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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.
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.
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.
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.
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