urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
I kind of get what you’re saying, but your wording is a bit freeform so I’m having trouble following you.
I think what you’re saying is, “women don’t engage with this framing because it has a bad reputation and will pollute you with it, even if you engage with it, it couldn’t affect your behavior much because you’re already doing what you can to be attractive and your standards aren’t a matter of choice so it doesn’t give you any new information, and the view talks about people’s relative status and that’s painful to talk about.”
Yeah, if that’s what you mean, that’s a solid explanation. I think the truth is that people generally understand the things about SMV on an intuitive level, and discussing it explicitly just feels too painful or too impersonal or too abstract in a way people don’t really ever apply to the things that worry or concern themselves the most.
In private, with trusted friends, of course people discuss harsh things about attractiveness and dating sometimes. But discussing gender issues in mixed-sex company is like discussing feces at the dinner table.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
That’s fair, and pretty obvious. What someone chooses to say on a first date reveals what they think is high-status and interesting about themselves. If that for you is discussion of the dating market in analytical terms, that’s pretty sad and does say something about where your head is at. As I recall, I don’t know that any first date of mine has had much analysis of anything — I’m introspective but that’s not really first date material. I guess I would sometimes be philosophical, but in an upbeat way, about how I like to think about the world and consider the way the world could be improved and how people could treat each other better. That’s the right level of abstraction on my interests for early dating. But the best relationship I’ve ever had started with me in full public speaking about ideas mode, I chalk this up to a rare alignment of the stars. (Astrology on a first date is also a red flag.)
But I don’t think OP was trying to discuss it on dates, as he said, but with friends. But it’s not really light friendship material either. You have to really know someone and they have to either be a high decoupler as someone else said, or you have to have a really good reason to bring it up. Same-gender friendships are more constructive for it than opposite-gender ones.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
I mean, I don't know that this disagrees with the point -- in this framing, "the value of T&A" is a value that is orthogonal to "shorter, weaker, poorer, dumber, more boring," etc.
That said, while the joke is funny and it makes its point, I agree with you that reality doesn't say that T&A is the only thing men care about. "Poorer, weaker, dumber, more boring, more cowardly," isn't "not at all rich, not at all smart, not at all funny, not at all brave." In raw material terms, a woman in a two-income home, even if she takes home less pay, still contributes significantly to the household income.
Women are generally hypergamous, but not wildly so -- "peasant girl marries the prince" is a fantasy trope, but when actual princes marry, they marry members of the nobility, often just a step or two down from themselves. Or in modern times just a hot actress, I guess the joke lands a bit there, Meghan Markle got a damn good deal regardless of how she feels. I guess Kate Middleton wasn't noble either. She is beautiful, but in a refined way no one would hesitate praising in her presence, so I'll give half points on that one. This generation of princes can't be separated from their father's own desire for the commoner over the lady. Perhaps the takeaway here is that men don't care about their partner's status to a greater degree than women do care about theirs.
I don't feel any attraction to status, strength, wealth, but I do for intelligence and humor. I look for alignment on the ability to think about things intellectually and discuss them and a sense of humor that's compatible with mine. If anything, I kind of feel like I don't have the burden of hypergamy: if I meet someone at all attractive and they're kind and smart and funny, even if less so than me, I don't feel like I'm 'dating down' to fall for them. Their presence gets to be a place where I can be the best version of myself.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
Trying to talk to women about the actual mechanics of sexual/romantic relationships is like trying to talk to a restaurant critic about the intricacies of cooking a difficult dish. They can't. They know what they like, they have some idea of the different techniques that produce the food they review, but they aren't in the business of producing meals for others to eat. Women have this same relationship to romance. They're very interested in it, but they never actually produce it.
This hasn't been my experience. Romance has been somewhere between 40-60, 50-50, and 60-40 generated in every adult relationship I've ever been in. The only examples have been bad dates, but that's not really a relationship and I was the one not feeling it for someone who was reaching out with playful teasing and flirting just as much as I've been on the other end.
The problem is that the short-term transactional frame and the long-term bonding frame speak to mutually exclusive sets of personalities and worldviews. You can have qualifying thresholds and dealbreakers in relationships, but I don't think it's even possible for one human being to relate to another human being from a sincerely transactional and a sincerely emotional/ affiliation framework at the same time.
You're again saying that "even discussing the impact these things has on society" means "you are incapable of thinking in terms of affiliation and emotion in your personal relationships." This simply isn't true; would you say that a feminist, who believes that male abuse has a serious impact on dating outcomes for women, is incapable of forming a happy bond with a man?
There are, of course, many, many men who believe that this kind of concern, especially if it's 'elevated' or 'obsessive', makes a woman likely to perceive even normal and non-abusive (even if crappy) relationship troubles as abuse. I think things are more mixed, and it depends on whether an individual woman has examples of men in her life (father, brother, uncles, teachers, friends, etc) who demonstrate good character.
The best partners are those who acknowledge the bad parts of human nature, even their own capacity for it, and then choose, knowingly and according to their character, to pursue the good. Not talking about or acknowledging truths about reality is not a demonstration of good character. "Having the wool over your eyes" does not an empowered partner make, for men or for women.
But if you're making a claim that "negative schemas about the opposite sex predict poor relationship outcomes" then I'll heartily agree. I'm simply not certain that an acknowledgement of the realities of dating constitute that, and I believe you're uncharitably imputing a mindset to people that's not necessarily there. There are men who do have the mindset you're talking about -- and some of them are indeed in the room with us right now -- but simply discussing the issues of dating does not constitute acceptance of the harshest offered framing in the space where they are discussed. As the adage goes, "consent is not the absence of a no but the presence of an enthusiastic yes," even if you seem to disagree.
