when you are psyched up and excited for your life, when you are excited for what you've planned to accomplish through the day, it's amazing you will wake up before the alarm clock even startles you to awake. Your successes fuel your ambition, your successes give you extra energy, your successes pave the way for more successes, it's the snowball effect. With one success you are excited to meet another and another and another, and pretty soon the diciplines that were so difficult in the beginning, the diciplines that got you going are now part of your philosophy..
Cold approach works and feels good but the actual value given by a random woman, even when you select for the attractive or peacocking ones, tends to be very very low. I think many intellectuals overestimate the value of randomly picked women because those they have come across in male-dominated feels tend to be exceptional - very intelligence, skilled, curious etc. If you're like me, you'll find yourself yearning for the physical beauty of the wider community when you're around rationalist women, and the interest in rationality from the rationalist community when you're around beautiful women. The secret, I've been learning, is simply to see the good in everyone, and select for people who are good at managing interpersonal relationships above all other traits, in one's social circle.
Your link seems to argue that peace interventions aren't maximally efficient, not that they're not useful. As for why peace is a good metric to use, war (for the majority of the population affected) is a sufficiently clear negative that it would take extremely strong arguments to show peace is not an important positive good. Just look at the revealed preferences of refugee flows, if nothing else.
There's a new paper arguing, contra Pinker, that the world is not getting more peaceful:
On the tail risk of violent conflict and its underestimation
Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Every claim in the abstract is supported by the data - with the exception of the last claim. Which is the important one, as it's the only one really contradicting the "long peace" thesis.
Most of the paper is an analysis of trends in peace and war that establish that what we see throughout conflict history is consistent with a memoryless powerlaw process whose mean we underestimate from the sample. That is useful and interesting.
However, the paper does not compare the hypothesis that the world is getting peaceful with the alternative hypothesis that it's business as usual. Note that it's not cherry-picking to suggest that the world might be getting more peaceful since 1945 (or 1953). We've had the development of nuclear weapons, the creation of the UN, and the complete end of direct great power wars (a rather unprecedented development). It would be good to test this hypothesis; unfortunately this paper, while informative, does not do so.
The only part of the analysis that could be applied here is the claim that:
This could mean that the peace since the second world war is not unusual, but could be quite typical. But this ignores the "per capita" aspect of violence: the more people, the more deadly events we expect at same per capita violence. Since the current population is so much larger than it's ever been, the average time delay is certainly lower that 101.58 years. They do have a per capita average time delay - table III. Though this seems to predict events with 10 million casualties (per 7.2 billion people) every 37 years or so. That's 3.3 million casualties just after WW2, rising to 10 million today. This has never happened so far (unless one accepts the highest death toll estimate of the Korean war; as usual, it is unclear whether 1945 or 1953 was the real transition).
This does not prove that the "long peace" is right, but at least shows the paper has failed to prove it wrong.