I've noticed this among the young men in my extended family and friends. One guy is model cute, and goes out on Tinder "dates" whenever he wants (new girl weekly, at least). He had a live-in girlfriend, but with an open relationship.
And if I were one of these women, I'd probably do the same thing. Even if you can't marry a hottie, if you can have sex with one a few times, that still sounds like fun.
The other guys, who are "normal", and certainly not homely, just don't go out at all, even at what I would consider to be a fairly advanced age. I suspect some are still virgins. Instead, video games and pot.
Since I am homely, this is exactly what I'd be doing if I were young now, given society's recent barrage of disparagement towards men. And especially if I knew someone like adult-me who got absolutely crushed by alimony.
I foresee no particular solution. I think we'll just follow Japan and South Korea. Other societies with different norms will simply displace us. Which I think is fine.
> And if I were one of these women, I'd probably do the same thing.
My wife works with men and women who have a hard time finding relationships, so I have a bit of insight here.
You are completely wrong about what women want. You think that women are the same as men, but you are wrong. Women do not want a 'hottie'. I can tell you those women who go out with that 'hottie' have no self esteem, and are not happy. They end up at my wife's practice.
Men want a hot wife, because looks are very important. Women want a successful man, who can take care of the family, and is strong enough to protect the family. Women most of the time describe it as a "real man", but this does not translate well in what men thing a "real man" is.
Most women do not want a player, and only end up with one because of the low self esteem.
The good news is that men can influence their chances with women a LOT (and no this is not becoming a player). The sad part is that most men are too stubborn to accept this reality, and much rather blame their failure on women, other men or something else externally.
I think this misses the way inclinations change over one's lifespan. When you say women aren't interested in looks, well, not as much when they're 30 or 35. But when they're 16, 20, 24, they're a lot more open to a fun weekend, especially when they're so close at hand. And they're perhaps somewhat inclined to believe that someone who will spend a weekend with them might spend a lifetime. Later, the ice weasels come, and they realize it's not so.
This describes several of my ex's, and indeed, they did end up in therapy (or should have). I'm sure self-esteem has a role, and I tried hard to instill that in my step-daughters, to help them do better with this (and, as Chris Rock said, to keep them off the pole).
Men also change over time, of course. But a lot of what you're missing is simply that men like me never had a clue as to what to do when we were young. Not stubborn at all--just clueless. Two hundred years ago, it didn't really matter--sheer want would make things work.
Today, we're all so well off that few women really need to pair off. And those who plan on it tend to think more that they can do it a lot later. Unfortunately, by then, a lot of men have already rotted on the dock.
> Two hundred years ago, it didn't really matter--sheer want would make things work
I think the difference historically and this is true for conservative parts of the developing world today is that parents would spend a lot of effort getting their kids into a marriage, often in a semi-ritualistic manner which involved mutual meetings of the family, extended family background checks etc. (to state my bias, I found my wife in such a process)
The result is that someone who has been through the dating process is guiding the younger generation + there is a lot of checking for compatibility dangers that could take a while to emerge in a normal dating situation.
In America today this is often socially unacceptable, more from the kid's side than the parent's side. So young men often navigate the dating world with little guidance from the previous generation. I feel like the dominant message to parents these days is to stay away from their kids dating lives as much as possible, and while there is some merit to that message, it does leave the younger generation with less of a straight road to a marriage.
>Women do not want a 'hottie'. I can tell you those women who go out with that 'hottie' have no self esteem, and are not happy. They end up at my wife's practice.
Out of curiosity, how do you integrate the online dating studies that point to 70%+ of women only wanting the top 20% of men (ie. the "hotties") into your wife's practice, and what she sees from her clients?
I looked at that data together with my wife, and my analytical mind concluded that it's all bullshit with a clickbait title.
Take this for instance: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... , based on 27 women, and he even says himself "Additionally, I am only accounting for the percentage of “likes” and not the actual men they “like”. I have to assume that in general females find the same men attractive. I think this is the biggest flaw in this analysis".
So yeah, basically you can throw away any conclusion there. Other articles are based on this "study". But maybe there are new studies that I haven't seen yet.
