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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   21933 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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The Traveller Question

In rural England, two girls are raped by a group of 13 and 14 year old boys. Eventually arrested and charged, a judge sentences them to community service, because he wants to “avoid criminalizing these children unnecessarily”. An outrage ensues, even the Prime Minister calls the sentence a disgrace. Little reported on: these youths were neither migrants nor the traditional native underclass of Albion. They belong to an unusual population called Irish Travellers with which few non-British or Irish are particularly familiar.

A year or two after I first moved to London, I witnessed a commotion outside Harrods. A large group of white teenagers was arguing with the store’s security. White teenagers are not particularly rare in London, but an entire group that is white and mostly blonde and blue eyed is. They were also dressed in an unusual way, the boys in an exaggerated version of the ‘Deano’ style of the time with some designer accoutrements - Prada caps, Gucci cross body bags; the girls in tight dresses or shorts and push-up bras, full faces of heavy makeup, much costume jewelry. Dressing like this is a working class English pastime, but in most English towns and cities it’s the preserve of college aged adults. These were children, maybe 12, 13, 14. Of interest, too, was that many were couples - 13 year old girls and boys holding hands, that kind of thing. Rare in secular society. There was no parental supervision that I could see, either. These gatherings happen regularly outside Harrods; occasionally someone is stabbed (the last time this happened in that exact location was a few weeks ago).

They were Irish Travellers or Gypsies, a highly clannish, poor and violent population who live itinerant lives across the British Isles, bane of farmers and publicans, fond of suing anyone who crosses them under anti-discrimination laws they lobbied for (in both the Irish republic and United Kingdom) that grant them special status as an ethnic minority. In Ireland, they are 0.7% of the population yet 12-15% of prison inmates, an astonishing level of overrepresentation that even many much-maligned other minority groups on both sides of the Atlantic have failed to match.

But here’s the unusual thing about Irish Travelers: they’re Irish. Genetically, they are indistinguishable from the ethnic Irish population. There is no marker that convincingly separates them from the settled ethnic Irish population. Historically, divergence was at most 300 years ago as a modern Irish state slowly emerged under British rule in the aftermath of the wars of the 17th century, which is too soon for the kind of extreme selection effects that produced some other minority groups to emerge. What genetic studies have been done claim to show difference only in terms of higher levels of inbreeding over the fewer than 12 generations for which they’ve existed (discrediting earlier theories that they had some ancient or Romani ancestry, which they do not).

The Irish Travellers are younger as a people than the Amish, for example. They are younger, depending on how you look at things, than the Ultra Orthodox Jews, who arguably first emerged at a similar or earlier time in the mid-18th century. HBD cannot really explain the Irish Traveller. They also have a very interesting culture. Despite the girls dressing very immodestly, they place a very high emphasis on both sexual purity and very early marriage, for example, sometimes as early as 14-16, for both boys and girls. They have a total fertility rate of somewhere around 3, higher than even many fecund minority groups and perhaps double the (rest of the) native population.

Beyond the occasional London gathering (which at times involves these people racing their horse-drawn buggies - chariots really - through the city) Irish travelers mainly live in the country, where they are widely hated by rural residents for (perceived or real) squatting on their land, theft of property and livestock, domestic burglary, petty crime, and welfare abuse. One of the most famous cases in British criminal law history involved a farmer who had been burgled by some traveller youths, and who then decided to wait for them, lights off, at the top of his staircase with a shotgun. He killed one, with the judge ruling that this was clearly a trap rather than self defense (he had bragged about it, which was unfortunate) and initially went to jail for life before being reduced to 3 years after a public outcry. There was another famous case recently in which a local cop was brutally killed by some Travellers driving away from a crime scene, dragged behind a car for a mile which killed him, they didn’t stop; this resulted in another major outcry, which led to sentences for cop killers being increased. Beyond this, the English state is, as it is in so many cases, broadly incapable of doing anything, forced assimilation is impossible even for settled populations, let alone itinerant ones.

But there is a large slice of the English countryside where the greatest ire is reserved today not for migrants or any other foreign population, but for these Irish Travelers. There is even a (flawed) case sometimes made that much historic prejudice against Irish migrants was more about these people than the rest of the Irish (although, as mentioned, this is wrong at least until very recently). Over time, their birth rates mean they will be an ever larger proportion of the population.

They were Irish Travellers or Gypsies,

Hang on, I thought these were different - certainly in America, "Gypsy" is a now-offensive term for the Romani. I knew that it was apparently still kosher in the UK, but I assumed that it was used to refer to the same population. Does the British "Gypsy" refer to Irish Travellers rather than Romani? Is it an umbrella title encompassing both?

There are two kinds of gypsies in England, Romani and Traveller. Older and less politically correct British call both of them gypsies interchangeably, whether or not they are aware of the distinction.

I gather both have existed here in some form for a long time, but the majority of Roma arrived after the EU accession from Romania and Bulgaria, while the Irish Travelers have moved between Great Britain and Ireland for hundreds of years, since there has pretty much always been free movement except for during the Second World War. For a long time, before the origin of the Romani gypsies was understood as distinctly Indian, there was a widespread belief that the two groups may have been related. Even some Travellers thought or think of themselves as related and, starting in the late 19th century, some travelers actually adopted aesthetic aspects of Romani culture including the brightly painted caravans.

Unless someone is talking about London pickpockets or EU immigration, most British seem to mean traveller when they talk about gypsies, especially if they are rural. The Roma tend to cluster around towns and cities here, even if they are more rural in Eastern Europe proper.

Is it an umbrella title encompassing both?

Growing up in the UK in the 90s, 'gypsy' just meant people in caravans, which meant English or Irish travellers. The UK didn't really have a visible Romani population until Romanians and Bulgarians were able to come here as part of our (at the time) EU membership, and now every town has a dozen Big Issue sellers of Romani extraction that the papers euphemistically call 'Romanian' and which actual Romanians loudly insist are Gypsies and have nothing to do with them.

Fun fact, the Romani call Irish travellers something like 'half breed' because they have the itinerant lifestyle but they aren't Romani (although most Romani are settled these days anyway).

If you want an insulting term that is more apt for Irish Travellers as opposed to Roma, the traditional slur was "Pikey", although as with all slurs the meaning is vague and liable to expand over time.* The Snatch (by the same team as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) is a most excellent British gangster movie in which one of the many factions robbing each other is a pikey gang, and is referred to as such by all the other characters (except for the visiting American, who has no idea what he is dealing with).

Romanichal is the traditional term for the long-established British Roma community (as opposed to recent eastern European arrivals).

The British version of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding is almost entirely about pikeys because they couldn't get any Romani gypsies to cooperate with the filmmakers.

* Apparently British Roma use "pikey" as a slur for non-Roma who lead a travelling lifestyle, including Irish travellers, travelling showmen, and New Age travellers. Wikipedia says that it has become a catch-all term for the feral poor similar to "chav", but I have not heard that usage.

Wikipedia says that it has become a catch-all term for the feral poor similar to "chav", but I have not heard that usage.

I remember hearing that use in the '90s and '00s, but it would seem a little odd to say today. Not exactly because it's un-PC, it's just fallen out of use.

I have to say something because @orthoxerox made the same mistake but with the excuse of being a native speaker of a language without articles. The movie is called Snatch.

You are indeed correct. I would point out that what you call the film doesn't matter that much - what's important is that you watch it. It's a very good film.

I learned the word chav about 20 years ago. At the place I was working at the time there was a considerable culture of non-Japanese, mostly American/Australian/British. A gay American man, an Aussie woman and an American woman joined brains and came up with the idea to celebrate American Thanksgiving but in what they called collectively "chavvy" style. This meant those of us invited were to wear sweatpants and sportswear (I wasn't entirely sure of this) but also bring what was termed chavvy food. I mention the man was gay only to suggest the idea had its roots in women and gayness. Anyway chavvy food, that's what we were told to bring for the potluck.

This ended up meaning the food I had eaten all my life unironically for Thanksgiving, namely green bean casserole and cornbread dressing (both of which I made myself and brought.) I don't remember much about this festive afternoon/evening except that I got drunk, and that what I made, anyway, was good. I think I also ended up making the gravy. This was one of many experiences I've had with people from outside my world, whereby I realized Southern (white) culture down to the food was viewed as lowbrow. Later reading Nancy Isenberg I would realize such views could even be codified.

Looking back I'm sometimes baffled why I hung out with the people I hung out with, but sometimes living abroad you end up with odd acquaintances. Not trying to derail the thread, I am enjoying reading the discussion.

in America, "Gypsy" is a now-offensive term for the Romani.

Gypsy isn't offensive in America, unless you're talking to someone who goes out of their way to be offended by everything.

I considered typing "now-considered-to-be-offensive" or some other convolution, but ultimately deemed it unnecessary - I think it sort of goes without saying that "offensive term for [ethnicity]" means "term considered offensive by the sorts of people who care a great deal about what terms are offensive", particularly in the context of pointing out that their UK colleagues seemingly came to a different conclusion about the very same word.

No, I don't think those two things are in fact equivalent. For example, one could reasonably say that "nigger" is an offensive term for black people in America. The vast, vast majority of people in the nation would be greatly offended by using that word to describe people. By contrast, only a small (but vocal) minority considers "Gypsy" to be offensive. As such I don't think it merits saying the term is considered offensive at all, because unless you inhabit an extremely lefty bubble nobody is going to bat an eye of you say "Gypsy".

The "Romani" are also not from Rome, Romania etc. The term Gypsy arose because people erroneously thought they came from Egypt, but actually they are an Indian people who were kicked out of there long ago.

Genetically, they are indistinguishable from the ethnic Irish population. There is no marker that convincingly separates them from the settled ethnic Irish population.

Source? Wikipedia says otherwise: "Genetic analysis has shown Irish Travellers to be of Irish extraction, and that they likely diverged from the settled Irish population in the 1600s, probably during the time of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Centuries of cultural isolation have led Travellers to become genetically distinct from the settled Irish.[13]"

HBD cannot really explain the Irish Traveller

HBD seems tenable as an explanation. Because group differences are just individual differences, if a large enough group of individuals who deviate from the population average in some trait (such as criminal inclination) gather and stay together, then a distinct group average can emerge. Perhaps the group may have gotten their start as a sort of traveling association of outlaws in an era where an organized state was unable to break up their formation. I would like to see this tested via adoption studies or studies of people of traveler descent growing up entirely outside the traveler culture - do those individuals commit more crime than their non-traveler counterparts?

Wikipedia says otherwise: "Genetic analysis has shown Irish Travellers to be of Irish extraction, and that they likely diverged from the settled Irish population in the 1600s, probably during the time of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Centuries of cultural isolation have led Travellers to become genetically distinct from the settled Irish.[13]"

This is unfortunately what I was hoping to avoid a discussion about. Yes, Travellers are “genetically distinct” in the way that every individual and every family is genetically distinct. You can do a DNA test and say “wow, you’re related to a lot of Travellers, you must be a Traveller”. This isn’t evidence of a distinct population.

  1. Phenotypically Travellers are not distinguishable from comparable white Irish the way that clearly different human populations are. Roma are an ethnicity that is easily identified. Travellers are not.

  2. Criminal population isn’t really sufficient or even likely, it’s not a plausible origin story. Even if it were, plenty of Anglo populations including Anglo Americans and Anglo Australians have significant criminal / convict ancestry and yet reverted to their population means in time. It’s extremely implausible, even aside from the actual historical record, that Traveller 20x over representation among criminals in Ireland is explained by a founding population of criminals as if this is some kind of fantasy RPG thieves guild enterprise.

  3. The standards by which some studies claim to show distinct Traveller genetics can also be used to show that every small village was (or was until very recently) its own distinct genetic subpopulation. This isn’t even wrong, it’s just not useful and is a bad Motte and Bailey type argument here.

Granting that yes, 23&Me can tell you’re an Irish Traveller because you’re related to 300 other people who wrote down that they’re Irish Travellers is not sufficient to make this group a separate ethnic tribe.

Yes, Travellers are “genetically distinct” in the way that every individual and every family is genetically distinct. You can do a DNA test and say “wow, you’re related to a lot of Travellers, you must be a Traveller”. This isn’t evidence of a distinct population.

The standards by which some studies claim to show distinct Traveller genetics can also be used to show that every small village was (or was until very recently) its own distinct genetic subpopulation. This isn’t even wrong, it’s just not useful and is a bad Motte and Bailey type argument here.

It is not a motte and bailey. This is precisely what I meant.

Criminal population isn’t really sufficient or even likely, it’s not a plausible origin story. Even if it were, plenty of Anglo populations including Anglo Americans and Anglo Australians have significant criminal / convict ancestry and yet reverted to their population means in time. It’s extremely implausible, even aside from the actual historical record, that Traveller 20x over representation among criminals in Ireland is explained by a founding population of criminals as if this is some kind of fantasy RPG thieves guild enterprise.

Australia is a good counterexample, and I've always wondered why their crime rate isn't higher. I looked into it very briefly, and there are a few things that explain why. First, the crimes were mostly limited to petty theft. The more serious criminals were simply executed:

Most convicts were transported for petty crimes, particularly theft: thieves comprised 80% of all transportees.[4] More serious crimes, such as rape and murder, became transportable offences in the 1830s, but since they were also punishable by death, comparatively few convicts were transported for such crimes.[5]

whereas many criminal gangs even require you to commit murder as a prerequisite for membership.

Second, Australia was not exclusively founded by convicts. They were diluted significantly by regular free immigration. I couldn't find the number I was hoping for (average % of ancestry from convicts), but there is this stat that 20% of White Australians have at least some convict ancestry, so presumably the overall percentage is quite low, perhaps at around 10%.

Adding these factors along with the regression to the mean effect, and we should expect a negligible difference in the crime rate of modern White Australians, whereas the same would not hold under the criminal association theory I gave for the travelers. I don't have a pulse on your last point on the historical plausibility of this idea; perhaps you could fill us in?

Downthread, someone mentioned evaporative cooling, which would be an even stronger mechanism than what I'm proposing, so adding that in should be sufficient to account for the remaining difference.

Yeah the convict population of Australia is always massively overstated. They were one of the first major migrant waves, but the Gold Rush in Australia multiplied the population with free men. There were approximately 200k white Australian inhabitants (which was about 30-40% convict/convict-descent) prior to the Gold Rush in 1851, and about 2 million White Australians 30 years later in 1880.

Hmm, are you claiming too much, though? I'm concerned that your standard would not allow for a distinction between the Borderers versus other English groups that emigrated to the US as described in Albion's Seed.

My dude I can literally tell when a person's heritage is from a specific part of my own country (not britain) to such a degree I haven't been wrong yet. The same kind of people who tell you Irish Travelers are not distinct from the general irish also tell me there are no genetically distinct sub-populations in my country.

HBD cannot really explain the Irish Traveller

In his book The Son Also Rises, Gregory Clark does just that. He looks at both the Irish and the English travellers, who I'd previously thought were the same people.

They are stupid and dysfunctional for the same reason that Ashkenazim and Arab Christians are smart, evaporative cooling. If the most intelligent members of the caravan-dwelling class leave their communities and buy houses/get jobs/marry non-gypsies for a few generations, then the Travellers are what you get at the end of it.

If one was to take 50 Irish Traveller babies and have them raised by, say, Utah Mormons (who are closely genetically related given they are largely British and also a high competence population) with no contact or knowledge of their ancestry, do you believe they would be 20x overrepresented as violent criminals (this would be a large multiple of the oft-repeated 13-52 stat)? I just want to be clear about this assertion. Irish Traveller outmarriage was also historically too rare for this to viably explain this outcome.

Some overrepresentation would be inevitable for immediate hereditary reasons. But 20x? This is what reversion to the population mean would imply.

Perhaps they're like a dog breed. Genetically, they're quite difficult to distinguish from other dog breeds, but phenotypically very distinct due to small genetic differences having an outsized influence. Intense selection pressures over short time periods can have interesting consequences.

Dogs are obviously distinguishable phenotypically. It would be very interesting if every dog breed looked the same but varied hugely in capability.

Phenotype is not limited to appearance. Siberian huskies look similar to wolves but of course differ greatly in propensity towards violence against humans. Similarly, Nigerian-Americans are indistinguishable compared to Nigerian-Africans in appearance, but are likely to be a bit more intelligent on average than a typical White American simply due to selective immigration. If you cherry-picked the worst White criminals and put them in one place, you would have a nasty, behaviorally distinct group that nonetheless looks identical to other Whites, and whose behavioral differences are largely due to specific genetic differences.

Siberian huskies are immediately distinguishable from wolves- for one thing they're half the size- and most other northern spitzes are also easy to tell apart. They also interact with humans very differently(I had a cousin with pet wolves growing up, and a different one who had Alaskan malamutes), even aside from aggression. These are very different things and it is not difficult to tell them apart, despite some superficial similarities.

Phenotype includes behaviors. Dams are a phenotype (or extended phenotype) of beavers, but I would presume aggressive selection could produce a breed of beaver that looked very much the same but did not build dams (or perhaps only built very weak and ineffective dams) in a few generations.

Part of Dawkins' thesis in The Extended Phenotype (and in the closing chapter of The Selfish Gene) is that there are beaver genes "for" dam height in the same way that there are human genes "for" hair colour - the dam is a physical effect partially caused by the information contained in the DNA base sequence.

They would probably end up with a higher proportion of IEPs than average, and possibly unemployment and welfare, though that can be hidden by mormons giving each other jobs at below market skill level.

?

I mean mormon nepotism is well known. But why would we assume a higher percentage of IEP's? The mormon advantage isn't all HBD, lots of it is culture.

Because IEPs are to mitigate genetic disadvantages, which they probably have, since their birth parents came from a worse off group. Even if the genetics are similar (though they probably have some issues there as well), if they gave them up for adoption to strangers their parents must have been unusually dysfunctional, and probably have some degree of fetal alcohol syndrome or some such issues.

If one was to take 50 Irish Traveller babies and have them raised by, say, Utah Mormons (who are closely genetically related given they are largely British and also a high competence population) with no contact or knowledge of their ancestry, do you believe they would be 20x overrepresented as violent criminals (this would be a large multiple of the oft-repeated 13-52 stat)? I just want to be clear about this assertion. Irish Traveller outmarriage was also historically too rare for this to viably explain this outcome.

I'm not sure where that 20x statistic comes from, I certainly didn't quote it. But in answer to your question, I don't believe that the outcomes of the traveller-adoptees would be identical to their traveller kin, but I do believe that these adoptees would be committing significantly more crime than their natural-born Mormon siblings. Maybe 50% genetic, 20% shared environment and 30% non-shared environment, in line with what we see for IQ.

I'm not sure where that 20x statistic comes from, I certainly didn't quote it.

I'm assuming it's this part:

In Ireland, they are 0.7% of the population yet 12-15% of prison inmates, an astonishing level of overrepresentation that even many much-maligned other minority groups on both sides of the Atlantic have failed to match.

Suppose that experiment gives 5x rather than 20x, do you count it as a win for your POV?

(this would be a large multiple of the oft-repeated 13-52 stat)

Do you realize that 13-52 doesn't mean 52/13 = 4 overrepresentation, but 52/13/((100-52)/(100-13))=7.25, so not actually a large multiple

I highly doubt that the traveler population has a lower genetic IQ due to evaporative cooling than the native working class of Ireland(which has probably suffered stronger genetic selection by evaporative cooling), and which is not nearly so overrepresented among the prison population. Some cultures are just bad, like this one. The Roma are far less welcomed in Europe than similar IQ Mexicans are in the US- because Mexicans believe in paying their bills through honest work(and then drinking themselves stupid and blaring their polka beats at 2 AM while being incapable of recognizing that requests to turn the volume down aren't requests for an invitation to join the party), while Roma have a culture of stealing and swindling their way into the money to pay their bills with, and then doing the strung out loud noises thing anyways.

I highly doubt that the traveler population has a lower genetic IQ due to evaporative cooling than the native working class of Ireland(which has probably suffered stronger genetic selection by evaporative cooling)

How do you figure that? The working class is, almost definitionally, large. There's no other group big enough to absorb all their most functional members. By contrast, the (relatively) small traveller population could have been subject to a much stronger selection pressure.

There are many non-genetic reasons for why people do terrible stuff. "Idle teenagers do crime for no good reason" has been happening since forever. I would not assume that any explanation is true before further details reveal themselves.

That’s often because people vastly underestimate just how finely grained genetic determinism is at the microstructure of things. I’ve sometimes wondered if memes play an epigenetic role in social behavior and how it occurs.

What's the prevalence of cousin marriage?

They belong to an unusual population called Irish Travellers with which few non-British or Irish are particularly familiar.

Was The Snatch not a big hit in the US? It was extremely popular in Russia.

Historically, divergence was at most 300 years ago as a modern Irish state slowly emerged under British rule in the aftermath of the wars of the 17th century, which is too soon for the kind of extreme selection effects that produced some other minority groups to emerge.

Huh, TIL. Is this a counterexample to the HBD argument? Do those of them who dislike the culture simply precipitate out of the community and become sedentary Irish?

Was The Snatch not a big hit in the US? It was extremely popular in Russia.

I'd assume that most people don't look up what a "poikey" is.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if your average 'murican assumes "Mikey the Pikey" is just the local equivalent of white trailer trash. But I could be wrong.

Was The Snatch not a big hit in the US?

I've certainly never heard of it.

Is this a counterexample to the HBD argument?

Russia itself is a counterexample to the HBD argument. Incompetent corrupt oligarchy running a shithole for average people that's slightly poorer than Mexico- despite being fairly good at G-loaded tasks like chess grandmasters and advancing higher mathematics.

Snatch Brad Pitt, Jason Statham, seen it many times. No?

I've never heard it referred to it as The Snatch. It sounds like the title of the porn parody.

A Snatch by any other name..

I guess those two were not yet well-known back then.

Pitt was immensely famous already from several films, including Se7en five years prior. You may be right about Statham.

Pitt was immensely famous already from several films, including Se7en five years prior.

Perhaps more importantly, Fight Club from the year prior. Snatch was his next movie and partially promoted as "mega movie star appears in small quirky film."

Russia isn't a counterexample against HBD. The USA was reliant on Russian spacecraft to reach the ISS for some time (which again the Russians helped build). Likewise the US relies on Russia for about 20% of its enriched uranium.

Mexico doesn't produce machine tools, oil industry equipment, aircraft engines, rocket engines, radar or any sophisticated technology at all. Mexico only assembles electronics. They assemble cars and components designed by others, with machinery supplied by real industrial powers.

Russians are far more capable than Mexicans, which is why the US casually dominated Mexico whenever they clashed, whereas Russia was and is much more of a challenge. Russia can reduce Europe and North America to ash in hours, Mexico can barely control its own territory from gangsters nevermind prosecute foreign policy.

Yes, Russia obviously is capable of doing things that require a lot of thinking- but it can’t translate that into running a country that’s a nice place to live in.

That's what six centuries of post-Mongol ruling culture does to you.

Who says HBD means all countries run by smart people are more pleasant than countries run by stupid people? I'd rather live in Fiji than North Korea. But Koreans are more capable than Fijians.

Also now I look at it, Russia has twice Mexico's GDP per capita PPP. And even if you look at median incomes, Russia is still about 70% higher. So I don't think that Russia is even poorer than Mexico in any meaningful way and murder rate is lower too. Hard to be more murderous than Mexico. So unless we look at nominal GDP figures which are distorted by sanctions, then Russia is clearly better off. HBD bros win again.

I'd also rather live in Fiji than South Korea for that matter, but that's mostly due to the weather.

but it can’t translate that into running a country that’s a nice place to live in

As opposed to Mexico?

We called it just Snatch, but yes it was, or at least was very popular as a cool and good movie among college kids interested in such things. In Latin America, it was called something that translates to Pigs and Diamonds.

Huh, TIL. Is this a counterexample to the HBD argument?

