ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
ThenElection
4d ago
The fact that you're using this number as a measuring stick tells me that you probably earn vastly more money than I do.
Quite possible. That said, in my experience there are rapidly diminishing returns to more money for dating once you get past, say, 100k/year. Going from 50k/year to 100k/year is far more valuable than 100k/year to 500k/year.
I would say 5 minutes a day while you're sitting on the toilet. More than 100 contacts per week, less than 200?
ThenElection
4d ago
One plausible argument for corporate safetyists (which we'll undoubtedly be seeing more of) is that we need strong regulation so that the only AIs created will be the hellful, harmless ones created by big, responsible corporations. The cat may be out of the bag, but perhaps it can be contained in a small room.
ThenElection
4d ago
Oh, I'm trying to provide a counterpoint to the idea that shortness inherently means a miserable dating life. Currently engaged and have had several attractive women who wanted to marry me in the past, despite my, ahem, shortcomings.
ThenElection
4d ago
Climbing summit of Mt Everest would be far harder; I get grumpy climbing Mount Tam or honestly running more than a mile or two. Not a military veteran.
Never got any kind of talks about anything related to dating, so I was pretty clueless and didn't understand why it was so hard and had to learn through lots of trial and error what works.
What makes me exceptional? Hmm. Education from an elite university, good generalist knowledge in most subjects. Jobs have tended to be with well-known companies with decent comp packages, but people with those are a dime a dozen in the Bay Area. I speak a couple languages (particularly, languages that line up with my desired dating demographics) and have lived on a couple continents, and in my twenties had a pretty unconventional path compared to most people I know. I have some hobbies that are pretty unique and typically female dominated. I can usually make friends with anyone, from bona fide meth addicts to rich girls who went to posh boarding schools to Trump partisans to enthusiast tabletop gamers.
Also, persistence. That's been a pro and a con (too much persistence gets you stuck with folks who aren't really that into you), but it gets you somewhere.
ThenElection
4d ago
5'3" here, and it's not quite that bad. Fit, but six pack only visible part of the year; not particularly charismatic and arguably mildly on the spectrum; less than half a million per year. I do make time for partners, and most people would agree they're conventionally attractive. It does take a lot more work than if I were a foot taller. TBQH the biggest issue in my dating history has been getting taken off the market for long periods by people who didn't really appreciate me because I thought I couldn't do any better.
ThenElection
4d ago
It helps reduce neuroticism; if you manage to learn grace under literal fire, most other things roll off your shoulders. You're not going to be terrified at the idea of buying a woman a drink or being turned down.
Though, even vets who never saw combat get significant benefits. There's a baseline level of physical fitness most have, and they also learn structure in their daily lives and the capability to deal with banal peacetime military shit. Many men never achieve even that, and so even those bare minimum things put you solidly in the "above average" category.
ThenElection
4d ago
An ex-marine who holds down a job afterwards will do very well in the dating market; all the ones I know do very well, even in cases where their base demographics are unattractive (short; Asian). It seems kind of overkill, though, and there are easier ways to do well enough without having to deal with the tradeoffs and shittiness of military life.
Anecdotally, when I chat with Anthropic employees, they seem more genuinely concerned with safety than OpenAI employees, for better or for worse. OpenAI folks seem more or less lip service from top to bottom, while an Anthropic person has told me they struggle to sleep and have nightmares many nights about paperclipping (though that is an outlier). Hopefully the piles of money will help pay for a comfier mattress and therapy.
Obviously that's a pretension among actual decision makers. I wonder how long until we get a third AI company who positions itself as the one that truly, super duper deeply cares about safety and starts poaching employees to get started and raise VC money.
More sympathetically to the idea of working for an AI capabilities company despite being genuinely concerned about safety, suppose you think there's a 10% or even 50% chance of doom. It's very clear at this point that the genie is out of the bottle, and it's unlikely anything you're going to do is going to cause or meaningfully accelerate doom. Might as well make lots of money in the meantime and have a chance at godly amounts of money if doom doesn't happen.
ThenElection
4d ago
Outside of work and places like that there's no issue expressing interest in a girl
Even in those, there's no ethical issue. I even know several real life examples where a supervisor dated and married a supervisee, to the benefit of all concerned.
There are logistic and legal considerations, so I'd be a bit more cautious than the usual case. But (aside from the supervisor/supervisee situation) even that consideration isn't likely to blow up in your face, and even less likely to be career ending.
Another bi guy here! One who does much better with the men than the ladies, but who's nevertheless ended up with a woman.