I have a problem with the word "hottie" because we men know very well which girls fall into this category. But because women have way more and different dimensions to select on, a male photo model doesn't have as much attraction as you would expect.
Men in that sense are really lucky, because we can boost our attractiveness pretty good. Women on the other hand, if you don't have the looks, there is only so much you can do with makeup.
The OkCupid blog has robust data. Have you looked at that?
Not saying that these studies are not flawed, but the simple fact that Tinder and most of online dating is basically a looks based popularity contest hints at a problem for the median folks.
There's always a lot of new users, there are always a few young new and attractive users. So the majority just waits for the one. So the hot ones pair off, leave the platform (or come back and pair off with other hot ones, then repeat), but the Average Jane and Joe just waste their time and money while having their self-esteem crushed.
IRL you have more than looks, more than one (at best two) static pictures. Plus online dating is very passive. There is no chance to hear someone's voice, to flirting with someone, to make them laugh. (Sure, there are online similars to them, but they are far from equivalents.)
For starters IRL you rarely have the density of "encounters" that you have on Tinder, so you have a lot more resources invested in meeting people, this likely increases how much time you spend on one person at a time.
Regarding the 50 year old women. She has success on Tinder? Why is that no kidding? Or you have left out a "no"?
I made that mistake when I started, until I realized that there is only 1 goal: get her on a date. And while other guys were asking "how was your day?" every few days, I asked them out after a good chat, and shortcutted it.
They don't "really" want them, they just "want" them because of low self-esteem seems to be the approach of matching that particular theory to reality.
Sure some of one's attractiveness can be improved with fitness, but for everyone there's some amount of genetic lottery there; if you don't have it you ain't gonna get it.
That's a good story to tell someone to make them give up.
Maybe that's why it's being spread. Keep most guys down, sitting at home alone, so the few in the (not-so) know can have all the chicks to themselves...
Right but you are the product of a previous mating and kids to resemble their parents so the odds of that are low.
If you are a single guy looking for women the best places to live are NYC, Vancouver and parts of the Midwest with major hospitals. In those places there are more women than men. Yes you can work in SV but there’s way more guys then gals there.
If you assume that the system is that a woman select the most attractive man out of a pool of candidates, which seems right to me as a gross approximation, that does nothing to change the dynamics of the system. It just gives more chances to an individual to the detriment of the rest of the candidates. It's a zero sum game. Just another treadmill for the everyone to run, if you mind the pun.
The systematic problem is that all developments in the last decades have made dating/sex a very efficient market that is skewed towards winner-take-all. There is zero commitment required, the pools are very large, and selection is straightforward.
I generally agree with this but I think our society has somehow morphed into a place where you have to actively and mindfully avoid this lifestyle. Video games, binge watching, pornography, fast food, pot, alcohol, etc. The drugs of the modern world are pervasive and this lifestyle is not stigmatized whatsoever even though it is a recipe for depression.
Whoa! I never thought of this, and it seems particularly more apt of an observation with the trend towards legalizing marijuana, and even further, decriminalizing other drugs like mushrooms and LSD.
On top of that, games have adopted more and more gambling-like and actual features, and have long been playing on peoples' addictive natures by design.
I don't think you should club together drugs like LSD and mushrooms with pot. I've known nobody addicted to LSD or whose lives are significantly negatively affected by them. Pot, yes, despite the propaganda that it is not addictive, does seem to have a component of addiction and people who take it regularly can't seem to stop talking about it.
I’m clumping them together because there has been a renewed interest in clinical study to treat things like pain and depression, as well as a trend to decriminalize them. Sorry about your friend.
> There's women who do that too, it's just the connection is missing
Because both video gaming and pot smoking is a solo or a very small group activity where the slots get taken by pot smoker's and video gamer's buddies.
Sadly, this feels intuitively correct. I've heard a formalization of the prisoner's dilemma called the IQ shredder [1]. Whether it's a reach or not is something I am still debating internally. At the very least, I do sense that I, as someone who's working in tech and experience relatively stable upward career momentum, there's only so long I can "hang on" to my yuppie lifestyle before it works against my end goals to reproduce and have a family. While there's a playbook for what got me here, there's not one for what's going to get me to the next step.