The best counterexample to the HBD argument is probably the Irish in general. In the 19th century, the Irish (in Ireland, mainland Britain and America) had a reputation as the least intelligent white national group. The work of the early IQ testers demonstrated that this reputation was deserved - well-run IQ tests in the first-half of the twentieth century give an average IQ in the 90-93 range for both Irish in Ireland and Irish-Americans. But as Ireland develops and Irish immigrants in the US (and mainland Britain) assimilate measured IQ converges to the white average of 100. In the 1960's average IQs are about 92 in rural Ireland and 100 in the cities. And in the 21st century average white Irish IQ is the same as white British.

Note that all these figures are on top of the Flynn effect, which increases the level of actual g corresponding to 100 IQ over time.

Any eugenic force on the Irish would have been different in Ireland and America, and would have affected other American ethnic groups as well in a way we don't see. So this is an almost 10-point IQ gain from non-genetic causes.

I have watched and enjoyed Snatch, where Brad Pitt's boxer character is an Irish Traveller. It's also where the famous pig farm speech comes from. I think it's popular among men of a certain age, like Fight Club was, but maybe a decade later.

Coincidentally my wife did a paraphrased version of the pig farm speech to my kids last night to their horror/glee (all 3 under 11 years of age).

They kept asking her - "How do you know this?!?... Why do you know this!?!"

The two movies were released roughly just one year apart though.

They belong to an unusual population called Irish Travellers with which few non-British or Irish are particularly familiar.

Why am I learning this particular fact right now on TheMotte when this story has been all over the media and Reddit for the last 3-5 days?

To be fair the Daily Mail did report it, as you might expect.

Ah, I refuse to have anything to do with the Daily Fail.

Which is why your survey of the media was faulty.

I have standards you know...

Standards are as standards function. If whatever outlet you dislike routinely reports details of incidents that your media silo doesn't, it may behoove you to pay attention, or find something else to fill that information gap. You can usually do this via X, some of these racists are remarkably precise.

UK media seems to be diverging pretty hard. The Henry Nowak story being huge on the Right and getting buried on the left, for instance.

Just had a look at the Henry Nowak story. Leaving aside the 'police handcuff a man who is bleeding to death because somebody called him a racist' part of it, what concerns me is the judge in the case telling the jury that carrying a knife for self-defence is legal. It's just not.

Yeah. You can argue that there's some religious element but the entire idea of the Sikhs being able to carry knives is essentially a pro wrestling kayfabe where they're able to fulfil their religious requirement of 'self defense' but should also immediately get nuked with the full force of the law if they actually ever unsheathe one.

One of the most famous cases in British criminal law history involved a farmer who had been burgled by some traveller youths

A much stranger episode in Engligh civil law history also involving gypsies has to be Attorney-General v Corke [1933] Ch 89. The case itself doesn't mention whether the "nomadic caravan dwellers" were Irish travellers or Romani but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that a landowner of a brick field near a town allowed them to camp on it for a while. The expected happened and they dumped shit and caused general mayhem in the surrounds outside the landowner's field. The locals were, as you can expect, not amused. Knowing that suing the "nomadic caravan dwellers" was pointless the local authority decided to go after the landowner instead.

They won in court. But the twist was that it wasn't for nuisance or some other everyday tort like that. Instead the judge ruled that this was a situation which came under Rylands v Fletcher. This is a little known rule of English law which holds that:

The person who for his own purposes brings on his lands and collects and keeps there anything likely to do mischief if it escapes, must keep it in at his peril, and, if he does not do so, is prima facie answerable for all the damage which is the natural consequence of its escape.

Normally this tort applies to things escaping due to unnatural use of land, so stuff like fire, water, gas or other dangerous substances (the original case was one relating to a water reservoir breaking and flooding a neighbour's mine) leaking out and carries strict liability, so there's no easy defense for the landowner. Mr. Justice Bennett, in his infinite wisdom, decided though that inviting gypsies to live on your field constituted an unnatural use of land likely to cause mischief if they escaped, and the landowner was accordingly held liable. Now that's something you don't get to see every day!

Of course there's no way such a claim would succeed in the same terms today, this is a bygone relic from an era where English judges were still Based.

This issue is now dealt with through planning law rather than tort law - in rural areas the typical pikey encampment is on land zoned as agricultural with the permission of the (often-absentee) landowner. And the lifecycle of the encampment is driven by the glacial speed of planning enforcement.

This could plausibly be explained by genes, as the selection event that filtered Normal Irish into Traveler Irish would have selected for the most antisocial Irishman. If Cromwell’s invasion caused many Irish to be homeless, and this is the event which triggered the formation of the traveler community, which type of Irishman decided to continue living itinerantly post-upheaval? Which decided to continue this way of life over the centuries? Those who were made homeless but who were prosocial didn’t stay homeless; those who were prosocial yet born into the community would have left (throughout the 18th century). So there’s a plausible genetic mechanism by which [make most of the Irish homeless] followed by [select those who continue being homeless after a decade] would have selected for the uniquely antisocial. All that’s left would be [let the prosocial born in the community leave], which didn’t happen in the 20th century but could have in the 18th and 19th, followed by [let the most antisocial have the most children]. If the itinerant lifestyle selects for antisocial genes because the most antisocial traveler can steal the most goods and thus afford the healthier children, then we can maybe work out a genetic explanation. In the same way, the Gypsy community weeds out the most guilt-prone because they would be unable to inflict harm on another human without emotional distress via the daily scheming grind. Something something pitbulls and golden retrievers.

We could also have to look at what the normal Irish were doing 18th-21st century. Were they weeding out their antisocial by imprisoning and executing “their own”, while the travelers were simply fleeing with their criminals in tow? This would also elucidate a genetic divergence etiology

Genetically, they are indistinguishable from the ethnic Irish population. There is no marker that convincingly separates them from the settled ethnic Irish population.

You should have looked at IQ PGS or EA PGS and not "marker" also... aren't you getting this from writings of people who claim that even large visible differences between races don't exist? Crime is much, much less genetic that intelligence, that is why we have justice and prisons -- it helps keep crime down.

One of the open questions on the trans issue is just how big is the problem, really, particularly as it relates to children, and how often they're prescribed irreversible medical procedures. One attempt to answer it is the Stop The Harm Database, they go over insurance / Medicaid / VA claims and try to find procedure and NDC codes relevant to gender affirming care. According to them something to the tune of 14,000 minors received hormones, blockers, or surgeries between 2019 and 2023, with 5,747 of them getting some form of surgery. That report is not without criticism, we discussed it before and it was pointed out that the number includes laser hair removal as a surgery, so at first glance it looks like the "central example" of the kind of gender surgery that would cause people to freak out is actually a lot less frequent. However, evidence keeps accumulating that the numbers are just as bad a trans-skeptics are indicating, and perhaps even worse.

First, a small sanity check. The first pediatric gender clinic in the US opened in 2007, Stop The Harm now has 54 in it's database. These 54 clinics have to pay their bills somehow, and that implies a throughput that is probably more consistent with the 14K number being accurate, rather than an overestimate. Of course that alone tells us nothing, a clinic can offer a wide range of non-invasive services, like psychological support, or hell perhaps they do keep the lights on with laser hair removal.

If you followed the culture war for a while, you might remember that originally the argument was "no one is doing gender surgeries on minors, chud", but the actual healthcare providers are sometimes so far away from the culture war front, that they don't realize what they're doing is controversial, and proudly show it off. Here's Keiser Permanente's paper on how many gender-affirming mastectomies they performed on minors between 2013 and 2020. In that period they had 209 patients, the majority taking place at the end, as the trans trend was gaining momentum. They helpfully provide a chart of the incidence rate, and point out it increased 13-fold during that period, to a rate of 47.7 per 100K. The incidence rate gives us an opportunity to run another sanity check. If we take the population statistics by age and sex from 2020, add up the girls aged 13-17 (the age group from the paper; about 3.18% of the total population), multiply that by the total population from the 2020 census (331,449,281), we get 10,540,087 girls matching the demographic from the paper, and when we multiply that by the incidence rate, w get a grand total of 5027 potential mastectomies in the whole country, for 2020 alone. Now, again, that's just a sanity check. Kaiser Permanente is in California, the bluest of blue states, so I'm happy to grant that the incidence rate in other parts of the country is likely lower*, but it does hint at the Stop The Harm numbers not being insane, and the surgery statistics not being carried by laser hair removal.

So has someone tried to run a proper estimate for the whole country? On one hand we have a JAMA paper - National Estimates of Gender-Affirming Surgery in the US giving us 3.7K mastectomies for the 12-18 age group, between 2016 and 2019. Now there's a bit of an issue here in that the authors decided to include 18 year olds in the group, so we have no clue as to how many surgeries were done on minors. I'm pretty sure this is deliberate obfuscation on the parts of the authors, as I've seen multiple people ask one of them for the 12-17 numbers, and them going "oh, haha, sorry that's how we grouped, and it would be too much trouble to go back and recalculate it now". When other academics (from SEGM, I think) asked for the raw data, they went with "lol, no". I wish I could link it, but this was in a Twitter thread that took place around the time the paper got published (3-ish years ago), so I don't even know how to begin looking for it.

On the other hand we have the Manhattan Institute's """report""" giving us from 5,288 to 6,294 mastectomies between 2017 and 2023, and I put it in quote marks because it looks more like an article to me. They say they got their hands on an insurance database, and presumably they ran the right queries, but I'm still salty about the lack of detail on methodology. That said, this number does not actually contradict the JAMA paper. Note that in that paper they ran the numbers for 2016-2019 - the period when the trans trend was just picking up. 2019 was without doubt the year with the most mastectomies in their paper, not just by the Manhattan Institute's chart, but by Kaiser Permanente's as well. Further the MI chart would give us between 1700 and 2500-ish mastectomies for the years 2017-2019 - well within the bar given in JAMA. It's in fact lower, as 2016 saw a lot fewer mastectomies, if you go by KP's incidence rate, and you wouldn't reach 3.7K even if 2016 was exactly equal to 2017. This however is expected because, like I mentioned, the JAMA paper includes 18 year olds. All in all, despite my gripes with how the article is written, the numbers seem perfectly consistent with the numbers given by """mainstream""" sources.

We brought up a few factors that could imply they numbers are overestimated, but are there any pointing to them actually being underestimated? The MI believes even their liberal estimates are undercounting the actual numbers:

Two caveats should be mentioned. First, 2023 data are incomplete, making it premature to conclude that a dip occurred that year, relative to previous years. Second, even the liberal estimates are an undercount, as the data are limited by two constraints: the procedures had to be covered by insurance, and patients had to have a preexisting diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The out-of-pocket costs of “top surgery” can be as low as $3,000, a sum many middle-class families can afford. Further, if it is true, as is being alleged, that gender clinicians are using false diagnostic and procedural codes for insurance billing, these cases would not show up in our data.

That last bit might raise an eyebrow. Normally, I'd say it reminds me of a bit I once saw in an Adam Curtis documentary, about how the OG Neocons were screaming about the USSR building up a massive fleet of submarines, and when it was investigated and they found no such thing, they started screaming that this means the Soviets have a massive fleet of stealth submarines. In this case, however, well bear with me...

The link at the end of the quoted paragraph leads to a story about Dr. Ethan Haim and Vanessa Sivadge, whistleblowers from the Texas Children’s Hospital who exposed it for still providing gender-affirming care, even as the hospital officially announced it's putting a stop to them. For their trouble, they were rewarded by Biden siccing the FBI on them. The case of Dr. Haim is one of the biggest affronts to justice I saw in recent years, but I'd need an entirely separate effort post to go over that. The article slowly builds a decent-ish case that the hospital may have illegally billed Medicaid for the gender affirming procedures, but it's not directly relevant to my argument. The interesting bit is when you followed these two down the rabbit hole. They testified in congress about this matter, and Vanessa Sivadge, as far as I understood her testimony claims to have personally witnessed the doctors putting down the wrong ICD code in their diagnoses:

Mr. ONDER: Tell me a little bit, what was going on? They were downright putting the wrong ICD–10 code in these patients’ charts?

Ms. SIVADGE. Yes. Thank you for that question. Yes, Texas Children’s Hospital, through two particular doctors, were intentionally misdiagnosing patients, and I saw this with my own eyes. They were, for example, labeling a male with a testosterone deficiency to administer testosterone. They would do this because, on the medical chart, they would put the preferred gender identity of the patient and not the biological sex. This makes it very difficult to detect fraud for any insurance company who gets the billing code. It’s very difficult to distinguish what is actually happening.

Now, these congressional testimonies always felt a bit too generic to me, so we don't get much beyond a "trust me, bro", even if it's backed by a threat of perjury. Dr. Haim for his part never claimed to see it personally, but the issue seems to have become a personal hobby horse of his, and if you follow him you can see he dug out a lot of interesting things, like, for instance this fact-sheet, which he also testified about, from the Campaign For Southern Equality. They sent it out to gender clinics, and outright come out and say "hey, these (gender dysphoria related) codes are commonly rejected by insurance providers, try using ones like 'E34.9 Endocrine disorder, other' instead". Or how about this coding update from the American Medical Association where they recommend doctors stop using the code for gender affirming breast reduction/removal and use either the one for "treatment or prevention of breast cancer", or "reduction mammaplasty"?

Ok, so we have a few institutions encouraging the use of alternative diagnosis / procedure codes, how much of an impact could that have on the national estimates of incidence. Well, much like with Kaiser Permanente happily informing us on how many mastectomies they performed, some pro-trans researchers happily estimated the impact of using alternative codes for us:

The ICD-10 code was the most common way we identified GDY – 97% of patients were identified using either E34 or F64. Utilizing billing codes is an imperfect but practical way of identifying transgender patients for chart review, which has been used by multiple previous studies.23,31–33 Some codes used in similar adult studies, such as F65.1 “Transvestic Fetishism,” or Z87.890 “Personal History of Sex Reassignment,” were not present in our population. While the exclusion of the latter is likely due to the age, multiple interviews with gender-affirming care providers in our adolescent clinic revealed that providers prefer to use E34.9 “Endocrine disorder, other” for patients, as it is a less stigmatizing diagnosis. The use of E34.9 was specific to providers in the adolescent clinic, who indicated they did not use this code for patients other than those in the gender program. Together, these codes captured more patients than gender identity fields would alone (Table 2).

From what I'm seeing, about half of the trans patients taking hormones might be hiding under E34.9 “Endocrine disorder, other”, which is pretty important as Stop The Harm might include laser hair removal, but it does not include code E34.9 (they do did manage to grab all the relevant mestactomy codes, despite the AMA recommendation, however).

As a side note, the hospital, that the authors of the second paper are affiliated with, recently received a subpoena from the DOJ, demanding records related to pediatric gender-procedures, which they decided to completely ignore, almost like they have something to hide. The DOJ's petition to enforce compliance has now been granted, so I suppose we will, at some point, find out if they were on the up and up.

Ironically legal issues might be yet another way of providing us with yet another sanity check. One more interesting thing that popped up on my feed from following Dr. Haim is this court case, here's the interesting bit:

The Court finds the following facts were proven by a preponderance of the evidence for the purposes of the hearing on preliminary injunction:

16. The TRUE Center saw 1140 patients under 18 in 2025. Of those, 257 patients were prescribed puberty blockers and 549 patients were prescribed hormone therapy. In 2024, the TRUE Center saw 1203 patients under 18. Of those, 260 were prescribed puberty blockers and 549 were prescribed hormone therapy.

The TRUE Center is in Colorado. According to Stop The Harm Colorado saw a combined total of 240 patients taking hormones or puberty blocker. In other words, the numbers found by the court, for a single clinic, for a single year, were 2-3x greater than the numbers from Stop The Harm for the entire state for the entire period from 2019 to 2023. @gattsuru called their numbers eyepopping, it might their own they were being conservative.

This is a really idiotic question, but would the coding you describe distinguish between an elective mastectomy and a medically indicated one i.e. for an adolescent patient with breast cancer?

Definitely not a stupid question, and I'm not be the right person to ask (I think we have a few doctors here). The procedure codes seem to be descriptive of what the surgeon is about to do, rather than the purpose. For this post I was listening to an interview with Dr. Haim and the way he was describing it sounded like they go together with the ICD diagnostic codes, which explain why you're doing it, and than the insurer decides if they want to cover it. But I'm not an American, not a doctor, not an insurer, take with loads of salt.

Not a surgeon but as a US doctor that's essentially my understanding as well. All medical encounters would have a CPT code which is assigned for the actual service rendered or procedure performed as well as an ICD-10 diagnostic code which labels the medical diagnosis. I assume the procedure code would be the same for both of these, so for the type large volume data analysis done for these studies I don't think there would be a way of distinguishing between procedures if the diagnostic code is purposely entered incorrectly (short of actually digging into the written medical record case by case).

For some reason the notification for this response popped up only now for me. Thanks for the confirmation.

For some reason

Probably because the moderators didn't save this comment from the automatic new-user filter until just now.

Perhaps this response is even dumber, but adolescent breast cancer/reductions due to overactive puberty or whatever, while rare, is not a new thing the way trans mostly is, so we should be able to compare baseline numbers by averaging pre-2007 statistics?

reductions due to overactive puberty

TBH that shouldn't be a thing either unless it's to stave off cancer or something. There's nothing wrong with having big boobs and we as a society should absolutely come down on the very concept of reducing breast size for cosmetic consideration.

I'm sure there is a subset of people where the breasts are a legitimate physical handicap. Either due to really precocious puberty or since they're just too big for somebody's frame and present significant discomfort for living a normal life. In both cases I think it's reasonable to reduce.

Ah well, if they are literally impossible to lug around then sure.

and when we multiply that by the incidence rate, w get a grand total of 5027 potential mastectomies in the whole country, for 2020 alone

Quibble, but the "incidence" for 2020 in the chart is scaled from the part of the year before COVID lockdowns prevented elective surgeries. But the full-year number for 2019 is in the same neighbourhood, so it doesn't affect your argument.

Also, I don't understand why you care about the diagnostic code for elective mastectomies on minors. The rate of breast cancer in teenage girls (whether or not pretending to be boys) is so low that you can reasonably treat all mastectomies on minors as transgender surgeries.

But the full-year number for 2019 is in the same neighbourhood, so it doesn't affect your argument.

Yeah, and post lockdowns the number picked back up anyway. This is all just a ballpark estimation

Also, I don't understand why you care about the diagnostic code for elective mastectomies on minors. The rate of breast cancer in teenage girls (whether or not pretending to be boys) is so low that you can reasonably treat all mastectomies on minors as transgender surgeries.

There are non-cancer-related breast reductions, but I suppose that's a fair point.

I find both sides of this CW rather tiresome. The pro-trans "well, if half of the class in fifth grade wants puberty blockers, just let them have puberty blockers" is obviously wrong, but the anti-trans side is just as bad.

With parental consent (PC), a 16-yo can marry a 30-yo and bear his children in a lot of states. Or a 17-yo (with PC) can enlist in the army and get blown to pieces in some war on another continent. Or he could murder someone domestically (without PC) and be executed for that, until the liberals in the SCOTUS put a stop to that in 2005. And of course every 10-yo has the ability to kill themselves (without PC), not granted by the SCOTUS but by physics (i.e., God). Sadly, suicide is the second or third most common cause of death for teens (though homicides are ahead of suicides in the 15-19 group, second only to accidental injury, which I find even more fucked up).

I think that the bodily integrity of people whom we don't consider to have the ability to fully consent is an important good, and one should not make it too easy for them to get irreversible changes done to their bodies.

That being said, I do not consider mastectomies to be that irreversibly life-altering. If you change your mind, you can still get implants, and we have the tech to prevent any kids you might have from starving to death (and arguably had the tech for 10k years or so).

Bottom surgery is a different category, but the fact that you focus on mastectomies likely means that it is exceedingly rare in minors. And while we are discussing genital surgery without medical indication in minors, we should probably acknowledge that the median case is not the 15-yo getting her breasts removed, but the baby getting circumcised for religious reasons of his parents.

With regard to puberty and interventions, I will notice that 'natural' is not the same as 'good'. 'Natural' is when half of the kids die before puberty, and nobody remotely sane would suggest we go back to that. We have seen how God has planned out human life, and collectively decided "fuck that guy". The natural fate of a 12-yo with no health anomaly is not puberty. It is death through asphyxiation within minutes -- basically everywhere in the observable universe.

That being said, I doubt that most people's lives would be improved by accepting/deciding that they are trans. A lot of kids have issues with their identity around puberty, for most of them accepting their birth gender is likely the best outcome as far as quality of life is concerned. But there is certainly a subset who have a different gender identity hardwired and would be harmed not helped by letting puberty happen.

This means that medical interventions must be made based on trade-offs. Anticipate how the patient would view the intervention with 20 years of hindsight. Try to minimize the excepted reduction in QALYs -- no matter if it is due to suicide, sterility, surgical interventions etc. This involves guesswork, but every moral decision in the real world involves guesswork. Sometimes you will still decide wrongly and mess up a patient's life, either way. It also involves not being in the trenches of the CW. If you think that every trans-related intervention in minors is either good, you have not grasped the complexity of the situation. If you think every intervention is bad, likewise.

I mean the issue is that once you get on the transition train, it’s very hard to get off. And I’m not just talking about surgeries, but cross-dressing and hormonal treatments as well. Kids just don’t have the mental capacity to understand that whatever they do today their 80 year old future self will have to live with. Most 15 year olds cannot imagine being 80. They can’t even imagine being 30. Ask them about their plans for a career and it’s not based on things that athirty year old would think about like pay and owning a house and having kids and wanting time off etc. kids at 15 just think about a job that they think sounds cool or unique. They want to study stuff they like even if there’s no real prospects for a good middle class job from a lit major. They like books, and they want to study books.

So I think trans stuff, because it’s permanent and kids dont understand that, needs to be treated with extreme caution. I’m not going to say absolutely nobody should ever let a kid get surgery. But this is the same psychiatric system that manages to massively over diagnose lots of other mental illnesses to the point that it’s crazy. I don’t think the WAPATH model works because it’s done by a system that assumes that because someone said it, that it’s a reality.

It's not even 15 year olds, which is bad enough, it's the "you must let your six year old/four year old/two year old/how low can we drop the age and still get away with it? socially transition and accept that you have a daughter not a son, or else the end result will be DEAD CHILD" messaging.

This is an instantiation of a generic problem I see on the left, which is that, in practice, there appears to be no real way to repudiate or police the most extreme parts of the ideology. I think there are many causes of this problem, including the overarching one that the left has an orientation towards breaking boundaries, which cashes out in refusing to have standards*. So imposing things like "reasonableness" or "checking if the consequences of following through on such things leads to desirable outcomes" is deemed as oppressive and appropriately censured/censored. Associated with this is that the modern left has gone all-in on identity politics, which is definitionally a rejection of valuing ideas based on how they interact with objective reality but rather based on the identities of whose mouths those ideas came from. Thus, as long as one can find individuals with the right melanin content and gender identity and sexual attractions to deem some idea as true or even sacrosanct, then It Is Known.

I've said before that, when gay marriage was actually controversial, I scoffed at the notion that this was a "slippery slope" that would lead to [horrors beyond comprehension], and that I've learned since that I was completely wrong. Any push for a meaningful change to society that doesn't also have twice as much focus on determining and executing on how to stop that push seems likely to inevitably lead to a fall down the slippery slope.

* In practice, de facto standards inevitably form, of course. To be more detailed, it's that any imposed standards can be effectively argued against in a way that is orthogonal to actual truth or reality or usefulness.

I’m the same. The left has the difficulty of being unable to actually set and keep a boundary or standards of any sort. It’s not just identity stuff, but immigration, welfare, drug policy, crime laws. The default answer is radical hedonistic individualism and if anyone tells you you aren’t allowed to do anything you want to do, or says it will lead to poor outcomes or harm other people (or yourself for that matter) they are evil oppressors.

