faceh
1d ago
It seems like there are still pockets of competence to be found and an increasing motivation to overcome short term political obstacles and create some robust institutions that will allow coordination amongst serious chaos. I think that even in the worst case scenarios of the U.S. FedGov starting to collapse, state governments are capable of acting as a backstop.
If Starship is successful and we get some orbital infrastructure, its JUST possible we can get some self-sufficient or semi-self sufficient off-world communities. Not a great place to bear and raise kids, of course, but somewhat insulated from turmoil on earth. Buys some time if nothing else.
Biggest problem I don't see a clear solution for is maintaining a decent technology stack if the global shipping network degrades. That is, all the materials, labor, expertise, and machinery/capital could still be intact, but if there's no cheap shipping to connect it all together, most nations are left only with what they can source domestically and from immediate (friendly) neighbors. Not ideal, and it means any places that have stockpiles of critical equipment and materials will need to be protected, and somehow organized to use all that for maintaining civilization.
AI is a wildcard here for the moment.
And... the big question is what, if anything, will convince women to start popping kids out again.
faceh
1d ago
DAMNIT.
I'm really not trying to make that my 'thing.' Gotta write about some obscure Floridian political fight or something to make up for it.
oh well.
faceh
1d ago
Hey now, I'm mostly cynical about the larger issue of intersex relations.
I'm quite the fan of women in the abstract and many specific ones that I like a lot, and are great people.
The stats inform my behavior and proposed solutions, but cynicism is reserved for the larger system that I think is sucking everyone dry, and not in the fun way.
faceh
1d ago
You pretty much nailed it, impressively accurate for an 'outsider.'
The one achievement of the apps is getting the average guy to finance (both paying for apps, and paying for dates) the whole operation so that average women can sleep with a variety of hot guys who will never, ever commit, and the hot guys don't have to invest much capital, so it is cheaper for them than finding hookers.
And for the women, its definitely a 'decision paralysis' or 'paradox of choice' situation. You've got 50 matches on any given day, and you need to pick one or two to go on dates with, but of course doing that is possibly locking you out from choosing the ideal match... if such a thing exists, so its easier to just not pick and let men do the whole song and dance to hold your attention.
Its horribly toxic, and I worry that the younger kids just have never known anything different, so its 'normal.' When it really, really should not be normal.
faceh
2d ago
I think the subset of the human species that has the necessary skills to achieve interplanetary spaceflight is probably going to figure something out in time.
Whether that will be enough to keep the species as a whole at a post-industrial revolution tech level, though, I dunno.
Your point is scarily plausible, though.
faceh
2d ago
I think guys like boobs enough to put down the phone if there's a real pair in front of them, at the very least.
faceh
2d ago
Yeah. I can't say for sure how much of it is just my own perception, but the time of a single woman going out by herself to places where she might get noticed and approached seemed to be literally over.
Its always a girls' night thing, or she's with a group of friends for a specific event, or maybe its a date she pre-arranged on the apps.
Saw a tweet that made the specific argument that men aren't really competing to be more interesting than other men for a woman's attention at any given time (sometimes they are, of course). He's competing to be more interesting than her phone. Which is a difficult lift. She's got a dozen apps on there for various forms of communication, another dozen for feeding video slop, and then probably a half dozen games to fill in the gaps.
Up against that much dopamine-hacking technology, what can a given guy sitting in front of her do or say that will actually get her to stop thinking about her messages, or her latest instagram post, or make her want to engage in conversation instead of scroll tiktok.
faceh
3d ago
Women are currently too valuable as a political force for the political class to remove their power to vote, let alone reduce them to chattel.
So that is DEFINITELY a 'coup-complete' sort of solution.
faceh
3d ago
I also appreciate your posts. Modern "dating" just seems like the mother of all coordination problems
There are some bigger ones, but this one will directly impact all the others over the long enough run.
I'm confident we'll 'figure it out' because the drive to reproduce and the forces of natural selection are not going to give in so easily. Going to suck for many, many people, though. Possibly including me.
But the CRAZY thing is we had the necessary social techs for this problem. There was a system that 'worked' (not optimal, not everyone was happy, but it was a decent equilibrium) and then dismantled most of it, and now we're stuck here because very few left even remember there being a better time.
