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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2727 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 6, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Anyone use SAS direct attached storage at home? I want to retire a Synology used as bulk storage for my server, since it maxes at 4 Gbps ethernet. I could go with a cheap USB 3.1 gen2 10Gbps SATA enclosure, but it looks like I could get an enclosure with SAS backplane and connect the disks via SAS to SATA breakout cables, and supposedly, this will allow SAS disks to be used. I'm a little skeptical since I've never used the SATA breakout cables in this way, but since this would increase disk bandwidth by about an order of magnitude over USB I am thinking about trying it.

Does anyone have any good links to blogs or posts about how to use dating apps optimally? I figure someone has this stuff figured out

Respond to women in variable ratio intervals, and only in a way that increases their engagement.

Gwern has done the public service of archiving the old OKCupid data blog. Still the best resource online for how people actually use online dating, deleted for its honesty. You'll have to adapt that to swipe apps, of course, but a lot of food for thought.

Cred

Back when I was on the dating app roulette, I was told by female friends that I had a great profile. Other women have asked me 'how to find men like me' and I have been called a 'what a shame he's straight' by a gay man. I haven't been on the market for a couple of years, but the advice should still be valid.

Most important - Be recognizable

Women go through a million same looking profiles. The worst thing to be is unrecognizable and vanilla. Have at least 1 thing about you that stands out. Discussing dating profiles is a favorite past time for women. It is good be a certain type of guy. 'The chef', 'the fashionista', 'the salsa dancer'. If you're just 'a guy', you will fall through the cracks.

My dating profile photo checklist:

  • I have friends -> group photo (Ideally mixed gender)
  • I am in shape -> full body shot (clothed)
  • I am not ugly -> face closeup front
  • I can look like a fuck-boy like if you need me to
  • I have a good heart. (opposite of fuck boy - pet photos, fun uncle, belly laughs, family photos)
  • I do fitness stuff
  • I do fun stuff & have hobbies
  • I actually am 6 feet tall (I am 1 cm off but eh, close enough)

Cheat codes: Wield them as you see fit.

  • Women love pets
  • Women love men who cook
  • Women love men who love therapy
  • Women love men who are loved by women (sisters are okay)

Prompts:

  • People aren't creative. All your photo captions and prompt answers should reveal something about you that leads to an obvious comment from the woman. For me it was my cooking and hiking photos.
  • Have high coverage. Be concise, but signal different information each prompt.
  • Don't be too humble. You can be self-deprecating to counter-signal if your photos already position you as high-status. Otherwise, be earnest about your achievements.

Dos and Donts:

  • Avoid fishing photos. Just post a photo of you on a boat with friends instead. Same idea, different messaging.
  • If you are posting sports photos make them active & outdoors. Cheering for your favorite team in a crowd or playing the game with a jersey. Don't post photos in full-kit from the sofa.
  • Have a social presence. Instagram is ideal. Makes you look sociable. Be google searchable.
  • Be strategic about having weird hobbies on your profile. I like anime, but wouldn't dare put that on my profile. I am transparent about liking it when asked, but don't advertise for the first 2-ish dates.
  • I have been told that doing standup and having a podcast are the 2 biggest icks for women. (I have been seeding the possibility in my girlfriend for 2 years now, and she fake? threatens breakup every time. We'll get there)
  • If you are on the heavier side, then wear layers. Don't fake edit your photos. There are ways to look good even if you're heavy. I'd prefer those.
  • If you don't have good photos. Then pay to get good photos taken. THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL. YOU MUST HAVE GOOD PHOTOS.
  • Hair - be bald or make your hair look good. Don't go around trying to embarrassingly rescue your impending baldness. Get a good haircut. Pay up 50-70$ for a good barber once.
  • Facial hair - Be well groomed. I have the world's worst beard genes. I still managed to persevere through months of growing some density to maintain a #3 on my trimmer. Be clean shaven or grow a half-decent beard/stache. Do not post pubes on your face. Please.
  • Have 1 suit photo - Suits are a man's bikini. Insanely flattering for all body types. Full suit please.
  • Limit sunglasses and caps in your photos. Immediately raises flags for ugliness / baldness.

Useful reddit links:

Question:

How do you have so many photos of yourself? I have three photos a year taken of me. Are you taking loads of photos? Did you take a weekend photo shoot?

Ask nicely or bribe a friend who has a decent phone or camera. Unless you want to pay for a professional photographer.

(Girls have it so easy. Women be taking photos of each other.)

I love hosting events. I usually have candid photos from there. Hiking is my other main source. Gotta take a photo at the summit. Anything from the last 3 years is game. I was obnoxious about asking to be filmed when climbing just so I could get a cool jumping-photo. Was also obnoxious about asking to be filmed when playing music at a community event. Needed a playing-music photo.

In dating you have to be forward. Similarly, be forward about asking to have your photo taken at every social event. You only need 1-2 trust worthy friends who'd wingman for you. Trust me, they understand. We've all been there. In my experience, every friends group has a photography hobbyist. They will take your photo, develop it for you and send a perfectly edited photo for free. Find this person. You will never run out of photos.

If nothing else works, yes, I recommend a photo shoot.

Contrarian take: if your goal is to actually find a soul mate and not just a number of short flings, don't do this. Be yourself, aggressively. DO mention your less conventional hobbies like anime on your profile, unapologetically. Be creative and unique and weird, in a way that turns off almost everyone EXCEPT for that rare person who actually likes who you are.

I did this for several years, and 90%+ of the women I messaged ignored me completely. I barely got any responses, and the conversations I did have usually didn't lead anywhere since I was a weird goofball. And then a girl who had D&D listed in her bio responded positively to my D&D inspired pickup line and we dated for several years before eventually getting married. And now we stay at home playing board games and playing with cats instead of having to do stupid things like go hiking or eating at restaurants the way I would if I had managed to convince a normal girl to date me.

Your advice is excellent for maximizing engagement. But you will spend a lot of time dating a lot of average people who like average things if you take it too far. Obviously some of your advice is just general good advice for emphasizing your positive traits that you already have and doesn't run into this issue. But I think being authentic in a negative way (by normie standards) is actually useful to help filter out the normies and find someone else who shares your quirks.

I think this debate might be a question of satisficers vs optimisers/maximisers.

This is further complicated by the dual dating strategy of satisficing for short term while simultaneously maximising for long term (and maintaining the facade of not committing to either while remaining open to both).

This is still further complicated by dating questionnaires that focus on trivia and are trivially gameable. "Do you think it's okay to cheat on dating questionnaires? Yes/No". Hmmmmm... nnno. Wow, so match percentage.

D&D isn't weird anymore. I see tons of women's profiles mention D&D, and my photo of me at my weekly bar game with mixed genders gets me absolutely nowhere.

I partially disagree.

The goal of right-swipes is to avoid the serial killers. It is low-pass filter meant to remove the bad apples. Then, you find if they're your soul mate on the date. It's not that anime are a cringe hobby. It's that many men who mention anime as a hobby are underdeveloped manchilds. There are many exceptions, but women correctly assume that finding the needle in the haystack is a futile effort.

mention your less conventional hobbies like anime on your profile, unapologetically

Depends on how hot you are. Anyone who wants choice, assumes that they are hot enough to have choice. A normie should first get a bit of experience. Date around so you know how to get sufficient interest.

Remember, men do most of the swiping. This means that OP can always send a targeted 'unapologetic' message to a woman if they find this 'anime loving soul mate'. But for other women, they don't immediately put up red flags. The profile is a low-pass filter. The date is the high-pass filter.

I am aggressively myself after the first date. On a first date, both parties are too nervous. I still recommend being authentic on a first date. But have a peeling-the-onion approach to revealing aspects of yourself. Don't go in with the sledge-hammer. If you're meant to be soulmates with anime as a common hobby, then anime will come up whether you want to or not. But, if you're soul mates and she doesn't like anime, then aggressively shoe horning it in can set off alarms.

Now for the caveat. I recommend sprinkling 'dog whistles' in your profile. My linked spotify was full of odd genres that signaled my weirdness. If you're into anime, you can link some 'fear and loathing' or 'Nujabes'. If you have abs, it's okay to cosplay as Luffy from One Piece of Goku from Dragonball. You can wear Hokusai's great wave tshirts or a photo of you hiking Mt. Fuji. A keen Japano-phile will clock you right there. But, it won't turn-off the anime-ignorant. Just avoid posting photos at a manga-con or akibahara.

Your advice is excellent for maximizing engagement. But you will spend a lot of time dating a lot of average people who like average things if you take it too far

Fair

I still would avoid obvious icky hobbies on a dating profile. Anime has a very strong association with porn, child porn, and childishness. Video games tend to send immature and irresponsible signals. If you have a weird hobby that’s fairly active, creative, or social, fine. But the goal here is to get a woman to want to take a chance on you. It’s like searching for a job in a sense — anything that would make a woman hesitant to hit the “buy” button is probably not a good idea. One in a thousand find a gamer girl. But at the cost quite often of having hundreds of women see anime and gaming in the bio and deciding to not engage.

One in a thousand find a gamer girl. But at the cost quite often of having hundreds of women see anime and gaming in the bio and deciding to not engage.

This is the point. It's not that for each random woman who sees your profile you roll a random die and there's a 99% chance you lose her interest. It's that for each woman when she was born and grew up life rolled a random die and there's a 99% chance that she became the kind of person who would lose interest in a man who likes anime and video games. If you want to date a woman who hates anime and videogames then I suppose you might consider scaring her off to be a bad thing, but if you want to find that gamer girl then the normie woman is an obstacle. A waste of your time. Instead of spending hours, days, years of your life sending messages and spending time with women who would have been scared off by videogames and anime but you kept by playing it cool, you could instead scare them all off and then the only people left are the gamer girls.

You don't have time to date 1000 women. If you're some super hot gigachad I suppose you could if you go on a brand new date every day for three years without breaks or repeats. But realistically, that's way too many. But if you scare 99% of them off (and not randomly, you're scaring the worst 99% off) you DO have time to message and date the remaining 10 until you find the perfect one in a thousand.

But if you don’t get any hits or very few because your “about me” is full of anime and gaming, im assuming that this is a major part of your life, much like I’d assume that someone who mentions golf on their profile has golf as a major part of their life, and probably will spend most weekends on the course. Someone who’s into gaming enough to mention it on a dating profile is likely going to game at least 25 hours a week, and maybe more. If I’m looking for a person I might want to marry, I don’t see that in a guy who spends most of his free time with a controller in his hands. And I do like gaming, I just don’t want my life to consist of trying to squeeze in all the other stuff around the hobbies of gaming and anime.

Again, these are correct signals that I am sending intentionally. This IS a major part of my life. I DO spend at least 25 hours a week on anime and games. If you are looking to do "all the other stuff" that isn't gaming and anime and squeeze it around then you're not my 1 in 1000 and I don't want to marry you. That just sounds like a recipe for constant conflict and strife. While some amount of compromise is important in a relationship, and you should sometimes do things the other person wants to do for their sake, the less it's necessary because you both want the same things, the better. If one person expects to go out and do things all the time and the other wants to stay home all the time then at any point in time only one of them is getting their way. So if anyone sees this and realizes that I'm not the right person for them because I'm literally not the right person for them then good, we can both save some time and try to find someone more compatible. In practice, this did turn into me getting very few hits for precisely that reason. Most women saw my profile, made this assumption about me (correctly), they thought this was a negative trait, and then they didn't want to talk to me. Mission accomplished.

Because one did want to talk to me. Instead of dating and/or marrying someone like that, I found someone with whom I get to keep doing videogames and anime and my wife will do them with me. Well, she doesn't care for anime that much, but we play lots of games together. Sometimes we're just sitting next to each other playing completely separate games and she'll giggle as the monsters die and it's adorable. And sometimes she'll want to go somewhere and do something and I'll suck it up and go because it's not very often, because she's mostly like me and genuinely wants to be at home most of the time.

