Unfortunately this is the only weekend in the near future, that I already have a prior engagement I can't get out of!

I think it's a great idea and I would've been very interested in going.

Participated!

Here are two options for cheap(er) theatre tickets in NYC:

• TKTS booth - half price tickets the day of the show
• Student rush/standing room policies - Same day tickets and lotteries with steeply reduced prices. (Age/enrollment restrictions may apply

Also, the Staten Island Ferry is free to ride, and gives you pretty views of the city from the water. Just be sure that when you land in Staten Island, you hurry through the terminal to reboard the boat immediately to go back. There's little to visit in Staten Island.

Nope. That's moderate Civilizational Incompetence; science knows well that 1mg is often way too much for a first dose, but shops have presumably found that the average customer thinks "More melatonin is better" and that informed customers are too scarce to market to. You can get correctly dosed melatonin on the Internet, as with any other niche market.

I'm currently in the US for a research internship (I'm from the Netherlands) and I'd like to travel a bit on the weekends while I'm here. At the moment I'm thinking of visiting Montreal (I've heard it's nice this time of year?) and New York in the near future. Does anyone have any travel recommendations? I could especially use recommendations for (cheap) places to stay overnight.

Note: I do not have a drivers license so will be depending on public transport.

I think that if you're not a straight male you might not get the same benefits. You might get something, but it wouldn't be worth watching a twenty hour video series unless you have time to spare. It's sort of hard to explain why I feel this way. The best I can say is that the discussion and atmosphere is very man-centric, and even if some of the advice applies to women as well, it would be hard to have it hit on an emotional level, hard to differentiate between things that would and wouldn't apply to women, and hard to sit through all the discussion of nightclubs and getting laid to the relevant stuff.

Or, here's another angle. The program goes something like "women are primarily attracted to men who are assertive, independent, confident, and leaderlike - the 'alpha male'. Now I will spend hours upon hours talking about what this type of attractive man would do in a club. Okay, have you internalized this attitude yet? Surprise, you are now a little closer to becoming this independent, confident, leaderlike man, and this will help you in areas outside of women, as a nice bonus!" Can you see why this approach might not work for women?

If you still want to watch it, by all means download it and check out the first few hours for yourself, I might be wrong. But don't blame me if you don't find it useful. d:

EDIT: Apparently everyone disagrees with me, so maybe you should in fact go ahead and check it out. This is just my intuition, I guess.

I strongly disagree. I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone other than a straight man. It is definitely not catering to anyone else. A huge theme is that men and women feel attraction in drastically different ways and therefore need to pursue different strategies, so I expect that the majority of the advice would not transfer. And even if parts of it did, I'm not sure how you would go about identifying those parts. Lots of the general social skills and life attitudes might transfer, but again, not all of it, and it's heavily tied in with the themes of attracting women.

I would only watch it if you're looking for ways to spend your time and are interested in the subject of relationships / social dynamics.

The Blueprint Decoded

This is a 20-hour video series by RSD in the controversial PUA genre. However, I think this video series is not at all like the image many people might have of the genre. The discussion is very very smart - discussing matters of psychology, philosophy, spirituality, etc., occasionally coming back down to earth to apply it to the practicalities of attracting women. At the same time, the speaker, Owen Cook a.k.a. Tyler Durden, comes off as very friendly, casual, reasonable, rational, and normal - the type of guy you might want to hang out with. The claims are contrarian, but at the same time the tone is very positive (i.e. not even remotely like, say, Roissy), and not misogynistic, although of course your mileage may very - if you're a radical feminist you will obviously be offended. There are pretty much zero explicit tactics discussed, no "do and say this to get girls". And the content is immensely applicable not only to attracting women, but to social skills and even life in general.

The tagline boasts "4 day total immersion, advanced identity-level change" and I feel like it delivered this. The videos approach the same core themes from so many different angles, over and over again, that by the time you're done you feel like your mental state and the way you relate yourself to the world has been transformed. If I had to define the change in one word, it would be "self-respect".

For a variety of reasons, I have had very little social interaction since I've watched this a month or so ago, unfortunately, but the interactions that I have had have been very different. I have been much more relaxed, happier, looser, have occupied a higher-status role in the groups that I have been in, and I think have all-around presented myself better. I haven't had the chance to actually really talk to any girls, however. So it remains to be seen if I will actually improve in the area that quote-unquote matters.

If you're a straight man and you might say that you "don't understand women" or "don't know how to talk to girls", I would recommend that you torrent this and at least watch the first few hours to see if it appeals to you. If you feel shy, awkward, or low status much of the time, I would doubly recommend it. If you're unfamiliar with the PUA genre, I recommend that you read The Game by Neil Strauss beforehand just so you get some sense of what the subculture is like and the attitudes that this video series is a response to. (By the way, The Game is a fairly well-written memoir that stands on its own, even if you aren't trying to learn attraction techniques from it.)

I recently had to deal with a number of grant applications, which were definitely stressful. I was sure that I would mess up in some way, and actually I did: I included a recommendation letter for one grant in the application for another. Oops!

Most of your tips are things I realised myself during the application process, but I probably would have been better off had I read these tips beforehand, so thank you for sharing them.

My personal strategy is to double-check everything (though I've seemed to have failed at doing that in this case).

Hi everyone,

I have been lurking LessWrong on and off for quite a while. I originally found this place through HPMoR; I thought the 'LessWrong' authorname was clever and it was nice to find out there was a whole community based around aiming to be less wrong! My tendency to overthink whatever I write has gotten in the way of actually taking part in the community so far though. Maybe now that I have gotten the introduction out of the way I'll be more likely to post.

A bit more about myself: I'm a student from the Netherlands, doing a masters in Artificial Intelligence. I'm currently planning a research internship in Albany, NY, that will start sometime this summer. I'd love to get in touch with people from there by the way, so if anyone is interested let me know!