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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36344 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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MIRI Researcher Don’t be a Quokka Challenge (IMPOSSIBLE).

Katja Grace posts “date me” document. Asks everyone to share.

I originally posted a similar link in the small-scale-questions thread in response to Tyler Cowen linking to the doc on MarginalRevolution. What I didn’t know at the time is that Katja apparently wants this to be spread everywhere?!?!?

Object-level thoughts: I quite liked it. The document makes a compelling case that will appeal strongly to a certain demographic of men. It’s pretty much exactly what you would expect from “mid-30s Bay Area rationalist woman ready to settle down and have kids,” expanded out into a full dating profile. It certainly caught my attention.

Meta-level thoughts: OH NO WHAT ARE YOU DOING? You can send out something like this to your blog readers. They’ll know how to interpret it, and they’re the kind of people you’d be interested in anyways. You can’t toss it out into the black void that is Twitter and expect to come out unscathed. She even dropped her personal email address at the end. Guess who’s going to need a new Gmail account next week?

”If you don’t hear back in two weeks, feel free to try again, or try other means.”

Protip: If you are a woman, do not ever put something like this in your dating profile. This will be used as an excuse for some weirdo on the edge of sanity to stalk you.

I feel bad for her getting dragged in the quote tweets, but like, what did she expect? Why, in response to getting a negative reaction, is she intent on spreading it even further? That’s the opposite of what she should be doing. Everyone who would be compatible with her has already seen it.

Protip: If you are a woman, do not ever put something like this in your dating profile. This will be used as an excuse for some weirdo on the edge of sanity to stalk you.

You're assuming that she doesn't want to be stalked, though, and...

Pro sincere enthusiasms. I listen to hymns a lot (here’s my favorite). I like patriotic anthems, and poems about going to war. I don’t like irony or use of the word ‘cringe’.

Fan of love. I’m not into loving less out of concern for looking lame. I think loving is cool, even if unrequited, or ridiculous, or in the face of a mountain of flaws.

Have a truly excessive amount of sex while falling madly in love with one other

...I see no compelling evidence of that. There's definitely a population of women who want that; Twilight hit bestseller status for a reason.

(Spreading it as widely as she did, though, is still not logistically a good idea since it increases the risk of getting herself 2+ stalkers and the accompanying free Nice Boat.)

Should you date Katja Grace?

This is long and not as edited as you might hope, but you don’t need to read it! Read as much as is helpfully evocative, then if interested skip to the end.

Basic dating facts

  • Female, bi
  • 36, relatively unfussed re age of partner

You can stop reading right there. No man of any quality is going to commit to a woman in her mid thirties when he could just as easily get a woman in her mid twenties.

Jim was right again. From "Fertility":

My unmarried niece failed to show up at my son’s wedding. I complained to her mother, observing that she has no life, so no excuse for not turning up.

Her mother, who is my elder sister, was somewhat indignant about this and alleged that my niece had a boyfriend. I commented that since my niece was too old to be fertile, her boyfriend was not serious, unlikely to become a husband, and may well be a boyfriend only in my niece’s energetic imagination.

At this my sister went apocalyptic, claiming that women can go on having children forever, or for a very long time, and that women remain attractive to potential new husbands forever, although her own life should have disabused her of this theory. (She foolishly divorced her high socioeconomic status husband, and expected to remarry swiftly, and remarry someone of equal or higher socioeconomic status, despite two kids in tow and a past history of … behavior unsuitable for a wife.)

It would seem that the male belief that fertility and attractiveness decline rapidly once a woman reaches a certain age is phallocentric and oppressive.

Equality means that female ovaries have the same functional lifetime as male testicles, which is logical, and, like equality itself, insane.

So here follows a public service announcement for women:

Ovaries dry up a lot quicker than testicles. At age thirty six two fifths of women are infertile, and most of the women that are theoretically fertile have a hard time getting pregnant, plus there is a substantially higher risk of the pregnancy going wrong. So you should have your babies before thirty six. If planning three babies two years apart, need to get pregnant at thirty one. If pregnant at thirty one, married at thirty. Which is why your prospects for getting married plunge abruptly at thirty, because any potential husbands are doing the same arithmetic. Yes, some woman you know got pregnant and married at forty four – but your chances of being that woman are not good.

Getting married and having kids is going to deep six your career to the same extent regardless whether you marry at eighteen or thirty five. Being successful in your career makes you less attractive to men, because of the higher divorce risk, bitchiness risk, and infidelity risk of successful career women. You can always do the career thing later. You cannot do the baby thing later. Male doctors marry nurses. They do not marry female doctors.

From "The false life plan":

Men and women are happiest if successfully performing their traditional roles. This is to be expected, since whites and east asians, the descendents of civilizations, are descended from those that did perform their traditional roles.

The Cathedral, however, presents girls, in school and on television, with a false life plan: That they will follow the same path as males, and marriage and family will just spontaneously happen while they are fucking Jeremy Meeks.

...

I was talking to a mother about her highly “successful” lawyerette daughter, remarking that this child had reached an age where marriage had long been unlikely, and children were now becoming unlikely. The mother was outraged at such horribly reactionary crime think. I never got around to discussing the fact her very high IQ lawyerette daughter had spent her youth, her beauty, and her fertile years fucking stony broke losers, many of them low IQ, many of them loser criminals. (Successful criminals know that politeness is cheaper than violence and you need to be particularly pleasant and respectful to police, even if violence is sometimes necessary, so successful criminals don’t clean up with girls the way dumb loser criminals on their way to jail do.) Her mother attempted to introduce her daughter to more suitable males, but her daughter complained that these males of her own economic class simply did not turn her on.

...

Consider the reality show star Kate Gosselin, woman has eight children by a decent, reasonably attractive husband, who loves her and loves his children. Acts like a complete shrew towards the only man who will ever love her and her children. Ditches him. Is shocked to discover that no other male wants a woman past her prime and encumbered with eight children.

Kate Gosselin was videotaped continually treating her husband like dirt, as the man she reluctantly settled for seeing as all her preferred choices would not return her phone calls.

She then divorced him, depriving him of his much loved children, depriving her eight children of a much needed father, and herself of a much needed and entirely irreplaceable husband.

And I have seen a similar dynamic in every divorce that I have observed, though of course with considerably fewer children. In every divorce that I have observed the wife was utterly and spectacularly out of contact with marriage market realities. The result of the divorce is that the man, who very much did not want the divorce, was much better off, free of a hateful and unfaithful shrew, and the wife was very much worse off. As the wife goggles fell from his eyes, he usually found a considerably younger replacement.

At the age of thirty eight, with eight children and a notorious shrew, Kate Gosselin’s chances of marrying even a homeless obese seventy year old alcoholic are about equal to her chances of being kidnapped by terrorists and becoming the wife of the sultan, but she specifically requires her new husband to be rich, six foot tall, physically fit, and childless. (Her previous husband was not rich, not six foot tall, and only ordinarily fit, which is presumably why she divorced him.)

Meanwhile her husband, Jon Gosselin, the father of her children, having lost the wife goggles, promptly got a hot twenty two year old girlfriend to replace his aging thirty eight year old wife, and if the girlfriend is lucky, might marry her. But then, having been burned once, maybe not.

The typical marriage is Kate Gosselin and Jon Gosselin: The wife has a hugely inflated idea of her marriage market value (based on her F-buddy market value when she was considerably younger) and this poisons the marriage.

...

Because male attractiveness and fertility fades far more slowly than female attractiveness and fertility, most divorces advantage the male and disadvantage the female, but most divorces are female initiated, and most females initiating divorce have expectations as unrealistic as those of Kate Gosselin. This is part of the false life plan – that females supposedly remain fertile and attractive for as long as men do, so concentrate on your career, girl, the way men do.

And from "Jobs and education make women ugly and unattractive":

Women find jobs and education attractive in men, so mistakenly and foolishly think that men will find jobs and education attractive in women. They find arrogance, cruelty, sexual promiscuity, and assholery attractive in men, so mistakenly and foolishly think that men will find arrogance, cruelty, sexual promiscuity, and assholery attractive in women.

What men like is primarily youth and fertility, but close second to this is kindness, fidelity, humility, and obedience. “Will this woman”, the man subconsciously thinks, “look after me and my children?”

A woman has all her life to do jobs and education, but limited time to get married and start a family. After thirty, she is not so hot any more, still bangable, but no fun for a long term relationship. She is also running out of eggs. After age thirty she can still have children, but there is a rapidly rising chance that she will not be able to have as large a family as she or her husband might wish. After forty, high chance she will not be able to have any children at all. And after forty, well, there are some men that will bang forty year old women, but most men would prefer whiskey, porn, and whores if a forty year old woman was the only alternative. Old men seldom marry old women. I am pretty old, and infamously indiscriminate about which women I bang (if it goes up, it goes in) but I don’t bang forty year old women, and there is a limit to how many times I will bang a woman in her thirties, unless she is exceptionally good looking for a thirty year old.

...

The worst part of jobs and education is that they suck up time that a woman should use to get married and have a family, but they also tend to mark up a woman’s face.

If a woman goes to college, and does not nail down her future husband in the first year, she is going to wind up banging a long succession of charismatic alpha males, and getting dumped by a long succession of alpha males, resulting in the infamous thousand cock stare, and the thousand cock stare is chillingly ugly.

Highly educated women get married less, get divorced more, and have fewer children than less educated women.

And then she goes to work.

Men need to be needed. Men do not want an independent woman. And being an independent woman hardens a woman’s face.

Women in high socioeconomic status jobs get married less, get divorced more, fuck around more before, during, and after marriage, and have fewer children than woman with low socioeconomic status jobs.

No man of any quality is going to commit to a woman in her mid thirties when he could just as easily get a woman in her mid twenties.

I unironically enjoy your periodic links to shock jock reactionary essays, but a weird blindspot of yours is that there are loads of non-quality men out there. They have to settle for less than a virginal sweet-natured 20yo tradwife just as Katja will have to settle for someone not exactly off the cover of a harlequin romance novel.

One thing I’m not seeing discussed on the spread it wide thing is perhaps she doesn’t actually want what she says she want.

Maybe she wants the hypothetical alpha who will see her good traits and decide that’s better for children than the Victoria Secret model.

This is the default female desire, so I agree with the high prior. But this criterion is optimized pretty well by standard female dating strategy.

What Katja is doing is very much not standard female dating strategy, so I don’t think she’s optimizing for the “hypothetical alpha” as you or I would see it.

She says she is a very online person and can deal with the hate, so she will be fine.

More interesting I found the exchange between gwern and Scott on /r/slatestarcodex

Gwern argued that dateMe.docs are a waste as they repel more than attract, Scott disagreed strongly and they are a good tool for filtering and have a high chance to find romance (Also Scott revealed that a few years ago he had a poly thing with her, so of course he took her side). Both didn't budge.

Gwern also linked to the inventor Putanomonit (who stole it from Aella really), who has a blog post about how dateMe.docs should not be used as "advertisment" (the same as a tinder profile) but as an application (send to a specific person/group of people).

https://putanumonit.com/2022/09/02/date-me-doc/

The issue at the heart of date-me docs is the same as that of dating profiles: the first thing they put forward about you is your desperation to find a date and inability to do so through the usual channels. This desperation and frustration are the absolute least attractive things about you. And while on dating apps this is ameliorated by the fact that anyone reading your profile admits to being in the same boat, putting your plea for TFW GF on platforms like Twitter where people go for mockery and indignation will, in fact, likely earn you some mockery and indignation.

Gwern argued that dateMe.docs are a waste as they repel more than attract, Scott disagreed strongly...

I was surprised to read Scott would weigh in so heavily on a topic that appeared to be... pretty dumb and lightweight. So I looked up the thread, since it wasn't linked in your comment. Scott replies twice in a row, then doubles down! What the heck? Scrolling down further, we find:

I dated Katja for two years and can say with confidence...

Ah. Scott is Katja's ex boyfriend. Much is made clear.

