faceh
6d ago
Yeah but your algorithm is explicitly excluding high ability, very much marriage material doctors, lawyers, etc.
Hmmmm.
Do you think.
its just possible.
That these 'very much marriage material' women.
Will probably get into a stable relationship at a relatively young age.
And will probably already be married before they get too old or too debt-burdened?
And thus would fall out of the pool very early anyway?
That's what the 'single' criteria is there for, after all.
faceh
6d ago
And yet, do you think there's much competition for the 'unmarriable' men?
Is it fair to say that a marriageable woman is going to get a LOT more attention than your average 'marriageable' man?
I mean, I could probably keep going and match all of your points with equivalents.
Do it.
Please.
I beg you.
Run the numbers on it all.
Give me some evidence that counteracts what appears to be a very clear trend.
Also, your criteria probably excludes 95+% of the black male population.
Is >=5 sexual partners that bad?
You go much above that and it has a VERY noticeable impact on divorce rates which guys are aware of.
I would admit that many guys would accept it, of course. But that says more about THEM, I think.
But if you were talking to a 23-25 year old women who admits to 6, 7, 8 whatever, what does that imply about her decision-making?
And suffice it to say, even if you exclude that criteria entirely, it doesn't really fix the ratio problem.
I only observe the US dating scene from a great distance, but as others point out, people aren't suffering that badly.
Check in on Gen Z sometime.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-much-of-gen-z-will-be-unmarried-at-40
Your analysis strikes me as catastrophizing, directionally correct but magnitudinally wrong.
Show the countervailing evidence. I beg you.
Relationship formation is in freefall across the fucking planet, I think 'catastrophe' is actually a fair characterization.
Maybe it's because of my particular bubble, but this is the one requirement in your list that seems completely unreasonable.
Funny enough, this was the one that was easiest to clear, I think the LLMs said north of 90% fit under this ceiling.
Most women don't have much or any student debt, if you include the ones who didn't attend college.
There are a few with a lot more than $50k,, but the overall average for women is around $33k, and I think that's limited to ONLY women that have debt at all.
And its even lower on average for white women. Black women have around $40k average.
Don't you think we could create a similar list of "minimum requirements for a marriageable single male" that would likewise exclude the vast majority of single men?
Yes?
And then what.
You think most men would be bothered more by a woman with a body count > 5 than a sex worker? Or would find drug use more acceptable than student loan debt?
I think a sex worker will ALMOST CERTAINLY have a body count greater than 5, so it'd be redundant to include.
And yeah, I think a guy serious about marriage would start to have second thoughts if he learned his GF had 5, 6, 7, bodies. Thats the point at which it has very noticeable impact on divorce rates. Guys are aware of that.
Of course, other factors could override that.
And for drug use... depends on the drug, doesn't it?
It's easy to ask ChatGPT to crunch some artificially-generated numbers to produce a blackpill.
My dude, I found the numbers myself, a year ago, no LLM involved:
https://www.themotte.org/post/1042/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/221415?context=8#context
The numbers are a 'real' as any other statistical conclusion can be.
so I'd like to ask if 90% of the single men you know are incapable of finding a decent woman?
YES.
Or damn near to it.
I'm surrounded by men who are great catches by all appearances, and THEY LITERALLY ALL HAVE THE PRECISE, EXACT SAME COMPLAINTS ABOUT TRYING TO FIND A PARTNER IN THE CURRENT SEXUAL MARKETPLACE.
EVERY ONE. I've got multiple friends whose women divorced them for seemingly no decent reason in the past 4 years. They are even MORE scarred and they're still scared of the dating scene they've been out of for a while.
I go on reddit's dating advice forum and its the same complaints. Note that one is complaining about the UK. It isn't just limited to America!
The young guys are cooked. Its hard to get even to a second date.. Guys will be single for years and years, despite living in NYC and checking all the boxes.
Its everywhere. These people are not outliers. Yet the advice always assumes they are the problem.
Almost half of Gen Z guys claim they're not even dating anymore.
Relationship formation is cratering across the globe
I talk to anyone, ANYWHERE and they're all saying the exact same thing about it. I DEFY you to find anyone who is having a 'good time' trying to find a partner.
Yes.
IT IS THAT BAD.
