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Don't we already have wAIfu chatbot companies, with scores upon scores of paying customers that suddenly go on suicide watch, when their chatbot doesn't want to have virtual sex with them anymore?
Anyway, this is precisely the source of my boundless disdain for Yudkowski and all the Rat-adjecant AI safety people. All that talk about "x-risks", only to overlook all the most obvious scenarios that can actually threaten humanity.
What are you talking about? Rationalists have totally noticed. Some even think is a good thing; if we are not going to force women to have sex with incels, we can at least allow virtual waifus to ease the pain.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I share his dislike for most of the Rat community. I think Yudkowsky gets it, though. (For a wire-header to be able to enjoy life, they'd have to create artifical challenges for themselves, not unlike those found in real life. So they might as well just engage with real life)
One of the obvious scenarios which threaten humanity is that some people have bad social skills and that they don't have an environment in which they can improve (or alternatively, that they can wirehead the reward of socializing, which is much more pleasant for them than actual improvement).
Giving "virtual waifus" to "incels" doesn't solve any issues, it just suppresses symptoms. By the way, I find it strange that, in an imaginary scenario where we approach AGI level of intelligence, we cannot seem to imagine coming up with a way to help people who have terrible social skills. I'm very puzzled by how a community can have so many knowledable (and sometimes intelligent) people and still have such shallow, naive, and simplified takes on serious topics.
It's not about social skills. It's about the fact that women are only attracted to a small minority of men. Any society where women are free to make their own sexual choices is going to be a society where the majority of men end up as incels.
Completely normal guys who shower and hold jobs and have friends and are non-obese or autistic get lectured by feminists that doing the bare minimum doesn't entitle them to a girlfriend while a small number of men plow their way through entire harems. And not even good men, but terrible human beings like Henry and Dean Moriarity, because not only are women only attracted to a small minority of men, but the minority of men they are attracted to are cocky assholes with options.
We increasingly live in a world where the average guy's best chance of getting married is to wife-up a 30+ single mother after she falls off the bottom of Chad's booty call list. And if you are an average man in your teens and twenties, you don't even get that, you get a "fuck you" and told to wait your turn.
If you wanted to fix this with advanced technology, and you did not want to resort to wire-heading or something morally equivalent like creating non-conscious sycophantic cat girls, digital or otherwise... well, you could create conscious male-complements that required some effort and level of social skills to successfully court but who were not impossible to please the way that human women are, what Eliezer calls verthandi... or you could modify human women to actually be satisfiable by regular men, perhaps with human men being modified in some other way in return... or, you know, we could just go back to what worked for the last 5000 years and force women to get married while they are still young to hard-working, law-abiding men, who would then be allowed to take their marital rights whenever they wanted (hey, you don't even need the advanced technology for that one!)
But if you don't want to wirehead, and you don't want to create sycophantic cat girls who will fuck and cuddle you at the drop of a hat, and you don't want to create bespoke Belldandys who will act like the love interest of a shonen romcom and get together with the nerdy loser after a few years of character growth and sexual tension, and you don't want to edit existing human women to make them something that could ever be satisfied with not being the exclusive wife of Chad, and you are not willing to bite the bullet and force young women to get married and perform their damn marital duties...
...then the problem is over-constrained and has no solution.
Seems like this is a claim that should come with some evidence. Depending on what you mean by "free to make their own sexual choices," women have more or less been able to choose and reject suitors for centuries in the West. And even in ancient times, they usually had some say in who they got married off to. Where they didn't, they were literally property, and if you are advocating that we'd be better off in a world where fathers simply sell their daughters and females are livestock, well... You need to read less Dread Jim. In very few societies have women ever been sexual and breeding chattel in the way he keeps advocating.
He did. It’s the old OKCupid data showing that, while male rate the average woman as averagely attractive, women rate the average man as extremely unattractive. And indeed any man below the 5th percentile or so.
Of course, it would be nice to have replications but there never will be, because if true this strongly indicates that any society where women are free to choose their mates or to remain single will be one where huge numbers of both sexes die alone. The latter choice was not possible in historic societies and is the main reason for our current predicament IMO. That is why I advocate for progressive and extremely high rates of taxation for single men and women approaching 30.
From the link:
Aside from how overused that one study is, the other major problem is that the womens’ answer is straight up incorrect, therefore bullshit. Women have the capacity to actually rank men on a respectable bell curve (just like gay men can rank women), they just choose not to because they concentrate on the ‘what will that answer say about me?’ implications. Similar to how straight men will sometimes performatively deny that an attractive man is attractive, or say that they can’t tell because they’re so straight it hurts and blinds.
It’s the opposite. If they were ranking some strangers as anthropologists, far from the context of their own coupling, they’d give a straight answer, as they usually do in the other studies. But on Okcupid, they think rating merely above average men as above average marks them as easy, low quality, desperate participants in the coupling game.
Also possible. It would be nice to have some kind of backing, though. Are you going on experience? Intuition?
I agree wholeheartedly, I just don’t think that a serious attempt at real data collection is going to happen for societal reasons, so we’re stuck with stuff that got scraped when nobody cared yet.
In "The Typical Man Disgusts the Typical Woman" post Update (the post that y'all are discussing), Caplan links to Emil Kirkegaard's analysis of four much more representative data collections:
In all of these, the OK Cupid's stark disparity in ratings do not reproduce. Women's photos do tend to get slightly higher attractiveness ratings, but, you know, there's probably a reason why both men's and women's magazines are full of half-naked women.
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