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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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I'll caveat right away that these numbers are coming from Grok (and Grok is pulling from academic sources that are worse than just an LLM); I don't trust them, you shouldn't trust them, yada yada. two links, because I derped on setting up the first (yes, I shouldn't have asked about the felony one first; everything else got obsessed with race.).

  • "Thus, 35-45% of 52-68% yields an estimate of 18-31% of American men aged 19-30 having both an income above $50,000 and stable employment."

  • "To estimate the percentage of American men aged 19-30 who are both emotionally stable and have no history of interpersonal or domestic violence:[...] Assuming independence (a simplification, as mental health issues like PTSD or substance abuse can correlate with IPV perpetration), we multiply the probabilities: 0.80 × 0.70 to 0.85 × 0.75 = 56-64%. If we account for correlation (e.g., mental distress increasing IPV likelihood), the range might be slightly lower, around 50-60%."

  • "Thus, an estimated 16.4 to 18.2 million American men aged 19–30 are not obese [ed: 60%], based on recent data."

  • "Approximately 80–89% of American men aged 19–30 would not cheat in a relationship given the opportunity, based on reported infidelity rates and adjusted for hypothetical temptation." [ed: I told you I don't trust the LLM]

  • "Approximately 40–60% of American men aged 19–30 are fiscally responsible, defined as regularly saving, budgeting, and managing debt without significant financial strain. This range accounts for the variability in financial independence and literacy among young adults."

  • "Approximately 65–75% of American men aged 19–30 have not fathered a child."

  • "Approximately 65–75% of American men aged 19–30 have not had more than five previous real-life sexual partners, based on CDC data, General Social Survey findings, and recent trends in sexual inactivity"

One that pidgeon didn't cover, but I think you are motioning around:

  • "If 10-15% of men aged 19-30 have adult felony convictions and 3-6% have juvenile felony-equivalent records, a rough estimate, assuming minimal overlap (since juvenile records often don’t carry into adult systems), might be 13-20% of American men aged 19-30 with either a felony record or a juvenile record equivalent to a felony."

Add them together, and Grok says:

  • "Approximately 2–5% of American men aged 19–30 meet all the criteria: stable job, income above $50,000/year, no history of interpersonal violence, not obese, would not cheat in a relationship given the opportunity, fiscally responsible, have not fathered a child, and no more than five previous real-life sexual partners."

[caveat: it did so with the formula "0.65 × 0.30 × 0.80 × 0.60 × 0.80 × 0.40 × 0.65 × 0.65 ≈ 0.0092". Don't trust LLMs!]

And this doesn't include stuff like orientation (despite what you'd think from the yaoi fans, there's a lot of distrust of actual bi guys among women) or student debt or willingness-to-have-kids or whether they're already married. It still leaves a gender gap, but given that the 'seekers' approach was comparing two decades of men against one decade of women, that's not really surprising.

I think that's bad in a different sense; having the vast majority of both gender 'not count' suggests that we're measuring the wrong thing.

((And I think this sort of button-pushing is itself dangerous, in the sense that it's letting both of us do harder statistical analysis without the gut-level integration of the knowledge that adding multiple filters after each other breaks apart comparisons.))