Guys who are CURRENTLY single are having a nightmarish time finding a partner.
Note: I have to exclude the guys I was great friends with in college (circa 2010) who are all still married with kids now.
Which just emphasizes how much worse its gotten since, say, 2013.
faceh
6d ago
I'd say "cishet" and "no college debt"
Now now, I specifically gave them a $50k ceiling. "NO" College debt is a pipe dream, I know it.
This ceiling is safe for like 95% of women, according to the LLMs.
And women are less likely to pay off their debt than men are and so be carrying it years later. So its kind of an important factor, men will have to absorb this 'bride price' when he marries her.
when your post is primarily on how the average woman is apparently unmarriable.
Well, I can add in my point that THE SOLUTION HERE IS TO PUT PRESSURE ON WOMEN to actually choose a guy relatively early, and offer some guidance on choosing one that will stick around. And, presumably, disincentivizing those who delay.
Because You also have to increase the pool of desirable, wiling women for this to play out favorably.
But I felt that would distract from the more neutral data I provided.
Also, not sure what criteria is "acute" mental illness judged by.
In my mind it would be less than a "severe" mental illness that is actually debilitating, but still serious enough that it impacts their daily behavior. You can peek and see how the LLMs chose to interpret it.
In either case, you can look at the raw numbers and see young women are showing INCREASING prevalence of mentall illness. Something around 30% for the under 30s.
Its fair to say things have gotten 'worse.'
And suppose that we agree on a final set of reasonable criteria - how many men, of those who are looking to marry and restrict the search set in such a way, meet a similar set of reasonable criteria? (I'll let women of themotte decide what that would be).
Sure.
But I will go ahead and place my bet that the number of men who meet this has probably been steady for the last couple decades, whereas the ratio of women who are marriagable has been decreasing.
See my point above about the pressure being on the wrong gender.
I'm dragging up the gender, dating, and fertility discourse for one last rodeo.
The below analysis is a possible infohazard for young single males. It contains analysis done by LLMs, but I solemnly swear I drafted this through my own brainpower, using AI only for the analysis I was too lazy to do myself.
I'm following upon a comment I made about a year ago that pulled out some raw numbers on the quality of women in the U.S., and how this might impact the desire of men to actually develop themselves and find one of those women and settle down.
At the time I didn't bother doing the work to produce an actual estimate of how many women would match the basic crtieria, given that these are NOT independent variables. The though occurred to me that AIs are the perfect solution for exactly this type of laziness, and now have the capability to do this task without completely making up numbers.
So, based on my old post, I chose 9 particular criteria that I think would ‘fairly’ qualify a woman as ‘marriageable.':
-
Single and looking (of course).
-
Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified.
-
Not ‘obese.’
-
Not a mother already.
-
No ‘acute’ mental illness.
-
No STI.
-
Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.
-
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
-
Under age 30.
And ask both ChatGPT and Grok to attempt to estimate the actual population of women in the U.S. that pass all these filters, accounting for how highly correlated each of the variables are.
Notable criteria I omitted:
-
Religious affiliation
-
Race
-
Political affiliation
-
Career
-
Drug use
-
Sex work/Onlyfans
I argue that a reasonable man would NOT want to ‘compromise’ on any of the original criteria, whereas the omitted ones are comparatively negotiable, or alternatively, are already captured in one of the original criteria.
Would you accept a woman who was carrying $50k in student loan debt into the relationship? I guess maybe if she was a doctor or lawyer or made enough money to justify it. Much higher than that and it starts to suggest financial recklessness.
5 as a body count is definitely an ‘arbitrary’ number, but again, you get much above that and it implies more bad decision-making. Ditto for being STI positive.
The age one is probably the most ‘unfair,’ but if having kids is a goal then this is pretty close to the ‘reasonable’ cutoff given the ticking fertility clock. Adjust upward if needed, I guess.
Here is the ChatGPT conversation. I used o3 in this case.
Here is Grok, specifically Grok 3.
In each case I used the “Deep Research” mode for the main query. I used identical prompts to start them off, they each seemingly did slightly different interpretations of the prompt. I was not using any fancy, complex prompt engineering to try and force it to think like a statistician or avoid hallucinations.