It ultimately comes down to how wide a net you're willing to case. Yes, if you're looking for someone who shares interests that 99% of women find unattractive (but not so unattractive as to be dealbreakers), and you aren't willing to date someone who doesn't share these interests, then just put it out there as a filter. If, however, like most people, you don't expect the person you're dating to like 100% of everything you like, then it's not worth scaring anyone off. Remember, these women have options, and the last thing you want to do is give them a reason to hit the dump button before making an attempt to get to know you. I've learned from my own habits that it doesn't take much to set this off. Not that it's necessarily anything negative, but that the profile provides so little information that I wouldn't even know where to start. You have to give me something to work with if you want me to start a conversation with you. If 99% of women aren't into anime or video games, and it isn't something that otherwise makes you look attractive, then even if it's ultimately neutral it's not doing much. And beyond the truly negative stereotypes, it signals that you're the kind of guy who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much.

There's a difference between someone sharing all of your interests, and someone who is willing to tolerate all of your interests. Even if they don't share the same hobbies, you don't want to date someone who fundamentally is unwilling to accept a part of you. If someone is going to be scared off by me liking anime, I want to scare them off instantly, not 5 dates later when they find out. Now, granted, there is some middle ground where some people might be willing to accept anime in someone who they already know is sane and not a pedophile but would screen it off on a stranger, but that still indicates some level of judgemental that I personally would rather filter out too.

And beyond the truly negative stereotypes, it signals that you're the kind of guy who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much.

Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family. When given the choice, we usually stay home and play games, where we both want to be.

Positives and negatives are subjective and high variance. And ultimately are scored from the single unique perspective of the person you end up with. They are not averaged. Your value as a romantic partner is not the average value ascribed to you by women collectively, but the value from the perception of the one person you actually end up with. So if you have niche interests and traits with high variance, where rather than everyone slightly disliking them, some people strongly dislike them and other rarer people strongly like them, then you want to filter for and find the people who like them, and then they become positive traits.

I understand what you're saying, and I'm happy for you, but GP was giving generalized advice. Like I said, most people aren't that selective. I can't imagine giving someone dating advice that consists of "list all your fringe interests that won't impress women at best and turn them off at worst and plug away for years with little success in the hopes of attracting your one true love". It's not what most people are looking for. And while I understand not wanting to get too involved before finding out it's a dealbreaker, it's not like you're going to keep it a secret. Like I said in my post, when you're online dating, you are your profile, and you're going to be your profile until she meets you in person. The profile is to get your foot in the door; after you actually meet, you're a real person, and discussing hobbies and interests is fair game for a first date, and you can tell her whatever you want on that front. And if you think that one date is too much of an investment to be worth the risk, then online dating just isn't for you, period.

I can't imagine giving someone dating advice that consists of "list all your fringe interests that won't impress women at best and turn them off at worst and plug away for years with little success in the hopes of attracting your one true love".

Nobody is giving that advice. They are saying "if you like something, it's fine to put it in your profile", because they believe (correctly imo) that those who are put off by that are people you don't want to date anyway. There's no need to obsessively list everything which might be a red flag for someone somewhere, the point is to just be yourself and not worry about those who don't like that.

Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family.

I thought my girlfriend and I were the most introverted couple out there, but we like going to restaurants and visiting scenic sites. Though I admit, there's a lot of "watch youtube on the couch."

It's interesting that a lot of dating advice is "be attractive" "be extraverted", and introverts have a hard time dating. I wonder at times how introverted women are meeting men. Perhaps the answer is "they aren't"; I have a theory that introverted women make up a majority of the "women going their own way" and not dating. I don't know that I've ever dated, or seriously considered dating, or asked out, a woman I would consider extraverted, and I wonder at times whether this contributed to my limited success back when I was on the market.

Which is weird because you would think that online dating would be the perfect environment for introverts. I never was able to work up the courage to ask out a girl in real life. I could never quite tell when it would be creepy and unwelcome and when it would be fine, so I always erred on the side of caution. But online dating everyone is there explicitly for the purpose of meeting people and can ghost you the instant they feel uncomfortable, so I didn't have to worry about that and could just be honest about being attracted to people. And can do it from the comfort of my home and not have to go outside and meet people in real life and do public social stuff with lots of people when I'm trying to have a one on one conversation.

Maybe the issue is that most of the shy introverted women get scared off by the tons of attention and unsolicited dick pics from creepy guys even online, and then the shy introverted men are left in a sea of women who have thick enough skins to stay anyway.

Yes, if you're looking for someone who shares interests that 99% of women find unattractive (but not so unattractive as to be dealbreakers), and you aren't willing to date someone who doesn't share these interests, then just put it out there as a filter.

I think that's true, and there's also another filter aspect to consider. If you don't care whether a partner shares your interest in X, but you require them to be ok with your interest in X, then you should also put it as a filter. Doing so avoids wasting your time on a relationship that wasn't going to work out anyway as soon as the girl says "I think anime is icky, stop watching it" and you refuse to give it up.

It's anime, a perfectly mainstream form of entertainment. Some women may find it off-putting, yes, but it's not like having kids, or smoking, or religion, or that kind of thing that you should tell someone up front. Most women probably wouldn't care if they found out, it's just not something that adds to your attractiveness. Worst case scenario, you can bring it up on the first date, or when you're texting back and forth. The point is just that it's not something that you want to waste valuable profile real estate on, to increase your chances of getting a foot in the door.

I just don't think that there's a loss here. Profile space is not scarce, so if you're worried that someone will find it a dealbteaker then put it in. It's better to go on zero dates than on one date which goes nowhere.

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Exactly, until they have had a chance to actually interact meaningfully with you, women are going to be maximally uncharitable with anything you say on your profile. Because they can afford to, as "men willing to message them on apps" are not a scarce ressource at all for them. So if you mention anything about anime in your profile, especially if it's one with limited real estate (I don't know how Hinge works specifically), then they will assume that this means anime is a massive part of your identity, so their mental image of you will shift to that of a neckbeard weeb with waifu bodypillows..

It's the same as with the politics we were discussing in this thread too. Until there's a bit of time/emotional investment from her part, you want to avoid giving her any reason to reject you; because as far as she knows, somewhere in her inbox is a message from her perfect 10, 6'3, 8" cock, liberal surgeon/prince who shares all the same interests as her, so why would she waste any time trying to understand what kind of human being someone with any yellow flags at all is like?

Once she's met you, or had some meaninful communication with you that humanises you, that changes, of course.

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I still would avoid obvious icky hobbies on a dating profile. Anime has a very strong association with porn, child porn, and childishness.

This take is so heavily out of date I'm wondering if it was frozen in about 2011 and just recently thawed out and revived.

Anime fans aren't relegated to 4chan these days.

One of the most popular series on Netflix in 2022 was an anime series tied into the Cyberpunk:2077 universe.

Netflix has been producing a TON of original anime series themselves. They literally revived a series from 2001 to help fill out their roster.

Which should tell you they're finding viewership for this stuff, and not just among loli enthusiasts.

Now, you might be correct as to how the older generations view anime, but there's probably a similar number of female weebs as male weebs about in the younger gens. Now, if you're looking for someone who is NOT a weeb, then yeah, maybe exclude it.

Even if that take is outdated, liking anime and video games isn't something that women are going to find attractive. It's neutral at best, and you don't want to waste your limited real estate conveying information that isn't going to move the needle in your favor. A lot of guys make profiles that seem tailored toward impressing other guys, but girls do the same thing as well. I guess the female equivalent would be mentioning that they like reality TV. What guy is going to find a girl more attractive after learning that she's really into Real Housewives? It isn't something most guys are going to look forward to watching together, it doesn't make her seem more interesting, and it may give the impression that she's kind of stupid.

Even if that take is outdated, liking anime and video games isn't something that women are going to find attractive.

As stated by @MathWizard up there, if you want someone with similar interests to you, you gotta put it out there somehow.

And as per usual, if you're hot, you could straight up say you're into lolicon and hentai and you'd still get likes.

So are you optimizing for hookups, or something resembling a soulmate?

In the grand scheme, its probably not changing your odds much in aggregate, but somewhat increasing the chances of finding someone who likes what you like.

You don't have to have the same interests as your soulmate. You have to get along and cooperate on tasks and share values.

The happiest couples are ones who know when they bore each other to tears, not ones who never have to worry about it. Because the latter are imaginary.

You'd like to find one that doesn't find your interests repugnant, though.

And again, why optimize to compete for the same limited pool of women that every other guy is now optimizing for.

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It's not about hookups vs. soulmate. It's about whether or not you expect a soulmate to have certain interests. If the answer is yes, you only want to be with someone who likes anime as much as you do and is attracted to guys who like anime, then I agree that you would have to put it out there. But that's not the way it is with most things or people. Just look at how much attention to sports men pay vs. women. Or woodworking. Or hunting. Or any number of other hobbies or interests. You can't expect your romantic partner to have 100% of the same interests you do, and most married couple I know aren't like that, right down to my parents. So yes, it's possible that you can be really into anime and have a girl who knows nothing about it and rolls her eyes at the idea of it and still have a successful relationship.

Indeed, once you clear the dozen other hurdles and expectations she'll have too.

I'm just pointing out that if you optimize for the 'wrong' thing, you could end up in a local maxima that gets you more likes in general, but actually filters out the women you'd really be happy to have.

And hey, if you get one and have to 'settle' a bit, its not so bad.

But if EVERYONE is optimizing for the same set of things, and the pool of women is fixed, you're really just creating a zero sum game that means you can get nothing at all despite (because of?) giving up on the things you really like.

I repeat, the pool of women is mostly fixed, so why do you want to optimize for the same thing every other guy is optimizing for?

It's been a while since I've been on the dating market (10 years, yikes), but +1 to women love pets. My first profile pic on okcupid back in the day was a photo of me and my puppy the day I got her. It definitely helped me drum up interest that I don't think I would've gotten otherwise.

Use good photos of yourself. Digging any deeper than that will make you go insane. Most people here are reasonably-high decouplers, but it hits differently when it’s your appearance and your social status and your geneline at stake.

What @Rov_Scam said, but with one pointer: as noted by someone else offering similar advice back when we were on Reddit, it's important to learn the dating app "meta" in the city in which you reside. In some cities Tinder is the "hookup" app and Hinge is the "serious relationship" app; in other cities, Tinder is the hookup and serious relationship app, and Hinge is unheard of. On a first pass my assumption is that Tinder is the hookup app and Hinge and Bumble are the serious relationship apps, but this may vary a lot from place to place. I met my girlfriend via Tinder, and I know at least three married couples who met via Tinder.

Based on friends who have all gotten long-term relationships from the apps, combined with my own experience, here's what I can tell you:

