Claiming your opinion carries more weight than someone else's is also an opinion, and a rather arrogant one, I might add.
It is true that there's no objective, repeatable scientific evidence of the existence of God, but keep in mind that science restricts itself to examining the laws of this universe, and phenomena that are subject to those laws. Any being that created this universe and its laws is obviously not subject to it, and therefore falls outside the realm of science anyway.
(FYI, a strong agnostic position antagonizes just about everybody on the thiest and athiest side).
Not at all. It antagonises everybody on the gnostic (people who pretend they know it all) side. There are plenty of agnostic theists and atheists, who believe something despite admitting it's unknowable.
In fact, I think any good christian should be humble enough to admit the limitations of his own knowledge and be at least slightly agnostic. (I know I am.)
He treats the arbitrary as on a par with the rational and evidentially supported. So he is the ultimate epistemological egalitarian: he equates the groundless and the proved. As such, he is an epistemological destroyer.
I've never heard of Leonard Peikoff, but he's clearly an idiot. Agnostics are the only ones who distinguish between the groundless and the proved. The only ones who consider what's evidentially supported and what isn't.
Strong agnosticism is a logically defensible position: there may exist a god who created a universe with thr property that it is impossible to prove (or disprove) that god's existance. This claim can only be disproven by establishing the existance of a different sort of god. Very few people hold this belief.
Are you sure that very few people hold this belief? It sounds like a very sensible one, and it is what a very influential agnostic, Immanuel Kant, believed. I believe the very same thing, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of the intelligent, well-educated christians I know would subscribe to the same belief.
Agnosticism and atheism aren't mutually exclusive. You can be an agnostic atheist (i.e. you don't believe in any god and you claim there is no way to know this for fact) or you can be a gnostic atheist (i.e. you don't believe any god and you claim to know this as fact). Most atheists are agnostic atheists.
In the same way, agnosticism and theism aren't mutually exclusive. Agnostics aren't in opposition with atheists or theists, they're in opposition with gnostics, be they theist or atheist.
I believe there's no way we can actually say whether there is or is not a god, but I feel there is none. People say that stance lacks conviction, but I feel I'm being more realistic on the matter.
I'd say it's conviction tempered by reason. Conviction doesn't have to be wholly irrational.
I'm agnostic, and I *am* picking a side and standing up for it.
'Agnostic' doesn't mean "I don't know whether to believe in the Christian god" (as your comment re: Zeus appears to imply). Agnosticism can mean either "I don't know whether there's a god or not" or "I believe it's unknowable whether there's a god or not".
Exactly. In the GP's words, I'd say agnosticism is firmly on the side of reason, whereas atheism and religion are on the side of faith.
They're not really opposites, though. It's perfectly possible to be a reasonable (agnoastic) atheist or a reasonable (agnostic) christian. I consider myself agnostic christan, for example. I firmly believe it's unknowable whether there's a god or not, yet at the same time I firmly believe that there is a god (and a very specific one at that), fully aware that this belief is not based on any reliable, objective evidence. That's what makes it belief, after all.
What really annoys me is theists and atheists who pretend they know everything and claim their position is fully supported by evidence when it's not. It's usually much easier to talk to agnostics (including agnostic atheists and theists) than fundamentalist atheists or theists. (Although I know one guy who I consider a fundamentalist agnostic. He's a really odd case, denying it's possible to be christian and agnostic at the same time, and worships Kant like he's the messiah, despite the fact that Kant himself was an agnostic christian.)
The Geneva conventions apply to uniformed soldiers fighting in declared wars between states. They specifically exclude "irregular" combatants who dress as civilians or are not acting on behalf of a state.
Irregular combatants dessing as civilians were, among western nations, usually spies. And enemy spies in your country were treated as criminals and tried according to the laws of your land, which were usually quite severe when it came to spying, but they still had the same rights that any criminal has. A fair trial, for example.
They problem with the Gitmo prisoners is that they were not only denied rights as PoWs, but also rights as criminals or even human beings. Torture is not just forbidden by the Geneva Convention, it's also against the Declaration of Human Rights.