The right when it errs tends to err on the side of control, law and order, and so on. Some of which might be simply a reaction to the leftward push of the left liberals who want everything legalized and available, no ages of consent, no barriers, etc.

The right also errs by conflating progressives (as in, the right-in-waiting) and liberals. Part of that is (to borrow another comment) that their TV hasn't gotten over the fact it's not 1989 any more.

The "left" actually does keep boundaries and standards, you just either don't know what they are, don't like how they're justified, or are simply confused by the fact they call them something else (and you need a tool like POSIWID to figure that out).

For example, their criminals are their police- they're policing Racial Injustice, one taxation event (theft) at a time, until the conditions are right for the[ir] government do the stealing with that justification. So is their drug policy- after all, they couldn't help but be someone who gets addicted to drugs, and your broken window and stolen goods are their healthcare policy. Immigration's the same thing; they believe they live in exclaves threatened by the existence of the rest of the [outgroup]/nation, and open borders is the natural Uno Reverse card.

The problem with conservatism (as in, where the right-in-waiting is headed) is that there isn't actually any way to moderate it, because its moral foundations are different and thus demand an infinite contribution to its memes. Liberalism is not like that because it draws its strength from where the memes are wrong, which is why they go back and forth between estabilshment and establishment-in-waiting.

I think claims of left-liberals being accelerationists is a bit uncharitable. And really, I tend to find even within the families I know who are liberal, they are much more permissive in parenting than the conservatives I know. They’re the ones who let their kids do things they don’t like, who don’t limit their kids or insist on chores etc. conservative parents are authoritarian in a good sense, they insist that kids do chores and limit their bad behavior or vices. Conservative parents are more prone to force an adult child to move out than a liberal. Even when the child is failing to launch because of their vices, liberals will make excuses and maybe say something about it, but not really confronting the issue head on. Their child could be gaming for 16 hours a day and have no job or education they’re working on, the kid can still be living at home for a decade.

I would argue that a lot of stuff is permanent and kids (or people more generally) don't understand it fully.

At least in previous generations, dropping out of school had consequences which were pretty permanent for many. Sure, there are people who dropped out of school and still got a university degree later on, but they are the exception, not the rule. Yet few if any countries try to make 16-yo's go to school against their will.

Teenage motherhood is another example. If you get pregnant at age 14 and decide to become a mother, then that decision will very likely shape your further life trajectory. Yet few states will force a 14-yo to have an abortion against her and her parents' wishes. (OTOH, plenty of red states will try to force a 14-yo to give birth.)

More mundanely, we let 14-yo's ride bicycles in traffic or engage in sports which have some risk of permanent harm, and if there is a state which bans 14-yo's from working with circular saws I have not heard about it.

And in society more generally, it is more of the same. The physical consequences of voting are very often permanent: the dead of WW2 did not come back to life when the Germans who had voted for NSDAP in 1933 voted for CDU in '49 instead. A 30-yo who picks up smoking likely has no good concept of what it is like to die of lung cancer at age 60.

Some things are almost-all downsides, almost-no upsides, and sometimes society tries to ban these for minors (cigarettes) or generally (heroin). Gender-affirming healthcare is more ambivalent, like dropping out of school is (or was, back before AI). Some will look back and say that it was the decision which saved their lives. More of the ones who are contemplating it would see it as a grave mistake in hindsight.

Even in a perfectly accommodating society (which we very much do not have), being transgender sucks (from what I can tell, I am cis-by-default). We simply do not have the tech to fully give people a body of their chosen gender with little hassle or downsides. If someone is indifferent between gender identities, I would strongly recommend them trying to be cis-by-default. Treat trans kids in school like you would treat wheelchair-bound kids -- they got dealt a bad hand, and one should certainly respect their struggle and try to accommodate them, but for God's sake do not make speeches about how brave they are. You want an environment where kids with MS will know that they can still attend school when they require a wheelchair, not an environment where kids will want to have a neurodegenerative disorder so everyone will talk about how brave they are.

Yes, but unlike trans stuff, we were generally very very careful about allowing kids to do such things. We require kids to go to school until at least 16. We preach against those bad decisions. We put up all kinds of roadblocks where possible. We do not allow let alone celebrate it. We do not tell kids who want to be teen mothers “hey, look at how cool teenage single mothers are! Here’s how you get pregnant! And a whole week or month dedicated to making sure all of my friends think teenage mothers are super cool and brave.” We don’t do that for dropping out of school. The culture has made dropping out of school synonymous with “Loser”. It’s not okay and not something, in most cases, that kids think is cool.

With trans stuff, we kinda do the opposite. We celebrate the bravery of those who do it. We kinda make it cool, and make sure that people around them think it’s cool. We give kids a roadmap to actually doing that stuff, and make it as easy as possible— including removing obstacles to doing it. The parents who say “no” or “not yet” are threatened, the doctors are coached to never ever imply that this kid isn’t right about who they are and what they want. Hormones are given out to kids who need parental permission to go on a field trip to the history museum.

I get that naturally trans kids probably exist. I just don’t think going whole hog into a pathway that will have the kid sterilized before he hits puberty makes sense. At 17-18 I think it’s much more reasonable as the personal choice of someone who I might disagree with but is capable of making that choice. At 12-13, they have no idea what being an adult is like or what will matter to them at 30 or 40 or 80.

With parental consent (PC), a 16-yo can marry a 30-yo and bear his children in a lot of states.

We don't have a culture that encourages 16-year-old girls to marry. This is a holdover from an earlier (healthier) era; no congresscritter would vote for something like that today. All relevant changes to these kinds of laws in modern times have been to raise the age upwards.

By contrast, we do have a culture that encourages teenagers to transition. It's in media and schools and therapists and discord mods. I have never seen a married 16-year-old girl; I see trans people all the time (trans prostitutes are common at my hotel; I also saw a transwoman at an SSC meetup).

With parental consent (PC), a 16-yo can marry a 30-yo and bear his children in a lot of states. Or a 17-yo (with PC) can enlist in the army and get blown to pieces in some war on another continent

I have no problem at all with the idea that the age of consent for marriage and military service should be 18.

That being said, I think there's an important difference: So called "transitioning" is a dumb idea for anyone at any age. A strong argument can be made that nobody should be permitted to do it whatsoever. However, there is a principle that in a free society, adults are given a lot of liberty and autonomy over their bodies. Therefore, at a minimum, "transitioning" can and should be banned for anyone under 18.

By contrast, marriage and military service are not necessarily dumb ideas.

But there is certainly a subset who have a different gender identity hardwired

I'm extremely skeptical of this. What is the evidence for this claim?

So called "transitioning" is a dumb idea for anyone at any age. A strong argument can be made that nobody should be permitted to do it whatsoever.

It wasn’t a dumb idea for me, I’m very happy with the results and it has been overwhelmingly positive for me in my personal life. What strong argument could you make that I shouldn’t have been permitted to do it?

Dismissing an entire medical/psychiatric treatment out of hand is itself a dumb idea. This is a common attitude beyond transgenderism, I’ve heard similar takes about depression, anxiety, ADHD (another medical issue that involves children!) but if all you have to offer as alternatives are facile suggestions then you don’t really understand the level of distress some psychological conditions cause.

What strong argument could you make that I shouldn’t have been permitted to do it?

I'd need to dig out the study where this came from, I think it was one of the early Dutch ones (so definitely from pro-trans side), but I recall someone making a remark that it's very typical for transgender people to report satisfaction with the procedure, but that it doesn't seem to be reflected by their mental health actually improving.

It’s difficult to find good quality studies I suppose. A later one found a correlation between surgery and lowered psychological distress and suicidality but I don’t know if that’s the highest quality one you can find.

But in my case I was talking about HRT, not surgery.

Yeah, the Dutch stuff is about the whole shebang, from blockers to surgeries. It looks like I may have confused the source material for what the critics were saying about the same data. More recently there was a big study out of Finland looking at hormones + surgeries as well.

What strong argument could you make that I shouldn’t have been permitted to do it?

The same as for suicide: it's a social contagion, the mere existence of which perpetuates itself through society.

It wasn’t a dumb idea for me, I’m very happy with the results and it has been overwhelmingly positive for me in my personal life. What strong argument could you make that I shouldn’t have been permitted to do it?

Based on my general experience and observations, the vast majority (likely 100%) of trans people are some combination of (1) mentally ill; (2) delusional; (3) have an autogynophiliac fetish; and (4) want license to abuse other people by forcing them to play along with their fantasies. So that it doesn't help anyone (including trans people themselves) to play along with this nonsense, and it has a lot of potential to cause harm to others.

Dismissing an entire medical/psychiatric treatment out of hand is itself a dumb idea.

It's clear that the people on one side of the debate are deluded. Time will tell.

It wasn’t a dumb idea for me, I’m very happy with the results and it has been overwhelmingly positive for me in my personal life. What strong argument could you make that I shouldn’t have been permitted to do it?

Is that due to the procedure or due to social avenues that wouldn't have existed without the procedure/joining that particular community? The whole egg-cracking/self-perpetuating thing make it tricky to discern where given lines are. Like personally I've got no issue with people choosing to be fluid in their gender identity, and I'd be all for a medical procedure that actually accomplished gender transition. I just don't really see how the existing medical suite is capable of anything but a very very crude facsimile that renders people permanently on the hook for treatment.

I do feel that there are people who are trying to get around legitimate social issues through opting to transition and/or joining those communities but to me the whole medical intervention thing is kind of its own separate matter.

To be honest I don’t really see a huge difference in social avenues, I haven’t joined any community and none of my close friends are trans women. It’s slightly easier to make friends with cis women now while men are harder to relate to, but it’s not a drastic change since I was seen as a gay man most of the time before. Although navigating gendered expectations is easier now, like I don’t have to constantly explain myself anymore if that makes sense?

For me the main benefit is that physical dysphoria has been hugely reduced, and I can finally look at myself in the mirror without wanting to claw my own face out. HRT was pretty effective in my case and I went from being disgusted at my own body every single day, to being at peace and even grateful for it (with one exception). It’s such a relief that I don’t have to retreat into fantasy land to make intimacy bearable anymore.

I’d love for the medical tech to be more advanced of course, who wouldn’t? But I gave what’s out there a go, and it lifted the dark cloud that was fogging my mind and causing me misery, and that’s good enough for me.

Edit: No “procedure” necessary for the above effects, just plain old HRT.

That being said, I think there's an important difference: So called "transitioning" is a dumb idea for anyone at any age. A strong argument can be made that nobody should be permitted to do it whatsoever.

Agreed. If a man went around thinking he was Napoleon and chopping off his legs to match his desired height, we would lock him up in the psych ward until he stopped being a danger to himself. Transitioning should be illegal.

However, there is a principle that in a free society, adults are given a lot of liberty and autonomy over their bodies. Therefore, at a minimum, "transitioning" can and should be banned for anyone under 18.

Arguments about personal liberty died in the fires of wokeness. It's clear now that someone's vision is going to rule society; liberalism is an unstable fantasy. We can have a culture that bans and shames transgenderism, or we can have a culture that encourages and celebrates transgenderism; there is no in-between. I know what I pick.

In the same way as your other examples, I find it really funny that the mainstream right wing opinion is the anti vaxx naturalism bullshit, something that can and likely will kill and harm many more children than trans idealogy ever has. In just a single year, in just Samoa there was 83 newborn deaths thanks to RFK and other anti vaxxers. Samoa only has "Approximately 4,800 to 5,500 newborns" a year, which means over 1.5% of the newborns just straight up died from anti vaxxism. And some of the survivors of course may have long term damage to their lungs or brain or die from something else cause their immune system is disrupted.

Hell if you take a longtermist sort of approach, him stalling medical trials could be responsible for hundreds of thousands or millions of unnecessary preventable future deaths once we add things up like the cancer research and other tech with whatever roughly 4 years worth of deaths that could have been prevented just a little earlier if they didn't have to pause now.

Now I'm a staunch anti government libertarian and think it's wrong to force parents into vaccinating their babies, but the hypocrisy on display is ridiculous. Actually, it's worse than hypocrisy, vaccines are a settled science, at least the trans issue is still rather unexplored. Another plus also being that it's opt in from the kid themselves unlike vaccines where the kid doesn't choose illness, long term injuries or death when the parent ignores it.

Be consistent, you either think government should be used to supersede parents and childrens choices for health reasons, in which case you should oppose RFK and MAHA and things like Florida's move to end vaccine mandates vehemently or you don't and you should let kids and their parents choose transitioning if they want. Level of severity isn't an argument, the former is way more dangerous and way more proven.

I find it really funny that the mainstream right wing opinion is the anti vaxx naturalism bullshit

Oh how the turn tables. It used to be the liberal granola moms with their new age healing crystals who had that market cornered. Funny how brazen lies and systemic abuse can turn a population against you. (shut down everything but allow BLM to protest, jail/fired for not taking the jab or having the temerity to enjoy the beach alone without a mask)

There is a distrust of the institutions and the scientists running them far more than the science behind the concept of vaccines.

I don't think it's actually true that "the mainstream right wing opinion is the anti vaxx naturalism bullshit". Poster who posted that likes to slip in false things, possibly in an attempt to manufacture common knowledge.

I have to agree the "mainstream" ie normies aren't as radicalized. Certain portions of the more radical fringe online right are however up there even harder than the granola moms used to be. (personal observation)

It's a good example of why I oppose government power like this from the start. What you use to suppress others and their "bad beliefs" can be used on you to suppress your "bad beliefs". Even when you have someone on "your side" in charge, what's the chance you agree with them on every topic? You will be suppressed too, just like RFK is trying to do to vaccines.

And it's not just "bad beliefs" either, plenty of other completely neutral stuff like sunscreens or life saving infant nutritional fluids gets caught in the crossfire of government regulations.

How many preventable deaths have been caused by the US's ban by default medical system forcing good meds to take years to come to market (if they aren't just blocked entirely by the price)? How many experiments on already dying terminally ill patients desperate to try out for a last chance at life never get run?

Now I'm a staunch anti government libertarian and think it's wrong to force parents into vaccinating their babies, but the hypocrisy on display is ridiculous. Actually, it's worse than hypocrisy, vaccines are a settled science, at least the trans issue is still rather unexplored. Another plus also being that it's opt in from the kid themselves unlike vaccines where the kid doesn't choose illness, long term injuries or death when the parent ignores it.

Be consistent, you either think government should be used to supersede parents and childrens choices for health reasons, in which case you should oppose RFK and MAHA and things like Florida's move to end vaccine mandates vehemently or you don't and you should let kids and their parents choose transitioning if they want. Level of severity isn't an argument, the former is way more dangerous and way more proven.

But these are not the options on the table. They are parents against their kids' transition. I'm no fan of anti-vaccine sentiment in general, but they are very consistent: Trans, just like vaccines, are to them an imposition by the government, trying to supersede their parental authority "for their own/their kids good". It's not surprising that the same people oppose both. It just happens that they are correct on one count, and incorrect on another (at least from my vantage point), but there is no hypocrisy involved here.

Not to mention that of course the parents critical of trans-ideology and the parents critical of vaccines are not actually the same group, there is merely a significant overlap due to low government trust being a common reason for both.

I'm 100% convinced that if it really was entirely about liberal parents transitioning their own kids, the same people would consider that foolish and bad, but there would be very little resistance, just let them do what they want. The problem entirely comes from government institutions trying to push trans ideology as settled science and threatening & slandering any parent who is not 100% on board with their kids' transition.

They are parents against their kids' transition.

When parents and children actively disagree on something, it's a far more difficult discussion that gets into balancing the rights of the parents to control their child vs the child's own right of autonomy. Personally I'm pretty strong in children having that right and but the trend has been consistently towards more and more helicopter parenting and coddling children so much even teenagers aren't allowed to leave their neighborhoods so that's just been lost.

Like come on, my parents told me stories of when they were in elementary school biking out miles away without supervision. Now even with phones, kids that same age can't even go to a different aisle at the grocery store. We have completely forgotten how independent and free our children can be once we start expecting it from them. It's happened to the youngest kids too! Now we just have a bunch of immature brats acting like they're still babies and aren't even potty trained yet. 12 year olds can't go to a different aisle and 5 year olds can't use a toilet.

Not to mention that of course the parents critical of trans-ideology and the parents critical of vaccines are not actually the same group, there is merely a significant overlap due to low government trust being a common reason for both.

Sure, so what about the attempts to ban transition in situations where the parents and children both agree to do it? Support for big government overruling parents and their children can't be motivated by opposition to big government.

Personally I'm pretty strong in children having that right but the trend has been consistently towards more and more helicopter parenting and coddling children so much even teenagers aren't allowed to leave their neighborhoods so that's just been lost.

You think parents not letting their kids leave their neighborhood, and parents not letting their kids chop off healthy body parts belongs in the se category?

Sure, so what about the attempts to ban transition in situations where the parents and children both agree to do it

We can probably work out some sort of a compromise. Say, we make it illegal for doctors to put pressure on parents with made up nonsense like "would you rather have a happy daughter or a dead son?" or lie about the reversibility of the procedures, but otherwise allow it for people who know what they're signing up for.

There's lots of possible compromises, but it requires the other side coming to the table. Currently, they still refuse, and insist on censoring us instead.

Finally, what I want to know why is this literally thr only subject where people's libertarianism comes out? Why haven't I seen your principled anti-government libertarianism around during the Covid era?

You think parents not letting their kids leave their neighborhood, and parents not letting their kids chop off healthy body parts belongs in the se category?

You don't understand how parents overruling children's autonomy is in the same category of parents overruling children's autonomy?

Finally, what I want to know why is this literally thr only subject where people's libertarianism comes out? Why haven't I seen your principled anti-government libertarianism around during the Covid era?

I've literally argued on this site for legalizing drugs and not caring when addicts overdose because it's their responsibility. I've argued against banning kids from phones and the Internet. I've argued against vaccine mandates. I've argued for free markets and getting rid of government regulations on everything from smaller government control like zoning to larger government control like the FDA which drives up costs and hurts people with long delays or immigration restrictions or anti discrimination laws (which are also unnecessary anyway in modern society to begin with) on large companies which prevents them from proper meritocratic hiring. I've consistently said that I am a fan of people like Reagan, Thatcher and Ayn Rand.

Almost every place that government exists, I say it should be scaled back. Sometimes I acknowledge that there are benefits to some government action (tradeoffs do exist!) like I see how welfare has personally helped a person in my life while also being against welfare overall. Or how I think that social security should have never existed, but since it did exist, it should fulfill the implicit promise behind it to the people they stole money from. Even Ayn Rand famously took her social security, because being against the program doesn't mean you can't ask the government to at least fulfill the promise it made when it took your money from you. She didn't think it should be stolen to begin with, but it's not hypocritical to say "then at least do what you said you would" right?

But generally I'm pretty damn consistent here, government out individual responsibilities in.

You don't understand how parents overruling children's autonomy is in the same category of parents overruling children's autonomy?

Yeah. Parents overrule children's autonomy all the time, arguably that's what they're for. Overriding it to the point where they can't leave their house unaccompanied is so extreme that it does belong in a separate category, in my opinion.

I've argued against vaccine mandates.

Really? You were here during the Covid era? My memory isn't great but I feel like I would have made a note given how vicious the Blues were at the time.

But generally I'm pretty damn consistent here, government out individual responsibilities in.

So you're assuming everyone else is a Randian / bordering on ancap? Because I don't see where's the hypocrisy otherwise.

Yeah. Parents overrule children's autonomy all the time, arguably that's what they're for.

That's true for younger children. But once you get to the teens, historically parents didn't have that much control! Especially the older teens. Their children would have had a job for a number of years and might have already moved out of the house for an apprenticeship as a page or a midshipmen or traveled along as a cowboy or did general work at a factory or whatever was fitting of the time period.

Most riders on the drives were out-of-work farmers’ sons, some as young as 12 years old, who saw the opportunity to trail cattle as both a rare paying job and a rite of passage.

It's very recently where we've started coddling teenagers like we do with babies and toddlers.

Really? You were here during the Covid era? My memory isn't great but I feel like I would have made a note given how vicious the Blues were at the time.

No, I didn't know the site was around back then. I am not those other people, I am just saying that I am consistent.

So you're assuming everyone else is a Randian / bordering on ancap? Because I don't see where's the hypocrisy otherwise.

No, I'm saying that if you're for one form of government coercion against the parent's and child's choices, but for another where it's only the parent, despite the latter also being more severe then there's not a good explanation for that besides politicizing and hypocrisy.

On every front anti vaxx is worse.

Autonomy? Parent alone choosing for a baby vs parent and teen.

Severity? 1.5% of the newborns died with just measles alone in Samoa.

Externalities? Anti vaxx can directly spread to people with weak immune systems or help disease evolve, where as a kid choosing to get their breasts removed and regretting it only hurts them.

Reverseability? While neither are wholly reversible, death is a lot worse than getting breasts removed and regretting it.

An argument that government coercion should overrule parents that cares about transition choices but not antivaxxers is not motivated by saving lives or helping people because the latter is far worse.

More comments

we should probably acknowledge that the median case is not the 15-yo getting her breasts removed, but the baby getting circumcised for religious reasons of his parents.

The two are far more similar than I think is commonly realized, because the 15 year old getting her breasts removed is also doing it for reasons that have a lot to do with the dominant civil religion. This is more apparent when the kid's younger, and just like the Christian Right of the '80s, it's always the moms [including teachers, who are just state surrogate moms] pushing the kids into doing it.

It's also why the "consent" argument doesn't work here, since the "but they can't consent" has the same valence as the "don't allow children under the Age of Consent to be exposed to the destructive memes of religion" of the 2010 Atheism Wars. That didn't really get off the ground; it's an argument that's plain unworkable outside of full societal restructuring (and most people have a vague sense it's being made in bad faith), since a parent's worldview inherently influences what their child does. That is ultimately true of the same assertion when applied to kids engaging in transgenderism.

And of course every 10-yo has the ability to kill themselves (without PC), not granted by the SCOTUS but by physics (i.e., God)

Every boy has the physical ability to chop off his own dick, and every girl has the physical ability to bind her breasts.

I think that the bodily integrity of people whom we don't consider to have the ability to fully consent is an important good, and one should not make it too easy for them to get irreversible changes done to their bodies.

If the moral framework around "consent" led directly to a society where transgenderism would be declared sacrosanct, that's pretty clear evidence that this framework has serious and fundamental flaws, and should be either refined or done away with.

It appears your problem is a dislike of making value judgements. A 16 year old getting pregnant is pretty normal. Getting an irreversible (and implants don't fix a breast to normal function) surgery is abnormal and bad. Enlisting in the Army has risks, many permanent, but it also has virtues, whereas cold blooded murder does not.

I do not like making value judgments of the form "it is normal, therefore it is good". History is full of of things which were considered normal and therefore good, which we nevertheless consider atrocities. If I were to judge behaviors good simply because they are widespread, then all the trans activists would have to do is to make teen mastectomies as common as circumcision and I would be forced to conclude that it is fine.

For the 16-yo getting a kid, it depends on the outcomes for her, the kid and broader society. Perhaps she will thrive in motherhood and raise five kids in a stable family. Perhaps she will be left by the father of the kid before it turns three, and struggle to meet the responsibilities of parenthood without any skills to earn a living, perhaps raising a kid whose trajectory through the criminal justice system is already over-determined. Perhaps if she does not have a kid she would become a brilliant medical researcher, or a serial killer.

Likewise the army. For pretty much everyone except Khorne worshippers, war is negative-sum. If people enlisting on one side of a conflict make the world a better place, then people enlisting on the other side of a conflict will make the world a worse place.

With parental consent (PC), a 16-yo can marry a 30-yo and bear his children in a lot of states.

As others pointed the entire culture is against such marriages, and even sees pregnancies from low age gap relationships as something to be prevented. I don't know how it is now, but it looked like a sizeable amount of money was being spent when I was an adolescent, to stop this from happening.