ChatGPT Gives this conclusion:
Bottom line: We estimate roughly 1 million women age 30 and under, equivalent to approximately 3-4% of that demographic (with a plausible interval of 2% on the low end up to about 5-6% on the high end), meet all eight of the given criteria simultaneously.
Grok comes to quite the similar conclusion:
Based on available data and statistical techniques, it seems likely that approximately 1.1 million biological women in the U.S. meet all the specified criteria, representing about 0.64% of the total female population, estimated at 171 million in 2025. The error range, reflecting data gaps, is ±0.3 million, or 0.8–1.4 million in absolute numbers, and 0.47–0.82% as a percentage.
Then I asked the truly cursed followup question: “how many men in the U.S. might be seeking these eligible women and thus how much competition is there for this population? How many are likely to ‘fail.’"
ChatGPT:
• Low-competition scenario (optimistic) – if male seekers are only approximately 9 m and women at the high end 1.4 m → approx. 6 : 1.
• High-competition scenario (pessimistic) – if male seekers hit approx. 16 m and women only 0.6 m → approx. 27 : 1.
Even under the friendliest assumptions, there are at least five single straight men pursuing every woman who meets all eight hurdles. The modal outcome is closer to ten-plus suitors per eligible woman.
Put bluntly, only about one man in ten who is actively hunting for this ultra-specific ideal partner can succeed; nine-plus will strike out.
Emphasis Mine.
Grok:
• Number of single men seeking women meeting all criteria: Approximately 4.5 million single, straight men aged 18–30 in the U.S. are likely seeking a partner, with an estimated 2.3 million (±0.5 million) specifically seeking women meeting all specified criteria (unmarried, not dating, straight, not a mother, not obese, age 30 or below, no acute mental illness, ≤5 sex partners, no STI, ≤$50,000 student debt). This is about 2.7% of the male population (171 million).
• Competition ratio: With approx. 1.1 million women meeting all criteria (from prior estimate), the ratio is roughly 2.1 men per woman (2.3 million ÷ 1.1 million), indicating moderate competition.
• Failure rate: Approximately 48% of these men (1.1 million out of 2.3 million) will fail to secure a partner meeting all criteria, assuming one-to-one pairing and no external factors (e.g., men seeking multiple partners or women remaining single).
Then the followup, when I tell it to extend the age range:
About 4.9 million single, straight men of all ages are likely seeking women aged 18–30 meeting all criteria, facing a 4.5:1 competition ratio. Roughly 78% (approx. 3.8 million) will fail to secure such a partner, driven by the scarcity of eligible women, age-related preference mismatches, and modern dating dynamics. Competition is high, particularly for older men, with failure rates varying by flexibility in criteria and dating market conditions.
The error bars are pretty large on this one... the 9-out-of-10 number doesn't quite pass the smell test... but I think the point speaks for itself.
I don’t want to say that this is bleak, per se. I mean, 1 million or so women in the U.S. with some decent marriageable bonafides. That’s not a small pool! The problem stems from noticing that said women will have somewhere upwards of 5 men, possibly near 27 who will be competing for their affections, or more if they’re near the absolute peak of physical attractiveness.
Hence my increasing annoyance with the bog standard advice proffered to young males “become worthy and put in some effort and you will find a good woman” as it becomes increasingly divorced from the actual reality on the ground.
It’s not wrong. It is incomplete. Insufficient. If we increase the number of “worthy” men, that’s just intensifying the competition for the desirable women… while ALSO ensuring that more of those ‘worthy’ men will lose and go unfulfilled, DESPITE applying their efforts towards “worthiness.”
You CAN’T tell young men both “be better, improve, you have to DESERVE a good woman before you get one!” and then, when he improves:
“oh, you have to lower your standards, just because you thought you deserved a stable, chaste(ish), physically fit partner doesn’t mean you’re entitled to one, world ain’t fair.”
That dog won’t hunt.
Thems the numbers. I’m not making this up wholesale or whining about advice because I find it uncomfortable. No. The math is directly belying the platitudes. I’m too autistic NOT to notice.
So where am I going with this?
First, I’m hoping, praying someone can actually show me evidence that this is wrong. All of my personal experience, anecdotal observations, research, and my gut fucking instinct all points to this being an accurate model of reality. But I am fallible.
If I’m wrong I want to know!