It really drives home the fact that yes, these people are in fact all fucking each other.

dateMe.docs should not be used as "advertisment" (the same as a tinder profile) but as an application (send to a specific person/group of people).

This was my intuition as well, which is why my first thought when seeing the MR post was, “who leaked this?”

Very personal opinion-y, but I also generally feel that males have more of a reason to do this kind of a profile, especially in the rat-sphere.

They're more prone to having the lack of social awareness and/or dating options that'd lead to it seeming to be a good idea. There's plenty of males who flat-out cannot get laid therefore a hail mary makes more sense.

This woman can get laid. She likely knows candidates who would make for a broadly acceptable solution to her problem that she's either implicitly or explicitly rejected. She should know better in terms of social etiquette. The problems that currently result in her singleness are likely a combination of pickiness, filtering and refusal to compromise on the Polyamory thing.

This raises the question - if following the "rationality" in life wins you much less than being a typical non-enlightened trad-wife in a typical non-woke society does, then what behaviour is truly rational? Consequentialism is rational they say, right?

It's a bit subjective sure, but it's very obvious to me personally than this sad state of loneliness, empty and infantile thoughts and talks about making the world better, constant painful rat wheel of self reflection and psychologists to replace friends and so many more which i completely non-charitably imply from this ladies document. It all is much worse than the full family with 3+ children at 40, very trivial and non-enlightened down to earth thoughts about children, their education, clothes, food and holidays. When you simply don't have time or energy for do-gooder bullshit. In the non-woke society where societal norms are working and where you know how to do things and achieve good results just by blindly following the norms.

Presumably she doesn't want to be an unenlightened trad wife. She wants tech work, polycules and now also children. Suppose by her standards it is the unenlightened trad wife who lives a meager life.

I recall reading of some research a few years back that found that countries with higher measures of feminism also tended to have lower measures of overall life satisfaction in women. As a feminist myself, it definitely gave me pause; if the feminist project was empirically not allowing women to have more satisfying lives than otherwise, then what was the point*? Obviously "feminism" is a term that can mean different things in different contexts to different people, and some have said that it's about the liberation and emancipation of women as a class, and for those people, I suppose they just don't care about women's life satisfaction as long as this class-based liberation is achieved. For me personally, it's about the equality between sexes (not a precise statement, but then again, ideologies are rarely all that precise), and in that context, perhaps I ought not care about the life satisfaction of women. I'm reminded of a quote I've heard somewhere, "you'll get equality, and you'll get it hard and good."

This and reading Scott Alexander's review of Seeing Like the State which was greatly about the disadvantages of central planning due to missing out on local contextual knowledge (to vastly oversimplify it), it led me to thinking that if something like life satisfaction or happiness is a priority at all, there's a lot of value to following along with "traditional" things, rather than coming up with the correct ways to do things rationally from first principles. The level of complexity involved in engineering a good life is beyond the ability of most (all?) humans if they take the latter approach, and there's a lot of knowledge encoded in these traditions that are difficult to notice and even more difficult to replicate artificially. And yet traditional methods are full of pitfalls as well; I think the "rational" approach would be to take a harsh but fair analysis of traditional methods and make careful incremental changes in an effort to carefully drain the bathwater without tossing the baby. And simultaneously replacing it with carefully vetted and verifiably cleaner bathwater, to continue the analogy.

*Of course, there are many ways to spin such a stat such as how greater freedom leads to greater knowledge of one's own disenfranchisement which leads to lesser life satisfaction. But as someone biased in favor of feminism, I'm consciously hesitant to accept such epicycles that is flattering to an ideology I follow; I'd rather take the interpretation that's most detrimental to my ideology, which happens to be the most straightforward one in this example.

if following the "rationality" in life wins you much less than being a typical non-enlightened trad-wife in a typical non-woke society does, then what behaviour is truly rational?

This is a pretty good summary of what "postmodernism" is all about.

It's a bit subjective sure, but it's very obvious to me personally than this sad state of loneliness, empty and infantile thoughts and talks about making the world better, constant painful rat wheel of self reflection and psychologists to replace friends and so many more which i completely non-charitably imply from this ladies document. It all is much worse than the full family with 3+ children at 40, very trivial and non-enlightened down to earth thoughts about children, their education, clothes, food and holidays. When you simply don't have time or energy for do-gooder bullshit. In the non-woke society where societal norms are working and where you know how to do things and achieve good results just by blindly following the norms.

Eh, you can frame anything in a negative light like this is if one so chose. Just as one could unfavourably compare the much maligned 'cat lady' to the wholesome rural wife, one could do the exact opposite and unfavourably compare the put-upon housewife who lives in a drudgery of unstimulating household tasks, where for every one minute playing with her kids in the garden she must endure many many more minutes of boring domestic chores, who as Betty Friedan put it looks around her laundry, cooking and cleaning and asks herself whether this is all there is to her life, to the successful career woman who commands greater respect among male peers, is independent and stands on her own two feet and contemplates the deeper questions in life. This is also a wildly oversimplistic picture to be sure, but no more so than yours and surely equally plausible.

Indeed, no-one would make the equivalent observation for men with such certainty as you did. Would anyone say that Buchanan or Ted Heath had wasted and lonely lives because they never married? Of course not

Wasn't Ted Heath a closeted homosexual?

Perhaps not wasted and lonely, but missing something fundamental. Procreating and raising children with your spouse seeing yourselves in your children is to many couples with children the whole point.

Wasn't Ted Heath a closeted homosexual?

No-one knows really. Some think he was closeted, some think just straight and unmarried, and I think I saw one or two of his cabinet colleagues in a documentary from ages ago say with some confidence that they thought he was really asexual.

missing something fundamental

They were certainly missing something, but I'm not really sure how 'fundamental' it was; no-one can enjoy all possible human experiences.

This is also a wildly oversimplistic picture to be sure, but no more so than yours and surely equally plausible.

Okay, those two pictures are equally plausible you say. What about 100+ years of "social progress" which went into one picture and is missing from another. Was that social progress achieving something really important?

I think so because whatever one might say about social pressures, in general there is a much greater degree of choice; it's not as if the avenue of being a homemaker has been closed off, and it does seem an important element of social progress that women are freer to choose something else if they so want.

I think pretty often about how many of the great novels and films of the 20s - 70s were about the emptiness and anomie of the suburban family lifestyle that is oft extolled as the height of human civilization.

I think the primary reason for this is that normal, well-adjusted people don’t write introspective novels. The great literature and televisual media from the 20th century was almost entirely written by people who felt like outsiders for whatever reason; maybe it’s just that mid-century Anglosphere society was ruthlessly optimized to maximize the happiness and contentment of average, normie people, and was destined to be destroyed and subverted by the very people for whom it could not possibly provide a satisfying life. Nobody wrote a novel from the perspective of the high-school bully, the contented stay-at-home mother of four, or the guy who muddled through school with middling grades and got a dull but remunerative blue collar job.

Is the life more full now do you think?

No. Original sin, life is suffering, dukkha, the Kaliyuga, the age of aquarius, the end of the five ages of man, the hedonic treadmill, late capitalism. Whatever you want to attribute it to human happiness strikes me as mostly unchanged across time periods outside of acute crises and tail risks.

It's called PsyOps.

Rationalist aren't 100% rational. They're slightly more rational than average. And they didn't get there because of the consequentialist advantages of rationalism, but because their thinking abilities are their individual greatest strength, and they try to lean into that by emphasizing the importance of reason in whatever socially approved context they find themselves in. In the progressive western world, the nominally most important context is "saving the world", so that's the basket they try to place their eggs in.

In other words, rationalists like all humans are primarily social animals, but they're also relatively socially awkward, and their reasoning abilities are what they try to compensate with. Given the many dysfunctions of their society, all their reasoning will rarely amount to more than dysfunctional results.

That's my take, anyways.

Mr. Yudkowsky would agree with you, as he wrote an essay titled: "Rationality is Systematized Winning".

Sure and i fully agree, however he stops the train of consequences on the winning part. The life goes on, though. Let's say you chose the box B, got a billion dollars price, won the game and died couple of years later from the alcoholism after severe depression as a result of lacking the meaning in life. I think in a sense it's more in line with actual life/society problems than just stopping at the winning. So was it rational to win the game? The consequences aren't great.

The western society already "won" the game i can argue. The consequences however can possibly be worse than losing it. Consequentialism seems very non-rational to me in that regard. Consequences aren't stopping at any point till the end of time, where are we stopping the time to calculate our utility function?

If you believe that you have decent chances of going into severe depression from a billion dollars... then don't get a billion dollars?

Or, more likely, you take the billion dollars and donate it, because even if it would mess with you to have that much money available.. you can still get a lot out of it.

I don't understand your complaint for consequentialism. You take actions with respect to what you believe. An action can have bad consequences even if you think it will likely have good ones.. so what?

You take actions based on your beliefs about their consequences, which you try to make as accurate as you can given your time. For most people, I think that they would actually benefit from a billion dollars (despite the meme that rich people are somehow worse-off). This can end up badly, like it making you a target of scammers, but you try to model that when you make your decision. However, a sliver of rationality is also noticing when you're failing to get what you want: if a billion dollars was making you unhappy, then donate it or restrict yourself to more limited amounts of money (because you need some degree of a required job or something).

If you have reason to believe your traditional roles are very likely good methods for winning, then you likely follow those. I don't run up to the mountain lion, because I have knowledge from cultural background that mountain lions are dangerous. However, a modern american (especially a rationalist) is unlikely to actually want to do the 'tradwife' lifestyle. I imagine most people are like this, actually, but that we don't have enough slack or availability of options for them to reach for what they really-really-want.

I normally browse the motte by looking at the recent comments and going through context from there. But for the last 15 hours, it seems there was nothing but this topic. Can someone lay out why a dating ad is so interesting to people?

Catty bickering gossip is always going to be one of the most popular topics for us fallible meatbags to engage in.

-- Young men who are having trouble dating love seeing their theories proven by a promiscuous woman entering middle age having trouble dating.

-- Trad people have to point out that she's miserable because she's quite aggressively not trad. It's not hard to argue from the evidence provided.

-- Any time you post personal facts on the internet, you get mocked. She's probably a perfectly average woman, but on the internet people whose last five sexual partners average a full point below her will say she's hideously ugly. I once made the mistake, during a Covid discussion in /r/stupidpol (of all places), of mentioning that by BMI I was overweight and that I wondered if the BMI increased risk even though I lifted/climbed/ran a marathon that year. The whole thread turned into a dogpile of stupidpol-ers (of all people) telling me my lifts were dogshit and I was probably really fat and lying to myself. Say anything about yourself personally on the internet and you'll get shit on.

-- There is a contingent of people that just hates when other people try to do something in a "cheesy" way, especially if cheesy succeeds for that person.

-- The ad was almost certainly designed with hooks (spirituality? Really?) To get people to argue about it, therefore making it more likely to be spread, therefore getting more eyeballs on it. Once the doc is a spectacle, someone will reply to her, inevitably. If she's "pure" bi, possibly a woman, in which case a lot of the dynamics are quite different. Celebrities, even internet celebrities, who can't get laid don't exist.

If an ageing single woman expresses complaints and frustrations about the human mating marketplace of a post-patriarchal Western society, especially if she’s middle-class and educated, the only people willing to assign any meaningful responsibility to her for her own misfortune will be anonymous though criminals on marginal online platforms. This is such a place, so all the thought criminals here seem to be eager to dismiss her (for good reason), because this cannot be done in mainstream discourse, plus (as in most such cases) it’s simply low-hanging fruit.

If an ageing single woman expresses complaints and frustrations about the human mating marketplace

She did not do this, though. I have the sense that some of the people here who are being negative towards her did not even look at her document.

Well, I'm sorry but yes, if you're a single childless 36-yr-old woman posting such a document openly, it means that, in effect, yes, she's complaining about her experiences in the mating/dating market.

We accidentally stepped on a scissor statement.

If her pitch/approach were twenty percent more cringey and she were four years older, everyone would agree this a sad and sympathetic case of someone with unrealistic expectations who missed the boat. Move in the other direction, and no one would think to remark on it — an everyday case of a career-focused woman settling down.

