faceh
5hr ago
High status males DO need to be reined in since they're the ones setting the social trends for most everyone below them in the totem pole.
If they are deigning to eschew monogamy and go around banging and impregnating various women with no intentions of marriage, guess what norms end up ascending?
Of course, we could just let those new norms dominate.
faceh
6hr ago
There would be ways to monetize it, but yeah, you'd have to accept losses unless you want to be subject to the exact same pressures that lead to influencers putting out braindead, controversy-baiting content.
faceh
6hr ago
According to the wiki he's a Cinematographer that's a bit more prestigious and less blue-collar coded than just being a camera guy.
Still, she's been with him for 20+ years, not bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Moder
Bit more research shows that she met him while she was working on a movie that ALSO STARRED BRAD PITT so yeah, good on him for outshining the most chad actor in modern history.
faceh
6hr ago
This is probably a solid way to put forth a pro-marriage, pro-natalism agenda.
But happy people in good relationships ostensibly don't feel much need to flaunt how good it is, and talk about what makes things work.
Would definitely need to be an outside observer intentionally tracking them down and publishing their observations from the outside.
In general, people react negatively to anything which is unflattering to women as a group.
Take it one level deeper.
Why would it be 'unflattering' for women to actively seek out the best specimen as a potential partner/mate? Not very romantic, granted, but its not like that's a BAD strategy!
Part of it is because it DOES lead women to stray, cheat, and betray 'good' men due to perceived better options.
The other factor, I think, is that their instincts for what to look for in a guy, which were honed in the ancestral environment, run into some massive issues b/c traits that are adaptive in the modern world are different than those that were necessary to survive the ancient one. This unfortunately leads to them getting into abusive and one-sided relationships because a guy who is physically aggressive, risk-seeking, craves power, and flouts social rules would be very appealing on an instinctual level... and is less likely to care what an individual woman feels about him... and will likely want to have more than one woman. Modern prosperity likewise makes it easier to fake those traits long enough to knock up a woman before she figures out the truth.
Not that I would want to cull high-T males from the population.
So I'd argue the 'unflattering' part arises because women's instincts, even if pointed in the correct direction, lead them to sub-optimal choices when applied. We've given women almost full discretion to pick who they screw, who they marry, and who is even allowed to interact with them. And their choice-making has left much to be desired, even to themselves. And some large part of this is due to the actively deceptive males who are optimized for getting laid with minimal investment, who have figured out how to attract women while having few of the actually desirable traits.
In our modern society, which option is more palatable? Obviously the second. As I alluded to, there is a taboo against saying anything negative about women as a group. And that's why people push back against hypergamy.
Oh I know.
I've put up too many comments reflecting on and arguing that pretty much every single problem in the dating market today can be traced to women's behavior shifting, whilst mens' has remained largely the same... except to the extent they have to interact with women.
faceh
7hr ago
I mean, a huge portion of women who get enough wealth to be independent just end up never settling at all, is the observed outcome, with large downstream impact on TFR.
faceh
8hr ago
The crass side of me wants to know how big that guy's schlong is. He isn't just a blue collar type, he had kids from a prior relationship, he got the bona fides.
But I choose to accept it as the feel-good story about finding true love in unlikely places that it appears as.
I've wondered if having a hard-working, weathered-but-handsome, otherwise well-put-together tradesman for a beau might become a status symbol in its own way, but that doesn't seem to have panned out.
It sometimes amazes me that there's anyone who actually pushes back on the redpill observation about "Hypergamy."
The idea that women are selecting for the highest status male in their local social system is integrated into virtually every aspect of human culture. There are exceptions in media (Disney's Aladdin had a princess fall for the street rat rather than an uber-powerful, and not bad-looking sorcerer sultan who wanted to keep her as his slave).
I would argue that reality is more exacting than fiction, here. Find me a real life story where an attractive woman with the option to pick between a handsome, reliable, but only moderately wealthy Blue Collar worker, and a high status millionaire minor celeb, and intentionally settled for the former.
And biologically its perfectly sensible. I don't think there's any other way for a woman to operate if she wants to ensure her offspring's success and her own long term security. Completely fair to acknowledge and accept this biological imperative.
The "blackpill" is that this factor doesn't get turned off if a woman gets married and has kids, so a guy is never fully safe from being supplanted if he loses status or a higher status male sets eyes on his woman. The high status males need to be reined in as well!
There is actual research showing that women who acquire more wealth use that to acquire independence, men who acquire wealth use it to start families.
But we are currently seeing what happens when all cultural guardrails and guidelines that limited that factor are removed:
Approximately, women will start demanding outsize displays of wealth, status, power, physical fitness in exchange for mating privileges, and thereby controlling more and more actual wealth, which leads to further inflation of demands.
