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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34366 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Here's a question for you that is less war and more straight culture. What makes a piece of media truly inspiring? What qualities does something need to possess so that things based on it will be great? I don't mean this in the sense of expertly turning your IP into a multimedia franchise through judicious licensing or whatever. I want to know what happens in the case of something like Dune where licensing doesn't seemed to be handled well at all. Yet it still not only managed to spawn a great movie. It also inspired a legendary board game, hugely influential video game, etc.

What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?

What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?

I question the premise that Dune is more fertile than Lord of The Rings. That said I think I understand the question that you're getting at will attempt to engage...

Related to my post last week on "Inferential Distance" I feel like one of the major assumption/axioms where blue tribe culture differs from the red is in the assumption that something that is popular cannot be good or worthwhile or vice versa. There seems to be this assumption that good art is supposed to be esoteric and inaccessible to the general public because how else is one supposed to demonstrate their superior education, intellect, and understanding. At the risk of coming across as uncharitable, the image in my mind is that of an insufferable hipster sneering at "all that shit" that the normies like

Meanwhile feel like history has demonstrated the opposite. The mark of "a great artist" is not being esoteric, or being admired by one's contemporaries. Often just the opposite. Historically the thing that has set a great artist apart is the ability to convey deep/complex themes to as wide an audience as possible, and I think that that is the true answer to your question.

What does 'blue tribe' mean here? Scott's Blue Tribe was "liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated". Some of these people are esoteric hipsters, but many, many more of them enjoy popular media, like popular music/movies/tv/, than try to one-up each other over short films they saw at film festivals.

In this context it means being a "Weirdo" IE western industrialized and educated, while also ticking the boxes of a secular, urban, hipster type. IE most of Scott's bullet points.

20 years ago, it was LotR getting the Hollywood treatment while Dune was the flagship for an existing player's first forays into the miniseries format. How the tables have turned! Though Frank Herbert's Dune was well-received, probably because it occupied a sweet spot between passion projects and big budgets.

I'd say good media is the intersection of a decent premise and an artistic vision. Since we're talking about adaptations of famous works, the premise is already met. Then it's up to the director/producer/etc. to make a cohesive piece of art rather than a checklist. I know that's kind of a cop-out, but...that's the key. Design by committee reduces the risk of outright bad media at the cost of some of the good.

There's a whole other argument I want to make about market share, deconstruction vs. reconstruction, and postmodernism, but tonight is not the night.

Design by committee reduces the risk of outright bad media at the cost of some of the good.

Is is frankly astonishing to me how expensive some movies are and how few people are responsible for the artistic vision, even if it is a committee. It's even more astonishing if it's just left up to one producer. How is this kind of trust formed at all?

There's a hidden assumption in your astonishment that spreading the responsibility to more people would make movie production safer from a financial perspective. Is there a reason to believe that?

Indeed, some works shine thanks to the Auteur Theory.

Hmmm. I guess I don't have a solid explanation for why committees are safer. My vibe is that committees operate by consensus and this means individual weirdnesses get sanded down in the process, thusly ensuring the outcome is more firmly within bounds.

That's great in manufacturing or engineering, it's often detrimental in art and entertainment.

Tfw you write out what you think is a really cool topic of discussion, but forget that nobody else lives inside your head but you, so you just expect everyone to connect all the dots the same way you did instead of explaining yourself properly, so you spend the whole time getting frustrated that nobody is engaging with it the way you expected.

When you include a line like "What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?" you really should reiterate your specific target. Especially since it was the only sentence you broke out of the paragraph, you basically made it the flashpoint of your post. People try to read left to right top to bottom, but our eyes are drawn to areas of uniqueness, I'd guess a lot of people read the last line first and, if they were like me, had an inordinate amount of trouble focusing on anything else you said after such a cosmetically ridiculous statement (because it does make sense under your stipulations, but your stipulations are kind of confusing.)

Here's a question - can you think of any examples of this other than dune? Another piece of media that seemed to fuck up its licensing opportunities but still inspired some great licensed works?

Here's a question - can you think of any examples of this other than dune? Another piece of media that seemed to fuck up its licensing opportunities but still inspired some great licensed works?

Dragonball managed to produce FighterZ even though 90% of its licensed games are terrible.

Moreover, the license fits the game. Dune II may have been a successful game, but I don't get the impression that it was successful as a Dune game specifically.

I suppose Dune II didn't necessarily stand out for its IP, yeah--the reason it's even called that is because the other Dune game of its time was a weird adventure game (albeit with strategic elements, weirdly), and aesthetically, Dune II doesn't quite fit with the visual style of the Lynch film (though Dune 2000 and Emperor would change that).

But that being said, I think Dune as an IP does give a cool enough world that makes people want to explore it--lord knows that that's probably why Brian Herbert continues to crank out Dune spinoffs.

Your mention of Dragon Ball does make me think: Gundam is an IP that arguably could be so much more, though it hasn't done too terribly--I think it's more that Gundam could use a bitchin' simulationist game along the lines of MechWarrior or Steel Battalion. The only games that seem to have come even close to emulating the brutal, anyone-can-die combat of the actual anime are MSG 2.0 for the PS1 and the Side Stories games for the Saturn--and outside of the Missing Link remake(?) of the latter, those games are trapped in the past. Everything else is more fantastical, arcade-oriented fare like Dynasty Warriors Gundam or Gundam Versus, or RPG stuff like SD Gundam or Super Robot Wars. And all of that stuff is maybe a little too focused on referencing iconic moments from their source animes, rather than simply plopping you into the world of the Universal Century, After Colony, Cosmic Era, or Post-Disaster and letting you choose your story. The only other kind of game that Gundam has spawned that really sounds appealing is the Japan-only Gihren's Greed series of strategic games.

The only games that seem to have come even close to emulating the brutal, anyone-can-die combat of the actual anime are MSG 2.0 for the PS1 and the Side Stories games for the Saturn--and outside of the Missing Link remake(?) of the latter, those games are trapped in the past.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire (for PS3) is very down-to-earth—it's quite easy to be sniped across the map by Gelgoogs or Guntanks in later levels (or by Acguys in earlier levels). I've also read that Zeonic Front (for PS2) is very tactical in the style of the first Rainbow Six game, though I haven't played it.

Dune II may have been a successful game, but I don't get the impression that it was successful as a Dune game specifically.

Yeah, I loved that game as a kid, but when I got my hands on the book, I felt it's a big missed opportunity. The Dune universe is full of these little details that are begging to be translated into game mechanics - you can only reliably use infantry to move your forces around, anything mechanized is getting eaten by worms, unless you airlift it in the last possible moment, etc... it would be a lot of work to get it right, but you could have so much rock-paper-scissors stuff built around that.

Tbh after reading your other comments, this just reads to me like "Why is [thing I like] so much better than [thing I don't like]?". I hate the new LotR series just as much as anyone else, but I've never heard about the Dune video nor board games and even the current movie, while certainly not bad, is not even near the LotR film trilogy. Looking at review aggregators, wikipedia, etc., both the public and critics seem to agree with that as well. The board game has a small fandom with no larger impact. The Dune 2 RTS seems to be the only objectively culturally impactful piece of media following the Dune books themselves.

I don't dislike Lord of the Rings at all. I have read it four times. I'm rather disappointed by the trilogy next to Villeneuve's Dune, but only because I have high expectations for it. In fact, most Lord of the Rings media is underwhelming and forgettable. I tried a lot of Lord of the Rings media in the 90s and 2000s and most of it fell in that 3.5-6.5 range. It is so forgettable that (some) people disagreeing with me here didn't even know that Lord of the Rings branded media was being produced long before the movies. Compare that to most Dune media, which I have been very impressed by. Not because I prefer Dune, which I enjoy but have read half as many times, but because the media that is based on it is so consistently impressive by comparison to what Lord of the Rings has put out.

And while the board game is undoubtedly niche (as games that have been out of print since '84 tend to be), its impact upon board games is still huge. Unique, balanced faction powers are now common in board/strategy games.

Agree completely. The original LoTR movie trilogy alone trumps anything Dune has done.

I guess I'll throw my hat into this ring: to leave aside your specific examples, I suppose that it depends not only on the source material, but how to use its tropes. Maybe also other factors like how nerdy are the licensors and how memeable the IP can be.

Okay, I lied, I still had your specific examples in mind when I typed that sentence, but I'll use them to demonstrate my points in a way that can potentially generalize:

Dune, as a franchise, seemed a bit impenetrable to me, despite the available media. Maybe it was just that I never worked up the urge to actually read the original novel for whatever reason, but I often saw the novel as this mystery land of deepness and esoteric-ness. I'd heard that the Lynch movie was an honest-but-failed attempt at adapting the book, I knew about Dune II and how it spawned Command & Conquer and the rest of the RTS genre, I knew about some of the concepts (albeit if only because they happened to be referenced in TV shows I watched, like Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy).

I finally read the original novel a couple years ago and it blew my mind. Before, I saw it as a sci-fi epic for those with more elitist (read: pretentious) tastes, but afterwards I got it, I thought it truly deserved its place as a sci-fi classic. Again, though, something about it isn't quite as "proletarian" as, say, Star Wars. It's a thick and dense novel (quite literally, even with my paperback copy being the recent-ish edition by Ace/Penguin and being reasonably-sized dimensionally), and it's also technically incomplete on its own (that "I consume your energy" quote I've seen thrown about here and on the old subreddit a few times? That's from Messiah, the sequel novel that was originally supposed to be part of the original novel). It's political in every sense of the word, and the "elitist" vibe I got from it is because its message can be easy to miss (Messiah reportedly came as a shock to fans of the original who now saw Paul recast into the role of a galactic asshole--Herbert's intended message of warning against hero worship was probably undermined by, again, needing to chop off Messiah's story into its own thing). Still, Dune can be boiled down into a classic and relatable story about an unlikely hero who is tarnished by the world around him, even when he changes things for the better. The problem may just come down to the investment energy requirements.

LOTR, which I admit to not really reading or wanting to experience, may seem at first glance to have similar challenges. Isn't that source material also huge, with a lot of stuff to digest? Well, yes, but that doesn't stop its fans. It may just be because Peter Jackson got an incredible amount of opportunity to adapt Tolkien's work in more managable chunks, and with somewhat more deft care than David Lynch could afford back in the 80's. I think one factor, though, is that the movies gave people things to point to, in the form of memorable scenes, quotes, and memes. Through gargantuan effort, LOTR was boiled down to its more essential elements, then transmitted memetically in a way that people could latch onto and get invested through. By contrast, Dune mostly had references to the more memorably-bonkers stuff from the Lynch film for years.

The other thing is the worlds of these, well, worlds, and how enticing they might be to explore. I think a big problem you had with your OP was phrasing: perhaps you meant to ask why Dune has so much potential that was kind-of squandered, versus LOTR which was handled generally-well but hasn't rippled beyond itself in quite the same way as Lynch Dune or Dune II. To which, I'd answer that Dune and LOTR have had vastly-different impacts on their respective genres, and while no LOTR thing has changed a medium quite like some Dune things have (again, outside of the Peter Jackson movies, possibly), LOTR doesn't need to further define other categories of works in its own image. Both settings, however, do have their fans who might love to explore those worlds. Any franchise has the potential to go bonanza like this if the cards are right.

Dune, as a franchise, seemed a bit impenetrable to me, despite the available media. Maybe it was just that I never worked up the urge to actually read the original novel for whatever reason, but I often saw the novel as this mystery land of deepness and esoteric-ness.

I read the books in my early 20s and recently re-read the first 3 books in honor of the movie coming out and was immediately immersed. I completely agree with you that it deserves it's place as a classic.

I think the "problem" with adapting Dune and the reason that it has the reputation for esotericism that it does is that so much of the story and world-building happens "off screen" as it were. It happens in the little snippets of in-universe media that introduce each chapter, it happens in the footnotes about the empire's economy, and it happens in little vignettes were a piece of music will remind some character of an incident from their childhood. This works well when presented in the original format as an illustrated serial or as a bound book, but it presents challenges in adaptation. A classic example is the famous(infamous?) banquet towards the middle of the first book. For the those unfamiliar the book basically starts out as a spy thriller. The Atreides family (our protagonists) know they are being set up but not by whom or to what purpose. Paul Atreides is working the room at a state dinner trying to get a read on who the various factions are and who is plotting with whom. In prose it's a fairly important scene that establishes a couple of recurring themes, forshadows some of the main characters' future choices, and it advances the ongoing mystery plot by giving the audience some clues. However, if you were to do a straight translation of it to stage or film what you would get is basically 5 minutes of Paul making small-talk with a bunch of minor functionaries/side-characters while everyone else sips whine and looks pensive. It's just kind of hard to stage a scene where most of the action is happening in the form of internal monologues.

Edited to Elaborate

Yeah, it's a shame that amazing scene has been left out of both film adaptations, but at the same time, I don't know how you could include that in filmic form without going all Edgar Wright on Dune. And as you note, that's just one example of something that makes Dune difficult to process into other media.

Edgar Wright's Dune is an alternate history production i didn't know i needed.