But it straddles the line just so, leaving room to get outraged that other people are binning her in a category you think it's ridiculous to bin her in. Accusations of misogyny go to accusations of white-knighting go to accusations of I-bet-you're-no-prize-yourself-partner etc etc.

In the immortal words of Uma Thurman: When you little scamps get together, you’re worse than a sewing circle.

Oooo that's a deep cut ;-)

I'll be honest, if this were a granede, it would explode while I was still holding it, as I love good gossip and drama myself. But people are taking it way too far. Not to mention, this isn't supposed to be a place for it to begin with.

Why, in response to getting a negative reaction, is she intent on spreading it even further? That’s the opposite of what she should be doing.

Really? She's deciding on what may be her final companion for the rest of her life, can cast the net as far as she wants and she's supposed to restrain herself because a few ****'s don't like it?

Everyone who would be compatible with her has already seen it.

How is this obvious to you. Are there not viral trends even within rationalist circles that you sometimes miss entirely?

I'm not exactly above calling out women's failure modes, but I really don't get the negativity of comments about it. Seems like i've underestimated the the prevalence of sheer gratuitous cruelty in the rat-adjacent scene.

Seems like i've underestimated the the prevalence of sheer gratuitous cruelty in the rat-adjacent scene.

It might just be the word sheer, but this seems to me an even bigger overreaction than quantum's post. He liked her post but thought it was unwise! That post doesn't seem cruel at all to me, let alone gratuitously so. Or do you mean other posts you've seen?

That said, I agree with the rest of your post - once you have rolled the dice you might as well play to win, and there are probably a decent number of motters who would be compatible with her who wouldn't know she existed if not for the op.

That said, I agree with the rest of your post - once you have rolled the dice you might as well play to win, and there are probably a decent number of motters who would be compatible with her who wouldn't know she existed if not for the op.

Oh, yeah I was refering to other posts, should've made that clearer.

God damn, I hadn't read the rest of the thread at the time, this thing went... places.

The simple answer for women who makes such lists is : "If you cared that much, you would've found someone 10 years ago."

Truth is, her interests are so niche, that she could do a stake out in a couple of known locations and easily find the man she is looking for. Bay Area ACX meetups & AI conferences are chock full of these kinds of men. Most importantly, these kinds of men will be found almost no where else. So why make a twitter post about it ? It's like planting cameras around the world for kangaroos to expand your likelihood of getting a hit, when you're already in Australia. Hers is such a sub-optimal strategy, that any "man with good judgement" is immediately going to run in the opposite direction. It might work, but not because it's well advised. It's the Bay Area ! A woman could fart in a general direction, and there would be a line of men waiting to smell her fragrance.

Women also fail to understand what 'poly' means. A man needs to do a ton of work to successfully convince a bunch of women to have a non-committed sexual relationship with him. Winner take all situations with men, mean that a man who can regularly have sex with >2 women (esp. in the bay area) can just as easily have sex with >10 women too. On the other hand, a man who juts barely landed a committed partner, has no chance of finding casual partners. Additionally, there isn't much of a middle ground. So there are only 3 kinds of happy bay-area men in poly relationships. Cucks, Chads who fuck everything that moves, and swingers where each partner helps bring prospective mates for their primary partner. (ie. she has to help find sexual partners for him). Chads have much higher standards, which mean that unless she is the kind to help find mates for her poly partner, she will be stuck with a cuck.

She wrote a whole lot, without saying anything.

Honesty

Interest in making the world better

Potential for close and collaborative relationship

Good judgment

Yeah duh. Name one person who doesn't want that in a half-decent partner............

If she is that forward, then the one question she should answer is : "Why have you been unsuccessful in finding someone for so long?"

Every single one of my non-ugly, smart, tech-nerdy female friends found an excellent long term tech guy partner who would meet all the requirements that Katja mentions. All within a few months of graduating from grad school. These women are every bit as direct, quirky and nerdy as Rats. But, they are smart enough to go through their networks, and quickly found a fully-vetted single guy within their Bay Area community.

The simple answer for women who makes such lists is : "If you cared that much, you would've found someone 10 years ago."

The simple answer to that is the dual mating strategy. She spent her 20s hooking up with hot (for her social circle) man, and now that she's in her 30s she wants to settle down with a stable (for her social circle) man. Since her social circle is male-heavy Bay Area rats, it's likely to be successful.

"Why have you been unsuccessful in finding someone for so long?"

This is exactly the key question. It's a combination of (1) doesn't seriously want to make the sacrifices that a serious relationship entails, (2) standards are too high, and (3) has some undisclosed issues that people don't like.

I spent my first 4 years in the Bay Area being incredibly slutty and pretty much constantly sleeping with a rotation of many "high value" women concurrently, basically up to my time capacity to do it. I would express to people that I wanted to settle down into a serious relationship, but until I met my fiancee, I stayed in my slutty phase way past when I started saying I wanted to have a serious relationship.

As I got and older, women asking the question "why are you still single" became less and less of a flirty compliment and more and more of an actual question. The answer for me and for almost all cases like this was some combination of the above, and I know it when I see it in other people.

Fortunately for men, their dating market value takes a long time to start seriously declining, and they can get out of the slut phase while their value is still increasing. In consequence, they can "settle down" with a partner who is near or above the upper envelope of the women they've been with. For women the decline tends to start much sooner and so the slut phase can become a slut trap, where their realistic options for settling down are worse in expectation than the guys they've been hooking up, which discourages settling.

It’s also possible that her social circle is particularly unusable/ineffective in this regard for whatever reason (it’s full of singles with low social skills, the sex ratio is lopsided etc.), that she moved a lot with her family in her youth so she has no established social circle to begin with. It’s also possible that she’s simply unaware of the reality of the biological clock.

On the other hand, a man who juts barely landed a committed partner, has no chance of finding casual partners.

Do you live in opposite world? The "vetting" meme is real: already having a gf is the best pussy magnet (outside of having several millions of dollars).

[Edit: for speak-plainly purposes, the vetting meme is the idea that women are more attracted to men who already have committed partners because the presence of the committed partner demonstrates ex facie that he is capable of satisfying a woman (in all social, financial, and sexual spheres). It is both a costly signal, and proof that he is indeed boyfriend material.]

The poster was specifically talking about men who can just barely land a committed partner.

Makes no difference. Women's intuition isn't so great that they can see the thread his relationship's hanging by. What they can see is the fact that he's got a relationship.

I do feel that this is a bit more complicated than it appears, though.

I've had a plethora of friends who've used the 'girls are more into me since I've got a relationship, I should try opening the relationship, oh wait it was all an illusion' kinda strategy for fucking themselves over. Girls are definitely more attentive when they're in a relationship, but a certain amount of that is being marked as 'safe for harmless flirtation/interest' which doesn't necessarily last when there's a actual outlet.

Aka preselection and female mate-choice copying.

It’s like job searching: The best way to get more offers is to already have at least one.

I generally agree with you but I think your analysis of men finding partners is a bit off.

Winner take all situations with men, mean that a man who can regularly have sex with >2 women (esp. in the bay area) can just as easily have sex with >10 women too. On the other hand, a man who juts barely landed a committed partner, has no chance of finding casual partners.

There's a big difference in difficulty between getting an high value woman and a low value woman(value being a combined metric of stuff like intelligence, appearance, conversational skill, mental stability, etc.) There are plenty of men who can just barely land a committed high value woman but can have regular hook ups with low value women.

What would be a "point-spread" for the number of children she ends up having?

Granted she has some insider information: "Enough eggs frozen to have ~5 children (or 90% chance of 3-10 children)"

For some reason I suspect that she'll not have five or even three children.

I imagine to attract an equal number of dollar-weighted bets on the over and under, it'd need to be under 2.00, perhaps under 1.00 as to her number of biological children before a given date.

She'll get one. Or even zero if she's unlucky with the frozen eggs. Given that a significant minority of eggs don't even survive the freeze-thaw cycle, and the dicey chances of successful implantation, I think the 5+ talk on her part is silliness. But maybe I'm really misunderstanding something here.

I mean, if she thinks there's a 90% chance she has enough eggs for 3-10 kids, and she says she's well-calibrated, presumably she has >10 eggs frozen.

Cobbling together some stats from Google: IVF is around 50% percent successful for under 35 women and the chances drop after 35. Let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say 50% for her if she acts fast.

The freeze-thaw cycle kills maybe 25% of the eggs.

If she has 10 eggs frozen and acts fast she could be reasonably confident to get 3 kids. But 5+ would require 13+ eggs and an assumption of 50% IFV success rate, which isn't going to hold up as she's already on the older side.

3ish seems possible. 5 is straining likelihood. 10 is nonsense. One website says that for a 90% chance of getting a single baby a woman should freeze 20 eggs.

And as one data point: 11 frozen eggs for zero kids for this woman.

after she froze her eggs in her late 30s, despite the $19,000 cost

probably explains it. Had it been at 23 yo, it'd be a different story

She’s probably friends with the people who founded MetaMed. I’m sure someone in her circles has written about “freezemaxing” and calculated the optimum way to freeze eggs at multiple fertility clinics or something.

I can't find the paper any more, but I swear I once found a research paper which said: if you inseminate a woman on the exact right day of the monthly cycle, the probability of a 35-40 year old conceiving is 20%.

Assume that she's exactly 36 1/2, so 42 months under those rules, run a binomial distribution...

Actually it's more complex than this because you need to block out 9 months after each conception, AND iirc the miscarriage chance is about 20% in that cohort too. Uhh... To Be Continued, I'll code up a simulation.

EDIT: I compute a 99.998% chance of at least 1 kid, 95% chance of >1, 67% chance of >2, 19% chance of >3. So maybe she's gonna be OK, but to reiterate, this is only if she starts tracking her oestrus and barebacking every optimal day, starting NOW.

35-40 year old conceiving is 20%

Are these stats skewed by the very infertile? 3 of our 4 children were conceived after 35, all on the first cycle attempted.

Again, I wish I could find the paper, but I remember it making the point that the variance is huge for that cohort, so that'll be why: it's an average of 20% but you lucked out on the high end of the very wide distribution.

This looks like a job for Manifold Markets.

I think you mean "over-under".

I'd bet money on the over if it's 0 or 1, and the under if it's 2 or higher.

To me, she doesn't seem like a quokka cause her approach will probably work and sexual forwardness in general is not what I think of as quokkaish. Quite the opposite, even if the forwardness is nerdy or overly "rationalist" or whatever. Wouldn't the really quokka thing be some kind of meek passiveness?

Sure, there is for her some danger of getting stalked but I mean realistically speaking it is probably not very high and anyway, what sort of life would it be if we were to not risk being audacious because it might slightly increase the chance of some insane person doing something bad to us? One might as well make an argument that one should avoid becoming a celebrity for the same reason. "Yeah, it might give you access to having a lot of influence and a lifestyle that you have been dreaming about, but it might slightly increase the chance that some crazy person will hurt you so you should not do it." That does not make sense. The potential reward is more than worth the minor risks.

I like her forwardness. If I had any issues with her it would be more that my current mental model of MIRI, although to be fair without knowing much about it, is that it is a cult.

She's a not-hideous, not-obese, intelligent woman in the Bay Area (a target rich environment). The problem can't be "leads", it has to be her filtering. Either she's filtering out the type of guy she's looking for somehow, or she's just plain too picky.

Hence memes such as male vs. female loneliness.

The thing that this meme forgets about (and a lot of men in general forget about) is all the women who aren't beautiful

It’s not due to “forgetting” non-beautiful women.

Dataclysm showed that, in online dating, even the 5th percentile of women in terms of attractiveness receive roughly the same amount of messages a week as 95th percentile men; a 50th percentile woman well more than a 99th percentile man. Men basically receive no messages until the 90th percentile or so.

In the Pig Thirst Experiment, a photoshopped fat woman with a pig face blended in and added bodyhair received hundreds of messages.

