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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25969 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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This thought occurred after Christmas this year during a few activities where family members wanted to play a game, so they pulled up a YouTube video to demonstrate how a thing is done, and it was incredibly gross.

99% of modern kids will never have the ability to be forgotten- parents post their pictures online when they're not able to give consent, including embarrassing and compromised photos. This includes YouTube videos of moms putting their daughters in compromised positions and posting them on the video site.

Such videos are easy to find- the mom often speaks, and their prepubescent girls do a seemingly-innocuous activity. Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.

I'll note that I don't have a proposed solution to this. The laws on child-porn already exist, but this content skirts the edge of acceptability. The girls are usually 10-13, and doing an innocuous activity- like playing pattycake or ring around the rosie, usually in mostly-acceptable clothing.

When you stumble on one such video, you can tell what I'm talking about. It's the camera angles.

For this reason, I come to TheMotte- have you seen the videos I'm talking about? What do you think about them, and how would you evaluate whether or not such content is okay to post online?

If you have kids, do you worry that there's some random perusing Instagram or willing to train ai on them?

After seeing these things, I can't get it out of my head, nor can I come up with a reasonable solution.

have you seen the videos I'm talking about?

No.

What do you think about them

Nothing at all until you wrote you about them, now I think...social media does all kinds of crazy stuff to people and people with it, as always.

how would you evaluate whether or not such content is okay to post online?

Okay? I wouldn't find it okay for my wife to post such things with my daughter. But for others? Really quite their own problem. Once the information is out there, it's too late, the damage, if any be, is done. Can't put that back in the bottle. I suppose you could punish parents for it as discouragement, but that's state overreach in my opinion. Sucks for the children, but the world can't save children from their parents.

Also, in general, your post is very oblique and could stand to be more direct and explicit.

I haven't seen these videos myself, but I've heard people complaining about them, not unlike yourself. And like you said, nothing about the videos are explicitly sexual. It doesn't go full pedobait like Cuties. But it's still uncomfortably sexualizing. From some other complaints I've seen the dead giveaway are the comments, usually full of gross comments by pedophiles ranging from plausibly deniable to 4-chan party van. Also foot fetishist? So many foot fetishist. I guess they can't all work at Nickelodeon.

The other tell is the recommendations on those videos. There is a tread worn in the algorithm a mile deep that assumes if you like that video, you must love other gross shit that sexualizes minors.

Personally, we keep all photos of our daughter off the internet. No social media, no approval for school or businesses to post them, just absolute zero tolerance. Partially because we both have family that is unwell, unsafe, obsessive and might not leave us or our daughter alone. Also for all the usual tech-paranoid reasons about AI and corporations creating and owning a simulacrum of your soul.

I’m kinda with you, although not a blanket ban from me. The issue beyond sexuality is that the internet is forever and kids cannot actually consent to having their image and activities uploaded. What’s cute at ten might be a problem at twenty or thirty when they’re trying to build their lives. Businesses can and do look at your Facebook. A lot of women will look at social media before going on a date. And whatever images and posts they find will form an impression. Every kid including me has an edge lord phase, where they think they’re super smart and cool because they dress weird and hold a lot of weird opinions (often quite loudly). For anyone born after 1990, that phase is online ready to bite them should the wrong person find it.

I've not seen these videos. I'm not totally sure how I'd feel about it, I suspect having a kid is going to change some of these feelings but I appear to lack the ick factor about having my likeness used to train AI. As for the soft core CP stuff? I'm overwhelmingly disgusted by pedophiles but I don't really think there is a way to prevent them from ever even seeing young children. I may still not like the idea of there being a lot of content on the open web about my future children but it's not really because pedos might find it.

If you have kids, do you worry that there's some random perusing Instagram or willing to train ai on them?

I have a child. I don’t care if someone uses photos for sexual purposes, the same person could masturbate to them from memory of seeing them in public. If you’re female, people will masturbate to you countless times without your knowledge and they have never needed AI to do it. People are weird, that’s life.

Still allows for the question of how 'normalized' you'd want it to become.

Presumably you wouldn't want a guy to just drop trou and start jackin' it right in sight of your kid.

And gazing at him/her creepily from the bushes while he does it is not a major improvement?

So I think parents end up conflating "jacking off at home to a sneakily taken photo" as sort of close to "hiding in the bushes and jacking off" even if there is far less danger implied by the latter.

So lets' just say that photos kept in the privacy of one's domicile are not harming anyone. How close in time and space should the masturbatory be able to get to the object of his desire before we get too uncomfortable and want to shut down the behavior?

Father here. Part of my job is to set her up for good partnerships.This requires her to be attentive, attractive, and to have a good social filter.

There will always be a fraction of people who are okay with jerking it to kids. I have no interest in adapting the Fast Bear Rule: making my daughter uglier/less available so pervs find a different girl. She will develop a filter & practice it like any other skill.

If I've done my job right, she won't have to worry about pedos. She just won't see them as legitimate options.

Such videos are easy to find- the mom often speaks, and their prepubescent girls do a seemingly-innocuous activity. Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.

I've not seen these videos, though I recall maybe 5ish years ago, there was a minor hubbub when some YouTuber brought this kind of thing to attention, and I watched a few of them which are probably similar to what you described in this post.

In any case, this quoted paragraphs touches on a common sentiment I've seen all over the place, which I still don't fully understand. Which is the notion that these images being on some pervert's HDD is somehow harmful to the subject of the original image. At best, I could see the argument that if the subject were acquaintances with the pervert, then the pervert's perception of the subject would be corrupted in an unfair way, but even that seems like a stretch. For strangers online, I'm not sure how to rationalize this; how does an arrangement of pixels that looks like me harm me if it's sitting on a HDD somewhere that I don't know, viewed by someone I've never heard of, and using it just to get his rocks off (most likely)?

With AI generation, I think a more generic fear exists that we don't know how insight AI will be able to gather in the future from this data, so there's a bit of an unlimited downside risk, but in terms of, say, modern diffusion models, I'm not sure there's anything that harms the subject either. Without intentional training, the model won't be able to recreate the subject's appearance based on their name, so there's just about no risk in terms of privacy. And if the training using video featuring the subject's face causes the model to, by chance, recreate the face, then it's just going to be one of umpteen anonymous faces the model generates. And if perverts generate grids of pixels using AI that look similar to the subject (by chance in this case of modern AI, but conscious intent wouldn't change anything), for the purpose of getting their rocks off while viewing the image, I don't see how the subject would be harmed.

I haven't seen anything like your post mentions. But it reminds me of hearing about a few test suits where children sued their parents for invading their privacy by sharing essentially their entire childhood online.

I wonder if in the future we'll have legal codification restricting parental sharing rights, or if it will segment along class lines like so many other things.

I also wonder about what kids from families like Chris Ballenger's, whose family are streamers, will think of this 20-30 years from now.

I think there's a decent amount of precedent that would entitle the child to claim at least a portion of any money earned through the use of their image.

So the parent would be expected to have a restricted account into which the earnings go and this gets turned over to the child when they turn 18 (reasonable amounts could be deducted for the child's benefit in the meantime).

For 'mere' invasion of privacy I'm not sure what the damages would be.

The realm of responsibility falls on the parents. Just as they're responsible for feeding and clothing their kids and deciding what school/clubs/activities to send them to, they're just as responsible for what they choose to put online. Any personal videos you want to put out that you don't want any strangers to see should be private and access heavily restricted.

People can and will sexualize anything and everything, see rule 34. This is a touchy subject but I'm not sure we can or should do more than we already do, which is banning any explicit sexual content of children and socially ostracizing those with that kind of desire. But you can't stop or control what people think, and I draw the uncomfortable line at turning those desires into actions. If they're just engaging in masturbation in the privacy of their own home, then while disgusting, isn't doing any actual harm. But if they start compiling videos to make it easier for others to see, or invite others into their fetishes, or start reaching out to the parents/child then they are engaging in actions that actually have an impact on the person, and punishment should take place here.

Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.

Did you mean the other way around? I think I would be mortified if they were directly some captured in some internet stranger's hard drive, ai generation not so much since the output is not the same as the input. Maybe you meant specifically about deepfakes, that is something I haven't come to terms with myself since I haven't given it much thought yet.

My opinions are mostly the same as yours, but there is a potential issue in that it's difficult to exist on the internet with literally no presence.

That is, pervs who never interact with children directly are still clicking on and watching certain videos that fulfill their criteria for desirable content, which boosts the metrics on those videos according to the algorithms on the website, be it Youtube or Instagram or something else. This both makes said content more visible to other people, and provides positive feedback that this is the sort of content that becomes popular. People who care about being a "successful influencer" pay attention to popular content from other people, and also popularity of their own content, and are more likely to replicate things that were successful. In a certain respect it's sort of like AI training but in other people's brains.

Therefore, an army of pervs attempting to be stealthy but still being caught by the algorithm still end up incentivizing young girls to produce less appropriate content, even if the girls themselves don't realize why said content is popular.

I haven't seen these, but the first thing that pops to my head by way of analogy is the way that close masculine friendship is now frequently coded as gay. Arab men holding hands? Gay. Two bros hugging it out? Gay. Telling your decades-long friend that you love him? Gay. Slap on the butt or other physical encouragement in sports? Gay. Just hanging out together? Believe it or not, still gay. Discouraging good, healthy, forms of masculine love is a terrible consequence of everything being interpreted through the lens of believing any two guys could be gay.

Likewise, viewing any adolescent play that isn't the platonic visual ideal of utter asexuality as an invitation to pedophiles concedes far too much ground for fear of pathology. A couple preteens playing pattycake just isn't sexual, even if weirdos are capable of interpreting it as such.

I haven't seen these, but the first thing that pops to my head by way of analogy is the way that close masculine friendship is now frequently coded as gay. Arab men holding hands? Gay. Two bros hugging it out? Gay. Telling your decades-long friend that you love him? Gay. Slap on the butt or other physical encouragement in sports? Gay. Just hanging out together? Believe it or not, still gay.

John Woo films? Total sausage fests.

The focus on male friendships in Woo's film have been interpreted as homoerotic. Woo has responded to these statements stating "People will bring their own preconceptions to a movie .... If they see something in The Killer that they consider to be homoerotic then that is their privilege. It's certainly not intentional."

That was 1989.

You cannot stop people from thinking gross thoughts. Moreover, they will be using AI in the near future to generate all they could ever want, and already do, and even if your children weren't in the dataset, it is diverse enough that something close enough to your children could be generated.

Focus on preventing real harm.

I have little regard for the pedo-panic in the first place, and this is even more weaksauce compared to that.

If you're at the point where children doing entirely innocuous things, in modest clothing, is somehow a bad thing because you're worried some pedo will use it as jerkoff material, then we're at about the point where audio-visual recording of just about anyone and anything is off the table, and maybe even a ban on thinking about the children, you creep.