Had the US treated them as criminals and given them a lawyer and a fair trial, most people wouldn't have complained. Except lawyers of course, because many of the Gitmo prisoners were arrested on foreign soil and had never even set foot in the US, so they should have been tried according to the laws of the countries where they lived or had been arrested.
But at least they would have had some rights. The problem is that the US specifically created and exploited a loop hole in order to deny people their rights, and that's fundamentally totalitarian and tyrannical, and definitely something that people should protest against. Loudly and, if necessary, violently.
Not that I completely disagree with you, but most of the individuals we are dealing with these days are not lawful combatants, and as such are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.
They were captured in a foreign country. I don't see how you can legally capture anyone in a foreign country unless you consider them enemy combatants.
Terrorists will never be anything but unlawful combatants in the eyes of the Geneva Conventions, however.
Then treat them as criminals and give them a fair trial. I'm pretty flexible that way. But treating them as subhuman and not having any rights whatsoever, that's just not an option.
Either they're civilians and deserve a fair trial, or they're combatants and should be treated as PoWs.
o) They summarily ignored any guy who wrote more than a few lines. What he had to say was mostly irrelevant, and ability to respond to what they'd written in their profiles in a thoughtful manner was a sign of being a wuss. o) They almost never initiated contact. They wanted an agressive guy to "pursue" them o) They were mostly "window shopping"
It was informative to see one who wouldn't even talk to me socially go all gushy and sparkly when an unemployed, sloppily dressed guy she'd not met before walked up. Said guy is 6'5". They had a couple dates, then he dumped her for a "hotter" woman at a party.
All of these examples I'd write off as crazies anyway. I'm not interested in dating self-destructive women no matter how hot they are. (They can be great for one-night stands, but not for a long term relationship.)
So then the big question becomes: where do you find women that aren't crazy?
While I'm not surprised that there are some crazy women on a veg site, I am quite surprised that they are looking for jerks and assholes rather than thoughtful guys.
I'm impressed they admit the robot is vegetarian. Isn't that unamerican or something? I'd expect public outrage if it didn't eat hamburgers and deep fried chicken.
My opinion at my current age of 50 is that if a man is younger than 30 and has never lived with anyone for any length of time, he has no idea what he wants in a partner.
I fully agree. I may only be 35, but I agree completely. I think marrying before 25 is way too early. You're still developing your own taste and personality. 30 is a great age to start.
A site full of women so desperate to meet people that they are happy to pay for it seems like a poor way to filter out the riff raff.
Exactly! Why is this not modded +5 Insightful?
Desperate people are more willing to pay for sex/love/human contact than people who are happy with their lives. A good dating site needs to accommodate people who aren't willing to pay, because that's where the real gems are.
It takes significant time to read each email and skim through the profiles of authors whose emails are reasonably good.
Which is exactly why they should do that last. Shortest job first: search for guys that interest you and mail them. Then start reading some of those thousands of carpet-bomb emails.
Also, don't read all those profiles. A lot of carpet-bombers don't even read your profile, and their messages show it. Delete the message, and permanently block the carpet-bomber. It's no use spending time on someone like that.
For an attractive reasonably young woman it simply would take too much time to add actively searching and reading guys' profiles to the time they already spend reading and responding to guys who write them.
That's why you should start by actively searching, reading profiles and mailing guys, and postpone reading messages from guys who initiate contact until you really have nothing better to do.
The author in my previous post did make first contact with me, and so have some other very cool women, but generally the cool women that have written me are probably more interesting to me than the general populace (e.g., the author is an Indian woman with some fairly arcane tastes).
My experience exactly. Cool, smart women contact men. Stupid boring men contact women. And stupid boring women wait for stupid boring men to carpet-bomb them.
It depends entirely on the impression you want to make. I once met a girl who complained that she was approached by tons of men on a dating site, all of which had a photo of themselves and their car. She was ready to reject anyone who felt it necessary to include some status symbol on their photo. Some women really do prefer normal, sane guys over men who think money will buy them love.