I'm a bit more sympathetic to women than that meme portrays because they do have to deal with more stalkers and risk of violence if they choose a partner poorly, but ultimately I do agree with it. If she has reasonable standards, she should not have very much trouble finding a partner at all. Her problem almost certainly isn't that she just hasn't yet met a good man who exists just over the horizon, it's that her idea of a good man doesn't exist/are so rare they're able to land higher value women than her.

I don't think violence is the main problem. I mean, yes, sure, some men could be violent (as some women could too) but I don't think Silicon Valley types she'd encounter in her peer circle is particularly high risk for that. There are, however, many other types, that many women may consider not being the prime relationship material. But it of course is in the eye of beholder. But I don't think there's a shortage of eligible non-violent non-insane willing male candidates there.

I've talked with her a few times in real life and formed a very positive impression of her.

Actually, it's a postrat «don't mean-spiritedly dunk on a rationalist» challenge (impossible), as is observable in comments.

Is this what we've come to? Ridiculing weird people for trying to have a consensual relationship they want? I mean, in a sense, a progressive would say that's a big part of what we do…

Regardless, I believe Katie will succeed in finding an agreeable partner, even if not an exact match. People in her social milieu do not really care for stuff like «town bike» or whatever. Age and looks – well, male rats are not movie stars either. Twitter infamy will come and pass.

This may be a genuinely rational move.

Is this what we've come to? Ridiculing weird people for trying to have a consensual relationship they want?

Come on in and have a seat. I was getting lonely clutching the pearls all by myself.

I thought you'd have some nits to pick around her hip/waist ratio or bosom size though.

Actually I haven't clicked the link and had no idea how she looks, nor do I care to click and learn that now. I usually presume that LW rationalists are agender textual entities (e.g. who is Kaj Sotala? Male, female, Indian-themed enemy from a roguelike? Sounds vaguely androgynous to me but I do not care).

“I usually presume that LW rationalists are agender textual entities (e.g. who is Kaj Sotala? Male, female, Indian-themed enemy from a roguelike? Sounds vaguely androgynous to me but I do not care).”

Male, I’ve met him. His name is a variation of ‘Kai’, one of those names that I guess is ambiguous to foreigners but unambiguously male in Finland.

as with other repugnant threads, I'm torn on whether the best solution is to express disapproval, or simply not feed the swarm.

I feel you there, my knee jerk response to the OP was something between "don't feed the troll" and the old admiral Akbar meme, "Its a Trap! but reading a lot of these responses, I can feel my own urge to respond rising.

And so Usenet exploded into flame and war. Ever has it been so.

Regardless, I believe Katie will succeed in finding an agreeable partner, even if not an exact match.

Agreed... in modern times, the male demand/supply for any female who's not hideously deformed or obese is basically infinite.

People in her social milieu do not really care for stuff like «town bike» or whatever

Disagree. Generally... Bay Area men, even progressive ones, would prefer their girlfriend, much less a wife, not to be a town bike or a former town bike. Even if such men voice opinions differently for social acceptance-reasons. Men, all else equal, would prefer a chaste girlfriend/wife. However, beggars also can't be choosers.

Why has she, at 36, not already met someone like this? The Bay Area is full of guys she’s ostensibly describing. The fact that it’s come to this suggests she either (1) doesn’t really want to find someone, (2) has way more stringent standards than she is saying, or (3) has something fundamentally wrong with her and unacceptable to most people. Hints in the profile tell me all three of these things are going on.

Age and looks – well, male rats are not movie stars either.

Ugly old people still want to date young attractive people.

Has anyone ever done any research on the success of these kind of dating docs? My guess would be that if you're male, it's mostly pointless, since you're just outing yourself as a person that's too socially inept to get a date the “regular” way, which is a huge turn-off to women, while if you're a woman then you can get away with it since the pool of men who this sort of thing appeals to is at least an order of magnitude larger than the number of women fishing in this pool, so the only limiting factor is whether the woman is willing to lower her standards to the point that she will accept the vaguely-autistic sort of man that this appeals to.

(I was going to link to Richard M. Stallman's Personal Ad as an early example of a male “dating doc”: it has been online since 2003. But in 2022 it was updated with “I am in a long-term relationship now and not looking for another”! So apparently this strategy can work for someone like Stallman, even if you have to wait nearly 20 years.)

you're just outing yourself as a person that's too socially inept to get a date the “regular” way, which is a huge turn-off to women

True, but also if you are a person that's too socially inept to get a date the “regular” way, pretty much any female you'll meet will figure it out in about 5 minutes anyway, so you don't lose that much really.

My guess would be that if you're male, it's mostly pointless, since you're just outing yourself as a person that's too socially inept to get a date the “regular” way, which is a huge turn-off to women, while if you're a woman then you can get away with it since the pool of men who this sort of thing appeals to is at least an order of magnitude larger than the number of women fishing in this pool, so the only limiting factor is whether the woman is willing to lower her standards to the point that she will accept the vaguely-autistic sort of man that this appeals to.

Pretty much. Women have automatic social legitimacy, and thus can get away with—and even be praised for—behavior that would get men mocked and laughed at. Marginal Revolution user Microchannels remarked:

"I think the long-form document works far better for women. It comes across as sincere and nerdy-cool.

For men, these type of documents come across as desperate and weird.

I have no idea why this double standard exists, but you can't fight reality."

If you really have no idea why this double standard exists, do you have any business talking about "fighting reality."?

One of the fundamental facts of human reproduction is that the male is ultimately disposable. A society can easily recover from losing 75% of its fighting age males. Not so much 75% of its women and children, which is why things like "the Birkenhead Drill" and "funeral order" are so pervasive. in western culture

I couldn't avoid searching 'richard stallman dancing' after reading that, and wasn't disappointed.

Is this what you're referring to?

Yep that one, plus the Soulja Boy one with the great video id: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pube5Aynsls . He's surprisingly nimble on his feet.

Bonus is the 2008 /r/programming post of it, which has the bizarre comment at the bottom (from 6 months ago somehow): "This post was made on the day i was born LMFAO"

I am worse for having seen this

Join us now and share the software...

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Seems like an effective strategy. 'I put myself out there and everyone hates me. Oh how vulnerable a woman I am at the moment.'

I don't see what the big deal is with this particular instance. Outraged men looking at reality defying 'mating requirements' lista made by women... It feels like one of the oldest internet culture war topics.

It reminds me of this TED Talk. Where, to make a long story short, a 'data driven' woman realized that she simply wasn't being picky enough when her 'mating requirements' list had left her with only 35 possible men to date in her city. Prompting her to go online to widen the net.

It has a heartfelt 'Sex and the City' ending where a woman finds true love against all odds. Sending an inspiring message to women of all ages, that there is someone out there for everyone.

I wouldn't have guessed that after all that effort and filtering she fell in love with that guy. And they only got one kid. But googling around they still seem to be married, so it worked for her?

Did you even look at her doc? She did not write any requirements whatsoever. She did write a "traits I like in partners" section, but it consists entirely of the following list, which is not exactly very demanding:

Honesty

Interest in making the world better

Potential for close and collaborative relationship (e.g. willingness to talk about problems, eventually be open about feelings, treat one another as equals, do a lot of things together)

Good judgment

Interest in making the world better

I somehow forgot to notice this at the time, but I consider this strong evidence for my "Effective Altruism is a place for nerds to meet women" theory.

Those requirements are so vague and empty as to be non-existent, and in that case you should just assume she has the same requirements as the generic still-single 36 year old woman: way higher than she can realistically expect to find.

Seems like an effective strategy. 'I put myself out there and everyone hates me. Oh how vulnerable a woman I am at the moment.'

It’d be pretty typical female online double-dipping.

I attempted to attention whore, but some people were mean to me and now I am sad. Please show your support and let you and them fight.

I chuckled seeing the usually laconic Cowen warn: “not interested in comments mocking Katja, put them somewhere else, I will delete them”

This is just a symptom of a larger problem. The problem isn't with her though, it's with mottizens.

While she's not to my personal tastes, she's an attractive woman with a few things that are not preferred on the dating market. In fact, she's actually above average in looks for her age, she just doesn't wear much makeup and wears frumpy clothes. While her age, polyamory, and mental health issues will reduce her popularity, so she's taking some efforts to mitigate that, and she's aiming a little high. Good for her.

Let's flip this around, and imagine her male counterpart, a short mottizen on the spectrum who wishes his software engineering job was more attractive to women. He decides he's going to work out, dress better, and put himself in social situations to improve his lot in the dating market, and he's aiming a little high. Would he be the target of derision here? Of course not.

Chances are that's exactly what she'll catch. She lives in the best dating environment in the world for women like her, doesn't seem the usual hangups about height, age, or race, and certainly doesn't demand the infamous sixes. Six months to a year from now she'll be in a serious relationship with a shortish, nerdy, tech guy with a few million in RSUs. They'll go on to IVF, have three children, and form a happy family. Good for them.

Let's flip this around, and imagine her male counterpart, a short mottizen on the spectrum who wishes his software engineering job was more attractive to women. He decides he's going to work out, dress better, and put himself in social situations to improve his lot in the dating market, and he's aiming a little high. Would he be the target of derision here? Of course not.

I'm not really on team "let's ridicule her" but the answer to "would a socially awkward guy be a subject of derision here?" for doing something as socially awkward as this is absolutely and obviously yes. You're out of your mind if you think men aren't held to a higher standard on weird awkward behavior.

Yeah, if he made an open document for prospective girlfriends? The howls of derision would be endless.

Im sorry but I dont think you know what the word attractive means.

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Let's flip this around, and imagine her male counterpart, a short mottizen on the spectrum who wishes his software engineering job was more attractive to women. He decides he's going to work out, dress better, and put himself in social situations to improve his lot in the dating market, and he's aiming a little high. Would he be the target of derision here? Of course not.

I mean, is this a like-for-like?

While both this hypothetical man and this woman can be said to be proactive, how is very different.

Working out and dressing better could be argued to be general self-improvement and are thus likely to be praised either way as cultivating virtue in a way that doesn't apply to, essentially, an ad. And none of them have the weirdness points of this situation.

That said I do find the idea that she won't find someone baffling though. She might not have kids at her age (kind of delusional to want to be talked into it now) . But her not being able to find a relationship at all seems a bit like red pill cope.

I would tell that short motteizan to marry a Ukrainian/Mexican/Lebanese/etc woman if he’s that desperate and absolutely make fun of him for being unrealistic about ways to appeal to women.

Any of these would be a better choice than a modal American woman anyway.

She isn’t attractive at all. Maybe a 5. She isn’t hideous or anything; just not attractive. Pretty much the definition of mid.

Her description of herself gives off a vibe of a bit kooky. Add in the poly stuff and I really don’t see who this appeals to.

Pretty much the definition of mid.

Spot on, and in her league, which is badly-socialized men in the best dating market for women on the planet, mid is well above par.

We're talking about a 36 year old woman that isn't obese and has no kids who dates guys like the Scotts and Yud, not a girl half her age trying to get into the hottest Miami club. She'll do fine.

I think a 5 is fair. My gut reaction upon seeing her was “eh” followed by a quick ctrl + w, but “mid” is an apt ${CurrentYear} descriptor.

I shudder at this thought—but by not being obese, not ancient, and otherwise not deformed, she might even be above average in attractiveness, which is perhaps damning by faint praise.

Yeah. Honestly from my own experience of dating apps/modern market, being non-obese, non-ancient, non-hideous and having an actual somewhat sensible lifepath she's reasonably upper percentile.

He decides he's going to work out, dress better, and put himself in social situations to improve his lot in the dating market, and he's aiming a little high. Would he be the target of derision here? Of course not.

I don't particularly like where this thread went either, but what are you talking about? Where's the part where she hit the gym, started dressing better, and practicing social skills that will make her attractive to men?

Where's the part where she hit the gym, started dressing better, and practicing social skills that will make her attractive to men?

It's always amusing when "Women are human beings; men are human doings" emerges organically/unwittingly.