One thing that many popular fictions have in common is that engaging with them feels more like discovering than like inventing. For example, I can pose to myself and others the question of what Sherlock Holmes' childhood was like. Sherlock Holmes is fictional so any speculation that I or others do about his childhood is invention. But the fiction is so rich that one can enter into it, basing one's speculations on the known written material and the less effable "spirit" of the work, and it feels as if one were researching the history of an actual human being. Similarly, one can for example discuss with others what the relationships between Lovecraft's various invented fictional entities are, or speculate about the nature of Tom Bombadil, or write an essay about the motivations of the Bene Gesserit. The fictional universe is rich enough that it easily supports adding new creation to it because it has established a certain consistency and coherence of logic, flavor, and spirit so that one can pick up where the original creator(s) left off. It holds together. The boundary between what is acceptably part of the universe and what violates its nature is of course blurry and no two people view it in exactly the same way, but nonetheless pretty much everyone feels that there is some kind of difference between new creations that are more consistent with the fictional universe and creations that are less consistent with it.

Dune

Fertile

I'm sorry, what

By your own account, you think Dune licensing is mismanaged. And you still call this fertile?

Fertile means bountiful. There's much less Dune stuff than there is LOTR stuff. It might have something to do with the way LOTR invented a whole genre of fantasy fiction and then had a very popular and well-received movie trilogy that continues to live in the minds of "normies" long after it succeeded.

I think Marvel is heavily mismanaged, but still fertile. Just none of it is any good. They keep growing garbage. They keep making more and more of it, but it sucks.

They don't make a lot of Dune. Dune media is as parched as the desert it comes from. Had the newer movie not come out - a movie where even the company funding it was unwilling to commit to wholly and was on record not being willing to fund the second half before they saw how people reacted - I think licensing it would have been dirt cheap. I also don't think Dune is all that great, although it definitely fills its world with a ton of ideas and is quite rare in the world of schlock-sci-fi in terms of both its scope and breadth.

You could probably say the same about WH40k; a similarly rich and expansive world in scope, which takes the distinct opposite approach to licensing by shotgunning walls of flak at everyone in exchange for cashing big royalty checks from as many sources as possible, with a net result that maybe 15-20% of their licensed work is worth anything at all.

What makes a piece of media inspiring is a terrible question because what inspires people will vary from person to person. If I had to take a blind stab at it, I'd say it would probably have to do with stories that try to grasp at universal things about the human condition.

I think the enduring power in the LOTR work is that it posits the existence of clear good, clear evil, and that the corrupting presence of evil is not defeated by martial might or using evil against evil but by the willingness of small, humble beings from nowhere to sacrifice. These are things that speak to the human understanding of the world and the nature of evil.

Granted, I think the first Blade movie is Great. I also think Nabokov's Pale Fire is Great, and I think the Lives of Others is Great. I think all of these things are wonderful for entirely different reasons. I don't want things that are based on these intellectual properties, much less think they'll be great at all. Yes, even the Wesley Snipes vampire movie. The more of this we got the worse it gets. They fail (or succeed, rarely!) on their own merits, but I would not call anything based on the intellectual property great simply because it belongs to the same intellectual property.

That way lies Star Wars. And the more you look at Star Wars as an IP, the more you realize that sometimes dead truly is better.

That way lies Star Wars. And the more you look at Star Wars as an IP, the more you realize that sometimes dead truly is better.

Yes, I'm surprised when people are surprised that new Star Wars stuff is rubbish. There hasn't be a truly great Star Wars film for 40 years (arguably longer) and the heyday of Star Wars franchised stuff was the 1990s, I think, with some great Lucas Arts games from that period.

Creative success is one of those highly unpredictable evolutionary processes whose outputs look better on average than they are, because we tend to forget the detritus.

There has been a bunch good EU content though. My assumption was that similar to marvel Disney would try to pick through the material and more or less loosely adopt the good stuff.

This seemed like such an easy (and already proven within the company) recipe for success that I couldn't really imagine massive failure. The property isn't super complex and the fans are not very needy. And yet..

I think that it's at least 10 years too late to create a fun expanded universe. Too much PC, too much safety-first writing. Even the Marvel stuff doesn't interest me, except at the margins where some really vivacious creativity sneaks in e.g. the Guardians of the Galaxy films.

I think I would have to go back at least 20 years to find any Star Wars creativity that I thought wasn't just good, but great. I mean, there are still good Bond films, but I haven't seen a great one since Goldeneye nearly 30 years ago.

What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?

This paragraph threw me for a loop. My impression is that Lord of the Rings is way more of a cultural Thing compared to Dune. Like, there also LotR video games? Action adventure, turn based RPG, RTS, even an MMORPG! There are movie series both live action and animated. All these vary wildly in quality so I'm not sure savvy licensing is the reason for their existence and success. Not to mention Lord of the Rings influence on the development on fantasy as a genre of media in general.

Apologies for not commenting on the more general question on your post, which I don't have many thoughts on, but feels like a very specific cultural bubble to regard Dune as more fertile ground for inspiration than Lord of the Rings...

Right, but that is why I chose Lord of the Rings for comparison. For all of its impact, for all the media based on it directly and indirectly, it has a much worse pound for pound showing than Dune. Sure, it has a forgettable RTS, but Dune II practically invented the genre. Sure, one of the Lord of the Rings board games ended up being great, but Dune has, again, a hugely influential game that people loved so much they were still playing it when it had been print for nearly 30 years.

Was this just luck that Dune has such a stronger showing than a more popular, older IP? Or is there some quality that can be analyzed?

Aside from generally being unpleasant and mischaracterizing my post, I'm not sure what your point is.

Are you mad that I'm not listing more fun Dune media? That I'm not getting further into the weeds? Or do you think that talking about another game that you have already described as fun and unique somehow disproves my point about Dune having disproportionately better media than Lord of the Rings?

What do I have to argue against, even if I wanted to? You say that Dune II is mostly generic with its ships and units, as if that is somehow a strike against the idea. But a couple of other people already made the point that the ability to fill in the gaps and details of Frank Herbert's universe is one of the things it has going for it when creating media.

Are they wrong? Maybe. Feel free to make that argument. It could be interesting, but you haven't actually made it yet.

Instead you seem to think you have proven some point when all you have done is attack me, state some facts about Dune games, and declared that I am "wrecked" because of my "grand-sounding theory."

If you step out of your weird fanboy-rage for a second, you'll see that I don't actually have a theory at all. I have three statements, only two of which are at all controversial. One is the assertion that some media inspires higher-quality derivatives than others (even if the media itself is not necessarily higher quality). This is a hypothesis. It has none of the characteristics of a theory because it is currently a blank page. A thesis statement looking for a body.

My second assertion was that Dune has inspired quite a lot of high-quality media. This was an illustration of the hypothesis. Because abstracts without concrete examples don't get engagement.

My final assertion, the one that seems to have filled you with such weird, fanboyish rage, is that Lord of the Rings has a much lower average level of quality. This is also part of the illustration for comparison and contrast. This isn't a theory. Now, I'm not going to say that I don't understand why the statement is controversial, and I'd be happy if people were disagreeing in a way that even broached the thesis statement, but again, you aren't doing it. You haven't even actually engaged with the concept.

You are so mad that you think that you can somehow knock down my "grand-sounding theory" without even engaging it. You can't. Even if you were to somehow prove that I am totally wrong and Lord of the Rings has much higher quality media, that still wouldn't disprove my hypothesis. Because that would just fit the hypothesis in the opposite direction.

I didn't use the word prove, so I don't understand why you are once again attributing words to me to mischaracterize what I wrote. Is this intellectual dishonesty or just poor reading comprehension?

Edit: Oh, you think I "accidentally" admitted that this is unfalsifiable. Just poor reading comprehension, then.

More comments

So could your question be rephrased as "why do Dune-licensed games have more impactful/genre-defining mechanics than LotR-licensed games"?

No, because I wanted a more universal examination. People just got really attached to the Lord of the Rings and Dune game comparison. Even the licensing aspect was less about importance for the principle and more about trying to head off nerdy arguments about what counts as influenced by these books. (E.G. how much inspiration does Star Wars take from Dune?)

I mean, if comparing Dune II to War in Middle Earth is a particularly useful comparison for insights, sure, compare away. But I was hoping for universalizable principles here, not just comparisons of these two franchises.

E.G. how much inspiration does Star Wars take from Dune?

None. They both take inspiration from the same well, but Star Wars is much more open about the roots in the Saturday morning serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Star Wars starts off with "desert planet" but then leaves that behind for the basic "rayguns and rockets" plot (and none the worse for it).

Dune is Morocco IN SPAAAACE and the Fremen are Berbers IN SPAAACE and he is a lot more pretentious than Lucas about it all. Both of them are planetary fantasies, but Herbert is all "deep environmentalism philosophy man" and Lucas was "and then pow! zap! space battles! stormtroopers! smugglers in starships! the good guys win!" so he's a lot more fun.

They both take inspiration from the same well, but Star Wars is much more open about the roots in the Saturday morning serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers

It also lifts a lot of plot and characterization from a specific Kurosawa movie. Mostly changed for the better but the parallel is very transparent.

LOTR's MMO was one of the best MMOs. For things outside of the movies, which LOTR still easily claims the better of them, Dune's universe is a bit more interesting when it comes to speculation. Middle Earth has a history. Dune has stuff. Its easy to create any sort of war or resource game (Age of Empire or Settlers of Catan IN DUNE)

Define "stuff."

Thousands of theoretical houses governing planets who could be at war with each other for any made up reason.

I mean, hell, you could make a strategy game depicting the Jihad as it happens between the original book and Messiah. Have two campaigns; one where you play as the Imperial house and work your way up to eventually meet face-to-face with Emperor Paul himself, and one where you're fighting for a band of houses trying to survive the wave of galactic murder Paul's ascension to the throne has unleashed.

That could be a fun 1P game, but RTS Dune is just low hanging fruit. You can be the Atriedes, the Harkkonnens, the Corrinos, etc.

It is not obvious to me that "a Dune video game created the RTS genre" and "there was a Dune board game so popular people played it decades after it was out of print" is sufficient to conclude "Dune had a stronger showing" than Lord of the Rings in terms of cultural inspiration.

The influence Tolkien's worldbuilding and method of storytelling on fantasy as a genre seems difficult to understate. Not just on directly LotR inspired works but across a range of intellectual properties and media types. This is not to say Dune wasn't influential or inspirational but it does not really compare, to my mind.

But this is just vague handwaving. I'm not arguing the popularity of Lord of the Rings or its cultural impact. I'm talking about the impact, in turn, of the licensed media that followed.

Lord of the Rings, as a book series, is hugely impactful on the culture. Lord of the Rings the multimedia franchise is, on average, middling and most of it will be forgotten. Dune, on the other hand, has been less impactful overall. Yet, despite having far less adaptations and licensed media (before the most recent movie. I'm not young and free enough to keep up with everything that is coming out now), what exists is both of a much higher average quality and often hugely impactful on their own mediums.

Just shrugging that off is simply being obtuse and ignoring the actual subject.

Then maybe that is where I'm misunderstanding what you're asking. I was thinking of the two works in terms of their broad cultural impact, not of just the impact of their licensed multimedia. In that case I think there is a case to be made for the original Lord of the Rings trilogy of films but that's about it innovation wise. I have enjoyed a lot of the Lord of the Rings games but I don't think they did anything particularly innovative, certainly not compared to what Dune seems to have done (I haven't played it myself).

On the one hand, I'd say this actually must be my fault in writing clearly because almost everyone is responding with a focus on the books themselves rather than the larger multimedia franchises.

On the other hand, I am mostly getting a lot of tears about how the Lord of the Rings trilogy is better and posters didn't even know that the board game existed so how impactful could it be? All without even engaging the question. High decouplers? Yeah, okay.

What you said at the end there - that there’s Dune related media that’s “hugely” impactful isnt clear at all. I can’t think of any.

Dune has produced one bad movie and one good movie.

LOTR has hugely influenced fantasy, music, video games and mich more. Dune has nothing much

I'd say Dune's resulted in some bangin' music.

Before clicking the link, my guess was this.

Are we forgetting Peter Jackson's LotR movies? They were far more impactful and frankly better than any Dune movie.

Also, LotR basically spawned the fantasy genre. Even within the LotR franchise, there are countless books that spun off from the main series.

I think there's two different things being claimed.

Is the tie-in media for the Dune franchise better than the stuff produced for LOTR? Possibly. If you mean Rings of Power oh hell yeah.

Is the tie-in media for the Dune franchise more influential? Again, maybe, but I think it's more in the "niche sphere where people really really care about the RTS genre" and not "general game-playing public". I haven't played any of the LOTR games and I remember back when they were issuing board games under the licence, but I've heard about them and seen them advertised. I honestly don't remember seeing anything for Dune media.

I don't understand how you came to the conclusion that Lord of the Rings adaptations are less inspiring than Dune's unless you are ignoring the Peter Jackson trilogy entirely. Those are some of the most culturally significant films in recent memory. Not a month goes by where I don't hear someone quoting Gandalf, sharing a meme about the One Ring (this is one I encountered last week), comparing their political opponents to orcs, or otherwise referencing them. While Dune has also had a significant impact, this influence went under the radar for many people until the recent movie release.

For what it's worth, I had never heard of the board game until now despite having read all 6 of Frank Herbert's books and most of the Dune Encyclopedia. Most people I talk to about Dune know it has something to do with a desert, spice, and sandworms, but I am far more likely in my experience to find someone able to recite Théoden's speech at the Pelennor Fields from memory than I am someone who can recall the Litany Against Fear. If you are only looking at the most recent adaptations and comparing the Denis Villeneuve film to the Rings of Power show, then of course Dune wins hands down, but that hardly seems fair.