For my part, I have said no, and I will continue to say no, and to attribute to the women around me the insights they generate on what could be done to better society for women and men, as I did in that post. I will even continue to quote you, when you post something valuable -- which you are very much capable of.
There's a difference between "women have a set of ages in which they're fertile and in which they can have a child and it's important we talk about this and it's justifiable that someone might want to marry a woman who is capable of having children" and "obviously people's sexual attractiveness has an impact on their dating life and outcomes," on the one hand, and "women are only valuable as T&A cum repositories and baby-making machines," on the other. If you don't see a distinction, well, your interpretation of reality is simply wrong, and I can't say anything else to help you.
Some things about reality are harsh. And those harsh things impact real people, and deserve being discussed. I don't talk about people I've dated in a "short-term transactional" way, because they're people and I've had real connections with them, but it's also very clear to me that, in every case, subconscious cues about my and their status, attractiveness, and compatibility were made by the both of us before either of us even spoke. Sexual attractiveness, a sense of ease, the way someone carries themselves, the way their eyes sparkle, how they dress... all of these form a huge amount of initial attraction, which isn't a replacement, much less a substitute, for the pair bonding and affiliation that can, and by all rights ought to, form once these drives motivate two people who are compatible with each other to form a loving relationship. You're describing sexual attraction and emotional affiliation as almost two incompatible views of the world -- that's simply bullshit, and it stinks to the highest heaven.
You can enjoy yours without women being obligated to listen to some elaborate Adam Smith rationalization of why they're objectively true and correct.
I don't know that people are saying that they're "objectively true or correct," although evolution did select for things by prioritizing fitness markers, even physical ones, and in most species, including humans, the female sex does most of this.
Yes, it is not fun. It's certainly not fun to hear people describe how competitive dating really is, especially in a way that can hit insecurities around attractiveness, age, personality, etc. It's not fun for me, of course, when you describe discussion topics I enjoy as predictive of poor relationship outcomes and therefore best to be avoided. But from your point of view, you're just being honest about your feelings. Turns out, so are men. Maybe we all ought to be more honest.
I'm not saying that it's good for people to comment on a specific person's 'sexual market value' when talking with other people. That's just rude -- although certainly quite a few women do it often, when the men aren't around. But a discussion, in theory, of the impact that these things has on society is a proper discussion, in the proper channels and among the proper crowd. Random female friends probably aren't the proper crowd.
But gestures broadly this here is literally designed to be the proper channel where the proper crowd gathers, and yet you seem just as annoyed that it's being discussed here. I would rather we have female voices present, and I certainly would rather than this community as whole speaks with more charity towards women, but the social system, which you seem to support, in which frank discussions of the realities of romance are verboten and icky simply means that social issues go unaddressed, and only the most disagreeable end up speaking out. If the empress has no clothes, I would rather the kindhearted and charitable addressed it rather than leaving the truth-telling to the harsh and cruel.
Yes, #allmen like T&A. Yes, #allmen think about how the dating is a marketplace. We don't have the luxury of turning our brains off and pretending that love falls from the sky as in cishet girl lore, even as a starting point. Our starting point is zero, and our baseline is one hell of nothing. We, too, are lied to by the cultural scripts that surround dating and intimacy, and we, too, turn to alternatives once they fail.
In many species, males have to compete in competitions or mate displays where things are, indeed, a numbers game in a matching marketplace. I believe anyone who looks clear-eyed at the world in which we live would acknowledge that human beings, far from being separate from the animal kingdom, too participate in competitions of mate selection and fitness-demonstration. Evolution did not stop at the neck.
If your view is that even acknowledging these things as elements of human nature, even as elements that should not and must not define our choices, counts as "obsession" or is a sign to you that someone is of poor relational character, then I don't know what to tell you -- except to say that if a concern about partner fitness and clear-eyed discussion of the harsh truths of human partnership are negative to you, you might want to start with the woman in the mirror.
I think the best way to understand modern Catholic atonement theology is by reference to "Paschal mystery theology", which has a lot in common with Christus Victor and Eastern soteriology. This is the overarching way Catholic teaching looks at the Cross since V2, and it has some criticisms among traditionalists, but it does, I believe, tie Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox views of the Cross together in a compelling way, as something mystical which is both transformative on the global level and applicable in an individual way.
Universalism and Theodicy
I am not a universalist, and I in general dislike the way in which Balthasar's "hopeful universalism" often becomes a way to justify not evangelizing. But at the same time I do believe God's dispositional will is for the salvation of all men (not the fallen angels or the devil, who are irretrievably damned), although his permissive will allows people to choose the alternative. It is important in Catholic theology that God permits rather than desires damnation, and I believe this is true to the way Scripture describes the will of God both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. God does judge and send people to Hell or to Heaven, but he does so based on the choices and nature of the person as configured to Christ by grace or not, which is described in Catholicism as infused rather than imputed righteousness. Catholic judgment is "forensic" in the sense of a finding-of-fact, not a finding-of-law.
I'm somewhere between a Thomist and a Molinist on the Predestination question, and Catholicism is famously and officially agnostic on the question. I don't hold as a firm belief that humans have effectively libertarian free-will as regards the universe, and the most motte-brained version of my view is closer to "God ran the simulation and figured out who would freely choose salvation under libertarian free will, and then created the world in such a way that those who would freely choose salvation under libertarian free will would be predestined to salvation even if the world does not possess libertarian free will". I come from a line of Holiness/Wesleyan-influenced preachers, so I think there's a time and a place for fire and brimstone, and I agree with Aquinas, and not Barron, that one of the important elements of the eschaton is the punishment of the unrepentant wicked.
