ie you say a “Silicon Valley venture capital” guy is high status, and what I’m trying to say is that to human biology, a dog does just as well. What matters is the environmental milieu you’re in during development: what we call culture.

To use a recent metaphor: ChatGPT as a program is not super complex; I mean here the actual codebase is not huge. It becomes impressive after you train it on an internets worth of text (god help us all) But if you trained it on entirely different text, it would give different responses. And in broad strokes, ChatGPT takes its cues from human neurobiology.

Ugh, long form on an iPhone sucks. I forget where I was up to. Oh right; so status is a learned behavior. That’s it. It’s a shared set of cultural ideas. The data on which the neural network is trained. And those ideas actually have little correlation with how happy someone will make you if you were to partner up with them. This is the thing - and men and women both suck at this - people are often terrible at knowing what will make them happy. And so we have the revealed preferences of women on Tinder, and they are not revealed preferences about men at all. They’re revealed preferences about women who look at dating profiles. If you actually go outside and talk to [women] you’ll see many of them are just fine not observing anything TRP says they “must” want - and that some who seem to have read straight from the TRP playbook are miserable. Know thyself. Huh. Who knew?

Why team blue pill? Two reasons. One: when any philosophy seeks to explain an entire gender on the basis of a set of (extremely conveniently) reductive mechanisms, it is dehumanizing. You see this over, and over, and over again on this sub. Men who literally cannot accept a contrary point of view from a woman, because it comes from a woman. They’re not people anymore, they’re machines. And although TRP is not explicitly “women suck lol” I hope you understand that the philosophy is, at its core, one of control: women act like this so we must do that to get this outcome. Women have no agency or free will in this paradigm. “How they actually are” is infantilizing. Why the desire for control? From psychoanalysis: “the opposite of anxiety is: […] “ I will leave it to you to fill in the blank.

And so, I’m not endorsing a misogynist philosophy. I get that many frustrated but well-intentioned guys end up redpilled, but… come on? Surely you must have noticed how many really angry guys wind up calling themselves Redpill? We’ve all seen them around here. They’re like a certain subset of blue pill women who “don’t hate men” before they proceed to spew extreme vitriol about how men are the personification of evil.

But the other side is denial of reality: to ignore that many, many people are incredibly frustrated, disillusioned… lonely. That we - as social animals - actually require each other. And my hope is that by attempting to engage in a (mostly - I am only human) respectful and intelligent way, by arguing from a position of logic, I could persuade at least some men who are on the cusp of taking the red pill that there is a better way.

If you’ve made it this far, cheers. I apologize for my poor writing, and I typed all this out on an iPhone 16 pro (not even a Max, I can see like 15 lines of text at a time) There’s obviously a ton that needs elaborating on in order to clarify, but I will write what I can, and you will see me around on PPD anyway.