faceh
1hr ago
I agree with the thrust here, but speaking as a Millennial that also bought into the whole 'go to college or you'll be flipping burgers' shtick, I think the real implication was just a bit more than about having money and a 'cushy' job, but also:
A) Having 'proved' yourself by obtaining a degree (especially if your job was related to your major) was 'supposed' to entitle you to some extra dignity and respect right off the bat.
B) Likewise it was supposed to 'open up doors' to areas you'd otherwise either never be allowed into, or that you'd have to grind for years and years to open otherwise. Not quite a 'VIP access' ticket, but definitely a 'priority boarding' pass, if you will.
In my case, B) was literally true because I had to bypass the "undergrad degree" gate to access the "law degree" gate and then the "bar license" gate.
But what 'we' found was that no, you're basically treated as a lowly intern to start, your pay might be a little better than if you lacked the degree, but it afforded you almost no actual respect and, in all probability, you'd have more respect if you'd been working that job 4 years rather than studying in that time.
(Yes, it makes perfect sense that a 4 year veteran should outrank the new recruit, but that was emphatically not how things were sold)
We also found that the 'doors' were actually opened by knowing the right people, which was a function of going to the right school for meeting those people, and almost completely orthogonal to the degree itself. We tried waving around impressive GPAs and extracurriculars and finding that we were still locked out unless we knew the secret handshakes, or had a ton of money to grease palms with.
So in this sense, think of how college was sold as an almost pure status boost. "You're a smart guy, you could jump into the workplace and eventually find yourself in a prestigious position, well-compensated and respected. But hey, if your SATs are high enough you can take a small detour to acquire a piece of paper that certifies you're a smart guy, and jump ahead to having some extra clout without the long climb from the bottom."
Shades of Elite Overproduction, but more about trying to skip the perceived 'minimum wage, maximum stress' grind that most young people have to overcome.
Its a very tempting deal on its face.
faceh
22hr ago
On the one side, the immense increase in anxiety disorders and antidepressant prescriptions among women over 35.
On the other, the fact that married women are, by most reliable recent data, happier than single women across the board.
I'd have to dig deep to find data that pinpointed this exact effect, though.
faceh
1d ago
Just... the reason they see them as threats is that an increasing proportion of older women are unattached.
A married woman might worry about a young floozy stealing her man, but that's simpler to police. Realizing that she has to compete with that same floozy for EVERY SINGLE ELIGIBLE MAN'S attention probably feels like an existential threat by comparison.
faceh
1d ago
Agreed. But to keep that limit there has to be some actual friction in place. We now know exactly where the slippery slope will take us.
This is arguably why dating apps blew up the market in short order. Took away ALL the friction for high value guys looking for one night stands AND removed it all from public view.
faceh
1d ago
I'd echo this, especially 3, 5, and 9, as great advice. However I'm speaking as a guy who got pretty damn close to marriage before things imploded.
4 is where guys will stumble b/c pursuing that wealth can become all-consuming, and at the very least will interfere with actually looking for a woman. Although I gather that once you hit a certain level of success women are more likely to just show up in your life. You've time to make a decent number of dice rolls in your mid-twenties, but you also have to be smart.
So I'd say there's no shame in somewhat lowering your expectations and while you should walk around with dick-swinging swagger being modest enough not to promise the sun, moon, and stars to a woman avoids some problems.
faceh
1d ago
Sam Hyde's advice on this is very good to keep in mind.
faceh
1d ago
I mean, that's ultimately the funny thing.
This implies that a Billionaire male will have a power imbalance with regard to ANY woman he pursues, unless its other Billionaires or particularly prominent female politicians.
But if you thought Billionaires were 'in bed with' the government and cooperating together before, then imagine if they were literally only marrying each other and further isolating their genes from the common man. (I've heard this is approximately how the "gay mafia" of San Francisco came to be).
I guess a good progressive would suggest that the billionaire should intentionally dispossess himself of almost all of his wealth and power and then pursue a partner on a more equitable basis.
Meanwhile One of the best selling books of the current century is about a kinky Billionaire pursuing a lower-middle class female... obsessively. The movie adaptation of said book grossed half a billion dollars.
Women LOVE the power imbalance (where, discreetly, the other party's obsession means she actually holds power over him).
faceh
1d ago
Maybe it's the people who should be willing to punish elites, vastly disproportionately. At least for as long as the elites have names and addresses and can't murder us all with drone swarms.
Yes, but that's another doozy of a coordination problem.
I've sometimes thought about actively attempting to rally disaffected young males who are otherwise prone to wasting their lives on video games and porn and helping them acquire training, purpose, and power, to use towards demanding better treatment for males across the board and, ultimately, to punish the worst malefactors who oversaw the current decline.
