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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.
She can very easily get a partner without resorting to such artifaces, all she has to do is be realistic about what her value as a 36 year old woman like her is. The odds of that happening though, even for a rationalist woman, aren't particularly good.
Once again this isn't all (or even mostly) her fault, but rather it is a fault of the society and milleu she lives in that her (inflated) hopes and dreams are about to go splat on the ground and this is one final desperate attempt from a struggling soul to avert doom.
They say that disappointment is caused by the difference in expectations vs reality, and by sending expectations for middle aged women to the moon without doing anything to change the reality on the ground modern Western culture claims for itself another victim.
What she is able to get and keep lies on a cline between the 21 year old incel and the 60 year old functioning alcoholic, the time to find a long term partner was 10 years ago for her. Had she been told at 26 that if she left it until 36 she'd only be able to get the dregs of society to commit to her there is a very good chance that she'd be happily married today. Instead her society which looks down on inflicting short term pain for long term gain has now condemned her to far greater suffering, probably for the rest of her life.
I've learned to phase out and stop caring about such cases, much as we've all phased out to the massive hunger and suffering going on right now in Africa.
I guess so, but maybe she just isn't interested in anything less than the best? This could make sense from an ev-psych point of view. If you have kids with a genetic dud, presumably your kids will also struggle more with mating, potentially creating a vicious cycle. I have no idea what the actual relationship between male attractiveness and long-term genetic ROI is, but I could imagine that in some environments, the expected genetic payoff of having kids with a bad enough mate could be close to zero.
This suggests an intervention that could get women to be interested in less-attractive men: censor or hide attractive but unavailable men from them, until her estimation of relative value of the available men goes up. Right now we have the opposite, with media showing unrealistically handsome and high-status men (i.e. James Bond or Tom Cruise) all the time.
Nothing that a 36 year old childless woman does makes sense from an evo-psych view. Such creatures would never have existed in the ancestral environment, because women needed to start exchanging their wombs for mastodon steak at 14 or they'd just die of exposure.
But even if they had it wouldn't make any sense, because having a kid with a genetic dud still gives you more chance of grandchildren than does having no kids, which gives you zero chance.
Infertile women were always a thing. The tale of Abraham and Sarah was intended to be deeply relatable.
I don't think they were, but it's irrelevant to the point. Even if I grant your hypothesis, they weren't a thing that could leave an impression in evolutionary psychology, because no infertile person ever can.
Also, Biblical Times substantially post-dates the ancestral environment.
Of course it can. Thedesire for sexual novelty (reduced if children are produced, ie sense of responsibility) would benefit someone who is fertile who married someone infertile.
Somewhat jokingly, PMS is anger directed at a man who didn't impregnate her this month. Maybe that is evolutionarily beneficial
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