ThenElection
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User ID: 622
The most recent GSS showed a reversal of the trend, but the data is sufficiently noisy (sample size around 200 young men and women) and confounded by COVID that we can't say with any real certainty that the trend has reversed or stopped.
ThenElection
1yr ago
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If you only filter for people who are in a certain type of relationship, you're filtering out those who aren't in any relationship, which is cutting out a substantial part of the distribution.
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Anecdotally, my sense is that men struggle more finding new partners in poly relationships than women do. E.g. on the poly subreddits, you see far more men in newly opened relationships struggling with their partners finding more partners while they themselves can't get a date.
That said, we simply don't have good statistics on this, and poly-identified relationships likely aren't representative of relationships in the broader sense.
ThenElection
1yr ago
I wouldn't be surprised if we saw an increase in mass shootings, terrorism, and pockets of radicalism. But those are all really blips in the statistics sensationalized by the media and not relevant for the average experience of most people.
The bigger risk is simply checking out of society. You'll end up with social and economic barbells of men, not necessarily overlapping: an elite class of men, and a broader underclass, while women fall into a more typical Gaussian distribution. Which also suggests that means and medians will be increasingly irrelevant when looking at population statistics.
ThenElection
1yr ago
if the often claimed "they settle down with the beta" afterwards happens, they still get a partner.
People grow and learn important skills from relayionships. Imagine a world where most men don't have relationships in their 20s, while most women do. Outside of being a crappy experience for those men, even if those men do start to partner in their 30s, they will be developmentally stunted compared to their paired partners and will know less what they want of a partner, leading to lots of frustrations and outcries of manchildhood. That's a strictly worse world than one where people are coming into relationships on an equal footing.
And that's not considering the possibility that the quality of men in their 30s will be made lower by lack of relationships in their 20s than they otherwise would have been, either by dropping out of society or falling into the incel rabbit hole.
ThenElection
1yr ago
doesn't arranged marriage / getting married quickly for children have this same problem?
They do, and that's a socially recognized failure mode for those mating styles.
I agree that the typical life cycle pattern for relationships is currently something like "a comparatively short period of serial dating followed by monogamy." Particularly in the lower age groups, though, the (low quality) statistics we do have suggest the beginnings of another trend. It's something society should devote resources to publicly tracking so that we at least know the state of the world.
ThenElection
1yr ago
As a vegetarian:
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it's vegetarians who are making an affirmative claim, so an argument for vegetarianism is the starting point.
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for my particular utilitarianish anti-suffering based-flavor of vegetarianism, I think the strongest argument against it is that it is difficult to add up the suffering created by our actions, as mediated through the economy. Is eating a loaf of bread really that much better than a cut of steak? Cultivating an acre of wheat kills millions of insects; how do we balance their suffering against a cow's? And, sure, they also had to be killed to provide the feed for the cows, but then we just end up in a place where whatever we do as a society creates a constant holocaust of the nonhuman, and the best thing to do would be to just off ourselves. Or perhaps figure out how to feed our species out of vats full of algae, but that seems... distasteful.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Perhaps, but for GSS the means were close enough to equal, which is what you'd expect regardless of the overall distribution. Either lying is only a small effect, or there's a counteracting effect that masks it.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Not looking for particular source talk (though, I wonder if that would be allowed here; better if not). But how do deployed soldiers typically source their gear? Hookups back home, or locally? Or do they time their cycles to avoid having to deal with those logistics?
ThenElection
1yr ago
I think you'd be able to walk unassisted with a hairline tibia fracture, even though it'd feel shitty and be a bad idea.
Not that I think we should take the story at face value.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Publicly stated opposition, at least. In private, they tend to go for other people with above average abilities. That tendency is even stronger when they're e.g. choosing anonymous donors from a sperm bank.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Obviously there are few to no statistics on "people who are strong opponents of HBD." The population I was referring to isn't strong opponents of HBD; the population is people of above average abilities.
They comprise the majority of sperm bank clients. And sperm banks put a very high premium on sperm from elite universities, which only makes sense if most clients use university attendance as a proxy for intelligence and think intelligence has a genetic component.
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Redshirting of boys is a good idea for an individual parent. But I suspect there's a Red Queen aspect that's being ignored: relative age/size/development plays a big role in school outcomes, particularly for boys. (E.g. short boys put on HGH show improved social and emotional outcomes). If all of a sudden all boys in a grade level are a year older, no one really benefits. This relative hierarchy is also consistent with girls not benefitting as much from red shirting: if it was merely that people who are more developed tend to do better in school and boys are delayed a bit, girls who are redshirted would still show a comparable benefit just even more so. And single sex schools don't show as large a benefit for boys as redshirting does.
