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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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This is kind of the problem. I'm familiar with the concept of 'tradeoffs' and accept that. If I somehow land a smoking hot redhead with DD's, I can accept she might be a bit profligate in spending, which I will corral as best I can.

But the women are generally lacking so many of the desirable traits I'd look for that there's not much to trade off against!

Reading you guys makes me realize I am significantly more of a naive or fatalist romantic than I would have credited myself as. Romance is something that happens, dammit, not the synthetic end result of a deliberate, cold-blooded process.

I mean, we don't live in the best or the worst of all worlds. There are some genuinely beautiful, selfless relationships out there. But not everyone gets one. My cynicism applies only to me and my future prospects (or lack thereof).

From "Unspeakable Bargains" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Once upon a time there was a man named Simon who was a successful junior trader at a financial firm in New York City, who was heterosexual and liked conventionally pretty women. Simon used to take attractive women out to swanky restaurants, and fancy theatres, and amusement parks on weekends, and buy them jewelry and clothing; and then they would go back to his place and have fun. One day, Simon decided to stop spending money on women.

Immediately after, women decided to stop spending time on him.

Simon was very depressed by this. "So they never liked me to begin with?" he bemoaned, clutching his hands against the lapels of his $4000 business suit. "They were just stringing me along for my money all along?"

"That's admittedly a possibility," said Noelle, a well-known author who wasn't conventionally attractive and could therefore go to expensive restaurants with Simon without sex entering into it. "But considering the sheer weirdness of what you just tried to get away with, we can't even conclude that much. I don't even know how to describe the exact mistake you're making. Why on Earth did you try that in the first place?"

"Numerous movies and TV shows have told me that if girls really like me, they'll like me for myself rather than my money," explained Simon.

"Honestly I sometimes find it a bit hard to really, deeply understand from a first-person perspective what it's like to make that mistake," said Noelle. "Admittedly, I'm privileged, because I attract people by being a famous author, and therefore I identify strongly with the aspect of myself that I market sexually. Like, anyone who only sleeps with me because I'm the famous author Noelle Smith therefore does like me for myself, as I define 'myself'. So it's hard for me to imagine the existential horror of needing to market oneself sexually using only wealth, physical attractiveness, sexual skill, and other characteristics that ultimately fail to distinguish you from millions of other people. But then I know that there's other famous authors who attract people and that doesn't seem to upset me. For that matter, I know that there's centillions upon centillions of perfectly identical Noelles elsewhere in our spatially infinite universe, and that doesn't upset me. I seem to have lost track of the thread of the conversation, where were we again?"

"I was being sad about the fact that all of those girls turned out to only be attracted to me for my money," said Simon. "Honestly, it wouldn't even disturb me all that much, except for the fact that all the movies and TV shows have told me that this is an inferior quality of love, which means that somebody else is doing better than I am."

"Oh right, that," said Noelle. "Yeah, and I was saying we couldn't even conclude that much, though there is a certain prior probability in play. Look, it'd be one thing if you were poor, but honest, and also extremely handsome. But if you're visibly wearing a $4000 suit and still trying to take the girl to eat at McDonalds, that sends another message entirely. What the hell were you thinking?"

"I was thinking that at least Wendy, of all the women I was dating, said that she liked me for myself and that the restaurants had nothing to do with it!" declared Simon. "I'm genuinely disturbed that she turned out to be lying!"

"Oh, Wendy? Yeah, her I liked," said Noelle. "Simon, I don't think Wendy was lying. I think she was making a deep-seated error about how her own psychology worked, like, she was having trouble interpreting reality in a way that didn't seem horrible to her, so she slipped sideways into a nearby universe instead. Look, Wendy's model-level beautiful, right? She can date in the big leagues. 'Don't marry for money, hang around rich girls and marry for love,' as the saying goes. Wendy's pretty enough that she can afford to hang around with a hundred people in your rough category of socioeconomic status, and pick out one that she likes. She could still have been attracted to you more than other rich guys, because of the fine details of your personality or something. Like, she found it cute the way you snort in the middle of laughing, or whatever the hell it is you think it's acceptable for women to be attracted to."

"Yeah, but it's not okay that Wendy also cared about the money!" said Simon. "That makes her a horrible person, right? Or at least shallow. A woman with real depth to her wouldn't care about my money at all."