Obviously this leaves open the hole of how and why, precisely, evil and damnation are permitted if God does not desire them, and that's obviously where we open the Pandora's box of theodicy. For my part, I lean towards a narrative theodicy; God is in a sense writing a story, and the story is better if evil exists and good overcomes it, and it's better for the good if villains exist so that the good can be distinguished (very Thomistic of me), and it's better for the just rewards of the good if it's not a consolation prize given to everyone, and it's better if that's based on what they might choose in total freedom than if it's based on a decree. A game of skill is more rewarding than a game of chance.
I don't think any theodicy is philosophically compelling, but I think that's because a story is more compelling to the human person than philosophy. There's a reason the great teachings of Jesus are all stories and parables. Taken from that viewpoint, the stories of the Bible actually have a greater significance than the merely instructive -- the stories of God's triumph and the triumph of the righteous contained therein are actually the project of the existence of the world. Balthasar has a bit of this, in Theo-Drama.
There's also the tendency in more liberal or modernist theology to talk about "maybe suffering is a way to get close to God because God inherently suffers," which I think is really dumb for all the ways classical theists think it's dumb, but I believe orthodox theopaschism -- not patripassionism, where the Father somehow suffers, which is a straight heresy, but theopaschism in which the unity of the natures of Christ in one person is considered vitally important, where we can say things like "God suffered in the flesh," and "God died on the Cross" -- is indispensable in answering the problem of evil. I believe that one of the most important fruits of the Cross is that suffering is transformed by Christ's passion from a separation from God due to sin to a means of Christlikeness, not merely in terms of endurance training (which St. Paul compares it to), but in terms of actually sharing experiences and metaphysical/mystical closeness to Christ himself.
I believe unorthodox theopaschism, especially in modern times, came into existence because orthodoxy neglected orthodox theopaschism, and left open a hole that heterodoxy stepped into.
And that brings us to the Cross.
Substitution
I will also note that substitution theory, taken strictly, is considered heretical by Catholicism, but more metaphorical, spiritual, or allegorical interpretations of substitution are taken seriously in the Church Fathers and in modern Catholic teaching. The idea that the wages of sin is death, yet God in his mercy set aside the curse of death and sent his son, instead, to die voluntarily, has a heroic element to it, and this has never escaped the attention of theology.
I compare it less to the Son being tormented by the Father's justice and more by the Son acting like a POW who offers himself to die in place of others. The key element of penal substitution that I think is heretical is the emphasis on a division in the Trinity, that the Son was "being damned by the father," which is a phrase I've heard Reformed pastors preach, when instead the substitution of the Son is about an act of the Trinity in unity contending against the state that was inherent to man's fallen nature, where sinfulness leads to death and separation from God.
GK Chesterton has his own alarming phrase that "On the Cross, God became an atheist," not as a statement about the actual beliefs of the crucified Christ, but in the sense that Jesus voluntarily took up the cross, which took him to the place of death and as far away from God as man could go, so that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." The point is not "the Father punished the Son by sending him to death," but "the Son, in unity of will with the Father, went unto death to bring grace and truth, chasing down the 1 of the 99 by going to the limit of human experience."
This also means that you can say things like, "Christ's dying on the Cross brought God's goodness to those who are tormented or dying," as an act of solidarity with people who are cast off and rejected, but also a way to bring divinity and grace to people who are far from God. It has a mystical quality to it, that God actually himself, in his flesh, went into the domain of all those things (and even into Sheol), which means that God is no longer absent there. I've compared it before to placing a flag in enemy territory; the Cross is the flag, and one of the ancient Roman Eucharistic prayers describes it as "the boundary post" that sets the limit of death and the devil, claiming the territory for God by erecting a fence.
A Ransom for Many
Ransom theory, on the other hand, puts Satan in a prominent place: he is either the kidnapper of human souls or is the (legitimate, in some sense) owner of human souls. The exchange of Christ for humanity and the subsequent torture and murder of Christ was simultaneously Satan’s crowning achievement and his destruction.
I actually love this angle on the atonement, although I love most of them.
I understand that Reformed theology (also Luther?) often believes that Michael the Archangel is Christ, but Catholics emphatically do not; he's the guardian angel of Israel and now the Church. So when Catholics read in Revelation that Michael defeats the devil, they see that the final defeat of Satan takes place not by the direct involvement of Christ, but by a subordinate, even a great one. Even the final banishment of Satan to the lake of fire in Rev. 20 is often seen as something Michael does, leading to the long history of Catholic art depicting Michael stamping on the head of Satan.
I often think of this as the great humiliation of Satan. His only encounters with Christ are when he had taken flesh, was weak, fasting, in the desert, and when he is nailed to the Cross with his hands nailed behind his back, and he wins both times. The pride of the devil is he believes he could rival God, and is greater than human beings, but God defeats him in human flesh and restrained in human torment, and he allows a created angel to apprehend and damn him. In other words -- "you are not my equal, and even at my lowest I am incomparably greater than you. Know your place." The foolishness of God is greater than men's wisdom.