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Boys and girls develop differently. Areas where boys tend to develop faster (independence; exploration; spatial and analytical reasoning; objective tests) are increasingly deemphasized in schooling. If you judge boys and girls according to who develops the most like girls, it's not surprising when girls have better outcomes.
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Age-based grade levels are outdated: there are enough factors of development that targeting instruction at a given grade level at some hypothetical child who is average in all those factors is not a "one size fits all" or even a "one size fits some" model, but one size fits none. (cf the curse of dimensionality). If I were to have a kid, public schools are the last place I'd put him or her.
ThenElection
1yr ago
My point is that it's a relative development effect as well as an absolute development effect.
Girls also undergo a year of development in a year, same as boys. But redshirting doesn't increase their outcomes nearly as much. If it were purely a matter of absolute level of development, girls who redshirted would improve outcomes compared to their one year lower peers, same as boys, but they don't.
A good test of this would be redshirting all boys in a year. My prediction is that the improvement in outcomes would be substantially less than for a class composition with a smaller proportion of redshirt boys, and the effect would be dose dependent.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Time isn't on the PRC's side. It needs to open a wide lead over the US economically and militarily to achieve its regional goals before its demographic storm hits, and limping slightly faster to the finish line doesn't help there.
ThenElection
1yr ago
That's well-stated and something I'll think over.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Realism isn't the point and shouldn't be a knock against it. The point is that Star Trek offered an unadulterated vision of near utopia (no place). All political ideologies have these myths, whether it's heroic individualism in a gulch or collectivist ecstasy or a nation of democratic smallholders. And to engage with the ideology you have to understand and grok why its vision is so compelling.
What's the Star Trek of contemporary American liberalism? Girls? Euphoria? The same, for what it's worth, applies to the Right. No one has a real vision.
Though arguably that's for the best.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Has anyone seen Gwern lately, or is he filling up a 500tb RAID with Asuka pics?
Yes.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AnimeResearch/comments/xumxfk/novelai_diffusion_has_arrived_nai_launches/
ThenElection
1yr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man
In some sense it's grading on a curve, but it's clear that substantial effort and technical expertise (for the tools available at the time) went into these prehistoric sculptures.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Isn't a broken culture another obvious alternative explanation?
People residing on the western coast of Africa had an existing, stable culture. With the rise of modernity, polities started raiding each other, slaughtering most people and atomizing the survivors into marketable goods who were sold to buyers on the other side of the world. Even once they formed new family structures, those were broken apart at higher rates (possibly?) than comparable populations. Cultural knowledge was lost, and that reverberates to this day, perhaps exacerbated in recent times by government policies that discouraged family formation. It continues to this day because only (relative) elites are able to maintain stable families
I'm not claiming that this is true, exactly, but it's a prima facie plausible and obvious argument that's been made many times. Black thinkers originated this argument, and since then figures ranging from Du Bois to Sowell to Obama have propounded versions of it.
What's most interesting is that in recent times it's become as taboo as the genetics explanation, and making the claim that black culture is broken is as likely to receive accusations of racism as full-on HBD.
ThenElection
1yr ago
China, in particular, really likes the nuclear status quo. As soon as non-proliferation is dead, you'll see all of its regional neighbors/enemies get nukes within a few months or years at most. Taiwan actually ends up with an effective deterrent without direct US intervention.
Russia using a nuke would pretty much immediately shift China away from being an ally/neutral in this situation.
Students get renowned NYU professor fired for giving low grades
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-petition.html
A quarter of students signed a petition that an organic chemistry class was too hard, and the professor teaching it was fired. The professor, Maitland Jones, had taught organic chemistry for decades, at NYU and Princeton before it. He had also written a widely used textbook on it. Causes cited include MJ being an asshole; COVID educational policies; and a general downward trend in student quality preceding COVID. One thing that isn't mentioned is that NYU adopted an SAT-optional test policy for the class entering in 2020.
This is why educational policies matter at every level. As a cohort degrades in quality, downstream institutions face pressure to adapt curricula and policies to satisfy those students. The next downstream organization then faces the same pressure. If the student was good enough to graduate high school, shouldn't they be good enough to go to college? If a student got into a university, shouldn't they be good enough to pass all their classes? If a student graduated from undergrad, shouldn't they have a shot at doctoral and professional degrees? If they got into med school, shouldn't they be able to graduate? If they got an MD, shouldn't they able to be a practicing surgeon?
I used to be an interview-giver (~50 per year) at a major tech company. One of the reasons I stopped giving interviews was the experience I had around a particular candidate in 2019.
