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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36359 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.

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

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