It also is entirely pointless to forbid it now, even for the ever illusive concerns of it ending up in AI training data. You don't think there's enough out there that people aren't making photorealistic artifical CSAM, in both photographic and video form? The cat is out of the bag, and while I'm sure there are some pedophiles who have a fetish for jailbait/"real" children, barring about 99.99% of parents from recording their kids and sharing it is so grossly overkill it's demented. You take a video of your daughter jumping on a trampoline and upload it on Insta? Well, about 6 frames can be construed as an "upskirt" shot, enjoy your ban. Discord is already banning people without recourse, including entire discord servers, if a single still image (that bald dude munching popcorn used as a reaction image), is shared, because their heuristics recognize it as a frame shared with a flagged CSAM video.

The reasonable solution, as far as I'm concerned, is to not care, or at least find something more concrete to worry about.

Small correction, that bald guy reaction image was used to cover up the actual image, which is also actually just someone eating popcorn, but the second one does trigger an instant account ban.

Thanks for clarifying! I'll take your word for it, since I am modestly attached to my Discord account and don't desire to find out the hard way haha.

Saw this linked elsewhere, and do we now have a better notion of what was going on inside OpenAI with the attempted ousting of Sam Altman? With Altman re-instated, and a new, Altman-friendly board in place, is this the kind of revision of the mission statement that was worrying the previous board?

I continue to believe the real danger from AI is not the AI itself, but the humans that use it, and "We can make zillions from fat, juicy, military contracts/Whoops, how we were to know that would happen?" seems like one of the failure modes that should concern the AI doomer set.

I don't see it as providing any new information: this was almost so certain as to be predetermined. The MIC is a lucrative and stable system to be integrated into, and the dynamics of capitalism were going to inevitably drive OAI into its arms. Little different from Google pulling out of China for being a totalitarian regime to, five years later, begging Daddy Xi to please let them make money in China.

Safetyists can draw some minimal level of comfort from the fact that OAI priorities will marginally shift from improving capabilities towards AGI to building tools that the MIC desires. More profits, less fundamental/deep research. (And I think that's genuinely good for safetyists: a smarter drone swarm is not going to destroy humanity.)

a smarter drone swarm is not going to destroy humanity

Not if you think the danger lies in the super-intelligent AI getting control of that smarter drone swarm to achieve its end. I don't believe in the super-intelligent AI, I do believe in ordinary dumb humans getting shiner, more destructive toys, and somebody presses the wrong button or is insufficiently clear about what or who the target should be, and then "oops" but it's too late then. 'How were we supposed to know that setting up autonomous killbots might come back to bite us in the ass? Sorry, widow of Mr. President, we never intended it to be our motorcade that got zapped, it was supposed to be the other guys over the border of the country our guy was visiting at the time'.

My hope is perhaps the technology is overhyped. Given the apparent change in just a few months about six months ago, I was expecting even bigger changes by now. Here’s hoping there is some kind of difficult technical issue.

I think there's more a staircase of jagged growth than a straight line up at the leading edge. You have leaps from GPT-2 to GPT-3 to GPT-3.5 to GPT-4. The gap between them can be years. GPT-3 was a cool toy but two years later GPT-3.5 changed the world. Even though there's been no qualitative change from GPT-4 last year, they've multiplied the context limit and added visual/internet browsing capabilities.

Why jagged? I reckon it takes time to process their gains understanding-wise, adopt new software improvements, get more training materials and buy new hardware. There's other stuff they do like censoring or optimizing . They're thinking 'do I really want to spend 100 million now and get a better version of GPT-4 or wait a bit longer for when my resources go further, once we've figured out X, Y and Z'. Training the models costs a lot of money and ties down a lot of compute. You wouldn't want to constantly be in training and making small improvments, missing out on making big improvements.

Just because nothing happened for the last few months, it doesn't mean that progress has stopped.

Maybe (though it’s really been more than a few months). We shall see. Perhaps it is merely copium.

The future of Open Ai is much like Wolfram Alpha--something overhyped to change the world and initially really cool and useful, but now crap due to to extreme metering of computational power and paywalls. Expect the same here. The need to turn a profit from this will limit the power.

Don't think this is at all true. A lot of usecases are porn, and quite a few involve violence or 'being offensive' or racism, but the vast majority of llm usecases work almost as well as they would without censorship/safety training.

You know, I totally forgot about Wolfram Alpha. I remember it was really cool back several years when I last played around with it, but after I got through the math classes I had it help me with, it just flew out of my mind and was forgotten.

Disagree, GPT may be thoroughly spayed in the political sense but (as of now) this is still not enough to stop a slightly dedicated shitposter attacker, and while it has a long way to go in terms of cognition, what we have is already enough for many use cases. Cooding with it in particular is amazingly convenient, developers I know still have to wrangle it and correct its output but it is very tangibly helpful, and for me as a not-dev, being able to write simple scripts for work in 5-10 minutes of prompting instead of 1-2 hours of googling (especially if I'm a noob at the relevant language) is an absolute blessing. I imagine assorted wordcels feel the same way.

The only interesting thing about the accelerationist vs safetyist wars is that for some reason the safetyists actually thought they were still going to matter once big money and the military-industrial complex decided what should be. EA hangers-on writing papers for their pet think tanks are just lucky they're unserious enough people to be sidelined through board wrangling and don't need to be thrown off any bridges.

I've definitely believed all along that once the money fountain got within their sights, all the "ha ha ha of course nothing will change/it changes" was the next step.

We solemnly swear we won't ever do anything even the teensiest bit naughty (unless it makes us a LOT of money).

I suppose it was just a bit eye-opening exactly how powerless the people who thought they were in charge really were, but yeah. AI danger is people, and people danger is greed, and "we can make tons of money off government contracts, don't let's be too fussy about which governments even" is always going to beat "AI can be an existential risk and we must be vewwy vewwy quiet when hunting wabbits", no matter how idealistic and "but look at all our high-quality technical papers full of the most jargoniest jargon!" you can pull out.

This is why I always thought the safety-first position— the people with power/money care more about increasing their wealth than in preserving humanity. And AI, if it actually works as promised, is a big, flashing “I win” button right in front of them. The only thing that might cause someone to consider blowing up an AI bank is if it belongs to a rival. The government wants it because it’s important to maintaining geopolitical status. The rich want it because the massive efficiency gains will put money in their pockets.

The ‘safetyist’ guys are in many cases the very same engineers who demanded Altman’s reinstatement so they could get their Microsoft (or other) payout when it comes.

In truth, most people will abandon most principles when presented with a good chance of getting rich. And you can always justify it by telling yourself someone else was going to do it anyway, and at least this way you get paid.

They've long been called useful idiots whose ideas around safety only really serve to establish and maintain control and do nothing to prevent evil uses.

I think this move vindicated that analysis.

OpenAI bragging about its safety statement and mission statement which were going to make it the most ethicallest ever research company, don't be worried but just trust us guys. And now this.

I hate being proved correct about being cynical, I would have loved to be pleasantly surprised by "Huh, they actually do mean all the bumpf about safety and they won't cave in to the money fountain", but this is a fallen world after all.

'Evil uses'.

At the moment, LLMs couldn't plot their way out of a paper bag and fail at basic logic.

If we're talking 'evil' using LLMs to combat 'extremism' and 'misinformation' is both widely not seen as 'evil' and the most immediate use. They'll also be used to snoop through people's emails and highlight things cops could use.

Was any of that a use case OpenAI mission statement prohibited?

Image recognition seems good enough now though that killer drones that don't need an uplink and guidance to their own targets so they're immune to jamming are going to be fielded fairly soon. (<5 years).

But is OpenAI best at that?

I deliberately remained axiologically agnostic because what you think the machine should be restricted to do or not to isn't relevant to the fact that putting it behind a locked door and giving the key to the State and Corporations is never ever going to work.

They would have had a better chance putting it all in the hands of a single man. Organizations are structurally unable to stay mission focused. And only naive academics could believe otherwise to this day.

And now some news from Ukraine: Gonzalo Lira is dead.

More details about his demise in Ukrainian prison.

You probably heard about him. Former pickup artist guru who turned into journalist/propagandist lambasting Ukraine and Zelensky - from Ukraine in war time. Whatever you think about him and his opinions, this tooks serious guts (and GL was well aware of the risks).

English Wikipedia finds him not enough notable and deleted him at 4th attempt, but, strangely enough, simple English Wikipedia keeps his article.

Now, he is notable enough to be noticed by Tucker Carlson and notable enough make it to Twitter worldwide trends (as for now), notable enough to be added as another reason for Red tribe to oppose supporting Ukraine.

Not smart move from Ukrainian government. You gained a little bit of sadistic revenge and even smaller bit of intimidation of people inside Ukraine (who already know well what will happen to them if they open their mouth too much). You lost rather bigger piece of credibility with people whose support you desperately need.

RIP Coach Red Pill. Whatever you were in your life, now you are symbol and martyr.

RIP Coach Red Pill. Whatever you were in your life, now you are symbol and martyr

No, he's not, he's an object lesson in why you don't go to a corrupt shithole under military rule by Nazis and start advocating for the country they're in a state of total war with.

If I went to Ukraine(which doesn't seem like a great idea to me, but IDK maybe I decided to get a mail order bride or something), I would keep my opinion that Crimea is part of Russia because it voted for annexation to myself in the interest of not getting murdered or imprisoned.

No, he's not,

For you and most of us here, or Soldo. For plenty of others that might be true. People swalloved Ghost of Kyiv and Sam Hyde as Ghost of Kyiv..

Being stupid, putting oneself at risk, being naive all seem like things that are more likely to make someone a martyr. I think he won't become a martyr because regime media in the west will simply ignore it. Or at best right wing media will cover it while regime media ignores it so it becomes a polarizing culture war issue, he'll be an Ashli Babbitt basically.

Reports:

Redacted: Calling the Ukrainian government Nazis is a very inflammatory claim, with no justification provided Redacted: antagonistic

While this isn't antagonistic enough for me to care, it does seem a bit excessive to call the Ukrainian government Nazis.

Hyperbole? Well, that's okay, to a degree, and I think it's evident that you're implying they're authoritarian rather than literal card-carrying National Socialists. The rules regarding providing justification for one's claims are not meant to be taken quite that literally as far as I'm concerned, even if this is a subpar phrasing. You do acknowledge they're corrupt (a subjective standard, but true enough, even if less than they used to be), and that there are restrictions on speech and political affiliation because they are, in fact, in a state of Total War. I suggest the people who reported you read between a lines a tad bit more, even if you exaggerate.

Anyway, I deem this comment only mildly inflammatory, within the bounds of what I'm willing to tolerate, but I would prefer you try and be a little more polite and less pejorative in your phrasing. This isn't a warning, more of a tut-tut.

Sigh. One day the mods will be freed from accusations that we are biased in favor of Liberals/Ukraine/The Jews/Rightists and other mutually contradictory groups, but not today.