Me, I only barely remember a time when it wasn't so openly hostile and the new technology (smartphones, social media) promised to improve things. And I feel like I was a naive idiot to think that way. But I also didn't have a good model of how intersex relations really work at scale.
My general policy is to extend maximum charity and assume good faith until proven otherwise.
Funny enough, I use similar principles when dating, and I get burned for it on occasion.
faceh
3d ago
Yup.
Its not so much a complaint that the playing field isn't level or fair, "Wahhhh Mommm they aren't sharing the pussy, make them share!"
Its objecting to playing the game this way at all because its making everything worse for everyone involved. Either crack down on the people who are making it suck so much... or make everyone play a different, friendlier, more fun game.
But both complaints read like you're sexually unsuccessful and crying for someone to give you a boost, to the uninformed observer.
If both men and women are allowed to lie, misrepresent their intentions, back out of their agreements, and undercut each other, in other words, to defect without penalty, this is where the game spirals to. And there is no obvious bottom.
Coordination to improve things is fuckin' hard, but it requires people to admit the problems that exist and to being impacted by them. And we can't even get to THAT step without people dogpiling on the ones who admit weakness.
And when the people most capable of effecting and coordinating change are also one of the few ones who benefit from the status quo (high value, somewhat sociopathic dudes), its even harder to shift. They don't see a need to adjust things.
faceh
3d ago
Don't send a guy into a nightclub without either knowing how to dance or knowing how to throw down if someone pushes him around. Preferably both.
faceh
3d ago
Get off of dating apps, hit the nearest nightclub and if you succeed, you'll sound the way me or @faceh or those who did way more with way hotter girls than any of us.
Personally I'd say skip the nightclub and hit the best Martial Arts gym you can find in a 10 mile radius.
faceh
3d ago
I can probably dredge up a few if I thought for a bit.
But women will tell it to you directly if you let them.
This video also lives rent-free in my head.
Even straight up liberal bisexual chicks will let it slip.
Also, try flipping through any given Romance book on the bestseller's list these days.
faceh
3d ago
They were horrifying, and reduced women to attention seeking narcissist/children most of the time. But damnit if they didn't work. And frankly, at the time, they hardly seemed worse than the covers of women's magazine's you'd see in the checkout isle proudly advertising ways to "train your man".
Yep.
I can distinctly recall the dawning sense of disgusted realization when I began implementing the Red Pill stuff in small doses with women I was interested in and saw it working in real time. Very consistently. Even against women who were anti-redpill.
The easiest way to notice it nowadays is see how any given woman will 'ignore' most compliments paid to her by onlookers... but A SINGLE VEILED INSULT and suddenly all her attention focuses in and she responds ONLY to that. And the nature of her response will vary entirely based on how attractive the insulting party is.
Its tapping into baseline truth more closely than the narrative I was brought up on ever did.
The reason I don't talk about my own success or failures in this arena much is that it simply doesn't matter for the arguments I'm making. I don't want people to give my words more credence or less credence based on my own personal status. Read the stats, bring your own stats, make the arguments without regard to personal achievements.
My romantic life is kind of a mess on the whole, lot of false starts and pursuing the wrong people. But I've never had actual trouble getting dates. Its finding the right person and getting them to commit where I've struck out.
I was at one point two weeks out from being married to a girl that I truly loved. Then SHE cut it off, shacked up with 'the guy I didn't have to worry about' for a bit, then flew off to the other side of the country. I felt (still feel) a sort of irrational fury towards the other guy in the situation. I would gladly go a few rounds in a boxing ring with him, for instance. "Jealousy" ain't it, though. He'll never have what I had.
I currently have a second date scheduled with a cute redhead that I met through an old friend of mine. About a month back I had a couple dates with a petite little Haitian girl that I could literally toss over my shoulder with one arm and carry off to bed.
I feel what could be described as jealousy towards the type of guy who just lines up women for almost every day of the week, rotates through them, dumps them when they become inconvenient, and literally never ever commits but uses commitment as a carrot for getting laid. I'm sure that lifestyle has tons of perks in the current social environment.