Which, yes, looks very much like a paramilitary force if you squint, and so I wouldn't be surprised if I got assassinated before it hit any critical mass.
(Gavin McInnes tried this approach with the Proud Boys, and it really got away from him)
I think that is easily disrupted by, e.g. the Andrew Tate grift, where some guy who can convince men that he knows shortcuts to getting wealth and pussy and wrings all the money and enthusiasm out of them by having them chase superficial goals.
I've given up hope that 'the people' will enforce accountability, sans the rise of some Napoleonic (Trumpian? Messianic?) figure who can represent them and guide them strategically to advance a righteous goal on behalf of the whole.
And I won't ever pretend to be that kind of guy.
Well, there's an inherent inequality in that its really only men who can truly enforce the law (sans that threat of eternal damnation from an all-powerful God), so it would be harder to maintain that sort of equality if men didn't want to be bound by it.
We can refactor the question to be basically "how can we convince men to accept strong limits on their sexual freedom (i.e., stop using their physical prowess to secure sex) when their baser instincts would prefer more of a free-for-all? AND convince them to actively police each other?"
For me, it is easy. I believe that the second, third, and beyond order effects of enforced monogamy are self-evidently worth it: we get to have a civilization with internet, running water, and a functioning air travel system. Eventually space travel.
But a guy who finds himself near the top of the hierarchy, he might be well aware that he could vastly increase the variety of his sexual partners if he defects... and he reasonably believes he has sufficient power to get away with it. And a biological imperative to spread his genes to boot.
Guys at the bottom also have reason to defect, but rarely the capacity.
So refactoring it further: "How can we convince elite males who could improve their own position by defecting (whilst destroying the game for everyone else) to accept limits on their sexual freedom and thus their genetic success when other humans have limited ability to even police them?"
I don't have a good answer to this that isn't "Convince these elite males that there's an even higher power that sees all their actions and declares which actions will be punished. And punished VASTLY dis-proportionally, to boot."
We start to slide back towards my classic Skin in the Game screed. Elites need to suffer for misbehavior too.
Because fewer people are getting married overall. There's probably a core root cause for both these observations. Using marriage as the metric means selecting for the types who are still getting married under current social circumstances.
But other sorts of situations, like Sugar dating are becoming more common, if not 'prominent.'
Two of my personal friends are in 10+ year age gap relationships right now, and I suspect only one of those couples will end up married.
Bill Belichick isn't married. Leonardo DiCaprio isn't married, nor is Tobey Maguire.
So I'd suspect that a behavior that was semi-common for a century or more hasn't actually decreased much.
Happy to review other evidence though.
Once again, the institution of marriage was solving some pernicious coordination problems (women don't want to get pumped and dumped and left preggers, men want to to have sexual access to women who are virgins or as close to it as possible, neither can truly verify the intentions of the other) so for COMPLETELY SECULAR REASONS its very very useful to have "abstinence until marriage" as a strong norm and "'til death do us part'" as an 'enforceable' obligation.
There's a lot of other obligations that we tie up in there that trip people up, to say nothing of the obligations to the children that emerge.
But
A) You can't really construct a piecemeal version of this and expect it to work. and
B) You need some severe punishment for breaching the covenant to really make it stick. Religious folks have fear of their God as a factor, I don't know what we can impose on nonbelievers (short of a death sentence) that will keep them in line, even against their baser instincts.
Any secular punishments we create can likely be circumvented by clever/powerful enough actors.
faceh
1d ago
Right. But the problem with relying solely on social technology is that if a high-status guy doesn't like them, he might break the norms and 'win' due to everyone else deferring to his position, as our monkey brains are wont to do.
I think the threat of eternal damnation is a necessary component we haven't figured out a replacement for.
For Henry VIII even that wasn't enough.
The only compromise position I've hit on that might align incentives is setting it so that 'marriage' is 25 year contract that can't be exited without EXTREME difficulty during that time, but can then be 'extended' if the parties choose at the end of that period.
Logic being that's enough time to raise the kids to adulthood and get them set up well.
Its not very romantic or aspirational though, so it is probably too autistic of a solution.
faceh
2d ago
God Bless.
I see enough 'mismatched' couples appearancewise that I always wonder at what else is cementing their bond. Having it all is wonderful.
faceh
2d ago
I have never hidden the fact that I hate the fruits of the sexual revolution. We are currently in what is my own personal hellscape for all romantic purposes, everything about it is my anti-preference. I don't expect my preferences to be universal, its a 'me' problem. But nobody else appears happy either.