This is at least one explanation for why females have gotten less satisfied with their status, even as they've been given more wealth and power.
Women's satisfaction dropped 15 points spanning the emergence of #MeToo, while men's fell five points. The latest reading among women, 44%, is the lowest on record, although it is not statistically different from the 46% readings in 2018 and 2020. At the same time, men's satisfaction with the treatment of women has remained flat at 61% to 62% since 2018.
Find me a single person who can argue with a straight face that females are on balance worse off, socially or politically speaking, than 2002.
And so China is rapidly plunging down this dystopic slope and trying to aggressively re-establish the guardrails from the top down.
Interesting to see if they can get to any sort of agreeable equilibrium. At least they are willing to do things that might upset women.
I would still guess that South Korea is the one plumbing the deepest depths of how far things can fall, but even they are showing the slightest glimmer of things turning around.
faceh
1d ago
Its something I noted a few months back, OpenAI is screwed for lacking any supporting infrastructure for their core product.
They're up against companies with unlimited cash flow (Google), integrated social networks (META, xAI), or a noticeable edge in performance (Anthropic), or maybe all 3. And China.
They literally only had first-mover advantage. They gained a tiny edge by throwing out somewhat undercooked models that were nonetheless marginally better than others and got name recognition. But the cost of switching is, basically, zero.
Sora was their attempt to build some infra from scratch, a very dubious proposition. And then Sora got eclipsed by other SOTA video models. This keeps happening to them.
It looks like the Pentagon deal might have saved their bacon for the time being.
faceh
2d ago
Yep.
I'm not that big of a boomer, I get "the kids will find ways to smoke/drink/have sex regardless of the rules."
But flipping the valence from "this is something you do in secret in the abandoned shed out behind the football field" to "This is something actively advertised and facilitated, including for children" basically portends the complete capitulation of your society to this particular vice.
And I do suggest that the revealed preference is that anyone who has the funds/capacity to escape these things and move to a place where they ARE more restricted/marginalized does so. There are no places that are considered "nice to live" that also have strip clubs on every other corner and THC gummies available over the counter at the convenience store.
This is also why I think "YIMBYs" aren't really a thing. They may claim and honestly believe they want to have affordable housing units built in their neighborhood, but they also know all the disorder and additional nuisances that will come along with these things so in practice they'll oppose it when the rubber meets the road.
faceh
2d ago
Ding ding.
It is underappreciated how there are a good number of ways to irreversibly lower your quality of life and prospects for success without dying.
Certain drugs, getting paralyzed, losing a limb, and of course, outright brain damage.
There's hardships that you overcome and make you stronger and more robust, then there's hardships that can drag you down to a lower baseline permanently, and we lack the ability, technologically or otherwise, to correct.
The latter tend to be less visible.
I think there is a stable-ish regime of "legal, but regulated so heavily that its only profitable on the absolute margins."
Zoning rules that keep them from being within 5000 feet of a school, bans from advertising on television, heightened liability for harms, special insurance they have to purchase, that sort of thing.
So the ultimate effect is that these activities are run by small outfits with limited capacity (i.e. not industrialized) and/or are pushed to the absolute outskirts of society. Just to keep them from proliferating, I guess.
But Capitalism will be continually seeking ways to route around these regulations and will probably eventually hit on a strategy or loophole that brings them out of hiding.
faceh
2d ago
Oh that's right, we still had Quantitative easing active during that time.
they thought they were seeing the baseline numbers for a new product instead of 'here is the once-a-century harvest'
This seems to be a common blind spot with large scale investors.
Even if they aren't literally killing the golden goose, they are biased towards assuming current feast conditions are a sign of how things will be going forward.
Same thing that happened with tech hiring during that time, although would have been hard to predict how AI would quickly rise to displace them.
I don't think so, but under current laws and norms, if the parents intervene, particularly in a physical way, to try to reign in their daughter THEY will be punished for restricting her autonomy. On one side you can say the state's role is to protect her autonomy. But to the extent she's susceptible to influence of others, on the other side, the state's role is to protect a malign influence from her parents.
The maximum irony is that a guy who spends months 'grooming' a young girl (as long as he doesn't actually solicit sex or touch her) then helps her set up an Onlyfans and publish explicit content the very day she turns 18 is legally protected from any kind of reprisal from the family if they find out. He has done nothing that the law can punish, and if he doesn't care about social judgment, he escapes Scott-free.
And I'd suggest that current technology makes the groomer's job way easier than the parent trying to keep the daughter out of sex work.