That being said, I do not consider mastectomies to be that irreversibly life-altering. If you change your mind, you can still get implants

I'm sorry, that's deranged. That's the sort of stuff that makes me want to go to the local feminists and say "I'm sorry, you were right". What you said only makes sense if you believe the breasts' only function is decorative, for the enjoyment of men.

And while we are discussing genital surgery without medical indication in minors, we should probably acknowledge that the median case is not the 15-yo getting her breasts removed, but the baby getting circumcised for religious reasons of his parents.

Yes, circumcision is barbaric, next question.

With regard to puberty and interventions, I will notice that 'natural' is not the same as 'good'. 'Natural' is when half of the kids die before puberty, and nobody remotely sane would suggest we go back to that. We have seen how God has planned out human life, and collectively decided "fuck that guy". The natural fate of a 12-yo with no health anomaly is not puberty. It is death through asphyxiation within minutes -- basically everywhere in the observable universe.

That's a pretty absurd argument, if that's where you want to leave it at. When a kid loses their baby teeth, we don't try to halt that process because "natural is not the same as good". When a kid grows, and experiences growing pains, we also don't try to halt the process no matter how much he whines about it. These things are a normal part of healthy development, and we recognize an argument needs to be made to intervene in it, not to defend allowing the process to take place.

But there is certainly a subset who have a different gender identity hardwired and would be harmed not helped by letting puberty happen.

If it's certain, what sort of evidence do you have for the claim? Every systematic review of pediatric gender care that I'm aware of, came out saying the evidence is of low or very low quality. As far as I recall the history of these interventions, this isn't even a case of small studies showing promising initial results, but failing to scale, the results have been pretty poor from the start, but we went ahead with it for ideological reasons.

This means that medical interventions must be made based on trade-offs. Anticipate how the patient would view the intervention with 20 years of hindsight. Try to minimize the excepted reduction in QALYs -- no matter if it is due to suicide, sterility, surgical interventions etc. This involves guesswork, but every moral decision in the real world involves guesswork

Ok, and when it turns out they're not doing it, can I point that out? When it, in fact turns out that they might be maximizing the reduction in QALY's, can I point that out? When it turns out they're not even so much interested in figuring out whether any of these things are medically justified to begin with, as they are an autonomy and self-expression, can I point that out? When it turns out that the approach you're proposing is not only not being followed, but is pretty much impossible under the current framework, because by definition anyone who wants a trans-surgery is trans, and thus justifies the surgery being performed, can I point it out? Can I point all of these things out without being called "just as bad" as the side that's doing them?

With parental consent (PC), a 16-yo can marry a 30-yo and bear his children in a lot of states. Or a 17-yo (with PC) can enlist in the army and get blown to pieces in some war on another continent. Or he could murder someone domestically (without PC) and be executed for that, until the liberals in the SCOTUS put a stop to that in 2005. And of course every 10-yo has the ability to kill themselves (without PC), not granted by the SCOTUS but by physics (i.e., God). Sadly, suicide is the second or third most common cause of death for teens (though homicides are ahead of suicides in the 15-19 group, second only to accidental injury, which I find even more fucked up).

Uh, one of these things is not like the others?

Yes, we have not implanted microchips in children's brains en masse preventing them from taking their own lives until they've reached the age of majority. Very astute observation. In the West, just about any sufficiently determined ten-year-old can kill himself. By extension, any sufficiently determined ten-year-old could probably emasculate himself if he put his mind to it.

Anti-trans posters are not complaining that we don't live in a maximally totalitarian dystopia in which no harm of any kind will ever befall minors. (If anything, I'd say the median anti-trans poster would be more in favour of minors incurring the occasional skinned knee or broken arm rather than sitting in their bedrooms staring at their phones. I'd hazard a guess that there's a significant amount of overlap between the most trans-affirming parents and this modern breed of safetyist helicopter parent. I could even map out a plausible causal pathway wherein safetyist helicopter parenting results in one's child identifying as trans.)

We are complaining about: medical organisations violating the principle of primum non nocere and being derelict in their duty of care to their patients; these organisations carrying out elective procedures on patients too young to understand the implications thereof; claiming (on the basis of extremely flimsy and far from dispositive evidence) these procedures are necessary to prevent the patients in question from taking their own lives; ignoring any evidence to the contrary; browbeating and gaslighting the patients' enormously distressed parents with emotionally manipulative slogans like "would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?"; and flat-out lying to the public about how many such procedures have been conducted, and for what reason.

The fact that (short of having him sectioned) any sufficiently determined ten-year-old cannot be physically prevented from killing himself is not, in any way, a rebuttal to any of the above complaints. In fact, it strikes me as a complete non sequitur. It doesn't even rise to the level of whataboutism.

But there is certainly a subset who have a different gender identity hardwired and would be harmed not helped by letting puberty happen.

Citation requested.

No, the anti-trans side is not as bad as giving half of all fifth-graders chemical castration drugs that are only justified when you have advanced prostate cancer.

Nothing you wrote is anywhere near as bad as castrating ten year olds. Nothing is anywhere near that bad.

'Natural' is when half of the kids die before puberty

I'm so, so, so sick of dishonest hacks confusing the brutal competition between life forms with the normal development of healthy organisms. The presence of disease or predation does not make dying before adulthood "natural," and conflating them is dishonest in the extreme.

Yeah. I get the argument for social transition/choosing to identify but the second you start getting medical it's pretty insane when even a great, perfectly-timed gender transition with an elite surgical team is still not going to stand up to any real scrutiny from society and has a bunch of side-effects for life.

If the drugs/surgery had any real productive ability to actually accomplish their goals I'd get the argument but for the most part they're totally inadequate so what's the point of incurring possible negative effects?

I'm so, so, so sick of dishonest hacks confusing the brutal competition between life forms with the normal development of healthy organisms. The presence of disease or predation does not make dying before adulthood "natural," and conflating them is dishonest in the extreme.

Your "healthy organism" (that adjective is doing a lot of work, there) is very much the product of billions of years of brutal competition. There is no reason to suppose that the amoral process of evolution would find something which is morally good.

I will grant you that humans evolved for being efficient, so most random alterations (like removing a hand or an eye) you do on a human will make it less efficient, so a lot of times what is good and what is natural will coincide.

As a trivial example of the natural and the good not coinciding, a good fraction of healthy humans will have their periods about once a month, a process which I understand can be very painful simply because evolution did not give a fuck about the lives of the carriers of the genomes being free of pain. It would only care about it if the pain was strong enough that women would have frequently jumped of cliffs to escape it (and probably have given rise to genes which make them more reluctant to suicide). (I mean, you could try to define a woman who has her period as an unhealthy organism who is suffering from not being pregnant (though I would despise such a world-view), but pregnancy in humans is just more body horror, so the point stands.)

As another example, per Google's LLM, about 15-30% of adult male humans are estimated to have died from human-on-human violence in the ancestral environment. A 17-yo guy who gets into fights and perhaps ends up killing another guy is not mentally ill, but simply following a genetic script which worked perfectly well in the ancestral environment. From the perspective of evolution, he is a perfectly healthy organism, and the guy who attends university to get an office job is the real weirdo.

A big part of human civilization is to take these apes evolved for scavenging in the African savanna (or whatever) and turn them into call center workers, lawyers and so on. While this thankfully does not involve physical maiming, it certainly involves denying a lot of inherited instincts -- either through nurture or by executing people for stuff like 'murder' until they become docile, if you are a HBD believer.

If you change your mind, you can still get implants

So long as you're willing to get regular MRI scans to make sure the implant has not silently ruptured:

Saline-filled breast implants Saline-filled implants are filled with saltwater. The surgeon inserts the empty shell and, once it’s in place, fills it with saline until it’s the desired size.

Some people prefer saline-filled implants because:

if a saline implant gets a leak or rupture in its shell or its valve fails, it’s usually obvious because the saline leaks out and the breast appears deflated

saline is harmless and absorbed by the body

you don’t need to get routine MRI screenings to check for silent rupture (implant break that doesn’t cause any noticeable symptoms)

However, a disadvantage of saline implants is that some people think they feel less natural than silicone implants. Also, rippling and wrinkling on the surface of the implant is more likely to be visible through the skin.

Silicone-filled breast implants Silicone-filled implants are pre-filled with silicone gel.

Some people prefer silicone-filled implants because:

they may look and feel softer and more like natural breast tissue than saline implants

the surgeon might be able to provide more brands and styles of implants to choose from (since more of the implants on the market are silicone-filled)

There are several disadvantages of silicone-filled implants, though, related to what happens if there is a rupture.

If a silicone-filled implant ruptures, it’s harder to recognize because the implant often maintains its shape. If the silicone gel comes out of the implant, it can stay in the body and may spread to nearby tissues or to other parts of the body such as the lymph nodes or the lungs.

Sure, no problem. Chop off your boobs when you're too young to vote or drink, and then if you change your mind, get surgery for fake boobs which you just have to be careful about them leaking into your lungs. Great choices there!

Oh, it gets better. On the off chance you decide to have a kid after all this, you can look forward to stuff like this:

I'm numb on the top of my chest, and I continue to be unable to feel on my skin [my son], or myself, or my boyfriend or anyone... But there's like chest tissue that is becoming engorged and filling with milk that is trapped in between scar tissue that's under my chest. I got these, like, rocks in my chest. When it happens, you can see it physically, like my chest getting large rocks in it, but it's not two, like breasts... it's little rocks and lumps and they're hot, and they're painful, and you can physically see it.

That being said, I do not consider mastectomies to be that irreversibly life-altering. If you change your mind, you can still get implants, and we have the tech to prevent any kids you might have from starving to death (and arguably had the tech for 10k years or so).

Are mastectomies more or less irreversibly life-altering than anorexia or bulimia? If schools were actively encouraging their students to pick up these habits, and hiding this fact from the students' parents, would that be more or less acceptable than the current status quo?

[caveat : I'm not especially concerned about hormones for 16+, and I don't really get the object to 17+ mastectomies. These processes do have risks and side effects, but they're relatively well-bounded and understood, and combined with the drastically reduced incidence of desistance by those age ranges, the harm calculations just aren't looking that severe. I could be persuaded on these things -- I have been persuaded that use of puberty blockers were not just a minimally-harmful experiment but instead ranged from ill-advised to active malpractice, and the prominence and tolerance of bad actors from that sequence does leave me more cautious about the evidence and documentation for hormone therapy for the 16-18 range -- but I've had too many serious medical interventions before I was 18 for the 'mutilate' or 'consent' frameworks alone to really hit. Younger hormone therapy seems to have serious impact on bone health, and the long-term effects of orochidectomy and hysterectomy are much more serious and much harder for teenagers to understand.]

These 54 clinics have to pay their bills somehow, and that implies a throughput that is probably more consistent with the 14K number being accurate, rather than an overestimate. Of course that alone tells us nothing, a clinic can offer a wide range of non-invasive services, like psychological support, or hell perhaps they do keep the lights on with laser hair removal.

There are definitely clinics without surgical capabilities (or in jurisdictions that prohibit surgical intervention for minors), so psychological support and pharmaceutical interventions and such clearly can suffice for some businesses, and naively I'd expect that while the individual compensations are higher for surgical intervention, the bread-and-butter by definition is a lot more likely to come from recurring stuff. Dunno if there are any public figures, though.

That last bit might raise an eyebrow. Normally, I'd say it reminds me of a bit I once saw in an Adam Curtis documentary, about how the OG Neocons were screaming about the USSR building up a massive fleet of submarines, and when it was investigated and they found no such thing, they started screaming that this means the Soviets have a massive fleet of stealth submarines.

Eh, I get this is playful overstatement, but the extent minor insurance tomfoolery is tolerated is pretty important to recognize. Unless you're Haim, the feds really don't get involved in Medi* stuff unless it's hilariously overt or big amounts of cash are floating around, and sometimes not even then. Just fucking up ICD codes is wrist-slap stuff at best. Which is why it's a big concern... but it also means that it's a lot less of a big overt scandal if it's proven.

For their trouble, they were rewarded by Biden siccing the FBI on them. The case of Dr. Haim is one of the biggest affronts to justice I saw in recent years, but I'd need an entirely separate effort post to go over that.

Some discussion here

As a side note, the hospital, that the authors of the second paper are affiliated with, recently received a subpoena from the DOJ, demanding records related to pediatric gender-procedures, which they decided to completely ignore, almost like they have something to hide. The DOJ's petition to enforce compliance has now been granted, so I suppose we will, at some point, find out if they were on the up and up.

I'm not quite so optimistic; there was a mess of legal interplay here that would have gotten less favored political actors disbarred, and while requests for emergency relief have been denied so far, the jurisdiction charlie foxtrot is enough a mess it's possible the summary statistics will only be released if O'Connor defies procedure.

In other words, the numbers found by the court, for a single clinic, for a single year, were 2-3x greater than the numbers from Stop The Harm for the entire state for the entire period from 2019 to 2023. gattsuru called their numbers eyepopping, it might their own they were being conservative.

To be clear, eyepopping was more a reference to the 5k surgery interventions, but yes, the discrepancy between TRUE's claimed patient count and that available to other observers is concerning. Similarly, SEGM estimates a maximum of 1k masectomies on under-18s per year, and I'd consider them gender-critical in a way that would give higher-end estimates whenever possible. If they're vastly underestimating things, that's a concern regardless of the merits or demerits of the procedures simply because we can't possibly measure the outcomes on things that we don't know are happening.

These processes do have risks and side effects, but they're relatively well-bounded and understood, and combined with the drastically reduced incidence of desistance by those age ranges, the harm calculations just aren't looking that severe.

You have to be kidding me. The possibility for incidents of testicular/ovarian cancer when on HRT should not be so easily discounted. You are also chemically castrating the child so they can get like an extra decade or two of "looking hot enough" to live a vain meaningless life. Also you can't simply undo puberty blockers, it's not a free lunch sort of deal.

The possibility for incidents of testicular/ovarian cancer when on HRT should not be so easily discounted.

It's a serious concern and something that needs to be seriously reviewed by any medical professional and the patient, especially given the impact on both fertility and hormone stability in the case of desistance. But it's not some clear threshold behavior or more dangerous for the 16-18 year age range than for 19+: while I recognize that the data is limited, the risk seems primarily tied to duration of treatment rather than age of onset, the proposed link is attenuated, and the base incidence is low to start with. As with the "vain meaningless life" aspect, an argument that generalizes to adults only persuades to the extent it would meaningfully apply to adults.

(And the testicular cancer risk seems genuinely to have not panned out? Though they would say that...)

Also you can't simply undo puberty blockers, it's not a free lunch sort of deal.

I pretty explicitly spelled out that I've been persuaded that the data on puberty blockers is actively against their common-form use, and the extent that 'technical experts' promoted them despite or even because of severe and irrecoverable side effects have reduced my trust in both those experts and a lot of the information coming from the broader medical community on this topic.

and I don't really get the object to 17+ mastectomies. These processes do have risks and side effects, but they're relatively well-bounded and understood.

They're irreversible, 17 is still in the "crazy teenager" years, and even for the purposes of gender dysphoria, they don't seem like something that can't wait a few years. I of course have my issues with blockers / hormones, but I at least understand the logic, that at a certain age you have to pick a path, and it will be very complicated to roll it back if you do it later. There's a potential compromise I could see, where instead of mastectomies they'd be doing breast reduction, with preservation of function.

and combined with the drastically reduced incidence of desistance by those age ranges

Where do you get that from? From what I understand desistence is still pretty understudied.

Eh, I get this is playful overstatement, but the extent minor insurance tomfoolery is tolerated is pretty important to recognize

I appreciate you been evenhanded on this, and I was trying to do the same. I wouldn't have anything against asserting general minor insurance tomfoolery, but asserting tomfoolery that conveniently supports my point didn't feel fair, and I wanted to make it clear I find any potential skepticism completely valid.

Some discussion here

Huh, I can't believe I didn't catch that at the time.

Similarly, SEGM estimates a maximum of 1k masectomies on under-18s per year

This would be lower than the STH number, but not by much (and that's expected as they include other forms of surgery, including the infamous laser hair removal).

There's a potential compromise I could see, where instead of mastectomies they'd be doing breast reduction, with preservation of function.

Yeah, that's fair, and has some practical arguments in its benefit anyways. Apologies, I'm just used to seeing them merged together. I think there's some moderate arguments for reducing total surgeries in cases desistance is extremely unlikely -- an FTM with the unfortunate genetics to have D-cup breasts at 16 and who's had a stable identity since 12 is in an awkward place where they're going to go under the knife twice for something that they're pretty confident about -- but complication rates for these procedures are low enough that it's a plausible compromise from an ethical perspective.

Whether it's an enforceable one is harder. Ideally, we'd just have enough trust... but we clearly don't, and that distrust is well-founded, hence this discussion. There would definitely be aggressive action by both patients and to straddle the line of what's 'just' an aggressive reduction, and there's even some process arguments to not be entirely dishonest when doing so (afaict, 'masculinizing mastectomy' is already much more likely to leave lymph nodes in place compared to conventional mastectomy; "inverted T" procedures are structurally more similar to a breast reduction to an A or AA and are actually used by some trans men as their final masculinizing top surgery already). There's a few clear markers -- removal of the nipples, lymph nodes, milk ducts, yada -- but we can't exactly those to end up on the medical file even if there were agreement on them being the 'right' dividing line.

Which is probably the broader problem.

Where do you get that from? From what I understand desistence is still pretty understudied.

That's a reasonable criticism, a lot of the data is either low-confidence or coming from suspect sources, and there are adult desisters.

But if the numbers were even comparable to the most optimistic trans activists claims of 'low' pre-puberty desistance, we'd be talking 1%, and that's still well over three thousand people in the United States alone. If adult desistance were the majority or a sizable fraction, as gender-critical people claim with some support for pre-puberty, we'd have FtMtFs by the tens of thousands at this point, especially in the aftermath of the Fox Virian lawsuit.

It's hard to make that match up with reality as we see it. That's a low confidence claim -- there have been enough changes in FtM demographics that something could have changed in 2023 on the intake side, or 2026 on the outtake side; it's possible the entire measurement system is so badly corrupted we can't see a 1-in-100 signal of a 700k+ population -- but for all it's just absence of evidence, it is still signal. And the most plausible explanations are either low rates of adult desistance or very early desistance that is being handled, despite a doctrine that I agree shows insufficient patient safeguards for this specific case.

I wouldn't have anything against asserting general minor insurance tomfoolery, but asserting tomfoolery that conveniently supports my point didn't feel fair, and I wanted to make it clear I find any potential skepticism completely valid.

Fair.

This would be lower than the STH number, but not by much (and that's expected as they include other forms of surgery, including the infamous laser hair removal).

Yeah. Not sure if that reflects coincidence, genuine number, taking from the same underlying source, or being bamboozled by the same misdirection.

EDIT:

They're irreversible, 17 is still in the "crazy teenager" years, and even for the purposes of gender dysphoria, they don't seem like something that can't wait a few years

I guess my problem's that we allow a lot of other crazy teenager years to do irreversible things without dire and traumatic medical need. Hell, we force or psuedo-force it in many circumstances. I don't buy the suicide prevention arguments and I understand that many social conservatives are opposed to other cosmetic surgeries in this age range, and I understand that this is deeper than a piercing or (most) tattoos, but it's hard for me to put it in the category of something they can't understand well enough to make decisions just because some 1:10000 or 1:1000 risk that they won't like it a few years later.

Some of that's just because this feels like salami-slicing -- if 17-year-olds are crazy, then so are 19-year-olds, and well we don't let 20-year-olds drink alcohol, and 24-year-olds can't be trusted with rental cards -- that someone will make even if you have a very principled end-state, but there are just also pragmatic arguments.

A complete ban on 'top surgery' for a trans guy is, in a large portion and probably majority of cases, going to be a serious constraint on their romantic opportunities at a time a lot of normal people start forming exactly those relationships: boobs tend to be pretty polarizing for straights and gays and lesbians alike. For the genetically (un)lucky, passing becomes impossible, and while that's not a massive value from your perspective, it's clearly something a lot of adult trans men do put a lot of effort into. These do, I recognize, become less serious if we accept significant breast reduction surgeries as a separate category.

From a practical standpoint, a surgical intervention at 17 makes it possible to 'turn a new leaf' at college, in ways that having the procedures done at college do not. That's most extreme in states that require surgical intervention to recognize legal transition, but even outside of those constraints, there's just a massive difference from 'Aiden-who-was-Alice' and 'Aiden-who's-short-and-really-shy-in-showers'. There's some downsides to this goal from a social conservative perspective -- I would argue it makes desistance a lot less likely, and soccons would argue that it's closer to love bombing -- but it's worth noticing as a motivation.

FIRST To The Drop

FIRST (painful backronym "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology") is a large robotics education program, operating both in the United States and worldwide, established by Dean Kamen (... yes, the segway guy) and Woody Flowers in 1992.

It's best-known for its FIRST Robotics Competition, where teams of students make large robots that compete in 3v3 matches on a basketball-court sized arena, which has an estimated 90k students, followed by the FIRST Tech Challenge, which focuses on smaller robots competing in 2v2 matches in a 12-foot-square arena, which serves around 90k students.

The youngest segment, FIRST LEGO League, is a bit of an oddball: rather than direct head-to-head competition with a mix of fully autonomous and remote-controlled modes, students complete sets of scored challenges with one robot on a table-sized field at a time. While the kits support Python, almost everyone's stuck in a mediocre Blockly-styled language. FIRST's headline number says 600k+ FLL students, but that blends in some of their other not-quite-robotics applications; the real FLL Challenge number isn't available but probably 500k+. So despite being the youngest program and the least well-known, it reaches far more students than the rest of the program combined, and in an awkward way.

FIRST, correspondingly, has more than its fair share of normal culture war problems. The programs have had a pretty painful see-saw between rewarding actual robotics, programming, and manufacturing on one hand, and giving out blue ribbons for 'community outreach' on the other. There's been several snafus around The Rainbow STEM alliance hitting state politics. Especially at the higher end of the competitions, the different equipment and expertise available to the most well-established teams and the median team are extreme, and then administratively that problem gets described as 'helping underprivileged students'. FIRST renamed the high-profile Chairman's Award into the rather obnoxiously-named Impact Award, which is just after PICO/POCI in terms of missed opportunities, and while a team doesn't have to be optimized for the mainstream press to get anywhere on the Impact Award, it's no coincidence that it happens. There's a very awkward question about FRC events playing the People's Republic of China's anthem before the United States one.

But today I'll bring a more boring one. What happens when you build a major program serving a half-million people, and the hardware doesn't show up?

This didn't come as a bolt from the blue. FIRST Lego League's reliance on a much-bigger company for its entry-level program had been both a source of friction and a massive lost financial opportunity, and the Lego's Group's move from the powerful-if-antique EV3 to the drastically-less-capable Spike Prime was already the writing on the wall that the Mindstorms-style robotic environments weren't going to be long for this world. However, Lego sunsetting the Spike Prime kit only a few years after its initial release, and replacing it with an even-less-apt and even-more-expensive successor named the CS/AI kit, incompatible with the existing tournament style events FLL runs, isn't just a vague problem off in the distance.

Few, if any, extant FLL teams want the new equipment, they want it even less if it's only going to be around a year or two, and they couldn't run any practical game with it if they did. The new kits just can't support multiple robotics payloads in any useful way, and as a result have to run in a completely separate league from the Spike Prime-based kits. Many regions may not run the new equipment's tournaments at all.

And now those teams have 40 days before end of sales. Spare parts will be available til June 2028, and teams can keep using their existing kits, but in two months new teams will be stuck on the secondary and resale markets -- and for many school-based teams, that means not buying at all. Because of the age range and parent buy-in, community teams often come and go as students age in and graduate, and now new teams are facing a hell of a problem when on-boarding.

