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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.

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.