  1. Use Hinge, and nothing else. The quality of people on there is much better and the other apps are garbage.
  2. Use good photos; don't just pick the six most recent photos with you in them. The first one should be a good picture that shows what you actually look like. One picture should be of you in a group, so they can see that you actually have friends, but more than one creates confusion as to who you actually are. It also shouldn't be one of you and your ex, and ideally shouldn't include anyone better looking than you are. This also shouldn't be your first picture, and should be somewhere down in the order so the only people who will see it will be those intrigued enough to scroll down that far. At least a few pictures should be purpose-shot. You don't have to hire a photographer, but a friend who knows how to work a real camera with a long lens will help. Don't include too many pictures where you're wearing a hat or sunglasses as this makes it hard for to see what you look like. Some of the pictures should be "action shots" of you engaging in hobbies so they can see that you're interesting rather than read about it. Make sure you're smiling and showing your teeth. A lot of guys tend to smirk or look overly serious, and women don't like that. Women also don't care about cars so shots of you posing in front of your Mustang or WRX just make you look like a douche. The only exception would be if you own a Lambo or something and want to attract women who are after your money. Don't include pictures of you with deer you shot or fish you caught. No pictures of you shirtless or flexing. Selfies are bad. Bathroom selfies are worse. Bathroom selfies of you flexing are worst. You can include a Linkedin style professional photo if you have one, but I'd save this for last.
  3. Fill out the profile completely or almost completely. The purpose is to make you look like an attractive, well-rounded person. Include your job (unless you're a doctor, which will get you more matches but from women looking for guys with money), especially if you have a good professional job. If you're working as a bartender but graduated from college, it's okay to just list the college. It's also okay to just list the job if you're paranoid about them being able to figure out who you are (which can be surprisingly easy). It's fine not to list your religion if you don't want to, but your politics are liberal. Most young women in urban areas simply won't date Trump supporters, and if you say you're moderate or other or nothing they'll just think you're a conservative who doesn't want to admit it. Your height is an inch taller than you actually are, unless you're like 6'5" or something. Unless you're obviously black or East Asian your race is white. It's fine to omit one or two of these but if you omit too many the profile looks incomplete and it makes you look either uninteresting or like you have something to hide.
  4. If you have children, say you have children. If you don't, say you don't. Omitting this does you no good and can fuck things up. Women who aren't open to dating guys with kids won't risk it on guys who they don't know that about if they have other options. If you do have kids and they find out later it might be a dealbreaker. As far as intentions, be specific with those as well; if you want kids say you want kids, if you don't say you don't, and if you're open to the idea but not committed one way or the other say that. "Not sure yet" may be an option if you're under 30, but in general you'd just be turning people off since a girl who wants kids isn't going to be happy if the guy decides he doesn't want them after she's been dating him for two years. You're looking for a long-term relationship; if you're looking for a hookup you shouldn't be on Hinge. Saying "life partner" may be fine but could come across as a bit intense. Saying "figuring out my dating goals" makes you look confused and indecisive; I always assume people who write this are dipping their toe in the water after a divorce and will probably be flaky. Saying "long, open to short" or the reverse makes it look like you're either taking what you can get or are looking for a hookup but don't want to admit it.
  5. Select your prompts carefully, and include as much information as possible. I don't have a list of prompts at my fingertips, but you should be able to discern which ones actually say something about you and which ones don't. You only get three of these so use them wisely; saying that you order the loaded french fries for the table doesn't add anything to the discussion. On the other hand, saying what you do on a typical Sunday communicates what you like to do when you're not working or running errands, and saying what you could do together communicates what you have to offer in a relationship. Avoid one-word answers and non-answers, which are things that apply to pretty much everybody. So, you like tacos, travel, and music? Great, so does everybody else. Give her a reason to date you over the masses with generic responses. Even if she doesn't like all the things you like, it will at least make you seem interesting.
  6. Avoid using negative prompts. The last thing you want to do is give someone a reason not to match with you. If something is a serious dealbreaker, Hinge has a match note feature where it will come up when you match and give them the option to back out. I've only seen this once, and it was just a generic thing about actually being serious about starting a long-term relationship. But unless something is a serious no-go I wouldn't bother; you only get three prompts, so use them wisely. Also, and this probably goes without saying, but there are a bunch of prompts that mention therapy that shouldn't be used by anybody.
  7. The general theme of this list so far is that your profile will make or break your success. Six photos and three prompts are the only information the person on the other end is going to have when deciding to make a match. This is valuable real estate and you don't want to waste any of it. I've talked to a lot of female friends about this, and they're pretty unanimous and unequivocal about their complaints. It's been said over and over again about how women have it much easier on these apps then men, and while that's true to an extent, women have their own frustrations. Sure, a woman may be flooded with likes, but a large percentage of those are going to be from guys who have half-assed profiles that don't give them any usable information and another large percentage is going to be from guys who put some effort into making profiles that seem designed to appeal to other guys (though women are equally guilty of both of these). If you're not supermodel hot, seeing one of these profiles will make her hit the dump button without a second thought, and if you are supermodel hot she'll think about it and come to the conclusion that you're a fuck boy looking to score.
  8. No that we've gotten through the profile, you have to actually use the app. First, you won't get many likes, and the ones you do get will be from women you probably aren't interested in dating. Hinge isn't a swiping app like Tinder where you have to randomly match with someone. You send out likes to profiles you're interested in and the other person can choose to match or reject. Like in real life, men have to take all (or at least most) of the initiative—men match by sending out likes, women match by reviewing incoming likes. The only women who normally send out likes are the ones who aren't receiving a sufficient number of quality likes themselves. The rest are either women who happen to really like your profile or women who just got on the app and haven't yet realized they don't have to send likes out. The likes women send out are generally to men who are supermodel hot. This has created an interesting dynamic where men rarely get any incoming likes and don't match with the ones they do get, while women may send out a bunch of likes but rarely get matches from those.
  9. When you send out a like, Hinge gives you the option of including a message along with it. You should always do this. Remember, women are getting a lot of incoming likes, and most of these won't have messages. You're going to have to start a conversation eventually, so you might as well do it now, and it will at least give the woman a reason to check out the profile rather than just hit the dump button. And these messages should be well thought out and have something to do with the profile, preferably one of the prompts. This shows that you actually read the profile and are taking an interest rather than just clicking on a pretty face. And sending messages like "Cute" does nothing to start the conversation and doesn't demonstrate anything—if you didn't think she was cute you probably wouldn't have reached out in the first place. Some guys online have said that this does nothing but make them waste time thinking of something to say to someone who probably won't respond, and that they get comparable results by not saying anything and only putting in effort if there's actually a match, but this seems lazy to me. Again, most guys won't say anything, and you need to do whatever you can to make yourself stand out.
  10. When you actually get a match, respond promptly, and try to follow up your response with a question to keep the conversation going. Remember, women have an easier time getting matches, and you don't want to give them any reason not to respond. Don't be afraid to go back to the profile to get more source material, but also don't be afraid to get into things that aren't covered by the profile. Put some effort into this and don't slip into idle small talk; "How was your day?" isn't going to elicit any useful information for you and isn't going to communicate anything to them. Don't communicate during the work day unless you want them to think that you don't work very hard. Weekends are trickier; remember, you're trying to give the impression that you lead a busy, interesting life, and messaging on Saturday night or a beautiful Sunday afternoon doesn't give that impression. That being said, if it's a miserable day or they message you first, don't be afraid to respond on a weekend, and don't wait all weekend to respond to a message you got after work on Friday. Pick your shots.
  11. Don't be afraid to respond promptly. You don't have to check the app every 15 minutes, but you should be logging in at least once a day, preferably not late at night. If a girl is slow to respond it can be tempting to use that as a license to stall yourself, but remember, she probably has other options, and isn't going to keep talking to a guy who doesn't seem that interested. Sometimes you'll catch her on the app at the same time as you and you'll get a real-time conversation going, but mostly you'll get one exchange per day, and sometimes you'll respond one day and she the next, and you the next, etc. Sometimes things move faster, and people get busy and don't check the app for a while. Also, give her at least 48 hours to respond, but after this don't be afraid to double text. Sometimes people are just busy and forget, or possibly you did something to make them think you weren't that interested. I wouldn't worry about this making it look like you're needy. She might not be that interested, but you have to take all the shots you can at this point. If she still doesn't respond, but hasn't unmatched, at that point I'll wait until it's been two weeks since the last communication and send another message. After two weeks the app hides the dead conversations, but if there's another message it will unhide it and get you back on the radar. Usually it's a lost cause at that point, but you never know. Some people have things come up that make them drop everything, and by the time they get back on they won't respond to your message because they think the ship has sailed. I take the view that if they haven't unmatched me or otherwise communicated that they're not interested that I'm still at least marginally in the running and it's something worth pursuing.
  12. You should aim to have about three active matches going at once. Less is fine if you aren't getting any, but any more than that is wasting your time. Trying to keep a dozen conversations going at once is going to get pretty unwieldy pretty fast; it's time-consuming, and you're inevitably going to be more interested in some of the matches than others. There are obvious exceptions. Sometimes you'll get nothing for a while and get a flood all at once. Sometimes you'll have a full plate and more will trickle in, or conversations you thought were dead will get unexpectedly revived by the other party. Think of it as a podium with a first, second, and third. Any other active matches are off the podium, and the ones that have been around longer should be closer to the top. Everyone else you may be matched with is an off-podium reserve, and may include both active, unintentional matches and dead conversations who haven't unmatched you for some reason. If something changes with one of the finalists, knock them off the podium and rearrange things accordingly. Also, once you have a full podium, you should stop sending out likes. The last thing you want is women you might be interested getting short shrift due to bad timing and dipping out due to lack of attention on your part.
  13. Don't string along those lower in the running. This can be tempting, either because you have limited time for dating you don't want to waste on them, and you don't want to be on date two with your third place before you've gotten to date one with first place, or whatever. Women aren't stupid; if a conversation goes on too long without you asking them out, they're going to get the picture and will stop wasting their time.
  14. To that effect, don't let conversations drag on with anyone for too long without asking them out. This is obviously going to depend on the frequency of messaging, but unless there are unusual circumstances, you shouldn't go more than a week, and if you're getting (and sending) prompt responses it should be a lot less than that. In-app messaging should be used to establish rapport and show interest, and that's it. It's hard to get a feel for when a good time to ask someone else is, but you'll quickly get the idea. If the topic you're discussing is played out and you're scrambling to change the subject it's a good sign. If the conversation is flowing on multiple subjects it's a good sign. If the conversation is dying and you can't think of a response, it's a good sign. Sometimes you'll ask someone out because you're excited to meet her, and other times you'll ask someone out because you're bored with the conversation and are willing to take a chance that she'll be more interesting in person. If I get an unexpected response from a months-dead conversation, I'll usually just ask her out right there because I'm not interested in wasting my time again. As for what to say, keep it simple. "It's been nice chatting and if you're interested in hanging out let me know when you're available" is as good as anything. You don't have to propose anything right away, though if you're not available certain days, let her know. Sometimes people will be good with responding but get cold feet when it comes time for action. Usually it means they were just stringing you along as a plan B. I'll usually give them longer to respond to a date request, like a week, because I don't know if they're trying to figure out a schedule or something. If they still haven't responded, they're going to keep getting weekly messages from me until they either respond or unmatch. I can understand losing interest and not responding while in the messaging phase, but if there's an offer on the table, I think they should either accept it or reject it. There's no penalty for persistence, so there's no reason not to.
  15. As for what to do, I usually prefer drinks or coffee for a first date, preferably on a weeknight. Dinner is a traditional date option, but doesn't work as well for online dates. The cost of dining out makes it expensive for something that probably isn't going anywhere, and can attract the kind of woman who just wants a free meal. More importantly, there are disadvantages due to timing, as there is no date where dinner is the appropriate length. If it's going poorly you're stuck there til the end. If it's going well you're going to have to find a bar or somewhere else to go afterward, because the 60–90 minutes a restaurant meal takes isn't really enough time. If you're at a bar or coffee shop you can linger as long as you want or beat a retreat if necessary. For what it's worth, I only went out to dinner on a first date once, and only because the girl backed me into it, and she ended up being a bitch (not to me, but you can usually tell). I also don't like "activity dates" for a first date, since they tend to be similarly expensive and don't give time to interact. The purpose of a first date should be conversation, and I don't want to spend money to not talk to someone.
  16. When you're on the date, be yourself. If you end up getting involved, she's going to meet the real you eventually, so don't waste her and your time putting on a facade. If things went well and you'd like to see her again, let her know that you had a good time and text her the next day asking her out again. If you don't want to see her again, tell her you had a good time and leave it at that. Giver her a day or so to reflect on things. A decade ago, with IRL girls I already knew, I would tell them I'd like to see them again at the end of date one, but I don't do this anymore, because it puts them on the spot. I said this to the last IRL girl I dated, who was ten years younger than me, and she seemed uncomfortable and gave a noncommittal answer which ruined the rest of my night and the next two days. Imagine how surprised I was when she agreed to a second date after I asked her out again. Which brings me to another thing—I don't know if you're familiar with the "three day rule", but if you are, forget it. It may have some applicability depending on your age, but most mature women don't expect you to play games. Give them time to reflect, but don't feel the need to drag it out. If she agrees to a second date, it's going to be because she's interested in you, not because you used proper dating technique.
  17. Don't get discouraged. It will probably take I while for you to get matches, and you're probably going to be plugging away at it for months before you get off the app. This is normal for everyone. If you aren't getting matches after a month, then you need to take a serious look at your profile and make an adjustment. Also, keep in mind that these are real people, and treat them like you'd want to be treated. Online dating is similar to the internet at large, where people use the nature of the medium as an excuse for shitty behavior they wouldn't do in the real world. Try not to be one of these people, but don't hold it against other people. People will abruptly cut off conversations, but not unmatch you. People will cancel or reschedule dates at the last minute. People will take forever to respond without an apology or explanation for the delay. People will match with you but never talk to you. You'll meet people who text really well but in person have the personality of a manilla envelope taped to a beige wall. You'll have dates that you think went awesome with someone who doesn't want to see you again. You'll have dates that you think went terribly but you'll get a second one out of nowhere.
  18. There are a lot of people online who will tell you that this is impossible if you aren't a male model with an MD. Ignore them. I have numerous friends who have met long-term partners on Hinge, and none of them are exactly Adonis. None of them ended up with women below the standard of what I'd expect, and most of them are dating (or married) above what I'd expect. Also don't believe the people who tell you that since the apps have an incentive to keep you single they're specifically designed not to work. While this theory sounds plausible, there will never be an app that works so well that a major market will run out of single customers. There are definitely some weird idiosyncrasies and glitches, but by and large, the apps do what they say they do.
  19. Don't, under any circumstances, pay for this. Some people are convinced that the apps are designed to keep people paying, and that they won't work unless you pay. As I said, they work as advertised. Paying gives you access to features that are of dubious benefit. For instance, getting unlimited likes per day may seem like a good thing (the free version limits you to around five), but the consequence of this is that you end up burning through the local dating pool before you've had time to optimize your profile. Roses are a scam; don't bother with them, even the free one you get a week. Filters may have some use, but not for what they charge. Profile boosts are pointless for men, who don't need more people seeing their profile for reasons stated above. These features are window dressing for their real purpose, which is to attract the kind of undateable whales with bad profiles who are convinced that their lack of success is due to them not paying enough money.
  20. Beyond this, I can't really give you advice. The first step is creating a profile that is likely to get you matches, and the second step is managing your matches so that you can get dates. During this period, you basically are your profile, which is why the profile is so important. After you meet, though, you transform into a real person, and so does she, and now anything I can tell you is just basic dating advice you can get anywhere else.