Everyone gets that its absolutely creepy and predatory behavior but the law as written will make it impossible to actually do anything to prevent it other than try your best to monitor the kid's comms.
faceh
3d ago
The point is that tattoos are, in fact, normalized and a far less reliable sign of dysfunction than they once were. The most basic bitch people get them, albeit if you see full sleeves and facial tattoos, I'd be cautious.
Yes, normalizing things means you get more 'normal' people doing them.
Which is often not good.
And of course pushes the actual deviants to ever more costly signalling to boot.
I'd suggest we are seeing the same thing with OF/sex work, and that's the broader reason why pushback would be good.
And I put up those sticky notes for nothing, let alone the permanent marker on our skin.
I spent an hour in the shower scrubbing those off last time, and I still had to wear long sleeves for the next two days. I'd prefer you just staple the notes straight to our chest.
Think of how tattoos used to be a strong sign of criminality, and how you can see grandpas and yuppies flaunting them in public.
Face tattoos and certain socially taboo symbols still work pretty well though.
And in fact, the proliferation in women getting stupid tattoos is ANOTHER point on which I'd try to dissuade my hypothetical daughter, since the costs of undoing it are substantial, but that's not one I'd be as aggressive about policing.
I am really annoyed with the fact that some women end up getting whole sleeves done very shortly after they turn 18, which again seems a bit too early for most towards grasping the long term consequences.
(Hard drugs also encompass a wide range of drugs, some of them MUCH worse for you)
Yes, the actual physical toll that such drugs take on the body is much worse, but in terms of eroding one's mental health and cutting off social networks, its probably on the same order, since the type of people who will keep you in their social network knowing you're a sex worker are probably not great as a support system. As a point, I'd imagine that other women wouldn't really want their husbands or boyfriends around you if your career is known.
So you'll be mostly stuck with other women who can't keep steady relationships... and men who think you're a potential lay.
Fine, once I'm asleep you can take over our advocacy, just remember to water the succulent and throw out the trash.
Wait, I thought that was a plastic plant. Oh dear.
I also noticed that the dog went missing from the last time I took over, please tell me she's boarded somewhere pleasant and not roaming the streets looking for more roadkill lasagna.
faceh
3d ago
I see several Fix Everything switches if I look around. Nuclear power, an end to NIMBYism, institutionalization of the mentally ill homeless (I have a US bias, some places don't have Fix Everything switches).
See, we're really in agreement on almost everything else.
But I'll just push that one point: how many people ended up as 'mentally ill homeless' because there wasn't an intervention earlier on in their life to keep them on a more productive track?
Like I said, if OF caused giga-AIDS, we should ban it. But not even actual AIDS kills >51% of people, let alone merely things that could cause AIDS.
We've got the tech to make this so, but in living memory it was a mass killer of humans.
And the tech that keeps it at bay relies on a fairly fragile supply chain, so if that goes, it comes back with a vengeance.
Its that sort of thing that makes me believe that we should in fact try to push towards a social order that is more robust against AIDS transmission (same for other serious diseases) as a backstop against a decline in our technological capacity.
And I do feel similarly about other technological solutions that blunt the impact of but do not eliminate some negative effect.
But come on, are you saying starting an OF is remotely as dangerous? If not, I think my decision to remain within legal bounds is both pragmatically valid and in accordance with my values.
I have seen some cases of women who go into that line of work and it seemingly crushes their spirits, collapses their social networks, and ultimately puts them in an emotional condition that wrecks their ability to maintain a romantic connection. I think this impact is at least on the order of that of getting addicted to a hard drug, although it is probably easier to recover if you have support.
Although its most likely that there was some pre-existing mental condition that explains both that outcome and why they tried sex work in the first place.
I've talked to some girls who indicate the main thing keeping them from trying it themselves is their apparently overdeveloped sense of shame, and I'm like "okay but can you not hit on actual logical bases to avoid it, aside from the emotional aversion?"
(Lets be fair, I also DESPISE Multi-level marketing schemes and would love to nuke those from orbit, and would take measures to keep my kids from falling into that trap too, although I'd like to think my kids would know the math well enough to see why those won't work.) OF has many of the same aspects as MLMs when you look at how it works in practice, but you're burning up more than just your time and money if you try to take it seriously.
I'm off to bed in a bit, but a pleasure nonetheless. I don't think your views are unreasonable, even if we do have our differences.
Yep, good to point out where we are different in our beliefs so the others don't catch on LOL.
faceh
3d ago
Either you believe the state has a serious role to play in harm reduction, or it doesn't.
Through direct intervention, I think it doesn't.
Through maintaining general social order, perhaps it might.
faceh
3d ago
Incredibly enjoying this discussion since its one of the few times I'm seeing major daylight between our respective positions, despite coming from almost identical premises, it seems.
