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I'm dragging up the gender, dating, and fertility discourse for one last rodeo.
The below analysis is a possible infohazard for young single males. It contains analysis done by LLMs, but I solemnly swear I drafted this through my own brainpower, using AI only for the analysis I was too lazy to do myself.
I'm following upon a comment I made about a year ago that pulled out some raw numbers on the quality of women in the U.S., and how this might impact the desire of men to actually develop themselves and find one of those women and settle down.
At the time I didn't bother doing the work to produce an actual estimate of how many women would match the basic crtieria, given that these are NOT independent variables. The though occurred to me that AIs are the perfect solution for exactly this type of laziness, and now have the capability to do this task without completely making up numbers.
So, based on my old post, I chose 9 particular criteria that I think would ‘fairly’ qualify a woman as ‘marriageable.':
Single and looking (of course).
Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified.
Not ‘obese.’
Not a mother already.
No ‘acute’ mental illness.
No STI.
Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
Under age 30.
And ask both ChatGPT and Grok to attempt to estimate the actual population of women in the U.S. that pass all these filters, accounting for how highly correlated each of the variables are.
Notable criteria I omitted:
Religious affiliation
Race
Political affiliation
Career
Drug use
Sex work/Onlyfans
I argue that a reasonable man would NOT want to ‘compromise’ on any of the original criteria, whereas the omitted ones are comparatively negotiable, or alternatively, are already captured in one of the original criteria.
Would you accept a woman who was carrying $50k in student loan debt into the relationship? I guess maybe if she was a doctor or lawyer or made enough money to justify it. Much higher than that and it starts to suggest financial recklessness.
5 as a body count is definitely an ‘arbitrary’ number, but again, you get much above that and it implies more bad decision-making. Ditto for being STI positive.
The age one is probably the most ‘unfair,’ but if having kids is a goal then this is pretty close to the ‘reasonable’ cutoff given the ticking fertility clock. Adjust upward if needed, I guess.
Here is the ChatGPT conversation. I used o3 in this case.
Here is Grok, specifically Grok 3.
In each case I used the “Deep Research” mode for the main query. I used identical prompts to start them off, they each seemingly did slightly different interpretations of the prompt. I was not using any fancy, complex prompt engineering to try and force it to think like a statistician or avoid hallucinations.
ChatGPT Gives this conclusion:
Grok comes to quite the similar conclusion:
Then I asked the truly cursed followup question: “how many men in the U.S. might be seeking these eligible women and thus how much competition is there for this population? How many are likely to ‘fail.’"
ChatGPT:
Emphasis Mine.
Grok:
Then the followup, when I tell it to extend the age range:
The error bars are pretty large on this one... the 9-out-of-10 number doesn't quite pass the smell test... but I think the point speaks for itself.
I don’t want to say that this is bleak, per se. I mean, 1 million or so women in the U.S. with some decent marriageable bonafides. That’s not a small pool! The problem stems from noticing that said women will have somewhere upwards of 5 men, possibly near 27 who will be competing for their affections, or more if they’re near the absolute peak of physical attractiveness.
Hence my increasing annoyance with the bog standard advice proffered to young males “become worthy and put in some effort and you will find a good woman” as it becomes increasingly divorced from the actual reality on the ground.
It’s not wrong. It is incomplete. Insufficient. If we increase the number of “worthy” men, that’s just intensifying the competition for the desirable women… while ALSO ensuring that more of those ‘worthy’ men will lose and go unfulfilled, DESPITE applying their efforts towards “worthiness.”
You CAN’T tell young men both “be better, improve, you have to DESERVE a good woman before you get one!” and then, when he improves:
“oh, you have to lower your standards, just because you thought you deserved a stable, chaste(ish), physically fit partner doesn’t mean you’re entitled to one, world ain’t fair.”
That dog won’t hunt.
Thems the numbers. I’m not making this up wholesale or whining about advice because I find it uncomfortable. No. The math is directly belying the platitudes. I’m too autistic NOT to notice.
So where am I going with this?
First, I’m hoping, praying someone can actually show me evidence that this is wrong. All of my personal experience, anecdotal observations, research, and my gut fucking instinct all points to this being an accurate model of reality. But I am fallible.
If I’m wrong I want to know!
I’m also not particularly worried about ME in general. I am in a good position to find a good woman, even though I’m sick of all the numerous frustrations and inanities one has to endure to do so. I get annoyed when someone, even in good faith, tries to suggest that my complaints are more mental than real. I can see the numbers, I've been in the trenches for years, this is a true phenomena, the competition is heavy, the prizes are... lacking.