I've seen speculation that the LEGO-FIRST partnership only collapsed because, between Woody Flower's death on the academic side and Dean Kamen's 'absence' on the business relationship one, FIRST as an organization no longer has the social capability to manage these sort of partnerships. There'd be a very morbid irony if the biggest impact the Epstein Files had was on an educational non-profit, but I'm skeptical. And not just in the sense that Kamen was probably 'just' incredibly unperceptive or showing poor judgement. The financials and business decisions just don't explain enough.

Lego almost certainly was making money hand over fist for those Spike Prime kits: I'd estimate that their material cost is under 50 USD for a kit they sold direct at 400 USD. And, for that matter, making money hand over FIRST, since little if any of the kit money went to the organization running the events. Even including overhead and development costs, the financial incentive of a captive market is serious. But they aren't going to make a new hardware environment just to handle a League Game, because if that was even slightly in the cards, Lego wouldn't be trying to use their new AI/CS kits for the league they're proposing either.

Something has Lego unwilling to support conventional more capable robotics. That's a serious question of its own, and the answers could say a good deal about the broader world: Lego could conceivably be worried about product liability, thinking about optimizing for classroom environments where a lot of the money is, swerving over some bizarre financial or business concern, or building toward a future where computer programming or robotics means less and AI means more. (Though the "AI" part of Lego's new "CS/AI Kit" is just pose detection you could do with OpenCV in 2015.)

But that's unknowable, and moreover, not just a FIRST problem. FIRST's problem is that they've got a year, maybe two, to build an ecosystem from the ground up.

The first obvious answer is finding someone that's already doing this stuff.

Unfortunately, the edutech space is an abomination right now, between high cost of entry (the minimum regulatory price, just in paperwork, to bring a programmable wireless robot to market just in the US is about 20k USD) and the extreme uncertainty in demand and post-sales cost centers. The other big robotics program in the United States is Vex, and Vex's elementary- and AIM program is pretty much remote-control trash. and while their middle-school programs are more serious, they're neither built for nor readily retrofitted toward the sort of competition matches -- either designed for head-to-head bouts in the late middle school range, or with extremely constrained build capabilities even compared to random Legos. Worse, there are some business reasons that Vex and FIRST wouldn't want to partner even if the hardware did work, as Vex competes directly with several FIRST FTC vendors and might want to better position GO or IQ as replacements for FIRST entirely.

FIRST could build something in-house, or with their partners.

It's not looking great, Bob. To be fair, the XRP was almost certainly a grad student school project (I'm hoping not an electrical engineer), and it does have some moderately clever software decisions, and if your BoM is aiming for ~30 bucks at small unit size, you have to compromise somewhere. To be less fair, it's a grad student making worse electrical engineering decisions for a product than I've seen made for one-off youtube shorts. (to be actively uncharitable, if I find whoever keeps selling ultrasonic distance sensors when time-of-flight sensors are right there, I'm putting him in a Saw-style trap). Rev Robotics, that third-party partner that directly competes with Vex, isn't able to keep up with FIRST's demands for their FTC and FRC equipment, has little if any experience in the younger education sector, and their existing control hubs and display hubs are infamous for not surviving heavy use by late middle-schoolers, or even poor travel conditions.

FIRST could hope some new business is going to pull a rabbit out of a hat for them.

Hope's not a plan. There's no RFP for a replacement kit (and FIRST's past RFPs have been pretty badly designed). There's little evidence that they could talk Lego around into keeping older-style kits active longer, and a lot of reason that Lego might not want to be sweet-talked. It's only been a couple months since the news dropped so maybe they're just trying to get started -- but if they only have a year or two, they don't have a lot of months to get moving. It can take two or three months just to get a single manufacturing run with a new ABS-injection mold, and that's assuming you already have the business relationships set up to do it. Anyone considering entering the field, without having some attestation from FIRST, has to know their investment could be cut out from them at any moment, whether because FIRST makes up with Lego, abandons this age range, or just doesn't like the new developer's specific kit. The window for a third party to pop out of the woodwork and target FIRST's specific program needs is tight, and closing, and it doesn't even look that attractive.

I dunno.

If I were in their shoes, building in-house seems the clear least-bad decision: education hardware is a major space to get income with high margins, there's a lot of potential market and inroads for other educational use, and it'd massively derisk the organization from this exact problem. FIRST has tens of thousands of volunteers, hundreds with dedicated hardware design experience, millions of alumni, organizational connections with multiple higher education groups that already do serious software and design work for grad student projects gratis, and enough cash on hand and grants to easily self-fund the development cycle. This could be done well at 2-3 million USD, and done at all around 1 million USD, and the organization did have that money and the people it could ask for grants specifically to do it, and at least from the outside, it wasn't trying. FIRST doesn't have a ton of full-time staff, but this isn't an unusual type of tech to contract out. Regardless of specific industrial capacity, actually owning and directing the product lifecycle is both a possibility and a necessity, as this whole incident spells out.

But if I were in their shoes, I've have done that five years ago. Anyone with eyes could tell you that depending on hardware owned by single third parties was a major problem for the organization. Maybe there were arguments for not doing building in-house for FLL before this year, since the Lego Brand Name was a major selling point. But that's still leaving tens of millions of dollars in kit profit on the table to sweeten the deal for a partner where it wasn't enough. It's also only one of the FIRST programs. The FTC and especially FRC environment in particular has long depended on controllers that never really 'fit' the ecosystem. FRC's RoboRio is a National Instruments product that NI clearly hates to sell and support, and have actively made less robust by reducing the conformal coating and introducing a microSD card slot.

That's been a problem FIRST knew needed to be solved, and it's only in the last two years that they've even started to consider even partial ownership of the actual robotics controller that they're selling their entire programs around. And they started in the hardest environment to do it, trying to replace the gigahertz-speed and (differential-signaling) peripheral-heavy RoboRio rather than the megahertz-speed Spike Prime.

Maybe the teething problems explain the hesitance? FIRST did start working moving the FTC and FRC environments toward gear they had at least a partial ownership in with the SystemCore controller. That settled on a Raspberry PI CM5-based device, mostly Rev Robotic's brainchild, and both much later than the intended timeline and inevitably going to have supply chain issues. That seems like more argument to start fast, with well-circumscribed and specific feature sets, dependent on proven hardware, than not start at all.

FIRST has risked tens of millions of dollars in program revenue, and the program as a whole, on hardware that they didn't control and couldn't guarantee would remain available. The end result is a worldwide program, with hundreds of thousands of interested students and tens of thousands of volunteers, that's just driving unpiloted toward an oncoming cliff. Which makes for an especially awkward metaphor in a robotics context.

I don't pretend to know all the intricacies here, but IME school robotics competitions are mostly used by UMC strivers to pad their kids' college resumes (the earlier they get funnelled into this the better), complete with parents "helping out" in the class to get their kids favors from the teacher.

Inshallah this whole edifice will be plowed under and the earth salted.

Yeah, the guys working on robots in the real world were mostly diesel mechanics or HVAC techs or generator guys whose brother in law mentioned someone who was hiring over an NFL game, and who don't know what 'python' is('update the software' is treated as a mechanical repair and what it actually means is a question for tech support, which doesn't know either and suggests it when everything is working except the machine).

I mean sure, there's tons of jobs in robotics like that, but those robotics competitions were designed (at least originally) to funnel young nerds torwarts going to college for electrical engineering. Because the field needs large amounts of those, too, and for the last 20 years you could more easily make more money (unless you made it into Boston dynamics et. al) if you went into pure software instead. So a little PR for a career close to the hardware was a good idea in principle.

If you'd want more technicians straight out of school, you'd do something like an RC racing league with a build phase for the car/drone.

That's reasonable. There's some robotics industry stuff that FIRST helps toward -- most heavily machine shops, where you want someone who can actually work through g-code or particular CNC interfaces, and to a lesser extent you do see some LabView in 'the real world' for aviation research -- but it's definitely not going to get you more prepared to work in a median industrial factory. I'd like to raise the sanity waterline there, too, but I don't think I can speak the language.

That's fair, and it (along with the grant/scholarship ecosystem) are a serious frustration with these programs.

But there is a separation between the telos and the day-to-day work: even for students that are only getting involved to fill out their college resume, they at least have the opportunity to learn more. I've had students go into the program unfamiliar with the "plus" and "minus" screwdrivers, and come out knowing how to safely use a lathe; start without the ability to read basic Java assignment, and leave building a command scheduler library; to begin with a wire management scheme of 'rat's nest', and grow to something that's not horrifying; to start a stuttering mess and grow to actually give a confident presentation.

My bigger criticism of the programs are how poorly they play into some portions of that: the program designs make it very hard to justify teaching soldering, or electrical engineering, or good CAD principles, or serious ground-up manufacturing, even off-season. ((to be fair, because it's hard to find the mentor expertise. I can't CAD worth shit. Finding anyone who can run a hot air rework station and volunteer six hours a week is a pretty hefty lift.))

The Lego stuff has always been at the less productive end of that. You can teach basic programming with it even if the EV3 did a little better, and there is a public speaking and product development bit even if it's never been very realistic, but the design and problem-solving sides have always felt a little too much like encouraging students to solve by exhaustion rather than learning.

But it's noteworthy that Lego seems to be pulling toward the UMC strivers, that FIRST decided to nope out. It's even more noteworthy that result seems destructive toward FIRST, rather than anyone else, and will only become more so if FIRST doesn't shape up fast, and that they don't seem to have any route to do so in no small part because of the skills development segments that they've missed.

But there is a separation between the telos and the day-to-day work

Sorry about all that, but I'd still rather see this buried. Maybe we can bring back shop class, or just return a few hours a week to the kids that they can use to go to a maker space rather than grinding legible college app activities.

But it's noteworthy that Lego seems to be pulling toward the UMC strivers, that FIRST decided to nope out.

I don't quite understand. Who is even doing this besides the strivers?

It's even more noteworthy that result seems destructive toward FIRST

Is FIRST not basically the only game in town?

I don't quite understand. Who is even doing this besides the strivers?

Anecdote, but there's a decent number who use it to see if their kid actually likes programming or STEM-adjacent stuff since the school programs are garbage and self-driven learning is very hit-or-miss, a smaller number who just insist their kid do something as an after school program to get them out of the house and FIRST is something that's still air-conditioned, and a lot of kids who get into it because it's an in-school program and less dumb than most of the other electives.

The dedicated strivers exist, and they're really obnoxious when you run into one that's made themselves a drive coach, but it's not the only entry point.

Is FIRST not basically the only game in town?

No, surprisingly. VEX V5 is the most comparable league to FTC, and it's technically a little larger in terms of just student count. The teams I mentor actually have pretty serious recruitment conflict because it's so much easier to run an 'award-winning' V5 team. FRC is pretty unique in scale, at least until you get into battle-bot style destructive stuff, but that doesn't really show up on the resumes. And there's a bunch of smaller programs like REFC Drone or the National Robotics Competition.

Anecdote, but there's a decent number who use it to see if their kid actually likes programming or STEM-adjacent stuff since the school programs are garbage and self-driven learning is very hit-or-miss, a smaller number who just insist their kid do something as an after school program to get them out of the house and FIRST is something that's still air-conditioned, and a lot of kids who get into it because it's an in-school program and less dumb than most of the other electives.

I'd just add that it's basically the sort of 'disguising good training / education as fun' pipeline that provides early exposure and participation to engineering design challenges in a way that most school curriculum aren't set up to do. Even when it's adult-led it's closer to apprenticeship than school work.

In most contexts or countries, a shop-class works on a 'teach how to use the tools and follow instructions' principles. Curriculum and grading standards are, well, standardized across iterations, oversight is high for safety reasons, and projects for personal design are typically bounded. You are typically doing a series of building steps to a pre-defined end, with an intent of teaching basic skills to demonstrate a culmination. It is usually very much start to finish.

The FIRST competition format is substantially different, since teams are attempting to design (and then implement) their own solution to a problem set that can be approached in significantly different ways. This means they have to work backwards starting with defining their end-state, identifying what they need to achieve to get there, and only then trying to figure out how to do it.

This isn't a natural skill set to many adults, let alone kids with even larger skill gaps and less training.

The dedicated strivers exist, and they're really obnoxious when you run into one that's made themselves a drive coach, but it's not the only entry point.

It also doesn't invalidate the benefits to participants. Bad coaches exist in practically any organized sport, but bad coaches don't negate the benefits of children having a hobby that gives them a peer group to bond with, structured competition to succeed and fail in, and clear demonstrations of inputs to results to build a sense of agency. Even if the child is only doing it because the parents want that resume padding, it is still good for the children, and the future adults those children grow up to be.

Even if the child is only doing it because the parents want that resume padding, it is still good for the children, and the future adults those children grow up to be.

Nah. If you've met any of the people who used to do this stuff as kids, they just minimax it to get maximal reward for minimal effort, use their parents' volunteering as leverage to advance within the club, then become extruded homogenized IC drone product at FAANG.

Yah. Strivers who actually minmax have to know what to minmax, which is still preferable to would-be minmaxers who don't know how or what to minmax. Even if you cannot get someone to understand or appreciate why a habit is good, it is still better for them to develop the habit than to not. There is never going to be a shortage of ambitious / selfish / lazy people wanting good jobs; it is still better if their average baseline competance is higher than lower, if only so that don't get in the way of other people's good work.

And this holds true even for the insufferable strivers. For the non-insufferable sorts, and even the non-strivers, developing good habits and skill sets is even more valuable. It would be an incompetent education policy that disregards the people who can be taught because there are poor actors who won't internalize the lessons. The world, and a profession, doesn't get better the more less-capable people it inducts.

Strivers who actually minmax have to know what to minmax, which is still preferable to would-be minmaxers who don't know how or what to minmax.

Rotely following Honorable Mother and Father's directions on minmaxing extracurriculars to get into Harvard may be less pedagogically useful than you believe.

Your mistake is confusing the result of Goodharting metrics to within an inch of their lives with actual development of skill and habits. Developing habits is a total waste of time when you can get good results by working the system and have more time left over to study for Bio Olympiad.

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I'm wondering how the Chinese "lego-compatible" ecosystem fits in here? It seems like an easy win FIRST and some up-and-coming brand.

My oldest is 8 and has been playing around with knock-off technic legos for about 2 years. They're about 30% the price of name-brand, and the pieces themselves seem basically just as good. The instructions and designs are definitely not as good as lego, but this seems like a place where FIRST could put in Western-quality work for cheap.

Some of the knock-off stuff is legitimately better than lego too. We have ~5 sets of fake-duplo marble runs that are legitimately much more fun to play with than anything lego makes in the duplo age range (both for kids and adults).

Where do you buy this stuff?

It depends a lot on what you're looking for. DeCADA is one of the higher quality vendors and has a real store, but mostly sells full kits and only a little cheaper. Mould King is closer to Lego Mindstorms is capabilities and has a more serious price delta, but they've had some occasional missteps with early kits. If you just want bricks and parts, either to build your own set or as replacements, GoBricks is the biggest bulk manufacturer with a good reputation, although I have no idea how well they'd scale to FIRST's demand.

And if you just want bulk and don't care what, AliBaba has absolute tons... but the quality can be flaky.

Search amazon for "duplo marble run" and you get all sorts of cool knock-off duplo sets that are so much better than anything lego makes: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=duplo+marble+run

I think they definitely need to be a part of whatever FIRST goes with. Even if not!FLL wanted to keep the Lego relationship going, the possibility Lego might just stop selling to them (or worse, sell and then delay a shipment at the last moment) because they're direct competitors is a Sword of Damocles for the entire ecosystem. And the clone vendors are just way too attractive to ignore, since in many cases it's cheaper to buy from them than to get raw plastic feedstock.

The trouble's the practical side of that:

  • You need someone who can actually negotiate that purchase and sales infrastructure at scale, with guarantees that it will last. That's hard to do because any contract to someone who only exists as a corporate entity overseas isn't worth the paper it's written on, but it can be done well enough. I just don't think FIRST has anyone who can do that. It'd be a major project just to figure out how to handle the kit bundling and sales.
  • You need compliance. A sizable portion of these kits are going to schools that simply won't buy your products without the right paperwork, but even direct sales might make their insurers pucker without it. For the US, that means CPSIA testing, ATSM F963, and (for electronics) FCC Part 15 testing. All I know for EU/AU/whatever is that they're more additional costs. Individually, these aren't tremendously expensive compared to the pure development side, but there's a lot of them, they add up, and they're very vulnerable to supplier changes. Almost no Chinese manufacturer does this stuff, and any that pretend should be treated as suspect. (I have no idea how dropshippers or aiislove handles this, outside of probably 'not': enforcement is extremely rare unless there's a serious incident, so a lot of small businesses can get away with 100-scale or 1000-scale sales, but that won't let FIRST do it for 30k units).
  • You need a real electronics solution. There's a mountain of Chinese vendors here, but it's overwhelmingly targeting the hobbyist sector (or, less charitably, 'cheap crap' sector). The world of 'good programming environments, well-hardened enclosure, focused on 6-14 year-old market, discrete motor hardware' is a lot smaller. The set that does that and can pass compliance and make 30k kits a year for ten years is basically zero: either they're building controller boards that change with whatever silicon is trendy, they have an RoHS status of 'trust me bro', or they're intended to compete with Vex IQ rather Technic, or some combination of the above. You could build a relationship with someone that's making it something for you seriously... but I don't know that FIRST can.
  • You need a sales avenue that isn't crazy. The average FLL lead mentor is not going to buy from Alibaba. The average school team can't buy from Alibaba. Traditionally FIRST has relied on AndyMark and Rev Robotics (and to a lesser extent, CTRE) to do that, and none of them can handle this sort of process and production run.

I never got into the mindstorms stuff, and robotics isn’t really my thing. But I had followed it for a long time, and it’s genuinely strange to me that Lego moved to the “Spike Prime” thing and then cancelled it, too.

I’ve also read that there’s a big push for “AI literacy” in schools, and Lego may be trying to appeal to this curriculum demand with the new kit. I guess it just goes to show that everything has to have AI in it nowadays.

They’re making money hand over fist in botanical sets and pricey display models, maybe they think the robotics game doesn’t have high enough growth potential for their current business model.

But I’m still stewing over the death of Bionicle, and I think about Lego Universe every now again, so the LEGO Group’s ability to cancel iconic things without remorse doesn’t surprise me.

But I had followed it for a long time, and it’s genuinely strange to me that Lego moved to the “Spike Prime” thing and then cancelled it, too.

Yeah. It's a massive amount of development expenses to throw out, because pretty much everything programmable with a 3+ ports is going or gone. And there's no obvious silicon supply issues, even at Lego's scale, to explain some secular reason. 6 years is a lot of time by computer standards, but it's lightning fast by consumer electronics: the EV3 got 9 years, and the economics arguments were a lot stronger by the time it got ol'yeller'd.

My best guess is that Lego has been aimed at the educational sector increasingly heavily over the last four or five years -- the Boston move explicitly drew lines about proximity to educators -- and something about the Spike didn't fit that. The curriculum had too many students or educators dropping out, the classroom infrastructure just wasn't working, or some agreement meant they weren't getting the money from teacher training that's been a real cash cow for Vex and company.

Or they just like bad decisions? Killing Bionicle was a bizarre one.

I’ve also read that there’s a big push for “AI literacy” in schools, and Lego may be trying to appeal to this curriculum demand with the new kit. I guess it just goes to show that everything has to have AI in it nowadays.

Which is funny, because the CS/AI kit's big ML feature is just computer vision, a lot of it stuff that's been around for a decade in OpenCV. But that's why they've got the massive marketing team and I don't.

Which is funny, because the CS/AI kit's big ML feature is just computer vision, a lot of it stuff that's been around for a decade in OpenCV. But that's why they've got the massive marketing team and I don't.

Everything is AI now. Searching a database? AI. Computer vision? Obviously AI. If-then statement? That sounds like a computer following a chain of logic, it’s AI. Everything and nothing is AI.

I guess when investment pushes into a particular area, the financial incentives push for dressing anything up as the area in question. Generative AI is genuinely a huge deal, but it’s expensive to actually invest in it, and substandard substitutes are eager to parade as the real deal.

When Sluts Settle Down

Of course there were men who wanted to sleep with Alex Cooper, and of course there was a man who wanted to marry her, too

One of the incel or black pill arguments I think has more than a grain of truth goes something like this:

Men are raised around the polite fiction that women (and society) want them to be nice above all else. Nice guys get the girl. And, after all, anyone can be nice. That's part of why this is important social messaging. But of course in the end, the boy must live. And he discovers that, in fact, niceness isn't what gets the girl. Being hot is, having status is. The original statement isn't wrong. In the abstract, all but the most damaged women do want a "nice guy". A good husband and father, someone to grow old with, someone who won't abuse her, someone her friends and family will respect. But that isn't all she wants, and it's certainly not the first thing most people look for. The boy knows this himself - after all, he is no less vain when it comes to an ideal partner. But he must see it to know the polite fiction, and when he sees it, it frustrates him.

Girls receive their own version of this polite fiction. It has a worthy intention and there is truth to it. But it is also fake, and when people argue it against the evidence, they do young women and themselves a disservice. That fiction is something like this, although in more liberal or progressive circles it will be stated far less explicitly (although it is still stated, by peers, by elders, and most significantly by men): Men don't want a slut. The sluts end up humiliated, pathetic, and alone. The chaste get the guy, and the happy ending. In the real world, girls grow up knowing this isn't true.

Andrew Tate once posted that he rejects “women who have slept with more than 3 men. Vile.” And the guys they influence might claim in the group chat that they would marry only a pure, virginal woman. But if a woman who looked like Cooper asked any of those guys out on a date, you best believe they’d jump at the chance—no matter how many notches she had on her bedpost.

Man, here, will say that men (or at least attractive or otherwise high status men) will fuck promiscuous women but never marry them. But that isn't really true. The truth is that some of the highest status men marry sluts. The truth is, as every woman herself realizes as she gets older, that even chauvinist men, slut-shaming men, men who post nasty comments about a woman's purported body count do so; in many cases even knowingly. Most women could give you a half dozen examples in their own lives. The boy most concerned and public about his contempt for 'sluts' at my own high school married, not ten years later, a woman everyone (including him) knew even then had been around. Who are the Miami streamer/Clav/etc influencer types going to end up marrying? It will not be chaste virgins from the imagined heartland.

Girls know that desirable men love (and fall in love with) sluts all the time. Like the fact that hot women do not always go for the 'nice guy', it is is ubiquitous. In the same way that not being neurotic about being nice makes you more confident, and therefore more attractive, not worrying about being a slut makes many more promiscuous young women more confident around men, more willing to make the first move. As the opinion piece says:

When she meets the man she wants as her husband, she’ll go get him. Meanwhile, her chaste peers are often left paralyzed on the sidelines, waiting for a hypothetical Prince Charming who respects their sacred timeline and who ticks all the boxes, only to find themselves in a perpetual state of situationship purgatory.

By the way, I think the evidence is clear that promiscuity is bad for men and women. It's bad for the soul, it's bad for future relationships, it makes it more difficult to form meaningful attachments. I don't think it's bad to have a preference for someone who hasn't slept around, in fact it's almost certainly smart. But it's just not a revealed priority preference for most men to strongly disincentive this behavior in and of itself.

Men have always been into sluts, of course. Men have always married them, or always wanted to. Real, working (well, partially working) chastity, it must be remembered, was largely enforced by the older generation, in large part for young women by older women, on both sides of the equation. It was the elderly establishment, the church elders who prevented the King from marrying Wallis Simpson. Chastity is important for paternity and therefore inheritance. There are good societal as well as personal reasons. But as soon as men were allowed (by society, by their parents, by each other) to marry sluts, they did. You cannot take seriously a threat when its very proponents work so hard to disprove it.

Tangential to your point but alex cooper has that high cheekbone look so popular in hollywood that I find absolutely repulsive, so I would not in fact date alex cooper if given the chance.