Of course, I'm also always rather put off by the whole "psychological problems don't exist" meme. What's up with that? Sorry, but no, they DO; not everyone who thinks they've got Asperger's or whatever actually does, but that doesn't mean NOONE does. And if you do, well, of course you can stick your head in the sand and pretend that your problems aren't real and that they'll go away if you just wish them away, but to believe that that'll work out is painfully naive.
Psychological problems definitely exist, but they're often used as an excuse not to do something (or anything). They're used as a reason to hide from the real world, to not get a job, etc.
I once knew a guy who was severely spastic. He sat in a heavy motorised wheelchair, could hardly talk, he was as disabled as you can be without being paralised. Whatever your problems are, I bet you they are way, way smaller than this guy's problems. Yet he went out a lot. He went to concerts, including ones that involved camping for a couple of days. He went on his own by train to concerts in other cities, and for some reason, this guy often ended up with a girl on his lap. It was a complete mystery to me how a spastic guy with unkempt hair hanging sideways in a wheelchair, can get a girl while I, tall, not too bad looking, couldn't.
I think the answer is confidence. What does he have to be confident about? No idea, but despite his complete disability, he did have a job. He may not be able to move, but he can think. He's good with computers, and computers are an easy way for him to communicate with people. So instead of simply sitting on the disability pay that he's more entitled to than anyone else I've ever met, he got a job as a programmer (with an employer who was willing to deal with the problems of having a severely disabled employee). He may not type very fast, but solving complex problems requires more thinking than typing, and he's good at that.
If that guy can hold a job, then Asperger's is not an excuse for being unemployed. Lots of nerds with Asperger's have very productive, well paying jobs. Sure, it may be harder to find one that suits you, but if you search hard enough, you'll find something. But an "I can't work" mentality isn't going to help you. Employers, like women, are looking for someone who's confident. In this case, someone who's confident that he can work.
(Eventually the department he worked at was dismantled, and you don't want to know how hard it is to get social security money when you lose a job while being severely disabled. You can't get unemployment money because you're disabled. The service in charge of new disabilities won't pay you because it's a pre-existing condition, and the service for young disableds won't pay you because you've had a job, which means it can't have been a pre-existing condition.)
I don't entirely agree. For example, genetics does have something to do with it. both with building muscles, and with social interaction. Some people just have a natural talent for talking to people, I've got a natural talent for putting my foot in my mouth or hiding behind my screen.
But over the years, I have been exposed to other people. Either through usenet and other forums (where you can think about what you say before you type it) or through roleplaying games, where I only need to interact with other nerds, but I'm playing someone who can interact smoothly with a variety of strangers, fasttalk guards, seduce women, talk to high nobles, etc. And if I fail (and it needs to be a bit more than just making a skill roll), then I'm still in my protected environment with my friends. But if I succeed, I rule!
I think RPGs and usenet have done quite a lot for my social skills. I'm still not one for smalltalk, and I still feel like an alien when I'm in a social situation, but I've learned to participate. I'm slowly getting better at it, I think.
Some people reject the "real" world because it is too overwhelming to them. Concerts, comedy clubs, bars, etc., wear them out. They still do these things, but only once in a while. They just don't have the will do do them on a regular basis.
Not going out every weekend is not the same thing as rejecting the real world. There's plenty of real world outside clubs, bars and restaurants.
And a lot of introverts actually do go out, just not to meaningless places that are all about chatting meaninglessly with strangers. They pick specific activities that interest them. A specific movie, a concert with music they love, some weird hobby that only a handful of people in the area even heard of. For most introverts (for me at least, although I'm not quite as introverted as I used to be) it's not so much that the real world is too overwhelming, it's that they're not interested in (and really really bad at) idle chat and smalltalk.
I'm still much better at hanging out with people when we're doing something, like playing a game. If we're just talking, it'd better be about something really interesting.
When they meet someone at these places, they can't keep up. They get exhausted by the other person's constant demand for going out and being social. Once in a while is too little for one, and too much for the other.
Just because you're dating doesn't mean you have to do everything together. Yes, you do need to have something in common, otherwise you'll never spend any time together, but some extraverts really do like staying home and just curling up on the couch together or something.