No, he's not, he's an object lesson in why you don't go to a corrupt shithole under military rule by Nazis and start advocating for the country they're in a state of total war with.

Nazis? Do you believe that Zelensky is a Pythonesque Jewish Nazi or are you using the Russian government's definition of Nazi?

For maximally cynical, conspiratory and blackpilling take, seek, as usual Rolo Slavski.

Gonzalo Lira Was Abandoned to His Death

Gonzalo Lira was the biggest journalist covering the war from an anti-Ukrainian perspective for the first few months. I saw him everywhere and watched his content. The idea that he doesn’t deserve a Wikipedia page is crazy. He was also threatened with death early on by Ukrainian military operatives, which coincided with his long stretch of not posting.

What was the gist of his reporting? Anything contradicting the propaganda coming out of Moscow and Kiev?

The gist (as much as I can remember) was that Ukraine is destined to lose, and that the conflict was the result of Western-backed influence in Maidan / the failure to declare no NATO membership. But yeah, anything seriously critical of Ukraine is going to be labeled “propaganda coming out of Moscow”, and this in no way justifies harassing and possibly killing an ideologue and reporter.

Was he ? I've looked at what he was saying and it was either derivative/trite- what skeptics have been saying for years, and what was readily apparent from numbers etc or flat-out wrong.

Bad moves from both sides here. Coach literally livetweeted that he was going to cross at a specific border checkpoint with Hungary hours before he actually did so, and surprise surprise, he was caught and jailed. Ukraine should've kicked him out instead of keeping him because it's not like he could do actual harm to the war effort.

I don't know if this will have significant material repercussions for Ukraine. I was under the impression that Ukraine funding was slowed if not dried up entirely due to the focus on the new hot thing, the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Western supporters of the Kiev regime tend to allow Ukrainians many things that they would generally not put up with closer to home and would criticize if they happened in a state that is one of the West's enemies. Things such as overthrowing a legally elected government, having numerous Nazis in their ranks, supporting chauvinistic nationalism, forcing men to fight in the army by beating them in some cases, blowing up allies' infrastructure, having kill lists of civilians who oppose them, and so on.

It is what it is. I gave up on expecting consistency from people's political attitudes a very long time ago. And finding someone who is genuinely neutral on this war rather than being a rabid partisan of either one side or the other seems to be about as rare as finding an oasis in the desert.

You lost rather bigger piece of credibility with people whose support you desperately need.

I have my doubts that Ukraine would be getting Red Tribe's support any time soon with or without imprisoning their activists who advocated against them.

Plenty of republicans support funding Ukraine war. 13% said of republican leaning it's not funded enough, 20% that funding level is about right.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/12/08/about-half-of-republicans-now-say-the-us-is-providing-too-much-aid-to-ukraine/

Congressman Crenshaw and Linsey Graham, iirc, were selling it specifically as paying for killing Russian soldiers.

My strong initial reaction is that anyone who has a clue who this guy was is a lost cause for Ukraine's lobbying.

One thing that comes to mind is comparing this with the treatment of Miles Routledge by the Taliban.

Of course it's not apples to apples, but as far as "westernized sperg goes on stroll in country where real shit is going on" it's at least somewhat comparable.

I suspect that the main difference is Miles just plays the part of an idiot whiles CRP may legitimately have been one. But the difference between pneumonia gulags and forced movie marathons is a bit stark. Especially factoring in which country had a diplomatic mission from the UK/US.

The real lesson in all this is that you don't start telling people how to run their business when you're a guest, and that goes double when they're at war.

It's too late for him, but I hope Lira's family makes it okay out of this mess.

Miles never really criticized the Taliban in-country in a way that threatened them, he was swept up as a generic Westerner whose nationality put him on the ‘enemy’ side, but he wasn’t a critic.

The US also locked up hostile propagandists in wartime (in much less desperate situations, it must be said, than Ukraine is in today). Lira knew the risks.

“Middle aged redpill e-celeb moves to BAYSED Eastern Europe to fuck Slavic teenagers; gets himself killed by advocating publicly for the military conquest of the country he’s currently in” is such a hilarious sequence of events.

Can anybody convince Rollo Tomassi to move to Taiwan?

It is objectively absurd that of all people this petty online schemer is a matter of international record, but if you put it as "55 year old American dies of pneumonia in a foreign gulag funded by his own government for political speech, leaves widow and child" it sounds more like Boulgakov than Seinfeld.

The US regularly threw Westerners (including Americans) jailed by US-allied conservative governments under the bus in the Cold War. It’s nothing new, if you were a good American Marxist and decided to start shit in a friendly reactionary Latin American country the CIA wasn’t going to bail you out.

In fact the CIA famously approved Pinochet’s killing of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, both American journalists in Chile sympathetic to Allende. And they were ex-Harvard, ex-Philips Exeter, high status and well-connected Americans, let alone washed up former pick up artists.

Chris Christie has exited the Presidential race.

Does this matter? No, probably not. His campaign barely had a heartbeat outside New Hampshire. It does probably slightly raise Haley's chance of pulling off an upset in NH, as Christie's loudly anti-Trump campaign has probably attracted few voters interested in switching to the former president. But most polls still have her behind by such a margin that even getting 100% of Christie's supporters won't be enough. And even if she manages to win NH, it's highly unlikely that translates into actually winning the nomination.

To the extent it matters, it's probably because it helps Haley rather than DeSantis become the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency candidate if Trump has a heart attack or gets sent to jail or something.

I do at least give Christie credit for taking Trump on directly. The spectacle of e.g. Haley defending Trump's eligibility to be elected at the same time that he is claiming she is ineligible and should be disqualified is so undignified. Christie never had a path to win, but at least he wasn't just running for VP.

Some recent polls have her behind by less than ten points in New Hampshire, while Christie was polling there (and nowhere else) at 10% or so.

I do at least give Christie credit for taking Trump on directly.

The purpose of his candidacy seems to be parlaying a spot on the debate platform into clout in anti-Trump circles. He hasn't been in office for six years, he's disgraced because of Bridgegate, and his career as a Republican looks moribund. Most of the people in the debate using kid gloves with Trump are probably angling for an appointment down the road. That's not a concern for Christie, whose incentives run the other way.

he's disgraced because of Bridgegate

Except in New Jersey, where Bridgegate is just politics as usual and it's the beach photos of Christie at an otherwise closed Island Beach State Park which disgrace Christie and sicken everyone else.

How does a prosperous society combat insidious "compassion"?

NYT: A City’s Campaign Against Homelessness Brings Stories of Violence Local officials called for residents to deter the homeless in Kalispell, Mont., but unhoused residents said they were then accosted and attacked.

In Kalispell, city leaders approved an ordinance to punish motorists who give money or supplies to panhandlers. They shut off water and electricity at a city park where some were seeking refuge. The county commissioners wrote an open letter to the community early last year, warning that providing shelter or resources to homeless people would “enable” them and entice more of them into the area.

Homeless residents said the city’s letter unleashed a punishing public backlash, with many reporting that groups of young people were roaming through homeless encampments and tormenting those living there.

The article then notes acts of violence including eggs thrown, paintballs shot, and one homeless beaten dead (though the motive is not specified). None of this seems particularly remarkable to me, as the base rate for being subject to intra-homeless violence and general excess mortality seems substantial in any American city.

Yet the article's top reader comments predictably shout from the rooftops "cruelty", "what happened to compassion", "these so-called Christians", "it's a war against the homeless, not homelessness". Worse, I don't get the sense this chorus is particularly performative as compared to other virtue signaling hobby horses. Instead, my read, based on nothing more than a decade-long familiarity of NYT reader comments, is that a majority of the readership genuinely believes the people of Kalispell, Montana to be deplorables as a result of their anti-homeless actions.

I haven't egged, paintballed, or beaten any homeless and don't intend to start, but I firmly believe that any city will be worse off if a "compassionate" genie magically conjured up 100 homeless people to live its streets; no comment on whether I think a city should welcome a "cruel" genie who's able and willing to magically poof away the same. I also understand second order effects and believe people respond to incentives. It seems to me, then, that every compassionate Times reader equals something like 0.0001 compassionate genies, and every cruel Kalispell resident 0.01 cruel genies. Mechanics and process aside, the end result is a San Fran full of growing compassion and ever more unhoused, and a Kalispell with a cruel lid on the homeless, and maybe even a reduction down the line.

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion? Even if the rational counterarguments are themselves obvious, it seems like a fundamentally losing messaging game. We raise our children to be compassionate and we look for spouses who are compassionate. Trying to shout from the rooftops that compassion is actually bad when it comes to the homeless feels akin to telling the world that generosity is bad when it comes to tipping. Which is why I'm resigned that no matter how many articles are written about the tipping culture being out of control, it will creep up to more industries and circumstances and higher preset amounts. Similarly, I'm resigned that more tax and charity dollars will go to the homeless and the homeless industrial complex ad infinitum, because you can't argue against compassion, at least not outside of the ratsphere and among the voting masses.

But perhaps an answer is to change the framing entirely. Ivy League campus DEI would have never died from straight white men (and adjacent Asians) arguing how anti-white and anti-man the apparatus is; it's just not persuasive enough for the public long accustomed to hearing about oppression, systemic racism, patriarchy, and the value of diversity. Falling the accepted wisdom requires something entirely different, recently having one oppressed in-group fight another until the contradiction is impossible to sustain.

So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem? Is it possible to effectively campaign for the cruel genie?

How does a prosperous society combat insidious "compassion"?

With actual compassion.

It's not like homelessness is an unsolvable problem.

Sure, we'd need to spend money on it, but not that much; do you have any idea how much money we spend on beer and makeup? More to the point, do you realize that the labor force participation rate for adults is around 62%? We have plenty of excess capacity that could be turned towards solving this problem, if we wanted to.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices. We could make a big impact just by lifting the zoning restrictions that economists are already telling us to lift for non-compassionate reasons.

It may be true that some specific types of half-measures towards compassion are worse than nothing, but that doesn't mean we should accept doing nothing. It means we should use full measures.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices.

Is this correlation or causation? What do you think it's like being homeless in small town Indiana? Way shittier than San Francisco or Seattle, I guarantee, both in terms of support for subsistence as well as entertainment and amusement.

The chronic, problematic homeless have very little incentive to stick around where they grew up, their families, local support networks, because they have already lost or devalued them. The people shitting or shooting on sidewalks in SF have already exhausted the patience of those who once cared about them.

People want to deny this for some reason, and say that the vast majority of SF homeless are former SF residents, implying that maybe they've never left.

The question I would ask any homeless in SF:

Did you once rent or own here? Have you ever lived anywhere else?

As for why they might choose SF over Indiana, I hope it's obvious.

Did you once rent or own here? Have you ever lived anywhere else?

From the 2019 San Francisco homeless survey

With the relevant 2019 answers being-

Seventy percent (70%) of respondents reported living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) reported living in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Six percent (6%) reported living in San Francisco for less than one year.