But then I think about how corrosive to their own wellbeing that process must be, and I lose the part of the feeling of "Man I wish that were me" and its mostly replaced with the anger of "he pays no cost for ruining them, then leaves the rest of us to deal with the fallout."
I'm about as jealous of these guys as I am of a guy pissing in a swimming pool. Sure, it's easier than getting out and going to the designated bathroom, but I know that if everybody starts doing it, we all end up swimming in urine.
Because of the aforementioned woman I almost married, I know full well that my actual preference is to have a long, established relationship with an intimate partner and having regular sex with the same person is qualitatively superior (to me) than a few flings per partner with many partners in a row. I've run the experiment on both sides, I know the outcome. I act accordingly.
But none of what I just said changes the nature of the stats out there. A small portion of men are being chased by a large proportion of women, banging them, getting their hopes up, breaking their hearts, and moving on, leaving the women bitter and with heightened standards going forward, making life harder on all the guys who come after.
And believe me, I am GENUINELY WORRIED about the social effects that will arise if those guys continue to struggle. I can't hate women. Its not in me. I see them as 'different, but not inherently lesser.'
The generation that's coming up? Many dudes don't seem to have that restraint. I'm trying to warn people, and hey, I worry too because I live in this society. But believe me I ain't the one struggling.
faceh
4d ago
Hard earned insights that were A/B tested for quite a while.
I've done a lot of lifting over the past year and a half and I'm already 6 foot 2. I won't say that I can capture any given woman's attention at will, by any means, but if I can get that initial attention its funny how positive the interactions are regardless of whether I'm being a dick or just being friendly. Its like the words don't matter in the slightest.
Learning how to flip between a general aloofness and then a more intense, undressing-with-your-eyes energy was also key.
it was never the lines that did it, there's no such thing as a pickup line. Women were attracted to the self perception they saw which I can firmly state is extraordinarily difficult to fake. Something not tied to looks, actual status or money.
"Frame" or "Presence" is probably the best way to put it.
Physical appearance (being tall and large, that is, muscular) helps a lot. Voice being deep helps. Eye contact. And good fashion sense.
But beyond that, it comes down to being so self assured and unbothered by anything that this particular conversation with a woman is just not a big deal to you, and you're clearly going to go off and do something fun and awesome as soon as you leave it, and she can tag along if she plays her cards right, but if not, its not like you care much.
Its not enough to act like a king. You must be the king.
As you say, the lines themselves don't matter. If you can capture the attention by just being present, and command her attraction by exuding confidence, its easy.
faceh
4d ago
One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't working, castrating these men. Of course I would like women to shape up too, but that seems like a tall ask.
I'll do you one better and suggest summary execution.
The logic being that screwing with a relatively fresh, innocent, 'happy' young woman and leaving her worse off is irretrievably depleting a scarce, somewhat fixed supply of a critically valuable resource.
There's legitimately no way to repair the 'damage' through monetary compensation alone, and in a sense, the extent of the damage is probably 'incalculable.'
So hey, just remove your ability to do further damage via permanent incapacitation, rather than risk your continued despoiling of the dating pool.
But yeah, castration seems a reasonable compromise position there. I don't know how many it'd take to successfully deter, but its probably fewer than you think.
The dynamic where willing to deceive about long term prospects gets men more sex is probably responsible for a lot of hate women have for men generally.
Its probably fair to say that the bottom 50% of men, in terms of attractiveness, are functionally invisible to the average woman. And you ever heard the saying "the opposite of love isn't hate, its indifference?" Yeah.
Which is to say, they don't actually count those men in their own personal calculation of what "men" are like. If you tell these women that a huge portion of men are actually not able to get matches on tinder, or can't successfully approach women, and thus are unable to find a relationship despite honest best efforts, these women will simply disbelieve you. Availability Heuristic and all that.
So from their perspective, the men that they notice and pursue, i.e. the ones that actually 'exist' for them, are doing just fine. In fact they're doing TOO well, its not fair that he can just pump and dump her because she's one of 5 or 6 others he has on tap!
I'd say that most of the intersex animosity is because women see the top, call it 20% of men as "men" and the bottom 50% as nonentities that don't enter their thought processes at all. And then there's that awkward 30% of men who are in a superposition of 'man' and 'not man' unless and until a woman decides to pay them attention.
