This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Why do a lot of women not like acknowledging the practical aspects of dating? By this I mean that women appear to be put off by me simply discussing:
Of course I'm not discussing these topic with women I'm trying to actually date, I'm not that autistic. But if you're trying to actually find a partner to settle down and have kids with, how do you not take all of these into account? Not only does it reek of impracticality, but on an even deeper level, it appears that any attempt to practically model the dating world at all produces a negative female reaction.
(Maybe it's because some of these women don't ever intend on having kids and therefore don't ever have to be realistic about dating.)
There was an old post by Scott Alexander about lies that improve the outcome if everyone pretends they are true. His example was secular movements like UU failing to replicate the success of the churches sticking with the "old man in the sky" stuff.
What will happen to the society if everyone agrees that looks and youth are incredibly important and form a significant part of your SMV?
SMV is a zero-sum game. If your goal is finding the partner with the highest SMV, then it doesn't matter if the values are 1,2..100 or 95,95.05..100. Everyone will be constantly trying to optimize their SMV in a race of incredibly hot rats.
Imagine every single woman frantically looksmaxxing as soon as she hits puberty because she doesn't have time, she has to be at her hottest when she's 16 or 19 or whatever age you consider the best.
Instead, we all repeat one nice little lie: "somewhere in this world there's your other half waiting for you, one day you'll understand you're made for each other". We look down (at least performatively) on people that want to get "the best", because they openly reject the shared lie instead of saying, "we just didn't click, you know?" The lie lets millions of people settle down with a person that is good enough instead of constantly striving for the best achievable pairing.
This is very much not true. Just because something has zero-sum interactions within it does not mean the entirety of it is zero-sum. A lot of SMV is based on things like health and reproductive fitness, which are positive sum. As a simple counterexample, if we had a fancy pill that made everyone age at half speed after they hit 20, the SMV for almost everyone would go up. In relative terms on the dating market the relative positioning of everyone, and thus your ability to secure a mate, would stay the same. But the mate that you got would be a person that aged half as fast and would remain more healthy and attractive for you as a partner. Similarly, if a social trend went around convincing all women to chop their breasts off (and I don't mean the minority that currently does this, I mean if it became so widespread that literally all of them did it), then there would be zero-sum tradeoffs (women with naturally small breasts would gain positions on the hierarchy since they'd lose less than their peers) AND there would be huge negative sum results (all men would lose the ability to date women with breasts no matter how high their own SMV, and any children they have would be dependent on formula).
Doubling all the point values across the board makes people better off. Halving them makes people worse off. Meanwhile in a true zero-sum game like football or baseball, doubling or halving the point value of all scoring actions changes nothing, because the numbers are arbitrary and don't refer to anything except relative positions.
Your general argument still holds. Lying about SMV to other people in ways that negates their advantages over you can raise your position on the hierarchy. But this is still negative sum, in that they lose more than you gain, so it's a fundamentally selfish and anti-social thing.
Yeah, but if your view is SMV is the criterion for dating, you'll never settle because you'll be constantly haunted by "there could be someone even hotter out there I could get" and then you end up with no-one at all.
That's not how any market ever works. Nobody, except maybe people with a specific type of obsessive compulsive disorder, tries to buy something at a store but fails because they just keep going to new stores looking for better bargains and never actually purchases the thing. At some point you find one that's better than any other, you've found so far, reason that there's a very low chance there's a better one and if there was it would take too long to find, and you pick that one. SMV doesn't change this reasoning at all.
I believe you are sadly mistaken.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link