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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5671 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

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have the impression/intuition that getting casual sex would, to an extent, trade off against finding a wife; so my thought was that there might be a substantial number of men who would prioritize the "find a wife" side of the tradeoff to the extent that they are (relatively) uninterested in casual sex, even if they didn't find it particularly immoral.

My intuition is that this tradeoff exists in various contexts, but the landscape is quite a bit more complicated. There's the fact that having features and skills that are optimized for having lots of casual sex also are helpful for finding a wife, and so there's a lot of synergy. It's only when looking at the subset of men who are high in such features that the tradeoff exists. But in the general population, optimizing for one also optimizes for the other. And I think over the past half century or so, that factor has become more dominant, and the men for whom such a tradeoff exists have gotten less populous.

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