If you break your spine while driving drunk, or lose your dick while fucking a blender, then I don't see why society should have to foot the bill. Maybe drug addicts who are violent, criminally inclined and disruptive and entirely unwilling to accept help shouldn't be eligible for housing or most welfare. If they're doing coke on weekends and making a million dollars a year as a quant, why the hell should I care?
I'm gathering that you're ultimately fine with full on Social and Natural Darwinism for deciding punishments and outcomes for risky behavior... but there's a certain amount of nuance when it comes to your own progeny.
If my daughter told me she was going to attempt suicide, or do fentanyl, then I think I would do quite a few things that are clearly illegal, and damn the consequences. Starting an OF or doing sex work is not ideal, but not nearly as bad.
Well let me drill down on that a bit. If you believed that her doing sex work was more likely than not (i.e. 51%) to make it so that she'd be unable to marry a reliable, respectable, supportive husband and thus grievously impact her financial future, her odds of being a mother, her overall mental health, are you still going to stand on the 'autonomy' position, even if she's getting some malicious actor whispering in her ear (but, importantly NOT coercing her)? Yes, I would hope she'd listen to her loving father over the Casanova trying to pimp her out, but if she slips up this one time that might be all it takes.
The position I'm arguing is that there are things that can create lifelong misery and consequences that are nonetheless NOT as serious as death or dismemberment, but have outsized negative impact compared to their benefits. Yes, people should be able to pursue such things. But if your own child, in their youthful indiscretion, is about to go jump off a metaphorical cliff into the water below,
Wouldn't you be willing to take some serious measures to avert that?
but I'd yell at them if they stopped me from going out on a date with someone they don't like.
I mean, depends a bit on what "they don't like" actually means. "This woman is riddled with STDs and has a history of violent outbursts" might justify trying to stop you. But yes, that's a fair distinction.
faceh
3d ago
Nah, too easy to fake or mistake that signal.
I've known more than a handful of women who are UTTERLY NORMAL LOOKING (or maybe just small, discreet signals), and hold down professional careers... and are ridiculously down to clown in some fairly depraved ways when the social context is right. Then clean themselves up and get back to work the next day.
I know there's more of them amongst us who probably haven't been given the opportunity to act out and would leap at it given the chance. But you can't just go around asking them at random, can you. Dating apps might have made it more efficient for them to find outlets, if nothing else.
One sign that does pop up a lot... dead dads. But I think that only interacts with genetic effects.
faceh
3d ago
However, I'm a professor of the benefits of localism, so I'd be arguing against liberalism in the particular social order I would prefer to exist in, not strictly speaking saying it shouldn't be applied anywhere.
See, neither of us disagree that there is scope for guard-rails or restrictions, we just disagree on where to put them.
Yep.
But my 18 year old daughter? I would impose as much punishment as is legal, say threatening to cut her off from college funds or leave her life. But I wouldn't ask the government to make sex work illegal, that is going too far.
Right.
But should it be legal to, e.g. physically fight off the male interlopers who are pulling her into porn? Online grooming/blackmail gangs are a real thing. (That link is quite SFW but the implications are stomach-churning, fair warning) Maybe you can physically detain her for a period of time so she can't hang with the porno guys. That has legal precedent, after all. Maybe require her to wear a tracking bracelet outside the house. Of course, I'm told that's basically what parents do with their phones anyway.
I just find it interesting that you happily suggest using incentives to nudge her behavior around, but might balk at the idea of using even basic physical intervention. I am in agreement that creating a law that reins her in is too far.
Overall, I'm okay with "do your best to train your kid to use all common sense and restraint and to do the better thing, then let them go their own way."
I'm just not sold on the idea that 18 years of age is the correct checkpoint for many kids, and if we say its okay to use certain tactics to control their behavior before age 18, it runs into the same issue, why is it suddenly impermissible after they're 18? Your interest in their wellbeing hasn't shifted!
And no, I'm not limiting this to females. It might be useful to also prevent dudes from doing reckless and stupid stuff too. Its just that physically restraining a fully grown guy from doing a thing is a riskier proposition, for obvious reasons.
I've seen too many statistics from the last ten years about the rapid decline in relationship formation (among the young) and the womens' constant complaints about a lack of men worth marrying to pretend there's not an actual trend that mostly swamps the anecdotes.
The women will tell you this themselves:
https://archive.is/Lgk2V
EDIT: @erwgv3g34 found a working Archive link
Like I said, the hypergamy is baked into the culture. Women aren't 'hiding' it per se, but don't like being reminded that its their choices creating the outcomes.
Dating apps and social media in particular have led to a situation where the local 'social system' a woman is observing is no longer her school, or even her local village, but every single guy in a 20 mile radius.
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