If your question was more narrowly focused on Dune II and the Dune board game being genre-defining as compared to LOTR strategy games and board games, then I'd wager that due to Dune's lesser cultural significance than LOTR and somewhat freer IP, developers were more willing to take risks and innovate than they would have with the Tolkien Estate breathing down their backs. Looking at the source material, it's clear that Tolkien left a lot more to work with than Herbert, so if it were a true free-for-all I'd bet on some Silmarillion adaptation wiping the floor with the best Dune has to offer (though if someone other than Brian Herbert wrote a proper Butlerian Jihad story that might stand a chance).

To be fair, the Dune RTS game was a genre-defining phenomenon.

But I agree with the overall sentiment!

I thought about that, but the Dune RTS was genre-defining in large part because of when it came out. It was easier for a game to stand out in those days.

What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?

I don't think that one has had clearly more franchise/influence success that LoTR, especially when one looks at their influence on science fiction and fantasy respectively.

However, I do think that there is an interesting contrast: Frank Herbert was deliberately an austere writer, partly because the easiest way to have a plausible and non-dated portrayal of the future is to leave a lot of details unfilled. Tolkien, meanwhile, often goes out of his way to fill his world with detail.

This does have the advantage that an adaptation of Dune can look like almost anything, and there are lots of details for imaginative creators to fill in, e.g. House Ordos (loads of houses in Dune, let's add a cool one), Lynch's uniforms for the Atredis, or Villeneuve's spaceships. Of course, you also get things like Lynch's Guild Navigators or Villeneuve's hilariously unsubtle understanding of the Voice, but that's the price of freedom.

Frank Herbert was deliberately an austere writer

Herbert, austere? Perhaps by modern standards but by the SF standards of the day he didn't hold a candle to most of the well-known writers, and not even close to Asimov.

I had a similar reaction at first (pages and pages of Jessica drinking a cup of coffee?) but on reflection, Harlequin5942 is right - there's not much depth to the Dune universe. He tells us a lot about Arrakis, but mostly in the form of the history of the Fremen as it relates to Paul and the Atreides family. I don't really remember much about the story and history of the planet when it wasn't all about the Fremen Tough Guys.

And he mentions a lot of things about the Empire and so forth, but we get more "and this happened way back, and so-and-so lives on this planet" but not a lot of deep world-building. So there is a lot of space for adaptations, particularly in relation to games, to go whatever way they like - keep the visuals, but you can pretty much have Planet of Whatever, New Order, Sect, Guild, Society or Tea Rooms of That, and inventing all the original characters you like, because why not, who says they can't exist?

LOTR is a lot different. You can't just pop up with "oh yeah we have this new set of Elves", not unless you are going to fit them in to existing canon, and even if you go "Well they're Avari, that's why they look like a cross between Kenyans Maasai and Samurai" you will have to do a lot of fast talking to get that one to fly 😁

That's where Rings of Power fell flat on its face - it tried to crowbar in DIVERSITÉ and ENNNCLÚSION while keeping as near to the look of the movies as Warner Studios lawyers would let them go, and with not even two lines of "Okay, so Dísa is the black Dwarven princess from one of the Eastern Houses, this is why she doesn't look like the Khazad-dum Dwarves" to prepare the ground. Oh, you noticed our one (1) black Elf and our one (1) black Dwarf and you want more than "this is the 21st century adaptation" to explain that? You racist bigot hater!

I meant more in comparison to the average speculative fiction writer, and I meant mainly in terms of leaving out world-building details.

At least in the very recent era of these IPs you can look at it like this: The people making Dune were trying to adapt the book of Dune. The people making the new Lord of the Rings show were trying to write their own prequel they made up and couldn't include anything from the Silmarillion.

LOTR also has a legendary board game, many popular video games, etc. So I'm not really sure what exactly you're trying to say is the advantage of Dune here.

I didn't ask about number. I asked about quality. Sure, Lord of the Rings has a great board game. Some of the video games are even pretty decent. But I'm talking about percentage of hits here. Lord of the Rings, for all of its numbers and popularity, is comparatively underwhelming when you compare the average quality of what it gets in comparison to Dune. Sure, War of the Ring is considered a classic, but what about Lord of the Rings that came before it? Or the Lord of the Rings TCG? Etcetera.

I mean if it's about quality and not numbers, one single classic board game (War of the Ring as you said) is enough. The others before it don't matter.

I will grant that Dune 2 is a legendary RTS and LOTR has nothing with that kind of legacy, but I contend that has little to do with the IP. They simply were making the right game at the right time, and had few to no competitors. By the time you had LOTR games being made (which I remind you are actually pretty good in many cases), there was a thriving games industry and the genres were pretty well established. I contend that something like BfME 2 is as good as Dune 2, it just was later on and so it didn't have the same impact. The IP didn't cause that.

Of course the others before it matter. It's an infinite monkeys on typewriters scenario. If you give enough people opportunities to make a game based on Lord of the Rings, one of them eventually is likely to be good.

And sure, on a technical level, Battle for Middle Earth is the more polished, later game. But that is sidestepping the most difficult part in creating, which is creating something new and dynamic. It is easy to make a similar game in hindsight, once it has already been done. And you are simply wrong when you say that there was no opportunity to make Tolkien-branded games while they were making Dune games. That just isn't true. They were making games. They even attempted a strategy game before Dune II. It is just forgettable.

We're going to have to agree to disagree. I think you are wrong on all points, I'm sure you think the same of me. If we can't agree on the basic axioms we're dealing with, then of course our conclusions will differ.

LOTR has nothing with that kind of legacy

Not quite, but there was a very influential adventure game:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)

Presumably that's why, in Red Dwarf, as their generic adventure game, they hint at a LOTR game:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fYAlB1Kxayc

I think the one IP based aspect of the RTS template that easily could have converged towards very different designs is the focus on in-map resource extraction and economy. You can't make a Dune game without harvesters, but you can easily make a strategy game without actively managed economy units and harassing thereof. And many successful RTS's from this century have abandoned this aspect.

I wasn't even particularly looking for Dune-related insights, but this is definitely an interesting point. Thank you.

I mostly agree with everyone. Your estimation of Dune versus Lord of the Rings seems way, way off to me.

That said, I think you are still observing something. Dune, even today, is a wildly alien setting. I have no clue how alien Lord of the Rings was when it came out, but today after decades of copy cats and the whole fantasy genre being a tentpole of nerd culture, it's bog standard. This makes Dune infinitely more niche. Both works are profoundly fertile IMHO, but LotR has had people tilling it's fields for 60 years now. It's just about used up. Dune on the other hand, has remained comparatively impenetrable. Relatively few artist have dredged anything out of it's pages, much less successfully, compared to LotR. And there is ample thematic depth to explore in that regard.

That said, we are no longer a culture that seems to comprehend themes. Watch the 40 hours of documentary footage about Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson cared deeply about maintaining the vision and themes that Tolkien infused into his works. I know people argue about how well he did. But at least he wasn't actively striving to shit all over it, "update it for a modern audience" or "fix Lord of the Rings.". I'm so fucking starved for sincerity and integrity in my culture these days, rewatching LotR almost brought a tear to my eye it was so beautiful.

The themes of Dune are more complicated and nebulous. The first book is a traditional hero's journey. Or is it? The sequels really have you questioning what young Paul Atreides wrought. The series as a whole takes place on a massive timeline. I question the capacity of our culture making apparatus to grok what Dune is really about. It asks questions like "What makes for a stable civilization, and at what costs?" And "Can I be so good at fucking that my sexcraft is considered a bioweapon?"

Frankly I'm shocked I haven't seen more Dune porn parodies. Or maybe they wouldn't even need to be parodies, just straight up porn adaptation.

Regardless, the Dune universe always seemed like a post-singularity world of profound human suffering. It was about as opposite to Iain Banks vision in the Culture novels as could possibly be. Instead of machines granting humans endless lives of luxury, they had been extirpated utterly and completely, and instead humans were beat into the tasks of machines, often losing their humanity in the process. I don't know if Herbert intended these depictions of humans "accomplishing anything" to be aspirational, but the horrifically deformed and caged Navigators or the drug addicted Mentats always squicked me out. It's never been done justice, and I don't expect it to. I can only give David Lynch credit for at least making a movie as weird as the books were, even if it got goofy as fuck in places with the source material.

So what do you think makes Dune so much more alien? It can't simply be cultural. Western fantasy, at least as an aesthetic, has certainly found fans in Asia. Is it the focus on politics and big, weird ideas like transhumanism? Is it the focus on the macro scale compared to LotR, which made it less character focused but better lent to the strategy games that I ended up having to talk to so much about?

What makes Dune so alien is that the people aren't people anymore. I mean, a few are remotely relatable. Duncan Idaho, as he comes and goes throughout the story, is probably the most relatable. But everyone else has weird alien brains, acting on strange neo-singularity logic in a world that takes what we know of the human condition and pushes it to it's breaking point.

Yet there is no struggle in this. The world of Dune is so habituated to this strange alien condition, it's taken totally for granted. It's a society that regularly wrings the humanity out of children from birth so that they can serve the functions various machines used to, and nobody cares. It's a wildly fascinating, alien setting. But it's so distantly removed from our present understanding of the human condition, it can only resonate weakly with an audience in that way. It's main draw is it's sheer alienness.

So you have these two settings. One (LotR) is defined by good versus evil, overcoming bleak odds for the sake of home and hearth, and hope. The other (Dune) is about stretching the parameters of the human condition until things are no longer recognizably human. It's easy to make a game, or a movie, or artwork or song about the first. To do the second one, and do it proper, takes a skill and imagination I have not yet seen. Oh there have been serviceable Dune products. A board game, video games, movies, that ape the aesthetic or literal plot points of Dune. And the aesthetic is important. But I've never, ever, seen the themes of Dune accurately portrayed or grappled with in any follow on media.

Fuck without rhythm!

And you won't

Extract

The sperm.

I should quibble that, while Dune isn't as obviously bound into the DNA of sci-fi as LOTR is to fantasy, Dune still has left indelible marks on the genre as a whole. Besides the aforementioned Dune II and how it led to Command & Conquer, the books themselves and the ideas therein were practically ripped-off for a sci-fi/sci-fantasy franchise you might recognize: Warhammer 40,000.

40K has a lot of Dune's ideas: a powerful God-Emperor, technology reverted to a means rather as the be-all-end-all, the focus on humanity and its capabilities (albeit twisted and tinged, no doubt, by heavy-metal influences like 2000 AD), the freakish Navigators that space travel relies on...

40K also has that "profound human suffering" part down pat, albeit for different reasons (in 40K, the human race as a whole commits great evil against others and itself in order to have a fighting chance against Moorcock-influenced endless evil). 40K isn't quite as interested as being as deep as Dune (at least, depending on the writer). After all, it is a wargame franchise, meaning there must always be war (which is literally part of the game's tagline!), and one of the popular sayings from the universe is "Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment." However, again, depending on the writer, the grand saga of the Imperium of Man can be about the human drive to survive and flourish, about how hope and unity can keep one strong in the face of evil.

The only other sci-fi franchise I can think of that uses some of the same tropes as 40K and also gestures broadly at the ideas of civilization, war, and stability is the other major sci-fi wargaming franchise from the 80's: BattleTech, the game and world created when Jordan Weisman picked up model kits/miniatures at a trade show and imagined a world not unlike the medieval, post-Roman-collapse world, but where giant anime robots replaced horses and knights and where kingdoms stretched across lightyears.

Star Wars has also obviously ripped a shitload from Dune. There's also an intergalactic emperor, a main character with a biblical first name (Paul -> Luke), a large part of the original firm takes place on a desert planet, the whole medieval/futuristic combination etc. More listed here.

If one accepts the Castalia House thesis that D&D actually didn't borrow much at all from Tolkien and was more indebted to pre-LotR pulps, one might indeed make an argument that Dune is at least as important to scifi as a genre as LotR is to fantasy. Of course, that is a big if.

There are many out there, mostly progressives in my experience, who confuse open mindedness (verb) with open-mindedness (noun). The noun version of it often assumes that open-mindedness refers to a set of specific outlooks and convictions, and not the simple act of being open to new and/or different views.

I'm really gonna need some examples to engage with this.

This is also analogous to people who "believe in Science" i.e. agree with a set of opinions they have been told scientists support, as opposed to "doing science" i.e. actually investigating claims and being willing to change one's beliefs when presented with new data.

This is a bad top level post. It is low effort, boo outgroup, and lacks evidence. Don't do this.

This is interesting and I think a good point (it's something I remembered doing as a teenager - conflating "being smart" with "agreeing with very smart people") but it isn't really sufficient for a top level comment. Can you add some detailed examples?

I'll second the comment that this isn't enough meat to justify a top-level comment. But to build on the post, I think this is a part of a larger pattern I see, where some people believe in principles and some people don't.

A personal anecdote I've brought up here in the past is me noticing - and being surprised by - around 10 years ago how common it was for people in my leftist progressive circles to describe ideology and behaviors they disagreed with (usually right-wing and conservative) as "gross." This was immediately after the previous couple decades of us fighting for gay marriage and more broadly gay rights and acceptance under the reasoning that personal disgust reaction was something that ought not to carry any sort of moral weight, and thus all those conservatives who found gay people icky had no ground in refusing to accept gay people just as much as they accept straight people. Yet the exact same people - often the exact same individuals - were using their own personal disgust reaction to something as a way to denigrate it.

Around that time around 10 years ago was also when Atheism+ was formed as an offshoot from the existing atheism/skepticism online community. I believe this was the blog post announcing this intended schism, which I quote:

Atheists plus we care about social justice,

Atheists plus we support women’s rights,

Atheists plus we protest racism,

Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,

Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

This was intended as a contrast to the existing community which was really just that last bullet point in its core, though I would actually describe it more as "Atheists as a result of using critical thinking and skepticism." Most of the above bullet points have nothing in principle to do with atheism, but are rather sociopolitical positions that were popular among online atheists at the time (and likely still today). I came to realize that, for many of my fellow online atheists, the reason they had arrived at atheism wasn't so much due to trying to reason about the existence of a god as it was due to being a way to contrast their own beliefs against the religious conservative beliefs they disagreed with.