I’m also not particularly worried about ME in general. I am in a good position to find a good woman, even though I’m sick of all the numerous frustrations and inanities one has to endure to do so. I get annoyed when someone, even in good faith, tries to suggest that my complaints are more mental than real. I can see the numbers, I've been in the trenches for years, this is a true phenomena, the competition is heavy, the prizes are... lacking.
And finally and most importantly, I genuinely feel the only way we keep the Ferris Wheel of organized civilization turning is if average women are willing to marry average men, and stay married, and help raise kids. I’m all for pushing the ‘average’ quality up, as long as actual relationships are forming.
Objectively, that is not happening. And so I’m worried because if society breaks down... well, I live here and I don't like what that implies for me, either.
(Yes, AGI is possibly/probably going to make this all a moot point before it all really collapses)
faceh
9d ago
Barring starving to death, it'll probably be quick and mostly painless.
I'm kind of, KIND of at peace with the idea of being paperclipped.
The futures that I can't bear to think about are the ones where the AI creates a slightly defective Utopia which is wrong in some critical way, OR it directly values human suffering enough to keep us alive AND miserable.
faceh
10d ago
When you put it that way it makes me kinda pumped for being able to 'mash up' old actors with new ones.
Schwarzenegger in his prime against Statham.
Bruce Willis vs. Chris Hemsworth.
Anthony Hopkins can share a scene with Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson.
My brain might not even care that its not real!
faceh
10d ago
I would feel duty-bound to wind up some stuff at work before embarking, but depending on how this year proceeds it might seem like a good move. I'm kinda sick of paying bills and being responsible when the world seems geared to go through some serious upheavals, and all my best laid plans could collapse in a week.
Its not even ennui, I enjoy what I do, but the world doesn't seem like its going to give me the outcomes that I've wanted since childhood, no matter how much I ask and work for it.
A good friend of mine is taking a trip through southeast Asia for a month while he's between jobs, and it seems like a helluva fun time. He got to fire off an RPG.
The one romantic prospect that I was sort of excited for has mostly fizzled (I may give it one more shot, but there's not much on the horizon now). Gambling on finding a soulmate while traveling appeals to the romantic inside me. The romantic who has been beaten into a depression by the realities of modern dating.
And you're a BIT more than a 'random internet stranger."
I mean, that's the whole reason for the hype, isn't it? To make sure you sell a bunch of the thing before people realize its not quite up to snuff. He's a much better salesman than other billionaire founders.
And he's also got a knack for finding ways to squeeze profits out of projects by some lateral thinking:
What to do with unused launch capacity on Falcon? Launch a network of satellites for a globe-spanning internet service. Satellites that need to be replenished regularly. Starlink is a great product in its own right and justifies Falcon launches, so it helps keep SpaceX solvent.
Then he pulled that switcheroo with Twitter by selling it to the xAI company, so that even if he never turns a profit on twitter as a service, he's already got a way to profit from the information.
To say nothing of how quickly Grok has become an important part of X's infrastructure.
This is why the claim that Elon is stupid and lucky don't make sense to me. Guy may not play 4d chess, but he's playing speed chess like a grandmaster, making sure his few mistakes don't ruin him by moving faster than his opponents, if only by a split second.
faceh
10d ago
Agreed. Hence I generally support the Rationalist project, hopeless as it seems.
faceh
10d ago
Yep.
But it starts to drive you (well, ME) a tiny bit insane to have to act 'normal' while you have an acute awareness of the impending moment.
I literally cannot believe that I'm sitting at my desk, at work, while some other dude, in a lab or office somewhere else, is engineering an AI that is going to replace my job or possibly kill me in a few years.
Its like if humanity discovered the massive Egg that Godzilla was about to hatch from. And scientists on analysis estimate that "This thing is going to hatch within 2-10 years, and there's not much we can do about it."
But I have to go back to work and ignore the Godzilla egg and do spreadsheets and contracts and all the stuff that keeps society moving, knowing that unless the hatching fails entirely, none of this will make a damn spit of difference.
faceh
10d ago
If I may AKSHULLY for a moment.
He overpromises and never delivers on schedule...
And then STILL delivers an end result closer to the hype than any of his rivals.
That's been the secret. Hype something up and then deliver (eventually) a product that doesn't live up to the hype but is still better than anything else in its class.