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Mr Lee said: “[China] will make progress but if you look at the per capita they have got, the differences are so wide. We have the advantage of quality control of the people who come in so we have bright Indians, bright Chinese, bright Caucasians so the increase in population means an increase in talent.”
How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there, Harry? Surely they are not infinite. And what will they do in Singapore? Well, engage in the finance and marketing rat-race and depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting valuable genes just so your property prices don’t go down. Singapore is an IQ shredder.
IQ Shredder is a dangerous concept, because it displaces "human worth" onto _individual_ fertility and offspring. If we follow that ethics a little further, we might find ourselves fully devaluating any religious practice which has an element of chastity (because it's dysgenic, obviously!), as well as condemning homosexuality along similar lines.
The fact of the matter is that, psychologically speaking on the level of a single individual, we do not seek offspring so much as pleasures, and sex and child-rearing are some of life's greatest pleasures. But that does not mean they're the exclusive sources of pleasure available in any culture, and I would warn against putting too much faith in any such notions.
> it displaces "human worth" onto _individual_ fertility and offspring
I think the word "worth" could be an anthropomorphization. I read the concept through the lens of survivability. Hypothetically, a societal identity which does not ensure biological reproduction could be evolutionarily outcompeted by one that does. Even, or especially by a fertility cult. I remember this being one of the central, disturbingly dystopic outcomes that Mike Judge's Idiocracy tried to address.
A lot of progressive technocrats look at model citizens with technologically harnessed upward mobility. They observe and want to enable global movement towards this. But if the environment that enables the financial prosperity of these model citizens also disables their ability to reproduce their way of life, how does it successfully compete in "the marketplace of ideology" against opponents who out-produce them by default? Wouldn't that be a local maximum? Without some kind of mechanism in place to address that, the progression has no guarantee of continuing. And this could lead to the dystopic scenario outlined in the film.
> Hypothetically, a societal identity which does not ensure biological reproduction could be evolutionarily outcompeted by one that does
Ah, this is pretty close to the same claim that "JayMan" made once when explaining to me how "gay people shouldn't exist, evolutionarily speaking" (because, of course, the gays would be outcompeted genetically by non-gays, and the identity wouldn't persist, right?)
Let me tie it into this:
> if the environment that enables the financial prosperity of these model citizens also disables their ability to reproduce their way of life, how does it successfully compete in "the marketplace of ideology" against opponents who out-produce them by default?
Because ideologies don't exist in a market, they exist within an ecosystem. To put it plainly: it doesn't matter if the finance guys don't have kids, because the finance guys aren't themselves breeding more finance guys. The fact that the role of "finance guy" exists at all is a product of the broader cultural ecosystem, which wont disappear even if all the extant finance guys do.
But all this is beside the point. Land's post lays out a sociological model (viewing the world as a detached observer) and then, through sleight-of-hand and careful selection of metrics, converts it into a measure of value (how one views one's life as an individual).
If your sociological frame makes the world look like a dys/utopia, consider that it might be a flawed frame, at least if your goal is to see clearly.
I think you missed the point the parent comment was making.
Obviously "finance guy" would not only breed other "finance guys". However if the society consumes a majority of its productive members without insuring their reproduction, then they'll be selected against.
> Ah, this is pretty close to the same claim that "JayMan" made once when explaining to me how "gay people shouldn't exist, evolutionarily speaking" (because, of course, the gays would be outcompeted genetically by non-gays, and the identity wouldn't persist, right?)
That's such a weird position and obviously made by someone who doesn't understand evolution, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it here. It's the equivalent of saying that diseases/cancer/handicaps couldn't exist because "evolution". That is not what parent is talking about when underlying the risks of hindering reproduction for a whole class of citizens.
> if the society consumes a majority of its productive members without insuring their reproduction, then they'll be selected against.
