Podbit · Modern Wisdom
In David Puts' study, male formidability — rated by other men — predicted how many sexual partners a man had over the next 18 months. Women's attractiveness ratings of those same men had zero predictive power. Looksmaxers may have accidentally optimised for the right variable.
Where this was said
At 1:32:20 · chapter starts 1:32:02
Rob Henderson builds on Louise Perry's Spectator piece about OnlyFans as a supernormal stimulus for women (thousands of men praising you simultaneously), applying the same logic to female teacher scandals. When an attractive 25-year-old woman undresses before an experienced 28-year-old man, the response is pleasant but muted. When she does so before a 16-year-old encountering a mature woman for the first time, the intensity of his reaction — that specific look — is something no adult male encounter can replicate. Henderson is careful to note male teachers still commit these transgressions far more frequently; female scandals go viral precisely because they're anomalous. Chris Williamson connects this to his own reading of Freida McFadden's thriller 'The Teacher', whose twist forces the reader to confront their asymmetric moral reactions to the same act committed by different genders.
Rob Henderson proposed that some female teachers who sleep with male students are motivated not primarily by sex, but by the uniquely intense sexual attention an adolescent boy — encountering a fully mature woman for the first time — provides. It's a supernormal stimulus that no adult male can replicate.
In David Puts' study, how formidable men appeared to other men predicted their partner count over 18 months; women's attractiveness ratings of those same men had zero predictive power.
Social norms compress behavior so effectively that we assume other minds are similar to ours. They almost never are. After running over 100 psychology studies, Greenberg's biggest finding is that humans are far more different from each other than we intuitively believe.
The widely shared claim that we have a credit card's worth of plastic in our brains may be a massive overestimate. Researchers used nitrile gloves to measure microplastics — and nitrile gloves shed microplastic particles onto the measuring device. A second paper found the original tool used was unreliable, and that we may have far less plastic than reported.
RSD isn't just hurt feelings — it's a dopamine-deficient brain with a hyperactive amygdala and a frayed connection to the prefrontal cortex. Add a surge of norepinephrine and you get chest pain, sweating, and trembling that convinces your body something catastrophic is happening.
In Dan Ariely's door experiment, participants sacrificed the highest-reward door — repeatedly — just to avoid seeing other doors disappear. Even when researchers trained them to use the best door, they kept wasting clicks to maintain options. This is the bias that runs our lives: we'll take a worse outcome to preserve the feeling of optionality.
Dan Gilbert discovered that the brain has a 'psychological immune system' — it misremembers, reframes, and rationalizes to keep you satisfied with whatever you chose. The fear before commitment is all about potential regret. But after committing, your brain quietly starts justifying the choice — and the more irreversible the decision, the stronger the effect.
The psychological immune system can get you through the first few months of any commitment. But durable, long-term well-being requires self-concordance — choosing commitments that are genuinely aligned with your values and what you actually want. Without that alignment, the satisfaction fades fast.
Vision didn't just help animals find food — it ignited the Cambrian explosion of speciation. Half of the human cortex is devoted to visual processing, and that same visual hierarchy directly inspired the neural network architectures powering today's AI.
Peptides come loaded with a powerful narrative: regenerative, subcutaneous, targeted, cutting-edge. That narrative can genuinely move outcomes, especially for pain, energy, and recovery. The RCT's job is to quantify how much additional benefit comes from the molecule itself — above and beyond the compelling story surrounding it.
A pharmaceutical is not an amino acid sequence — it is the successful solution to manufacturing, purification, formulation, and consistency challenges. When clinical trials prove a drug works, they validate a specific product under specific processes, not every preparation that shares the same sequence.
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