If we could have stopped them somewhere around the norms of, I dunno 1995 I might find it tolerable. But alas there were never any brakes on the train.
And people are rediscovering traditional sexual norms from 'first principles' but we don't have the social cohesion to even attempt to rebuild the system as it existed before. This may or may not be an intentional result of certain groups (I make no specific accusation) intentionally stirring the pot.
This post is an excellent summary of how many, many of the online "pickup artists" have success across a decade or more and bed perhaps hundreds or thousands of women ... and then lose their fucking minds.
There but for the grace of God go I. Thankfully when I was doing my study of pickup artists and red pill ideas, I could reason out that following the rules and ideas to their logical conclusion would lead to that exact outcome.
faceh
2d ago
Thing is, its also utterly unrealistic to expect extreme-high-status men to accept being alone for 40+ years OR marry someone they aren't attracted to.
How do you stop them from using their status to just override any taboos and get what they want?
I do think its a real problem when they cycle through young women and leave them less appealing for the younger guys, of course, so I agree in general.
If nothing else, I think the argument about "different life experiences" falls flat on its face.
The whole point of long term relationships is mutually experiencing life. If you stick it out then your life experiences will inherently equalize. One being substantially more experienced than the other doesn't reduce that factor, as long as they're willingly sharing in experiences going forward.
Now, I'm going to politely inquire, in terms of you and your wife's physical attractiveness, would you rate each of you as close on an 'objective' scale? I'm specifically NOT accusing her of being a gold digger or you of flexing wealth to make up for anything, its just helpful context.
People's subjective preferences override such things anyway.
I feel confident saying its a mix of (2) generally and (2a), specifically intrasexual competition driven by the fact that Millenials are hitting their late 30's 40s, many, MANY of them single (including both those who were never married, and those who got divorced). And they're now facing down the implications of this situation in a way that prior generations never had to.
And now we've got a sizeable surplus of older women who are effectively 'unionizing' to try and preserve their value in the marketplace, and a surplus of older guys who are in their 'prime' (if they took care of themselves physically) and have the wealth to expend on acquiring the things they missed out on in their younger days. No, its not unique to Millenials, but I suspect that the environment they're in is creating pressures previous generations didn't experience at the social level.
On top of the complete demolition of any social/religious guidance around dating, leaving everyone to do things on an ad hoc basis.
Older women would love to prevent older men from getting taken off the market by younger women. Rationally so! They have an uneasy alliance with younger men who would ALSO like to keep older men from competing.
The only way to restrict wealthier older men from 'poaching' young women is either massive doses of social shame (which Celebs, at least, are probably immune to) OR getting them MeToo'd (which is a specific type of social shame that can also carry legal consequences). So some sort of 'moral' framework gets built out around these relationships to attempt to justify the attacks.
I've pointed out that if we don't have a system where EVERYONE (even the King) is Monogamous... then the likely stable alternative is harem-maxxing.
Anyway, here's my prior research into the prevalence of age gape relationships:
https://www.themotte.org/post/120/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/19112?context=8#context
I was actually surprised to find that they were more common (historically and now) than I thought. Husbands being 10+ years older is already about 8% of heterosexual marriages!
And that's not accounting for non-marital ones.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/half-americans-say-they-have-been-10-year-age-gap-relationship
Here's a more recent poll on that point. HALF of Americans say they've been in a 10+ year relationship? I actually find that a bit hard to swallow, but should tell you something nonetheless.
Given the study's design, take it with a whole shaker of salt:
These are the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between June 20-23, 2023. For this survey, a sample of 1,210 adults and oversample of 201 Men that have dated women 10+ years younger than them and 207 Women that have dated men 10+ years older than them, age 18+ from the continental U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii was interviewed online in English.
faceh
2d ago
I guess the logical end-point of this is multi-agent negotiation between the LLM representatives of the state, the legislature, the courts, and various interest groups, all negotiating, passing, and striking down new laws millions of times a year. Humans might not notice this, of course, since at this point the laws might mostly bind the LLMs...
I don't think this will be the actual end-point in a permanent sense, but yeah, this might be where we land for the next decade or so.
SORT OF.
In the more emotionally-driven areas (so yeah, outside of commercial), like divorce and contested probate, sometimes people genuinely just want to inflict the process as a punishment on the other side... and sometimes emotions flip and what looked like a surefire drawn-out fight gets resolved in a weekend.
Lawyers are still bound to do what their clients want, after all. But if a lawyer can pull up their AI Case Analyzer and say "Look, its not just my opinion, the Computer is telling you that even if we drag this out for two years your best outcome is an additional 10-15k over the offer that's on the table now" maybe we avoid some conflict.
