I (35M) just got married to a woman I met on hinge. She’s awesome and I brag about her to anyone who’ll listen. Before that, though, I was an extremely active dater and hooker-upper. I probably went on dates with a couple hundred women and slept with about a hundred. Here are some thoughts:
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Dating can be extremely fun!! You should be excited to get out and do this. Chasing girls is fun. Banter is fun. Flirting is fun. Leaning in for the first kiss or knee touch or any small escalation is fun. Slightly risky behavior is super fun. Try to have fun, don’t just obsess about the destination. I racked up quite a body count and have great memories about a lot of these girls and experiences still. So do they. I love my wife more than dating but I loved the process of dating and sleeping with hot women a lot too.
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Location matters, a lot. I was dating mostly in the Bay Area (but would also go on lots of one-offs while traveling for work in other cities). There are just way more people to date in a city and even though there’s also more competition a deep market is good for everybody. If you are not in a big city and are really serious about dating, you should move to one. New York is the best in the US, by a lot, but most big cities are good.
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Take 3 months and improve all the low hanging things you can about yourself. These are mostly physical. Lose weight if you’re even a little overweight. Go to the gym. Run, do cardio. Take care of your skin. Learn how to dress well. Get a good haircut. Switch to contacts if you have glasses. If you have bad teeth, get them fixed. Old me resented that I had to change something so shallow about myself, but I did it, and it vastly expanded my dating options and dating success. I personally wouldn’t go this far, but if you really have a big physical flaw on your face, consider cosmetic surgery. Also, these improvements will benefit you in your non-dating life as well.
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Get over any ego/insecurity you feel. You just need to ask lots of people out and you’ll get rejected a lot at various stages. That’s fine. You’ll get much much better with practice, and also learning to persevere in the face of rejection is a good skill.
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Most of my dates came from apps, with one-off random things materializing from in person encounters. Tinder sucks, bumble and hinge are good, and Raya is the best.
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It’s important to not come across like a loser. Nobody wants to date a loser. You need to project confidence, happiness, and can’t seem desperate. That said, earnestness (not obsessiveness) is generally attractive, so don’t bother playing games like “only one text in a row” or “don’t text right away after the first date.” If you like the girl it’s fine to say so. That said, don’t write ridiculous walls of text if she’s not reciprocating.
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You need to move from app convo to text to date planning to date quickly. Like 10 on app texts is plenty to ask for her number and suggest meeting up. It’s impossible to overstate how many matches a typical woman will have, and however witty or special you think you are over text you have no hope of standing out. You need to meet up in person, quickly. If you don’t meet up within a week of matching you probably won’t meet up.
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Things get way easier with age. I was hooking up with way more hot 21 year olds when I was 30 than when I was 21.
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Don’t get too invested in any one person, especially early on. As a man, you will typically be the one pushing for dates/sex initially, but the natural dynamics is that the woman will be pushing for the more serious things later on. Don’t bother getting invested until this point.
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The advice for hooking up is exactly the same as the advice for a serious relationship. You need to get your foot in the door first and foremost. That’s the hardest part as a guy. In my experience the conversion rate from “she wants to have sex” to “she wants something serious” is nearly 100%.
Good luck; have fun.
Tomato
11mo ago
Have the barbarians realize they are now doing most of the work holding up the empire together, while not getting commensurate benefits, which go to the fat and lazy citizens instead
This just doesn’t at all seem like what the US military does. The actual territory of the US is held together just fine, it’s not like there are far-flung territories with constant foreign incursions and we need troopers on the ground to fight off raiders.
I guess you could say we have a bunch of far-flung military bases? But again these are in friendly locations and anyway aren’t kept in the empire by weight of local arms.
Tomato
11mo ago
There is indeed a robust but not quite formal military —> (possibly elite MBA) —> elite corporate/finance job pipeline. Military guys, typically former officers (but not always, and not always academy guys) are anecdotally very overrepresented in positions like this.
Despite a lot of rhetoric on sites like this, the actual elite who run things (and not the proverbial pink haired HR lady) like working with people who have demonstrated strong moral commitments, discipline, and the ability to show up on time and work hard.
Tomato
10mo ago
West Point/Annapolis/etc are hard to get into, at least as measured by acceptance rates. They're not that far off from other elite American universities.
Tomato
10mo ago
Quality of character: The resilience borne of having grown up in the oppressive anti-Black racial landscape of the United States
It's easy to see how this will be used as a loophole, but I think what they're going for is the almost certainly true idea that it requires far less innate talent to be a straight-A/high SAT asian student from Palo Alto than it does to be a straight-A/high SAT black student from Detroit, and if you're solving for something like, "admit the student where our treatment effect will be the largest" then you'd prefer that black student over that asian student.