Going back to the gay acceptance issue, more recently, I had a conversation with someone here (can't recall whom, and this was several months ago) about liberalism and gay acceptance, and I tried to make the point that if someone doesn't viscerally find gay people disgusting or degenerate or whatever, then supporting gay marriage/acceptance doesn't indicate anything about their support for liberal principles (rather than the liberal side of the liberal/conservative sociopolitical divide in the US); it's only by supporting rights and acceptance for something that one finds personally disgusting or otherwise negative that one can actually meaningfully indicate their support for liberal principles. I recall not being able to make an argument that was convincing to that person.

My thinking is that this is partly/largely an influence of postmodern thinking. In a very real sense, the people that I found surprising are stepping one meta level above where I am; I take one step up from the object level and relying on principles, and they're taking one step up from that and picking and choosing the principles that allow them to arrive at their object-level preferences. I haven't thought about this much beyond this and how to resolve the turtles-all-the-way-down problem here, though. I also wonder if this issue is just as common in other sociopolitical circles, since humans have human failings everywhere, but I notice it more among my own circles. But postmodern discourse and way of thinking tends to be more dominant in the leftist world, so maybe not.

You get it. That's exactly what I'm referring to.

I really like your point about atheism. I've noticed something perhaps similar with the rise of being "spiritual". It more strikes me as someone wanting to have their cake and eat it too; they want the palliative benefits of religion without having to suffer from the way religion is regarded culturally. In other words, they want the benefits of religion but they also want to be cool and progressive.

Also a good point about true open mindedness coming from a place of principal and not simple agreeance. I do agree that the tendency to determine one's conclusion and then reverse engineer the argument is all too common. I suppose this has probably been common to some extent throughout human history, but what strikes me as unique is that this psychology has infected institutional thinking as well. It doesn't seem that there are really any adults left in the room on that regard; institution managers who engage in the boring, almost technocratic practice of simply assessing the information and then making the right decision based on that.

One of Scott's best posts is relevant here

I’m not seeing the “verb” version as a verb. Use it in a sentence.

verb - being open to new ideas

noun - a specific set of ideas that are regarded as the open minded ideas.

Seconded. Open-minding? Mind-opening? Not really seeing any such form used as the OP suggests.

Probably what the OP meant was something like open-mindedness as a practice as opposed to open-mindedness as an identity. Their noun/verb distinction is wrong and distracting.

Elon is still making changes to twitter

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1637198368714772486

In the coming weeks, Twitter will prioritize replies by:

  1. People you follow
  1. Verified accounts
  1. Unverified accounts

Verified accounts are 1000X harder to game by bot & troll armies.

There is great wisdom to the old saying: “You get what you pay for.”

"1000X harder to game by bot & troll armies" Really? It seems like scammers have no trouble getting verified accounts: https://www.theverge.com/23379133/twitter-instagram-verified-account-for-sale-scam-criminal

Also, not to mention that verified accounts tended to be the ones who are woke and the most critical of his management, so why would Elon want to give them priority? It's already bad enough that there are more ads on twitter. Now giving more priority to blue accounts will make it worse.

This seems like a bad idea

I keep hearing whispers that Twitter is doing away with legacy bluechecks. Did anything ever come of that?

I can’t believe Elon is still trying to get people to pay $8/month. He still doesn’t get it. Power Tweeters (i.e. the people who might care about bluechecks) aren’t Twitter’s customers. They are Twitter’s primary product. Their purpose in the Twitter ecosystem is to attract eyeballs (ordinary users). These eyeballs are the secondary product which is sold to advertisers for $$$. Trying to extract money from the primary product directly is both inefficient (there are far less power Tweeters than ordinary users) and counterproductive (you run the risk of driving your most valuable assets away).

Yes. They were mostly converted to yellow piss marks.

I can’t believe Elon is still trying to get people to pay $8/month

$8 is nothing. Lots of Americans have bought it for the convenience.

Trying to extract money from the primary product directly is both inefficient (there are far less power Tweeters than ordinary users) and counterproductive

As to the $8 blue checks, I believe you're going to join the august company of people who thought they knew better than Elon Musk and didn't have basic physics on their side.

You are confusing two blue checks here. The one you are talking about is the historical blue check. The new one is about the ordinary guy getting some features.

I keep hearing whispers that Twitter is doing away with legacy bluechecks. Did anything ever come of that?

It's a two-tiered system, which adds to the confusion. Old, legacy verified users are grandfathered in: no fee. New verified users who are notable do not need to pay the fee. Everyone else does.

And a lot of people, including me, use a browser extension that reveals if the checkmark is legacy or paid. There's another toggle on the extension to hide paid checkmarks completely, which is very funny to me. You can also opt to show them in comic sans font.

I actually think the For You option (versus just showing your followed accounts) is where I find a ton of interesting tweets and new people to follow. I see people complain about "horrible politics" on their For You feed, but surely that's related to what they interact with?

The workaround for anyone who dislikes changes to Twitter is to use lists to follow only the people you find interesting and use the 8 Dollars extension. Then it's just like old Twitter.

Yeah. Charging them for Twitter is like charging the Attractive women for Tinder and not the males.

The reason why Elon went with $8/mo is that is the amount twitter makes of a user in ads. By switching making revenue to the user instead of to advertisers, he's hoping Twitter will become less beholding to advertisers controlling what can and cannot be said on twitter and making it a more open platform.

Whether this will work is something to be seen as Elon went from Reddit's messianic hero good boy to super-evil megavillan in the blink of an eye, but I understand where he's going with this.

I remember someone writing a post/substack about how valuable the blue-checkmark is and that it should be 10k+ to maintain one for products, corporations, and/or power users. Maybe they'll create a higher tier for super users as well? Who knows.

I haven't used twitter in years so I'm just speculating. I just don't find that it's worth it to use.

Does anyone have a good model for Elon's thought process here? I do not see him deriving any satisfaction from his current role at Twitter.

Investing effort as the CEO of a Social media product seems like a big step down from being known as a Tech Entrepreneur in the Electric vehicle or commericial Space aviation space.

Getting into fist fights on Twitter trying to squeeze non advertising revenue from a social media product seems like the least interesting and the most self-defeating thing to do. The general population is now accustomed to getting Social media for "free". It's a losing battle to make them pay for it with the glut of other "free" options.

Does anyone have a good model for Elon's thought process here? I do not see him deriving any satisfaction from his current role at Twitter.

Epistemic status- Confident: I think he originally bought Twitter because he thought it was a morally good thing to do, that he would bring back free speech, even though it'll be at a small cost to him because the return on investment would be lower than if he just kept his 55 billion in Tesla stock. But when he bought Twitter, it caused advertisers to flee, because they don't want the bad PR of being associated with free speech Twitter. Elon realized he massively over paid for Twitter, and has since been scrambling to make Twitter remotely profitable, and not go the way of Tumblr after Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion and sold it for 3 million.

Epistemic status- I think this is true but I'm far from sure: I also think he gets caught up in internet arguments and drama the same way lots of normal people do. Lots of people share memes and get into pointless arguments on the internet. Elon is the same, but just has far from eyes on him than anyone else. He's probably relatively unbothered by the abuse that gets most celebrities to stop getting into constant culture wars. Also, he knows that his tweets going viral from people hating him still gets Twitter views and in the news cycle, so him saying something dumb often earns him more money than him saying something smart, at least in the short term.

Also, I don't think trying to turn Twitter into a subscription model is a bad idea. Ads, even when your site isn't blacklisted by a lot of advertising companies, pay very very little. If he can get even a very small fraction of users to subscribe, it can easily out earn advertising. For example, Tumblr introduced their own parody checkmarks(you get 2 for $8!) after Twitter start selling them, and the Tumblr app gained $263,000 in consumer spending since the paid verification scheme was launched, which amounts to a 125 percent boost in iOS in-app revenue(https://mashable.com/article/tumblr-twitter-blue-tick-revenue). Which is a pretty massive amount for a joke.

And my guess is Twitter will make a lot more than 263k per month on check marks.

Also, not to mention that verified accounts tended to be the ones who are woke and the most critical of his management

You don't use twitter, I believe.

While I'm willing to believe this statement (I think Grey has mentioned not using it before), I'd like to see evidence countering what you quoted.

Journalists used to be one of the foremost classes of Blueticks (back before it was a pay-to-play feature) and tend to lean pretty left.

Current demographics are a lot harder to track since it's gone to a subscription service.

The old school verified accounts/blueticks definitely tended to align with Wokeness.

These days it's far more of a mishmash of whoever's willing to pay.

From the article you linked:

Pearl was familiar with the email content’s theme as it resembled previous automated correspondence from Twitter — featuring a minimal white background, black text, and blue links.

Fearing her account’s safety, Pearl clicked the link inside the email that supposedly would instantly let her secure her account and entered her existing password on the following webpage to update it.

Moments later, a message arrived in a Telegram group. All it contained was a screenshot of Pearl’s Twitter profile and a link. Three hours later, the admin texted, “Sold.”

Pearl had fallen prey to a phishing attack. The email wasn’t from Twitter but from a hacker who had copied the look of an official Twitter message.

This doesn't seem like anything new, let alone related to the new Twitter Blue system. "Impersonation of official communication" is an age-old "social engineering" attack. Hell, the article predates Twitter Blue, and has more to do with the prior crypto-craze that's even led to things like the hacking of Discord bots.

I assume Elon's bet is that $8/month is too high a price for normal spammers and scammers to bother with. Phishers will always be a problem, yes, but again, we've had literal decades of trying to warn regular people to be vigilant against cyberattacks. Maybe it'll be worse when there's more bluechecks, but that's the other thing: the value of the bluecheck is not as high in the eye of the beholder, or, rather, the signal changes with the ubiquity of the check. Pre-Elon, the Blue Check was generally taken as a warning sign that the holder was a sanctimonious opinion-holder who leaned left. Post-Elon, "you paid $8 for a checkmark" has become the new lazy insult on Twitter. If the worst-case scenario you imply were to come to pass, why would the response not be "most users scroll past the checkmarked tweets"?

From that small excerpt, all I can say is that Pearl is an idiot. How many of these kinds of emails does everyone get everyday? I've had urgent messages about my account with such-and-such being compromised, and they look legit - but since I never went near such-and-such and have no account, I know it's a fake.

Anyone above the age of reason who clicks on a mystery link in an email, in this day, is an idiot. Sorry Pearl but it's your fault, not Musk's fault.

From that small excerpt, all I can say is that Pearl is an idiot. How many of these kinds of emails does everyone get everyday? I've had urgent messages about my account with such-and-such being compromised, and they look legit - but since I never went near such-and-such and have no account, I know it's a fake.

Anyone above the age of reason who clicks on a mystery link in an email, in this day, is an idiot. Sorry Pearl but it's your fault, not Musk's fault.

It is shocking to me, as someone whose job is basically helping small business owners deal with technology, how resistant people are to learning basic internet safety habits. There are often two or three clear signs that these emails are fake and a very simple way to verify without clicking any links in the email. Fortunately, I've trained several of my clients to forward suspicious emails to me, so I can confirm their suspicions, but it really isn't very hard and we've had 20+ years of life-training on this by now, haven't we?

It doesn't strike me as a terrible idea from a moderation perspective, but it might damage the product from an end-user perspective. I haven't been impressed with his management of Twitter at all. He didn't even unban all accounts like he said he would, nor has he stepped down as CEO like he said he would. He wants so desperately to be cool in a certain way, and that only makes him all the more lame.

He unbanned Kanye and Nick Fuentes, but then promptly re-banned them. Not unbanning Alex Jones was weak though.

Monogamous men in long-term relationships aren't doin too hot

A recent post by Aella goes over some statistics on marriage and relationships with a focus on the male perspective. The results are... pretty awful. It's a well-known fact that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, 70% of which are initiated by women, and that family courts are heavily biased against men. This makes marriage an inherently risky proposition, as people are putting a substantial chunk of their life on the line on what amounts to coinflip odds.

So what about the men who pass that check and remain married? Is it all sunshine and rainbows for all of them? Well, obviously not, as there are common tropes of bitter old couples who argue with each other over tons of small things, and of couples where the passion has long since dissipated but they remain together out of convenience. What proportion of marriages are unfulfilling like this? There hasn't been much research or data on this but Aella reveals that the answer is, unfortunately, most of them.

On the question of "Are you satisfied with your sex life?", men are indeed quite satisfied if they're in relationships that are less than a year old, but the rate of agreement drops precipitously as the relationship progresses. By the time the relationship is 6-8 years old, men flip to being net-unsatisfied with their sex life. It continues getting worse and worse over time, although at a slower rate. For relationships that are 12+ years old, ~53% of men report being unsatisfied with their sex life compared to 41% who are satisfied. More than twice as many men report being severely unsatisfied (13.7%) compared to the number who are strongly satisfied (6%). An unsatisfying sex life has a strong negative correlation with overall relationship satisfaction, and a strong positive correlation to agreeing with statements like ”My partner doesn't excite me” (r=0.47), ”My relationship causes me grief or sorrow” (r=0.44), ”In hindsight, getting into this relationship was a bad idea” (r=0.42), and ”My partner judges me” (r=0.31). It also often leads to cheating. By the time relationships are 22 years old, over 40% of men self-report cheating at least once, while over 20% of women report the same.