(one can hope that clients can see reason, this might be a fool's bet)
If SCOTUS makes a major decision, interested litigators will move very rapidly to bring cases under that new decision. Look at how many shots gun rights groups have taken at SCOTUS recently.
I don't disagree with this overall, but I want to make it clear that I think they'll be even faster.
Bruen was handed down in 2022 and it took a couple years for states to get really creative rules and rulings on the books... and of course SCOTUS has been agonizingly slow to address these matters.
I'm suggesting that in this new world, SCOTUS could hand down a decision, and by the next week various state legislatures could be passing bills that are competently written specifically to thwart/loophole those decisions.
So my definition of "reacts very quickly" assumes speedier action due to LLM assistance.
faceh
2d ago
I could imagine adding CivPro rules that discourage wanton LLM use. I don't see how they effectively enforce them.
faceh
4d ago
not through any fault of the court but because the attorney responsible isn't motivated to list them for trial until the ducks are all in a row
I mean, I'd just point out that this answers your initial thought:
I don't know that LLMs really could add much since any lawyer would be able to give you a ballpark on likelihood of success and the award range.
Any lawyer can give you the ballpark, but the LLM now makes it 'viable' to file and prosecute a suit as long as it is expected to be barely EV positive.
The cost of getting 'all ducks in a row' should go down substantially.
faceh
4d ago
It could genuinely be fixed (in the short term) by spending a LOT more money on the court system to get competent judges, clerks, assistants to process cases in a timely fashion, update systems to modern tech to increase throughput, and Marshall necessary resources to enforce the court's rulings too.
But Courts are inherently a cost center for any government. Indeed, in Florida, the statutory trend is to draft laws to discourage litigation at every turn. Requiring extra procedural hoops before filing is permitted, forcing pre-suit negotiations or even mediation, and now they're starting to restrict the ability to collect attorney's fees.
No government that I know of actively expands its judicial resources to scale with its economy or population.
There are some issues that have to funnel through the courts (Probate, the disposition of a dead person's stuff, being one of them), but beyond that, in their function as dispute resolver can still 'work' by making the process as ardurous and unpleasant as necessary for the parties to consider cooperation the strictly superior option.
My REAL suspicion is that AI will get good enough at predicting case outcomes that it will discourage active litigation/encourage quick settlements, as you can go to Claude, Grok, and Gemini and feed it all the facts and evidence and it can spit out "75% chance of favorable verdict, likely awards range from $150,000 to $300,000, and it will probably take 19-24 months to reach trial."
And if the other party finds this credible, the incentive for solving things cooperatively become obvious.
faceh
4d ago
the current amount of legal writing vastly exceeds the amount which will ever be appealed, and probably exceeds by one hundredfold the amount which will ever reach the Supreme Court
Yes, this is why SCOTUS has a ton of informal and formal criteria for selecting which cases are worth their time to hear.
But it seems obvious to me that there was a hard bottleneck on how quickly litigants can react to new caselaw and that Courts intentionally avoid making drastic rulings that cause sweeping changes so any given court decision is going to have gaps in it which they will likewise be slow to 'plug.'
I suspect now its as easy as "read this Appellate decision and find me six possible loopholes or procedural methods to delay its implementation to achieve my client's goals, make sure to check the entire corpus of Law Journal Articles for creative arguments or possible alternative interpretations of existing law. Make no mistakes."
(and I'm leaving aside the issue of JUDGES using LLMs to find and create bases for favorable rulings)
I mean, yes.
But all of those factors can also be boiled down to "women have acquired all the independence and concurrent responsibility they ever wanted, and this has caused them immense psychological distress."
Part of that independence is "now you have free rein to choose any mate you want... provided you can attract them."
And on top of the "paradox of choice" problem, now they realize that every other woman has this option... and is now competing for the same mates. This problem intensifies given that women are already primed to want the things they see other woman wanting.
The rule that I've realized explains 90% of it: a woman will amplify any signal or story or selective pressure that raises her own status/desirability as a mate.
She will attack any signal or story or selective pressure that raises other womens' status, thereby compromising her own.
See the "body positivity" movement. Even though NO HIGH-STATUS MALE IN THE HISTORY OF THE PLANET has married an obese woman, they unionized around the idea that they're perfect and beautiful as they are and men selecting based on size/weight had the problem.
But Ozempic has hit and now they're all happily losing weight.
And the outrage over Sydney Sweeney is likewise explained by this. Women who aren't pleasant-looking blonds with massive honkers are threatened when men seemingly declare this the ideal for female appearance.
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