Some scattered thoughts:
(1) Contrary to @doglatine, I'd suggest that being attractive is more important than not being unattractive. Polarization is key, and given the choice between eliminating all unattractive traits (impossible anyway) or developing a single trait that's highly attractive to (some subset of) women, the latter is likely to get you better results. Which isn't to say that getting rid of unattractive traits isn't important; it's just that I'm working on the presumption that you've (particularly as a bi guy) already gotten the low hanging fruit there (shower and shave every day; wearing clothes that fit decently), and additional efforts are likely to have rapidly diminishing returns. You aren't going to un-unattractivate yourself into attractiveness. And if your attractive traits are attracting potential female partners, you've pretty much won; women (all people, really) are willing to overlook, almost to a fault, any unattractive trait in a man if they feel attraction to him.
The only thing that's not low-hanging fruit to put effort into is, basically, don't be fat; if you're fat, any advice you get here that's not "don't be fat" is entirely missing the forest for the trees.
(1a) So how to be attractive? This honestly requires a lot more information than we have here, and it's highly dependent on your current state. Broadly, I'd say become highly successful at something: career, some hobby, immaculate physique, high level of style. You are really the only one positioned to make any kind of useful plan on how best to navigate from your current state to a more attractive one.
(2) Dating is not the type of thing that responds well to putting lots of time into it. An hour a week on the dating apps should be sufficient to get a date per week. If you're getting a substantially worse effort/outcome ratio than this, you need to either focus on the real world, revamp your profile, or improve your attractiveness. Probably some combination of those.
(3) There are pretty much no rules around dating. You can date any adult you want, and you can approach any adult you want. So long as you don't pester them after being turned down, you've committed no moral offense. That doesn't mean that you should thoughtlessly make approaches or date, but remember those are just matters of tactics, not of ethics. If someone has a wild emotional breakdown because you went up to her in a cafe and said hi, that's on her, not you.
(3a) As far as lying goes, I'd recommend against actual lies, but anyone telling you to list all your negative traits upfront are looking out for their convenience over your well-being, and they certainly wouldn't do it for themselves or someone they care about. As point of example, my last three girlfriends (including my current fiance) all said that they wouldn't have matched with me if I had listed my height on my profile. Had I committed some unpardonable sin by not? Nope; more than that, not only me but they would have all been made worse off if I took the "always make your most unattractive traits the main takeaway of your first advertising pitch" advice to heart. There's also an algorithmic aspect here: most dating sites use something like Elo-scoring to determine who to display to users, but if you list a trait that generates a broadly negative response, even women who don't care about that trait aren't ever going to swipe right on you, because you won't ever even end up in their swipe queue.
(4) Dating is all about conforming to gender roles. That means that, as a man, you'll have to approach, and you should be "confident." Confidence here has pretty much nothing to do with self-esteem but is instead something like masculine performativity. Body language, voice timbre, and conversational style (don't hedge things you say, even if you know they need to be hedged) will get you far here.
(5) Persistence is overrated. You should initiate and make yourself available, but put no more effort into pursuing a particular relationship than you would a friendship. If a woman's into you, she'll reciprocate. If she's not, perhaps you'd be able to convince her to give you a shot because you'll always be willing to put in ten times as much effort as she ever will, but that's a pretty miserable existence.
ThenElection
8d ago
People are both more resilient and more delicate than you can imagine. You can be pushed and hit your head on the ground in the wrong way, and you're dead.
Dealing with sketchy public transit on a daily basis, my main death fear is getting stabbed, though. I've only seen a crazy threateningly brandish a knife on the bus a couple times, but it's always terrifying. And knives, contrary to popular belief, are every bit as deadly as guns, and pretty much everyone can get a hold of one. Someone who's in a particular mental state can plausibly turn into a threat to your life in a second. (So can sane people, but the threat they pose is always more calculated and directed toward some end e.g. mugging you, which if you don't resist isn't usually a life thread.)
Yud is a useful idiot. Not in the sense that he's stupid or even that his arguments are wrong: their truth or well-reasoned-ness is entirely besides the point. AI is clearly important, and people (including people with political power) are worried about it and the threat it poses to them. Amplifying a weird, neurotic extremist yelling on the sidelines about paperclips provides useful cover for more "restrained" control over AI: on one side is Yud, on the other is careless AI libertarians hellbent on either destroying civilization or making revenge porn of their exes, and in the middle are helpful folks like the FTC, EEOC, and CFPB who offer careful, educated policies to expand their power to protect the people from unlawful bias and other harmful outcomes.
ThenElection
1mo ago
It's a fairly broad definition of elite (6% of the population, consisting of landlords and rich peasants and apparently excluding commercial and urban elites), and it's useful to compare the old elite class to the new elite class. From the same paper:
We begin by comparing the income premium enjoyed by the descendants of the pre-revolution elite with that enjoyed by the emerging, post-revolution, Communist elite (see Table 3, Panel A). The pre-revolution elite are largely excluded from the post-revolution, Communist elite — in fact, the correlation coefficient between these two elite membership remains at around -0.9 (s.e. = 0.008) across the parents and children generations. We find that the pre-revolution elite’s income premium is 70.9% of that exhibited among the post-revolution, Communist elite (see Table 2, Panel B). This indicates that the descendants of the pre-revolution elite have regained their elite status, at least in the economic domain, to a level that is comparable to the new elite of the current Communist incumbent who directly benefit from many structural factors such as preferential access to jobs in the public sector and state-owned enterprises.