Eight percent (8%) of respondents reported living out of state at the time they became homeless. Twenty- two percent (22%) reported living in another county within California.

Thirty percent (30%) of respondents reported living in a home owned or rented by themselves or a partner immediately prior to becoming homeless. Thirty-three percent (33%) reported staying with friends or family. Twelve percent (12%) reported living in subsidized housing, and 5% were staying in a hotel or motel. Six percent (6%) of respondents reported they were in a jail or prison immediately prior to becoming homeless, while 4% were in a hospital or treatment facility, 3% were living in foster care, and 1% were in a juvenile justice facility.

I have a prior against the accuracy of the surveys, as there is definitely a "narrative" to uphold, and I have to imagine the survey takers are themselves homeless advocates and activists, more interested accumulating and distributing resources than hardheaded analysis. Still, taking these numbers at face value:

Of 100 homeless people:

  • 30 were homeless elsewhere and moved to SF
  • 4 became homeless within a year of moving to SF
  • 28 were living housed in SF for between 1 and 10 years
  • 38 were living housed in SF for more than 10 years

How does one randomly sample homeless people? Is this a representative sample? I would survey most egregious cases first -- the zombies milling about the UN plaza in the open air drug market. The shitters, shooters, hitters, harassers, yellers. Maybe the ones with the most encounters with police. I can imagine the sampling in this survey was done via more "official" means, like those contacting advocacy orgs, shelters, case workers, etc. There are very real methodological difficulties here. I haven't yet dug into the details of the survey, but maybe you are familiar with it?

Smells like narrative to me too. But even if we accept the numbers are accurate, I don't see how having a high percentage of locals changes the bottom line. SF has had high levels of out-migration to other cities and states for years, with cost of living being the top cited reason. Presumably the vast majority of these who moved did not end up homeless in their new locales. Why should policy reward those who chose to stay behind and end up homeless? Seems to me society is better off if it incentivized mobility so people on the verge of homelessness at a HCOL area can have a home in a LCOL area.

Not beyond what is covered in the document itself, but yes any survey like this is going to be biased because at the bare minimum the respondents are cooperative and capable enough to answer a survey instead of stabbing the person attempting to administer it or simply staring into space when asked questions.

Here is how they said they got responses:

Surveys were conducted by peer survey workers with lived homeless experience who were referred by local service providers. Training sessions were facilitated by ASR, City staff, and community partners. Potential interviewers were led through a comprehensive orientation that included project background information as well as detailed instruction on respondent eligibility, interviewing protocol, and confidentiality. Peer survey workers were compensated at a rate of $7 per completed survey. It was determined that survey data would be more easily obtained if an incentive gift was offered to respondents in appreciation for their time and participation. Socks were provided as an incentive for participating in the 2019 homeless survey. The socks were easy to distribute, had wide appeal, and could be provided within the project budget. The incentives proved to be widely accepted among survey respondents.

Based on a Point-in-Time Count estimate of 8,035 homeless persons, with a randomized survey sampling process, the 1,054 valid surveys represented a confidence interval of +/- 3% with a 95% confidence level when generalizing the results of the survey to the estimated population of individuals experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. The 2019 survey was administered in shelters, transitional housing facilities, and on the street. In order to ensure the representation of transitional housing residents, who can be underrepresented in a street- based survey, survey quotas were created to reach individuals and heads of family households living in these programs. Strategic attempts were also made to reach individuals in various geographic locations and of various subset groups such as homeless youth, minority ethnic groups, military veterans, domestic violence survivors, and families. One way to increase the participation of these groups was to recruit peer survey workers. Since 2009, the ASR survey methodology has prioritized a peer-to-peer approach to data collection by increasing the number of currently homeless surveyors. In order to increase randomization of sample respondents, survey workers were trained to employ an “every third encounter” survey approach. Survey workers were instructed to approach every third person they considered to be an eligible survey respondent. If the person declined to take the survey, the survey worker could approach the next eligible person they encountered. After completing a survey, the randomized approach was resumed.

And their self-admitted problems with their methodology:

The 2019 San Francisco Homeless Survey methodology relies heavily on self-reported data collected from peer surveyors and program staff. While self-report allows individuals to represent their own experiences, self-reported data are often more variable than clinically reported data. However, using a peer-to-peer interviewing methodology is believed to allow respondents to be more candid with their answers and to help reduce the uneasiness of revealing personal information. Further, service providers and City staff members recommended individuals who would be the best suited to conducting interviews and these individuals received comprehensive training about how to conduct interviews. Service providers and City staff also reviewed the surveys to ensure quality responses. Surveys that were considered incomplete or containing false responses were not accepted, the process for which included reviewing individual surveys submitted by surveyors and assessing patterns in survey responses for inconsistencies. It is important to recognize that variations between survey years may result from shifts in the demographic profiles of surveyors and accessibility to certain populations. Survey confidence intervals presented indicate the level of variability that may occur from year to year when interpreting findings. While every effort was made to collect surveys from a random and diverse sample of sheltered and unsheltered individuals, the hard-to-reach nature of the population experiencing homelessness prevents a true random sampling. Recruitment of diverse and geographically dispersed surveyors was prioritized. However, equal survey participation across all populations may be limited by the participation and adequate representation of subpopulations in planning and implementation processes. This includes persons living in vehicles, who are historically difficult to enumerate and survey.

Edit :To your point:

Is this a representative sample? I would survey most egregious cases first -- the zombies milling about the UN plaza in the open air drug market. The shitters, shooters, hitters, harassers, yellers. Maybe the ones with the most encounters with police.

I am not sure how this would be a more representative sample of the homeless population as a whole. I do think that for many matters involving the homeless it would be far more useful to drill into the disruptive + perennial homeless population rather than those who are unobtrusive or temporary. Though there are obvious difficulties in collecting data on those actively working against you doing so.

Great response. No quibbles. Fully agreed on final paragraph.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices.

Could that be because both homeless people and non-homeless people want to live in certain areas, while the latter pay for the privilege and thereby drive up housing prices?

Probably not. The vast majority of homeless people became homeless in their current locale, which suggests the relationship is people move to attractive location => housing costs go up => some segment of the population that wasn't at risk of becoming homeless now is => individual episodes of misfortune amongst the now-larger at-risk population lead to more homeless people.

Ah, that additional data does give a clearer picture.

At 650k homeless and 500k per unit of housing, that’s 320 billion which is maybe doable for the federal government. Double that price (for California) and not so much. I have no idea what the ongoing maintenance cost for that housing would be - a typical house is .5%. Let’s 10x to 5% which is tens of billions per year. Having said that, we’ll manufacture more homeless next year and it’s not like we have the infra, materials, real estate or man power to actually build all of that anyway. I’m not sure this is actually fixable with money after all.

  1. Is it possible that housing pricing is correlated with cities and cities may be easier for homeless people to navigate? That is, high home prices don’t cause homelessness but instead is a function of the same thing that attracts homelessness.

  2. Other argument is people aren’t really worried about the working homeless that housing prices may cause. Instead, they are worried about the drugged out crazy.

  1. It's possible, but my understanding is that the homelessness is highly correlated with housing prices between cities in a way that's hard to square with that assumption, and that homelessness rates responds to changes in housing prices too quickly for anything like that to be a plausible mechanism. Not an expert though, feel free ot research it more and report back.

  2. Maybe, but a lot of the money and political capital that gets spent on 'homelessness' as an issue end up going to support the working/sane homeless. Take them out of the equation, maybe we find that the drugged out crazies are actually a really small population that we could help pretty cheaply. It at least resolves the confound between the groups and lets us work on the problem more directly.

I think it’s likely that the correlation is caused by far left politics that favor both impediments to building housing and funding homelessness.

the labor force participation rate for adults is around 62%?

It's actually 85% when you remove people past retirement age.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

You can get paid six figures working at a buc-ees in rural Alabama. The 15% not participating in the labor force have reasons for this and are unlikely to be interested in government make-work.

Considering stay at home parents, students and people between jobs or purposefully marginally employed: that's really high.

I thought labor participation rate was at an all time low, but this sounds sensible.

People between jobs or marginally employed usually count as the labor force, but yes.

the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices

Yeah sure, offer all of them a spot in a shelter or halfway house.

And then the unrelated problem of crazy aggressive street-dwelling drug addicts will remain. Because there are two problems here: homeless "but there for the grace of God go I" and by-choice drug addicts. No one forced the meth pipe into their mouth.

And if housing prices were so high that you and I couldn't live in our current places: we'd move. We wouldn't move to a city park and get really high and yell at people and shit on the sidewalk.

I want compassion for the homeless. I support shelters for them somewhere far from my neighborhood and I want huge Chinese-style concrete housing blocks legalized on the city core. And we are going to need some other strategy for the drug-addled street-shitters.

In an alternate world, considering China has a glut of housing in its ghost cities and a population bomb, America can send its homeless over along with a big fat check for each.

When people make this argument it drives me nuts. I'm sorry, but I hope you don't actually believe this and honestly I think you are arguing this in bad faith and we should dismiss it because you aren't even arguing against what people are actually talking about. When people complain about the homeless, they aren't complaining about people who can't afford rent or have fallen on tough times. They are complaining about the insane people who scream at women and children and shit on the street or the drug addicts who have no intention of getting sober and leave used needles in parks children play at. Housing prices have no effect on these people because they either have no intention of getting a home, are too mentally ill for it to matter and need full time care, or would just use any housing you give them as a flop house to use and sell drugs at. The only way to help these people is to force them into institutions that will treat their mental illness and addiction against their will. Since you aren't allowed to do that, the only other thing you can do is to make it clear to them being homeless in your areas will suck and force them to go elsewhere.

The only way to help these people is to force them into institutions that will treat their mental illness and addiction against their will.

Even three months in jail (for possession) would probably work miracles. Break their cycle of compulsive using and let them sober up and give them a chance to try being something other than a junkie living in a tent in a park.

(The public thinks of jail as a fate almost like death but they’re not that bad. The best jail is probably better than the worst public school)

To be fair, I think of the worst public school as a fate almost like death.

Jail is much worse if you're a typical middle class person. If you have no family, no job, and no home, jail isn't such a step down.

Right. If you're a middle class person and go to jail, you're probably no longer a middle class person when you get out.

Going to jail doesn't stop people from using drugs -- in fact it's even worse than rehab in that not only do you meet & spend all your time with a lot of people having a shared interest in doing drugs, but these people also enjoy doing crime in order to get more drugs.

Going to jail forces them to mostly stop being floridly actively addicted for a bit. Those few months where they can think some thoughts aside from how to get their next hit of meth/fentanyl 100% of the time is the valuable opportunity here. Jail has bad parts too: person's re-integration in society becomes harder because they have a record, and they meet a lot more criminals who can teach them to do more crime.

But, this forced sobering up might also be the only tool our society has that stops them from being a junkie destined to overdose in the near future committing crime the whole way.