Tomato
10mo ago
I've honestly never really understood the obsession with "merit" and college admissions. Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students? The discussion really seems to be wrapped up in some notion of rewarding hard work or talent. But why should we reward that as opposed to something else? Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?
As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect. I guess it could be the case that the kid with the highest high school GPA will get the largest treatment effect, but it's not really obvious to me that this is true. Maybe it's the legacy white kid who will be able to build out his connections; maybe it's the black kid who had to endure a shitty high school and by a gritty miracle ground out a 1300 SAT score; maybe the 1600 SAT score asian kid is going to do great no matter where he ends up.
People need to do a bit more work in connecting the dots here IMO.
Tomato
10mo ago
It confers a great deal of status on the person who receives it.
Right, so how do we decide who gets this status? Is it the person who benefits the most, or is it the person who got a 1600 on their SAT? It's not clear that these are the same people. They might be, I don't think I've ever seen an anti-AA person clearly connecting the dots.
Tomato
10mo ago
Right, what I'm asking is why it's so obvious that the decision rule we use to decide who gets that status should be based on who got a 1600 on their SAT in high school, or some similar measure of pre-college merit. Why shouldn't it be based on our best estimate of who will benefit most from that status? Maybe these things overlap, but it's not obvious that they do.
Tomato
10mo ago
I'd rather send A+ students to Harvard in a way that turns them into people who contribute amazing world-changing things, than sending C- students to Harvard in a way that turns them into upper-middle class middle management, even if the latter would mean larger Harvard marginal treatment effect.
Really what I'm asking for is some evidence for the assertion that sending A+ students to Harvard is the way to maximize the number of people who contribute amazing world-changing things, and that the C- student who got affirmative actioned into Harvard isn't doing that.
Tomato
10mo ago
But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard.
We're literally discussing SCOTUS, abstractly representing society, having a say in who gets to go to Harvard so it's worth thinking about what we as a society are aiming for.
Tomato
10mo ago
Why do these libertarians take the view that their abstract notion of merit entitles them to a Harvard education? Why suddenly hate the laisses-faire outcome of Harvard deciding how to allocate Harvard's resources?
Tomato
10mo ago
I agree with this, but it's a different argument than the meritocracy argument.
Tomato
10mo ago
They're restricting the space of inputs that Harvard is allowed to use when making admissions decisions. I don't see how it's misleading at all to characterize that as SCOTUS having a say in who goes to Harvard.
In that context, the question of "what we as a society are aiming for" has to do with, "Do we want organizations, even private ones, to be able to discriminate their admissions against individuals on the basis of that individual's race?"
There's one line of argument that's saying, AA is bad because race-based discrimination is bad. I guess I agree with that but I'm kind of a libertarian at heart so my prior is that Harvard should be able to do what it wants. But anyway, I'm not interested in that part of the discussion.
There's another line of argument, which I'm asking about, which is saying that AA is bad because it's not meritocratic, and I'm trying to understand why we should really care about that per se.
Tomato
10mo ago
I sort of have the view that Harvard/Stanford/Whatever is good at churning out elite but not exciting folks like programmers and doctors and bankers and lawyers, but for truly world-changing things to the extent that there's any correlation there it's all selection rather than treatment. If Harvard is good at doing the former and not the latter, I think it kind of makes sense to "uplift" a bunch of people into those positions that don't require true genius to do well, and not really worry whether the next Einstein goes to Harvard or Ohio State for undergrad. Anyway, as you said, it would be hard to identify this in the data anyway, but I just don't think it's the open and shut case that a lot of people here make it out to be.
Tomato
10mo ago
Okay fine, but I hope people with this view are ready to bite the bullet and support admitting a ton of legacies and athletes and CEO's kids.
Tomato
10mo ago
This feels like semantics so I'm going to drop it after this, but I'm responding to someone saying "But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard" by pointing out that if society is restricting the ruleset by which Harvard can choose who gets into Harvard, then clearly, plainly, obviously, society is on its face having a say in who gets to go to Harvard. I'm not sure what's complicated about this tbh.