There's also the "two screens" effect of this: Satan believes the crucifixion of Christ is his great moment that reveals how grand his ability to contend against God is, and presumably he revels in it. But the view of everyone else is stunned horror, a person being tortured until death. His great moment is not just his destruction, but it's the revelation of the vacuity of his moral authority. He tempted man in the garden with the knowledge of good and evil, but he reveals in this moment that his knowledge of good and evil was catastrophically insufficient, and in fact he believes that evil is good. Any argument to be made that his goal is to free man must contend with the fact that his "crowning achievement," as you put it, was the torture and death of a man.
This also connects to the larger vision in the Church Fathers that Gethsemane and the Cross are the garden and the tree that undo what occurred in the original garden and with the original tree; instead of Satan tempting man with the knowledge of good and evil that properly belongs to the divinity, but which ultimately separates them from God, God instead tempts Satan with the weakness of man's flesh, which ultimately undoes him with the divinity of the God-man. Gregory of Nyssa has a great passage on this, which connects to my larger theme:
[I]t was not in the nature of the opposing power [suffering, death, and the devil] to come in contact with the undiluted presence of God, and to undergo His unclouded manifestation, therefore, in order to secure that the ransom in our behalf might be easily accepted by him who required it, the Deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with ravenous fish, the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh, and thus, life being introduced into the house of death, and light shining in darkness, that which is diametrically opposed to light and life might vanish; for it is not in the nature of darkness to remain when light is present, or of death to exist when life is active.
To be clear, these are my own views, not necessarily the official Catholic position on things. But they're informed by the Catholic and to an extent Orthodox approach, with my own characteristic views interlaced.
EDIT: Edited significantly to add content, and section markers because of how long it got.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
I'd happily pick yes. My parents care for each other and have been married for four decades.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
My mom's social media is like this with lots of office setups, planners, and forms of paper-based organization, in addition to street food vendors and "OMG life in Japan/Korea is like the 22nd century." Organization and orderliness appeal to the professional woman.
My girlfriend's new obsession is mechanical keyboards, which girlyTok has discovered and is now a part of the "complete the ultimate feminine office setup" social media trend rotation. Linear switches are now being called "creamy."
I have no problem with this -- women deserve good keyboards too -- but yeah, women love stationarycore and office setups. I think it's just part of the larger trend of women beautifying any space they enter into.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3mo ago
Sometimes I watch true crime documentaries with my girlfriend, and what always stands out in the rape or rape+murder situations is that many of them, even among stranger assaults, don't consist of a random guy grabbing a woman off the street and dragging her into a street corner. They often consist of date rape, or something like a group of guys and girls are hanging out after a party with some booze and one of the guys stays with one of the girls and then drags her into the figurative alley.
I think there's a feminist point to be made there that there is a group of men that believes such a situation entitles them to some sex afterward. But where I disagree with the feminist point is that I think this often goes along with innate personality traits or psychopathy, and there's no amount of education or re-education that can be done to fully eliminate their existence. Louis CK has a joke where he goes:
We're so afraid of pedophilia because it's and it's not going anywhere. That's a fact, it's not like there's a finite amount of pedophiles, and we got the last one. Now it keeps happening. Every generation there's more. Some of you have kids, and some of those kids are gonna grow up to fuck kids... So any real solution has to start with the basic reality that there will always be pedophiles.
I'd say the same is true of people who are psychopathic, and genuinely do see women (and men, and children, and animals, and everything) as inanimate objects to be used as they wish. There's another one born every minute. I think the reason some of the incel stuff sets of warning alarms is that there is some "women have instrumental value to me, redistribute the pussy-objects" language in there, especially in the extreme spaces. But the interesting difference is that these are often "someone else should give me a woman"-type complaints, which is... a pretty pathetic point of view, and not the worldview inhabited by most rapists, who are proud of their ability to coerce and overpower women on their own and often don't even see what they're doing as rape.
But the typical incel is a lonely, sad, and yeah often times angry and frustrated guy, but the very elements that cause his inceldom like shyness and seclusion are also traits that 'protect' him from attacking people. In an 'honor among thieves' sense, in the original meaning where Plato indicates that you have to have some level of real skill and mastery to pull off a heist (i.e. the Oceans films), there are often skills and traits possessed by many rapists, but not by the average incel, that would enable them to date and have consensual sex with a woman, though they choose not to. This is actually borne out by research on repeat offenders, who make up the vast majority of sexual assaults, and who are often skilled, socially competent, strategic, and careful. To me, this makes the crimes of rapists more evil -- they have the capacities built into them to do good, but choose evil.
And obviously when we talk about domestic violence, you have to be in a domicile with a woman to commit domestic violence against her. That's pretty non-incel.
I think society can do a lot to give resources and aid to victims, to prevent what crime can be prevented, and to try and catch these kinds of men early and get them the hell away from society and from women. My girlfriend's point, by the way, is that it's a horrific injustice for men who commit crimes like this to then be sentenced to something like 10 years in prison, of which he might serve 3 because of parole, and then he's out on the street again and rapes someone else. And it's often liberal and progressive groups who argue in favor of systems like parole, and in general for viewing the criminal justice system as a greater threat to safety and liberty than violent criminals.
But also alcohol is awful, and we should be screaming at young people not to go get drunk at parties, because alcohol impairs judgment for everyone who partakes and people can make decisions they never would sober, which can place even relatively normal people in a position to become involved in violence. In more ways than just sexual violence; see the persistence of the barfight as a concept, or the drunk uncles who always seem to get on the Florida news for doing something awful at EPCOT, or, say, the women's movement against alcohol because of the long, long history of daddy coming home drunk as a skunk and beating his wife and his children.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3mo ago
Wow, that's a fascinating graph. I was very confused and started writing a comment about how I'd want more recent data than 1980 before forming conclusions, but looking at the paper itself I see that's by birth year.