This assumes both that productivity is heritable and that the nature of productivity is fixed. The former seems contingently true (assuming the latter), but the latter seems false, as the forms of work considered "productive" tend to shift over time.
The other Problem is the implicit assumption that "[economic] productivity is good", which is an entirely different class of argument than above.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think your subtle distinction between the market and ecosystem is key here because they don't fully map 1 to 1. And you're correct that the market is downstream from the ecosystem itself. But with that said, I'm not sure that I agree with the spirit of your argument.
> the gays would be outcompeted genetically by non-gays, and the identity wouldn't persist, right?
I'm not sure that's historically accurate. The connection between pederasty and upper caste aristocracy goes back to Greek civilization, if not earlier, and is its own kind of a cultural reproduction mechanism that seemed to have elements of both mentorship and romance. Without a doubt, it's something that I still see today in elite circles.
> The fact that the role of "finance guy" exists at all is a product of the broader cultural ecosystem
I think I'd beg to disagree -- not with the product of the ecosystem part, but with the idea that it's cultural rather than socioeconomic and caste based. And maybe this comes back to my point earlier, which is a friction point that maybe both the IQ shredder concept and this article fail to account for, which is a certain degree of lifestyle dynamism.
That is to say, is that finance guy stuck as a finance guy forever? Or does he eventually accumulate enough wealth before moving on to a separate phase of his life, one where he can have a family of whatever size he wants with the best partner he can find that will take him? Because if that's the case, then maybe both the IQ shredder and Idiocracy argument perhaps only serve a useful function when referring to the lower and middle class, and fail to account for the upper class. And this, too seems to make intuitive sense to me: even as we see the middle class hollowed out, the upper class in America (and maybe across the world) continue to see increased prosperity at levels never before seen in history.
> If your sociological frame makes the world look like a dys/utopia, consider that it might be a flawed frame, at least if your goal is to see clearly.
I think the warning against dualistic frames is fair to keep in mind. But if you have a non-dualistic frame, that "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" then I think that it's equally fair to warn that a frame which conflates an observed scenario to as a dystopic frame rather than evidence of an apoptotic mechanism could itself be the flawed frame.
I mean, my point was that it's a relatively absurd argument based on a misunderstanding of evolution, as the sibling comment states.
> it's cultural rather than socioeconomic and caste based
Are castes and socioeconomics distinct from culture? (I'm working with Lévi-Strauss's definition of culture as the set of symbolic forms present across society)
> both the IQ shredder and Idiocracy argument perhaps only serve a useful function when referring to the lower and middle class, and fail to account for the upper class
If we consider it in this frame, it seems roughly equivalent to the "brain drain" idea that made the rounds a decade or so ago. Only difference being the ethical valence of the arguments.
> evidence of an apoptotic mechanism
Is this a valid metaphor? I'm unsure myself. I don't find myself agreeing with Spengler and co, but I also don't think I could muster a strong argument against it on demand.
"IQ shredder" simply describes what is happening. You may not like what it describes, but calling it "dangerous" is odd. Is describing water as wet also dangerous?
>condemning homosexuality
There are worse things than condemnation. In Somalia, homosexuality is punishable by death. Somalia also has a birth rate of 5.93. The future is populated by those who show up. If you want gay rights to continue to exist, then you should want LGBT-friendly nations to have a birth rate higher than replacement.
See my post below: "Land's post lays out a sociological model (viewing the world as a detached observer) and then, through sleight-of-hand and careful selection of metrics, converts it into a measure of value (how one views one's life as an individual)."
And if I were one of these women, I'd probably do the same thing. Even if you can't marry a hottie, if you can have sex with one a few times, that still sounds like fun.
The other guys, who are "normal", and certainly not homely, just don't go out at all, even at what I would consider to be a fairly advanced age. I suspect some are still virgins. Instead, video games and pot.
Since I am homely, this is exactly what I'd be doing if I were young now, given society's recent barrage of disparagement towards men. And especially if I knew someone like adult-me who got absolutely crushed by alimony.
I foresee no particular solution. I think we'll just follow Japan and South Korea. Other societies with different norms will simply displace us. Which I think is fine.