Noelle thunked her head against the wall of the restaurant booth they were in. "You know," she said, "even if we concede that this hypothetical quality would earn a woman 2.3 virtue points, which could in itself be debated, my mind is still going: 'But why would somebody that virtuous need to end up dating somebody poor and unattractive? Shouldn't she be able to score a wealthy boyfriend who's attracted to excessively virtuous women?'"

"I'm starting to wonder if I've gone to the wrong friend for consolation here," said Simon.

"Possibly," said Noelle. "I mean, I'm having trouble imagining a universe whose mating market ends up that far out of equilibrium. Like, I can't believe in the implied alternative to mating markets for long enough for me to become emotional about it, or something like that. But even so I feel you're being unfair to Wendy in calling her shallow. If you hang around 20 guys whose personalities attract you, and then you marry the one who takes you to the most expensive restaurants, there's nothing wrong with that. There isn't even anything shallow about that. Deep women can like Kobe beef too. There's nothing wrong with wanting to go to expensive restaurants at the same time as being with someone you like."

"Of course there is," said Simon. "Let's be realistic here, if you like 20 people for themselves, there's going to be some quantitative level at which you like them, and if you pick the wealthiest person from among those, you're going to end up sacrificing 0.3 liking points so you can get 10 wealth points. How is that not shallow? I know, I know, you think everyone just is shallow, and maybe that's true, but it's still sad."

Noelle thunked her head against the wall again. "See," she said, "I don't think of myself as being cold-heartedly cynical when I reject that way of looking at things. I don't think that kind of exchange is bad when it happens alongside everything else in life. I don't think that optimizing your own life and reaching up for things is selfish and bad. I don't think it's wrong for a woman to want jewelry and for that to influence her dating life, so long as that one consideration doesn't take over her life at the expense of everything else. And aren't you the guy who never asks out any woman he doesn't consider to be at least a 9 out of 10?"

"That's not the same at all!" Simon said indignantly. "I can't control who I'm sexually attracted to. It's not like I try to score women on the same scale that everyone else uses, the way that wealth is objective and measurable, and then I only try to score with women who score at the 90th percentile. I just can't control who my brain is attracted to, that's all--there's no choices involved."

"Well," said Noelle, "I have to admit that I'd feel a lot more sympathetic if you said that you were willing to date 6-out-of-10s in exchange for them being okay with you being frugal. As it stands, I can't help but feel like you're trying to be a barista who insists on still getting the $4 but not giving people the coffee. It seems to imply an asymmetry in how your mind sees people--that you see them being 'selfish', but not yourself trying to 'just live a better life' or however you'd put it."

"I didn't think sex was supposed to be this cold-blooded exchange!" said Simon. "And maybe it is, maybe there's no escaping it--but then it's okay for me to be sad about that, right?"

"I'm not sure exactly how to describe what mistake you're making," Noelle said, "but it has something to do with it being really horrible for some reason that something matters, and that thing clearly does matter in the real universe, so you don't want to live in the real universe anymore. And also something to do with you having trouble really taking on somebody else's perspective, maybe because that would force you to acknowledge that the thing is allowed to matter."

"Would it kill you to say that my feelings are valid?" said Simon.

"I'll say it if you pay me $50," said Noelle.

Simon shook his head. "I wonder if the reason we have a taboo against greedy women in the first place is that women like you ruined it for everyone else."

"No, see," said Noelle, "I feel like I'd want $50 in exchange for saying that, and my feelings are valid too."

Or, as Alpha Centauri put it:

"Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant."

– CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"

This is why God gave us cats, so you could have a genuine meet-cute with a creature that will love you forever.

Cats? Those shameless, opportunist egomaniacs without a shred of loyalty?

The allergenic ones?

Well, God did not make the world to suit everyone.

Cats? Those shameless, opportunist egomaniacs without a shred of loyalty?

I get that's the meme, but it really doesn't match my experience. In my experience, I drag a feral stray out of somewhere inconvenient, kidnap it, clean it, and then it showers my family with affection for 15 years, like a permanent, low-effort toddler that wants to snuggle and also kills vermin.

The allergenic ones?

This may be more of an issue. My condolences on your condition.

Cats do have loyalty, which is different from bred servility because it's not unconditional.