I guess the issues would be -- does this take account of divorce and remarriage? It's possible there are some serial monogamists here, and some situations that don't necesarrily demonstrate a continuous commitment between one couple over the course of time in which a couple would normally have children. Since we're talking about the effects on childrearing, it also doesn't necessarily take into account whether many of the college-educated women got married, but too late to have children, or more than one child. The way this data is sampled smells kind of fishy to me, because it genuinely just asks whether a woman is married at a certain point, not what the marital history looks like. I would want to see massively more data before we conclude what marriage is like.
But there are some fascinating takeaways there -- in particular, that there is a higher rate of college-educated women being married to non-college men than the rate of college-educated men being married to non-college women. Simple models of hypergamy would predict the opposite. But there does, like you said, seem to be a thing where earning potential (which itself is correlated with a LOT of other social variables) is more important than college degree in attaining marriage for men.
Perhaps I was onto something when I said:
The mental health/loneliness/decoupling of academic success from life success crisis seems to be hitting young men most of all, though I don't doubt it has victims among young women as well. Being able to survive through this period of time with a sense of optimism and drive for the future, as well as romantic achievement, is probably the strongest correlate (not necessarily causal factor) of success among men, in a way I'm not sure is precisely true of women in the same way.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3mo ago
“I could care less” annoys the crap out of me, literally. Literal human waste is being excreted due to my annoyance.
I do find it pretty funny though. “I could care less about your feelings!” almost feels triumphant, like “I could care less, but I don’t care enough to care less!” It’s a joke a competent comedian could probably spin into something hilarious. I don’t love the expression though, both because it confuses so many people and because it’s just a strange way to say “I don’t care.” Just say that.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3mo ago
I don't know that autism was ever firmly suspected in my childhood, but my mom did have several books on her bookshelf whose titles rounded off to "What To Do If Your Child Is A Weirdo" -- I believe some were about "Sensory Processing Disorder," which I understand was never in the DSM and the symptoms that were purportedly in the syndrome are understood to be more diagnostic of autism, and my social development was somewhat stunted. I was definitely a 'little professor', then and now, but my father is a professor, so perhaps that's not unexpected.
I didn't have friends as a kid, I had two friends in primary school and junior high, both of which were not great people who didn't care about me as a person. The neighbor kids tried to steal from my house. I didn't have a good friend until junior high, then only for a brief time -- a Latino guy who joked about Herman Cain with me. A nice guy, god bless him. In high school I made more friends, but it was hard, I came off as awkward and sheltered. I hung out with the math geeks but I was bad at math and I didn't like the kind of video games they enjoyed. I can't disambiguate my experiences between "neurodevelopmental problem that led to peer rejection that led to social anxiety" or "peer rejection that led to social developmental delays that led to social anxiety."
As far as I know, I don't have any relatives with either suspected or diagnosed autism. I do have first cousins with OCD, which would probably explain my excessive concern for contamination and orderliness. And I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder and GAD as a teenager, and by no means are these fad diagnoses, and my answer to the miracle question would be "these things would be gone." If you actually have a mental disorder that interferes with your life and functioning, it's a source of shame and dysfunction rather than an identity marker.
My girlfriend asked me once whether I thought she was autistic, which came out of the blue and didn't seem likely to me -- she's more socially fluent than she thinks, and often notices nuances in people's communication that others don't notice. I think we're at a point where the "weird is good" millennial worldview has run its course, and social atomization has eliminated many of the ways that 'weird' people were integrated into and sustained by society, and so 'weird' people are desperate to find some kind of an explanation for why they don't fit in, when it may be partly biological, partly psychological, and partly civilizational. The fact that normies are starting to look like me scares me, a lot.
I think the autism rights people have actually won, in a lot of ways -- we're at a point where people with basic social anxiety disorder like to speculate about whether or not they're autistic, because autism feels like a good diagnosis, like unlocking a secret way of being human rather than an incapacity to engage in normal activities because of fear. It also means that the outcome is "baked in" rather than conquerable with effort: if you struggle socially because you have anxiety, it means you have all the right hardware to function normally but are afraid to use it and are behind on your software updates.
If you struggle because you're autistic, it means you're special and neurodivergent and you get to ask for accommodations instead of taking responsibility for your social development into your own hands. Unfortunately, I think there are many neurotypical people who wish to gain the compassion that the informed often feel for autistic people, without the struggle that autistic people often have to go through to function.
The "autistic people often end up with a cluster B wife" thing is funny, but more precisely I do wonder whether a lot of people who suspect they may have autism are actually people who may be closer to cluster A and C themselves. I do wonder if there are a lot of Avoidant and Schizoid folks who feel 'weird' in a way that overlaps somewhat with autism but are clinically and psychologically distinct.
If I had to say, I suspect I line up with the broader autism phenotype, and I do have concern that any children I may have may struggle neurodevelopmentally. I share your dislike of fad diagnoses, and I suppose my suspicion and dislike of people who do this is why I've written thousands of words across posts, comments, and journal entries trying to talk myself out of any conception that I might be autistic. If it's true, there are few to no adult accommodations, and autism evaluation in adults isn't a thing, and regardless of where I'd land I'd still be the same guy with the same problems; nothing would be fixed or improved by it.