My wife is much more extraverted than I am. She has a much easier time talking to my friends than I have. (I won't even touch the subject of her friends here, although one of them is a real nerd who loves to talk with me because he can talk about computers with me.) Yet for some reason I'm often the one who wants to go out and do stuff. Well, that's not entirely true. She wants to go out and have lunch with people, or go shopping, or visit them and talk about things. I want to go to a specific movie, a concert, a game convention, etc. So she goes shopping with my sister, has lunch with her friends and assorted strangers and occasionally goes out for dinner or to a theater with me. It works quite well for us.
Introverts are not antisocial, they just need lower levels of stimulation. They want to stay in with a small group of familiar friends and role play or watch movies or play video games or whatever. This lifestyle, however, does not provide many opportunities to meet significant others who are also introverts and would make a perfect match...the groups of friends that introverts form don't often have occasion to mix with one another. And activities that make them mix are always an uphill battle for an introvert.
Summary: if you don't want to meet new people, you're not going to meet new people.
However, there are a lot of ways in which introverts can meet people. My brother, for example, loves folk and world music. He reads about it, has a respectable CD collection, but that doesn't meet him any new people. Until he started visiting folk concerts. Live music is always great, and although not a great way to meet people if you never talk to anyone, after a couple of folk festivals, you might start to recognise some people who also visit multiple festivals (works better with smaller festivals). But it gets better: he discovered Balfolk, modern folk dancing, with lots of low-key, easy access dance events. There are lots of women who love that stuff, you get to hold hands with women (because it's part of the dance rather than some complicated social reason), and after a couple of those events, you start recognising regulars. It's a great way for an introvert to meet people, make friends and hopefully find somebody you really like.
Slashdot Mirror
Nerd is distinct from Geek. Nerd falls below Geek in the pecking order.
Only if you're a geek. Otherwise it's the other way around.
Okay, nerds are less social, but they're also smarter.
I was not responding to you.
You were, only not to that specific post by him.
Claiming your opinion carries more weight than someone else's is also an opinion, and a rather arrogant one, I might add.
It is true that there's no objective, repeatable scientific evidence of the existence of God, but keep in mind that science restricts itself to examining the laws of this universe, and phenomena that are subject to those laws. Any being that created this universe and its laws is obviously not subject to it, and therefore falls outside the realm of science anyway.
(FYI, a strong agnostic position antagonizes just about everybody on the thiest and athiest side).
Not at all. It antagonises everybody on the gnostic (people who pretend they know it all) side. There are plenty of agnostic theists and atheists, who believe something despite admitting it's unknowable.
In fact, I think any good christian should be humble enough to admit the limitations of his own knowledge and be at least slightly agnostic. (I know I am.)
He treats the arbitrary as on a par with the rational and evidentially supported. So he is the ultimate epistemological egalitarian: he equates the groundless and the proved. As such, he is an epistemological destroyer.
I've never heard of Leonard Peikoff, but he's clearly an idiot. Agnostics are the only ones who distinguish between the groundless and the proved. The only ones who consider what's evidentially supported and what isn't.
Sorry dude, some things are just so ridiculous
This is an opinion. Don't confuse it with objective fact.
Is there a God?
A) Yes.
B) I don't know.
C) No.
A) is a theist. B) and C) are both not theists, therefor, atheists.
What if I answer: I don't know, but I think there is? There's plenty of room for a significant difference between B and C.
Strong agnosticism is a logically defensible position: there may exist a god who created a universe with thr property that it is impossible to prove (or disprove) that god's existance. This claim can only be disproven by establishing the existance of a different sort of god. Very few people hold this belief.
Are you sure that very few people hold this belief? It sounds like a very sensible one, and it is what a very influential agnostic, Immanuel Kant, believed. I believe the very same thing, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of the intelligent, well-educated christians I know would subscribe to the same belief.
Agnosticism and atheism aren't mutually exclusive. You can be an agnostic atheist (i.e. you don't believe in any god and you claim there is no way to know this for fact) or you can be a gnostic atheist (i.e. you don't believe any god and you claim to know this as fact). Most atheists are agnostic atheists.
In the same way, agnosticism and theism aren't mutually exclusive. Agnostics aren't in opposition with atheists or theists, they're in opposition with gnostics, be they theist or atheist.