Background context: the company I'm referencing here has a general candidate intake; relatively few people are recruited to work on a particular team. The candidate, after an initial screen, goes through five typical whiteboarding coding interviews (now four; one has been replaced by a Goodliness and Leadership "G&L" interview to provide a more, err, holistic perspective). Each interviewer scores the candidate on several attributes, briefly comments on them, and provides a rating from Strong No Hire to Strong Hire. If the initial scores are promising, everyone writes up a full review and justification that takes 1-2 hours of time. A hiring committee composed of technical leadership then reviews the packet and gives the thumbs up or down.
My go-to questions were framed around an array that starts with increasing integers and then switches, once, to decreasing integers. E.g. you might have [1, 3, 5, 4, 2] or [11, 12, 15, 9]. I start with a very simple question that tests that the candidate understands the property, followed by a warm-up, and then three more sophisticated questions that I actually try to get a hiring signal from. Around 50% of candidates make it substantially past the warm-up, and even those who don't usually still feel good about the interview and hopefully learned something because they made genuine progress.
So, the candidate comes in, and he had graduated cum laude with a CS degree from a HBCU before going to work at a government contractor. So after some chit-chat to get him into a productive headspace, I pose the simple question: how might you find the minimum value for an array with this property? Most candidates can immediately answer (sometimes with some clarifications on the spec) so I rarely ask them to code it out, but he just didn't get it. So we code, and he struggles everywhere, from not knowing how to get the length of the array to not understanding how something could be increasing and then decreasing. We spent 45 minutes with me hand-holding him to a pseudocode solution on the initial sanity check and don't even get to the warm-up.
Naturally, I give Strong No Hire. Surprisingly, I am told by the recruiter I need to do the full write up, which I dutifully and meticulously do. The recruiter comes back and tells me that she thinks I unfairly rated him (how would she know???) on two of the attributes and needed to either further justify them or change them. I justify further. Finally, he goes to hiring committee, he's (thankfully) turned down, and the scores everyone gave him are released to us. Literally everyone had given him the lowest possible rating on every attribute and said Strong No Hire. Despite that, all of us had to spend hours writing up the interviews and resisting calls from the recruiter to revise our scores, which was highly exceptional and not something we used to be asked. The second that happened, I removed myself permanently from the interviewer pool: clearly my time wasn't something they respected or valued.
I checked up on the candidate on LinkedIn a couple months ago, and he's still at his government contractor, writing the code that runs the US military. Glad that critical ad impression code was protected from him.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Yep, exactly that. No catch.
It then is supposed to segue neatly into the actual warm-up (to find the maximum). Depending on the performance there, I have different follow-up questions: write a function to verify that an array satisfies this constraint; "invert" an array that initially satisfies this constraint such that it decreases and then increases; or sort an array that initially satisfies this constraint. (Though it's been leaked and has since been retired.)
Yeah, they're not particularly hard and not intended to be; the goal is to just see if someone is a competent coder, not a genius. I still only ended up giving a LH or higher recommendation to ~20% of people.
In some ways going for the best and brightest would be disadvantageous; they'd get bored wiring protos and updating config files all day. The main things selected for are competence, willingness to do some bare minimum of work, and compliance/desire not to rock the boat too much. Which probably makes sense.
Do we have solid statistics supporting this?
Subjectively, I agree. This phenomenon matches what I see among friends and myself. If you hop into polyamorous communities, the modal complaint is a man frustrated that his partner is far more successful than him while he hasn't had any. And it's consistent with the experiences of incels.
But we're pretty lacking when it comes to good statistics about it. There's a now-deletes Hinge post which calculated the Gini coefficients of match distributions (heterosexual women live in a romantic Denmark; heterosexual men live in South Africa). But that is pretty early in the process, just a casual blog post about online dating, and deleted anyway. (Other OLD "studies" are even worse, with the infamous OkCupid post being a solid candidate for the Worst Ever.) There's also the GSS data that show growing proportions, of young women (around 20%) but especially young men (around 30%), who haven't had a sexual partner in the last year. This is better, but suffers from coarse data and small samples.
There's a lack of interest in looking at this too deeply, though. What do we do if we find out this is in fact happening or even accelerating? As you point out, it's an article of faith that a monogamous relationship is in the cards for everyone who wants one. But if it's a myth, what could we do for the men left holding the shit end of the stick, to either arrest the trend or make up for it? Should we? With an increasing remote possibility of a loving relationship, do those men have any incentive to support and engage in society?
I am convinced that having a large cohort of men who simply fail to launch is a very bad outcome, both for them and for society at large.
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