Best of luck to you.

I wound down my Hinge account because I stumbled into a promising relationship with a girl I knew IRL, but this rings true for me. At the time I wrapped things up, I was getting enough dates with women that I was excited to meet without being overwhelmed by the volume, and had to disappoint several decent-sounding women before I deleted.

Seconding the recommendation to use positive, information-dense prompts. The poll option on your profile is particularly good for this, as it lets you put three positive aspects of yourself into a single widget.

On messaging: here are some decent templates. https://killyourinnerloser.com/tinder-guide-3/#chapter-1-templates
I like these because they push inexorably towards a date, but I had more success not following them than forcing the conversation back onto those rails. Unlike the author of that series, I was looking for an LTR, not to get laid as frequently as possible. But the permission to always move towards a date (if not directly), and to be a little bit sexual and direct, was very useful in setting my intentions on the platform.

Also, Hinge has capped the number of open conversations on a user's account. This is a good thing, as it forces both men and women to either get to the point and arrange a date, or to unmatch and move on.

On getting matched from your likes: I never could tell if Hinge used a stack or a queue for incoming matches. It might show the newest incoming likes first and then maintain a queue after that or something, I dunno. But it often happened that I would get a slow rise in matches coming in a few weeks after I started, usually around the time I began to despair. Have patience.

OP should also think about approaching women in real life. A lot of them complain on the apps that they only have accounts because nobody talks IRL any more.

I keep thinking that eventually I will start dating, but this list, despite being good advice, looks like a gigantic pain in the ass. Why is it like this? Will it ever not be like this? I don't want to do this shit. What if I just never did it and stayed single for the rest of my life? What if I got in a pretend gay relationship? Fuck this gay earth!

Dating apps are still optional. You can meet people through partying or general friend groups and depending on the region that is still somewhat the default. There are many cross-sex hobbies you can use as a starting point. Work has gotten quite complicated, so I wouldn't advice it, but some people still manage somehow.

But generally, women are picky & fickle and always will be. They want to see social proof that you're great, as a partner, as a worker, as a friend, as a father, and their default is rejection.

It's like this because you're in one of the rare online venues where thoroughness is rewarded, and the parent parent parent culture of LessWrong seeded ours with norms around writing massive walls of text.

Most of GP's advice is about not shooting yourself in the foot. How not to get your likes ignored. How not to have a conversation fizzle out. etc. Get to the date and enjoy spending time with women, even if they're not the women you'll end up dating long-term or marrying.

Or you could just attempt The Hock, I guess?

Or you could just attempt The Hock, I guess?

Chuckled. Anyone have updates on Skookum? I feel a lot of time has passed. If he were going to Hock it now is prime Hock time.

A question on Manifold was resolved in the negative, and thankfully not because he died in an anonymous patch of the Alaskan wilderness:

He says he's no longer actively planning any preparations, so I think I'll go ahead and resolve this NO. But he says he's still "kinda thinking" about doing it next winter, so I might make a new market then if anything ends up coming to fruition.

Thank you. Why in the world is he dead set on winter? Assuming it's not all posturing, which of course it may be.

I can only assume that his mind latched onto the most extreme "solution" to the extreme "problem" with which he diagnosed himself.

I encounter a very specific problem in the messaging stage where I'll ask someone out, they'll say yes, then ghost the day of the date. This happens more often than dates actually happen.

A few years ago, they'd cancel and reschedule repeatedly until I got the hint and stopped bothering them. Now they just ghost.

Speaking of, a few years ago, I actually got matches and occasionally received likes from women who were attractive enough. Now I live in an empty soul-crushing hell, despite having lost weight and gained muscle since then.

Depressed quibbles: How is stand-up an ick? multiple times in IRL conversations, women will out of nowhere ask me if I'm a comedian (I always say "no, I'm just like this"). I've done an open-mic set once or twice and killed it, it's something I keep on trying to get myself to do again, now apparently it's an ick? "Oh, only once? You should do it more, you're so funny." I guess I was right to not believe her.

Also, bartending? I thought the entire point of being a bartender is to get laid?

I thought bartender or stand-up was being interpreted as 'poor'. Like how sometimes people say self-employed when they mean unemployed. Or how women are plus-size, curvy, big-boned rather than fat.

I don't entirely know how to explain the behavior of certain people online, but I have my theories. I think some people have a tendency to be agreeable and avoid confrontation even if it's texting with a stranger, and if they get cold feet for whatever reason it's easier to just ignore the situation or come up with an excuse than it is to be honest. The polite thing to do here is to lie in the bed you made, go on the date, and if he asks you out again say you had a good time but aren't interested in pursuing things further. I've had cancellations before, but most of them have come a couple days before the scheduled date, which give me the opportunity to make other plans, or have been quickly rescheduled and gone off, or both. I was only ghosted once day-of, about ten minutes before I had to leave the house, and it pissed me off to no end. Basically we had been ironing out the details for several days, and when I got out of the shower to check for any messages I had a notification but when I tried to open it I had been unmatched. Apparently she thought that I'd see the message, not realizing that unmatching me prevented this. In any event, not knowing for sure what had happened, I felt compelled to go to the location anyway on the off chance that there had been some mistake or glitch and she showed up, as unlikely as that was, because in no instance will I be responsible for standing somebody up. I had already found her Facebook page through some mild "research" and was tempted to send out a message under my real name expressing my disappointment that someone 37-years-old would be so immature and have such disrespect for somebody else's time, but I wisely decided against it.

How is stand-up an ick?

I wasn't the guy who posted that, but the problem isn't so much stand-up itself as it is putting it on your profile. The issues with stand-up are two-pronged: First, the vast, vast majority of stand-up comedians are bad. Second, bad stand-up comedy fails harder and more spectacularly than other forms of public entertainment. Bad musical and theatrical performances draw polite applause. Bad comedic performances do not draw polite laughter. Laughter is a visceral experience that can't be credibly faked. Imagine dating a girl who sings badly in community musical theater and drags you to one of here shows. You may have to bite your lip but you can make it through. Now imagine she drags you to her stand-up show, and you don't find anything she says remotely funny. She's going to notice that you aren't laughing, and it's going to be especially noticeable if nobody else in the audience is laughing either. Bad stand-up comedy in cringeworthy in a way that other things done badly can't approach, and the sight of a comedian truly dying to the point that you're expecting crickets after every punchline is physically uncomfortable.

I wouldn't say there's anything particularly wrong with doing stand-up on occasion at an open mic, but putting it on your profile when you aren't doing it for a living suggests it's a more central part of your personality than it probably should be. Part of the issue with this and podcasts are that anyone can ostensibly do them without any obvious talent. By way of analogy, being in a horrible band you're totally serious about at least requires the ability to play an instrument to a passable degree. Now compare this to those people who take karaoke way too seriously. Most of these people sing passably well but wouldn't be allowed anywhere near a recording studio, yet they always pick songs nobody's heard of because they think they're going to bring down the house. One guy sang some lame Josh Groban song that sounded like "O Canada". One woman preceded her off-key caterwauling by telling everybody she was enrolled in a contest to win $10,000. No that she won the contest, that she entered the contest. Think of it like Disney. If you find out the girl you're dating likes Disney, then maybe you can deal with it; it's a popular studio. But that's different from the girl who puts a picture of her in mouse ears in front of Cinderella castle on her dating profile.

Also, bartending? I thought the entire point of being a bartender is to get laid?

That was a stand-in for barista or cashier or parking lot attendant or the kind of other jobs that people with college degrees may do while they're looking for an actual career. Women with professional jobs are going to wonder what the deal is with a college-educated person working a job that decidedly doesn't require a degree. Better to explain it in person.

There's a lot of good advice in here, but I feel like misrepresenting your politics would cause more problems than it solves. If a girl is so hyper-liberal she will reject anyone who has the faintest whiff of being conservative (even to the point she will reject people who say they are moderate!), I think she's going to leave you as soon as she finds out you aren't the liberal you claimed you were. Maybe not if you're Chad Thundercock and she just can't bring herself to give up the good D, but I also doubt that such a Chad needs advice in the first place because he's swimming in women.

I think the main reason to hide your power level in this situation is that majority of women, especially in cities, are going to be at least tepidly liberal, probably just fully in line with mainstream liberalism. Liberal bubbles are extremely strong and their media dominance allows them to pretty much never have to meaningfully engage with opposing opinions; from your average city liberal's perspective, conservatives or anyone more conservative than maintstream neo-liberalism are either willingly ignorant morons or hateful.

If you can first make her realize that you are neither of those things, if you lead with the "actually a smart and caring guy" part and then reveal you're also moderate/conservative, then there's a pretty ok chance you'll burst her bubble. If you lead with the moderate/conservative, you'll likely just bounce right off.

I see what you're saying... I guess it just seems implausible to me that anyone except a diehard true believer is going to filter out even the most tepid signs of conservatism (as mentioned in the OP). And for someone like that, they aren't going to accept anyone less committed than they are. But if indeed there are otherwise moderate women who are filtering so strongly, then I agree that hiding your power level could work.

Women seem to want to use the precious space in their Hinge profiles to mention they like tacos and how much they think Black Lives Matter. I also see lots of "you better also be an anti-capitalist leftist socialist" stuff.

I'm sure IRL they manage to ignore or not notice the lack of frothing leftism in potential partners, but on Hinge they're very much into superficial ideological compliance.

I personally hate how much of peoples' personalities have been eaten by politics. I also find that the more rabidly leftist a woman is, the more likely she is to treat me like garbage.

To be clear, I wasn't trying to suggest that OP misrepresent himself, as I don't know what his politics are, but I was merely stating a fact: Politics aren't immutable, and if you want to maximize your success, you have to be some flavor of what can plausibly be described as liberal. I'd say that if you live in a mid-size metro area, 80%–85% or attractive, professional, interesting women are going to be liberal. Hell, at least half of the self-identified Christians I've seen have identified as liberal. Very few will be openly conservative, a few will be moderate, and the rest will omit the information entirely, but usually those who omit it entirely often aren't one's I'd be inclined to message otherwise.

Remember, these women have more options, and the last thing you want to do is give them a reason to hit the dump button. When there are plenty of liberal men out there, it's relatively unlikely that they're going to waste their time on someone who might have voted for Trump. And let's be honest, it's about Trump more than anything else; you can have traditionally conservative opinions out the wazoo but as long as you can genuinely say you hate Trump you'll have a fighting chance. If you want to use the apps as a conservative you can try, but you might as well wear pro wrestling t-shirts in all your pictures while you're at it.