As far as the new elite, they're ahead of the old elite, but not crazily so. Communist elites make ~25% more than the average Joe, while the old elites make 16% more. It's plenty fair to say that the old elite suffered a great loss in power and status during the revolution (at the very least), but they persist.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Angry young men is a bit ambiguous, though, and I'm not sure the "angry young men" of today are comparable to those of the past. Before, the rabble were employed as productive labor in critical economic activities and had broader real-life social connections with one another. Now, at best they're criminals, and at worst they're living in their parents' basements addicted to porn and video games. The past cohort was a much more fertile ground for revolutionary impulses and organizations to develop.
Fun aside: Sulla started out relatively poor, and only got wealth (and political power) after his mistress Nicopolis left him a sizeable inheritance. She herself was a former slave and earned her fortune through... prostitution.
Is the next Sulla currently out there dating an OnlyFans model?
Communists in China and Russia somewhat successfully replaced traditional elites, but in China the elite largely fled (and there were complex dynamics around the Qing court anyway), and in Russia they either fled or died (in the case of many sons of leading aristocrats) in the First World War. Even so, of course, many communist elites were of bourgeois middle class origin (certainly in the top decile by income distribution, and with some status and power); Xi's ancestors (before his father's rise in the CCP) were wealthy landowners in Shaanxi
Indeed. Also see Persistence Despite Revolutions:
The pattern of inequality that characterized the prerevolution generation re-emerges today. Almost half a century after the revolutions, individuals whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 16 percent more income and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from non-elite households. We find evidence that human capital (such as knowledge, skills, and values) has been transmitted within the families, and the social capital embodied in kinship networks has survived the revolutions. These channels allow the pre-revolution elite to rebound after the revolutions, and their socioeconomic status persists despite one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate differences in the population.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Never used meth myself (no judgment), but I have several friends who've used it pretty regularly. Although the dealers sell things of various purity and quality, it doesn't seem too common for it to be totally fake (as opposed to adulterated with other substances that range from biologically inert to deadly).
ThenElection
1mo ago
One of the funnier things about San Francisco: it's easier to purchase meth or fent here than a vape. Not even a slight exaggeration. I can find a obvious dealer on a corner in less than a 5 minute walk, and the city does nothing to police them. For vapes, though, you've got to go to certain local stores and convince them to sell it to you from behind the counter, as the city feels like it's a good use of time and money to send in undercover agents to enforce the ban. Can't even have them shipped here.
(Degenerate vaper here.)
ThenElection
1mo ago
It happens, but not every single day and to the extent boys do on video games. Not sure where we'd get actual numbers on it beyond anecdotes and impressions though.
The big addiction teenage girls are drawn to on a daily basis is social media, which is at least as worrying as video games.
ThenElection
1mo ago
There is literary fiction whose readership is heavily tilted toward men. Think Pynchon, DFW, etc. Heavy, pretentious, ponderous tomes whose reading indicates some kind of status achievement. I think with less certainty that some literary journals (namely n+1) are also more heavily subscribed to by men.
Those have fallen out of fashion, though, to the point where it's a meme that having Infinite Jest on your bookshelf is a literary red flag for potential dates.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I didn't think of that, and it's an interesting idea. But I don't know many folks who have millions of dollars that need to be laundered, and it's probably too risky to trust them to hold up their end of the deal. (Also, at that point I'd be left with millions of dollars of unaccounted for cash, which seems substantially less valuable than cash that doesn't need to be laundered.)
Though I guess the biggest issue with my original scheme is that it might expose the winnings to double taxation.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I've always felt that if I won the lottery, I'd find someone (ideally already rich) to claim the prize for me in exchange for a significant cut (probably up to 50%). Even having your name public as a lottery winner gets you a lot of attention you don't want.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Did I call him a pedophile? Just pointed out that he had an age-inappropriate relationship with a teenager, which is true.
The broader point is that sexual peccadilloes don't matter one way or another in terms of the value of someone's work, and (secondarily) cultural context matters. In the case of Foucault etc, they lived in a milieu where society hadn't yet decided that having sex with a teenager who was not yet of age was the Worst Thing Ever.
Would love this. It'd be really nice if it included a short intro to Bulgarian politics; I don't have a sense of if its dynamics are closer to Poland's or Greece's (or totally different from both).
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