By David Futrelle
Priorities, we’ve all got them. For example, my top priorities for the next year and a half are to 1) not die and/or 2) go completely broke. By contrast, the top priority of a Reddit “pickup artist” known as RedPill_Swinger is to procure himself as many potential future “lays” as possible, worldwide pandemic or no.
But alas, he’s not doing so well, and so he has turned to the Ask The Red Pill subreddit for advice on how to handle the “huge drop in the ROI of online dating apps.”
“I used to average one new girl/week before the outbreak of coronavirus and had (maybe have?) 6 plates,” he writes. “Plates,” for the uninitiated, is the oh-so-respectful Red Piller way of referring to women they date casually (“spinning plates”).
I told the plates I’m not gonna meet them until the quarantine is over cause I don’t wanna risk but I don’t mind fishing for new ones. So since the outbreak of coronavirus I only had a new entry who came over and we had sex. I was an idiot, I shouldn’t have risked.
Mr. Swinger, who says he’s an Italian living in Eastern Europe, puts part of the blame on “racism,” by which he seems to mean that women in his area are wary of people connected to one of the countries hardest hit by the virus.
This being said I’m not trying to shift the blame outside of me but I notice a huge change in the ROI. When they ask I don’t DEER [NOTE: Deny Everything? Even I don’t know what this acronym means –DF] but know that the “where are you from shit test” is hard to pass because my name is easy to link to Italy.m, and I also know that coming out is a deal breaker even though I have the same odds of being infected as them and I’ve got a OCD about following the quarantine rules (the new entry came over before the “curfew”), washing everything, sterilising and all.
He wonders if he should just lie and say he’s from Colchester instead.
Should I change my name and let them assume otherwise? I’ve got the plausible deniability that I’ve lived in Colchester and, no, people can’t tell the difference when I speak.
Yeah, I’m sure no one can tell the difference between an Italian and a British accent.
Even the Red Pillers think Mr Swinger’s post is a bit much.
“Jesus Christ, get over yourself,” writes one. “There is a pandemic going on.”
“You can’t possibly be that dense,” adds another.
And then there’s this fellow, who ignores the OP and offers his risk-reward assessment of casual sex in the age of coronavirus. In his mind, the virus
Doesn’t mean you can’t have sex. Let’s look at it this way:
Door #1: You have sex with a girl, get COVID and die. No big deal.
Door #2: You go around like a fucking sperg with a face mask and try to stay isolated, then die because a random guy sneezed in your face. Congrats.
I would rather take door #1.
I would suggest that he indeed take door #1 if doing so wouldn’t put others at risk.
Math is hard.
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Is it just me, or did anyone else picture a man walking into a kitchen, shouting at the dishes, and then going fishing?
The Monty Hall problem: corona edition. This time, there’s one fewer door and they’re all lousy.
I still can’t figure that one out intuitively; despite numerous explanations. I’m almost at the stage of investing in a door and some goats.
I read lay radio and I was like “what the fuck is a lay radio”
@Alan:
Best consult an independent financial advisor. And remember: the value of your goats can go down as well as up.
Is there anything less erotic than PUA talk? It’s so dehumanising that it’s hard to believe they actually have fun.
@Alan Robertshaw
Others have probably explained better, and I’m sure other people here are capable of giving a better explanation, but here goes (assuming you know the premise of the problem):
If you choose a door at random, there is a 1/3 chance your door has a car behind it. There is a 2/3 chance that it is one of the other doors. When the host opens a door, he knows what is behind each door and he won’t open the one which has a car behind it. But, since your original door had a 1/3 chance of being right, that is still the probability of that door having a car. So, there is a 2/3 chance that the car is behind the other unopened door. Those are better odds, so it is better to switch to that door.
Or just take the xkcd approach:
@ naglfar
Aww! I think that would be me too.
There was a legendary quiz/darts show here called Bullseye. At the end the winners were given the chance to win a mystery star prize. If they lost the host, Jim Bowen, would say “Let’s see what you would have won”. It was nearly always a car.
However, on the occasions they did win, the prize was almost invariably a speedboat. Very handy for people living in a tenth story flat in Wolverhampton.
It was revealed in later years that the programme budget didn’t actually run to a car; but the producer had a mate who sold speedboats.
In my experience, speedboats are WAAAAYYYY more expensive than cars….
Two questions:
a) Should lying about what someone would have won be considered fraud?
b) Since when does calculating the lay ratio involve relativity (mc2 and light cone diagrams) and electromagnetic fields (B and E vectors)? 🙂
Hot tip: You can increase your “lay ratio” to infinity, by decreasing to zero the number of random women you invite over to exchange bodily fluids and fauna during a pandemic. Denominators are magical things.
I’m having trouble following the logic that says acquaintances are risky and might be infected, but total strangers are fine.
That 2 is supposed to be superscript. I’m sure I used the correct tag correctly. Is someone sabotaging me to make me look stupid?
@ weird eddie
Apparently not if you have a mate who’ll give you a discount. Also, the producer would offer to buy back the speedboat for cash in hand.
These two looked thrilled though.
@Weird Eddie
Rather depends on the boat; one such as what Bullseye was offering would’ve run about $3,000, which would about buy you a new Yugo. Plus, if you get a new car you can immediately drive away in it, but turning a useless boat into cash is a hassle.
My advice for figuring out the Monty Hall problem intuitively is to imagine it with 100 doors. You pick a door; the game show host opens 98 of the other doors and shows there’s no prize behind those. Do you then switch to the remaining door, or stick with your first choice?
Then imagine it with fewer doors, until you get to 3.
@Buttercup
But if you invite 0 women and have sex with 0 of them, 0/0 is an indeterminate form and requires L’Hôpital’s rule to solve. So what were the derivatives?
@Surplus
The website does weird stuff with superscripts, they don’t always work.
DEER defend explain excuse rationalize
DEER = Defend Explain Excuse Rationalize
ninja’d by long time lurker. 🙂
DEER = “Defend, Explain, Excuse, Rationalise”, apparently. And yes, this does seem to be a red pill-specific acronym.
They might not DEER, but they sure can DARVO.
@Naglfar: To properly quantify redpill lay ratios, we’d need to use imaginary numbers.
@Buttercup
Of course, if you asked them they’d just say it was complex, which is technically true but there’s no real part.
Two things that really stood out to me:
The PUA idea of the “shit test” being applied to something as simple as “where are you from” makes me suspect that this guy regards anything a woman does other than have sex with him as a “shit test.”
And the lovely bit of ableism from the guy denigrating take precautions against a pandemic. Truly, red pillers are just the best people.
@Allandrel
I didn’t even notice that word the first time through. I can’t say I’m really that surprised; ableism (and anti-autism stuff especially) is a key part of manosphere/alt-right ideology.
*Trump voice*
Only the very best. So much the best, you will get tired of the best. The greatest you have ever seen. Folks, you have never seen better.
@Naglfar
Tremendous, tremendous. And their ratings! You’ve never seen ratings like this. They say no one’s ever seen ratings like this!
Re: Monty Hall problem: a hint on how it works is that you get one answer if you assume that the host knows which door the prize is behind, and a different one if you assume the host doesn’t know and opened a door at random. By default, people unconsciously assume the latter, but the “real” answer assumes the former… it’s just not normally spelled out, so your intuition has no reason to take it into consideration.
(I can try to explain it to anyone who still doesn’t get it.)
Something tells me this guy was striking out on the dating front long before Covid-19. I honestly can’t imagine anyone of any gender being desperate enough to even CONSIDER going out with this jerk.