I’ve found Opus 4.7 to generate better and more human-like text vs Opus 4.6 for my purposes, but I can’t indicate whether it’s any better at coding. I use a mix of LLMs for various things, and my feeling is that ChatGPT is more bland and LLM-y in its output, but much more generous with usage limits. In the limited coding I’ve done, I haven’t seen much of a difference between them. ChatGPT’s image generation model is also nice, as far as my amateur impression can tell.
But it’s a constant fight with the usage limits on Claude, whereas ChatGPT feels like it flows freely. My current pattern is to default to Chat for most informational and coding purposes and bring out Claude Opus for when I want a more thoughtful analysis of something. I don’t know how Sonnet compares to ChatGPT.
Gemini feels massively behind in both usability and tooling, and its integrations with third parties are only good for Google products.
urquan
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3mo ago
Yeah, that doesn’t represent happiness, that measures how you feel you measure, literally, on the social ladder. Is there research that asks something more like, “How happy are you, 1-10?”
urquan
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3mo ago
I had a... friend, I guess, in high school, who I felt was narcissistic and far, far too full of herself, and I started mildly insulting her and putting her down, because I felt like she needed to be taken down a peg and realize not everyone worshipped the ground she walked on. I rarely put people down like this, but something about her just annoyed me.
My impression was that she took this as an attempt at flirting, and started doing weird things like comparing me to her boyfriend. I just rolled my eyes at this and continued putting her down. She was cute, I suppose, but her personality was radioactive and it shocked me how much people liked her.
urquan
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3mo ago
I was a trainer in a large group for a while (mostly women) and the one woman who was demonstratively affectionate toward me and the other male trainers was almost unanimously turned on by the rest of the female trainees. This was always done subtly except behind closed doors.
OH I had to re-read this a couple of times, because I was trying to figure out if you were really saying "she was turned on by the female trainees" i.e. was somehow a very loose bisexual girl who personally liked both you and the female trainees, or if you meant "she almost unanimously turned on the rest of the female trainees" i.e. they were all sapphic for her. Wow, does the sentence make more sense when I read it right.
I don't know how you could have phrased it better, but this perhaps is my punishment for skimming motte posts while sleepy.
A woman who communicates interest with a stranger even subtly is rare, outside an alcohol-drenched setting.
I've had it happen, but typically with extreme plausible deniability, in the sense that their interest could be understood platonically and their invitations to date could be understood as an invitation for a nice time with a friend. This could be an attempt not to look too eager/excessive/expoitable, unfamiliarity with how you clearly show interest to someone (women are often pretty bad at it, because they aren't forced to practice), a kind of hedging of bets in case someone isn't all that compatible, or plain simple insecurity and rejection sensitivity of the same kind that causes men to orbit sometimes instead of stating their interest clearly. Probably a mixture.
urquan
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3mo ago
It was the students like me who lacked good study habits, institutional knowledge, amd networking skills who had a rough time.
Ah, the gifted kid paradox. Everything in the early years is easy, so you don't develop study skills and grit, and then when you face something actually tough it crushes you.
(Also, AMD networking skills are extremely important -- how are you going to succeed if you can't connect your Ryzen gaming beast to the internet for studying? :P)
urquan
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3mo ago
Really, really cringe things that associate elements of the American civic religion with Christianity are pretty dime-a-dozen in red tribe art, such as the most hilarious painting of all time: Jesus holding the Constitution of the United States while a Supreme Court Justice weeps.
It's exceptionally gauche to make such a piece of artwork of a living politician, but I'm sure it happens on the left too from time to time. That people invest this kind of hope in politicians is pretty ridiculous to me, but they do, and silly stuff like this results.
I think most people have generated a "what would I look like as a medieval X/what would Y look like as a Christian saint" image using AI, it's a fairly common pastime. Sharing it on social media is pretty ridiculous though.
Trump is pretty narcissistic, and this may be a symptom of that, but it's far from the most insane thing he's ever done and at this point the truth is that his supporters' support for him is something that's not amenable to anything that actually happens, and the hope that many on the left/center have that some scandal will destroy his popularity among his base just isn't going to happen. Even the Christians who were outraged by this still "back the mission."
urquan
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3mo ago
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Definitely getting in the field it was interesting to see how not-bleeding-edge a lot of corporate IT is, but also slightly comforting -- I often describe my own personality as the direct opposite of silicon valley: "move slowly and fix things." That's definitely the sort of thing I would put on a sticker.
The messy reality of maintenance/operations and the need to actually test things cautiously is a huge element of how I view computers; I've always related to them in an operations kind of a way and even in my youth I was only moderately interested in programming. It didn't seize me the way it often does other people. I'm not sure anyone dreams of being level 1 support, but I did dream a bit as a kid about being a sysadmin, especially once I got heavily into Linux which I've used on my desktop for about 10 years now.
That said, I do love automation, orchestration, and I suppose hyper-convergence, and I do use them extensively in my homelab. It's definitely a goal of mine to use those at some point in my career, and I know of some shops who use them. Perhaps time will bring them more into the mainstream of general IT, because IaC is awesome (and is genuinely something that use of AI makes significantly easier to learn).
I love teaching, and I've been told by people that I'm good at sitting down with someone and explaining things in a way they can understand. So the opportunity to share knowledge and help people learn/get people back to work/find a workaround or a fix that helps people move on with their day is very satisfying to me. I hate computers getting in my way as much as anyone, and it's great to get them out of people's way.
