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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32824 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Are unmarried men taken seriously in business and life?

I listened to Charles Haywood’s latest essay on entrepreneurship and he bluntly suggested that single men are not taken seriously in business. This is something I’ve long suspected, but rarely heard articulated. The only other time I can think of hearing this in media is Alec Baldwins character in The Departed saying something to the effect that you need to be married to: “let your bosses know your not a fag and that at least one woman can tolerate you”.

It seems completely obvious to me and was a source of anxiety for many years. I married in my mid 30s. It’s also completely antithetical to the dominant narrative and I reckon you’d find countless news and opinion articles arguing the opposite.

I also wonder how kids factor into this. I recall reading an analysis of honor culture and the three Ps: provide, protect, and procreate. I don’t have enough background to fully explain this theory but the just of it is that in order to be a man that is fully accepted in a honor culture, you must be competent to excel in one or multiple Ps. I suspect that this is linked to my original question and that having a wife and kids demonstrates competence in all of these dimensions.

Men are suspicious of single men because they have less to lose and so are more likely to take risks, to screw you over, to walk out of a job without a notice period, not to mention higher risk behavior like to fuck their coworkers, to commit a crime that gets the company into hot water, to attempt a high risk strategy to usurp you and so on and so on. The more deep social links someone has in a community, the less likely they are to be unpredictable or break any rules, written or unwritten.

I think this has the best explaining power behind OP's heuristic unless the businessmen OP is referring to are the baseball scouts from Moneyball.

I wish there was a guide for retards like me that listed out all the translations of "When they say X social/personal attributes is bad/good because of set(Y), they actually mean set(Z)". These are not groundbreaking revelations by any means intellectually, but they still catch me off guard because they don't come naturally to me.

I live in Dubai and recently I attended a talk by a woman from PWC about how the MENA region is the next Silicon Valley because tech startups secured 4B USD in funding. That is a pittance FYI. It was immediately obvious to me that this lady with a big-name accounting degree from the UK is committing the base rate fallacy in a very data visualization filled presentation, she did not justify her next silicon valley statement with "the MENA region has more funding than the past" or the "MENA region has more funding than other regions". Just that it has a "big" number digit of funding. Not only that her data analysis and visualizations lacked the most successful tech country in the MENA Region, Israel!

Then it hit me.. Her job isn't to speak the truth, the data are just there for decorations/pretense of credibility/deniability, it's to speak what people want to hear with plausible deniability (fancy UK masters degree), while not offending anyone as well (Excluding Israel because Arabs regardless of normalization of relationtions wouldn't like hearing Jews are doing better, even smart and rich Arabs). Her job is to Euler an audience on a decision predetermined by someone else already regardless of the data, it's a dog and pony show.

This lady had 100x the social sense that I had. Because my presentation would have spoken the truth about the tech sector of the MENA region (it sucks donkey dick) and included Israel. I would have lamented "oh but they told me to analyze the data and present on it, I did that! why did I get fired??".

I did think I could embarrass her by pointing those things out, but I would just mark myself as a troublemaker.

Her job isn't to speak the truth, the data are just there for decorations/pretense of credibility/deniability, it's to speak what people want to hear with plausible deniability

Her job is to land fat consultancy fees for PWC contracting for the MENA governments hoping to turn the oil money (before it runs out) into something high-value that will replace it. Hence the dream of being Silicon Valley (and they're not alone, a lot of European governments - including my own - are trying to get their own Silicon Whatever off the ground).

PWC know there's a snowball in hell's chance of that happening. But do they care? No, they care about "can we get a multi-million contract out of these pigeons to waste a couple of years pretending to build their toy tech start-up centre". That's what she was there for, and it's good that you eventually realised that. You wouldn't have embarrassed her, you would have embarrassed yourself as not being clued-in enough to realise the game being played.

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