That's just it -- it's pretty easy to get drugs in jail, drugs addicts that are sent there don't (generally) sober up.

And zero interest in helping you get off drugs. Negative interest really, if they're cooking or supplying helping you get clean cuts into their bottom line.

Sure, we'd need to spend money on it, but not that much; do you have any idea how much money we spend on beer and makeup?

It's hard to get exact numbers, but between the city, state, and non-profits, the spending on San Francisco's homeless is on the order of 1 billion per year. That's like $4000 per San Francisco household, and a far cry from "beer and makeup" money.

What has SF received in exchange for these billions spent? Nothing but more squalor, decay, and crime. That's because more money is either useless or actively harmful. Solving homelessness is a fairly intractable problem if all you have is a carrot and no stick.

Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem. Last year in King County (Seattle), there were 1293 drug overdose deaths. In 2022, there were 1001. In 2021, there were 708. In 2020, there were 509. In just 3 years, overdose deaths increased 150% from an already high level.

These are the drug deaths. Imagine how many drug users there are. Imagine trying to get a job or respond to government incentives if you are addicted to fentanyl.

The best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to arrest, prosecute, and jail fentanyl dealers. Maybe this wouldn't save our current batch of junkies. But it would stop new ones from being created.

The best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to arrest, prosecute, and jail fentanyl dealers.

To be the devil's advocate: the true best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to spike drugs with enormous elephant-killing doses of carfentanyl.

I'm not saying, "Do it," I'm just saying to run it through the computer and check. It'll say that it won't help, and I'll stop going on about it.

It's crazy, but fentanyl is probably making a dent in the homeless population. With 3,000 deaths in last 3 years, that means 0.1% of the county's population has died of an overdose.

Possibly something like 10% of the people living on the streets have died of a fentanyl overdose in the last 3 years.

A few years ago I read an article from a group of journalists in some Midwest city on their experiences following police and ambulances for a week. All the drug addled homeless they saw. All the fatal overdoses they saw, seemingly miraculously reversed and the dead brought back to life by narcan.

I can't seem to find the full write up now, but here is one of the fun parts.

If you like the sound and feeling of dental drills pressing into you, you'll love the emergency drill used to bore holes into the bones of fentanyl addicts. And then the addict in question comes back to life and runs off with a medical stent sticking out of his leg. The costume designers for Hellraiser are reading this and thinking it's a bit too much.

But more seriously, yes, fentanyl and it's equivalents have surely killed off a significant minority of the would-be indigent population. And the fake not-meth cooked by the cartels is rotting the brains of much of the rest. This is an enormous tragedy seemingly unnoticed by almost everyone.

If you like the sound and feeling of dental drills pressing into you, you'll love the emergency drill used to bore holes into the bones of fentanyl addicts. And then the addict in question comes back to life and runs off with a medical stent sticking out of his leg. The costume designers for Hellraiser are reading this and thinking it's a bit too much.

Hmm, I've never actually seen an interosseous injection or infusion, I always assumed it involved a very sturdy needle and a hammer, but I suppose power tools make more sense.

Insane story. Yeah, Narcan has saved many. I've heard anecdotes about the same person being revived a dozen times by paramedics.

I mentioned elsewhere on this forum that I am mostly a libertarian. Addictive and deadly drugs are one of the few areas that I am not. The harms to society are just too great.

I find it bizarre that some people would defend statements like "you need a license to cut hair" while at the same time saying "if someone wants to sell an addictive and lethal drug that's fine". And yet that is the status quo we've arrived at in places like SF and Seattle.

Overdoses deaths are like 10x what they were during the so-called War on Drugs.

SF is more or less the poster child for "I will do anything to end homelessness but build more housing". It's not surprising that their spending on homelessness has failed to resolve the issue when they've made only the most tepid efforts to actually house the homeless rather than just ameliorate their conditions.

Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem.

Drugs aren't the problem. They're a problem, but West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates (this pattern is true in weaker forms across the rest of Appalachia and parts of the Midwest).

I have the misfortune of visiting San Francisco. When I bitterly complain about the aggressive street-shitting drug-addled homelessness people, I don't mean to say that they'd be productive citizens if only $1000/month studio apartments existed.

Sure, rezone and build some high rises. Step 2: the guy screaming while he sprays diarrhea onto the sidewalk for some reason doesn't get a lease in one. What shall we do with this man when more multi-home zoning doesn't fix his drug-fried brain?

I currently reside in a city that has a homelessness rate similar to SF. While there are some really unhinged characters, the vast majority are merely visibly homeless (which, I will grant, still puts people off - most people don't like being accosted by scruffy strangers asking for money). Cheap housing won't transform them into model citizens, but it will get them off the street and facilitate enforcement against the more genuinely anti-social. I don't know, maybe the SF vagrants are built different.

Perhaps more importantly, it alters the homelessness-generating function. As mentioned, WV is dirt poor and full of addicts, but they are able to die of a fentanyl overdose in the comfort of their own living room, because housing in WV is cheap enough that even a marginally employed fent addict can afford a place to live. If the current crop of homeless contains a large share of people who are unfixable to the degree the only real choice for them is whether or not their cell has padding, preventing more people from ending up in that circumstance is a major part of actually fixing the problem.

Point taken, I guess I was responding to GoodGuy's attitude that "it's just so simple". It's really not.

  1. Which place has "built more housing" and solved their homeless problem. People were pointing to Salt Lake City as an example. As far as I know that has utterly failed now.

  2. Which place has successfully housed fentanyl addicts at reasonable cost

West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates

I'd have to see if that's even true anymore with the huge increase in overdose rates in places like Washington. But it's worth pointing out that drug addicts don't move to West Virginia, they move AWAY from West Virginia. So West Virginia is outsourcing their drug problem elsewhere.

Even if housing prices are a root cause, we'd have to build a LOT of housing to solve our problems. Many places with cheap housing in the Midwest have had declining populations for decades. West Virginia has a lower population today than it did in 1950. On the other hand, the U.S. has built tons of homes and has the same amount of housing per capita as in the year 2000.

The amount of housing we'd need to build to make a dent is huge. Marginal increases aren't going to cut it. Cutting rent from $3000/mo to $2800/mo isn't going to make SF any more affordable for the fentanyl addict. So what's the cost of increasing our housing stock by 20%? There are 144 million homes in the U.S. Building new ones is very expensive, on the order of let's say $350,000 per (a huge underestimate for places like SF). So it would cost $10 trillion to build enough homes, although of course in practice it would be impossible.

Building housing is not really workable. It's too damn expensive. I would be in favor of measures that make homes a much worse investment in order to curtail market speculation. But I don't think it'd fix the homeless problem.

But it's worth pointing out that drug addicts don't move to West Virginia, they move AWAY from West Virginia.

Drug addicts mostly don't move anywhere. I've never seen any evidence that bears out the idea that there's a significant mobile homeless population migrating towards the most accommodating locales. As near as I can tell, it's the opposite: homeless addicts (and homeless generally) are overwhelmingly in the locality where they became homeless, and where they aren't they're usually near-ish.

we'd have to build a LOT of housing to solve our problems.

True.

There are approximate 1,500,000 new housing starts in the US per year. If we take your estimated cost per unit of 350k (tbh I think this is high, but this is all ROM so it's not going to radically change the picture), we're already spending ~$525b/year. $5T over ten years. Hitting the 20% you suggested entails doubling that. Don't get me wrong, that's a lot of money, but an extra $5T over years for a country with the wealth of the US is not some inconceivable sum. Especially considering that most of it would be coming from the private sector rather than the government. (I also note that it is probably overkill - housing shortages are highly concentrated. WV doesn't need to increase its housing stock at all, CA needs to increase it a lot)

I'd also note that marginal shifts do matter. If the average rent goes down by $200, that suggests low end rent is also going down. It may not be a radical, sweeping improvement, but there will be people who can afford housing who couldn't before or who move from precarious to... less precarious. If building housing is unworkable than that is in effect saying the problem is unsolvable. Solving the opioid crisis is a worthy political goal, but it won't do much for homelessness.

I'd have to see if that's even true anymore with the huge increase in overdose rates in places like Washington.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm

Even if it's equalized in the intervening time, it doesn't alter the underlying point that the relationship between drug ODs and homelessness rates are not strongly correlated. A hypothetical scenario where WA and WV have the same OD rate but WA has four times the homelessness rate does not suggest drugs are driving homelessness. On the other hand, the median home price in Charleston is $150k, in Seattle it's $800k.

Wonder if all the confusing noise can be cleared up if a city managed to build a sufficient number of bare bones housing that the bulk of the local homeless simply do not want to live in. As it stands, the call to build more housing is all muddled up between the (imo) legitimate call to ease zoning and environmental regulations and the (imo) facile crutch that a city should not be cruel because the simple compassionate answer is to build more.

the (imo) facile crutch that a city should not be cruel because the simple compassionate answer is to build more.

Contra this, there is a certain fetishization of cruelty - often disgust papered over with affected ruthlessness ("sometimes hard choices are necessary; this is a hard choice, therefore it is necessary) - when it comes to discussions of how to handle the homeless/drug addicts/[insert undesirable here]. There is a great deal of room in between the idea that kindness requires us to tolerate anti-social behavior from homeless people and endorsing extra-legal violence against them.

In particular, I tend to find a tendency to underestimate how harshly the homeless are currently treated. For example, I often see the question asked "why don't they break up homeless encampments?" or similar sentiments. And the answer to that is that in most cities they do (to the extent that it's legal to do so). But this doesn't actually accomplish very much - they might temporarily move to a different street, but it can't meaningfully fix the problem because the homeless don't have anywhere to go. Selfish local remedies (e.g. bussing out the homeless) tend to be zero sum, since other localities implement the same measure and you waste a bunch of money pushing the homeless back and forth grandstanding about how tough you are on vagrants.

Selfish local remedies (e.g. bussing out the homeless) tend to be zero sum, since other localities implement the same measure and you waste a bunch of money pushing the homeless back and forth grandstanding about how tough you are on vagrants.

It's a nice thought to think one categorization up, but akin to Theresa May's warning of citizen of nowhere, in practice Texans aren't going to be losing too much sleep over the welfare of people in NYC or Chicago forced to deal with bussed migrants, just as the latter cities never lost much sleep over Texans.

I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that one way this can be positive sum is to better match what a community is willing to give with how much it actually gives--let the compassionate sanctuary cities provide the sanctuary, and let the cruel law and order states enforce rule of law.

The dealers are just people responding to market incentives. If you arrest them, someone else will take their place.

I can understand the people who look at the crime that results from drug prohibition and try to estimate that it is higher than would be from increased drug usage in the population. Reasonable minds can estimate those factors differently. What I can't understand is this seemingly pervasive opinion that increasing costs in a market somehow doesn't affect equilibrium quantity. Some people go so far as to say that decreasing costs would lower equilibrium quantity, which is even more absurd. At least with the former, one could have the faintest of theoretical support if they posited a totally inelastic demand curve, one that could not even be shifted by applying/removing literal criminal penalties. This still seems like a pretty whack assumption, but that's what you'd need to even get the weakest version of this sort of claim.