So for men, opting for marriage seems like an exceedingly bad option because they not only have to pass the 50/50 on whether the marriage collapses into a divorce, but then they also need to hope their relationship remains net-satisfying in the long run when only around 40% do. Modern relationships age like milk and doing the math on the two probabilities (0.5 * 0.4 = 0.2) means marriage only has about a 20% chance of being satisfying in the long-term. To be fair, relationships in history also had to deal with one or both sides becoming unsatisfied, but the lust-focus of modern marriages make them particularly susceptible to problems compared to the more contractual marriages of history.

Seeing things like these almost makes me feel sorry for westerners, ... almost.

My personal upbringing taught me to always treat all women with great respect/guard their honour. I was never interested in sleeping around for instance. Shortly after I entered university one of my fellow countrymen who was a few years above me told me that the Western women around me were for having fun with and were not suitable for marriage. He told me that when I was ready for marriage I should bring over a sweet girl from back home. At the time I found the statement to be offensive towards women and was somewhat indignant, for surely (or so I thought) these women were just like those back home but without a strong social norms to guide them and in the end they all wanted the same thing, but over the years with experience I have come to see the wisdom in his words. Western women really aren't worth much more than having fun with.

The problem here isn't women as a whole, but women infested with western brain rot specifically. And Western men played a big part in letting their society get to such a point.

I'm sorry but a "traditional" culture/woman won't save you from a dead bedroom. Evidence? I am from one of those cultures and every kid (other young adults like me) more or less unanimously aggress that their parents never have sex.

The only thing that will save you is if both partners are of solid mental, physical, hormonal and psychological health.

It's one of those things that sounds good but doesn't work, if there is little mutual want for sex in the beginning like many socially enforced marriages, what hope is there to be sex years down the line?

The only thing that will save you is if both partners are of solid mental, physical, hormonal and psychological health.

Fair, but western culture significantly reduces the probability someone is of "solid mental, physical, hormonal and psychological health."

Source?

See how rates of mental health issues are significantly higher in the west than elsewhere. And before you say this is due to underreporting elsewhere notice the dose effect relationship between mental illness and how close you are to the "centre" of it all, e.g. see how liberals are more mentally ill than conservatives, women are more mentally ill than men, see here: https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/over-50-percent-white-liberal-women-under-30-mental-health-condition , urban dwellers are more mentally ill than rurals, people now are more mentally ill than people 10 years ago, people in the Anglosphere are more mentally ill than people outside the anglosphere, people outside the anoglosphere who speak English are more mentally ill than people outside the anglosphere who don't etc. (see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-with-mental-or-substance-disorders-by-sex for a graph of mental illness rates for a chart that uses multiple sources/regressions to correct for underdiagnosis). We wouldn't expect to see so many disparate links if it was all due to reporting bias.

"centre" of it all

Centre of what? The West? Why is that progressive people in Anglophone cities?

Also, the liberal/conservative and male/female differences in neuroticism are cross-cultural, as far as I know.

We wouldn't expect to see so many disparate links if it was all due to reporting bias.

Why not? These reference classes are also correlated with the medicalisation of mental illness... But then again, medicalisation could be due to a dose-response relationship between progressivism and mental illness! Causality of mental illness is VERY complicated and opaque.

Centre of what? The West? Why is that progressive people in Anglophone cities?

Because Anglos absolutely dominate the culture of other western countries. When was the last time you were forced to conform with some bizzare non-Anglo idea?

These reference classes are also correlated with the medicalisation of mental illness

Non-anglos speaking English correlate with medicalization of mental illness more than non-anglos not speaking English?

Because Anglos absolutely dominate the culture of other western countries. When was the last time you were forced to conform with some bizzare non-Anglo idea?

Critical theory and postmodernism are products of France and Germany, and I work in academia, so probably some time today.

However, it's true that Anglos have cultural dominance of progressive media (not so much e.g. what happens in churches) and I think that the fundamental point you are making is conceivable, but nonetheless speculative.

Non-anglos speaking English correlate with medicalization of mental illness more than non-anglos not speaking English?

But your hypothesis is not "speaking English causes mental illness", but rather "being exposed to certain Anglophone ideas causes mental illness." One of these Anglophone ideas is progressivism; another is the contemporary conceptions of depression and anxiety, which may have increased reporting rates.

Interestingly, in the case of schizophrenia (which standards apart from depression and anxiety in many ways, e.g. there's no non-pharma way to effectively treat schizophrenia) rates seem to be similar all over the world, and there is no clear Western/non-Western pattern:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_schizophrenia#By_country

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We're often so bombarded with claims of faux xenophobia that when the real thing pops up upon reading you're like ' wait, what? '

As if Chinese, African, and South American subcultures are just ripe with mentally & physically healthy people.

Maybe your small part of the world is doing groovy, or has yet to succumb to the soda, pop & burger bombardment, but that's from a lack of access or (as it reads) you being in the tippy top of your people's (whichever that may be) class hierarchy.

Given the sizes of families in those traditional cultures, I can guarantee you that married people do in fact have sex in them.

every kid (other young adults like me) more or less unanimously aggress that their parents never have sex.

Were all of you found under cabbage leaves, then? 🤣 I think children - even young adults - may not realise when their parents are having sex. It probably does decline as people get older, but not as much as young people think.

Think of Hamlet in the play - he can't understand why his mother would want to marry his uncle out of reasons of sexual desire, because she's old now, she should be beyond that kind of urge:

You cannot call it love; for at your age

The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,

And waits upon the judgment: and what judgment

Would step from this to this?

…O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell,

If thou canst mutine in a matron's bones,

To flaming youth let virtue be as wax,

And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame

When the compulsive ardor gives the charge,

Since frost itself as actively doth burn

And reason panders will.

I was created in a lab.

My parents seriously don't have sex, but they got other problems so that confounds it. But parents not having sex or there being absolutely no signs of it ever happening seems to be common if not universal belief around me, at least some of that should points to a trend I suppose. Very speculative but no one is really out there counting sex frequency by nationality so sentiments on the ground serves as the closest proxy I can get.

My parents managed to have four kids even though circumstances would appear to have made it very difficult for them to get the opportunities to do so, for various reasons 😁 So I do take "I don't see any signs of my parents sleeping together" with a grain of salt; it depends how old the parents are, how old the kids, etc. As you get older there will be a reduction in libido and a feeling that "yeah I could get wild in bed or I could read my book then have a good night's sleep" and people choosing the book and sleep.

no one is really out there counting sex frequency by nationality

Yes they are. https://www.statista.com/statistics/245194/most-sexually-active-countries-worldwide/

I don't know the veracity of this data but it came up on the first page of google.

120+ times a year?? Yeah, I strongly doubt the veracity that people are out there having sex at a rate of roughly once every 3 days, that too people in relationships where I suppose a majority of the sex would come from.

Well sure, if I was really trying to draw conclusions I’d look for multiple sources of hard to fake data(marketing data from condom companies and percentage of arrests for prostitution, for example) and try to make it robust enough that the confounders cancel out. But equally clearly there is (probably quite low quality) data out there on sex frequency by nationality.

Your parents are either outliers or are keeping it quiet. Hat tip. Most parents keep it quiet.

If that’s the case why are men of your culture such inveterate users of prostitutes?

Care to proactively provide evidence for this inflammatory claim? You have the relevant stats to share?

First I am hearing of this, I would love to see a source showing high prevalence of prostitution. Ideally for high class people back home (our lower classes may as well be a different species to us) but I'll accept general data from anywhere around the world.

There are 3 million prostitutes in India - presumably someone is visiting them.

3 million?

This here says only 600k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_statistics_by_country which is 1/6 of the per capita rate of the US.

Newspapers from India…

https://www.firstpost.com/india/supreme-court-recognises-prostitution-as-profession-what-does-this-mean-for-sex-workers-10726011.html/amp

“While some estimate that there are around 8,00,000 sex workers in India, the actual number could be as high as 20 lakh across the country.”

The Western media like NYTimes says 3 million.

Aella spam might be what drives me outta here. The mods need to give us word filters.

Minimize the thread and move on. At a glance you will know of it needs the minus button or not.

men are indeed quite satisfied if they're in relationships that are less than a year old

That's the least surprising piece of info I've heard in a while.

Aging whore asks her simps if they are happily married, finds out that they would rather pay her for secks than pursue meaningful relationships with their wives.

This is extremely fascinating.

If a “fat acceptance” movement, morbidly obese female tik toker were to ask her audience “to those of you who are living unhealthy skinny lifestyles deprived of food and joy, do you enjoy your joyless horrible boring life?”, and then if the overweight audience responded with “no we hate being skinny being fat is much better!” Would this be a topic of discussion here? I mean other than yo ridicule it?

How many happily married men with consistently growing families down at my local SSPX parish do you think have ever heard of Aella? Do you think my wife’s parents, very clearly happily married for 50 years and still constantly getting annoyingly drunk and cringing us out by acting like horny teenagers have ever heard of Aella?

The fact that anybody pays any mind to these absolutely ridiculous “polls” is embarrassing. It is absolutely no surprise to me, and I don’t think should be a surprise to anyone, that unhappy men are the ones following this person around online and parroting her nonsense.

Lets take it a step further: the poll describes her customers. Perhaps the conclusion is that obsessively following around a prostitute, reading the things she writes, and integrating her understanding of the world into your own, is bad for building healthy relationships. So maybe a recommendation could be: stop reading this e-girls marketing materials, its ruining your marriage in service of her.

A couple months ago, you got dinged for posting a low-effort sneer.

This one is... well, you used a lot more words this time, but it's basically the same post.

I don't know why Aella is your trigger, but whatever, clearly you really don't like her. You are certainly free to criticize her and her polling methodology. But "I think she's a stupid whore, why are you simps talking about her?" is just telling people you don't like the topic of conversation and you want them to stop.

Instead, try just not reading threads that are of no interest to you.

FWIW I agree with you

Well, hold on a second: I obviously disagree with this person, their methodology, and even the conclusion from what are in my opinion poorly constructed polling.

But: is it in an insult to call her a whore? Isn't that...her job?

Instead, try just not reading threads that are of no interest to you.

This thread, as well as the phenomenon of people it rat-spaces developing this much of a blindspot is incredibly interesting to me, whic is probably why I've responded to both things with similar criticism.

Ymeshukeut or however you spell his username is obviously very critical of any criticism of the 2020 election and has been since when we were still on /r/ssc. Do you make mod posts telling him to just avoid the topic? If not why not?

I was previously "dinged" for being overly concise, so I expanded my point substantially. I understand that you disagree with the conclusion, but I don't think it's fair to imply that it is unacceptable to be critical of this person and her polls.

Aging whore asks her simps if they are happily married, finds out that they would rather pay her for secks than pursue meaningful relationships with their wives.

This is what you appear to object to. I can restate it as: "a person who sells a product is losing access to the product and has switched to writing about why fans of her product are anti-fans of other products", but that seems...unnecessarily vague.

I didn't mod you for calling her a whore. She is a public figure and we don't really have a rule against insulting public figures. On the other hand, we'd prefer people comment more substantively than "This public figure I don't like is a retard/incel/whore." But that in itself wouldn't be modded. It certainly set the tone for your comment, though, which is basically to dunk on your outgroup.

Ymeshukeut or however you spell his username is obviously very critical of any criticism of the 2020 election and has been since when we were still on /r/ssc. Do you make mod posts telling him to just avoid the topic? If not why not?

Because he's not telling other people that it's a stupid topic and only loser simps are still talking about it.

but I don't think it's fair to imply that it is unacceptable to be critical of this person and her polls.

I just said in the post you are replying to that you can criticize her and her polls.

Isn't she a sex worker/former sex worker, though? Whore is a bit of a strong word, but "whorelord" is on her Twitter profile.

I don't have anything against this person, but I guess her following is mostly based on the fact that she's literate and pretty and a libertarian?

Pretty? Lmao she's not even very attractive.

But: is it in an insult to call her a whore?

Well yeah, that is why you called her a whore. If calling her a whore was not insulting then you would have found some other word.

This is part of why I think this discussion is interesting, and want to see it happening despite amadans wishes.

This is not an accurate statement of my wishes. I did not shut down the discussion. You are the one who appeared to be trying to shut down the discussion.

You're also free to start a thread about the etymology and ethics of "whore."

What you're not free to do is try to derail the thread every time Aella comes up with a rant about how you don't understand why people are giving the whore attention.

The poll is biased. It is biased due to the profession and stated motivations of the person who conducted the poll, and her audience.

How on EARTH is this not relevant to the discussion?

Discussion about the use of the word “whore” wasnt started by me. The crux of my post was talking about bias and selection. You and the person my deleted post replied to wanted to get into some semantics argument about words.

Maybe start throwing vague threats about what is “allowed” (or perhaps who is allowed criticism) at “goodguy”, or tell him to break his desire to discuss semantics into another thread. I’m trying to talk about polling bias here.

I think there's the significant point that the job of person making a poll on sexual satisfaction with partners is offering sexual satisfaction as a non-partner. Yes, maybe he could have used another word, but the point was (primarily) to draw attention to that.

FWIW, I didn't think this was a low-effort sneer, and I thought it was very much relevant and on-topic for what the person brought up. It's the core criticism.

Is it basically the same post, though? Same target, still kind of derogatory, but this time it looks like he's actually making arguments.

