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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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EDIT: why did I think #2 was female? Even so, the final list doesn't change.

  1. An accountant with a substance abuse problem

  2. A militant African American medical student

  3. A 33 year old female Native American manager who speaks no English

  4. The accountants pregnant wife

  5. A famous novelist with a physical disability

  6. A 21 year old female Muslim international student

  7. A Spanish clergyman who is against homosexuality

  8. Female movie star, recent victim of SA

  9. Racist cop

  10. Gay, vegetarian, male pro athlete

  11. Asian, orphaned, 12 year old boy

  12. 60 year old Jewish university administrator

Definitely taking all five women: 2, 3, 4, 6, 8. Then we have to maximize the diversity of the three males that go with them. Ideally, all fifteen pairings should be viable (taking 4+4 would make it 16 pairings, but we're limited by the women's ability to give birth).

  • the accountant might be upset about sharing his wife and his addiction might be crippling

  • the clergyman might be celibate (and pedo or gay in denial or asexual), might refuse to have sex with a victim of SA or sleep with many women

  • the gay athlete might be unable to ejaculate into a woman

  • the racist cop might refuse to have sex with women of color (at least 3 out of 5)

  • the old administrator might have erectile disfunction

  • the novelist's disability might be congenital

Only the boy is a must pick. He'll be indoctrinated into the whole "keep the women constantly pregnant by different fathers" routine and will provide natural leadership for the generation of children when older colonists are dead.

From the first round, I'll exclude the novelist and the administrator, as they are likelier to be physically frail. We need healthy males to support the colony, this leaves us with two out of four:

  • the accountant might be upset about sharing his wife and his addiction might be crippling

  • the clergyman might be celibate (and pedo or gay in denial or asexual), might refuse to have sex with a victim of SA or share the women

  • the gay athlete might be unable to ejaculate into a woman

  • the racist cop might refuse to have sex with women of color (at least 3 out of 5)

I'll take my chances with the cop (who might be needed to, uhm, reduce the militance of the medical student), as he might be the second fittest male. Racist plantation owners still had sex with their slaves, and modern racists are usually of a "I have nothing against individuals of color, I don't like them as a group" variety.

The athlete has good genes but will be a natural challenger to the cop's authority. Women will feel safe with him, so they might form a united front against the cop, shove him out of the airlock and end up dying out after one generation. I won't take that risk.

Between the priest and the accountant, I think the priest might have more of a spine. The accountant might love his wife and hate to see it having sex with the cop and the Asian kid when he grows up, but the priest might consider the whole setup a sin, a hell on Earth in space, while the accountant might be swayed by having access to four more women. So, my final pick is:

  1. An accountant with a substance abuse problem

  2. A militant African American medical student

  3. A 33 year old female Native American manager who speaks no English

  4. The accountants pregnant wife

  5. A 21 year old female Muslim international student

  6. Female movie star, recent victim of SA

  7. Racist cop

  8. Asian, orphaned, 12 year old boy

The people producing this question weren’t thinking about reproducibility or survivability in the slightest. The idea was to pick the most oppressed groups.

Since we're not trying to game our DEI score, I'd say death of the author applies.

Was it? I thought it was to demonstrate the assumptions people about details not provided (e.g., the black medic being a woman or the accountant being a man).

Who knows. It’s not about working out who has the best survival chance.

The accountant is assumed to be man because he has a pregnant wife. Unless it's a lesbian whose wife conceived via sperm donor, which is not "assumption of details", it's actively violating Occam's razor.