Addicts are relatively insensitive to cost fluctuations. Sure maybe the equilibrium will drop slightly, but I don’t think” arrest the dealers” (if you can identify and incarcerate enough of them without authoritarian measures) isn’t going to solve the problem in a way that would be satisfactory to me.

You're not thinking marginally. Any demand curve has "high value consumers". The "addicts", so to speak. They're the ones all the way up at the top left part of the curve. Literally no other product in existence leads people to reason by way of, "There are some high value consumers of this product; therefore, the entire demand curve is nearly perfectly price inelastic." None.

Years back, in the old old place, we analyzed published estimations of the price elasticity of marijuana. I can try to find some time to dig it up. In the meantime, would you like to venture a guesstimate?

What I can't understand is this seemingly pervasive opinion that increasing costs in a market somehow doesn't affect equilibrium quantity. Some people go so far as to say that decreasing costs would lower equilibrium quantity, which is even more absurd.

Aren't there some goods for which lowering their price actually decreases the quantity sold, because it allows people to substitute it with more expensive, higher quality products? However, I've also been told that this was just a hypothetical good speculated by some economists rather than something observed to exist in reality.

But either way, I think almost no one thinks to model this type of thing in terms of supply and demand. There was another comment a couple days back here about why Freddie DeBoer and/or people like him didn't find it obvious that slut shaming was a metaphorical form of unionizing by women in the metaphorical mating market where I think the same phenomenon happens. For some topics, people tend to see as almost supernatural in how they're free from the basic laws of reality, and both crime and love fit into those things. As for why people treat these things as supernatural instead of bound by reality, I think it mostly has to do with how most people, most of the time, including people like me who write on this site, prefer to feel good than to be right. Being right takes hard work, research, skepticism, correcting self-biases, modeling, etc. But it's easy to believe that whatever my side is saying about some controversial topic is correct, and it feels so damned good to do so.

It still shifts the supply curve leftwards. No one ever said it would eliminate the supply completely.

Huh? No they won't. The chance of getting arrested changes the incentives.

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

Popper said it best: Tolerance for tolerant, compassion for compassionate, but franchise only for democrats, and when dealing with defectors, one must defect.

His principle is merely self-defense on the society-wide scale. One who instead blindly tolerates everyone, etc, at the very least increases instability, for contra-systemic forces are empowered.

franchise only for democrats

Was this link supposed to go here?

That one's "franchise only for Democrats" instead.

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

By showing that what is claimed is compassionate is not really so.

Can you spell out why you believe that giving things to the homeless, or abstaining from assaulting or expelling them, is bad? Is it just the "more of them will move into the area" thing (so it's bad that they disgrace some people who don't want anything to do with them with their presence, as opposed to... staying somewhere far away from civilisation? If they otherwise just hung out in another city, the total number of people unwillingly exposed to the homeless would be about the same), or do you actually think that this materially increases the number of homeless (either by keeping them alive when they would otherwise die, or by incentivising people to become homeless who otherwise wouldn't)?

It seems to me that the last theory would require extraordinary evidence, and the "homeless would stay in the woods if civilisation were successfully hostile to them" route can be expected to result in them dying all the same (I'd guess that the majority of people who are homeless don't have the executive function/skill level to eke out a living on land that is so useless as to remain unclaimed by civilisation). If your ask amounts to solving the homeless problem by accelerating the homeless-to-dead pipeline, you should be explicit about it, because the main obstacle to realising your proposal will be that upon reflection most people will be against it on moral principle, and this topic attracts enough attention that you can't hope to sneak some policy past the public without them realising this.

I would think the point is instead "accelerating the homeless here to homeless in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco pipeline". As South Park explained many years ago with their "California is super cool to the homeless" song.

The effect of the carrots and sticks is largely to displace them to areas that are more willing to give up beauty, cleanliness, safety, tax dollars etc. vs. areas that are less willing to. Seems Pareto optimal for all involved, including the homeless themselves for a sufficient amount of sticks should they stick around in a hostile region.

There's a big difference between NYC homeless problem, California homeless problem, and Kalispell, Montana having a homeless problem. NYC homeless are people who are/were otherwise living in NYC and wind up on the street, NYC faces relatively little risk of attracting outsize homeless population to the working population, NYC is simply so large that its resources will be large enough to handle the situation. California cities attract some homeless people, who like the mild weather, and faces some risk of attracting too many homeless people if they are too generous, but again has a large economy and resources to handle them.

Kalispell, Montana can quite easily attract too many homeless people for a town of 20k residents to handle. We have no concept of residency in a town, as opposed to a state, and a strong tradition of freedom of movement between states. If Kalispell is facing a wave of homelessness among people who grew up in Kalispell and its environs then Kalispell has some responsibility to care for them. But to say that Kalispell must care for thousands of homeless residents raised anywhere in the United States is difficult. And if Kalispell is too generous, they may run that risk, of thousands of bums finding their way to town to take advantage of the situation.

So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem? Is it possible to effectively campaign for the cruel genie?

I know your post ties these questions together but I think they are actually pretty distinct.

For the first question, one of the best grounds to argue against compassion is its effectiveness. Pretty much no one wants homeless people to exist for their own sake. Even the "compassionate" side wishes there were no (or fewer) homeless people. The question is do compassionate means actually function to reduce the homeless population? Are we willing to devote the kind of resources that would be necessary for those means to succeed? As @guesswho says, we could just build every homeless person a house if we were willing to commit that level of resources. The best way to attack compassionate solutions is probably to argue against their effectiveness, either in total or in terms of tradeoffs. "This thing might be good to do but would not be worth it" is an argument everyone can understand (though perhaps disagree).

On the second question it depends on what you mean by "cruel." If you think we should merely leave the homeless alone, devoting no resources to helping them, I think that becomes a variation in the tradeoff argument I discussed above. On the other hand if you want to inflict some more active harm on them you are going to have problems. My impression is lots of people think some good reason is required to justify harming other people. Those people do not generally regard "does not have a permanent residence" as being a good reason. Often discussions about homelessness focus on other bad things homeless people often do as justification but is this other behavior that is functioning as justification, not homelessness itself.

I think it is more important from the perspective of modeling the internal process of people who want to deal with homelessness with compassion. The OP describes the "compassion" genie as magically creating 100 more homeless people. But what is compassionate about that?

I agree the effects are not as cleanly separable as I might like but sometimes it feels like people don't even try. When I hear people talk about the "homeless" in an unqualified way I assume they mean it in an unqualified, not "a specific subset of homeless people who engage in particular behaviors."

So, basically "can't have shit in Detroit".

Speculatively extending Scott's speculative hypothesis on set points, say a quarter of the enshittification proponents cannot be shamed, however ruthlessly you try, because they are miserable SOBs that proactively want the city to be shitty, because then they feel less bad about themselves. This advances the vicious cycle as the shitty environment makes them feel even worse, so they resist efforts to uplift the surroundings even more, and we end up with a third of people in this camp, then a half.

I suspect that the number of long term homeless whose poor behavior is solely or even mostly attributable to their homelessness to be very low; as far as I can tell the whole ‘just give them trailers or tenements to live in’ strategy has been tried and it didn’t work very well because they didn’t remain fit to live in.

I'm comfortable with saying that it's deplorable to throw eggs at homeless, shoot paintballs at them, beat them, or infringe on people's liberty to give each other money.

It's just that it would be silly to judge the entire town as deplorable because those things happened.

It's just that it would be silly to judge the entire town as deplorable because those things happened.

Not if you want a casus belli to force toxic compassion unto it.

infringe on people's liberty to give each other money.

How do you feel about people's liberty to feed bears? Giving vagrants money is apt to have a similarly salubrious effect on the local quality of life as feeding the local bear population.

You need to make the public understand how chronic stresses add up and lead to obesity, cancer, etc. Someone soliciting 500 people at an intersection is someone giving 500 people needless stress. The negative consequences of this are not canceled out by the benefit to the homeless man. Same with a park — a person should be able to walk in one rare beautiful piece of nature without seeing sprawled junk and disheveled tents. The benefit of this stress-free nature exposure is, ironically, protective against the possibility of developing homelessness in the future.

Anyway I would write something like, “we have noticed an uptick in minor trauma and stress responses among our residents, including women and lower income minorities. We have traced this stress response to the individuals who are soliciting money to stressed drivers trying to watch for incoming traffic; this is not just distracting, but it reminds many residents of their own lack of financial stability. In order to safeguard our most at-risk residents from further stress, we are going to make soliciting for money in public illegal. We instead ask everyone to donate to a town-wide fund for our poorest residents. The town will match dollar per every $400 donation. We are also going to ensure that our parks are free from unnecessary stressors.”

Love this. Unfortunately the hierarchy of oppression seems to me unweighted, so because chronic stress ranks beneath poverty, it doesn't matter that 500x chronic stress > 1x homeless. Maybe a clever thought leader could try upgrading solicitation to rape, and since rape still out-oppresses poverty, society could rightfully lock up all the rapists who invade the psychological safe spaces of BIPOC folx.

Yeah, great answer. Chronic stress kills.

Unfortunately as @Fruck says, our entire worldview, especially the medical establishment, is firmly against chronic stress being an issue. Just take a look at muscular injuries. While many doctors such as John Sarno have done great research and essentially proven that most chronic injuries are psychosomatic, the modern establishment view within medicine is that pretty much all injuries are mechanical, and need to be fixed with surgery. The idea that chronic stress over time leads to emotional issues which lead to physical pain is a massive threat to the current medical system.

There are a lot of researchers, doctors, and therapists doing good work in the chronic pain space, but boy are they fighting an uphill battle. And just imagine trying to tell someone "Yeah well... you didn't really need that shoulder surgery that cost you (or likely other taxpayers) tens of thousands of dollars, but it was probably easier than getting you to do some self-reflection and actually fix your personal problems." It's not exactly a sexy argument to make.

the modern establishment view within medicine is that pretty much all injuries are mechanical,

This is a gross oversimplification. The consensus view of pain is the biopsychosocial model.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6067990/#:~:text=The%20biopsychosocial%20model%20of%20pain,that%20reciprocally%20influence%20one%20another.

The thing about Sarno is that his model is pretty much only psycho.

Yes this is the consensus view in chronic pain science - do you think it’s the consensus view among everyday doctors, especially those for specific disorders like carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, tendinitis, etc etc? Hell no.

Most of these doctors haven’t even heard the term biopscyhosocial. I can tell you that confidently because I spent almost ten thousand dollars and got 30+ different opinions from these doctors for my own chronic issues, and only found out about the biopsychosocial model myself. All this less than five years ago.

I even acknowledge that there are doctors doing good work in the chronic pain space, as you discuss. But to call my claim a gross oversimplification is simply not true.