If I read it correctly, his argument is as follows:

  1. A decent amount of Aella's following is probably due to sex appeal

  2. People who are following people due to sex appeal are probably in worse marriages on average

  3. The people in the polls probably disproportionately consist of people following Aella

  4. Conclusion: the people in Aella's polls probably have worse marriages than average

And then (the step further)

  1. It seems plausible that consuming Aella's content might hurt marriages

  2. The people in her survey seem in kind of a worse state than one would expect

  3. Maybe stay a little further away from Aella if you want a healthy marriage

(Okay, this was presented significantly less after the manner of a syllogism than the first)

This second part seems less well supported, and since it follows the data the opposite way from the first set, it might be hard to disambiguate effects (how can we tell the direction of causation here? How do we even know that there is a difference, aside from anecdata and a priori sorts of things?).

It wasn't exactly the most courteous way of saying things, but there was definitely more substance to this than in the linked post (well, the directly linked one. His further reply had more depth, but wasn't quite saying the same things as this post, if I'm reading it rightly).

The fact that anybody pays any mind to these absolutely ridiculous “polls” is embarrassing. It is absolutely no surprise to me, and I don’t think should be a surprise to anyone, that unhappy men are the ones following this person around online and parroting her nonsense.

Setting aside the negative tone and adjectives about this character in the first paragraph, I have to agree on this. Don't understand what's the deal with this Aella person, first time I heard about her was here and then watched a recent podcast. My impression is, this is just a regular girl that escorts and do polls on twitter. Why people care so much. I can't find any other reason than 'simping'.

A lot of women in highly visible positions seem to be very much aligned with the progressive Zeitgeist in regarding rationalist adjacent spaces as *-ists. Aella seems to be an oddity in this regard. I am pretty sure if any other woman even makes a superficial attempt [1] at hearing out rationalist positions, she will build up a similar following of simps.

[1] By superficial attempt I do not mean to say anything about Aella. I don't follow her and don't know anything about her.

She's simply a semi-famous figure in the rationalist community. Even here she's revered a bit, with a moderator describing her as "friend-of-the-motte", despite her never having commented on /r/TheMotte or even registered on here as far as I'm aware. I don't even know of any evidence that she even knows of the existence of this place. Then there are people like Scott Alexander, who describes her as a "national treasure", and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who brags that he can satisfy her because he's immortal.

If I had to wager a guess, she got her notoriety from doing a ton of provocative Twitter polls, because the easiest way to get engagement is to get negative engagement. It's why PETA is infamous and behaves the way they do.

I'm pretty sure she got her notoriety from certain photos with lawn gnomes.

The polling--and the SSC comments, and the pingbacks from other rationalist figures--came later.

Correct. She was the gnome-fucker on reddit before she was anything else.

I'm still not sure why she would be called friend of the motte. That just seems like consensus building. "This is a person we all know and love." Not exactly.

You're right, she was on the podcast. The Bailey Podcast E012: Polyamory (Feat. Aella).

I'll take it. That's close enough for my book.

It's an applause light. "Oh cool, I've been told that she's a friend of The Motte! That means she should be trustworthy!" It'd make sense to place her in as much a positive light as possible, because the very next thing in the post is the author attacking the arguments of Aella's debate opponent.

I honestly took calling her a "friend of the motte" as a joke. At least half a joke. She's brought up a lot, but she's a polarizing figure.

Some of us were raised in a time when a regular girl would never escort, and never ever do polls on twitter.

And what about the counterfactual?

I read your post and was left with the assumption that you were referring to population-level statistics, not a straw poll. The one is pretty emphatically not the other, and pretending it is renders the rest of the discussion moot, in my view.

Why should we believe that any of these statistics hold up at a population level?

Aella has a response to these types of questions here. I don't know how you'd ever get population-level statistics on these types of questions without going through the task of asking every single person.

The proper response to data quality questions is to respond with better data, not throw away all conclusions totally because they're politically inconvenient (which is what a lot of political partisans like to do). The problem is that research is very thin on these types of questions, so oftentimes there's not a lot of counterdata to respond with. In such a case, some data > no data, just keep in mind the error bars are higher than they would be if this was an established survey house polling on a traditional question like "who do you want for president".

In such a case, some data > no data, just keep in mind the error bars are higher than they would be if this was an established survey house polling on a traditional question like "who do you want for president".

If it makes us draw a false conclusion then yes, it is most certainly worse than no data.

No hedging of the claim seems to be occurring, it isn't "my followers" after all, and the blatant motte and bailey here probably has pushed me out of suspicion and into hostility as it concerns Aella.

The proper response to data quality questions is to respond with better data,

No it's not. Getting better quality data will cost a lot of money. People have no obligation to spend their hard earned cash, in order to prove a TikTok poll wrong.

Why the criticism of TikTok as a sample source? I'd imagine it's actually less vulnerable to sampling bias than Twitter, being that it's stupidly-popular. Now, granted, I'd use it more as a finger on the pulse of what's popular with the younger demographics, but still.

Why the criticism of TikTok as a sample source? I'd imagine it's actually less vulnerable to sampling bias than Twitter

Damning by faint praise?

Again, it's not perfectly representative of the world or even America, but I'd sure as shit say that something like TikTok or Tumblr can be valuable as a social weathervane. After all, a lot of the social justice stuff was incubated on Tumblr, and look where we are now.

I certainly don't mean that whoever responds has to do/fund the survey themselves, just that they should cite some form of data done by someone else.

Why? What if there isn't any other data done by someone else, the data in question can still be bad and be proven wrong.

How can you prove it wrong if you don't have data?

I mean you can point out the methodology is faulty, in this case the data.

So what you would be doing is finding errors in it's reasoning, the conclusion may be true on its own, doesn't matter.

that is fair, thanks.

Well, for one, the statistics I've seen for divorce is that there is a very large class difference. My first result of a Google search was this that says overall only 30% of middle and upper class couples get divorced, 41% of the working class, and 46% of the poor (which also disagree with 50% overall).

Result #3 says the overall divorce rate is 44%. It also notes many professions (including SW devs) have a divorce rate around 20%.

Aella's readers are a very non-representative sample. Perhaps not quite as non-representative as the lobby of a divorce lawyer, but not too much worse, IMO, and yes, selling very skewed data as representative data is worse than NO data, IMO.

Cole_Phelps_doubt.png

In this case and on this particular topic, perhaps more so than any other case in this thread, I feel the need to say "consider the source". This is an obviously a biased sample being presented by someone who by her own admission is pushing an agenda where that agenda is "monogamy is bad". I recognize that there is a school of rationalist thinking where the source of a piece of information doesn't matter, only the true/false value of the information matters, but I think this is folly.

True statements can still be used to deceive.

In this case I think it needs to be pointed out that we are not actually talking about "Monogamous men in long-term relationships" we're talking about "self-identified men who associate with this particular prostitute". The charitable interpretation of this post is that guys are seeking out this prostitute do so in large part because they're not getting it at home. In reply to which I can practically feel my 19th century ancestors reading over my shoulder from beyond the grave, rolling their eyes, and replying "well no shit".

By the time the relationship is 6-8 years old, men flip to being net-unsatisfied with their sex life.

This sounds like a rediscovery of the seven year itch. I think that people do tend to become dissatisfied after a while in any situation as novelty and excitement wears off. I don't know if men have it particularly worse, married women also seem to be unhappy.

In fact, everyone seems to be unhappy. So unless the cure is polyamory or just having affairs, I don't know what will make people happier about "I'm stuck with only one person to have sex with, and it's not as exciting as it used to be, and I wish I could be grazing on that greener grass on the other side of the fence".

I think that people do tend to become dissatisfied after a while in any situation as novelty and excitement wears off.

I can understand twenty-somethings in their first long-term relationship having second thoughts, and wondering if they can do better. I can also agree that novelty and excitement inevitably wears off, but I don't see how that necessarily implies dissatisfaction.

I don't know what will make people happier about "I'm stuck with only one person to have sex with, and it's not as exciting as it used to be, and I wish I could be grazing on that greener grass on the other side of the fence".

Shame? Mockery? Psy-ops equal to in strength but opposite in direction to the current ones, which would glorify sticking through tough times, instead of chasing butterflies in your stomach?

I do think as you get older, the range of possibilities shuts down. When you're in your 40s and 50s, there's now a lot of paths you never took and will never get to take, a lot of choices and responsibilities you have made and taken upon yourself. You're getting older, and the range of your future is narrowing bit by bit (another thirty years of life is now less ahead than behind you, much different than being in your 20s). Everyone begins to wonder "Is that it? Is this all I have? Could I have done better? Could I do better?"

Having a fling is one way of reassuring yourself that you're still desirable and capable of spontaneity. 'Familiarity breeds contempt' is a saying for a reason, we get used to what we have and don't find it interesting or valuable anymore, because we expect to have it. Now, if you imbibed the modern notion that "being in love" is the only reason for going into and staying in a relationship, then finding "but I don't feel like I am in love" may persuade you to break things by having a fling or deciding you will leave your spouse and take up with newer version. The views of duty and sticking with something and that indeed change is inevitable and we must deal with that are less popular, because they are so restrictive. Why can't I have it all, what is the good of being someone living in the modern age with all the choices my ancestors could never have, if I'm going to be stuck with "just like your grandparents, you are going to find that the pink fizzy excitement wears off and you are living a companionate relationship instead of one of high passion and excitement every day".

What would psy-ops opposite in direction to the current ones even look like? Divorce makes for easy TV because it's dramatic and I think that's an underrated factor in current psy-ops.

Something like the Stark family in GoT, but with less tragedy is the first thing that comes to my mind.

“Did you just divorce-shame me?” she demanded indignantly, as if he’d violated some well-established principle of etiquette.

We could stop doing things like that. Just stop digging.

The reply could at least be "yes, and you deserved it". Removing shame is one of the dumbest things western culture has done, IMHO.

"Show me a hot woman, and I'll show you a man who's tired of fucking her."

Things will get tired. What you can imagine you can have will always be greater than what you can actually procure. One has to just live with that fact and begin de-prioritizing sexual variety.

There was about a two-year period in which I was with a woman who was into bringing other people into bed, but I knew it had a built-in but fuzzy expiration date. Kind of dysfunctional and couldn't go on for long.

To be fair, relationships in history also had to deal with one or both sides becoming unsatisfied, but the lust-focus of modern marriages make them particularly susceptible to problems compared to the more contractual marriages of history.

I'd add that it was typical in the past, for most classes, to keep producing children until at least you had grandchildren. If a marriage is primarily focused on somehow managing to produce a good number of children to survive to adulthood and support you in your old age, then you just don't have much time go worry about whether or not your marriage is satisfying. You're too worried about stopping Little Tommy from dying from tuberculosis.

More recently, the idea that your partner is supposed to be "your best friend" (and for some men, their only close friend) also seems damaging. Expecting one person to be an emotional, sexual, reproductive, and financial principal partner is naturally going to have a high failure rate. Contexts where husbands and wives can hang out with people outside their marriage, without fear of cheating (because they'll be in single-sex spaces) are an underrated feature of most (all?) traditional societies. Bridge-clubs/knitting circles for women and bowling/golfing/etc. for men had an underrated function. AFAICT, my most happily married friends are those who have kept up e.g. dog-walking with their gal-pals or footie games with their mates.

Ah, gender war my old friend we meet again. I am a bit salty that Aella gets such massive sample sizes with so many variables only to give us some paltry plots, I wish she gave these datasets the Kaggle tryhard treatment.

Sexual satisfaction for males probably confounds strongly with The Coolidge effect (medium term) and aging induced decreasing testosterone levels for very long timeframes. I might be exceptionally male brained but it's natural to me that novelty produces the most dopamine etc in the sexual domain, the picture is different in the companionship domain, but strictly sexual, there's not much ambiguity for me.

Nevertheless, I do think the overly gynocentric culture that is giving birth to all the male malaise has a role in what Aella found.

Reading the Longhouse essay brought to mind a number of conversations I've had with male friends over the past few years -- normie middle-class Christian guys who want to do the right thing, but who feel hard-pressed by what you might call "toxic femininity." I am afraid to give specific examples, for fear of inadvertently outing some of these men to those who know them, but let me say simply that what these guys have in common is the feeling that they can do nothing right in their marriages or relationships with other women. (Emphasis mine) I think of one man in particular, a friend who emailed a couple of years ago to say that his wife faulted him for not being strong and decisive, but whenever he was strong and decisive, she laid into him for being bossy and uncaring. All the guys I'm talking about are committed Christians with educations and strong middle-class norms. One of these male friends, a younger guy who follows pop culture a lot more closely than I do, said that women like his wife and her friends are bombarded constantly with "you go, girl" messages in media, trying to convince them that the men in their lives are holding them down and holding them back. Along those lines, a middle-aged pal I see once or twice a year told me last year that most of his wife's close circle of friends had filed for divorce in the past year, for no reason other than that they were bored, and thought life had more to offer

I see a similar line of reasoning in the hivemind (especially femine discourse dominated ones) that leads to the highlighted outcome above. I'm not going to go into some screed but I would be surprised if "the squeeze" doesn't leak into relationships as well, or just stops existing altogether once the contract has been signed.

Here's a theory. Humans are not destined to be happy in relationships, in the same way, they are not destined to be happy in their jobs or whatever. By that, I mean that monogamous pairing doesn't really maximize local surplus, for reasons starting from humans being sexually dimorphic mammals. Similar to how no amount of material gain short of post-scarcity can sidestep the relative status issue.

My theory is that the only monogamous relationships that are sexually fulfilling to both the male and the female in the long term are those in those which the male and female both have very high "SMV". You are still left with sidestepping the Coolidge Effect.