If they only compare themselves to the upper 20% of guys, and ignore the bottom 50%, then mentally yeah it feels like SHE is the disadvantaged one in this situation. They can ignore things like the male suicide rate, the fact that most of the crappiest jobs are male-dominated, and that men are generally disfavored by the law because they only see the top 20% of dudes, who ARE in fact doing really well, and assume that's representative. And boom, there's your patriarchy.
Meanwhile, the other 80% of men are painfully aware of their own status, and are finding that every woman they attempt to approach is in fact pursuing those top 20% of guys, and, as noted, is un-self-aware of this factor, and disregards the experience of the vast majority of men when judging them.
So women are mad at 'men' because the only men they care about are rejecting them in the end, refusing commitment but taking sex.
Men are mad at 'women' because when women get mad at those top men, they put ALL men on blast, and that catches a lot of guys in the crossfire who have not done a damn thing to deserve it. They're being treated like villains ON TOP of being rejected by women en masse because those top men are gleefully exploiting their position, and women are incapable of regulating their own marketplace so are getting increasingly distressed and lashing out.
And uh, it looks like said men are getting very, very fed up with this.
And no, this is NOT explained solely by manosphere influencers. Even men who are successfully dating seem to believe less in gender equality. Because those top 20% of guys probably have come to understand women from the other side.
Discovered HPMOR and subsequently Lesswrong During the summer after my 1L year, so this would have been 2012.
It was timely, I was struggling with where I was going to aim my career and life goals and having an epistemic crisis (I had no idea how to figure out what I wanted to do, because I felt unable to accurately judge the information I was given). I absolutely credit the Sequences and the other figures in there for helping me figure out my life enough to get where I am now, quite comfortable with my current position. And it eventually helped introduce me to the people who are ACTUALLY part of my (Red-tinged grey) tribe, and I feel accepted there.
I was rat-adjacent for a while, now at best I'm adjacent to the rat-adjacent b/c there's a current in the ratsphere that is kind of toxic to anyone who isn't neurodivergent in a very specific way. Most humans are just not going to be able to adopt their way of thinking, and exposure to it can have very negative effects in their life.
The Effective Altruists got out of hand for a while there and some of them blew up in ways that I considered foreseeable. Let's not speak of the Zizians.
So I'm happy to remain on the periphery because the skills they teach are extremely valuable, their insights are useful, but many of them seem completely lost when it comes to applying those to effect positive change in the real world, and they often actively oppose those who are effecting (mostly) positive change.
Miserable.
Both from personal experience and the sheer stats.
Every forum about online dating you can find is dominated by three genres of posts:
-
Male who is struggling mightily to figure out why he can't get matches.
-
Male and Female who are struggling to understand why someone they connected with, maybe even went on dates with, ghosted them or otherwise rejected them without warning.
-
Male and Female who post aggressively toxic interactions they had with their matches, and often insinuating that this is a problem with the entirety of the opposite sex.
And some people in the comments pointing out how these issues interact. (To be explicit: Most men don't get matches, so women are choosing to match with a small subset of guys who turn out to be toxic (but they're hot), and they use this experience to justify being toxic to other guys, and it ends up mostly being toxic interactions that get posted and get attention, so it makes it look like everybody is toxic.)
Admittedly there's the occasional 'hey this app worked for me, I'm getting married!' post, but rare enough that they're not representative.
Nobody, I repeat NOBODY is having a good time on these apps, and yet they all feel stuck because that's where they perceive the equilibrium is. And they repeat the various 'copes' to each other like mantras. "Its a numbers game" "their behavior doesn't reflect on you" "you dodged a bullet, keep looking!" Actually, a handful of sociopathic dudes are probably having an alright time.
Its generally known that paying money for the apps is a waste and doesn't help, yet they don't take the next logical leap and see that being on the apps at all is probably a waste.
So how are the swiping apps these days? (Personally I think it would be more sustainable for me emotionally because swiping right is a much smaller investment. Swiping right on 100 women and not getting any matches would not significantly update my world view, while composing longer texts to three women and not getting any replies would be painful.)
Yeah that's the thing.
Try swiping right on thousands of women, of varying degrees of attractiveness, and getting nothing. Quantity has a quality all its own, indeed.