There's yet to be an example I can think of where he made a promise then got beaten by a competitor to delivering on it.
So failing to deliver isn't fatal if nobody else can beat you to delivering.
Hah, that'd be a hell of a reversal. I bet they'd keep a physical person 'on staff' who can make in-person appearances pretending to be the actual actor, but in reality they're not getting paid like an actual celebrity.
The Job of 'actor' still entails acting, but now you've just become a body double for the digital version, you make a lot less money but all you have to do is not generate any really bad press and uphold the charade and you'll be comfortable for life.
faceh
11d ago
Or the immortality of said celebs.
If they can keep casting well-liked actors in films via AI, even after they'd dead or retired, they're going to do it.
I do wonder, as with AI-Generated music, which is ACTUALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE these days, if one major reason people will still prefer 'real' artists is simply because they want to personally meet them or be able to experience them live, so they'll eventually shun the AI stuff not specifically because they know it is AI, but because there's no personal life/gossip/tabloid drama to follow, and they want to physically touch the person at some point.
faceh
11d ago
Its not that 'absolutely nothing' has happened, but more that every advance has been marginal, so even if you follow ALL the best advice, you're getting an extra 10-15% of extra lifespan at best.
If you want to see the absolute extreme limit of human longevity science, follow Bryan Johnson.
As a side note: why are you bullish on LEV?
Keeping up with the literature, it seems very much like the 'code' of why aging occurs/effects us the way it does has almost been cracked. In short, the information that our cells use to reproduce starts to accumulate errors from both internal and external causes and their ability to repair those errors diminishes in kind (the more errors to repair, the more strain on the repair system). This leads our cells to A) become cancerous, B) Become senescent (nonfunctional but still 'active'), and C) change/mutate to a different type of cell, which obviously isn't helpful.
Eventually this cascades to full organ failure, and we die.
i.e. the science seems to 'know' the reason we 'get old.' The systems behind it are becoming better understood, and now the hunt is on for various methods or drugs or therapies that can trigger or reinforce natural repair systems or otherwise keep the cells reproducing accurately for much longer.
This is an actually tricky question, but a LOT more interest in this area has led to increased funding. It does seem likely that a couple silver bullets might emerge in the near future.
There's the obvious question of "where are the immortal mice?" And I think that's probably the thing that gives me the most doubt. If there's a surefire solution, then labs should be able to demonstrate it by pumping some mice full of it and showing that they just don't die naturally.
But watch out for interventions to extend canine lives. There's clearly something brewing.
And of course. "where are the immortal Billionaires," who could obviously afford any treatment they want, regardless of how experimental or illegal? Although I'd certainly suggest that the Billionaires just hitting their 50's and 60's these days are looking less decrepit than usual.
And I want a Goddamn explanation for how Tom Cruise is still hanging from airplanes in his early 60's. That doesn't invoke Thetans.
However I am reserving some bearishness for the possibility that the whole field is suffering from the current scientific crises where p-hacking, fraud, and failed replications are running rampant. For instance, studies of Blue Zones where extreme human longevity seems to be more common, seems likely to suffer from poor record-keeping, which is to say we can't be sure anyone is really as old as they say.
And that means the information gleaned from studying them will be inherently flawed. This might have ripple effects on the field's validity, if their model of 'extreme' longevity (and thus the metrics they're chasing) are on shaky grounds.
But the motivation to solve this issue is huge, and AI drug discovery is already a thing, so I'd expect some breakthroughs to emerge relatively soon. Maybe we get those immortal mice.
and in the meantime there are definitely a number of smaller interventions that, when done consistently, can up your chances of keeping healthy long enough to survive until aging reversal becomes feasible.
faceh
11d ago
Found an even better example, which has a number of tells, but if you told me this was a clip from a TV show I might believe you at first:
faceh
11d ago
I actually found the rally car one the most impressive, because holy cow that's a lot of details to keep consistent, including The water splash on the camera lens, and the vehicle itself doesn't do any weird shape changing even as the water obscures it, and the audio was good enough that I would not have called that it was an AI producing it rather than a professional Foley artist.
Camera motions seem slightly unnatural but THE CAMERA IS MOVING and the scene retains coherence. Actually mind-blowing.
faceh
11d ago
maybe they're right, but never materialized during the Cold War.