I have to admit, I don't get what everyone is talking about in this thread. Katja looks plenty attractive to marry and 36 is not disqualifyingly old, unlike the 42yo on HackerNews a few months ago. She probably did miss the boat. Katja's prospects, on the other hand, are quite good given her industry.

That said, I also don't see this as a case of a lost soul improving herself? I imagine the equivalent low SMV male posting a classified seeking applications for girlfriend would also get eyerolls. The "I'm willing to consider monogamy" part in particular stands out as comparable to "I'm willing to consider getting a steady job" for a guy.

Yeah the people saying she's not attractive are insane. I'm certainly willing to agree that she's not the hottest woman to ever grace the planet. But to say she isn't attractive at all says way more about the person making that claim (and none of it good) than it does her. She's reasonably pretty.

How is she attractive? She looks like an average 36 year old American woman IMO but that's not necessarily attractive. Is she more or less attractive than the computer-generated 'average woman' of most countries? I think less. I'll admit that attractiveness is difficult to define and depends on where you are. Even so, would a man's eyes linger on her in a crowd? I doubt it.

/images/16813407754612913.webp

Those average women are above hot. All the facial asymmetries have been averaged out.

As someone who consumes a lot of HBD/physiognomy-related content, I’ve seen these “composite photos of the average woman in [X] country” posts so many times, and I have an honest question for you: does the average adult female you see walking around in public in your country honestly look like this? How about the average woman in just your city alone? I can say pretty definitively that the average woman where I live - which is a coastal city that’s far healthier and less obese than the vast majority of locales in America - does not look this good. Hell, the average woman of the age range depicted in these photos doesn’t look this good.

I’ve never been to any of the countries reflected in this image - although I’ll be visiting the UK in a couple of weeks, so I can report back my findings soon - but I would be very surprised to find that the average French woman looks like the woman in that picture. Demographics, of course, are the big elephant in the room; the average young French woman, at least in major metropolitan areas of the country, is probably several shades darker, and the average ethnic French woman is probably at least ten years older than what’s in that picture.

So, no, the woman in OP’s post does not look as attractive as a speculative, fictionalized, idealized composite image, but I think she’s objectively above-average in an American context, given that she’s not overweight, she’s white, and she doesn’t appear to dress like a slob.

OK, let's ditch the average photos. I was looking for some kind of yardstick to measure from. That's clearly very difficult.

I think you have to be more than 'not overweight, non-white or slobby' to be attractive.

For example, take another real image, this time of the US's 1999 world cup soccer team. All but one of these women fulfills your triple criteria. Are they all attractive though? 9 is attractive IMO, followed by 11 and maybe 6. That's 2.5 or 3/11. The others aren't really attractive, though I'll concede that the camera angle isn't flattering.

My base assumption is that few 36 year old women will be attractive. Young people are more attractive than older people. Not everyone's going to get an attractive partner, that's life.

/images/16813498123716884.webp

But those pictures are of averaged women. It so happens, by virtue of trivial statistics, that you can average out random shortcomings and developmental errors with a random sample. Averaged women and men look pretty nice, markedly above average; at most, they can tell us about things like the typical anthropometric type and obesity rate.

... On second thought, an averaged man looks more meh. I guess this tells us something about eggs and sperm.

On second thought, an averaged man looks more meh. I guess this tells us something about eggs and sperm.

Yeah, I just checked on Google and averaged women are generally hot, while averaged men are merely "good looking".

More comments

What is the “not good things about the people making the claim?” I don’t think anyone has said she is ugly; just not attractive.

That their standards are absurdly out of whack, that they say mean things about people for no good reason, or both.

Also, saying she's not attractive is tantamount to saying she's ugly, IMO.

Seems to e there is ugly, meh, and attractive. She fits the idle category.

She's not attractive and I'll stand by that. I don't know where you live or what kinds of women you interact with where you think she's attractive. I live in the bay area, which is not exactly known for its attractive women, and she's way below average. She would be absolutely invisible in New York or LA.

She doesn't have to hit the gym or dress better. She's already attractive in her demographic because of her sex and the fact that she's not ugly or obese.

This is profoundly depressing.

36 years old. You’re not having 3 kids unless start today, with no courtship, and absolutely turn and burn on the pregnancies (likely against the recommendation of your doctor).

This really highlights the asymmetry in dating. The type of guy she is wanting to “settle down” with is extremely high value.

I only say these things as a warning: if you want to avoid this you have to start NOW. Don’t plan on “settling down” later. You need to be “settling down” in your early 20s.

Women mature faster and also age faster, on average. I'd say that's a case of symmetry, not asymmetry.

Isn't that a case of consistency, rather than symmetry? It's consistently asymmetrical between the sexes.

Women [...] age faster, on average

Do they? Then why do women live longer on average?

The type of guy she is wanting to “settle down” with is extremely high value.

Not sure where it follows from. In the doc, there's some platitudes like "honesty" (nobody wants to date a liar, what a surprise!) and "Interest in making the world better" (I guess open sociopaths also are out) - I am not sure "extremely high value" is warranted here.

You need to be “settling down” in your early 20s.

It's not quite that bad. Late twenties also works. Early 30s the window of opportunity is closing.

The type of guy she is wanting to “settle down” with is extremely high value

Really? Most of her criteria (which, especially with the encouragement she gives, don't even seem to be 'requirements' as such) seem to really boil down to 'be nice, be willing to be romantic and intellectually curious' which doesn't seem a particularly tall order.

This really highlights the asymmetry in dating.

I find the whole 'value' thing in dating quite grim indeed, I don't think most people think like that, but even if I were to concede it for a moment whenever people say this is sort of seems like a logical impossibility to me. Given that most people date monogamously (at least beyond a few dates) and the number of men and women roughly equal, if there is such a thing as 'value' and dating really is a sort of 'market' (which I don't actually believe but to let that go for a moment) then asymmetry is surely impossible?

I think by far the most important factor is that there's a lot more dating between older men and younger women than younger men and older women, so if you're a younger man pursuing a younger women you need to compete with both your own age cohort and the men older than you. I'd guess dating for older women feels really unfair too for the same reason.

(See an okcupid blog post for data (note it's an archive so the interactivity doesn't necessarily work))

In other words: it's symmetric across age ranges, but not necessarily within an age range.

Right, but then age simply becomes another trait which, if one believes in the market framework, gets plugged in to determine overall desirability. So a younger man not being able to find what he perceives to be, and what without age being a factor might be, an 'equal' younger woman isn't a case of asymmetry but rather a case of age simply counting against him and in favour of any hypothetical younger woman such that the any younger woman actually 'equal' to a hypothetical man must necessarily be 'unequal' in other respects because he's already behind in the age stakes.

But again, clearly no-one actually thinks like this in real life which is why the whole 'market' and 'value' thing is such a weird nonsense.

Given that most people date monogamously (at least beyond a few dates) and the number of men and women roughly equal, if there is such a thing as 'value' and dating really is a sort of 'market' (which I don't actually believe but to let that go for a moment) then asymmetry is surely impossible?

Try to prove this algebraically, using remotely realistic assumptions, and you'll find out.

Alternatively, you can take the easier route, and just look to see if you can do a possibility proof of the contrary, i.e. a consistent set of statements where your assumptions are true and yet there is an asymmetry in the dating market where a subset of daters face an exceptional challenge, e.g. young men or older women.

If you can't do either, then perhaps you shouldn't be so confident in your belief that an asymmetry in the dating market is impossible?

Could you elaborate on either, not sure I really follow.

For example, suppose that almost all women will prefer not to date young men (and will not date men who are much younger) and almost all men will prefer to date younger women. So, men have easier dating in their 30's compared to men in their 20's, while women have easier dating in their 20's than in their 30's.

She can very easily get a partner without resorting to such artifaces, all she has to do is be realistic about what her value as a 36 year old woman like her is. The odds of that happening though, even for a rationalist woman, aren't particularly good.

Once again this isn't all (or even mostly) her fault, but rather it is a fault of the society and milleu she lives in that her (inflated) hopes and dreams are about to go splat on the ground and this is one final desperate attempt from a struggling soul to avert doom.

They say that disappointment is caused by the difference in expectations vs reality, and by sending expectations for middle aged women to the moon without doing anything to change the reality on the ground modern Western culture claims for itself another victim.

What she is able to get and keep lies on a cline between the 21 year old incel and the 60 year old functioning alcoholic, the time to find a long term partner was 10 years ago for her. Had she been told at 26 that if she left it until 36 she'd only be able to get the dregs of society to commit to her there is a very good chance that she'd be happily married today. Instead her society which looks down on inflicting short term pain for long term gain has now condemned her to far greater suffering, probably for the rest of her life.

I've learned to phase out and stop caring about such cases, much as we've all phased out to the massive hunger and suffering going on right now in Africa.

You seem to be assuming that this her posting that doc is some kind of desperate Hail Mary attempt to find a partner.

You should keep in mind though that she is a rationalist, which means that writing three page documents for her is like writing two sentences for the average person. Rationalists for some reason tend to be extremely verbose, they shed words like cats shed fur. And being a rationalist, she is probably more comfortable with being literal in social situations than most people are.

This might not be a desperate Hail Mary for her, it might just be a normal Tuesday. If she did not write this document, maybe she would have felt compelled to write a 20 page-long essay about AI risk and post it on an Internet forum instead.

by sending expectations for middle aged women to the moon without doing anything to change the reality on the ground modern Western culture claims for itself another victim.

I don't get where this meme comes from. The idea that "women" as a group have "high expectations".

Plenty of absolute loser men manage to get laid and get married all the time. No money, unstable employment, obese, criminal record. They still find a way. Nondescript men too, men who are average and unremarkable in every respect. I've seen instances of every type of case. Clearly, the women that these men are dating don't have high expectations, at least not in the way that's typically thought of on this forum.

Perhaps men need to reexamine their own expectations? If every woman you're interested in is, in turn, only interested in millionaire VCs, what does that say about you?

I can agree with the 'get laid' part. With regard to the 'get married' part, I'm not so sure. I think the statistics on marriage rates among the lower class and underclass prove this, although I honestly can't be bothered to try digging them up right now.

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Might it be a matter of age, as the common wisdom is? Women age like milk and men age like wine and all that. Not that I’ve really agonized over this much, but I think it’s plausible that women have a perceived upper hand in the dating market initially (which might translate to more women trying to go for broke), and this slowly gets reversed to a clear male advantage in middle age or so. I think part of this is the reason for the perception in unfairness, since early adulthood is seen as when people “should be” dating and starting to settle down, and that’s when women are perceived (by themselves and by men) to have greater bargaining power in the dating scene.

What are the demographics of the men who are complaining about women having high expectations, actually? I honestly am not sure, I haven’t really exposed myself to the dating scene much. I’ve only dated two women lifetime and they’re both better catches than I think I am.

I don't know why women seem attracted to bad boy types, but especially if you have been one, this pattern is unmistakable.

Because lack of willingness to commit is a masculine signal of high value genetics. He can have his pick and he knows it.

This would be a real problem for women in a world in which less-exciting, more-committal men refused to raise the children of the first type once those women have 'gotten serious'. But generally those guys are happy enough with sloppy seconds, the companionship of a woman who still isn't too unappealing, and occasional obligatory sex, maybe even a kid or two of his own.

Culture can tune for this.

If you look at romance novels, it would suggest that women are interested in slightly (too much) older, dark (no blonde men please), gloomy, incredibly rich men, preferably with hereditary titles.

So, basically, Batman. (OK technically speaking Batman is not a hereditary title)

I think Mr. Darcy is who we're looking for. But then maybe Zoro is Mexican Mr. Darcy so Batman still counts.

Batman is not a hereditary title

I feel like some of the various writers of the comics and the TV shows kinda wanted that, though.

(I think the Batman Beyond crossover episode of Justice League Unlimited made that a thing.)

Plenty of absolute loser men manage to get laid and get married all the time. No money, unstable employment, obese, criminal record. They still find a way

but they did not necessarily start this way, for example, couples gaining weight during relationship due to age. Having a criminal record is not disqualifying at all though, but being short not uncommonly is.