The dating apps have managed to cheapen the value of any individual connection to almost zero. And most of what we're seeing now is downstream of that. And this carries over into every other aspect of the dating market. Nobody cares about any individual date because they know they can always hop on the apps and get more matches.
Swiping-style apps are just a plague. Its easier to see that if you remember long enough ago when there were apps that sort of worked. Now they literally gameify things and pretend they're doing you a favor... whilst also denying any responsibility if the quality of your matches is terrible (but they don't let you search out what you want!) and in fact implying its really your fault altogether.
I recommend avoiding.
faceh
9d ago
In other words, if your sample is just social media, then you're missing out on all the well-adjusted individuals who are keeping to themselves.
Yes, and indeed, in my social circle, the people who are actually keeping it together the best and who aren't basket cases tend to be the ones with the smallest social media footprint. I remain close friends with these ones.
But, uh, that ALSO tends to be correlated with "Got married relatively early" (before age 25) and "had kids" which is one hell of a major shift requiring one to hopefully become more mature. These folks were hitting their milestones 'on time' and usually had their lives in some kind of order at an earlier age.
I think even accounting for selection effects, I'm detecting a lot of women who hit some kind of crisis in their mid to late 20's and never fully moved on or recovered. In fact, that's often when they stop posting on social media altogether, because life has gone so badly for them they no longer want to publicize it. Hence, that spike in mental illness.
Me, I grew up kind of sheltered, but not bring my parent to an actual job interview sheltered
With Gen Z in general, but with, again, women in particular, there seems to be the double whammy of "taught to be afraid of almost everything" and yet "coddled and never forced to overcome actual challenges" that results in difficulty functioning in the uncertain and messy real world.
Which gets towards my original thesis: Women tend not to mature in their twenties, precisely because they're told on the one hand that the patriarchy is holding them back, many men want to hurt them, control them, that the world is completely slanted against them... AND they're given huge legs up for academics, employment, and general financial assistance.
At what point does your average woman need to gain maturity, if there's always some program or other that will render assistance if she finds herself facing difficulty, or there's always someone willing to take them in and shelter them from the consequences of their decisions?
And the upshot that women are actually less happy than they've been in decades.
The gap between how much assistance women are given, across the board, to succeed in life, and how dissatisfied they apparently are with how their lives are going seems to be at an all-time high. This tends to gel with the anectdotal observations I see, with women in particular having extreme difficulty getting their lives in order despite getting help from all sides, and complaining loudly that its not really their fault.
Which reads to me like they're still stuck in an adolescent mentality.
Do you work in inside sales? Mostly making a lighthearted joke, here. Maybe even healthcare or aviation?
Law. I do a lot of probate work, where someone's parents die and now the children are coming in to close out their final affairs and parcel out their estate.
That's when I sometimes run into the adult woman in her 40's or 50's who starts acting like an entitled brat and trying to boss all the other siblings around and/or acts like everyone else is out to get her/take away what she feels belongs to her, when there's no goddamn reason to do that. Stands out all the more when you've got 2-3 other siblings who are all well-adjusted, and they're saying "yeah we figured this would happen, she's always been like that."
Tends to make the whole process more cumbersome and frustrating (more money for me, though).
What can I say, I live here.
I'd like to see what else is out there in this gigantic universe.
If Civilization recedes in my lifetime, there's a serious chance it won't come back to the tech level necessary to get off the planet. At which point, we are STUCK here until a rogue asteroid smashes us, solar flare fries us, an alien Civ shows up, or some other cataclysm. Eventually the sun dies out too.
Then its game over for reals.
If there is any real purpose, any endgame, any way to discover the answer to the last question, it's probably only accessible to Kardashev II and above civilizations.
But really, I just think its more fun for everyone if civilization continues. One thing I think that is fair to say about most of human history: MOST of humanity was not having fun MOST of the time. Quite the opposite. Wars suck. Famine Sucks. Manual labor for sheer basic survival sucks. So civilization receding will suck.
We should be trying to have more fun.
But since we're bootstrapped sentient primates running on ancient murder monkey software and have access to nuclear weapons and we're bad at large-scale coordination, maybe this was always our fate. But I prefer to believe not.
More options
Context Copy link