Tomato
10mo ago
Aella-simping blogspam aside,
But when Aella asks Meghan “What kind of data would make you update your mind?” Meghan responds “No data”
While I’m sure this makes Aella Twitter poll takers gasp, it’s important to understand there’s a difference between something being falsifiable and something being testable with the data we have at our disposal. There’s a test you could theoretically run to tell whether porn is bad: a society-wide RCT where people are randomly assigned from birth into the porn society or into the no porn society and then we measure outcomes years later. In contrast there’s probably no observational data at present that would be very useful in answering the question well. (Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.) That doesn’t mean that Murphy’s belief is any more unfalsifiable than the particle physicist who needs a bigger particle accelerator’s theory is.
That whole exchange just tells me that Murphy has much better intuition than Aella for why causal inference with observational social science data is hard, even if she doesn’t have the language to exactly explain why.
Tomato
10mo ago
The whole point of that article, that selection bias is bad, correctly points out that it gives you a conditional expectation when you often want an unconditional one. But then in the very next sentence it says nbd because you often care about correlations, not expectations. Sure, you often care about unconditional correlations, not conditional ones, which is what selection bias gives you.
Tomato
10mo ago
Nobody has ever convinced me that “slightly slow transactions on the backend” has any meaningful welfare consequences.
Tomato
10mo ago
People into crypto because the tech allows for new types of transactions
What are the new types of transactions that anybody actually cares about in a quantitatively significant way?
Tomato
9mo ago
AI is vastly more significant than even either of the above.
I want to use this as an opportunity to remember that Paul Krugman quote from the 90s about how the internet will be no more significant than the fax machine, which everyone routinely dunks on him for. Show me where in this chart of GDP growth that the internet was widely adopted.
The world is ending and society is collapsing; by the way, you and your armed horde of refugees can’t come over here because of this piece of paper I have.
Dorks like this will rightfully be the first ones killed in any real apocalypse. How did anyone take these guys seriously?
Or more fitting:
sorry, the blockchain says this is my bunker. You see, it’s a decentralized, indelible, trustless system for recording ownersh—ACK!
Tomato
9mo ago
People here hate to admit it but the future will be filled with tall, good-looking chads who are good at socializing.
If society doesn’t collapse we’ll just continue on the same trajectory of mate selection. If it does collapse then physically fit, personable guys will be the ones who actually have useful abilities.
I’ve had the same shift and it’s coincided with me becoming, in chronological order, someone with a hard but well-paid job, a homeowner, a husband, and a father. None of that is easy, and it takes takes basically all of my time and mental energy to keep the whole thing standing up. Of course it is very satisfying and rewarding too.
In little breaks I have in my otherwise full schedule of carefully tending my garden, I notice that most people around me are just like me, showing up, working hard, earnestly trying to do their best. They’re all types, from the banker to the software engineer to the plumber to the Mexican immigrant lining up outside Home Depot looking for work while his wife works in the nail salon. Life is hard but most people show up and do their best, and end up doing okay.
And then you see the few people who at best just don’t give a fuck and can’t be bothered, or at worst actively make things worse for everybody else. In any sane society, these are the Bad Guys and would be treated like the Bad Guys. We’d be taking these people off the streets, we’d be keeping them away from our communities, and we’d be screaming at them for their absurd anti-social behavior.
But instead, especially in coastal big blue cities like where I live, society and government is entirely, 100% engaged in excusing and enabling them, while me and the banker and the plumber and the immigrant day laborer pay for it and told to smile while we do it. The only time we can get law enforcement to do anything is when their anti-social behavior is bad enough that it could hypothetically harm them (they don’t have any property, so property crime isn’t punishable).
Everybody else is out there busting their ass and it feels like the government always takes the other guy’s side. It’s so frustrating and absurd.
I teach at a big university. Class compositions are always like: 15% of students are awesome and are thrilled to be there and go above and beyond. 70% are good and do the work. 15% don’t give a shit. It’s hard to strike a balance between giving the best students more challenging and enriching material and keeping the worst students on track with the basics. In particular, you’re worried about leaving behind an earnest try-hard who just happens to kind of suck or be behind for reasons beyond his control.
My senior colleagues gave me the following advice which I’ve realized is absolutely right: conduct the class 100% for the benefit of the best students. They want to be in the class. They’ll benefit the most. And guess what, there are basically zero earnest try-hards who land in the bottom 15%.
I don’t know why we can run society in the same way. Run society for the benefit of the people who choose to participate productively in society. I know there’s this mythical class of people who would love to participate in productive society but their circumstances have done them wrong; if only they got the right social worker they could turn things around. But more and more I become convinced that almost all people who are out there shitting on other people’s lawns are just going to be lawn shitters no matter what we do and we need to get them as far away from our lawns, and my family, as possible.
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