There is nothing irrational about finding the whole God thing absurd,
It is, however, an opinion, rather than scientific fact. It's important to learn to distinguish between the two.
I believe there's no way we can actually say whether there is or is not a god, but I feel there is none. People say that stance lacks conviction, but I feel I'm being more realistic on the matter.
I'd say it's conviction tempered by reason. Conviction doesn't have to be wholly irrational.
I'm agnostic, and I *am* picking a side and standing up for it.
'Agnostic' doesn't mean "I don't know whether to believe in the Christian god" (as your comment re: Zeus appears to imply). Agnosticism can mean either "I don't know whether there's a god or not" or "I believe it's unknowable whether there's a god or not".
Exactly. In the GP's words, I'd say agnosticism is firmly on the side of reason, whereas atheism and religion are on the side of faith.
They're not really opposites, though. It's perfectly possible to be a reasonable (agnoastic) atheist or a reasonable (agnostic) christian. I consider myself agnostic christan, for example. I firmly believe it's unknowable whether there's a god or not, yet at the same time I firmly believe that there is a god (and a very specific one at that), fully aware that this belief is not based on any reliable, objective evidence. That's what makes it belief, after all.
What really annoys me is theists and atheists who pretend they know everything and claim their position is fully supported by evidence when it's not. It's usually much easier to talk to agnostics (including agnostic atheists and theists) than fundamentalist atheists or theists. (Although I know one guy who I consider a fundamentalist agnostic. He's a really odd case, denying it's possible to be christian and agnostic at the same time, and worships Kant like he's the messiah, despite the fact that Kant himself was an agnostic christian.)
It's higher in protein content. Not the same thing.
The Geneva conventions apply to uniformed soldiers fighting in declared wars between states. They specifically exclude "irregular" combatants who dress as civilians or are not acting on behalf of a state.
Irregular combatants dessing as civilians were, among western nations, usually spies. And enemy spies in your country were treated as criminals and tried according to the laws of your land, which were usually quite severe when it came to spying, but they still had the same rights that any criminal has. A fair trial, for example.
They problem with the Gitmo prisoners is that they were not only denied rights as PoWs, but also rights as criminals or even human beings. Torture is not just forbidden by the Geneva Convention, it's also against the Declaration of Human Rights.
Had the US treated them as criminals and given them a lawyer and a fair trial, most people wouldn't have complained. Except lawyers of course, because many of the Gitmo prisoners were arrested on foreign soil and had never even set foot in the US, so they should have been tried according to the laws of the countries where they lived or had been arrested.
But at least they would have had some rights. The problem is that the US specifically created and exploited a loop hole in order to deny people their rights, and that's fundamentally totalitarian and tyrannical, and definitely something that people should protest against. Loudly and, if necessary, violently.
On the other hand, the founding fathers were very clear that they were now a new state.
But you do realise that by modern post-9/11 standards, they'd have been considered terrorists by the Brits, right?
Not that I completely disagree with you, but most of the individuals we are dealing with these days are not lawful combatants, and as such are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.
They were captured in a foreign country. I don't see how you can legally capture anyone in a foreign country unless you consider them enemy combatants.
Terrorists will never be anything but unlawful combatants in the eyes of the Geneva Conventions, however.
Then treat them as criminals and give them a fair trial. I'm pretty flexible that way. But treating them as subhuman and not having any rights whatsoever, that's just not an option.
Either they're civilians and deserve a fair trial, or they're combatants and should be treated as PoWs.
o) They summarily ignored any guy who wrote more than a few lines. What he had to say was mostly irrelevant, and ability to respond to what they'd written in their profiles in a thoughtful manner was a sign of being a wuss.
o) They almost never initiated contact. They wanted an agressive guy to "pursue" them
o) They were mostly "window shopping"
It was informative to see one who wouldn't even talk to me socially go all gushy and sparkly when an unemployed, sloppily dressed guy she'd not met before walked up. Said guy is 6'5". They had a couple dates, then he dumped her for a "hotter" woman at a party.