The lack of significance on the balance sheet is definitely the greatest area of trepidation for me as I look forward in my career, in the sense that I do have concern about layoffs/being unable to do the job properly because of limited buy-in from management.
urquan
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3mo ago
Right, and what I'm saying is that being in the top 5% being regarded "not particularly impressive and just an OK result, specifically within the context of academic achievement" is blackpilling. I agree that's not impressive for the elite world, but no one's talking about the elite here. It is not a failure to not be part of the elite. The elite should not be the inherent frame through which we view the world, such that "he still could be [part of the elite] through other avenues" is the consolation prize, and not "he has many options for a non-elite but good life available." If being in the top 6-7% means you likely get a decent job, with some hedging there, that's pretty blackpilling as an idea. I guess it depends on what we mean by "decent"; and if "decent" is only somewhat achievable by this portion of the population, that's the starting point for social upheaval.
Again, it's not about whether specific professional areas are a good or bad fit -- and I agree law, investment banking or management consulting aren't -- it's about how we talk about people's achievement, and whether we have a world where people who aren't in the top 1-2% on any measure can expect to have a good life. Not an elite life, not a fantastic splendorous life, just a good life.
urquan
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3mo ago
I wouldn’t say they’re killing it, just that there is a bit of opportunity. I don’t know how to compare.
To be clear, by IT I mean general office IT support/MSPs, I can’t tell you how programmers or infosec people are doing. This is not a very tech focused area, but there’s always a need for general IT services even in flyover country because every organization uses IT. Last I heard cybersecurity type positions were desperate to be filled, and the big issue was finding people actually qualified for those kinds of roles. But what I hear from cyber people around here is their jobs tend to be cleaning up AD/Entra junk and enforcing role-based access control. Again, nothing glamorous.
urquan
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3mo ago
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
Where I am, IT seems to be doing fairly well. I know people who aren't spectacularly bright, but technically interested, who are doing well in entry-level IT and moving up into engineering positions. The hard part is getting your foot in the door, but once you do, there are opportunities available. They aren't always glamorous but they're real.
That said, success among young men in general is extremely bimodal, in ways that aren't necessarily correlated to socioeconomic background. I'd say half the zoomer or millennial men I know are unemployed or significantly underemployed, in a way that tracks mental health/functioning/grit/economic necessity more than it does raw intelligence or capability. Several are bankrolled partially or fully by the women in their lives, who have normal but not glamorous white-collar jobs that are generally higher-status or pay than what the men have. The ones who don't have a girlfriend are... pretty damn depressed, in the "repeatedly dropped out of college and lost touch with all their friends because they sleep 13 hours a day" way.
Young women have a distribution of success too, of course, but it seems to map most directly onto SES than it does individual factors. So I have a female friend whose mother was bipolar and is struggling to launch, but most of the college-educated ones are white-collar workers making median+ salaries, and it's the non-college-educated ones who seem to be stuck in the service sector.
The mental health/loneliness/decoupling of academic success from life success crisis seems to be hitting young men most of all, though I don't doubt it has victims among young women as well. Being able to survive through this period of time with a sense of optimism and drive for the future, as well as romantic achievement, is probably the strongest correlate (not necessarily causal factor) of success among men, in a way I'm not sure is precisely true of women in the same way.
In some ways I'm in the winning column, in some I'm in the not-so-good one. I don't have a lot of optimism for the future and I do feel like many of my early academic dreams died due to overcompetition and the marginalization of people like me in elite or semi-elite spaces. I suppose I'm just trying to hold on to what success I do have, but I have very little buy in for the system as it exists -- I just don't feel homicidal and find it morally outrageous that people do. Our problems are far, far more diffuse and our evils are far, far more banal than anything that would justify killing people over.
For the record, this is in a flyover state most coastal folks probably think of as a shithole. We have our problems but it's home.
urquan
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3mo ago
You know, "being in the top 5-6% of educational achievement isn't good, this is insufficient" is a pretty blackpilling line of thought in itself. Imagine how screwed you'd be to be in the bottom 94%. That's almost everyone, and I guess we're just sweeping them under the rug and calling them bad dummy dumbs who don't count.
(This is independent of whether it is, or should be, sufficient to practice law or any other specific field. Law seems like a pretty horrible profession even in 'good times.')
This is where it gets interesting. I don't interact with a lot of engineers in my daily life outside of work. Most of my social group is blue collar (service industry, trades, retail), college faculty and staff, or retirees (musical connections). Someone has brought it up in every social interaction I've had in the last 24 hours, and in every case, the general sentiment was that it was a shame the guy didn't have better aim.
This is crazy to me — I’m pretty sure most of the people around me couldn’t name Altman even if asked. People use ChatGPT, sometimes Gemini, sometimes Claude, no one thinks this is going to lead to “AGI” (a term they’re unfamiliar with), and in general ai chat is viewed as very helpful and often better than a google search, ai art is viewed mildly skeptically mostly for “can we believe photo evidence now?” reasons rather than “we must save the poor artists from the horrific slop!” reasons, and most people probably couldn’t name a single major executive involved in AI.
I’m sure the blue tribers around here are angry in these ways, but the “these evil tech billionaires are destroying society!” isn’t something I hear often irl. There’s been a lot of discussion about the Iran war and some about the Epstein files, but AI doomerism or boosterism just… isn’t a thing. It’s a technology people use, no one expects it to radically reshape the world or end it, just disrupt things a bit in the same way the smartphone did.
I guess a lot of people really don’t like AI, but my family and friends, a very small sample size, like it and use the chat models a lot for everyday tasks. I guess there’s going to be some job disruption, but I suspect that’s more because executives believe AI can do more than it actually can. It’s a tool that’s useful as an adjunct to human judgment, and I wouldn’t trust this generation of AI with truly autonomous operation of any real sort.