This was hard for me to accept when I was dating, but accept it I ultimately did; it's true and you're right to point it out. I eventually resolved this for myself by leaving the apps and going back to the old-fashioned way, as I concluded through years of experience that I myself was not willing to partner up with someone with such divergent values. In the past I was occasionally able to pull liberal girls closer to the center or right, but I am much happier to finally be with an actual conservative; it is a great blessing to not constantly be hiding my power level anymore.

Very helpful, thanks!

Great advice list! Couldn't have said it better myself. Ultimately the overarching goal is communicating that you're a well-rounded and well-adjusted guy, everything you do on these apps should be done with that in mind and your advice goes a long way towards giving tips as to how to do so.

I don't use and never have used apps for various reasons (mostly age) but this is a very detailed post of reasonable advice, good on you taking the time.

Edit: Age and (obviously) marriage.

What are you optimizing for.

Also no, nobody has a strategy that works consistently and the dating apps themselves are very motivated to shut one down if it arose.

They're gamified to all hell so its really like asking someone for tips on roulette or slots.

This statistics-laden article is applicable to Duolicious, a free (gratis and libre) dating website recently developed by a 4channer.

Unfortunately, the only person on that app within a 100 miles of me is Dante from DMC, and the other stuff from the rec isn’t generalizable to other apps. Thanks for the suggestion tho

Interestingly, women’s reply rate is highest for bios which are only slightly negative, whereas men’s reply rate is highest for very negative bios.

Cursed stat. They complain about the men with the nasty bios and the disparaging comments yet reward that with extra attention.

Although I'd be very surprised if that was what led to actual dates and even MORE surprised if it led to relationships.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up With and Without Galton, an open access book on Vasilii Florinskii and Russian eugenics, or as the author calls it, 'eugamics' (ie. well-married), as distinguished from Galton's eugenics.

I'm going through the Dante (the 8' tall 1000lb 2000-year-old genetically engineered super-soldier not the 35-year-old presumably normal height and weight narrator of Divine Comedy) books as a bit of a palette cleanser. Despite the almost complete lack of literary value I keep finding myself drawn back to various 40k books, and will usually wolf down two or three before turning my attention back to something a bit heavier. It's not exactly a secret as to why I do so, I adore the 40k universe. Everything about it makes for enjoyable stories, and the fact that there's multiple authors working on the same universe with some, let's say reasonably attentive, editors making sure everything stays more-or-less consistent across the big pictures means it's hard to run out of options.

Once I've wrapped up the Dante trilogy I've got Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege 1942-43 on deck.

Currently re-reading The Craft Sequence which is great.

I've been reading The Library Trilogy, a fantasy series by Mark Lawrence. I enjoyed most of the first book, which felt like a bit of a cross between Garth Nix's Lirael and His Dark Materials, but it started to fall apart by the end and the second book, while readable, couldn't really rejuvenate my interest.

Something in particular that irritated me slightly were the somewhat clumsy allusions to real-world politics scattered throughout the books; most of the time I don't want to think about political issues and that's especially the case when I'm reading for fun. I also don't like the feeling that the author on some level presumes his readers will be smugly nodding in agreement with his fairly evident views on current affairs.

The new Sanderson novel, Isles of the Emberdark. It is, of course, not very sophisticated or thoughty, but is a fun little adventure.

Contractor, by Bradley Buckmaster.

Cybernetically modified child shock trooper was abandoned by his government after the war, took to a life of nihilism and mercenary work, and now well into his fifties he takes a job that has him uncover the hidden history of the war that made him.

It's alright. Buckmaster hs a fairly unique style that's fun to read, and is almost completely unapologetical about the violence and the decidedly un-modern morality or lack thereof that fills his books. His world-building is fairly light, but his descriptions of combat and the technologies involved are probably the absolute best I've ever read (for what little I, an eternal civilian, know). At the same time the novel sometimes feels a little self-indulgent; and when you've read his other books, Brigador and Brigador Killers: Pilgrim, you notice a lot of re-cycled patterns. He describes the Contractor series as a writing exercise, so I suppose it must be forgiven. Then again, he subverts the expectations he sets up often enough to surprise this humble reader. It feels more predictable than it is, sometimes.

I'm not quite done with it, having a few chapters to go yet. It's fairly short overall. It's currently free on Kindle.

Edit: Finished it now. The ending is somewhat...out of scope? It's okay for Sci-Fi and I suppose the story has built up to it, but it has nothing to do with why anyone might read these particular books.

Recommended if you like boots-on-the-ground military sci-fi.

Sounds more experimental than anything but you've piqued my curiosity.

Be quick about it; I think the gratis period expires today or tomorrow.

I don't realistically have the time to get to it in the foreseeable future anyway but thanks.

What hath God Wrought: history of the US from 1815-1848. Also still slogging through Way of Kings.

What's your opinion of What Hath... so far? I read it shortly after it came out and thought it was one of the stronger entries in the series, at least among those I've read. I'd also be curious to know which other installments you have read and your opinion of them, besides the McPherson, of course, which is one of the towering monuments in American historiography.

I am really enjoying What Hath so far. I'm only a few chapters in, but I like how he is framing the whole period in terms of a transportation/communication revolution. Also enjoying his take on Jackson as a bully. McPherson is awesome, as you've surely seen me post about before. The only other two I've tried are The Republic for Which it Stands and The Glorious Cause. I found the first 5-6 chapters of the first one really really good (dealing with Western expansion/Reconstruction), but have been getting bogged down in the social history that follows those chapters. The second book is overwritten, at least in the first few chapters. I'd like to revisit them both quite soon though. Soft goal for this year is to read all of Oxford US history books that have come out so far.

I tried giving Worth the Candle a shot, but didn't like it. Maybe it will be subverted later on, but in the first book I found the implied worldview of the author not self-aware enough, sometimes bordering on the comical, which is especially bad considering that it's obvious the author wants to go for something more philosophical. The basic internal story was OK, good enough so that I finished book 1 without feeling like it was a slog, but I also have very little motivation to carry on. So, I guess it's at least still better than the Wandering Inn, which did turn into a slog just a few chapters in.

Treason's Harbor - Stuck in Malta while their ship is refitting Aubrey and Maturin discover the place is infested with prostitutes, French spies and a geriatric Admiral that can't keep his hands off the help.

I'm still enjoying this series and I'm not even half way through. I hope the quality keeps up.

Is there a secret to being able to actually understand what's going on in those books?

I'm as big a wordcel as you would expect someone who hangs out on this forum to be, but I cannot for the life of me finish Master and Commander. It feels like I'm a teenager being forced to read Shakespeare and not understanding the Early Modern English.

Do I need to persevere until my brain just gets it? Get ChatGPT to summarise the chapters for me? Re-read every sentence? Is there any trick beyond 'be less dumb'?

The audiobooks can carry you along with the narrator's tone doing a lot to provide context. Some people claim that they didn't get everything out of the books on their first 'read' but were pretty well versed by the end of the series. They then understood more on a re-read. Also some concepts aren't explained until later books where O'Brien often uses Maturin as a scrub land lubber stand in for the reader to have a sailor explain all things naval.

That might sound daunting, but if you can make it through Master and Commander things get easier (and more enjoyable).

I need to confess I still don't understand where all the sails are placed and for what purpose, but in general I understand that too much sail can tear the rigging (carrying away like a kite with a snapped line, even including ropes, beams and 'top men' ) or even crack a mast.

Do I need to persevere until my brain just gets it?

That's what worked for me.

Honestly I've just never had that problem at all but I guess that's a function of familiarity with the English of the time? It's unavoidably gained by reading history and especially firsthand accounts.

Yes, actually just get a good LLM to read over the chapter you just finished and catch anything you might have missed. I feel like I got SO MUCH more out of the books this way.

I’ve heard good things about A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O'Brian. Full disclosure though, I’ve never read it, nor any of the original books themselves.

Do you know how the narration of the audiobook is?

I'm listening to the audiobooks (narrated by Patrick Tull back in the 90's, and highly rated on the relevant subreddit). He has excellent pronunciation and while his accents aren't perfect, they don't break suspension of disbelief. Highly recommended.

If you have trouble sourcing the audiobooks, the subreddit is a good place to go spitting on your hands and raising the black flag looking.

The Secret of our Success by Joseph Henrich. Just as fascinating as Scott's review of it made it sound: I'm less than halfway through it and I already feel like I've learned so much. I've quoted so many interesting anecdotes from it to my girlfriend that she wants to read it as soon as I'm finished.

Mania by Lionel Shriver. Her novels are fun in a way that's hard to describe.

My mum was reading that a few months ago, and I teased her that she was reading a book by an admitted climate-change denier.

Heh, it's been kind of entertaining watching Shriver wander from The Guardian to The Spectator over the last decade, her boomer 2nd wave feminist liberalism (and I don't mean that as an insult) not sufficiently hip for the contemporary left and she too stubborn to get with the times.

I suppose what makes her fun to read is her uncompromisingly brutal honesty (Critics would just call her uncompromisingly brutal, but hey, some people have a taste for bitter.) combined with a scalpel-like vocabulary. It doesn't matter if the story is especially great (some are; some aren't) when the telling is that fun to read. That several of her novels draw from personal disquiet only add to the charm. I only later learned that So Much for That (an over-the-top takedown of American healthcare) was actually based on a close friend's death from mesothelioma.

To be frank she reminds me so much of my favorite English teacher from high school (a unique, highly intelligent, and, yes, profoundly bitter person; we were kindred spirits in that regard) that I sent her my copy of We Need to Talk About Kevin after reading it.

Finished Sharpe’s Tiger by Bernard Cornwell. I’d love to read more historical fiction of this quality, especially set in India.

I haven't read the books, only watched the Sean Bean tv movies. Do you have a comparison to how you see the books vs tv?

I think I previously watched/read a few that were set in Europe, and wasn’t too impressed with either. I don’t enjoy TV very much in the first place, and the books felt much weaker than Cornwell’s Arthurian/Viking-Saxon/medieval archer book series or Patrick O’Brien’s works.

This one was a nice surprise.

Well I just finished The Geneva convention(s). So I started with a new book "In another world with my smartphone"

The Geneva suggestion convention is a way more interesting read when you have all the cultural context of people calling things war crimes. It's a lot of fun to read and go "wow that isn't a war crime and the amount of effort it puts into this is really fun. (admittedly I was also watching an anime with a bunch of people in /r/anime and just recording the war crimes comitted by the good/bad guys (mostly the good guys) really made it a lot more fun of a read.

It's a lot of fun to read and go "wow that isn't a war crime

Can you give some examples of things which were described as war crimes but which actually weren't?

White Phosphorous munitions is the most common one you'll see online.

But there's also "firing at fleeing soldiers" "Double tapping" (very controversial but probably not a war crime though it can be a war crime in certain circumstances)

Also what counts as a child soldier depends on the treaty, for example the Geneva convention sets the age at 15, but OPAC defines it as below 18. (most nations have signed OPAC)

One funny thing about watching an anime with people was going "yeah meteor bombing the city was not a war crime but Inaho(the main character) using the school as a command post was because there was a hospital next door to his command post"

Double tapping

Is that when you fire twice at someone's chest?

Shooting at somebody after you've already hit them.

Shoot>Hit>Shoot again to make sure they're actually dead.

I think it's when the bomb site is bombed again after emergency personnel and allies/relatives have shown up... Bombing a funeral would be similar.

"Double-tap" is a rapid pair of aimed shots. They're probably referring to a game-of-telephone version of "dead-checking", where you shoot a downed enemy to make sure they're dead.

yeah it's gotten game of telephoned indeed. I heard it get called Double tapping in justin Taylor's youtube channel figuring that's probably a more "modern term" than what legal scholars from the 70s were saying...

The other place I read it is https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr/vol108/iss3/10/ which is an article from 2006

Finished the Rhesus Chart from the Laundry Files. I am sure it were a lot funnier for me if I were a Brit, absent that it kinda feels the series are running out of steam. Started the Annihilation Score which only supports the conclusion so far. Maybe it will get better, but starting it I found it a bit hard to sympathize with Mo so far. We'll see how it goes.

