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