I mean, if they were right, then in most timelines, a ton of humans died/were never born, and thus it is just more probable that you were born into the timeline where we narrowly avoided the doomsday scenario.
Or you could go back and look at any number of doomsday cults, even including early Christians anxiously awaiting Christ's return in their lifetimes.
My issue here is that we can see and interact with the 'messiah' this time. There are compelling arguments for why it will keep getting smarter. And if it gets smarter, there are plausible ways it can wipe out decent swaths of humanity.
I will grant that it is almost impossible to take anyone completely seriously because in both the scenario where we get Utopia AND the scenario where we get annihilated, nobody will care about the accuracy of the predictions that led up to it, so the incentive to be truthful and honest is minimal.
Just be cautious about normalcy bias, when things have been getting rapidly weirder for a while now.
The investment value of BTC is either an underlying "BTC will become so convenient to transact with that everyone will want to keep balances in it" (which looks less likely to happen the longer it goes without happening) or a meta "you can sell your BTC to someone who'll pay even more for it for some reason" (which happens, but can't happen forever without a non-circular reason).
The Bitcoin Maxi case at this point is that it is digital gold. More fungible and easier to store, and readily convertible to whatever currency you need. I don't buy it all myself, but Bitcoins ongoing survival is proof of something.
And if you think a dollar collapse is pending, then BTC is probably where people flee to in at least the short term.
Personally, I just wish I knew what to advise my kids.
I think I can make a case for NOT following certain paths, but as for actionable "Do this to prosper in the future" advice I am at a loss. Its not like you can just say "Plastics" and nudge them off in the direction of the next big technological gold rush.
10-15 years ago "learn to code" would have been SOLID advice. No longer. I'm increasingly reading that AI models are really good at various parts of the practice of medicine... and SUPPOSEDLY robot surgery is here. So the Med school investment looks a bit questionable.
And as for college funds... why should colleges even be a thing, at least with their current business model, when AIs are generally capable of teaching at the level of even the best professors, across any subject?
Yeah, for Gen Alpha, there is probably NO career advice that previous generations can offer them based on experience other than "wait and see."
Being able to personally push the boundaries of knowledge into previously uncharted territory used to be what you needed to do to get a PhD, not what you needed to do on a regular basis just to remain economically viable.
I can imagine a world where the AI is doing all the knowledge work but keeps giving humans various tasks that it needs to complete in order to push the boundaries of knowledge forward. Tasks that will seem completely nonsensical to the individual performing them but in the aggregate allow the AI to improve things, iteration after iteration, and thereby keep most humans 'employed' and paying them in some currency they can spend with other humans and thus the 'economy' chugs along but in effect everyone on earth is a 'gig worker' who gets tasks assigned to them as needed, and gets rewarded for performance.
A scarier version is that the AI requires you to be Neuralinked up to it so it can inject arbitrary commands into your brain as needed, but also rewards you handsomely for helping out.
My hedge is that I'm saying its >50%, so not a certainty, but I want to be clear that IF it happens I wasn't caught off-guard and if it doesn't happen (or indeed never happens) I did stick my neck out and will accept the derision.
Because obsessive auteurs (or autists) with time on their hands and the proper tools CAN in fact create amazing works in relatively short time frames. It took Michelangelo 4 years to paint the Sistine Chapel. Would we agree that with modern tools and a few decent assistants, in the current era he could easily knock it out in less than 1?
Bo Burnham produced an acclaimed 87 minute-long special all by his lonesome in just over a year.
A small and dedicated team that animated an 84-minute long film over 5 1/2 years using free tools totaled about 40-50 people working on it but was mostly down to just two guys doing the critical work.
(Incidentally, "Flow" is also what Google is calling their AI video workspace)
So if the AI is sufficiently good to 10x the productivity of the creators, a team of about 5 could probably get something that's Netflix-Worthy (derogatory way to put it, granted) done inside of a year, if they share a vision and have maniacal but competent leadership.
You're not wrong.
And yet.
Mental illness rates among women are drastically higher then men (particularly for YOUNG women).
So if it were merely 'awareness,' why aren't we seeing a surge in men?
So either women are more likely to get incorrect diagnoses.
Or, women have been this way all along.
Or women are actually suffering from more mental illnesses now than before.
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