Makes sense. Partying and hookups in a woman's 20s is signaling that she's wealthy and energetic enough to be able to do that, likes sex a lot, and has decent judgement that she didn't end up traumatized by it.

Women I've known who did that seem to be ending up with mixed results, since they go on to have a series of several year long relationships in their late 20s and early 30s, and it's easy to mess up the timing there. But most women I've known haven't been able to go out all the time anyway. They're working, a bit tired, and don't enjoy short term sexual relationships, which sounds like the more common female experience.

Yeah I think this is true, though from the male perspective it can be pretty hard to discern whether or not she ended up traumatized and, not to be cruel, that's something that can be very unpleasant to deal with in a relationship and you'd avoid if you could. People on the internet like to believe that everyone in the outgroup gets the worst-case scenario (e.g. "all party girls will cheat on you", "all picket-fence nuclear families have bad shit behind closed doors"), but there's always a distribution of outcomes.

Not sure Alex Cooper is a great example. She has good genes. Probably legitimately top 1% in looks and has over a $100 million after tax. I would marry her. That wouldn’t refute that don’t be a slut isn’t good advice for most girls. Not going to debate whether slut or not slut is better. All things being equal I would prefer the not slut. But all things are not equal.

In general people of greater ability can do thing and get away with things that would be harmful for people of lesser ability.

Personally I can do things like actively trade or go play poker and it benefits me. I would not recommend gambling to probably 99% of the population.

In modern American society my gut says I would advise young women to go be a slut. It opens a lot of doors for you and not being a slut is socially awkward now. Though I think it may be very psychologically damaging.

All things being equal I would prefer the not slut. But all things are not equal.

It seemed to me that this was essentially what remained of @2rafa's point, after one cleaned up the slightly muddled argument, anyway. Relatedly-

In modern American society my gut says I would advise young women to go be a slut. It opens a lot of doors for you and not being a slut is socially awkward now. Though I think it may be very psychologically damaging.

If you define "psychological damage" sufficiently broadly, is this not just the two sides of the deal offered by any form of social interaction? The modal rat-adjacent slightly right-wing homeschooled CHAD would like to keep the purity of his autistic trains of thought, birthed from the dust of the internet and nursed in its dark corners like the medieval idea of a, well, rat; but his life success will increase if he goes to college, has his rough corners filed off by the feminised DEIcracy and learns to talk the talk of successful people. The monk-like mathematician would like to stay in his ivory tower counting ordinal angels on the head of a pin, but three increasingly depressing postdocs with overwhelming teaching load later he gives up, starts spending his nights on HN and before long he is grifting funding from schmucky finance bros with papers about smart contracts instead.

after one cleaned up the slightly muddled argument

Unnecessary dig.

Not sure Alex Cooper is a great example. She has good genes. Probably legitimately top 1% in looks and has over a $100 million after tax. I would marry her.

Hm, as always with this topic, it does seem to me that people draw a ton of conclusions based on the apex fallacy. It's hard to avoid the reality that people you notice are, definitionally, people who are high status enough to be noticed, and, as such, do not accurately reflect the reality of the everyday person. What sucks is that the one societal institution that has the responsibility of cutting through the bias and fallacies to get at the truth of these things has so completely discredited itself that it has become worse than worthless for it.

That's my take on it.

There are MANY, MANY things that someone who is top 1% in status (by whatever means they came into it) can just 'get away' with that is likely to wreck someone who attempts it while even slightly outside that top tier.

Bill Belichek can date a woman who could be his granddaughter (Hugh Hefner also got away with this). Elon can sire kids with multiple women he is not married to.

I mentioned a while back that there seem to be two main stable social norms around human mating.

Either everyone is held to monogamous standards (but we expect people to fail), or nobody is... but this means top tier guys collect a harem and lower tier guys duke it out over the remains.

We're in a very uncomfortable transitory period where both sort of exist simultaneously but the exceptions that have been carved out are causing the foundations of the former to crumble in a way that may take it out entirely. Maybe already has.

This can indeed apply to women too. Madonna gets a boy toy. Beyonce sings a ballad for single ladies the same year she got married to an extremely wealthy man herself. Alex Cooper gets celebrity ladies to admit to ridiculous beliefs and behaviors that, were it a (lower status) male were saying it would sound almost psychopathic. Which, it turns out, is basically what the Fresh and Fit Podcast gets tarred with, rightly or wrongly.

Alex Cooper also gets her happy marriage regardless since she's attractive, wealthy, and now a celebrity in her own right.

This whole topic gets perilously close to my rant on elite accountability. Elites face few consequences for encouraging behaviors in the lower classes that lead to horrific outcomes, and use their status to achieve the outcomes they want regardless of their own misdeeds.

Much of this can be easily challenged. Consider the other side of the coin and look at people who have achieved celebrity wholly unworthy of the status. I see people who think “Destiny” is a good debater. Destiny is a fast talking moron with a permanent case of bed head who treats Google like it’s some sort of “God machine,” that can spit out conclusions he agrees with all day to win arguments. That’s… not how that works… And the people who look up to and idolize him are fools. If you want to see good debaters in action, look in the philosophy and rhetoric departments. Not Jordan Peterson. Or Matt Dillahunty. Etc. There’s plenty of people like this. What Elon and Belichick have in contrast with the others is competency.

Destiny is a fine enough debater. at least the two or three I've seen him in, most front of mid was the Israel debate on Fridman. He's not a one in a billion talent but compared to most pundants he handles himself well. To be a good debater you do need to actually handle yourself well in a real time discussion. If there was a glut of people in the rhetoric or philosophy department that could handle themselves well in this kind of debate they'd be able to make a splash in the debate scene, which is fairly open.

If there was a glut of people in the rhetoric or philosophy department that could handle themselves well in this kind of debate they'd be able to make a splash in the debate scene, which is fairly open.

William Lane Craig has been doing this his entire life. That’s what debate is. Destiny understands zero about debate, because the fool doesn’t [and probably can’t] read academic literature. Norman Finkelstein trolling him was always hilarious to watch.

If you thought finkleestein looked good in that debate then I don't know what to tell you. "Debate is about seriously handling ideas, here see how epic it is that a good debator played name calling games". I don't understand how your mind works.

Finkelstein is a first rate scholar of the region who’s recognized as such. Destiny is an idiot who thinks he’s on the level because he can print out Wikipedia pages. He got treated exactly the way he should’ve been.

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Contrary to what you might think, age gap relationships are more common in working class than middle class people, see this reddit thread for example. And I don’t think I need to show you stats about how single motherhood and having children outside of marriage is more common with lower income.

Upper middle class, high income professionals are the ones most likely to be in monogamous relationships, have children while married, and smaller age gaps.

Although maybe it’s a U shape and the true elites behave more like the working class (happens a lot)? I don’t know, but I don’t think there’s enough celebrities and billionaires to cause “lower tier guys” to “duke it out over the remains”.

can just 'get away' with that is likely to wreck someone who attempts it while even slightly outside that top tier.

I know people in age gap relationships, poly people, and people with kids from outside of marriage, and they’re certainly not elites, or wrecked by those things beyond being the subject of gossip and mockery, which isn’t a death sentence now that people aren’t dependent on living in a tight knit community for survival.

I mean outside of a few careers that'll consistently put you into proximity with attractive young women like acting, music, sports or working in those industries. How are most super-rich guys even meeting unattended barely-legal women and getting into a realistic trajectory to form a relationship? Even graduates and interns are now ranging older than they were historically and there's a huge pressure against shitting where you eat in the workplace.

Maybe the superrich can just get it done, but the fact that Epstein was even like a thing seems indicative that even megarich Westerners aren't particularly great at sourcing their own barely-legal whores thus Epstein being able to become a nigh-on billionaire for what shouldn't be that rare a skillset.

How are most super-rich guys even meeting unattended barely-legal women and getting into a realistic trajectory to form a relationship?

As far as I understand it, they can literally just message them on Instagram.

Likewise, yacht girls are a thing.

Ironically, I think one reason Epstein fell out of favor was... his services became way less valuable as the internet made it way simpler to find young girls to date and predate.

Part of the value of such a guy was simply being the Schelling point before the internet created new ones.

Isn't that more of a thing for rappers/athletes than just random rich guys?

Though then again I guess Elon Musk keeps finding people to impregnate, but on the other other hand they tend to skew to a sort of nerdy offbeat interesting personality moreso than just being girls gone wild.

I'm fine with Epstein going to prison but I also don't think he was doing anything wildly wildly outside of the realm of the average Dubai KTV/yacht-party operator's gamut and if I were an Emirates resident with a thing for 16 year olds there'd surely be a hookup trivially accessible somewhere.

See,

last time I discussed this point, I mentioned that the data mostly relies on age gaps of MARRIED couples.

I made this point:

Bill Belichik is not married.

Leonardo Dicaprio is not married.

Nor Tobey Macguire.

Nor Anthony Keidis

Nor Scooter Braun, who gets to motorboat Sydney Sweeney.

Nicholas Cage is if we want a minor counterexample.

This is actually what I mean when I say the institution that expects everyone to be monogamous has been hollowed out.

There is zero impetus for a high status male to get married if he doesn't want to.

That’s a list of actors and musicians though, except Scott Braun (who’s a record executive). Are they really the “elites” in the same way corporate leaders and billionaires are? They might get invited to Jeff Bezos’s wedding and occasionally attend the same parties but I doubt Tobey Macguire has the same power as someone at the helm of a trillion dollar company. Musicians especially tend to be not exactly the most stable or conformist of people, you expect drug use and wild public antics from a rock star, not monogamy.

If look at Fortune 500 CEOs, about 85% of them are married which is actually higher than the average for men of the same age group. I think of the major tech CEOs only Tim Cook is unmarried (for different reasons in his case, although that didn’t stop Sam Altman or Peter Thiel), and Elon Musk, although he’s been divorced three times (twice with same woman) and has a… polarising reputation.

It ought to be a truth universally acknowledged- although of course it isn't- that those who have lots of boy/girl friends are for the most part those possessing of the necessary sanguinity in temperament to generally attain to a high degree of success in all of the more ordinary tasks of social intercourse besides, and that these must be acknowledged as more desirable for all the normal reasons. It furthermore ought- although it often isn't- to be acknowledged that these chaste virgins sitting on the sidelines do not particularly want to date and marry Clav, their Mr Darcy may bear physical resemblance to him but is entirely unlike him in other ways.

But all that being said, there really is a large premium for social skills paid in all social tasks, including the mating game. To the sexually frustrated men reading this- go out and socialize. That alone explains a huge portion of this gap- do you think Justinian found Theodora's sexual history incredibly appealing, or Pericles Aspasia's, or Napoleon Josephine's? No, they wanted someone they could interact with as a friend rather than the stereotypical prissy upper-class wife of the day.

I suspect Aspasia's line of work did appeal somewhat to Pericles. He had a side that enjoyed a little rakish scandalizing (particularly in the Socratic tradition, which is at pains to show that Alcibiades didn't get his villainy from Socrates, but it's also evident in Plutarch).

I'll also note that in my experience this question of sexual history goes away somewhat on a psychological level if you as a guy rack up a high body count and some confidence in your skills in bed, and leveling up social skills is a first step to that.

Go out and socialize is too vague an instruction for men who need help doing so.

My advice is to find pro-social hobbies that are done in small group settings that also appeal to women. Preferably a hobby with physical exertion or exercise. Try different hobbies and stick with ones you honestly like. Develop expertise and volunteer for leadership or teaching roles once you develop expertise.

So hiking clubs and yoga are better than chess, poker, and car meet ups. Avoid hobbies that do not interest single women.

I didn’t say ‘go out and socialize’ as a blueprint for meeting women. I said ‘go out and socialize’ because social skills are important and take work to build up. Yes, swing dancing will get you closer to your goal of female companionship slightly faster, but MMA is likely still progress in that direction.

MMA is likely still progress in that direction.

MMA still very boys club and the sort of women that tend to go into it are a bit crazy. I've found that BJJ's starting to get more female participation, though, and a bunch of guys I know who I always kinda assumed were too autistic to function in the dating realm have actually managed to find random white belt girlfriends in recent years which is good for them.

What part of 'Go out and socialize because social skills are important and take work to build up' did you not understand? Lonely men should socialize including for non-meeting women purposes. Swing dancing happens to kill two birds with one stone, but MMA still helps to teach social interactions and being normal. No seriously social skills and confidence are make or break for male romantic success, that's why you see these men who are fat, slovenly, and poor who are ladykillers.

I agree to a degree though also feel like there's also an issue if the space you're choosing to push into is overwhelmingly male, and that's also part of why the dating rate is doing poorly since a lot more hobbies are now just leaning to either extreme of gender participation. Most of the successful MMA dating stories I've seen firsthand as somebody who spends time in those gyms were 'Random anglo converts to fairly-radical Islam due to social network in the gym and ends up with a nice girl who I've never seen more than the eyes of', which I guess is some sort of gesture towards social widening helping?

Again, I am not saying that social activities for the graceless should be conducted with the intent of meeting women, they should be conducted with the intent of improving social skills, and then go to book clubs or something.

With the caveat that there's very little empirical support for any of this, I'd say that this sort of advice is generally wrongheaded. Scott Alexander wrote on SlateStarCodex, IIRC, a very long time ago about how some cognitive behavioral therapy techniques seemed to have metaphorically "gotten into the water supply," such that using them on people actually in therapy became less effective, because they had already gotten the vast majority of the benefits that come from using them. I'd guess, for the vast majority of the populace, especially among the male and romantically unsuccessful, this basic advice is something they've heard and implemented plenty.

I'd guess I interact more with incels than most people by nature of being a nerd who interacts with anime/video game fans, and the vast majority of them simply don't lack the types of social skills that get developed from engaging in social activities all the time (some certainly do, though - though in those cases, I'd guess that they're intrinsically resistant to the technique). They dress well, are well-groomed, can hold good conversation without going into autistic ramblings, make decent money, and are usually not awful-looking (though probably somewhat below average?). They can barely even get matches, much less first dates, much even less second ones. There's something else they're missing.

Female Value = (Sexual attention she gives you)/(Sexual attention she gives/has-given others + 1) * (Everything Else)

If she gives you 0 sexual attention, she has no value. I am not making the claim that sex is the only thing women are good for, but the claim that a woman who is unwilling to have sex with you (even after marriage), clearly does not take you seriously as a partner. Even a woman who is for some biological reason incapable of PIV should still be interested in blowjobs or something.

If she has sex with thousands of other people in all sorts of kinky ways and then gets old and loses sexual interest and you end up in a boring vanilla relationship, that's bad.

If she has sex with a bunch of guys and then marries you and has a bunch of sex with you then that's fine.

If she is a virgin and has sex with you, and only you, and never anyone else, then that's a huge bonus.

All of this multiplies all of the other features. A big everything else like being hot and rich and funny are good features to have, and enough of them can make up for a large denominator in the fraction. But it's an uphill battle compared to someone chaste and loyal who is really really into you, specifically.

How is this consistent with the existence of celebrity simps and stalkers, who receive ~zero sexual attention from the target they value the most?

The fantasy in their heads substitutes for sexual attention. Hincley thought Jodie Foster would pay attention after the fact of his attempt at killing Reagan, so thats just action preceding outcome. Stalking and online simping lets the fantasy of the future potential be generated entirely in the head of the admirer, with little cost to the object of affection. Egirl with jannies modding their socials for free lean into this and since its all remote theres no downside.

Well, then you need to argue that imagined/expected/fantasised-about sexual attention does not usually constitute a significant term in male perception of female value.

By coincidence, just today I got myself re-earwormed by this tango classic, which is about the male protagonist lamenting how he repeatedly gets baited by imagined sexual attention. Surely its popularity suggests that the sentiment resonates.

The formula is true for the average/typical male, not universal. Evolution gears men to be attracted to healthy fertile human women. However biology and psychology are complicated, and so different people develop differently. Some men end up attracted to things like feet or armpits, which are much worse signals for fertility than breasts or hips. Some men end up attracted to dogs or other men, who can't bear their children. Some men have a fetish for cuckoldry, which decreases the chance any children they have are actually theirs. Some men end up deciding to not have children and their genetic line ends. Some men end up stalking people who don't want them. Stalkers are not normal, healthy, or common. If you look at per capita out of all men, how many of them are stalkers, they're quite infrequent. It's just that celebrities are also infrequent so if you pair all the potential stalkers with all the celebrities they end up disproportionately prevalent.

Plenty of individual men break the formula. But if you look on a population level, averages dominate the market. If the majority of men dislike X, then having X decreases your ability to find a good partner. You either need to tradeoff to find a partner who likes your good qualities enough to make up for this flaw, leaving you with a lower value than you otherwise would have, or you need to get lucky searching among the subset of people who don't think X is a flaw. This can be done. If X is really important to you and you not only want someone who would tolerate it but would actively embrace and encourage it, then maybe advertising and amplifying X to disqualify the majority of partners is a good thing for you. I know I did that with being a nerd. When I was single on online dating I actively advertised my nerdiness to screen off anyone who would consider that a negative. But it does significantly curtail your options and make it harder to find a partner. And you can only do it with so many things. If being a massive slut is the core of someone's identity, the hill they're willing to die on, then I suppose they can do that. But it's a heavy cost, and is unlikely to lead to good long-term results in my opinion (especially since the majority of men who are okay with promiscuous women are likely to be promiscuous themselves and less likely to settle down).

Some men end up attracted to things like feet or armpits, which are much worse signals for fertility than breasts or hips.

Disagree. I have noticed that even otherwise stunning MILFs tend to have veiny feet. In fact, that's my theory for why foot fetishism is so prevalent in men; pretty feet are a hard to fake signal of youth.

I was under the impression that it was cross-wiring in the brain due to feet and sexual organs being modeled in physically close proximity in the brain.

I've read this hypothesis thrown about a bunch, but I don't think I've seen it actually substantiated empirically. We'd need at least like 3 fMRI studies done by 3 different institutions all trying to prove each other wrong having no choice but to publish that they found evidence of some sort of this cross-wiring that was different in people with foot fetishes versus those who didn't before we could conclude anything like this.

Is this still the case when both people are in their 60s or beyond, and have lost a lot of libido, and are mostly looking for a comfortable partner to grow old with?

Even if they still have a lot of libido, does the wife regain her value if her party days were multiple decades in the past, or does the stain on her soul linger forever?

Does her value as a "virgin" remain after she's been married for decades and had sex thousands of times with her husband?

Is this still the case when both people are in their 60s or beyond, and have lost a lot of libido, and are mostly looking for a comfortable partner to grow old with?

Not as strongly, but still to some degree. A significant part of the equation is not merely the physical act of the sex itself but the affection/devotion/loyalty it represents. Once you're in your sixties and have lower libido, willingness/desire to have sex with you is less indicative of how much they like you. But largely yes the value per time is lower, which why you see a lot of old men divorce their wives and then marry younger hotter women. A significant part of the point of marriage is to tie people together to prevent this sort of thing. If you get married in your 20s-30s and then woman spends her youth with a man, it is unfair and selfish of him to discard her as soon as she becomes old. It's supposed to be a lifelong pact where the woman promises herself to him, and him to her, so that once she's old and the cumulative value she's provided is large, he doesn't turn around and discard her. It's her investing in him and therefore he owes her when she's older and doesn't have a young body to appeal to him as much any more.

Even if they still have a lot of libido, does the wife regain her value if her party days were multiple decades in the past, or does the stain on her soul linger forever?

Eh. I'd say the party days slowly decay, but so does youth, so by the time one is gone the other is likely to as well. Because people can change. It's not like sex is literally magical and the seed of other men taints her soul. It's what it indicates about her personality and loyalty, and the psychological impact of having sex with lots of people. So yeah, someone who slept around five years ago and then learned better and stopped doing that is better than someone who slept around five days ago, because the latter is going to have a mindset of someone who sleeps around.

Does her value as a "virgin" remain after she's been married for decades and had sex thousands of times with her husband?

To her husband? Absolutely 100%. The denominator is about devotion/affection for other people. She has more value the more she sleeps with him, because she's demonstrated her loyalty and affection to him. To other people? No. She's demonstrated the ability to be loyal, so is better than someone truly promiscuous, but if she's spent a lot of time attached to him and then he dies or they divorce or something she's going to always have hangups about him which will taint future relationships.

I should note that some of this applies in the other direction. Men who sleep around are likely to have some of these negative features in their relationships with women. But I think it tends to be to a lesser extent, first and foremost because women care less. A man is only able to sleep around if he's relatively high status, so some women find that appealing. Men can sleep around without getting emotionally attached more easily, so men who sleep around are less likely to behave differently. And men cheating on women can't create false paternity scenarios (which evolutionary is equivalent to death) so women care about loyalty less. To some extent. There are a lot of women who do care and do see men sleeping around as a bad thing, so I think on average it turns out negative for a man's average value if he's slept around, but there's much more variance. Not the near-universal loss that women experience.

I would say those are all reasonable answers, but a lot of that is well you know that's just like your opinion man. Different people are going to have very different opinions on this. Some guys genuinely might not care if their wife is sleeping around, because it gives them more freedom. Some might even get off on it. Others might hate it more than anything, to the point where they would feel honor-bound to kill over it. And most people act very differently in old age than they did as teenagers. You're trying to turn complicatd, messy human emotions into some simple math formula.

As far as I'm aware it's the majority opinion. It's not universal, but it's the default assumption you should be optimizing for if you're trying to attract a man. Once you find a specific person and you're reasonably certain you're going to settle down with them long term you should optimize for their preferences. But if you're on the market it's generally a good idea to optimize for majority opinion. Or at least be aware when you're going against it. Especially for something like this which is unchangeable. If you wear stupid clothes that people hate and then realize it's turning everyone off, you can change your clothes. You can't change the past, so if you're going to permanently sabotage your desirability in the minds of 80%+ of men you should be aware of it and only do it if you think that's worth it.

Sure, that's fine. Just as long as you acknowledge the yawning gulf between "here is a mathematical formula that describers all human interaction" and "as far as I'm aware this is the majority opinion." The next step might be to gather evidence to see if that actually is the majority opinion, and if so how much of a majority it is.

It’s possible they are lying on their self-reports, but this study shows mate desirability falls when either male or female participants know the number of partners of a prospective match. Maybe there’s a better study somewhere. In the case of Alex Cooper, she is famous and worth $60 million dollars. Many men will look past flaws for fame and fortune.

I’m more confused why the FreePress is running this piece. I thought this was a conservative mag? Is it not anymore?

I’m more confused why the FreePress is running this piece. I thought this was a conservative mag? Is it not anymore?

The Free Press is Bari Weiss's outlet, so the editorial line is generally speaking heterodox center left (like a 90s/early 2000s liberal) that goes soft on Trump because he's very pro Israel.

Very true. A few related thoughts:

  1. Even if you are an outright former prostitute, this does not necessarily preclude you from status if you just choose the right social group (i.e. move to Berkeley). For example, Aella, despite being, as far as I can tell, a midwit, seems to have parlayed her former profession into over 140,000 substack subscribers and about twice as many Twitter followers. This seems to have happened on the back of lurid prose and lurid twitter polls masquerading as "research". Having been Nate Soares' side piece, she has secured funding from MIRI for an AI safety project with other e-girls signing up as mentors. She's also been interviewed on Dwarkesh's podcast - unfortunately the video has been taken down, perhaps because the guy looked like he's nursing a hardon the whole time.

    Of course, Aella is something of an interesting counterexample to your specific argument because she is unable to find a husband despite offering a bounty of 100k for an introduction. However, her standards leave very few men in the pool and there may be only a handful of men on the planet who meet them.

  2. Some of these women literally marry and have kids with men they meet at gangbangs. An indicator of the state of socializing in America?

I solemnly swear I only know about this stuff due to my wife's morbid interest in it.