I am significantly more of a naive or fatalist romantic

My Brother in Christ (said completely without irony), that is who I am on the deepest level.

I fully expected I was going to marry my high school sweetheart. But we went to different colleges so you can guess how that turned out.

My entire relationship history is me trying my damndest to wrest a romantic happy ending from an increasingly cynical world. Each time I fail, I make some adaptation that hopefully improves my odds, and each time the reality of the situation proves I wasn't cold and calculating enough. So I become more strategically machievellian with the instrumental intent of finding someone to partner with and then GTFO of the toxic pool.

I've done everything I can in the past three years to maximize by 'social surface area' so I can have that chance encounter with the love of my life.

And unfortunately all this has done, now, is expose me to every single variant of dysfunction you can imagine. I've observed other people's relationships fail for the silliest, most avoidable of reasons, I've seen the very depths of toxic female behavior. I'm still fanning a small, candle-esque flame inside of me that believes a romantic happy ending is possible. But the stats are what the stats are, I won't look away.

If I were able to acquire the necessary power, I would radically restructure the social order enough to allow the sensitive young man to once again be competitive enough in the sexual marketplace that they CAN have their organic, fated encounter with their soulmate and expect the "live happily" to actually last "ever after."

I fully expected I was going to marry my high school sweetheart. But we went to different colleges so you can guess how that turned out.

happy_padme.jpg: She was fiercely loyal, regularly visited you, steadfastly refrained from partying or entertaining male attention, and you two eventually got married and lived happily ever after, right?

I told this story in another thread. Its even more tragic than you'd think. She broke it off with me and DIED not too long thereafter

To say that was a formative event for my psyche is underselling it.

Each time I fail, I make some adaptation that hopefully improves my odds, and each time the reality of the situation proves I wasn't cold and calculating enough

Do you think you may be overfitting here? If every time a relationship fails, you make an adaptation that would have ensured it worked, that does not necessarily mean you are becoming overall more desirable to the women that you want. Meanwhile, you are slowly giving up on something you value deeply.

I agree with the overall gist of it; Being the sensitive young man is endlessly disappointing, but that does not imply that meeting cynicism with cynicism of your own is a good solution that increases the odds of landing the relationship you want.

If every time a relationship fails, you make an adaptation that would have ensured it worked, that does not necessarily mean you are becoming overall more desirable to the women that you want. Meanwhile, you are slowly giving up on something you value deeply.

Yes. I am in a constant state of self-evaluation to see if I feel as though I have strayed too far from my 'authentic' self.

And the adaptations I make are not so much to 'ensure' that a failed relationship would have worked. I'm genuinely just trying to maximize the chances that I can encounter and then attract the sort of woman who is more likely to work it out with me. I have to filter aggressively, I have to maximize the space I'm searching but also minimize wasted time by not searching spaces that will turn up false positives. Its a DOOZY of an optimization problem.

And I also have to avoid all the various traps that dating has set for men in this day and age to boot. This sucks. Better men than I have failed. Nonetheless, I have the irrational confidence that I can somehow defy the odds or die trying.

Not to put too fine a point on it: Of all the women I have dated with intent... only one of them has gone on to eventually get a stable, lasting relationship (so far). The rest have crashed and burned in various ways. That one gained a bunch of weight and is perennially single. This one got knocked up and is a single mom. The one over there had a mental health crisis and hasn't surfaced since. And of course my high school sweetheart died.

Conclusion: those would not have been successful relationships regardless of my own contributions. I don't feel smug about this fact, I realized that I was damaged in my own way that led me to not see the issues at the time. As is my way, I did the hard work to try and fix myself as best I can. THE WORLD AS IT STANDS DOES NOT REWARD FIXING YOURSELF.

I'm not perfect, but I can very, VERY safely say by this point that I have my life in better shape and I am in a happier place than any of the women I once considered prospective wives.

Their loss, not mine.

The task is to find a woman with the necessary features that a relationship CAN be successful. The terrible fact is that the current social pressures actively despoils women in a way that makes that less likely. There's far, far fewer such women than we need.

Hence, as part of my campaign, I've declared war on the current status quo.

But its very hard to both fight the social forces that create this hellscape WHILST navigating the hellscape itself searching for a partner, so again I have to optimize where I can.

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