Started the Annihilation Score which only supports the conclusion so far. Maybe it will get better, but starting it I found it a bit hard to sympathize with Mo so far. We'll see how it goes.

Annihilation Score was the last one I read. I was not terribly impressed with it, and since I didn't think Rhesus Chart was all that great, either, I saw no reason to keep going.

The series starts very strong but gets worse as it continues, not to mention that it eventually segues into something like superhero fiction. Last one I read was The Labyrinth Index and I will not be proceeding.

I'm actually surprised at how effectively Stross keeps his leftist ideology from ruining the books entirely. It does make it through sometimes but generally can be ignored. There's much handwringing in later books about how 'society' basically renders middle-aged women 'invisible' e.g. Sure I rolled my eyes but no big deal.

Yeah a bunch of that in Annihilation Score that I noticed. It felt especially weird given the author is actually a male. Like, is he white-knighting for his political agenda, or does he try to paint Mo as a whiny Karen for some reason? That's certainly not what I'd expect from a professionally successful woman who is a highly sought after demon fighter and literally the main character, to be constantly worried about.

I'm actually surprised at how effectively Stross keeps his leftist ideology from ruining the books entirely. It does make it through sometimes but generally can be ignored.

Just be sure to never ever visit his blog. That's woke leftist central to the power of one million.

Miles, Mutants and Microbes, a Miles Vorkosigan anthology. It’s got a very different voice than either the stereotypical or reactionary flavors of modern sci-fi. More to say on this once I’ve finished it.

I’m reading it as a palate cleanser from those John McPhee geology essays. The last one was about California fault lines, which are simultaneously awe-inspiringly massive and, uh, kind of dull. Not my favorite. Plus, I was too young to remember the 1989 World Series earthquake which kind of inspired the piece, so that was lost on me.

Louis McMaster Bujold is always a blast. Sometimes a little preachy in the later works, but great howdunnits. Miles, Mutants, and Microbes is a little weird of an anthology since "Labyrinth" touches on topic the topic but not as heavily on the plot points of the other two works, while Diplomatic Immunity is more dependent on Cetaganda than either of the other two stories.

DI can stand alone or as a sequel to Falling Free, but it's an odd editing decision, even by Baen's standards.

You see that Vorkorsigan-like tones more often in fantasy -- Diana Wynne Jones is a little less high social drama but similar -- but it does seem pretty badly underserved in scifi. Maybe some of the Ciaphas Cain series, if you're into Warhammer?

Louis McMaster Bujold is always a blast

Used to be. But Gentleman Jole unfortunately has been like chewing cardboard. I understand why she wrote it, but can't recommend reading it to anyone. The Flowers of Vashnoi (the last work in the Vorverse for now, AFAIK, and probably for ever) is a little better but I wouldn't also go as far as calling it "a blast" - nowhere on the usual spectacular level.

Fair on Jole; like Ethan of Athos it feels like it's putting too much effort into trying to answer Le Guin's 'taking life versus giving it' problem, but without the big narrative tension from a speeding deadline. Flowers felt stronger if a bit more repetitive and is certainly no Memory or Komarr, but I still enjoyed it about the same lines as Cryoburn.

Finishing The Possibility of an Island, which has been mostly excellent. It’s plays with the ideas of Elementary Particles a bit less successfully, but it’s still Houellebecq and therefore still funny and romantic and sad. I’ll be officially finished with the œuvre and slightly heartbroken when I’m done.

He Who Fights With Monsters, Book 10 By Shirtaloon. I appreciate that it's (finally) become self-aware enough to subvert some of its tropes, but I'll probably have to give the series some time before reading 11 as I've been reading too much LitRPG lately.

This reminds me, I'm finding Dungeon Slayer pretty bad so far. The worldbuilding makes no sense, the main character is pretty dumb, and the secondary characters' behavior is extremely unrealistic. Fights have mostly been interesting and cool though!

I did laugh at the thought of adventurers pulling up to a dungeon in beat-up Honda Civics, doing their thing, and driving off. The author should lean a lot harder into this incredible juxtaposition of settings he's created. Like, it's weird to me that they do this dungeon in an urban area with good road access, then afterward sit around a campfire. They should be sitting around a table at Burger King afterward! Or perhaps shawarma.

(Edited to spoiler on the side of caution and also to add:)

Still enjoying 12 Miles Below but it's slowed down a lot and frankly I don't care about the robot girl who's gradually becoming human at all which sucks because I think she's like >50% of the content at this point. Seen it done too many times before and the author will have to pull off something truly surprising to make these chapters worth the slog. Still a super cool setting and the high points are pretty great. I think only four books are on audible though and I'm almost done with number three, so I'll probably hit a wall with that soon.

Anyhow even though I'm mostly complaining I do appreciate the recs. 12 Miles Below has unquestionably been worth the read overall and will stick with me.

Oh hey I started a new series recently called Iron Tyrant by Seth Ring and it's a lot of fun. First few chapters are extremely unrepresentative of the rest of the series. Overall the author shows a lot of competence in the stuff he's writing about -- brutal military training of enslaved child soldiers, espionage, political intrigue, etc. -- and that makes it good. First book is called Chain of Feathers. Absolutely cannot wait for more of these to come out. Oh, but I'll say that the magic system is... idk, it's not the most interesting, but he does cool stuff with it and for a litrpg it's surprisingly light on stats and stuff. It's much, much more about the character, the setting, politics, and just general coolness than it is about the magic system.

@Muninn extra ping in case you missed the edit.

Oof, sorry to hear that you're not enjoying Dungeon Slayer, and I'm afraid this is where my "cheap date" reader self doesn't necessarily do me any favors when I talk about series that I've enjoyed. It's a low bar! It's been maybe a couple of years now since I read the first few books and what I remember really liking about it was, in fact, the fight scenes and also the world-building, not just the dungeon part, which was fun, but also the tension between the ability-locked normies and the MC, which made for an interesting dynamic. I remember being close to bailing on the whole thing in the early going when the MC was starting out from butt monkey beginnings but I stuck with it and got into it enough to read several books. It sounds like your mileage is varying and I'd say feel free to throw that one against the wall and move on if it isn't doing it for you. I've picked up books and read them just because I wanted to see what the author would do with the premise, sometimes to my own chagrin.

On the 12 Miles front, yeah, developing To'Wrathh's character was annoying AF to me, too, though I understand the major plot points that revolve around her character making that necessary to a certain extent. A lot of her early stuff was just bloody annoying to me, though it did get better over time. To me, 12 Miles is at its best when it's exploring its world, particularly the underground sections, and at its dreariest when it's doing its developmental/consolidation bits. I can tell you that book 5 to me was largely one of those so I'd say there's no need to rush in picking up the audiobook when it becomes available. Regardless, I'm glad you're enjoying that one!

I appreciate the Seth Ring recommendation, Kindle pimps out his Battle Mage Farmer stuff to me semi-regularly because of a similar series that I read in the past. I have another series or three that I bought to make me immune to wanting to read another one of those but I might check out Iron Tyrant--it sounds interesting and more up my alley (that whole what will he do with the premise thing) than another "exploit the farmer class" style of LitRPG.

To'Wrathh

Goodness gracious, is that how that's spelled? I'd been thinking Turrath. Yikes. Now I'm afraid to ask about Toakar.

I like dave green, but I felt similarly about the apparent similarities in breadtube physiognomy. I think the better indicator would be how often they pull the soy face.

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I don't get it. What exactly is the problem with their appearance?

They look like, according to young Internet users, "Reddit soyboys."

The whole concept of "getting your views" from a youtuber sounds quite bewildering to me. I mean, listening to, sure, thinking about some ideas they raise, definitely, agreeing with something, maybe, but "worldview"?

Also, I have no idea who the twitter is and who those blogger types are, but if you compare them to antifa types commonly featured in arrest reports or just plain regular report from places like Portland that gave up on arresting them, they look the normalest normal of the bunch by far. They don't even have blue hair!

Here's a normal X link for people who want one.

but a lot of the terminally online right-wing personalities don't look very different that the terminally online left-wing to me.

Like who? Lomez and Raw Egg Nationalist got doxxed and they look like normal dudes.

What, specifically, is wrong with these people? Is that really the best way to argue against them? Or is it just being kind of a dick when you make fun of people's appearances?

Agreed. I look nothing like those guys and have no complaints. Aging white guys with beards, some balding. Seems pretty typical to me. Could use more cardio, less carbs if we are going to get picky.

IMHO neither of people looks repulsive (taking into account that maximally uncharitable stills were taken)

I can assure you that less flattering Trump/Putin/Macron/erc images can be found it and it also proves nothing.

It’s not necessarily looking ugly or strange but the fact that someone can’t figure out that they look off-putting even though they could fix this with some work, is profoundly disturbing. It suggests something unhinged about you as you are the sort of person without anyone in your life to tell you such a thing. What did you do to drive everyone away? What other social norms are you oblivious about?

Seems like reading really deep into very little.

I know people who approximately look like this type. Aging, balding white guy with beard. I have no complaints about their looks or character.

Could use more exercise and less food. True, but also true for most Americans their age.

What's with beards these days? I feel like beards came back hard over the last 10-15 years.

I don't know about them coming back, I've had one most of my adult life, at different levels of kemptness (as of now, decently trimmed). At first it was because I was conforming to hipster fashion. I've experimented with my facial hair a fair bit, I've had handlebars even at some point. But now my wife would divorce me if I shaved my beard, and it conforms to image I have of myself, as a gruff and stern looking.

I'm also a sysadmin, so it's basically a uniform for me.

For me at least, my wife is really into it. Of course it shouldn't look completely uncared for and not too long, but generally she doesn't even want me to go back to stubbles, clean shaven is not an option at all. It's simply unmanly in her mind. Keeping a medium-length beard is also less work than clean shaven.

Style history:

  • Special Forces types started wearing them during Iraq / Afghanistan. So a lot of tactical bros started that as well. You can see this all over GunTube and CopTube.
  • On the other end of the culture spectrum, "chill dude" vibes since the early 2010s have been facial hair friendly. Everything from a kind of lazy, Seth Rogan three day beard, to weird retro mustaches a la Arthur Shelby from Peaky Blinders.

The underlying reason common to both; growing a beard is a pretty good solution if you have a weak jawline. Some women don't like beards, but some do. The pool is large enough you aren't giving up much if you go for the beard. Very few women will totally overlook a particularly weak jaw line.

Here’s my theory. Confluence of at least three things:

  • It seems to be the case (a few studies + anecdata) that women prefer if not a full beard than at least some stubble to being clean shaven. It helps that the new wave of beards are generally speaking a little more cared for than previously. So “looksmaxxing” does slightly trend this direction (the historical norm?) and I think some evolutionary people would say that’s because it’s a loose indication of maturity and high T (?)

  • It has lost its strongest political coded connotation. I don’t know if I’m actually capable of fully accounting for their trajectory, but you had liberals with their fancy oiled mustaches and beards at a similar time as the “manosphere” right wing comeback, at the same time as millennials started flexing their social media dominance (and millennials are older and at the age where beards are nice and full and age appropriate), plus some lower or working class people who never stopped wearing them so much, and so now you have a situation where a beard isn’t necessarily a strong signal in any direction. This helps mass adoption.

  • Most importantly, prominent people have done it. Beards are one of the few ways men have to significantly “rebrand” their looks. Hair can do a bit, but only so much. Dress can do a bit, but is a little more subtle. But no matter if you are a celebrity, Twitter famous, a politician, or a regular dude, growing a beard is a very obvious change that gives you a different “vibe”. It’s very handy for a politician to be able to do a rebrand, and many have jumped on it. But this trend started IMO with other generalized influential people outside the political area - how many traditionally cowardly politicians have done it is a sign the movement is coming to a head

it’s a loose indication of maturity

It's an indication of someone desperate to signal maturity. [Hence, soyjacks.]

some lower or working class people who never stopped wearing them so much

You generally need to be clean-shaven for a respirator, so it's a sign you don't [have to] work in a factory.

