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Notes -
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.
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?
-- 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.
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