Of course, Aella is something of an interesting counterexample to your specific argument because she is unable to find a husband despite offering a bounty of 100k for an introduction.

I don't understand why, instead of offering cash upfront, she didn't first try bathing more frequently.

I don't know that it would make much of a difference given her requirements.

Yeah I don't think the shower frequency is going to be the immediate disqualifying factor for the 140 IQ, open relationship comfortable tech 9-fig+ guy she's probably hoping for.

The open relationship is a complete non-starter for any guy she’s likely to be interested in that has a brain cell. Any woman who would front the idea of an open relationship either already has someone in mind, or is cheating on you and just doesn’t want to bother with having to hide things anymore. The only real men out there of her wish pool that would “tolerate” that are ones that don’t have options.

Open relationships are kind of an inverse bell curve thing for men, IMO.

If you're bottom percentile you'll go for them out of desperation. If you're top percentile and can trivially attract casual sex from other women, then it has an appeal again even if not everybody will go for it. If you're anywhere in the middle of sexual attractiveness it's inherently skewed where the woman in the relationship will have about 10000x the ease of attracting casual sex partners and it's thus skewed.

Though on the other hand you could just make the argument that somebody on the far right side of the curve is also incentivized to just pick a girl who's monogamous and tolerates his philandering.

If you're top percentile and can trivially attract casual sex from other women, then it has an appeal again even if not everybody will go for it.

In certain subcultures, being in this level means you feel you don't need an open relationship; you can just a) cheat or b) enforce a one-sided/Islamic polyamory model. It certainly doesn't mean "complicate my life by having someone sleep with my wife".

Much more common in the entertainment and athletic fields than the ones Aella frequents so she has that going for her I guess.

enforce a one-sided/Islamic polyamory model.

"Open relationship" is the way to launder this arrangement to make it palatable in a politically progressive context.

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That's what 'pick a girl who's monogamous and tolerates the philandering' is gesturing to, though. I'd also imagine that even in top end tech circles that very few men have clout that transfers to instantaneous endless bitches in the way that an entertainment/athletic top ender has

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Aella, despite being, as far as I can tell, a midwit

Who do you consider examples of non-midwits (topwits?)? It seems to me that unless the standard you are applying is more correlated with your aesthetic/moral approval of the person than their wits as usually defined, you should then be writing off most of this forum as midwits as well.

(My impression is that she should be a little bit above the median of the Motte in terms of smarts and verbal skills, and way above in terms of agency (mostly evidenced by the successful ascent to and maintenance of local e-celeb status). Not in any sense my "type" either, so I think I have a low risk of bias due to simping.)

Who do you consider examples of non-midwits (topwits?)?

I mean, there's a lot of smart people out there. I don't pretend to have the final say on who is smart and who isn't, but I'd say, for example, Scott Alexander in his prime was a topwit.

It seems to me that unless the standard you are applying is more correlated with your aesthetic/moral approval of the person than their wits as usually defined, you should then be writing off most of this forum as midwits as well.

Aella is sculpting a public persona as her full time occupation. Her output is basically the best that she can do given full effort and attention. I like this forum a lot, but how many people here treat poasting as their full time job? I'd say zero. So I don't think that you can do a naive comparison given the discrepancy in effort involved.

My impression is that she should be a little bit above the median of the Motte in terms of smarts and verbal skills,

Why?

way above in terms of agency (mostly evidenced by the successful ascent to and maintenance of local e-celeb status).

Debatable, since on a pseudonymous forum you can't actually tell who is successful and who is full of shit. Being a publicly successful figure with a face and a name is part of the game she's playing. Nobody here is posting face reveals and most people here would rather, I suspect, that few people they know IRL knew they posted here.

I do concede she successfully attained celebrity status. Does that mean she's not a midwit? It's 2026, we've had tards as vice presidents.

I mean, there's a lot of smart people out there. I don't pretend to have the final say on who is smart and who isn't, but I'd say, for example, Scott Alexander in his prime was a topwit.

Sure, but he was... top 0.1%? Top 0.01%? Certainly somewhere pretty high up, in terms of wit, even if we assume that most of the witty people never make their wits available to the public.

Aella is sculpting a public persona as her full time occupation. Her output is basically the best that she can do given full effort and attention. I like this forum a lot, but how many people here treat poasting as their full time job? I'd say zero. So I don't think that you can do a naive comparison given the discrepancy in effort involved.

A fair point, but one hand we have plenty of very active posters and on the other hand all the escorting and socialising and what-not surely must take up some of her time as well. Besides, being able to actually translate more time investment into better output is a skill in itself.

Why?

Because most posters here produce significantly less interesting, more brainrotten and worse-researched takes? And even then, I'd be comfortable with assuming that all Mottizens are top 10% for some reasonable measure of "wits" and most are at least top 5%. I just suspect that most of us are so bubbled up that we vastly overestimate the median person.

Debatable, since on a pseudonymous forum you can't actually tell who is successful and who is full of shit.

I don't know, it seems that enough people here drop hints at their occupation that it's likely enough most are in considerably lower-agency life tracks where they essentially operate as employees in standard-ish careers, and the path to get there and advance further forward looks like "get better standardised credentials and perform better on the next performance review".

I do have to admit that I'm quite biased against Aella's detractors, simply because the correlation between aesthetic objections to her lifestyle and politics and barely-solicited public criticism of the quality of her output or intellectual qualities is so high. If my impression is that she is one of the more interesting bloggers, but then every time some topic adjacent to her is discussed a cavalcade of card-carrying MRAs and postrationalist born-again Christians and other assorted trads comes out of the woodwork to assert that she is stupid and boring (and also very unattractive to them), then it just seems like a better explanation that the detractor "doth protest too much" and also is falling prey to a variant of the just-world fallacy (believing that the world can't be so unfair that the immoral and distasteful would also be competent and talented).

Sure, but he was... top 0.1%? Top 0.01%? Certainly somewhere pretty high up, in terms of wit, even if we assume that most of the witty people never make their wits available to the public.

Yeah, but what do you want from me? You asked for topwits and got a topwit.

A fair point, but one hand we have plenty of very active posters and on the other hand all the escorting and socialising and what-not surely must take up some of her time as well. Besides, being able to actually translate more time investment into better output is a skill in itself.

I'm not sure that she still does escorting? In any case, socializing is basically your job as a public figure and helps feed the fame flywheel.

Because most posters here produce significantly less interesting, more brainrotten and worse-researched takes? And even then, I'd be comfortable with assuming that all Mottizens are top 10% for some reasonable measure of "wits" and most are at least top 5%. I just suspect that most of us are so bubbled up that we vastly overestimate the median person.

What is so well researched or interesting about her takes? Asking her Twitter followers about something is, I suppose, research, but I don't know it's particularly good. The usual deflection she offers when someone points this out is "social science is even worse" which, even if true, says more about the quality of social science research than about Aella's twitter poll to Claude code pipeline.

I don't know, it seems that enough people here drop hints at their occupation that it's likely enough most are in considerably lower-agency life tracks where they essentially operate as employees in standard-ish careers, and the path to get there and advance further forward looks like "get better standardised credentials and perform better on the next performance review".

I think this is certainly true. I am not sure that conflating "agency" with intelligence is correct.

every time some topic adjacent to her is discussed a cavalcade of card-carrying MRAs and postrationalist born-again Christians and other assorted trads comes out of the woodwork to assert that she is stupid and boring (and also very unattractive to them)

Ironically it seems to me that you are the one posting a weak knee jerk criticism here since I'm none of those things and didn't say anything about whether I find her attractive or not.

falling prey to a variant of the just-world fallacy (believing that the world can't be so unfair that the immoral and distasteful would also be competent and talented).

I think the real just world fantasy is to believe that nobody who is a midwit can attain fame and success.

Yeah, but what do you want from me? You asked for topwits and got a topwit.

My bad, it would have been more useful to ask for your understanding of the bottommost topwit or thereabouts.

I'm not sure that she still does escorting? In any case, socializing is basically your job as a public figure and helps feed the fame flywheel.

Sure, but it does not help the "good poasting" flywheel, and I assumed that any assessment of her wits is based on her textual output rather than her life as a Gesamtkunstwerk.

What is so well researched or interesting about her takes? Asking her Twitter followers about something is, I suppose, research, but I don't know it's particularly good.

The data analysis and visualisation, ideas for things to ask, and thoroughness in constructing the questions. I have not seen things like that fetish tabooness/preference by gender/popularity chart anywhere else outside of 4chan, and 4chan is many orders of magnitude more sloppy about it.

I think this is certainly true. I am not sure that conflating "agency" with intelligence is correct.

I would think of agency as at least strongly correlated with some component of intelligence (frontal lobe stuff?), and I say that as someone with very subpar levels of agency.

I think the real just world fantasy is to believe that nobody who is a midwit can attain fame and success.

Both can be just-world fantasies.

Ironically it seems to me that you are the one posting a weak knee jerk criticism here since I'm none of those things and didn't say anything about whether I find her attractive or not.

Fair point on the latter, but I thought it was fair to put you in the "assorted trad" box given your general right-wing alignment (you get that stamp based on memory, but it's not hard to find posts that give it away in your history) and the somewhat gratuitous use of "prostitute" (Escorts are between not covered by the definition and non-central examples in modern usage, so insisting on the world seems to be meant to convey condemnation).

The data analysis and visualisation, ideas for things to ask, and thoroughness in constructing the questions. I have not seen things like that fetish tabooness/preference by gender/popularity chart anywhere else outside of 4chan, and 4chan is many orders of magnitude more sloppy about it.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this point, since I don't think I can convince you that the fetishes of Aella followers graphed isn't in fact interesting or quality. De gustibus non dispuntandum est.

Fair point on the latter, but I thought it was fair to put you in the "assorted trad" box given your general right-wing alignment (you get that stamp based on memory, but it's not hard to find posts that give it away in your history)

I probably pass for "right aligned" in, like, San Francisco, but I'm a little baffled to get that label on this forum.

and the somewhat gratuitous use of "prostitute" (Escorts are between not covered by the definition and non-central examples in modern usage, so insisting on the world seems to be meant to convey condemnation).

Sorry, but the definition of a prostitute is:

a person who engages in sex acts and especially sexual intercourse in exchange for pay

Which certainly covers Aella. The goal was not to convey condemnation, it was to describe how she made her money.

I was under the impression that it's a clinical and neutral label for the world's oldest profession, but M-W helpfully points out that I haven't gotten the latest firmware update:

The terms sex worker and sex work are now preferred to prostitute and prostitution, which are increasingly rejected as offensive.

I'll continue to resist this hyperstitous slur cascade a while longer though.

I probably pass for "right aligned" in, like, San Francisco, but I'm a little baffled to get that label on this forum.

I see you use "pozzed" in a post on page 2 of your profile. I consider unironic use to be an unambiguous right-wing cultural marker. (Doesn't it come from right-wing COVID vaccine opposition, which if anything is significantly more right relative to the distribution of (>=mid)wit rightwingers than it is relative to the US right wing as a whole?)

prostitute or not

I have not actually read her CV or anything, but since people referred to her as an escort I thought she primarily sold companionship/romance (not a sex act). She may also have worked as a camgirl (since I remember seeing posts about camgirling), which I would also not group with prostitutes (as long as you can't lose your virginity over a video feed, nothing you can do over one counts as sex, as far as I'm concerned; therefore camgirling is not a sex act). I have no issue with the term "prostitute" for people who take money for performing sex acts, especially if sex acts are the main component of what money is being taken for ("I hang out with you all day and at one point we have sex" feels borderline).

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A prostitute is etymologically someone who is 'put out there', offered up to the public. "Sex worker" is broader, encompassing camgirls and pornstars who don't, in fact, make themselves available to the man on the street. I suppose escorts may or may not go into the narrower "prostitute" box depending on how exclusive they are, and how much personal taste factors into their choice of client (I think this was the key difference historically between a prostitute and a courtesan, at least; a woman who presents herself as a prostitute is advertising that she will fuck anybody if the money's good, while a courtesan must to a degree be wooed if you want to get in with her, she'll just also expect you to pay for the privilege if she says yes).

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What is so well researched or interesting about her takes? Asking her Twitter followers about something is, I suppose, research, but I don't know it's particularly good. The usual deflection she offers when someone points this out is "social science is even worse" which, even if true, says more about the quality of social science research than about Aella's twitter poll to Claude code pipeline.

Having somebody with sufficient clout/exposure to get earnest responses to the questions she's asking from a population of higher-functioning horny enthusiasts is a nice novelty. She's also autistic enough not to just automatically discard things that go against her preconceived notions of what the responses should be, which makes her better than social science academy members who are frequently fishing to prove their own notions since reporting otherwise is to get cancelled.

Not much to criticize here, but one bit of nuance: she's been married two years, it may well be that they make it all the way (hope so), but it's a bit early to do victory lap. Which I guess is one of the best things about settling down early: If it doesn't work out, you have more breathing room to start again.

The truth is that some of the highest status women marry sluts.

Should this have been "men"?

There are tradeoffs.

Slutty Sabrina might want Chad Centimillionaire and settle for Nicholas Niceguy. Patrick the Patriarch might want Virginal Virginia and settle for Somewhat Slutty Sarah...

Also 25% of US adults under 40 have never married. So it is completely plausible that Somewhat Slutty Sarah is just not going to marry, same for Nicholas and Patrick for that matter. 25% of the US population seems not to be marriage material.

Why does Internet romance discourse often seem to involve these strange stereotypical characters with catchy names? Chad became so generic and escaped into the mainstream, but who are Slutty Sabrina and Nicholas Niceguy?

Is this a consequence of Dunbar’s number that we must invent these imaginary people to gossip about? You could have said “A slutty woman might want a rich handsome man but will settle for an average nice guy” but instead had to create an alliterative cast of archetypes as if this had somehow happened. Occasionally this catches on and Chad becomes a generic term for a hunk and Karen an annoying middle aged woman, but like, why is this a thing in the first place, to want to give names to these weird fake straw people?

It predates the internet, I remember 'Billy Nomates' and I think I remember a 'John Everyman'. John Smith was the guy who wasn't who he said he was. I'm sure there are others.

I like it, it's an efficient and sometimes witty way to make it clear that we're talking about an example with a particular characteristic not a real person. And for the rest of the conversation you can just call them by their first name: 'Billy' instead of 'our hypothetical unpopular socially awkward example'.

Also, 'Joe Six-Pack'.

For the same reason Austrian economics appeals to simpletons. If it has highly complex mathematical formulas and macroeconomic models in it, people aren’t going to read it. I find it entertaining, TBF. Sometimes the mind needs a break.

Indeed, it adds humor to the conversation, which is usually necessary.

That more than anything is what gets me in hot water with others. Irony and immature sarcasm is a huge part of how I live my life. There’s a reason in past circles whenever my name gets brought up, “smart ass” is the first thing that comes to people’s minds. I have found that people either hate it or love it. It doesn’t mean I’m not out to present and deliver the logical argument; I am and I do, but I don’t see the problem with occasionally adding a little flair to things.

Austrian economics also has the added benefit of being correct about everything. Your simpletons seem to be doing alright

Alice and Bob have been used in cryptography discussions for decades. While initially you would just incrementally add new characters in alphabetical order, over time people began deliberately choosing characters' names as a play on words based on their role in the situation being described (e.g. "Eve" or "Yves" are characters who are eavesdropping on a conversation, "Mallory" is a malicious attacker). I view Slutty Sabrina etc. as a logical extension of that principle.

why is this a thing in the first place, to want to give names to these weird fake straw people?

I prefer Alice and Bob framings because when I'm describing a hypothetical scenario with any degree of complexity, failing to name the characters results in clunky, unwieldy prose where it can be difficult to follow which character is which. Compare:

Supposing Alice has a lot to drink and knowingly gets in the driver's seat of her car, fully cognisant of the fact that she's too inebriated to drive safely. Predictably, she has an accident in which a pedestrian, Bob, is killed. Upon her arrest, Alice defends herself by claiming that, while she did drive drunk of her own volition, she never consented to hitting Bob with her car, so she can't be held responsible for it.

With:

Supposing someone has a lot to drink and knowingly gets in the driver's seat of their car, fully cognisant of the fact that they're too inebriated to drive safely. Predictably, they have an accident in which a pedestrian is killed. Upon their arrest, the driver defends themself by claiming that, while they did drive drunk of their own volition, they never consented to hitting the pedestrian with their car, so they can't be held responsible for it.

The second example is actually pretty close to what I started writing when I originally wrote that comment, but after awhile even I started getting confused about who the pronoun "they" and its derivatives was referring to. Naming the characters made the situation much clearer. (And this is a scenario with only two characters: with three or more, naming the characters is practically obligatory.)

We think of people in archetypes, an archetype imbued with enough stories becomes an egregore. It's all just memes. I think it's biological. An abstract amalgamation of ideas about people just doesn't hit the same as having a symbol like Chad and Stacy or the Chud and danger hair.

I was just trying to be a little artsy and alliterative... Don't read so much into it.

Also 25% of US adults under 40 have never married.

Not "adults under 40", rather "40-year-olds" exactly. This is a much stronger result, as it needs to be to support your theory. If the stat were for "adults under 40" I'd have been happily surprised the number was so low; it would be consistent with everyone marrying in their mid-20s!

Good point, that's what I meant but not what I said!

In the abstract, all but the most damaged women do want a "nice guy"

I tend to disagree with this. Depending, of course on what is meant by "nice." Here's an example: Suppose you need help with something, such as moving a heavy object. So you ask someone you know if they can help you. Maybe it's the person down the hall in your college dorm. Maybe it's the person in the next cubicle at work. Most people would agree that the "nice" thing to do in this situation would be to help the person.

But when it comes to romance, if a man helps a woman in this way (and they are not already in a sexual relationship), it will reduce his chances of being sexually attractive to her.

So it's not just that being "nice" is given little weight. Being "nice" undermines the man's chances.

Men don't want a slut. The sluts end up humiliated, pathetic, and alone.

I see this as an exaggeration of something which is ultimately true. Being a slut definitely makes a woman less attractive to men for long-term relationships. Especially if the woman has bastard children as a result of her promiscuity.

Of course it's true that men put a lot of value on looks. And the current relationship and sexual marketplace in the West is heavily tilted in favor of women. So yeah, a slut who is decent looking will still be able to find a decent man.

So to sum up: Men are told that being "nice" makes them more attractive to women. This is completely wrong. Women are told that being sluts makes them less attractive to men (for relationship purposes). This is correct, although admittedly the slut penalty is not so great if the woman is childless.

In general, your point seems to be one of those false balance types of arguments. The unspoken argument is something along the lines of "Ok, so men are lied to about niceness, but women are lied to as well, so it's less of a big deal."

I tend to disagree with this. Depending, of course on what is meant by "nice." Here's an example: Suppose you need help with something, such as moving a heavy object. So you ask someone you know if they can help you. Maybe it's the person down the hall in your college dorm. Maybe it's the person in the next cubicle at work. Most people would agree that the "nice" thing to do in this situation would be to help the person.

But when it comes to romance, if a man helps a woman in this way (and they are not already in a sexual relationship), it will reduce his chances of being sexually attractive to her.

If a woman asks a man for help and he turns her down, you think she'll be more attracted to him? Why would you think so?

That’s not really his point, I think. His point is that if you’ve already served that purpose, there’s nothing further to gain insofar as you offered assistance freely without anything in return; and as such, you get marked as “that” guy. You’re basically a chump.

That assumes you're interested. If you give her a hand and are aloof and disinterested you've lost exactly nothing. Women can smell a guy who moves the boxes or whatever because he wants to get laid. Like almost everything there's no real rule here. There's, as always, calibration of your behavior and how you carry yourself. Would you disagree?

Well, if one of my homegirls really needed help and couldn’t get it elsewhere and she offered to buy or make dinner later (I’ve had this happen), sure; why not? (I wouldn’t do this if I was in a relationship though, unless my girlfriend/spouse was okay with it) If on the other hand she thought she could dial me up because she was a pretty face who was entitled to my assistance for no other reason than the fact she exists, she wouldn’t be in my contact list for very long. As we used to say growing up: ass, grass or cash for those girls.

That is certainly one way to be. I'm more a friend in need is a friend in deed. Though I don't actually know what the hell that means. I help whoever when I can. I help people with bags. I helped an old woman today work the coffee machine in the hospital 7-11. But I tend to take over tasks as my own if I'm helping. I don't want to be told every little thing, that pisses me off. But sure.

I used to be like that. I still am but less so given the way I’d get treated. If it’s an elderly woman or a man who seems really down on his luck, I’ll offer a helping hand and some of my time, but I don’t do it for just anyone anymore.

No good deed goes unpunished, certainly. One has to ask oneself why one does it, of course, and measure that against the act and potential consequences/blowback. My rule of thumb is never be reactive emotionally. I fail at this often.

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I'm more a friend in need is a friend in deed [sic]. Though I don't actually know what the hell that means.

The phrase, as I understand it, is "A friend in need is a friend indeed." The way I always understood it is that friendship isn't a transactional relationship where you log who did what for whom and try to even it out; it's one where you support each other because you love each other as friends. So it's only when a friend is in need that you can truly be their friend, by sacrificing something to help him out of that need; otherwise, you could just be leeching off of them. I'll also add that, I thought a line from John Wick 4 captured the same idea pretty well, when Wick, chased around by assassins, turns to one of his old friends for protection and apologizes, and his friend just responds, "Friendship means little when it's convenient."

I think your own understanding of the phrase (as well as its typography) is correct.

In trading it’s called adverse selection bias. If people are willing to fill your bid then they probably have a better model of value than you and are the one with edge. A guy being nice to a girl is essentially telling a girl he’s willing to trade with her (resources for sex). The guy unwilling to trade with her (give her free stuff hoping for sex) is implicitly telling her his price is higher than what she has to offer.

Sure, and then they will not have a match, and will have very little to do with other, and any attraction will just be theoretical and not become an actual relationship. But I can't think of very many real life people who's relationships are primarily characterized by resources for sex, since they're mostly earning similar amounts before getting together, and the women have to continue working after.

If a woman asks a man for help and he turns her down, you think she'll be more attracted to him?

Absolutely, in the sense that she'll be more attracted to him than if he had simply helped her.

Why would you think so?

I think so because that's what I (and other men) have observed. If I had to guess at the underlying psychology, my hypothesis would be that when a man does nice things for a woman, he is putting her above him. He is "supplicating" as the PUA's would say. This goes against her hypergamy instincts, i.e. it becomes harder for her to look up to him. Which kills attraction.

I disagree with the maximalist version of this. I agree if we're talking about the guy bending over backwards to help a woman because she's a woman, maybe some sort of childish misguided chivalrous ideal is pushing him and women resent that because they feel like the guy taking on this chivalrous role is trying to push her into the role of the grateful rescued maiden. But the well-liked, pillar of the community, popular with women guy is a helpful guy too. The difference is that he would help anyone, not just "fair maidens", and women know and feel that difference.

I disagree with the maximalist version of this. I agree if we're talking about the guy bending over backwards to help a woman because she's a woman, maybe some sort of childish misguided chivalrous ideal is pushing him and women resent that because they feel like the guy taking on this chivalrous role is trying to push her into the role of the grateful rescued maiden. But the well-liked, pillar of the community, popular with women guy is a helpful guy too. The difference is that he would help anyone, not just "fair maidens", and women know and feel that difference.

I knew one guy like this in college. He would drop everything to help just about anyone. He was popular with women in the sense that they all raved about what a prince he was. None of them dated him and as far as I know he graduated with his virginity intact.

I do agree that if a man is high enough status, he can probably play the "I am a humble servant and a lowly worm" schtick and still attract women. I would call that "countersignaling."

I do agree that if a man is high enough status, he can probably play the "I am a humble servant and a lowly worm" schtick and still attract women. I would call that "countersignaling."

No, that's the thing, high status men don't play "signaling" games. They don't play act like they're servants, they're just bros to everyone. They just don't act like women are different in that matter.