There are lots of short auto mechanics who have never been in shape on their third wife.

It seems very possible that PMC women are as a group unrealistically picky, but men marrying down is an age old phenomenon.

all she has to do is be realistic about what her value as a 36 year old woman like her is

I guess so, but maybe she just isn't interested in anything less than the best? This could make sense from an ev-psych point of view. If you have kids with a genetic dud, presumably your kids will also struggle more with mating, potentially creating a vicious cycle. I have no idea what the actual relationship between male attractiveness and long-term genetic ROI is, but I could imagine that in some environments, the expected genetic payoff of having kids with a bad enough mate could be close to zero.

This suggests an intervention that could get women to be interested in less-attractive men: censor or hide attractive but unavailable men from them, until her estimation of relative value of the available men goes up. Right now we have the opposite, with media showing unrealistically handsome and high-status men (i.e. James Bond or Tom Cruise) all the time.

This could make sense from an ev-psych point of view. If you have kids with a genetic dud, presumably your kids will also struggle more with mating, potentially creating a vicious cycle

Nothing that a 36 year old childless woman does makes sense from an evo-psych view. Such creatures would never have existed in the ancestral environment, because women needed to start exchanging their wombs for mastodon steak at 14 or they'd just die of exposure.

But even if they had it wouldn't make any sense, because having a kid with a genetic dud still gives you more chance of grandchildren than does having no kids, which gives you zero chance.

You are assuming that our distant ancestors saw absolutely no value in women other than their wombs. Which might be true, but I am not convinced of it. Even non-human animals are often more complicated than that in their psychological motivations.

having a kid with a genetic dud still gives you more chance of grandchildren

Not necessarily, because of the opportunity cost. It could easily be better in expectation to wait and hope for a slim chance of a better mate down the road.

I'm not claiming it is in her case, but I'm claiming that even the ev-bio-optimal strategy would sometimes wait too long and result in no baby at all.

Infertile women were always a thing. The tale of Abraham and Sarah was intended to be deeply relatable.

Infertile women were always a thing.

I don't think they were, but it's irrelevant to the point. Even if I grant your hypothesis, they weren't a thing that could leave an impression in evolutionary psychology, because no infertile person ever can.

Also, Biblical Times substantially post-dates the ancestral environment.

Counterpoint: insect colonies. Almost all bees in a hive are infertile females, therefore the phenotype of infertility can be selected for, unintuitive as it sounds. In any social species you could have similar "worker bee" individuals who perform some useful role without reproducing themselves, to the point individuals who do reproduce are advantaged by making them.

Of course it can. Thedesire for sexual novelty (reduced if children are produced, ie sense of responsibility) would benefit someone who is fertile who married someone infertile.

Somewhat jokingly, PMS is anger directed at a man who didn't impregnate her this month. Maybe that is evolutionarily beneficial

She's not infertile in that sense. She just made choices.

The massive hunger and suffering going on right now in Africa

Is this even true anymore? Back when Singer wrote Famine, Affluence, and Morality, people were literally starving to death. Nowadays it seems like people everywhere get enough food to survive, and the suffering is due mostly to endemic disease.

yeah. obesity rates are surging in Africa. It's going to be worse there because those people have biologically and culturally optimized to having so little food, so introducing western diets and sedentary lifestyles will cause even worse obesity than seen in the US. Too much food is the problem now. Scientists have to invent a drug that costs $1200/month just to prevent people from overeating

The fact that she didn't just download some random dating app and wait 30 minutes for a match suggests that her expectations are at least high enough that she can't get the sort of man she wants from a dating app.

Preposterous comment.

It should be 30 seconds.

There’s a massive hole where her “what I expect from a partner” section should be. There are implications to be drawn from its absence, but I think most people are projecting.

If Yud can get laid with multiple women in rat circles, then I'm willing to believe that no, they really don't require a 6'+ gigachad at minimum or anything like that.

You may not like it (and me neither), but Yud IS the rat circle equivalent of a 6'+ gigachad.

I'm not sure that the dating success of one of the most prestigious figures in the rat movement indicates that rat women have modest standards.

However, in my experience, most women's "standards" are more likely aspirations, which they will compromise if things feel right. Dating is not shopping - even women's shopping is not often shopping, as most men understand it (= you work out what you want and you go looking for it at an acceptable price).

Technically this could meet her expectations, but I think we can all read between the lines.

It is weird that Tyler would post this. I am thinking Why???

Small-scale question was one thing, but this is getting ridiculous.

Two threads here. One on SSC. The MR comments, the Twitter mentions, I'm sure ACX has an open thread for it. All of them devolving, immediately, into referendums on her fuckability. I don't care, and you shouldn't either. At least not here, in the Culture War thread, made for talking about the Culture War.

I don't care, and you shouldn't either. At least not here, in the Culture War thread, made for talking about the Culture War.

This is unnecessarily antagonistic. Under the circumstances, the rule corralling human biodiversity (including sex differences) and sexual harassment into the CW thread makes this an appropriate place to raise the discussion, given OP's stated belief that

This will be used as an excuse for some weirdo on the edge of sanity to stalk you.

If a topic doesn't interest you, that is a good time to practice the virtue of silence. But contrary to your claims, you seem to actually in fact care about these discussions--at least enough to complain about them.

This is the culture war thread, so the potential for any given conversation to "devolve, immediately" is always quite high. That's why we have the engagement rules that we have. Please adhere to them.

I can’t really argue against sexual politics as CW. I maintain that referendums on fuckability are not.

There is a difference between discussing the subject, where this person is an example, and discussing this person, where the overall subject is a motte.

Unfortunately her level of fuckability is rather relevant in this particular context.

Many people here get really fucking cringe whenever the topic of sexuality comes up. This comment thread reminds me of that one about Aella from the other week. Just a palpable sense of barely disguised seething towards women from some commenters.

Many people here get really fucking cringe ... Just a palpable sense of barely disguised seething towards women from some commenters.

Unnecessarily antagonistic. If you have something constructive to add to the conversation, do! Calling other users "cringe" does not contribute, and violates our rules of engagement. In my experience, rarely does the word "cringe" even get deployed outside of naked signaling. Aim for substance instead.

I almost made a comment that the only thing missing was the usual suspects getting tsundere over Aella, but I didn't want to remind them.

I think some people here can have perfectly good conversation and analysis about sexuality and dating. Others are clearly incredibly biased against women and have a massive chip on their shoulder.

A culture which has convinced a woman to:

  • Reject the ideas of love in favor of "polyamory"

  • Believe that they should or even can realistically wait until their late 30s to have children

and the discussion of that culture is about as on the nose culture war as could possibly exist.

One on SSC. The MR comments, the Twitter mentions, I'm sure ACX has an open thread for it.

Do most people here go to all of these other places? I don't.

At least not here, in the Culture War thread, made for talking about the Culture

Which women are fuckable is culture war. There have been a strain of feminism that clutches the pearls mightily when they encounter "unrequested comments about appearance". We also have the body positive people. And the delusional body positive people (fat acceptance, pro ana) - all of those try to change or extend the fuckability.

Which women are fuckable is culture war.

I was thinking about this for another reason but I have noticed polite liberal society seems to have this view that people who receive dick should be more or less entitled to receive whatever dick they want, whenever they want it. This is obviously true in the instances you mentioned but it was also true for, e.g., monkeypox, where it was somehow considered morally out of bounds to suggest that gay men stop having anal sex for a hot second while this all clears out.

We also have dating site data suggests that men prefer women as young as they're legal combined with people referring to relationships with adult women as "grooming" or even "pedophilia" if the women look young. No matter what you make of that, it's a hell of a culture war topic, ripe with opportunity for clashes of perspective.

I don't care, and you shouldn't either.

Why though? I mean, superficially, it's true that I have absolutely no stake in the matter, but this is a pretty general observation that applies to a hell of a lot more than this conversation.

At least not here, in the Culture War thread, made for talking about the Culture War.

Dating markets seem like prime culture war material to me.

Frankly, I didn’t think her fuckability would be controversial. I was expecting more general discussion of dating norms, polyamory, and such.

I guess you want more politics? Don’t worry, there will be plenty of that soon enough. Why not enjoy the lull in the Culture War with a bit of lighthearted gossip?

That’s…fair. I’m sorry for jumping down your throat just because you made the thread.

Anyone planning on having 3 kids with a 36-year-old is likely not going to be having 3 kids.

Do you know women with twins? If yes, have you seen how they live, what they do everyday? Expecting a 37 or 38-yr-old average middle-class woman, a rationalist on top of that, to nurture and raise twins isn't much realistic.

At her age, success rate per cycle is around 30%. This means that she’ll almost certainly require a couple of tries before she gives birth, which means that the second pregnancy attempt will almost certainly not happen sooner than 2 years later. By then, the chance of success will halve to less than 20%.

And that’s all assuming she starts tomorrow, instead of needing to find a partner and getting him to commit to having children together, which will take months on its own.

Considering the current social reality, it'd take years, not months. It's pretty much out of the question.

Surrogates exist.

When she was freezing the eggs, do you think she was planning to have another woman carry them for her?

In any case, I think that the medical establishment and media, if they were honest, should really repeat ad nauseam how low success rate IVF has above age of 35, so that women are less delusional about their future. Instead, medical establishment has every incentive to play down the low rates of success, given that they are paid for each attempt. Media, of course, keeps pretending that every woman can have it all, because of course she is a queen that deserves nothing less, and that’s all that matters.

I very much expect that was one of the planned-for contingencies, yes. I would not be shocked if she had explicitly put numbers on the probability it would come to that, and already made a decision on what she would do in that contingency.

I think you're modeling her as "typical 36-year-old woman who happens to exist in bay area rationalist circles" and I'm modeling her as "one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, and who happens to be a woman".

See her post stating that is not just true, but too obvious to say that you should cryonically freeze yourself when you die, on the off-chance that you may be revived in the future. I think the set of people who can earnestly write that post and the set of people who object to having another woman carry their baby to term, on a deep enough level to not even consider the question, have very little intersection.

I'm modeling her as "one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, and who happens to be a woman".

If, say, in 4 years, she is still unmarried and childless, how will that affect your perception of the grasp of the reality of the "founding members of the bay area rationalist circles"?

If she's still unmarried and childless in 4 years, I would be pretty surprised (call it 3:1 against). I am not sure how that would affect "my grasp of the reality of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles" because I am not sure what it would mean to affect my perception of someone's grasp of a reality of a group of people.

Do you anticipate that she would have philosophical objections to surrogacy? Because I generally expect "transhumanist enough to support cryopreservation" would very strongly correlate with "willing to use 'unnatural' solutions like IVF and surrogacy".

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I've heard that the success rate of frozen eggs in geriatric pregnancies is a lot lower than it's commonly understood to be, but I'm not that knowledgeable on the subject.

Do surrogate mother change the chances - in that case just pay 50000-100000 to some woman to carry them to term.

But that just makes the choice all the more stark - if you're a guy who wants to start a family, why would you pick a woman who's nearing 40 to do that with, instead of a woman 10-15 years younger for whom you don't have to shell out $100,000 in conception fees?

Because there exist in the world such things as love. And a human is generally speaking more than the sum of its parameters and identities. Also she may be able to suck golf ball trough a garden hose.

One possible reason would be because you get along better with the one who is 40 and shares your values, and you personally are a late-career tech person in the bay who has made good financial decisions and probably has a net worth with 8 digits where "shell out $100,000" is just not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

I'm sure there's always at least one possible reason in the universe of possible reasons, but I'm trying to model what a typical man would do, not write a sitcom about a 40-year-old career woman who has a whole lotta love to give and is searching for someone who completes her. "Marry a millionaire" should not be anyone's plan for starting a family - if you've reached this point, odds are you've already lost the game.

She doesn't need to care about what a typical man would do, she needs to care about what the most desirable man who reads this and goes "you know, that is exactly what I'm looking for" does.