All of these examples I'd write off as crazies anyway. I'm not interested in dating self-destructive women no matter how hot they are. (They can be great for one-night stands, but not for a long term relationship.)
So then the big question becomes: where do you find women that aren't crazy?
While I'm not surprised that there are some crazy women on a veg site, I am quite surprised that they are looking for jerks and assholes rather than thoughtful guys.
I'm impressed they admit the robot is vegetarian. Isn't that unamerican or something? I'd expect public outrage if it didn't eat hamburgers and deep fried chicken.
My opinion at my current age of 50 is that if a man is younger than 30 and has never lived with anyone for any length of time, he has no idea what he wants in a partner.
I fully agree. I may only be 35, but I agree completely. I think marrying before 25 is way too early. You're still developing your own taste and personality. 30 is a great age to start.
A site full of women so desperate to meet people that they are happy to pay for it seems like a poor way to filter out the riff raff.
Exactly! Why is this not modded +5 Insightful?
Desperate people are more willing to pay for sex/love/human contact than people who are happy with their lives. A good dating site needs to accommodate people who aren't willing to pay, because that's where the real gems are.
It takes significant time to read each email and skim through the profiles of authors whose emails are reasonably good.
Which is exactly why they should do that last. Shortest job first: search for guys that interest you and mail them. Then start reading some of those thousands of carpet-bomb emails.
Also, don't read all those profiles. A lot of carpet-bombers don't even read your profile, and their messages show it. Delete the message, and permanently block the carpet-bomber. It's no use spending time on someone like that.
For an attractive reasonably young woman it simply would take too much time to add actively searching and reading guys' profiles to the time they already spend reading and responding to guys who write them.
That's why you should start by actively searching, reading profiles and mailing guys, and postpone reading messages from guys who initiate contact until you really have nothing better to do.
The author in my previous post did make first contact with me, and so have some other very cool women, but generally the cool women that have written me are probably more interesting to me than the general populace (e.g., the author is an Indian woman with some fairly arcane tastes).
My experience exactly. Cool, smart women contact men. Stupid boring men contact women. And stupid boring women wait for stupid boring men to carpet-bomb them.
It depends entirely on the impression you want to make. I once met a girl who complained that she was approached by tons of men on a dating site, all of which had a photo of themselves and their car. She was ready to reject anyone who felt it necessary to include some status symbol on their photo. Some women really do prefer normal, sane guys over men who think money will buy them love.
Of course, I'm also always rather put off by the whole "psychological problems don't exist" meme. What's up with that? Sorry, but no, they DO; not everyone who thinks they've got Asperger's or whatever actually does, but that doesn't mean NOONE does. And if you do, well, of course you can stick your head in the sand and pretend that your problems aren't real and that they'll go away if you just wish them away, but to believe that that'll work out is painfully naive.
Psychological problems definitely exist, but they're often used as an excuse not to do something (or anything). They're used as a reason to hide from the real world, to not get a job, etc.
I once knew a guy who was severely spastic. He sat in a heavy motorised wheelchair, could hardly talk, he was as disabled as you can be without being paralised. Whatever your problems are, I bet you they are way, way smaller than this guy's problems. Yet he went out a lot. He went to concerts, including ones that involved camping for a couple of days. He went on his own by train to concerts in other cities, and for some reason, this guy often ended up with a girl on his lap. It was a complete mystery to me how a spastic guy with unkempt hair hanging sideways in a wheelchair, can get a girl while I, tall, not too bad looking, couldn't.
I think the answer is confidence. What does he have to be confident about? No idea, but despite his complete disability, he did have a job. He may not be able to move, but he can think. He's good with computers, and computers are an easy way for him to communicate with people. So instead of simply sitting on the disability pay that he's more entitled to than anyone else I've ever met, he got a job as a programmer (with an employer who was willing to deal with the problems of having a severely disabled employee). He may not type very fast, but solving complex problems requires more thinking than typing, and he's good at that.
If that guy can hold a job, then Asperger's is not an excuse for being unemployed. Lots of nerds with Asperger's have very productive, well paying jobs. Sure, it may be harder to find one that suits you, but if you search hard enough, you'll find something. But an "I can't work" mentality isn't going to help you. Employers, like women, are looking for someone who's confident. In this case, someone who's confident that he can work.