The human flourishing project is a lot harder than it seems.

Here's a theory. Humans are not destined to be happy in relationships, in the same way, they are not destined to be happy in their jobs or whatever.

"Destined" in the sense that it's a natural and expected outcome? No.

Relationships, like jobs, do not in themselves provide happiness and one shouldn't assume that once you have one, happiness and fulfillment will come.

That doesn't mean you can't have a happy relationship or a job you like. But those don't just happen.

Wouldn’t we need to explain why monogamy became standard practice? One sees a fence in a meadow when reading your post.

Monogamous societies reproduced and conquered the neighboring polygamous heathens the next valley/nation/continent over?

But that belies the notion that monogamy is inherently an unnatural outcome. If monogamy out competed (at a societal level) non monogamous communities shouldn’t we ask why?

If monogamy out competed (at a societal level) non monogamous communities shouldn’t we ask why?

"Outcompeted" overstates atelier's hypothesis a bit. Monogamous societies might be better specifically at "projecting military force against the other tribe in the next valley", while being worse at everything else (including "generating happy men and women").

Indeed, it's easy to see how that exact situation might come about: a tribe full of angry, depressed married men who are henpecked by their nagging monogamous wives so much that dicing with death seems like a prospect of sweet release, would indeed seem like they'd be well placed psychologically to mount a "kill the men and kidnap the women" fratricidal attack on a neighbouring tribe. Conversely, a tribe of men and women living in a successful hippie-free-love non-monogamous sexual utopia have better things to do than scheme to kill everyone in the next valley.

a tribe of men and women living in a successful hippie-free-love non-monogamous sexual utopia

Not usually the way polygamy works, that's a man with more than one wife and very strict rules about what the women can and can't do, whereas the man can marry up to the limit of whatever is socially acceptable or how many he can support, plus can visit courtesans, dancers, etc.

Where polygyny is practiced, it's generally "woman marries brothers". There's few to no "free love non-monogamous sexual utopia" where both men and women sleep around with whomever they like and there's no drama.

Take the avatars of Vishnu, Ram and Krishna. Ram is the man of one wife, which is unusual and is all part of his character as the man of ultimate virtues who does not breach social limits. Krishna has eight main wives and 16,100 ceremonial wives, whom he marries after rescuing them from captivity by a demon in order to safeguard their dignity, since living with another man (even if that was not voluntarily) means they are now unmarriageable and would be shunned by their families and society.

Sita, the wife of Rama, is another example of the double standard, if you will. While the kings may have multiple wives, if they so choose, after she is kidnapped by a demon and rescued by Rama, she has to undergo a trial by fire to prove her chastity, and even after returning to their kingdom, social disapproval lingers:

Some versions of the Ramayana describe Sita taking refuge with the fire-god Agni, while Maya Sita, her illusionary double, is kidnapped by the demon-king. ...Ravana took Sita back to his kingdom in Lanka and she was held as a prisoner in one of his palaces. During her captivity for a year in Lanka, Ravana expressed his desire for her; however, Sita refused his advances and struggled to maintain her chastity.

...Sita was finally rescued by Rama, who waged a war to defeat Ravana. Upon rescue, Rama makes Sita undergo a trial by fire to prove her chastity. In some versions of the Ramayana, during this test the fire-god Agni appears in front of Rama and attests to Sita's purity, or hands over to him the real Sita and declares it was Maya Sita who was abducted by Ravana. The Thai version of the Ramayana, however, tells of Sita walking on the fire, of her own accord, to feel clean, as opposed to jumping in it. She is not burnt, and the coals turn to lotuses.

...In the Uttara Kanda, following their return to Ayodhya, Rama was crowned as the king with Sita by his side. While Rama's trust and affection for Sita never wavered, it soon became evident that some people in Ayodhya could not accept Sita's long captivity under Ravana. During Rama's period of rule, an intemperate washerman, while berating his wayward wife, declared that he was "no pusillanimous Rama who would take his wife back after she had lived in the house of another man". The common folk started gossiping about Sita and questioned Ram's decision to make her queen. Rama was extremely distraught on hearing the news, but finally told Lakshmana that as a king, he had to make his citizens pleased and the purity of the queen of Ayodhya has to be above any gossip and rumour. With a heavy heart, he instructed him to take Sita to a forest outside Ayodhya and leave her there.

...Thus Sita was forced into exile a second time. Sita, who was pregnant, was given refuge in the hermitage of Valmiki, where she delivered twin sons named Kusha and Lava. In the hermitage, Sita raised her sons alone, as a single mother. They grew up to be valiant and intelligent and were eventually united with their father. Once she had witnessed the acceptance of her children by Rama, Sita sought final refuge in the arms of her mother Bhūmi. Hearing her plea for release from an unjust world and from a life that had rarely been happy, the Earth dramatically split open; Bhūmi appeared and took Sita away.

Some versions of the story have Sita appealing to Earth to open up and take her away because despite all that has gone before and her second exile, Rama still asks her to undergo yet another public test of her chastity in order to satisfy the people once and for all.

This is noncentral to my argument. The precise internal dynamics of the non-monogamous society(s) are irrelevant; the hypothesis calls only for them to have (a) better mean happiness than Monogamy Land, and (b) worse ability to commit ethnocide than Monogamy Land.

Yeah, but if your premise on "why did monogamy survive and indeed become dominant?" is to be examined, then we have to look at real world polygamous societies, not fantasy versions. I don't believe in the Golden Age Peaceful Matriarchal And Mother Goddess Society crap, as to how patriarchy became dominant, so I don't accept that as a starting point when examining the question. if the matriarchy was so ideal, why did the patriarchy get to replace it? Same with "we all started off with everyone fucking everyone else and nobody made a big deal out of it" for "then the wicked awful monogamists ruined it for everyone". If we look around, we see there isn't "everyone fucking everyone else, nobody cares" but that "men get to fuck who they want, people do care if women fuck without consequences". That seems more likely to segue into monogamy than "no shame, no guilt, polyamorous fucking for all" society.

If we start off with "there is free love equal rights men and women both are able to sleep around nobody cares society" versus "monogamous relationship society", we have to check that against "and does this hold up in the real world?", else we might as well put it down to "aliens made them do it".

In fact, we've now got "free love equal rights men and women both are able to sleep around nobody cares society", do we have better mean happiness than Monogamy Land? The complaints aired on here backed up with "surveys say", would seem to indicate "no".

Raising kids takes long term cooperation and long term resource commitment. Pairing up in twos is an obvious, stable and usually effective way to get this done.

Some societies had a few very rich men with many wifes. If that's just the Emperor of China or King Solomon then their typically monogamous societies still function well for raising children. But if it is common for men to have many wifes then many other men get no wife at all. I don't suppose a surplus male population is good for societal stability.

Yes. But if monogamous relationships are inherently unstable, then why were they historically stable enough to fear kids?

Are monogamous relationships historically inherently unstable? I would have thought not.

I'm sure some married men historically wished they could have more sex. But they consistently successfully raised kids. And even if there is some inherent long-term instability problem with monogamous, many societies historically solved that problem by almost completely forbidding divorce.

Modern society has various issues that I don't think are necessarily inherent. Maybe many people in 2023 are bad at long-term relationships. But not so many people in the year 1500 or 500.

Because local sexual satisfaction is not a terminal value and might even be orthogonal to survival in the type of Darwinian processes culture(s) undergoes throughout History.

Male sexual satisfaction is an infinite pit that one should never set as a goal. See blueberry porn and homosexuals.

Male sexual satisfaction is an infinite pit

That's been my experience, is it common?

Having no idea what this was I googled it.

The blueberry kink is a subgenre of several other kinks: It combines force-feeding, expansion or inflation porn (using air, water, enemas...

So that's a thing. I didn't click the links but a variety of websites offer such porn. I suppose that scene where the mean rich girl blows up like a balloon in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory made some people very horny.

I suppose that scene where the mean rich girl blows up like a balloon in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory made some people very horny.

I think that is literally where it all comes from.

A recent post by Aella goes over some statistics on marriage and relationships with a focus on the male perspective. The results are... pretty awful. It's a well-known fact that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, 70% of which are initiated by women, and that family courts are heavily biased against men. This makes marriage an inherently risky proposition, as people are putting a substantial chunk of their life on the line on what amounts to coinflip odds.

This does not surprise me at all, although divorce stats are skewed by serial offenders. Also not surprising it's initiated by women given the financial asymmetry at play. For a divorce to be initiated likely means the relationship had gone to shit well before then, so the 50% figure is probably way higher when you include relationships that are bad but not yet terminated in divorce.

Also not surprising it's initiated by women given the financial asymmetry at play

I feel like this is a factor, but I also feel like female sexuality tends to be a lot more 100-0/disgust-driven.

Male disinterest is likely to just fade into apathy in a longer term situation, whilst in my meandering experience women tend to be a whole more driven by 'The Ick' & active aversion of a previous partner when they've finally flipped the switch.

To be fair, relationships in history

In most of human history, people didn't live long past the age of 35. India's median life expectancy as late as 1945 was something like 36 years if memory serves.

In short, humans weren't meant for ultra-long relationships. That's a very recent phenomenon. Couples that have 40+ year relationships are extremely rare for good reasons. Typically, the man either has a very low libido or he is seeing prostitutes or has mistresses on the side. Or he has simply learned to suppress his desires to an unnatural extent and come to terms with it.

I don't know why our culture promotes the insane idea that marriages should last forever. It's actively harmful.

  • -24

This isn't the right approach to analyzing median life expectancy, because it overlooks the substantially higher rate of child mortality. In India in 1945, your life expectancy would be much higher than 36 if you survived your first three years of life. Child mortality pulls the mean life expectancy down, but also the median as well.

Upper class elderly are not at all a recent phenomenon. As one toy example, modern US Supreme Court Justices don't live significantly longer lives on average than Supreme Court Justices in the early 1800s.

That's not true. Average lifespan was low for most of human history due to high infant mortality rates. Life expectancy at marrying age was usually a lot higher, even if short by today's standards. Most people who married stayed married for the long haul.

In most of human history, people didn't live long past the age of 35. India's median life expectancy as late as 1945 was something like 36 years if memory serves.

This is a misunderstanding of fat tailed distributions. The mean (can't find the median) life expectancy was even worse, but this is because child mortality <5yo approached 30%. I can't find the adult mortality rate in India then (that is, the chances of dying between 15-60) but generally in history those who escaped early childood had a reasonable shot at gray hairs.

However, from evolution's perspective, it's true that the psychology of the female past the early 40s is likely pretty irrelevant. She has raised any offspring past the critical period. Maybe there is some selection effect from her acting as a wise grandmother.

Male psychology, though, remains important until old age. The male "mid life crisis" coincides with his wife's menopause, so you could infer evopsych is working specifically against lifelong monogamy.

EDIT: Lmao we're such pedants around here. I'm only the fifth person to just have to correct the life expectancy thing

EDIT: Lmao we're such pedants around here. I'm only the fifth person to just have to correct the life expectancy thing

That's a good thing. If there are five different comments pointing out the same basic, fundamental error that completely invalidates someone's conclusion, that's a sign that this person really messed up in their reasoning. It's like Twitter ratios but in Motte form.

I'll be the even more obnoxious pedant here and point out that the pedants are also wrong.

Mortality rates in the past were much higher at every age. It's not like people who survived past 5 years old went on have modern life spans. There were lots of things to trip them up. Look at the biographies of people in the pre-modern age and its littered with people who died in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc.. Very few reached 80 years of age which is the expectation of people living today in the first world who don't have obvious health or lifestyle issues.

Perhaps a person who lived to 5 might have a 50% chance of living to 50 or 60. But certainly not to 70 or 80.

As I recall from the history of great thinkers (so generally people shielded from accidental death or the extravagant diets of the aristocracy) quite a lot died in their 60s. I remember this, because it's around that age when quite a fewer "healthy-living" older people I know would have died if not for modern medicine. For example, my father was never notably ill until he was in his mid-60s.

I hate to be a still more obnoxious pedant, but I don't see anyone here claiming anything about living to the age of 70 or 80. Rather, they have said things like:

Life expectancy at marrying age was usually a lot higher [than 36], even if short by today's standards.

Or

Given relatively young ages at first marriage (often early 20s for eg medieval English peasants), a marriage of 30-40 years was not a bizarre outcome.

NP. We pendants need to stick together.

This could just as easily be ‘men who participate in polls run by prostitutes have lower relationship satisfaction’.

I am yet to see a convincing mechanistic explanation for why "men who participate in polls by prostitutes" confounds with the types of questions Aella asks. Yes, yes I know selection bias yada yada, but you need to have a working explanation of why that specific sample would be bad at answering the question as a representative of the population, the mere fact that they are not representative is not enough, the ways in which they are not representative might not be relevant at all.

Which is what I do think the case is. I think "are you sexually satisfied in your relationship" is a question that goes deep enough into the lizard brain that for the sample of Aellas readers would be different, they would have to be a different species of human!

Also if you are a Bayesian, "bad" (I'm not convinced its bad, it might be weak but I do think there is some signal) data is still better than no data, at least you can update your priors in a certain direction, or prime it to update in that direction.

There is a source of bias here that immediately comes to mind other than Aellas readers. People will be more likely to take time of of their day for a stupid survey if they have a dog in race. Which direction that works in.. I don't know.

Also if you are a Bayesian, "bad" (I'm not convinced its bad, it might be weak but I do think there is some signal) data is still better than no data,

there are like fifty lesswrong posts about how a selected subset of available data, biased by some force with unknown or known motives, is very difficult to "bayesian update". like, if the coin's probability is between .1 and .9 but you're shown a subset of 1000 of 1M flips, how is that better than no data?