It is true that this approach would not scale to everyone doing it. I predict that

  1. This will in fact work out for her, because she is a prominent person in a community containing many neurodivergent people who weigh "smart" and "philosophically aligned" more heavily, and "functional", "young", and "fit" less heavily, in their evaluation of partners than is typical for the broader population.

  2. Conditional on this working out for her, it will inspire a number of people to do the same thing. It will mostly not work out for them, because they will mostly not have her advantages.

Or better yet: take the L, and don't reduce the motherhood of another person to a transaction. Leave the money to the kids of a family member who was smart enough to have them when the time was right.

Why?

Because there are certain things that are integral to our humanity, and motherhood is one of them. By buying it from another person you're dehumanizing them, and the child.

I am adopted. Is my real mother, my birth mother or me less than human? I know for sure that a lot of strings were pulled for that adoption to happen.

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Is it just me, or does she kind of look like Caroline Ellison?

Is there some kind of nootropic that Bay Area poly-rat ladies are taking that does that to their cheeks, or is it a previously unnoticed genetic marker? Nature or Nurture, enquiring minds want to know.

I think she is much hotter. Unfortunately I ant no carebear so I am disqualified. But if she changes her mind to want someone with Kissinger's attitude to the world - I will be happy to submit my CV

I think it's just you, they don't look alike to me at all.

Check it out though:

https://thetigerinsidercom.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/42556376_310914529491210_6572609622962601984_n.jpg?w=960&h=768&crop=1

I think Ellison has whatever it is more strongly than this girl, but "short face, big forehead, chipmunk cheeks, prominent incisors" if you want to put it in words.

I see it too -- part of it is having a small/narrow upper dental arch -- for the opposite extreme, see Margot Robbie, who shows twice as many teeth when she smiles as these women do. Grace and Ellison are, facially, on the same end of some kind of mouse-shark axis.

they are both jewish so maybe that can explain it

It's not really a typical jewish look though.

I think if you’re a good looking woman you probably don’t end up in this subculture.

Not only that, you don't typically wind up hunting for suitors in your mid-30s, barring divorce.

Stuff like this reminds me of the utility of old-timely matchmakers- it must have in part been based around convincing people to have realistic standards.

Admittedly not "old timey" but I have been working with a matchmaker. I think I had fairly reasonable expectations going on, so I can't speak to whether they'll try to talk you down if you're being delusional. But they do put a cap on the number of hard requirements you can impose on possible matches, and you have to go on the dates they arrange without seeing the other person first.

Where did those go anyways? With the dating market being what it is you'd expect people to want to pay to skip the charade. Hell, I would.

The reason things are broken is that older married women used to create the social context in which their children could get married and make grandbabies for them, but now they all have mostly completely useless jobs instead.

Some of them knew they were doing this, but most were just doing what they felt was expected of them. Mostly women do what they feel is expected of them. It's expected now that women have jobs. If they don't have a job, they need to be doing intensive childrearing or volunteer work. It's completely unacceptable for them to spend their afternoons playing bridge or touring each other's gardens or shopping for hats or any other ladylike pursuit.

But those apparently useless activities BUILT THE ENTIRE FREAKING SOCIAL WORLD. Just like a world of women would never invent anything useful, a world of men will never have a nice party. You meet your future spouse at a nice party that your mom nagged you into going to because her friend needs more people there. You have total plausible deniability about being there - you're not there cause you're lonely and desperate - you don't need game, you don't need the rules. The biddies took care of that for you. All you need to do is show up and be fertile/virile.

But middle-aged women can't do this, and have jobs, and take care of their elderly parents, and exercise, and worry about their husbands leaving them or have to take care of their children with no husband at all. Impossible.

https://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/11/comment-of-day-reader-explain-why-its.html?sm_au=iVVDWqmR7DsjnmB5M7BKNK07qH22M

I recall seeing assorted op-eds, articles and blogs that a great many of them quit. The expectations women had, versus what they brought to the table, were an insurmountable gap. Just a few hits off google. Here is a reaction to one such video, the original went private. Here is another.

Such a gap in expectations has been long-noted even among normies. For example, in meme-form, albeit perhaps in less polite terms (paraphrased)—

What she wants: A tall, athletic, generous man with nice house and car

What she has to offer: Overdue credit card bills and some other niggas kids

This was definitely my experience being on the other side of this (women paying for a high-end matchmaker getting matched with me). The women doing this were definitely successful and had impressive resumes (but not any more so than that top 5% or so of women on normal dating apps in the Bay Area.) They all made the classic woman mistake of thinking that men will care about the same traits in women that they care about in men, and so on the basis of being a successful doctor or professor or VC or whatever were shooting way out of their league. I think the matchmaker's main job was basically to get them to be realistic and aim lower.

They all made the classic woman mistake of thinking that men will care about the same traits in women that they care about in men, and so on the basis of being a successful doctor or professor or VC or whatever were shooting way out of their league.

The issue here is that there is a demographic of middle-class and upper-class men who do care about these traits in women when looking for a wife. (Yes, I know this is a big qualifier, but still.)

I feel like in SV circles there will be some value placed on female accomplishments, but it's not gonna have the same primacy as it would amongst men.

Like give me a choice between an unemployed 7/10 and a doctor 7/10 and I'll take the Doctor every day. Give me the choice between a unemployed 7/10 and an accomplished 2/10 and vice-versa.

They exist on the high end. I was recruited into one of these in the Bay Area where women were paying like $50k to be set up on dates with someone like me (pretty normal guy) who they could find on bumble but thought too highly of themselves to try. It made for interesting sociology but I ended up meeting my fiancée the old fashioned way (a dating app).

meeting my fiancée the old fashioned way (a dating app)

Not sure how firmly your tongue was in cheek, but this made me feel like a brontosaur.

That’s a good question and I suspect the answer is a decline in social trust killed them off.

I think a decline in social trust sort of goes the other way actually. I was in this matchmaker network thing and the fact that matchmaker would contact me and see what I was up to kind of stopped me from hooking up with a zillion people at the same time like I did on dating apps because there are minimal social consequences for that. The matchmaker's value seems higher in the low social trust scenario. I think what really killed them is just direct competition from dating apps.

Yeah, she's going to reject all comers. I sincerely doubt this aging, mentally ill, town bike is going to net the sort of man she envisions thawing out her eggs for. Especially from how much she clearly thinks she's amazing, interspersed with all the giant red flags, in her open letter. If anyone I knew saw this and thought about emailing her, I'd pay for them to wrung out by a hooker first to clear their head. I don't know how thirsty and lonely you'd need to be to not see the red flags from orbit on this one.

Okay dude, this is a warning to both you and to @fuckduck9000, below, who just like you, expresses an opinion I largely agree with but chose to do so in a maximally unkind and inflammatory way.

Yes, I get it, it's fun to dunk on dorks and other members of your outgroup, and you particularly delight in dunking on chicks who could be TRP poster girls. @fuckduck9000's speculations about the pathologies that led you here were unnecessary, but he's not wrong that a woman posting a rant about unfuckable incel losers in response to a dude posting a sad dating resume like this would get reported to death. (And in fact, you have collected an impressive number of reports - six, to date - considering you're spilling venom in a way that's usually pretty popular with mottizens.)

I know you're going to get really mad at me because I'm spoiling your fun and you just don't understand why you can't just say that bitches be crazy lol. Frankly, I'm not having it - I'll bet you at least suspected before you clicked the post button that you'd get modded for this, and you chose to do it anyway because you enjoyed letting 'er rip too much.

Chads and stacies and incels, evolutionary psychology, TRP, the effects of social media and feminism and whatever else on the dating market, women regretting their life choices and turning into childless neurotics who see "The Wall" approaching - those are all valid topics of discussion, and we've certainly had enough threads about them in the past. What we do not want to become is a place to just dunk on the chads or the stacies because it's fun and someone made a fool of herself on the Internet. The OP was a reasonable top-level post. Lots of the discussion has been reasonable, even if not always kind or charitable. Your post was just "LOL delusional dried up slut" expressed with slightly more words.

Yeah, I chuckled. In fact, I admit your posts often make me chuckle and sigh before I mod you. But you still knew better. You've been warned often enough in the past. Considering your lengthy rap sheet and that @naraburns recently warned that we are going to start cracking down on cheap shot comments that degrade the quality of discourse, consider yourself fortunate you are not eating a ban for this.

What's "TRP"?

“The Red Pill.”

Yeah, I chuckled.

Good. Shows you aren't completely hollowed out. I hope you can hold onto that much of your humanity as long as possible.

Wait, what did fuckduck9000 do wrong? I can easily imagine things that could be said to WhiningCoil in response to his comment that would be much much more unkind and inflammatory than anything that I have seen fuckduck9000 write to him.

Sold - I was thinking how honest & open she was. She's probably insufferable but if you read my thoughts aloud you might think the same of me - true or not.

So: I enjoy paying college aged women to worship their feet. I usually pay 100-200$ an hour for this, varying between their self esteem levels. I've been this this for way longer than I thought I would and unless I fall in love or something I will probably be doing this until I'm a caricature of life.

Will you be Zelle or Venmo me the money? Or would it have to be a traditional hooker fuck like your post implies?

She's probably insufferable but if you read my thoughts aloud you might think the same of me - true or not.

You didn't read her thoughts though or,at least, you shouldn't have in what was clearly an ad - which typically carries the expectation of the advertiser putting their best foot forward, not their honest stream of consciousness.

Her putting her best foot forward wouldn't necessarily affect his perspective that much, if I had to guess. I won't try to speak for him but I'm guessing he's happy she's got enough feet that she can have a good one.

Too old is major red flag. Incomplete gaps in life. Screams damaged goods

Ok, I’ll bite. What are the red flags? Is it that she’s older and polyamorous? That’s certainly not ideal, but 36 with frozen eggs isn’t exactly “barren”. The main concern with polyamory is knowing the kids are yours. IVF makes that a non-issue.

Is it that she’s older and polyamorous?

Yes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/01/27/feature/she-championed-the-idea-that-freezing-your-eggs-would-free-your-career-but-things-didnt-quite-work-out/

Brigitte Adams caused a sensation four years ago when she appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek under the headline, “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” She was single and blond, a Vassar graduate who spoke fluent Italian, and was working in tech marketing for a number of prestigious companies. Her story was one of empowerment, how a new fertility procedure was giving women more choices, as the magazine noted provocatively, “in the quest to have it all.”

Adams remembers feeling a wonderful sense of freedom after she froze her eggs in her late 30s, despite the $19,000 cost. Her plan was to work a few more years, find a great guy to marry and still have a house full of her own children.

Things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.

In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor.

Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed.

With a bit of bad luck she might be practically infertile. Freezing, unfreezing and implanting into the uterus is rolling the dice repeatedly.

The main concern with polyamory is the main concern with dating single mothers, divorcees etc. - the involvement of other men in her life, be it other denizens of the polycule or the ex-husband/baby daddy, will be a constant source of unnecessary drama in your life. "Mom's boyfriend" is also a factor that correlates heavily with child abuse.

I think getting to the point in her life where she’s advertising herself on a Google form is a major red flag. I understand the argument of maximizing the number of people you encounter but frankly normal people who you can expect to have a normal happy productive relationship with do not do this.

Why is it any weirder than advertising yourself on a dating app? The only difference is the url.

I think like so many questions about social norms, it's just tautologically weirder because it's considered weirder. Back when dating apps were first taking off, they were considered weird, or at least weirder than meeting someone at a bar or in your friend circle or at work or whatever. Now dating apps are nigh ubiquitous, so they're not weirder - in fact, meeting someone at work would be considered quite a bit weirder nowadays. Posting your own personal "date me" doc isn't common, so it's considered weird, which makes it weird.

If we want to justify it more rationally, we might posit that an individual who is enough in-tune with the social norms of the culture to recognize what is and isn't considered weird to not do things considered weird is a more desirable partner than someone who isn't. But then there's countersignalling where people intentionally signal that weirdness to attract people who find that sort of weirdness more desirable in a partner. That's probably at least partly going on here.

The url being different is a big deal! We expect you to go to the thick market, if you don’t, we wonder why they didn’t work for you and make some inferences about you.

