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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.

Yeah, she's going to reject all comers. I sincerely doubt this aging, mentally ill, town bike is going to net the sort of man she envisions thawing out her eggs for. Especially from how much she clearly thinks she's amazing, interspersed with all the giant red flags, in her open letter. If anyone I knew saw this and thought about emailing her, I'd pay for them to wrung out by a hooker first to clear their head. I don't know how thirsty and lonely you'd need to be to not see the red flags from orbit on this one.

Unkind.

Reality is unkind. I won't be wrong.

Ever heard of decorum? 'I won't be wrong' is the lamest possible defence to rudeness, we lie all the time for the sake of common courtesy and that's just as it should be.

The entire rest of the internet is top down enforced "polite lies". This place was supposed to be different. Alas. It's become "rationalism, unless it hurts another self described rationalist feelings."

No, this place was always "you can talk about any idea, as long as you're civil". The "hurt feelings" things was only a criticism of people who felt hurt by ideas, not by actual insults.

There is no polite way to point out to an old barren whore that the kind of guy she wants to have geriatric pregnancies with isn't interested in an old barren whore or the risks of geriatric pregnancies. He has better options. Those things are just true. There is no conceivable way you can explain this to a woman who is in that situation, and not have them take offense. You're fighting an uphill battle against decades of lies they've been told about how they can have it all. They wouldn't have been in that situation otherwise.

Unless you want to just pretend whores aren't a real thing, or barrenness isn't a real thing, or male preferences aren't a real thing, and join that chorus of liars that got her into that situation in the first place. As though lies have no consequences.

There is no polite way to point out to an old barren whore that the kind of guy she wants to have geriatric pregnancies with isn't interested in an old barren whore or the risks of geriatric pregnancies. He has better options.

"A woman who is so advanced in age, and had so many sexual partners, will have a lot of issues attracting the kind of mate she wants because having had so many sexual partners tends to be unattractive to most men, and because a pregnancy at such a late age comes with a lot of risks. The hypothetical man simply has too many better options"

Amateur.

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