It helps that the new wave of beards are generally speaking a little more cared for than previously.

They're all just neckbeards to me.

It’s the new fedora.

They can't be the new Fedoras - some women actually like them

I don't know enough about what the names I see look like to tell in a general case. For the specific examples at play, my gut reaction is that the four example leftists all look less healthy and vigorous than my mental model of an average man, getting worse as you go left to right. Drug use, or malnourishment. Maybe a low-T correlation?

For comparison, I think "random Connecticut blue tribe middle class dad" looks healthier and more vigorous than any of them, so it's not just a politics thing.

The conservative examples look marginally better. I'd choose them as teammates in Survivor over the leftists, possible exempting Leftist 1, who looks like he might seriously outperform until the withdrawal kicks in. I'd probably pick a median dude in my community over any of them. Sort of relatedly, but I've heard women complain that dating in DC is a nightmare because so many of the men (all the Dems, but even most of the MAGA policy dorks) are so gay-coded.

But the online right also has it's bodybuilding contingent, and the online left has people like Hasan Piker, who whatever his other flaws, is in shape and good looking.

I do think there are certain types, especially among men, who heavily lean one way or another, and there's likely a biological basis for that, hormone loads affecting (dis)aggreability, independence, confidence, etc.

Is there anything to thé theory that the relatively early shift to love matches over arranged marriages has selected Western Europeans for greater phenotypic attractiveness?

That doesn’t make a ton of sense.

You’d only get a selection pressure if love matches offered a competitive advantage to attractive/attractive couples over attractive/ugly or ugly/ugly ones. My understanding of male sexuality suggests that partner hotness was not actually the limiting factor. Ugly/ugly couples were and are definitely willing to pop out as many kids as they can afford.

Ah, but medieval Europe was monogamous, and even if bastards clearly existed they probably had a much lower survival rate than legitimate children, and lower odds of reproducing even if they survived. The medieval European social structure tended to result in more eligible women than men in most social classes for long stretches at a time.

Bastards? No, I’m saying ugly couples are willing to have plenty of kids in wedlock. A guy whose farm feeds 10 is liable to end up with 10 kids whether he pairs off with the prettiest girl in the village or an absolute goblin.

Also I guess I doubt the bastard survivability claim.

This sounds similar to the armchair "war filter" theory that current day eastern european women are mostly attractive due to the fact that so many men were slaughtered in the 20th century that those who remained could choose only the most attractive as mates. I'm not sure evolution works that fast.

As @ZanarkandAbesFan suggests, there may not be a clear consensus on whether the median European (white?) woman is more attractive on the whole (and I'll use your phenotype term, meaning basically clear skin, facial symmetry, good straight teeth, healthy hair, etc but correct me if you mean something else) than her counterparts in other ethnicities. I assume we're talking about women of a certain age range?

You don't think "evolution" works fast enough to make you more likely to be attractive if you had an attractive mother and grandmother?

You don't think "evolution" works fast enough to make you more likely to be attractive if you had an attractive mother and grandmother?

Natural selection doesn’t cause population-level shifts in attractiveness in just a couple generations. Natalya might (or might not) inherit aspects of her mom’s good looks, but that’s genetics. Evolution needs sustained selective pressure across many generations to change the frequency of traits in a population. If evolution worked that fast, we’d see dramatic changes in appearance across just a few generations any time a war or famine hit. Traits like attractiveness are polygenic and influenced by culture, grooming, health, etc.

Is it generally agreed that Western Europeans (and people of WE descent) are more attractive?

I don’t think this is the case? It’s very, very, very hard to disentangle beauty from wealth.

You can see a bit of dynamics on smaller scales with skin tone ranges as defined by tans in-community: historically traditionally whiter skin implied you were rich enough to stay indoors, but in more modern times tanner skin implies you’re rich enough to spend free time outside, but these are fairly weak and obviously context dependent. But that’s clearly not what you’re talking about.

The fact of the matter is that by the time a post-puberty person can “fairly” judge attractiveness, they have a ton of stereotypes and social influence floating around. Plus, wealth often leads to fitness and attractiveness even semi directly, both in things like bone structure, teeth, weight, muscle tone, and more (some of which also have socioeconomic connotations). Also, worth noting as an aside, measures you’d assume to be universal indicators of appeal are not perfectly universal - if I remember correctly there are differences in eg hip ratio preferences that differ between groups. All this to say that it’s a fool’s errand to make a claim like that.

Anecdotally it’s whatever. I don’t think it’s wrong to have preferences even if they aren’t perfectly fair. I think it’s wrong to discriminate, but I’m not gonna bat an eye if someone says Ukrainians are the best or something, but don’t pretend it’s some universal truth

Was this meant as a reply to me or OP?

You asked if Western Europeans are the most attractive. The answer is pretty clearly that there’s not only no data to suggest this, but some major methodological issues on top if you wanted to investigate this, so practically there’s no way to know. Beauty standards are like, pretty famously in the realm of culturally subjective. So it’s functionally an intractable problem. I would thus further opine that it is therefore not worth thinking about.

Now whether you were genuinely promoting the idea, or using a Socratic method to pick apart the assumptions of the OP, that I failed to figure out. I figured it would serve both purposes here, I guess.

Now whether you were genuinely promoting the idea, or using a Socratic method to pick apart the assumptions of the OP, that I failed to figure out.

The latter. Not that I'm totally convinced that OP's premise is wrong (and I don't really agree that it's an intractable problem) but my issue was more with taking it as truth to the extent that we can start thinking about what the broader implications might be.

I doubt you could get an article published suggesting this but if you look at the revealed preferences of almost any other group of people when they have any choice to mate with Europeans at all, this seems quite obviously true. “Western” bit is a stretch though. Slavs or actual Caucasians obviously win over English/French at physical beauty. Southern Europeans too imo.

almost any other group of people when they have any choice to mate with Europeans at all

Potential counter example: my white former classmates, former coworkers and current coworkers.

There aren't that many Asians in America, but they seem to be preferred by many of the white people I know. The pairings I notice far exceed any expected amount not explained by a large bias in each others favor. I also married one, so I'm not judging.

I also did such dating, no judgment. Replied under the other thread

He did say "any other", though, which roughly matches with my impression. AFAIK it's also true that there are specific combination that are over-and under-represented, and white male asian female is extremely overrepresented.

East Asian women were the first counter-example that came to mind for me. Do white women tend to win out over them when it comes to revealed preferences?

Main driver in wmaf relationships is usually the Asian woman being very into the man and doing way beyond an equivalent white women to keep the relationship going. I have seen this countless times and experienced once myself dating such a girl (I am Turkish, white presenting enough for East Asians). It’s definitely quite a pleasant and attractive feeling as a man when a woman works so hard for you and this is the main attraction for most white men in such couplings.

I still think white women would definitely win in an “equal” setting where they aren’t insufferable and fat. Unfortunately they often are in relative terms.

It is confounded to extreme with various factors.

Not unlikely. People are going to be more focused on looks if they are choosing a partner for themselves rather than trying to find a partner for someone else.

Why has there been a coordinated push over the last few years to get people to stop using fireworks because it’s supposedly bad for veterans and dogs? I smell a psy-op.

First I’ve heard of it.

You know what I have seen, recently? Broccoli.

If you search “kids hate broccoli,” you can find countless articles parroting this un-American talking point. Some even suggest that “science” has solved this classic mystery. They’re citing the same study from 2021 which something something enzymes something sulfur.

Is this a psy-op? Maybe a ploy by those regulators over in Brussels?

Many years ago, I read a Goosebumps book in which it was a plot point that the protagonist liked liver. (He was replaced by a doppelganger who didn't like liver.) Maybe that was a psy-op from the beef lobby. It was successful in getting me to request liver from my mother. (I hated it.)

Try it in Boudin.

I smell a psy-op.

likely it is not psy-op but deranged dog-lovers treating them as children and/or people caring about dogs and valuing them over enjoyment of fireworks

plus impotent and ineffective attempt to target assholes launching fireworks at utterly random hours

why you expect psy-op?

Most of the complaints I see have nothing to do with dogs or vets, but are instead about the impact to birds.

Man, not every movement that is somewhat stupid is a "psy-op". I remember a non-negligible number of bleeding hearts back in India complaining about fireworks because it scared dogs, while the general populace didn't give a shit. Neither did I, both because my dogs could snooze through a nuclear exchange, and because I really didn't care.

Even my ex (who was a bleeding heart liberal by any standard) was part of them, because her poorly trained, nippy little anklebiter was scared shirtless.

It's obvious to me that a certain fraction of people will have an innate proclivity towards certain stances, might be personally sensitive to loud noises, or might live in places where fireworks get out of hand. And that eventually, they might start grassroot or coordinated complaints about it.

Not every silly worldview is a psy-op. You're diluting the word into uselessness.

And yet no one thinks about the dogs in Kharkiv and Kiev ... somehow they have not committed group suicide after 4 years of war. And somehow the dogs survived somehow for a hundred years of fireworks before 2015 when this madness started in earnest. And to think that almost all breeds have started as hunting dogs... I find the efforts to ban fireworks extremely annoying. The fact that they have limited success even in my god forgotten eastern european country is troubling. The more working class neighborhoods are still using a lot of fireworks but posh places are silent on new years eve.

  1. AFAIK noone claims that fireworks are deadly for dogs - rather that they are distressing and unpleasant

  2. AFAIK Ukrainians (1) care about people hurt in attacks (2) they took serious actions to reduce rate of this happening

It's just the no-fun brigade up to their usual tricks -- Peterson has been railing about this kind of mundane intervention to suck the enjoyment out of life for regular folks as incipient tyranny for some time, and I'm inclined to agree. See also health-justified alcohol taxes (now spreading to countries where people can't really afford them and could really use a drink, eg Mexico) and 20 mph speed limits in the UK.

I think the combination of overeducated and over sensitive people (quite often women, but not always) and social media are creating a dystopian society in which anything that might bother anyone anywhere must be removed and destroyed. This destroys even the chance of social bonding because unless you can actually go out and do fun things with an exclusive group, you can’t form close relationships. These people need to find their own jobs and hobbies and fix whatever is broken in them that turns them into scolds the minute anyone starts having fun.

I'm neither a veteran nor a dog owner, but I think we need to do something about fireworks because of the usual reason - jerks are ruining it for everyone. I would be perfectly okay with fireworks on July 4, stopping at a reasonable hour (say 10-11 pm) so as not to disturb those trying to sleep. Instead what we get is about 2 months of fireworks on either side of the holiday, frequently going past midnight.

I honestly don't know what to do - normally you might say "make it illegal", but the mortar fireworks are illegal in this state already. But since people can drive 4 hours to Wyoming to get fireworks there, the law doesn't accomplish anything. It's a shame, because I actually love fireworks and it would be really cool to have them in the neighborhood if people were responsible. And to be fair most people are. But as usual, the irresponsible minority is causing problems for everyone.

stopping at a reasonable hour (say 10-11 pm) so as not to disturb those trying to sleep. 10pm?! This gets you less than an hour of darkness where I live.

On July 4th itself, we should at least induldge till 2:00am., with maybe till midnight on the day before, through the next closest weekend.

And yet people have jobs, which they very frequently have to be at the next day. July 4 doesn't usually fall on a weekend like it did this year. It's not reasonable to insist that people can't get sleep when they have to be up the next morning just so that people can get hours upon hours of fireworks. 11 pm, even in your time zone, would be over an hour of darkness. 10pm would be similar in places I've lived. My stated timeframe of 10-11pm is a perfectly reasonable one imo.

July 4th is more important than jobs. Not being facetious.

Not even close. A person's livelihood is far more important than any given celebration, let alone this one which isn't even that important.

Not to dig in, but I can't let the hyperbole slide. A night of interrupted sleep on a national holiday, is not a threat to 'a person's livelihood'.

So whether livelihood is more important than a celebration (and it is), is an irrelevant point here.

Celebrating July 4th is a more important social tool than ensuring total sleep quality on a single night of the year.

I disagree that it's hyperbole, I chose that for a reason. You can't know what's going on in a person's life. Maybe they have an asshole boss who hates them and is looking to fire them at the first opportunity. In that case, interrupting their sleep may well be endangering their livelihood through no fault of their own. Thus the comparison I made.