While I'm no fan of the homeless, I really don't think chronic mental stress can cause SLAP tears.

No idea what SLAP tears are, but hey man the link between mental stress and physical injuries keeps getting validated to impact more and more issues that were previously thought to be mechanical.

Anything that is caused or exacerbated by ‘stress’ is an excellent candidate.

Personal bugbear: Superior Labrum, Anterior to Posterior. The labrum is a bowl of cartilage that provides passive stabilization of the shoulder joint, which in humans is significantly less structurally sound in exchange for a greater movement envelope. The labrum can be torn by heavy exertion at the edges of the envelope or by the proximal head being driven through the labrum, as in holding your arms rigid during a car crash.

That wouldn't work man, because people can't wrap their heads around cumulative issues. You can't make them understand because to understand that they would have to do a lot more work thinking about shit. If you say "ok take the stress of that guy selling oranges and add it to the stress of the guy wagging his dick at you on the overpass", they check out at the word add every time. "You want me to think about things instead of instantly defaulting to my knee-jerk reaction? Fuck you, this is America!" You have to go the other way, make it easier to think about somehow.

We raise our children to be compassionate and we look for spouses who are compassionate.

We raise our kids to lead with compassion in interpersonal settings where it is relatively easy to notice free-loaders (and for them to be punished for callousness as well). When dealing with freeloaders or people who not only can't participate in beneficial exchange but will actually punish you for trying, we tell them to stand up for themselves and not be gulls.

People get cut off all the time in interpersonal relationships (even the "pro-'Be Kind'" side is down with this). But they don't get to sue for human rights reasons to get back on the gravy train.

Many of us would find the sort of "compassion" suggested on a policy level that leads to defectors and the mentally ill corroding society absolutely asinine were it promoted to kids. It's not even acceptable when dealing with animals at the zoo.

We know a lot of people are not confused about this because "help your own, avoid freeloaders or impersonal systems that can create or incentivize freeloaders" is basic conservative ideology in America. Let's not even speak globally.

So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem?

The problem isn't just compassion it seems. Eric Adams seems to want to change NY's position on right to shelter. But he can't do so unilaterally. He basically seems to be working to limit (or soft ban, if you're being a cynic) asylum seekers - another compassion case - but is also seemingly stymied by the political and legal situation.

How much of it is really legal and political barriers that favor those who can navigate such systems (and do have that version of "compassion")? If homeless people could be committed at will, it hardly matters what litigious bleeding hearts at some charity think. If the UK Home Office could simply summarily deport, it hardly matters that people protest. I suspect far more people - who consider themselves compassionate - are annoyed by the inability to just get rid of people, and are constantly given the runaround with the "it's the courts! Nothing we can do!"

To put it another way: I'm not sure that it's the general public that needs to be retrained here.

I'm not sure that it's the general public that needs to be retrained here.

Depends on if you believe people ultimately deserve their government. Who's at fault for the fall of Afghanistan? Besides Biden and Obama, I think the conservative circles blame the Afghans. Ukrainians are (so far) willing to die to preserve their state and government, and Afghans aren't. Meanwhile Israel is willing to die to live, and the big question mark is what about Taiwan.

My point is, even if the courts are "technically" impeding deportation, it still goes back to the general public. The UK did Brexit, after all, so it can leave the ECHR, and Parliament can certainly seek to overrule its own high courts, and I think its recent legislation did basically dictate that courts define Rwanda as safe.

We know a lot of people are not confused about this because "help your own, avoid freeloaders or impersonal systems that can create or incentivize freeloaders" is basic conservative ideology in America. Let's not even speak globally.

Jonathan Haidt identified the group who bucks this trend as WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic). It can feel like these people's values are dominant in the population if you live in a WEIRD enclave but as you mention, globally and even just in more conservative areas they really aren't, even if they are still able to hold an outsized amount of influence due to the concentration of mediatic, economic and political power in WEIRD enclaves. Haidt identified that WEIRD people tended to compress all moral judgement to the harm/care and cheating/fairness moral dimentions, wheras conservatives (and non WEIRDs) had a more multi-dimensional moral judgement.

"it's the courts! Nothing we can do!"

There's an American version of this.

"We can't ban public camping, the courts ruled on this. Except of course when President Xi visits. Then we clear the streets."

There's a lot of ruin compassion in a Nation, especially a wealthy and liberal one.

But not infinitely or indefinitely so. Eventually, even the bleeding hearts stop, if only because they exsanguinated.

For example, see how the sentiment has turned against Middle-Eastern immigrants in the Nordic states, from them once being misunderstood darlings to far more Right-wing and integrationist parties coming into vogue as a battered populace changes their mind.

The same is true for many YIMBYs and people-of-houselessness defenders, who get a rude wakeup call when the homeless are camping in their neighborhood parks, ruining their public transport, and clearly demonstrating that efforts to simply be nice to them by offering housing, shelter or safe drugs are far from sufficient to solve the problem, at least for the worst homeless who are either crazy or too addicted/drug-addled to respect carrots and not sticks.

Of course, this does require things to get worse, and people can be stupidly kind longer than your housing market or appetite for Hep-B can bear, but it can happen and is happening. I've seen plenty of outcry on Twitter from Californians outraged that what their politicians had wrung hands about as an unavoidable problem of the homeless ruining the place mysteriously vanished overnight when Xi Jinping visited. Huh. It seems the state capacity to handle homelessness exists all along, just a lack of will to use it.

While I don't endorse Accelerationism in general, since I'd much prefer finding a solution that isn't "let it all burn to the ground knowing it'll be built back better", I still think that the general ethos has a point, at least when it comes to shocking the complacent into noticing reality.

people-of-houselessness

It's "people experiencing homelessness", deplorable. Report to your local bugpod for re-education.

Excuse me? Is it okay these days to just assume that other people have the privilege of a bugpod to retreat to, especially with the recent budget cuts to education?

In Airstrip One, we have a bugpod in every fifteen minute city. Has Emmanuel Goldstein sabotaged the provision of bugpods in your District?

Mechanics and process aside, the end result is a San Fran full of growing compassion and ever more unhoused

The alternative hypothesis is that the homelessness in San Francisco is driven by a very brutal housing market.

For example, this paper finds that "a 10% reduction in housing costs is estimated to lower homelessness rates by around 4.5%". The median rent in SF is $3275 and $1434 in Kalispell, MT (i.e. 130% higher in SF).

It always kind of confuses me that people think treating the homeless a little bit meaner or nicer will have a meaningful effect. Being homeless really, really sucks. I don't think it is the lack-of-sucking that enables the homeless to keep being homeless.

Seriously think about it: you've homeless for 4 years, have no education, references, or work experience. 2/3 long-term homeless have mental health issues and 2/3 have drug issues, so tack on one of those.

Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job? Would you be successful at finding one if it did? Would you still be looking for a job a week later?

(This isn't to say that typical "compassionate" solutions are effective either)

Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job?

The paintballs are motivation to be homeless somewhere else. A local solution that is not masquerading as a global solution.

I don’t think @vpn’s comment is advocating for trying to create a negative sum game where cities race to the bottom to be as nasty as possible to the homeless, but he’s welcome to correct me.

As the others have noted, the cruel response is meant to motivate the homeless to go somewhere else. This seems optimal if it means moving them from a place that wishes to make itself known as "cruel" [to the chronically homeless] to a place that wants itself seen as "compassionate".

I'll add too that it's also optimal if it means moving them from high cost of living to low COL areas.

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the motivation behind the paintballs. The local citizens are not trying to solve the problem of homelessness, locally or globally. They are acting in their self interest, attempting to preserve the good aspects of their city and prevent them from sliding down into vagrancy, filth, violence, and drugs. This is a broad, human, historical civilizational norm.

Austin, SF, and Seattle violate this norm. They attract vagrancy rather than repel it.

If you want to solve homelessness, start with one. Pick a project person, take them into your home, let their problems become your problems, and I believe you will understand the nature of the solution and be able to advocate for it more effectively.

Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job? Would you be successful at finding one if it did? Would you still be looking for a job a week later?

That’s not the point of shooting paintballs at them. The point is to make them go away. To send the very clear message, “You are not welcome in this area. The next time you come to this area, something even worse will happen to you.”

My neighborhood has a very bad homeless problem. They have colonized several areas, setting up elaborate multi-tent encampments on residential sidewalks and next to businesses. Recently, one of them decided to set up his encampment - which included multiple shopping carts roped together - right in front of my apartment complex, with the carts blocking the footpath. I walked out and berated him, calling him a bum, telling him I’ll call the police on him, threatening to wreck his shopping carts and destroy the items inside, etc. None of this was designed to help him better himself, or to show him a path forward to reintegrate with society. It was intended only to dissuade him, in the strongest possible terms, from ever showing his face near this complex again. And sure enough, I haven’t seen him since. I did the same to a different bum whom I caught digging in our dumpster. Haven’t seen him since that day either.

As far as I can tell, very few of these long-term homeless have any chance of effectively reintegrating into normal society. Furthermore, I do not care if they do. I don’t concern myself with their wellbeing. My only concern is doing everything in my (very limited) power to get them as far away from me as possible.

I walked out and berated him, calling him a bum, telling him I’ll call the police on him, threatening to wreck his shopping carts and destroy the items inside, etc

I wish I had your fortitude, and I'd appreciate any member of my community who did the same.

My fear with doing something like that is it escalating into physical violence (I'm fit, but pretty short). Did you worry about it escalating? Best case scenario, I end up getting shanked and recovering for a week in the hospital. Worse case, I get killed. Worst case, I kill the homeless person and get my and my family's lives destroyed by my local government and media.

Oh god yes, I was internally terrified. This guy was a bit shorter than me (and I’m a short guy) but could almost certainly have kicked my ass if he’d decided to fight me. (I’ve never been in a fight and have no confidence in my capacity for interpersonal violence.) He was clearly an immigrant, presumably from Central America, and I wonder if fear of deportation was the main thing that caused him not to escalate things to a physical altercation. He got in my face at one point and made a vague physical threat, and that’s when I told him, “You just threatened me? Cool, that’s exactly what I needed in order to get the police involved.” He seemed to immediately regret it, and that’s when he started gathering his shit and preparing to leave.

I have gotten very close to getting beaten up by unstable homeless people, because I am too proud to passively accept their insults or let them colonize public spaces. If a time traveler from the future informed me that my cause of death will be “stabbed by homeless black guy at the trolley station following an avoidable verbal altercation” it would not surprise me in the least.

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

Have more children. That simple. People redistribute their compassion quite a bit when they have family. I think that a lot of carebearing that we have lately is just the desire to take care of something and the thing most people would have otherwise in history is children. Right now it is at most dog or cat.

Also we better find out soon how people to prioritize their compassion, otherwise the flood of migrants that we deal with right now will become biblical in proportions.

Interesting model. I wouldn't call it simple per se, and suspect you say it more for dramatic flair, but as a solution it seems persuasive.