If you'd started out with this, I would not have posted my other reply, and if this is what you've been trying to assert all along, I retract my fangs. This sounds like we're in substantial agreement on the facts on the ground here.
The issue I still have, though, is twofold:
First, it seems to me that what you're objecting to is the word "market", and I worry you're importing connotations into this word that aren't there. Dating obviously isn't a commodities market, it's not about frozen concentrated orange juice, but there are other types of markets. The best version of economic modeling of relationships talks about them in terms of matching markets which line up perfectly with your model of desiderata and selection:
So the idea that stating "dating is a market" means the person making the statement believes that relationships are a competitive optimization game simply doesn't hold water for me.
But in terms of Sexual Market Value -- well, even products that aren't raw commodities like FCOJ often reflect idiosyncratic and unique preferences, yet a price for them can still be set. The 'value' of something under orthodox economic models has to do with the amount people are willing to pay, which reflects, at its heart, how low the supply is, and how high the demand is.
I don't think Sexual Market Value, to steelman it in its best and most useful formulation, is about one person's assignment of a "raw fuckability score." It's not even, necessarily, about the 1-10 ranking system, or whatever. It's about how many people in the population, in the matching market that is dating, would find that an individual meets all their 'various desiderata' such that they pass the initial Boolean filter. The value of someone on the "sexual marketplace" -- or if you don't like that phrasing, let's taboo it and go with "matchmaking environment" -- is determined by how many people would consider that person a greater catch. Lower supply and higher demand -- understood here as being considered uniquely, highly attractive by a greater and greater share of the population -- equals higher value. It's a property of the matching environment, not a metaphysical ranking of human ontological worth.
What's the benefit of this "higher value?" More choice. More attractive partners. Better suitors. Obviously there can be downsides, particularly for women who can be faced with lots of attention they don't really want, but even in your own framing -- "people may have a vague sense that partners should "match" in their attractiveness level" -- being more attractive means you end up with a more attractive partner. The value of this goes beyond the purely puerile: any feature that makes a person of the opposite sex highly desirable to a large number of people, like being really sweet, or very caring, or having a great job or a home owned outright or a kind smile, increases demand, and increased demand means the competition for that person's hand is harder. This isn't even a particularly male thing to comment on -- read Jane Austen.
I'll also note that male attraction, even at this level of abstraction, simply works differently than female attraction -- it's not so much a boolean as it is a gradual scale upwards in terms of excitement and interest, with a floor set somewhere, there is a Boolean at the most basic level. I actually believe there's more to this in many women's psychology than you're letting on here; obviously Orlando Bloom is a more exciting catch for any woman than Frumple McFrumpelstein.
My other point is this: the reason you see men talk about Sexual Market Value much more than women, especially in environments like this, has to do with the fact that, for many men, clearing that first boolean hurdle is really, really hard. There are a lot of men, and I've talked with them on here, as have you I believe, who will state honestly that they want nothing more than to focus on the pair bonding and the faithfully loving and the enjoying of personality elements of dating, but they seriously struggle to get to that point because they can't find a woman who meets their boolean floor and whose boolean floor is met by him. Again -- matching market.
When men talk about "increasing their sexual market value," they mean doing things that will make them cross that boolean threshold for a greater and greater number of women, not because they want to personally have sex with all those women (of course, some do), but because they as individuals have desiderata and more attention means they have more of an ability to pick someone who actually satisfies those desires. This also means they will thereby have more of an ability to select a partner who doesn't present with red flags and can find someone that is a good match in terms of their personality and values. You need optionality to select well.
The default state for men is no attention, or very low attention, where you have only a small ability to actually select a person who's consonant with your personality, values, and yeah, sexual desires. That makes it hard, and the ability even to try and choose a good partner from a set of suitors is a luxury a lot of men are locked out of. Many of those men end up in loving relationships with women they care for a great deal, but some also end up in terrible relationships with women who have problems or don't treat them well, and without the ability to meaningfully choose you end up either taking who makes herself available or you die alone. I get the sense that for a lot of women, dying alone is preferable to shacking up with a bad guy, and I can certainly see why, considering the possibility of "a bad guy" being pretty damn bad, but men actually do love women and they don't want to die alone, which obviously isn't the ideal for anyone.
So of course there's status panic -- dying alone is pretty low-status and sucky, and ending up with someone you don't care for and aren't attracted to, which is the other alternative, is also pretty low-status and sucky. The 'third way out,' is, of course, becoming more attractive to a greater number of women, to wit, increasing your sexual market value.
You're criticizing guys for saying things that aren't consonant with 'stage two', but many are just trying to succeed at 'stage one,' where their raw sexual attractiveness and that of the people they're trying to attract -- in terms of how valuable they are as a potential partner to them -- are highly relevant features of your experience. Some on the motte would of course charge you with despising these men for their pathetic unattractiveness and laundering this disgust through rationalization, but I've seen you extend charity to guys who admit their struggles enough times that I extend you the charity of simply believing you don't realize the gap.
Yes, it's icky to think about relationships this way. Yes, this should very much not be the end-all-and-be-all of someone's approach to dating and intimacy. Certainly no one should be considering marriage based on SMV, but I fail to see who exactly in this conversation said you should!
But the analytical and practical utility of at least sociologically modeling relationships as a matching market outweighs that it feels bad. And I don't advise that people talk about it in mixed company, or make decisions on the important things in their life based on it. Pair bonding is more important.
Stated properly, the model does real work, and it impoverishes our understanding of what's going on in society to taboo the concept.
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