If one has talked to all of their neighbors within range of the fireworks and found that they aren't causing problems (commendable if so), then fine. But realistically the people who set off fireworks until 2 am aren't doing that, they are taking the stance of "I don't care about the impact to you, I want to have fun". That is selfish and not ok in my book. Heck, that doesn't even accomplish social cohesion like you are arguing for - it causes divides between neighbors (because one of them is being an asshole to the others), not brings them together.

they are taking the stance of "I don't care about the impact to you, I want to have fun".

You have discovered the entire point of Independence Day, which celebrates exactly this on a nation-state level.

The crazy part is that the problem is obviously not the scheduled 20 minute municipal fireworks show that ends at 10:00 once a year. If you have sensitivities, you can just go on a drive for half an hour. The problem is the assholes setting off fireworks for months on either side at unpredictable timings. The first is enjoyed by many, the second is enjoyed only by the few setting them off. The first is legible, the second is not.

What is to be done? Clearly we must do something, and shuttering the scheduled show is something, so we must do it. How much will this help the people with sensitivities? Not at all, of course, because they suffer due to the second thing, not the first thing. But we're obviously unwilling or incapable of doing anything more about the second thing, so we'll pretend that this somehow makes it better.

To me it pattern matches with a bootleggers and baptists situation, but I can't immediately tell who the bootleggers are here. Is DJI behind this?

To be clear I in no way support stopping municipal fireworks shows. I'm referring purely to people setting them off in the street in front of their house, which has a significant component of antisocial jerks in my city. Official fireworks shows (municipal or otherwise) are perfectly fine and need no action taken at all.

What is to be done? Clearly we must do something

Why must we do something?

Or are you describing someone else’s thinking? Sorry, it just isn’t clear to me if the quoted bit is your own thinking on the subject.

That's the thinking of the people pushing for shutting down municipal fireworks shows.

Meh. Where I live there are four days a year when it’s legal to shoot fireworks(two state independence days, fourth, and new years). There will be fireworks shot off the day before and after, of course, but not for months at a time. Not worth worrying about.

Well I envy you the restraint of your neighbors. I am not so fortunate.

Remarkable considering you (I think?) live in a Hispanic neighborhood. In my heavily Hispanic neighborhood, I can expect to hear fireworks every night for many months around July 4.

I live in southern California and fireworks are going off for about a week prior and a week after the fourth pretty consistently. Though there's not a large Hispanic population in my immediate area but in any case it certainly is not just the day before or after. Last week I thought there was a series of gunshots going off until I realized the fourth was coming up. It doesn't bother me terribly except when its past midnight.

I saw a news story yesterday about California getting its biggest wildfire of the year so far starting last Wednesday. It struck me that if they ran a fake story about a huge wildfire starting the week before the fourth it might help people who start fires with fireworks show some restraint, but then I thought who am I kidding? It's possible people might think protecting the nerves of animals and veterans is a better way to tell people to stop than just telling them they might start a fire.

I've also been seeing the "worst wildfire of the year" in California articles. I keep thinking how LA almost burned to the ground in January and wondering how worst is being measured.

"Worst" is measured in acres, in this case, 70,800 of them.

I live in a mixed neighborhood. It will, like most such neighborhoods, be clearly Hispanic eventually, but for now thé children playing soccer/basketball in the street are white.

In Texas fireworks go on sale thé day after Christmas, February 25th, April 16, and st John’s eve(or respect life day as a state holiday). They are hard cut off on New Year’s Eve, Texas Independence Day, San Jacinto day, and Fourth of July. This controls thé festivities. Possession or personal use of fireworks out of season is a minor thing- but dealers operating out of season it is not. Hence fireworks run out by, like, today.

It's just yet another step in the direction of forcing American society to restructure for the benefit of dog owners. I've posted before about my utter disdain for modern dog culture and the strong correlation between selfishness/narcissism with dog ownership. They have already turned my city into their personal open-air toilet and have made nearly every space "dog-friendly" despite signs politely requesting otherwise. The difference here is that this isn't just some rule or norm they can repeatedly violate without asking until society throws its hands up at the futility of enforcement. For once, they are on the side opposed to the social norm defectors and need top-down enforcement, but have their heads too far up their dogs' asses to see the irony.

I can agree that the continued fireworks past midnight does get mildly annoying, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the year-round barking these dog owners inflict.

futility of enforcement

I actually think enforcement for this is incredibly easy.

I live in downtown Toronto, I have a dog. My neighborhood is overrun with dogs as it's all mid/late 20s yuppies in condos that are too small for kids.

There was a park that became an unofficial dog off-leash park while the nearby dog park was renovated for a year. Once the dog park opened people didn't stop going to the "unofficial" one. Eventually, by-law officers started doing occasional driveby's, and would attempt to ticket people. I have no idea if they actually ticketed anyone, but it had a profound chilling effect on people using that park as an offleash area.

And they half-assed it! Just hire more by-law officers and have them circulate. The evidence is clear, people do NOT respond to the severity of punishment, anyone breaking rules breaks them without worrying about the consequences as they think they wont get caught. What changes behavior is the assessed risk % of getting caught. So increase enforcement in a visible way, and watch people adapt.

The problem is, that requires taking action and doing things, and western governments at all levels are profoundly allergic to doing things.

This is a side note, but I actually had an incredibly sad related moment last winter. My girlfriend, dog, and I were walking through a park that has a skating rink. The Zamboni had created a snow mountain beside it. I have incredibly fond memories of playing on these as a kid. It was surrounded by other optimal parent age young adults like us, all letting their dogs play on the snow mountain. There were no children in sight anywhere in the park (it was morning, to be fair). Our dog had a great time running around it, but holy fuck was it sad seeing such a visual representation of the collapse in our societies fertility.

condos that are too small for kids.

? Kids don't take up very much space. Certainly less than normally sized dogs(not counting the small ratlike creatures which seem inexplicably popular these days).

While you can technically fit a kid anywhere, I'm not with you on the overall point.

My dogs footprint in my apartment is his bed, and his food/water bowl. Also a small box on a shelf with brush/harness/nail clippers/whatever

A kid is a crib, diapers, clothes, toys, a stroller, and I'm sure a ton of other gear I haven't considered. They need a whole room too eventually (or immediately? Idk what the meta on co sleeping is these days).

Also not to get into the whole child rearing in modernity thing again, but I'm just observing that dogs outnumber children in my neighborhood at least 5:1, and I live across the street from a playground so it might be even worse.

I can agree that the continued fireworks past midnight does get mildly annoying, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the year-round barking these dog owners inflict.

This is a crazy take. Fireworks (the mortar kind, which is what people around here do despite them being illegal) are an order of magnitude louder than dogs. Even if your neighbor's dog is barking a lot, barking utterly pales in comparison to fireworks in terms of how disruptive it is due to the massive difference in volume. It's made even worse by the fact that people choose to set off fireworks. At least a dog is an independent creature you can't control, but the fireworks people are deliberately choosing to be assholes disrupting their neighbors. Here people were setting off fireworks until 2 am! Fucking 2 am! Not only that, but people here start setting off fireworks 3-4 weeks before July 4, and continue for 3-4 weeks after, so it's not like it is just one night of this nonsense.

I would've had some sympathy for your argument if you just claimed that the two were equivalently disruptive. But claiming that fireworks are "absolutely nothing" in comparison to dogs barking is not the remotest bit reasonable. And it's not like most people have dogs that bark all the time anyways - I have had one neighbor, in my 40 years on this earth, that had such a dog. And yeah it's annoying. Perhaps one might even say those people are irresponsible and shouldn't own a dog. But they are the minority. Are you really trying to argue that fireworks are just desserts when they punish not only the irresponsible, but also the responsible owners and those who don't even have dogs? Because that would be completely disproportionate.

Even if your neighbor's dog is barking a lot, barking utterly pales in comparison to fireworks in terms of how disruptive it is due to the massive difference in volume

I don't know where you live, but I hear barking on a daily basis much louder than any of the firecrackers that went off this weekend (at least accounting for distance; how loud a mortar is from equivalent distance is frankly irrelevant to me unless my neighbor is literally setting them off from his porch). At least with fireworks, it's one or two nights per year and confined to a predictable 6 hour span. The barking occurs on a daily basis, at random, and extends indefinitely. Here, people's dogs bark at any hour. I've been woken up by howling at 3-4 am on a work day multiple times. You could ask me to choose fireworks every Friday if it meant dogs were banned from residential areas and I'd take that in a heartbeat. Over the span of a full year, there really is no comparison when it comes to which is more disruptive to my life.

At least a dog is an independent creature you can't control ... fireworks people are deliberately choosing to be assholes disrupting their neighbors

People choose to own dogs. They choose to ignore properly training them. They choose to continue to keep them even when they are a persistent nuisance to their neighbors. This attitude that you can't just get rid of your personal vanity project is common among dog owners. If your neighbor has a car horn that goes off at random times for random durations, I think you would be right to say it should either be fixed or trashed.

Are you really trying to argue that fireworks are just desserts when they punish not only the irresponsible, but also the responsible owners and those who don't even have dogs?

Nowhere in my post did I support the use of fireworks past a certain hour. I explicitly said I find them annoying as well. I've found many dog owners and their allies have a tendency to get extremely defensive and treat the slightest pushback on even a subset of behaviors as an attack. I never said that I want fireworks in order to punish dog owners, but somehow by simply saying that my personal frustration with dog barking is greater than my frustration with fireworks you jumped to that conclusion.

just wanted to say, extremely here for the anti-dog content. I love dogs, but like 5-10% of people max who own them should own them, and you should have to have a kid or be a single male (saying this somewhat sarcastically, but not completely).

This is one of my favorite blog articles on the subject: https://mattlakeman.org/2020/03/21/against-dog-ownership/

Pope Leo XIV has been pope for two months now. How has his first two months been and has your view of him shifted since he became pope?

I like that he referenced Tertullian in relation to the mystery of the Mass, in criticizing evangelical worship for being insufficiently mysterious and reverent.

Bookmarking for a response later- TLDR is continuity with JPII, encouraging moves for the conservatives, but very mild disappointments for the liberals.

Leo has appointed mostly the bishops that an impartial observer would have expected a replacement level pope to appoint, in a way which points to the return of the influence of the nuncios over pope Francis' progressive cardinal friends. All eyes are on Chicago and New York- both Archdioceses which are highly political appointments and have bishops who've reached retirement age. One, Cardinal Dolan, is generally considered 'conservative' and the other, Cardinal Cupich, is extremely progressive. These, and the prefects of causes of the saints and of the causes of bishops(both cabinet level officials in the Vatican), will likely be the first major political appointments made by the new pope.

In the Vatican Curia(central administration), pope Leo has confirmed the figures in place under pope Francis. This is customary for new popes. He appointed a nun as secretary(#2) of the dicastery for religious life, but as pope Francis had left a nun as prefect to appoint a bishop as her number two would be a scandal on its own. There are no indications as to who will be appointed to fill his old seat as prefect of the dicastery for the causes of bishops, nor who will be appointed to replace the extremely aged Cardinal Semeraro as prefect of the dicastery for the causes of the saints. He has, however, made a schlew of appointments to the boards of dicasteries(cabinet-level departments) in the Vatican, which indicate a desire for a more conservative direction. Specifically worth highlighting are Cardinal Marengo, the youngest cardinal, who was appointed to a position requiring frequent travel to Rome from his apostolic assignment in Ulanbaatar(yes, Mongolia has a cardinal), allowing him to build an influence network before the next conclave(which, given the ages of cardinals and likely lifespan of the pope, would put him as a senior figure); and Archbishop Fischer of Sidney, who was considered sidelined under pope Francis for his conservative views and, appointed to the board overseeing interreligious dialogue, will be able to grow in influence ahead of his likely appointment as a cardinal. Also worth noting is the high percentage of African bishops appointed; these tend to caucus with the furthest-right faction of western bishops and if the trend continues, this forseeably gives traditionalists more power and influence.

His public facing actions are not particularly noteworthy; he is essentially emulating JPII.

A question for Catholics, I assume. I don't have a view on him at all.

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