And finally and most importantly, I genuinely feel the only way we keep the Ferris Wheel of organized civilization turning is if average women are willing to marry average men, and stay married, and help raise kids. I’m all for pushing the ‘average’ quality up, as long as actual relationships are forming.
Objectively, that is not happening. And so I’m worried because if society breaks down... well, I live here and I don't like what that implies for me, either.
(Yes, AGI is possibly/probably going to make this all a moot point before it all really collapses)
Are you kidding me? You weren’t able to find real numbers, so you asked a system that has a well-known propensity to provide the kind of answers it thinks best match the question. I.e. you got a guesstimate, and you didn’t even bother getting it from a human. Nobody reading your post has gotten any information from it. There is no information there. It’s all just hunches and feelings, all the way down.
I get that you feel there aren’t many good women. Probably there aren’t. But this post makes a claim of objective reality that simply is not substantiated by its contents.
Incorrect, I found the real numbers a year ago. I linked it in my post:
https://www.themotte.org/post/1042/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/221415?context=8#context
I've been considering this issue for a long time.
That's as 'real' as any other statistical conclusions can be.
Possible its not correct, and I even acknowledge that.
That's why I said:
So what else you got?
As I told you before. IT IS NOT ME YOU HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT.
You keep making it sound like I'm the only person with this belief.
Worry about all the OTHER guys who feel there aren't many good women.
It sounds like you just find the implications of this, if true, to be too uncomfortable to admit?
But if its true, surely its worth discussion.
These are not independent variables. Just to hammer on the most obvious point, obesity is inversely correlated with wealth, typically measured by race in these statistical reports, and wealth is also inversely correlated with single motherhood. So you’ve got a bunch of fat poor single mothers out there, probably with 5+ partners, sucking up all of those negative attributes. Meanwhile, on the other end, you have relatively thin and sexless women… who have college debt and are very liberal. So which is more important? Impossible to do without the headache of real analysis. Said again, I really don’t like the practice of asking AI as if it’s an oracle. It ain’t.
Finally, the most important question to ask about this data is: have things been getting worse, and why, and for whom? Obesity is obviously getting worse, and is a real scourge, but there’s no effort here to measure things which would have been very important in the recent (<100y) past, like: does she live in my town? Is she the right Christian denomination? Is she white and NOT Irish?
Mating is an incredibly complicated sorting problem, where the constraints are enforced by personal attraction, class standards, and social Brownian motion that brings suitable parties into contact. If I had to swipe through the millions of women in a couple-hour drive from me, my wife (or someone like her, single) would be a bit of a needle in a haystack. And yet I met her at the right time, seemingly without effort. My friends tend to have similar stories.
Put another way. Obesity is high, yet very few of the people in my area are fat. In my personal circle the number goes down even further. At the same time, wealth goes up. So, by those standards, if men want to marry they should leave the areas with bad women.
Personally, I believe there aren’t many good women, but that there are plenty. A helpful factor breaking this down is that there aren’t many good men either. Being intelligent and stable starts moving you one to three standard deviations out of center, and makes a strong position feasible. If you’re in that category, the remaining question is: what unmarriagable characteristics do women and men in your subcategory have and what can be done about them?
In my experience, intelligent and educated men struggle with, basically, giving women what they like. They don’t have much personal, visceral experience with flirting, pushing boundaries gently and challenging women without threatening them. At the same time, they are insensitive and unresponsive to women’s needs, which are typically more subtle (or she drops the point more easily than she feels). Men who have a lot of trouble are typically aggressively against caring about what women like, usually out of spite. This can be fixed with experience and focused learning.
For women, the problem is that they are socialized to disrespect men and to identify any male qualities that they don’t personally gel with as moral failings. They are more aware of what men do and don’t like, but are encouraged to view giving men what they like as a sort of selling out. (At the same time, women actually LIKE positive attention from men, so you get bizarre behavior like women wearing revealing clothing and insisting that it’s “for them.”) This obviously sabotages relationships, but again, you can learn your way back out of it.
Finally, educated men and women both have problems with respecting the privacy of a relationship (although women have more trouble). So when they have problems, instead of dealing with them personally, they broadcast them widely - meaning that other people’s dysfunctions enter the relationship.
All this can be learned away. So, for the high-class young men looking for relationships, they should fix what problems they have in themselves and anticipate and work towards lessening them in women, probably starting with the public-private distinction.
But then again, who am I to say, I’m just another guy who just happens to know a lot of great guys my age (late 20s, early 30s) who found and married great women and are having kids with them. I guess that’s elite privilege? If so, I’ll happily bear that designation; why shouldn’t being better entail getting better things? I know some guys who aren’t doing so well in life who have worse women - is that supposed to surprise me?
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