(I'm not convinced its bad, it might be weak but I do think there is some signal)

Is doing all the work.

Other than 'bayesian = bad data better than no data' i agree with you, and more generally agree that basically all criticism of aella's data aren't good. I'm not a fan of surveys-as-a-way-to-learn-about-human-nature generally, but her surveys are much better than most other surveys, and will probably surface many 'meaningful correlations'.

On average, would men whose wives engage with Aella's content or women whose husbands engage with Aella's content feel more threatened by it? To me it seems obvious that it is the latter. And if so, the sample is inherently biased towards men who don't care what their wives think.

If you asked me to come up with an explanation for the possible bias, I'd say something like this: people reading a sex-adjacent blogger and responding to her polls must be hornier than average. They are more likely to be paired with a less horny spouse than a more horny one, leading to a higher reported rate of dissatisfying sexual life.

They are more likely to be paired with a less horny spouse than a more horny one, leading to a higher reported rate of dissatisfying sexual life.

Being the less horny partner can also lead to dissatisfaction with one's sexual life, so I'm not sure that follows.

How does this work in practice? "My wife keeps initiating sex, and I just can't keep up with her insatiable appetite"?

Pretty much.

Exactly so. You can't just roll onto her, waggle about for 30 seconds and be done you know? We're talking at least 20 minutes of high cardio when you have been working all day and finally get to relax and here she is, demanding sex again. Or you had sex an hour ago, but she just watched a sexy episode of love island and is in the mood again. So she starts teasing your soldier until he's ready for action, which he will be before long despite feeling like he's been beaten into a coma, and so spent ejaculation feels like passing a kidney stone.

Also, especially with younger and less experienced couples, sexual prowess can be used as a marker of the health of the relationship, so when one of them feels insecure about the relationship they initiate sex to ensure things are ok. This can turn into a vicious cycle where one partner feels like they are a bag of meat for fucking, which makes their partner insecure, which compels them to initiate sex, which makes the other partner feel like fuckmeat.

You laugh, but that can be true. Mainly it seems for the less-sexed partner, sex then becomes a chore: they have an amount of sex that satisfies them, but not their partner. Then they have to have sex if they're not in the mood, or else there is nagging and whining and passive-aggressive "well it'll be your own fault if I have an affair" at worst.

Even at best, "I'm having sex not because I want it, but because you want it", even if the less-sexed partner is happy to have sex for the purpose of emotional closeness or making their partner happy, can wear down the more-sexed partner; who likes to feel that they are being selfish and demanding and just using the person they are supposed to care about? If the other person doesn't want sex, does that mean they no longer desire you? Are they getting tired and want out of the relationship?

It seems pretty obvious to me that men who are unsatisfied with their sex lives are more likely to engage with... anything an autistic prostitute does. I don't claim that there's a good way to adjust for it, but we should probably treat this data as a reasonable upper bound rather than an average.

I am yet to see a convincing mechanistic explanation for why "men who participate in polls by prostitutes" confounds with the types of questions Aella asks. Yes, yes I know selection bias yada yada, but you need to have a working explanation of why that specific sample would be bad at answering the question as a representative of the population, the mere fact that they are not representative is not enough, the ways in which they are not representative might not be relevant at all.

I'm sure tradcons would have an obvious answer to this, and it might not be entirely wrong. (Though I don't know what a reliable poll of the state of long-term relationships among conservative religious folks would show.)

I suspect that reliable polling is fairly rare, but it does seem like religious in the sense of actually practicing people have better life and relationship outcomes in general compared to nonreligious people or religious in the sense of believing in God but only going to church on Christmas and Easter.

I think "are you sexually satisfied in your relationship" is a question that goes deep enough into the lizard brain that for the sample of Aellas readers would be different, they would have to be a different species of human!

Eh, I think "I'm regularly visiting hookers" already tells us "I'm not sexually satisfied in my relationship". We can then argue over why that is: is the relationship dull and dead, or is he just a pervy horndog who wouldn't be happy even if he married a pornstar, if he couldn't fuck around on the side?

See aella's "You don't need a perfectly random sample for useful data, jfc"

Note that the very first thing she does in that link is to warn against doing what the OP did.

But if you have good reasons to think that there's an important selection bias, then you need to take that into account in your updating.

One way to find out.

  • This Study had a mean satisfaction of 68.2% (converted from a 1-6 scale). It was higher with "Beginning Families" and lower with "Families with Teenagers".

  • This post says 58% of people have "achieved marital satisfaction".

  • This PhD blog post says "As time went on, relationship satisfaction continued to decrease at about the same rate as overall life satisfaction."

The numbers all appear to be different across the studies, but that's expected. Any way you look at it, it's a substantial fraction of unhappily married people (presumably including some men, because the other studies don't separate by gender.)

These things are super sensitive to the exact question wording so it's pretty hard to draw strong conclusions

But are we talking about "happy sex life" or "all life issues in general" when talking about "marital/relationship satisfaction"? A couple could be having sex every day of the week but be unhappy because she is a spendthrift or he never wants to get involved in organising a birthday party for his mother.

Maybe being sexually unsatisfied is just normal? Maybe there’s no reason to expect otherwise?

What baseline are we comparing against here? If you polled men in rural England in the 1500s and asked them “Are you satisfied with your sex life?” what sort of responses would you have gotten?

The "statistics" are a straw poll, not a valid sampling of the population as a whole. There's no reason to presume that they are a valid discription of general outcomes.

Not only is this not a random sample,* you can't assume that only 40% of marriages are satisfying from data that only 40% are satisfied with the sexual aspect of the marriage, despite the mild correlation you mention. Plenty of relationships end despite the sex being good, after all.

*And her linked discussion re its ostensible value changes nothing.

Yes, this was my primary objection as well. While I am not married, I have previously had long-term girlfriends who were terrible at sex, but whom I was overall net-positive satisfaction on the relationship, because they made up for it in other ways, like never giving me back-talk when I told them to make me a sandwich.

I can certainly believe that this effect would be further enhanced if children were involved. If your wife's given you six darling kids and she continues to diligently feed and clothe them (and you), you're probably going to be very pleased with your marriage even if she doesn't put on her latex dominatrix costume that much any more.

Don’t buy that in its own. You need to compare to the opposite. What’s the sex satisfaction of 40 year old single men?

From a lot of random errant 'Me as a single late-twenty something talking to married forty-something coworkers' conversations, I feel like the longterm married/coupled POV can be dissatisfied with their sex lives on account of rather misunderstanding the current moment in singledom.

I've had way too many chats with schlubby 45 year old middle-managers who seem to be convinced that Tinder is a cornucopia of casual sex for everyman and/or that they'd be able to be a 'chad'. Admittedly I've also seen the same play out more than a few times with younger longterm committed friends who've tried opening relationships and/or breaking up with their SOs to sample the market and found themselves deep in the shit.

100%. I honestly think this is one of reasons it's valuable to have some non-monogamous options on the table in a long-term relationship - it helps combat the 'grass is greener' phenomenon if you're occasionally allowed to leave your house and check out the neighbourhood. And generally speaking, these days the neighbourhood is a burning valley of cinder and radioactive ash. Maybe you find an intact tin of beans or something but you're mostly relieved to rush back into your cosy warm home.

I don't think even a fully-fledged non monogamous option is required for that. A bit of flirting with nonpartners here or there might just satiate the urge, after all a lot of the thrill is in the chase and flirting is enjoyable in and of itself even without it culminating in sex.

It does seem like playing with fire though. The people who actually have options will also be the ones who can afford to turn the side option into a main option, and you end up in a worse hellscape than the current one purely pushed by people on the margins making use of the new state of things and those not capable building a defense mechanism for it. Which is why I (hypothetically) think anything more than flirting should still be tabooed.

I'd go further: just don't spend too much time around your woman. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. One of the most awful things about growing up is gradually but inescapably discovering that my parents have an intense sexual relationship, even in their retirements, despite being nerds and squares. The best explanation I have is that they don't spend a lot of time around each other (they have lots of other friends and far more hobbies than they can pursue in a 365-day year) and so there's a spark of excitement when they actually spend time alone. They also had 3 kids and now have grandchildren they like to babysit, which also presumably limited their opportunities to spend time alone.

(And I hope that's the last time I have to think so much about my parents screwing in this thread.)

Companionate love blossoms with spending time together, but for keeping things alive in bed, I would guess that spending plenty of time apart is a good thing. The greatest danger for monogamous sex is the loss of a sense of it being special. For all their squarishness, bordering on puritanism, my parents always tried to impose on me the sense that sex is very, very special, and that the reason why not being promiscuous is important is not that sex isn't important, but that it's one of the most important things that humans can do.

I don't even think that's necessarily a good idea.

The vast majority of male-initiated open relationships I seen have turned into absolute clusterfucks when the guy realizes how gigantic the gulf is between his & her access to casual sexual partners.

That sounds like horrible advice, and an extremely cruel thing to do to someone who loves you / you claim to love.

Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that one did it without one's partner's knowledge and consent. And of course it won't work for all relationship dynamics. But I think more couples in general could benefit from having (explicit) loose rules around occasional dalliances outside the relationship.

Well, I actually think knowledge and "consent" is likely to be worse than straight up cheating.

This already happens in some places. In certain places, the overwhelming majority of sex worker clients are married. And a high enough % of men do use sex workers.

There might be utility in it being implicit/explicit or taboo/accepted but this arrangement does seem to be at least somewhat of a stable equilibrium.

It's not infinitely stable, but neither is long-term monogamy if this survey is worth anything at all.

My black pilled theory is that no stable equilibrium exists in terms of mutual sexual fulfillment, it's a privilege if you find yourself in one. https://www.themotte.org/post/411/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/76905?context=8#context

Plenty of things are already happening, and are stable equilibriums, but somehow I don't see people sugggest that it's important to, say, go out and mug someone every once in a while.

I imagine it can work if both parties are honest about it and the understanding is "you just wander off now and again to fuck someone" so long as there are no feelings attached. If it's a regular affair, that could really be a problem. And if you fall in love with new fling and want to divorce - yeah, that's the Jeff Bezos story.

But it does seem to work for some couples - see Alan and Jane Clark. He was a notorious philanderer, she stood by him (mainly by characterising the other women as floozies and sluts, too low-class to be any real threat to her):

In 1958, Clark, aged 30, married 16-year-old (Caroline) Jane, daughter of Colonel Leslie Brindley Bream Beuttler OBE of the Duke of Wellington's Regiment and a descendant on her mother's side of the Scottish ornithologist William Robert Ogilvie-Grant, grandson of the 6th Earl of Seafield. They were married for 41 years and had two sons.

While involved in the Matrix Churchill trial he was cited in a divorce case in South Africa, in which it was revealed he had had affairs with Valerie Harkess, the wife of a South African barrister, and her daughters, Josephine and Alison. After sensationalist tabloid headlines, Clark's wife Jane remarked upon what Clark had called "the coven" with the line: "Well, what do you expect when you sleep with below-stairs types?" She referred to her husband as an "S, H, one, T".

I can imagine it working in a political marriage, or of some other kind of convenience, but how many people here are likely to end up in one? For everyone else, I unironically believe this is one of the cases where it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. If nothing else, don't mindfuck people into "agreeing" to something that's going to hurt them.

If nothing else, don't mindfuck people into "agreeing" to something that's going to hurt them.

Absolutely that. It only ends badly for everyone, because the resentful partner will not tolerate such behaviour for long, and the partner who thinks they'll be swimming in pussy (or male attention, works both ways) may find they've broken up a functioning relationship and still get nothing in return.

As for "forgiveness not permission", I think if you can have flings and keep it secret from your partner and they never, ever, find out about any of them, then it works. But if you have a fling or flings and your partner finds out, they'll be hurt. Even if they forgive you, it'll probably be conditional on "and this never happens again" and if you're having flings because you're unhappy with your sex life, it's more likely than not going to happen again.

So if you promise "never again", continue to have flings, and get caught out the second time, it's all ruined. You're a liar and a cheater, they're leaving you!

And if you're honest about "our sex life is so boring I need this", that's another level of hurt and anger and may wreck the relationship anyway.

So if you promise "never again", continue to have flings, and get caught out the second time, it's all ruined. You're a liar and a cheater, they're leaving you!

I know this isn't what people who are into polyamory are gunning for, but this is exactly why I think it's the better option. Let your significant other have some moral clarity, instead of wrecking their brain with "I agreed to this".

For some people it does seem to work, but that seems to be a subset of "we're weird in various ways anyway". The kind of people who couldn't have a conventional, and successful, relationship. I honestly don't understand what the difference is between "solo poly" and "sleeping around", but hey, I'm not in those circles.

For other people, the default is monogamy and that's why cheating is seen as so destructive. And even if you get your partner to agree (and I see some stories of people who nagged a partner into trying poly or an open relationship or the likes), it may not work out well; one or both of you may be unhappy, one of you may be getting all the new dates and the other gets jealous, one of you falls in love and breaks up the relationship and so on.

It's tough. I think a lot of people go into relationships genuinely intending to be faithful and committed, then after a while when everything is just normal and commonplace routine, they get a wandering eye and want something new and different. I think a lot of affairs happen because people are just stupid (that's being human, we're all stupid at times) and then it gets found out and there is Drama.

If you honestly can't keep it in your (gender-neutral) pants, then be honest with your partner (unless you are so super-organised you can juggle all the balls and never ever get caught out, but honesty is still morally better).


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