Also, the medium is very different. A couple sentences dating app profile versus for some reason feeling the need to wordswordswords about herself. Like I’m a cerebral guy who values that in a partner but you convey that by being cerebral and intelligent, not by writing a novel about how you’re cerebral and intelligent. Show don’t tell is like a writing 101 concept.

But also being honest I wouldn't care about any of this if she was hot lol.

Currently polyamorous but open to monogamy. Seeking primary partner, open to other things.

Re: She's the town bike.

High variance. Very happy sometimes. Very agentic sometimes. Very dysfunctional and inert sometimes. Very good at some things. Very bad at some things.

That captivating combination of arrogance and crippling self-doubt

Mental health problems (anxiety, OCD, probable depression). I'm neurotic across topics ranging from obviously stupid so my partner has to keep being like, 'no, you are not dying of a pulmonary embolism right now', and 'yes, the people who liked you last week haven't suddenly started hating you for no reason', and things that are extremely hard to dismiss, such as that everyone is plausibly going to die.

Probable ADHD: I’m bad at doing things I’m not interested in, which includes a lot of things that it would be strategic to do.

She's mentally ill.

Tend to either do things in a twenty hour blaze of action or a dispirited three month slog.

Into ‘spirituality’. Very unsure what’s up with that. Sometimes everything seems amazing in a spiritual way. (I’m an atheist.)

Probably yellow flags more than red flags. Still, there be dragons.

And then about 10,000 more words trying to paper over her obvious personality disorders into some sort of manic pixie dream girl persona... except she's almost 40 and that's only cute in 20 somethings who can ostensibly grow out of it.

I could see that working for companionship, but not necessarily for raising children. Both because it dramatically increases the chances of the children ending up with mental illnesses, and also because at least one partner should be reasonably emotionally stable so the kids still get taken care of, all the time.

She’s the town bike

This is bad, but it’s more of a negotiable than a non-negotiable. I’d much rather be with someone with a high body count than say, raise another man’s child.

She’s mentally ill

These aren’t the mental illnesses you need to be worried about. I don’t see bipolar, BPD, or schizophrenia anywhere.

manic pixie dream girl persona

Idk seems like she might be fun.

RE the bipolar, numerous of her statements could be viewed as describing manic and depressive episodes. Specifically

Tend to either do things in a twenty hour blaze of action or a dispirited three month slog.

High variance. Very happy sometimes. Very agentic sometimes. Very dysfunctional and inert sometimes. Very good at some things. Very bad at some things.

That captivating combination of arrogance and crippling self-doubt

“If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you don’t deserve me at my best”-vibes.

Very agentic sometimes

Not sure if this is a not like other girls nod toward the hypoagency of women, or if she thinks being agentic is something men would also feel is necessary to point out about themselves.

Unkind.

Reality is unkind. I won't be wrong.

Ever heard of decorum? 'I won't be wrong' is the lamest possible defence to rudeness, we lie all the time for the sake of common courtesy and that's just as it should be.

The entire rest of the internet is top down enforced "polite lies". This place was supposed to be different. Alas. It's become "rationalism, unless it hurts another self described rationalist feelings."

I dunno, the Internet at large used to be "mean as hell, with optional grounding to Truth." Still kinda is, in a way.

The entire rest of the internet is top down enforced "polite lies". This place was supposed to be different. Alas. It's become "rationalism, unless it hurts another self described rationalist feelings."

Stop prevaricating. You didn't get modded because the woman who triggered your Dave Sim outburst this time happens to be a rationalist, or because it might (hypothetically, in the unlikely event that she reads this thread) hurt her feelings.

I second @HaroldWilson. Your statements about how this woman is a "town bike", a "whore", and so on are not some virtuous demonstrations of honesty and reason, they are angry emotional outbursts. If they were not, you would have chosen more neutral language.

Your comment about how "There is no polite way to point out to an old barren whore..." is deflection. You are obviously not writing all this here on The Motte in order to be helpful to this woman who, as far as you know, will never read anything that you write.

There a difference between not shying away from important truths and pointless, mean-spirited personal rudeness.

Calling someone an 'old barren whore' is just obnoxious shit-slinging that serves no purpose that could not be otherwise easily achieved with much less inflammatory and loaded language.

No, this place was always "you can talk about any idea, as long as you're civil". The "hurt feelings" things was only a criticism of people who felt hurt by ideas, not by actual insults.

There is no polite way to point out to an old barren whore that the kind of guy she wants to have geriatric pregnancies with isn't interested in an old barren whore or the risks of geriatric pregnancies. He has better options. Those things are just true. There is no conceivable way you can explain this to a woman who is in that situation, and not have them take offense. You're fighting an uphill battle against decades of lies they've been told about how they can have it all. They wouldn't have been in that situation otherwise.

Unless you want to just pretend whores aren't a real thing, or barrenness isn't a real thing, or male preferences aren't a real thing, and join that chorus of liars that got her into that situation in the first place. As though lies have no consequences.

There is no polite way to point out to an old barren whore that the kind of guy she wants to have geriatric pregnancies with isn't interested in an old barren whore or the risks of geriatric pregnancies. He has better options.

"A woman who is so advanced in age, and had so many sexual partners, will have a lot of issues attracting the kind of mate she wants because having had so many sexual partners tends to be unattractive to most men, and because a pregnancy at such a late age comes with a lot of risks. The hypothetical man simply has too many better options"

Amateur.

More comments

No reason to insult her. Whole thing’s rat gossip anyway, our People Magazine. And while we’re playing the personal trivia game, you’re not exactly kindly disposed towards women, are you Coil? I doubt her male counterpart would encounter so much hostility from you. She didn’t do anything, she’s even adjacent to our tribe. If she doesn’t get kindness, who does? When they smashed your last hobby, did you swear to deny all womankind kindness?

This is silly. Men are going to have a different reaction to female dating strategies compared to males because men have spent a lot of time thinking about the former and much less about the latter (unless you are gay).

It's not about your opinion on dating strategies, or mine. A woman expressing the same level of hostility would get the same response from me. It wouldn't be strictly necessary, because the same guys would be smashing the report button and screaming incoherently at the witch.

Let's check! @WhiningCoil do you have similar feelings regarding Jacob Falkovitch

It's not good. But I also don't see the same "I HAVE A PERSONALITY DISORDER" red flags. Three short, afraid to offend, needy paragraphs. Clicking through to the form... yikes. The photo at the time couldn't be more "M'lady" and I wouldn't want to admit I wrote those questions. I'd blame some matchmaker to try to distance myself from any medical liability for cringe induced sterility.

or Chris Olah?

Well lets see here

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Based and red pilled.

You know what, fuck it, I wish people (and women in particular) were more ostensibly open about what they're looking for and when or how they're looking to get it.

She might get shellacked for it but if we didn't live in an insane society "women from good family and untarnished morality announces she's looking for suitors, contact if interested" should be a non story.

The only reason it's controversial is because any amount of effort to get what you want "looks desperate" and people would rather everyone be desperate in silence.

I don't think an almost 40 year old career woman is going to attract a lot of people but she should be allowed to look for the few people that would date her, dammit.

untarnished morality

She's self described mentally ill and poly. She's deeply tarnished according to common standards. But 30-something poly Bay Area guys don't follow those standards, so good luck to her.

women from good family and untarnished morality announces she's looking for suitors, contact if interested

Is that what’s actually happening here? She’s definitely embracing some lifestyle choices that everyone acknowledges as unconventional and large fractions of the population would see as immoral.

In the absolute you're right of course, but she's in California. I'm not sure if being weirdly over socialized isn't the norm there.

Why, in response to getting a negative reaction, is she intent on spreading it even further?

One possibility is that she genuinely doesn't care about negativity from anon weirdos trying to be mean to her for being unusual and that she really does want to just cast as wide of a net as possible to find compelling responses.

Personally, I struggle to empathize much with this kind of approach. Everyone I'm friends with that is in a happy, stable marriage got there by meeting people in real life, thinking they were attractive, hanging out together, and eventually becoming a couple. Off the top of my head, I can think of zero exceptions to this, and that's in a friend group that's heavily tilted towards science nerds. I am aware that people also sometimes meet on the internet, but I would wager that the likelihood of finding an excellent and stable partner by opening with "I'm poly and here's a list of things I like" is going to be vanishingly low, particularly by the time one has arrived at their mid-30s. The whole thing just codes as plain out weird to me and isn't how people typically find happy marriages. I would, in fact, suggest that she touch grass.

This completes my anon weirdo negativity. I wish her well, I'm just not optimistic.

I haven't met a single married couple that I would in any way whatsoever call happy. The closer I get to a married couple, the more I realize they quasi get along and usually hate each other.

I've found zero current exceptions.

Which makes me feel like I don't understand happiness. Or maybe happiness can come with many (many!) caveats attached to it.

Not really about your point, and not really saying you're wrong, I just at this point in my life assume most everyone is a pod person and married people turn into a cocoon of bullshit.

This has been similar to my impression, though in a weaker sense. Like, there's definite friendships, love, and happiness.. but often far more shallow and less happy than I'd expect from two people who decide to be together for decades.

I think part of this is just people not having strong enough shared interests - I'd have issues marrying someone who wasn't in fields that I'm in, because having lots of related topics to talk about is valuable. This might just be me looking for that more than others do?

The closer I get to a married couple, the more I realize they quasi get along and usually hate each other.

Bubbles, man.

When my wife and I were dating, we went through a marriage-prep class with our church, taught by a bunch of couples in their 60s and 70s, who'd been married thirty years or more. None of them ever gave me the impression they hated or even merely tolerated each other.

This year is my fifth anniversary, and my life has drasticly improved in every way possible since getting married. being married to her is the best thing that's ever happened to me.

Ehh I don’t know. Life with small kids is stressful so my wife and I are often harried. But when the kids aren’t sick or hungry, we are great.

Also, we both have a needling form of humor that is in good sport. So I might tease her about her spending but it’s never actually an issue in our marriage but if you were an outsider you might think “they have huge issues on finances.”

In short, when times are (1) hard, (2) good, or (3) intimate (not necessarily in the sexual sense but when we can slow down and smell the roses) the relationship is amazing because there is such a deep connection, history, and shared purpose. But sometimes the day to day isn’t amazing.

I am the rare single man who’s social circle is almost entirely married, and they seem generally happy for it, although to varying degrees. In general it seems like marital happiness correlates much more strongly with willingness to put in the work of being in a relationship than with initial partner compatibility.

Anyone can say anything on the internet, but I am a genuinely very happy married man. My wife and I have been together for over 10 years and have never had an actual argument, never shouted at each other, never had any sort of the friction that seems common with others. I have never felt put upon by her or wished to see less of her. We share many hobbies as well as having non-shared hobbies. Sharing our lives together also provides financial improvement through shared housing, vacations, meals, and other cost-scaling. I can say without exaggeration that every day we're together is better for it.

I can't know everyone's inner life, but my impression is that two of my three closest friends have roughly similar relationships with their wives. The third doesn't seem quite as frictionless, but he has wonderful children and his wife seems like an excellent mother; my impression is that he is very content with his life decisions.

Presumably a rich tech guy roughly her age could find a much less old, less mentally ill woman.

Doesn't this very forum feature a strong contingent of programmers constantly lecturing the peanut gallery about how hard dating is?

A lot of those guys aren't trying to lead with the wealth, though. They're trying to find whatever a 'love match' is as opposed to explicitly trading $ for companionship.

Right, but are they the rich ones in their mid-to-late 30s?

I'm financially comfortable, in my thirties, and I don't need to date women who are looking for children in the near future. And I don't even smile, though I do shower.

Probably not so many 36 year old rich tech guys here. Making $250K in the Bay Area doesn't make you rich.

But the market is not made out of perfect information. You will never catch a fish if you don't throw out bait.

I guess we'll see if the "billionaire's wife" meme actually tracks reality.

This has strong "Hello my future girlfriend" energy. Actually, Michael Blount was born in 1987, so he's the perfect age for her, unless he's happily married.

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