(Eventually the department he worked at was dismantled, and you don't want to know how hard it is to get social security money when you lose a job while being severely disabled. You can't get unemployment money because you're disabled. The service in charge of new disabilities won't pay you because it's a pre-existing condition, and the service for young disableds won't pay you because you've had a job, which means it can't have been a pre-existing condition.)
I don't entirely agree. For example, genetics does have something to do with it. both with building muscles, and with social interaction. Some people just have a natural talent for talking to people, I've got a natural talent for putting my foot in my mouth or hiding behind my screen.
But over the years, I have been exposed to other people. Either through usenet and other forums (where you can think about what you say before you type it) or through roleplaying games, where I only need to interact with other nerds, but I'm playing someone who can interact smoothly with a variety of strangers, fasttalk guards, seduce women, talk to high nobles, etc. And if I fail (and it needs to be a bit more than just making a skill roll), then I'm still in my protected environment with my friends. But if I succeed, I rule!
I think RPGs and usenet have done quite a lot for my social skills. I'm still not one for smalltalk, and I still feel like an alien when I'm in a social situation, but I've learned to participate. I'm slowly getting better at it, I think.
Some people reject the "real" world because it is too overwhelming to them. Concerts, comedy clubs, bars, etc., wear them out. They still do these things, but only once in a while. They just don't have the will do do them on a regular basis.
Not going out every weekend is not the same thing as rejecting the real world. There's plenty of real world outside clubs, bars and restaurants.
And a lot of introverts actually do go out, just not to meaningless places that are all about chatting meaninglessly with strangers. They pick specific activities that interest them. A specific movie, a concert with music they love, some weird hobby that only a handful of people in the area even heard of. For most introverts (for me at least, although I'm not quite as introverted as I used to be) it's not so much that the real world is too overwhelming, it's that they're not interested in (and really really bad at) idle chat and smalltalk.
I'm still much better at hanging out with people when we're doing something, like playing a game. If we're just talking, it'd better be about something really interesting.
When they meet someone at these places, they can't keep up. They get exhausted by the other person's constant demand for going out and being social. Once in a while is too little for one, and too much for the other.
Just because you're dating doesn't mean you have to do everything together. Yes, you do need to have something in common, otherwise you'll never spend any time together, but some extraverts really do like staying home and just curling up on the couch together or something.
My wife is much more extraverted than I am. She has a much easier time talking to my friends than I have. (I won't even touch the subject of her friends here, although one of them is a real nerd who loves to talk with me because he can talk about computers with me.) Yet for some reason I'm often the one who wants to go out and do stuff. Well, that's not entirely true. She wants to go out and have lunch with people, or go shopping, or visit them and talk about things. I want to go to a specific movie, a concert, a game convention, etc. So she goes shopping with my sister, has lunch with her friends and assorted strangers and occasionally goes out for dinner or to a theater with me. It works quite well for us.
Introverts are not antisocial, they just need lower levels of stimulation. They want to stay in with a small group of familiar friends and role play or watch movies or play video games or whatever. This lifestyle, however, does not provide many opportunities to meet significant others who are also introverts and would make a perfect match...the groups of friends that introverts form don't often have occasion to mix with one another. And activities that make them mix are always an uphill battle for an introvert.
Summary: if you don't want to meet new people, you're not going to meet new people.
However, there are a lot of ways in which introverts can meet people. My brother, for example, loves folk and world music. He reads about it, has a respectable CD collection, but that doesn't meet him any new people. Until he started visiting folk concerts. Live music is always great, and although not a great way to meet people if you never talk to anyone, after a couple of folk festivals, you might start to recognise some people who also visit multiple festivals (works better with smaller festivals). But it gets better: he discovered Balfolk, modern folk dancing, with lots of low-key, easy access dance events. There are lots of women who love that stuff, you get to hold hands with women (because it's part of the dance rather than some complicated social reason), and after a couple of those events, you start recognising regulars. It's a great way for an introvert to meet people, make friends and hopefully find somebody you really like.
(It doesn't work so