Honestly, the second you start thinking about how to "signal" and playing games to attract women, you've lost; you're not and will not be high status that way. Maybe you'll trick some broken women into sleeping with you, which is maybe from some perspectives better than staying a virgin "nice guy". But high status men don't even know when their charm is on. I know some of these guys. They're just charisma black holes, there's no switch they don't act different to men and women, and their charm works on both equally, even straight guys. When they join a conversation, whatever the topic was is immediately dropped for everyone to talk about them and what's up with their lives and please talk more about yourself.

Honestly, the second you start thinking about how to "signal" and playing games to attract women, you've lost;

I strongly disagree. For example, let's suppose you're a typical guy. A girl wants you to do something nice for her, such as help her move something; hold her purse; buy her a drink, etc. Your brain (informed by years of propaganda) is urging you to do it. No, no, no. Don't do it. If you do it, it (generally speaking) ruins your chances with her.

No, that's the thing, high status men don't play "signaling" games.

Everyone plays "signaling" games, it's part of being human.

your chances with her.

Your chances of what? Your chances of quick casual sex, maybe. I don't think it harms your chances of falling into deep, mutual love, though, which is best done on a solid foundation of honesty and friendship. You cannot build a soul-deep connection with another human being if, from day one, you're playing mind games where you treat them worse than you would a stranger in an effort to push their evopsych buttons. Those tactics may get you somewhere, but that "somewhere" will not be love.

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I knew one guy like this in college. He would drop everything to help just about anyone. He was popular with women in the sense that they all raved about what a prince he was. None of them dated him and as far as I know he graduated with his virginity intact.

"Literally me" would be hyperbole, but I feel kinship with this guy insofar as I was eager to help with classwork, except I went out of my way to help attractive women less because I realized what it would look like if it appeared I was simping. Unfortunately, being just enough of a normie to understand how I might be perceived for my actions wasn't enough to overcome aspie mannerisms.

If I must tie this personal anecdote back into culture war issues, I'd like to cite "Autism is the real Blackpill," but a DuckDuckGo search and a Google search isn't turning up anything. Did I just hallucinate this piece? Does it sound familiar to anyone else? I'd like to have another go at it and see if its sources actually held up, or if I just gravitated towards assuming whatever says the worst about me is accurate - a dangerous bias.

"Literally me" would be hyperbole, but I feel kinship with this guy insofar as I was eager to help with classwork, except I went out of my way to help attractive women less because I realized what it would look like if it appeared I was simping. Unfortunately, being just enough of a normie to understand how I might be perceived for my actions wasn't enough to overcome aspie mannerisms.

FWIW the guy I am talking about did not have any aspie characteristics. He was just a very nice guy.

I guess part of the problem is that if you act like you are eager to please others, people perceive it as low status. In a medieval court, who would be running around trying to please everyone? Most likely one of the servants. Who might even be popular, but not respected. Not respected in the way that the king or his best warrior would have been respected.

I'd like to cite "Autism is the real Blackpill," but a DuckDuckGo search and a Google search isn't turning up anything. Did I just hallucinate this piece? Does it sound familiar to anyone else?

Was it this one?

Yes, thank you.

Huh. It seems like the feeling of "looking up to" a man and thinking him significantly higher status doesn't necessarily kill attraction (movie stars are attractive), but it does kill the chance of an actual relationship most of the time, he's too high status even to interact with.

It seems like the feeling of "looking up to" a man and thinking him significantly higher status doesn't necessarily kill attraction (movie stars are attractive), but it does kill the chance of an actual relationship most of the time, he's too high status even to interact with.

I would have to disagree with this. A man is going to lose a lot more romantic/sexual opportunities by being too low status than by being too high status. I don't see Leonardo DiCaprio complaining that no women want to date him because he's just too famous and successful.

Sure, being famous and successful will improve a man's status, and then he can get away with things. Even if his status is very polarizing, like Trump, he can still get away with a lot. That's an argument for being rich and successful, not for treating people worse. I assume DiCaprio, being successful and charming, would flirt about it and possibly hire someone to help his girlfriend out.

Sure, being famous and successful will improve a man's status, and then he can get away with things. Even if his status is very polarizing, like Trump, he can still get away with a lot. That's an argument for being rich and successful, not for treating people worse.

I disagree. Treating people too nicely (and a lot of men make this mistake) communicates that you are low status. People who are too nice need to start treating people worse. It doesn't mean that they need to start being actively mean, of course.

I assume DiCaprio, being successful and charming, would flirt about it and possibly hire someone to help his girlfriend out.

As a side note, once a man is in a sexual relationship with a woman, he has more leeway to do nice things for her.

To your first point, you’ve just described Briffault’s Law. I don’t know how many people here would strongly contest that point, but I’ve observed much the same. Maybe “help,” here and there, depends on the circumstance but sure. If she’s asking me to sacrifice, she’s going to have to begin negotiations. The only people I will unconditionally sacrifice for is my family. Most of these arguments rarely end up disputing the points of the other side directly. Instead they argue on the length and degrees of different factors.

As far as I can tell women like men who can do handyman work that they themselves are scared or incapable of doing, and find it attractive when men can do masculine things like lifting heavy objects.

As far as I can tell women like men who can do handyman work that they themselves are scared or incapable of doing,

All things being equal, I would agree. But all things are not equal. When a man does nice things for a woman with whom he is not already in an intimate relationship, it undermines her attraction for him.

Men are told that being "nice" makes them more attractive to women. This is completely wrong.

It’s not completely wrong at all. In the choice between a handsome, confident, successful and ‘evil’ man (a cheater, neglectful or abusive parent, etc) and a handsome, confident, successful and nice man, most non-damaged women will pick the latter. The issue is that being nice doesn’t outweigh the first three things.

Similarly, all else being equal men will go for the less promiscuous woman. But all else is rarely equal.

It’s not completely wrong at all. In the choice between a handsome, confident, successful and ‘evil’ man (a cheater, neglectful or abusive parent, etc) and a handsome, confident, successful and nice man, most non-damaged women will pick the latter.

Strong disagree. Hybristophilia and a predilection for dark triad traits are well-known patterns of female attraction. There is a reason why the stereotypical romance novel love interest is a werewolf or a mafia boss who treats the protagonist like shit for 90% of the story.

Girls simp for Snape and Sasuke, not Harry and Naruto.

That's not too different from saying that obviously men like promiscuous women since women in the male equivalent form of fiction - porn flicks - are promiscuous, no? Fantasy is fantasy, reality is reality.

Porn flicks surely feature promiscuous women sometimes, but do they do so at the same sort of dominant rate as the gender-swapped version? Porn has become so diverse and large and also are extremely under-studied, so I don't know exactly. But, in general, men tend to care much less about the actual backstory of the women in the porn and much more about their looks and personality. And the personality tends to always be some form of "extremely eager to have sex with [viewer character]," I believe, but that's orthogonal to promiscuous. There's certainly cuck/ntr porn that's popular, but I don't think, in general, women commenting that you're the 6th man she's banging tonight is all that common or something that would tend to make some given porn better for most men, the same way that some man being a werewolf/billionaire/doctor would make some given romance novel better for women, all else being equal.

Personally, I have no trouble finding porn where there's no implication whatsoever of the woman (or women, as the case tends to be) has any sort of sexual history besides what happens within the bounds of that particular video, which strictly involves 0-1 males. As such, this type of porn where the women aren't known to be promiscuous appears to me fairly popular.

that's orthogonal to promiscuous

I disagree. You can't be promiscuous if you treat sex as a low-priority activity or it has a high activation cost for you.

If that falls under "promiscuous," then I'd posit that it is true that men do prefer women to be a certain type of promiscuous woman over not promiscuous. The certain type being that she considers it a high-priority activity with low activation cost when with him and only him and the exact opposite when it comes to any other man. But I don't think that means it'd be accurate to say that men prefer promiscuous women over not promiscuous women, since "promiscuous" without qualifiers covers a much wider ground.

I've long been under the impression that "dark triad"/"evil" is an imperfect proxy/correlate for what women find attractive in those instances (which is not that well-understood or easily described). Otherwise, redpill-type advice would be much more effective - the men who take it are usually already resentful towards women and society, are you saying that as a group they are still somehow more held back by scruples about doing harm to others than silver spoon fratboys who have never encountered meaningful social adversity in their life?

Any theory of female attraction also needs to explain incidental features of it such as the widespread fascination with horses, which is transparently sexually charged. You can hardly project more dark-triad/evil traits onto horses than, I don't know, hyenas or pigs.

This is related to Beauty and the Beast, and vampires/werewolves. Women want men who are dangerous to bad men, and kind to them. Lacking that, some will settle for generally dangerous.

There’s also the “tortured soul” energy of your examples — a werewolf, a vampire, and the beast are all cursed with an affliction that tortures them and separates them from the human. The women in the stories serve as a stabilizing force — in BatB, literally the lifting of the curse itself — that humanizes him.

They’re dangerous, but deep down, beyond the curse, deeply good. A man who gets passionate and heated, but can be calmed by a touch of his woman, is a pretty real scenario couples experience all the time. Everyone knows that guy who will start yelling about something, and his wife squeezes his hand, and he chills out.

But you're not comparing a "nice" man and a "not nice" or "less nice" man, you're comparing him with an "evil" man. In practice, "not/less nice" cashes out to something like "has judgment and standards about whom he is nice to." Which seems pretty evident to me to be more attractive to women.

It’s not completely wrong at all. In the choice between a handsome, confident, successful and ‘evil’ man (a cheater, neglectful or abusive parent, etc) and a handsome, confident, successful and nice man, most non-damaged women will pick the latter. The issue is that being nice doesn’t outweigh the first three things.

When the message is sent to men to "be nice" it's not really "don't cheat" or "don't be an abusive parent." Rather, it's things like "be kind"; "be considerate" "be a good listener" "be the kind of guy who helps her move a heavy thing" etc. So you are pulling a bit of a bait and switch.

(Even so, if a man is otherwise attractive but is a cheater or is abusive, it's not going to hurt his chances with women all that much. The fraction of women who are turned on by a guy who mistreats them is not just a small number of "damaged" women. Let's put it this way: If I needed to find a wife and I had a choice between being perceived as (1) a man who is kind, considerate, a good listener, etc.; and (2) a man who is a cheater and or abusive, I would definitely take the second option. Almost all women are disgusted by men who are kind/considerate/a good listener. Most women will put up with men in the second category if they are otherwise desirable.)

When the message is sent to men to "be nice" it's not really "don't cheat" or "don't be an abusive parent." Rather, it's things like "be kind"; "be considerate" "be a good listener" "be the kind of guy who helps her move a heavy thing" etc. So you are pulling a bit of a bait and switch.

It's much simpler than that. It's "be attractive while doing these things". Imagine the two guys from the "hello, Human Resources" meme carrying a heavy box for a woman. One of them, she's staring at his forearms flexing, one of them she's watching the sweatstains break through his shirt with mounting disgust.

If you're reading this and it annoys you, stop typing and give me 30 pushups.

I wonder how many mottizens could give you 30 pushups at all.

I could do it with a few weeks training but I'm also 130kg.it's not hard for most men to do pushups

Let's put it this way: If I needed to find a wife and I had a choice between being perceived as (1) a man who is kind, considerate, a good listener, etc.; and (2) a man who is a cheater and or abusive, I would definitely take the second option. Almost all women are disgusted by men who are kind/considerate/a good listener. Most women will put up with men in the second category if they are otherwise desirable.

I find this hard to reconcile with reality, but I think it's for two reasons:

  1. You are focusing on traits that correlate with other more or less desired traits. "Women," generally, may be attracted to men who cheat or are abusive, but not because they cheat/abuse. It's that men with attractive qualities like physical vanity and high-risk-taking are also more likely to be abusive and cheat. Men who listen well are probably also unattractive in other ways. Being someone who expresses kindness along with risk-taking and physical attractiveness should be the goal to attract the most women.

  2. I suppose there are many women attracted to abusers and cheaters, but those would be exactly the women that I would not find attractive, including for all of the traits that likely correlate with those women: status chasing, too much attention to physical attractiveness, shallow thinkers, etc. It sounds like horrible advice, to me, for men to optimize attracting the most dysfunctional women.

You are focusing on traits that correlate with other more or less desired traits. "Women," generally, may be attracted to men who cheat or are abusive, but not because they cheat/abuse. It's that men with attractive qualities like physical vanity and high-risk-taking are also more likely to be abusive and cheat. Men who listen well are probably also unattractive in other ways. Being someone who expresses kindness along with risk-taking and physical attractiveness should be the goal to attract the most women.

Just so we are clear, are you claiming that, generally speaking, most men could improve their dating/romantic lives if they acted more kindly and considerately towards women?

Where is @Sloot at? He always wins these arguments.

I mean, he certainly has strong views and presents them forcefully. I can't say he's ever convinced me by his arguments, though, so I guess it depends on what you mean by "win".

That's interesting, I wonder if that is the median view here. I disagree with him as much as I agree on the whole. Which is a better record than many.

He tends to become active around topics like this. There are a large minority of topical users on TM who only come alive when the discussion shifts around to certain issues. There’s a reason I don’t partake in a lot of the political discussion here. It’s mostly arguing on incremental, insignificant tidbits of current events that aren’t going to end up going anywhere. Culture War is too top heavy on that dialogue IMO.

The “culture war” itself has cooled down and become entrenched to the point that you don’t always have new exciting “culture war” topics to talk about every day. So people just default to talking about US politics at large.

Or AI, which has lately been the subject of half to two-thirds of the top-level posts in the CW threads. A big change from Reddit days.

Yeah. I mean that was sort of just a matter of timing. We really started talking about AI a lot in the summer of 2022 because of DALL-E, right before the migration away from reddit.

If that’s the case we need to pull from Kiwi Farms more. They never have this problem, /s.

I think I'm in the same boat. But even when I disagree with him, the manner in which he expresses himself can almost always get a chuckle out of me, which is appreciated.

He's the only person I've blocked here, he's so consistently vulgar, with so little to be learned from it.

Same! I rarely block people but I can't stand the self-assured, adult red pill man's mindset. Feels quite close to just pure selfish evil to me.

Maybe he settled down.

Oh shit. Shots fired.

Men are raised around the polite fiction that women (and society) want them to be nice above all else. Nice guys get the girl. And, after all, anyone can be nice. That's part of why this is important social messaging. But of course in the end, the boy must live. And he discovers that, in fact, niceness isn't what gets the girl. Being hot is, having status is.

Isn't the problem that there's a tension between what society wants and what an individual wants? Society doesn't really care whether some random teenager "gets the girl." It only barely cares whether men overall get married, insofar as it needs to keep the fertility rate up to produce more workers. What "society" wants is for boys to be nice, stay out of trouble, and go to work. And, you know, those are pretty good things to want overall in society... it's just not the only things that a male mammal would want. I don't know the solution, but I wish we could at least start by openly acknowledge the problem.

You're correct but I think this is overcomplicating it.

  • Women want a man who is 'nice' but only to her.
  • Men want a women who is a 'slut' but only to him.

Women's fantasy is to have a strong-willed, dominant, somewhat abrasive/disagreeable man who gets what he wants, but softens around her and only her, that she can wrap around her finger, not a pushover but 'I would do anything for her'. She is the exception to the other women.

Men's fantasy is to have a youthful, viriginal, agreeable, respectable women, but so enamoured and devoted (unconditionally) that she is willing to throw herself at him and only him, and become his 'slut'. He is the exception to other men.

Everyone wants to feel special.

I think this quote from the article parallels my post from the last week's thread:

Because the truth is that sluts actually like men. They are the more enthusiastic market participants. To survive a decade of high-volume dating in the 2020s requires a certain psychological resilience and unflappable optimism about the opposite sex that is good preparation for marriage.

I don't necessarily think it's "good preparation for marriage", but "ladies in the streets, whores in the bedroom" or "high sex drive, low promiscuity" women don't stay on the dating market for long. They get married quickly, and their men hold on to them for dear life. Those who remain are either "sluts" or women who don't really prioritize men.

This is demeaning to men, as if all that’s needed to keep a man happy in a relationship is frequent sex. It’s also plain false, if you go on /r/deadbedrooms there’s a huge majority of women posting about how their boyfriends/husbands won’t have sex with them (I’d say maybe 30-40%?).

And before you say it, the common theme doesn’t seem to be the woman becoming unattractive/older. There’s a huge number of men with porn addictions out there, men who settle for a wife that’s not actually their type even if she’s otherwise attractive (what’s a 173cm skinny blonde to do if a man has a Latina fetish?), men who have low T, men who just have completely incompatible kinks, etc.

The stereotype that all men want sex all the time with any mildly attractive woman is harmful for everyone, and especially now with hormonal issues and porn addiction becoming extremely common in men. The prevalence of ED in men under 24 has more than doubled in the last 20 years! You can’t rely on old stereotypes anymore to navigate the modern dating world, whether you’re a man or a woman.

I do not necessarily disagree with you, but I don't quite understand how you came to this interpretation.

UPD: I checked a few pages of the DB subreddit, and very few low-libido men on it are truly low-libido, as in, not really interested in sexual pleasure. At least half of them aren't attracted to their partner, a quarter have medical issues and are frustrated by the lack of sex drive. Less than a quarter are significantly less libidinous than their partner and consider themselves normal.

Sure, I think the low libido vs high libido terminology isn’t accurate, it’s about having a partner that doesn’t want to have sex with you, and this happens to women too.

If you’re brought up with the idea that men are always willing to have sex at any time, and that the way to satisfy a man and get him to marry you is to be “a whore in the sheets” for him, what do you do when it turns out your man doesn’t want to have sex anymore?

And if a man is turning down sex and instead prefers to watch porn and masturbate, that feels far worse than him just having no libido for medical reasons!

Smash his wifi and put trenbolone in his coffee.

The opinion piece seems to be arguing that the main characteristic of sluts is them pursuing men somewhat aggressively, initiating relationships or at least sending blatant IOIs (indicators of interest) whereas the chastity of non-sluts manifests as them waiting while being paralyzed on the sidelines and being wallflowers. I find this rather strange.

I think most women, sluts or not, obviously agree that initiating relationships with men is cringy and comes across as desperate – and that accordingly, it’s not that sluts are such by virtue of pursuing men – and that putting out early to men that are potential partners/husbands is bad strategy. The simple difference between sluts and non-sluts is that the former agree to proposals for casual sex (normally) from men they do not view as potential husbands and the latter do not.

Andrew Tate once posted that he rejects women who have slept with more than 3 men.

I think it’s worth mentioning that in a practical sense, actually following this standard would reduce his mating pool to nil in the current social reality.

The problem with a lot of these conversations is what defines promiscuous or a slut? I find these terms so vague as to be useless. There are obviously a ton of agreement on the high end of things but I am somewhat shocked at who some guys consider to be "sluts."

I went "Who the hell is Alex Cooper?" and had to find out that she's the host of the "Call Her Daddy" podcast. You all remember, the podcast Kamala decided to visit instead of Joe Rogan.

Yeah, this all sounds like the sort of circus I'd expect.

Man, here, will say that men (or at least attractive or otherwise high status men) will fuck promiscuous women but never marry them. But that isn't really true.

I think that this used to be far truer than it is today. Yes, some men in the past married their mistresses. But for the most part mistress and wife were steps on different relationship tracks.

I am the least qualified person to summarize modern courtship mores, but the progression looks to me like this: sex, then long-term relationship, then moving in together, then marriage. In old-fashioned terms, most men in the early stages are asking, "Will she make a good mistress?" Only once that works out will they ask, "Will she make a good wife?" The wife filter is happening late in the process, and the function of marriage then is to cement a relationship that already exists.

By contrast older mores encouraged men to check for wife material earlier in the relationship, and a man who was expressly looking for mistress material wasn't putting her on the wife track.

Part of the reason narratives conflict is that there really are people who just marry their high school sweetheart and stay happily married for life. In fact, the fertile demographics are primarily composed of such people.

But yeah, if you miss out on that, move away from your hometown, and try to find love in the club or on a dating site, well... yeah, that's a different world. People are more broken there, everything is messier, and there's no community that radiates an aura buff for healthy, long-term relationships. Children become a liability, divorce settlements loom like a sword of Damocles, etc.

the polite fiction that women (and society) want them to be nice above all else

"Niceness" is the wrong word for what most women want in a man. I think it's less of a lie/polite fiction than a viewpoint error. The ideal man is more like a German Shepherd: the dog is friendly and playful among those it knows and trusts, and is hostile and aggressive against those it does not -- especially when they pose any sort of threat to those it knows and trusts. You can leave your toddler alone with the dog without a care in the world that the dog will bite it or attack it. But obviously this in no way implies the dog is incapable of violent aggression: you want vicious aggression when an intruder enters your home! It is the proper discretion of when to be friendly and when to be violent that makes this dog radiate such an aura of safety.

Putting the above three paragraphs together, it's easy to see what's going on: in the high school sweetheart case, there was never any need to treat this person as an outsider because this is someone you've always known since childhood. But a stranger in the city you met in a club? Obviously you cannot treat this person like you would a childhood freind. They are a threat, in some sense, and you're a miscalibrated fool to not treat them as such. They definitely can just have sex with you and ghost you, give you an STD, badger you into giving them money, bring in drama with their ex(es), or goad you into signing a marriage document then waltz off with half your money. It takes a fair amount of work to overcome this trust barrier, and often it's never overcome and no long-term relationship forms.

As for sluts, well... I think this word is also too big. There are prostitutes, people who engage in casual sex, and adulterers, and IMO these are quite different, especially the latter. Historically, I think these were often conflated because of the culture-defining preeminance of pathogenic threat (even if not consciously reified as such), which rendered any non-monogamous sex extremely dangerous. Today, to at least to a decent extent, the pathogen threat can be mitigated: antibiotics and similair treatments are effective for many diseases that would have been showstoppers historically, and if nothing else, we at least have tests so you know whether the person is infected in the first place. I think adulterers now stand out as much worse than the other two, as there's been a breach of trust. Prostitutes, well... the old saying comes to mind: "There are two kinds of men who pay for sex: those who are paying you to come, and those who are paying you to leave." With prostitution, at least, nominally, there's no breach in trust. Arguably, it's just a poor woman's method of searching for a good mate -- a man in the latter category who will hopefully one day decide not to pay her to go away. As for casual sex, I think the dynamics are much the same as for prostitution, it's just for women with enough access to money to find explicit prostitution uncouth (although the social norms for dating, namely "man pays for everything", basically make this tantamount to prostitution, just without calling it that).

Are men attracted to sluts? Eh, men are attracted to women, and sluts are mostly all that's available if you fumbled the high school sweetheart route. I mean where would you even go to encounter a non-sexually-active woman where it would be appropriate to make a sexual advance? The nun archetype exists for a reason: adult women who aren't married or sexually active select themselves into circles where they'll never be approached by a man at all. In The Sound of Music, the Reverend Mother basically boots Maria out of the abbey and into a governess job for this reason: Maria clearly doesn't belong in the abbey; she's supposed to be with children and a good husband. Alas, the role of Reverend Mother seems to have been lost to time.

I agree with you. What was the point of 2rafa's post? The median age of marriage is almost 30 for women. Are they supposed to be virgins or something? Does anybody care about the difference between 3 and 6 bodies? Will they even know? There's a word for men who really don't like sluts: Epstein-ahh pedophiles.

I think this is a real phenomenon, but Epstein is a terrible example. Epstein was bringing in low-class prostitutes and passing them around to his friends. He was running a prostitution ring, not seeking to find an untarnished dame for his hand in marriage.

Normies, especially American ones, don't care. A 23 year old „courting” a 15 year old for marriage goes in the woodchipper right after Jeffrey.

Also, as an aside, I think Epstein was a polygamist and not a pimp. His friends never seem to have partaken. Only him. Doesn't change what you said though.


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