Nothing about leaving the homeless on the street is compassion. Most of them belong in institutions or jail.

Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible to commit people against their will, so it's going to end up being jail.

Unfortunately activist DA's have more or less decided not to enforce laws against even deadly violent hobos.

Instead they are left on the street to die, and occasionally take people down with them.

The status quo is already cruelty all around. Cruelty towards them, cruelty towards their victims future and present. The response depicted in the article is merely the last resort of self preservation.

And given that this is Montana, homeless people are at extreme risk of just freezing to death, I would think:

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

This is the problem brought up in David Stove's What's Wrong with Benevolence? His answer to the title is: nothing, if it is combined with other virtues. The elevation of benevolence to the status of fundamental virtue, which began around the 18th century and which was accelerated by utilitarians.

What is required is the recognition that other virtues have a fundamental value, e.g. justice and prudence. This is not easy, even if the arguments are good, because most people are highly agreeable (in the Big Five sense) so they fear conflict, and they tend to see benevolence as a route to conflict-avoidance: "If only we are kind enough to the unhoused darlings, they won't cause any trouble to us."

It's the same dynamic with a lot of woke activism. Disagreeable radicals can bully around most people, because most people's default model for handling such conflicts is to bend the knee and hope it saves their own necks.

So elevating benevolence as the sole virtue has the persuasive power of elevating most people's submissive natures into approved virtues, and hence it has both philosophical arguments and self-interest in its favour. That's also why people's benevolence tends to extend to e.g. accepting misbehaviour by the homeless, but not Peter Singer-style austerity of living like a monk and donating all your income to the poor. Accepting abuse is much easier to market than undertaking privation.

Peter Singer-style austerity of living like a monk

ಠ_ಠ

Maybe "Peter-Singer-essay-style austerity", to ensure accurate phrasing just in case those allegations aren't all faked?

Accepting abuse is much easier to market than undertaking privation.

Is it? I'd argue that there's a popular "millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute" philosophy that points exactly the other way. Even if the first-order utilitarian analysis might judge a particular instance of abuse to be cheaper than privation, a second-order look at incentives suggests that rewarding abuse might merely engender more abuse.

I fear the real distinction here is that abuse of other people (the ones who can't afford to isolate themselves from crime) is easier for most people to accept than privation of themselves.

Although, in this analysis, "donating all your income to the poor" is deprivation that's also often tainted with various levels of abuse. The guy who takes your donations to buy food because some combination of his employer/family/government/health screwed him over is merely depriving you. The guy who takes your intended-for-food-and-shelter donations to buy intoxicants is abusing you. The guy who blew off high school and was then surprised to find that he can't get or hold a livable wage is in between.

Maybe "Peter-Singer-essay-style austerity", to ensure accurate phrasing just in case those allegations aren't all faked?

I was thinking specifically of his ideas about giving aid rather than his sex life, but yes.

I fear the real distinction here is that abuse of other people (the ones who can't afford to isolate themselves from crime) is easier for most people to accept than privation of themselves.

That's certainly easier, but people also seem willing to tolerate e.g. volunteering their pronouns when it's required for the job.

Although, in this analysis, "donating all your income to the poor" is deprivation that's also often tainted with various levels of abuse.

Depends on the poor people in question. Singer was thinking of starving children in the Third World, IIRC. However, as you say:

a second-order look at incentives suggests that rewarding abuse might merely engender more abuse.

Malthusian logic would suggest that the response of many of the Third World parents would be to have more children... At this step, serious benevolence-only types might start consider measures to encourage smaller families, such as "More education for women" or "More encouragement of contraception."

Malthusian logic would suggest that the response of many of the Third World parents would be to have more children... At this step, serious benevolence-only types might start consider...

Garrett Hardin was big on this. He thought standard charity to 3rd world countries was net negative. It merely lets them have more children and be further food insecure. If you want masses of starving people, give food to the poorest Africans.

I once tried to explain Garrett Hardin's point in a college anthropology class discussion and the TA became very mad. Her face frozen in anger glaring at me. Pointing out second order negative consequences doesn't make you thoughtful, it apparently makes you evil.

That was one of the formative experiences of my life watching that anthropology grad student lock up in anger because I said that dumping food on Africans whose agricultural capacity was decreasing due to desertification was actually a bad thing. Some large portion of Africa getting screwed by desertification was a major point of that class. So what happens when you send them food aid? One of my only failures to hide my contrarian nature in college.

Yes, one of the marks of bad social science (and other sciences, but it's particularly tempting in complex open systems) is not to ask the question, "And then what?"

I'll add one more explanation, beyond most people are highly agreeable: most people are lazy. Figuring out what is just and prudent takes more mental energy because it involves trade offs. It's way easier to assign a vague benevolence label onto some idea or policy. Hence, it's easy to be pro raising the minimum wage because it's benevolent! Takes way too much thinking to figure out the second order costs that make it unjust and imprudent.

An example of this is labels for legislation. The reason why they tend to have fuzzy "apple pie" names like "Inflation Reduction Act," "Patriot Act," "Social Justice Act" etc. is because a lot of voters will never think too far beyond the labels.

The issue of modern divorce was discussed here last week in the context of yet another round of wider discussion about the Sexual Revolution. (It's pretty much becoming tiresome at this point, but anyway.) Everyone who bothered to chime in seemed to agree with the notion that divorce is usually a net negative for the wife, both romantically and economically. It appeared to me that there's mostly a consensus about that here.

Fair enough. However, I've seen online data indicating that a) roughly 40% of all marriages end in divorce b) roughly 80% of divorces are initiated by the wives c) in cases where the wife is college-educated, that figure is 90%. In other words, in cases of marriages that fail, modern women are more likely than not to voluntarily put themselves in a disadvantageous life situation.

So...what gives? Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?

roughly 80% of divorces are initiated by the wives c) in cases where the wife is college-educated, that figure is 90%. In other words, in cases of marriages that fail, modern women are more likely than not to voluntarily put themselves in a disadvantageous life situation.

Why do you frame it as a disadvantage? Marriage on average raises a man's self reported happiness level and on average lowers the woman's. It's an institution that on the face of it benefits men's happiness over women; and the reverse is true whereby divorced women are significantly happier than divorced men. In terms of gender dynamics the 'bicycle needs the fish more than the fish needs the bicycle', men need women more than women need men. The fundamental cause of this divorce disparity is that men aren't bringing enough into their relationships on average and they are incapable or unwilling to bridge this gap, hence leading to a greater number of women filing for divorce. Men as a collective simply haven't adjusted to the new reality where they need to bring more than a decent paycheck to a relationship.

I frame it as a disadvantage because the big majority of commenters here also did so. If your romantic and economic prospects in life are likely to permanently erode due to a certain life decision, then yes, it can objectively be framed as a disadvantage. And no, I don't believe in such survey results for one second, nor in feminist allegories regarding fish and bicycles, especially when I never saw a bicycle look for a fish.

In my intuition, those happiness statistics are only possible in modern society which aggressively subsidizes women on several levels. What were those marriage happiness statistics in 1950? 1900? 1800? etc. Maybe I am wrong.

I'm not even sure it's true in the first place, all the top results on Google tell me that being married makes both men and women happier than single people.

I'd love to see the study around marriage happiness (not challenging it exists, genuinely interested, since I haven't heard it before).

I'm torn here because I think:

  • Focusing on self-reported happiness, an unreliable metric (to put it very politely) as the key to the value of marriage is both simplistic and self-serving to make the point
  • Kind of agreeing that, sometimes, men just don't bring much to the table

I know many single people who express interest in getting married. Unrealistic expectations abound. Overweight men ask why only overweight or single-mother women are interested. Women want strength and masculinity, but then try to bully their dates into submission within just a couple of weeks. Nobody seems interested in becoming a great lay or compromising on vacation destinations / home decor.

I think we're at a bit of a standoff in the sexual market where nobody recognizes their value or lack thereof.

It reminds me of these idiotic calls for "Financial Transparency" and discussing salary at work. No, learning that you're worth literally half your coworkers will not be an easy pill to swallow. Especially when your fundamental personality or intelligence is the reason why you're paid less.

There are other factors at play, no?

Uncertainty about future finances and dating is a lot less compelling when you’re risking a beating each weekend. Or, as I understand is more likely, when you’re picking the other woman’s hair off his collar.

To bring something up, only to admit it is marginal in the next sentence, seems like apophasis.

But infidelity explanation might make more sense. As 78% of women compete for the attention of 20% of men, in a society in which polyamory isn't mainstream, 58% of women have to settle. To then see their second choice having his pick of litter, so to speak, must inflame a sense of not only betrayal but also of inferiority.

Jealousy feels like a perfectly adequate explanation to me. I think you might be overcomplicating the issue.

The notion that 40% of all husbands, or even the majority of those, in modern Western societies beat their wives regularly and/or cheat on them is not something I can take seriously.

I have some bad news for you, then.

Approximately half of [Americans] in married relationships cheat at least one time during the course of the marriage.

I sometimes wonder if I'm on the same planet as people talking about divorce statistics. Speaking of the divorce of my parents, my dad got really paranoid over time, stopped working, started drinking excessively, and kept getting into arguments over ridiculous things; the last straw was a big blowout fight with some light physical violence involved. I think people asking this question have a tendency to assume that all men that get divorced are just like them. Some women make really poor choices? Well, some men do, too. And it's hard to speak so broadly about all divorces. You couldn't reduce the circumstances that led to Raskolnikov killing the old woman to a set of statistics.

If one values harm inflicted onto some other person, equally or more, than the same harm suffered, than one is either indifferent or prefers to inflict such harm.

But even if the one is considers suffering a loss 1 util to inflict the loss of 2 util onto a hated person to be not worth it, if one is able to inflict the loss of 4 util at the same cost, one may prefer to engage in mutually destructive activity.

Back in the old days, one theory I came across in the Manosphere was that cases of “divorce rape” are usually explained not simply by vindictiveness or greed or resentment but also by the intent to destroy the ability of the ex-husband to attract another wife, especially one who’s more attractive. Assuming that this is true, I don’t think it’s done just out of spite, because it’s a big blow to the social status of a woman for her husband to leave her and find a more attractive wife.

Worth pointing out that there's a difference between having a term in your utility function for wanting someone to suffer, vs a term for carrying out implied social threats in order to confirm their initial validity.

Which is to say, a lot of people do things that seem irrational when they are in bad situations, because those behaviors are either evolved or socially engineered (or generally, both) as credible threats intended to avoid those bad situations in the first place. The reason we get so jealous and angry at being cheated on that we might just kill you (or otherwise cause huge harms) is not because the jealous reaction makes sense, it's a threat to avoid cheating in the first place. Same thing for lots of suicide threats/attempts, many types of vengeance and respect-based posturing, etc.

I disagree with the proposed consensus.

Maybe you could argue that if a random marriage were forced to be broken up, that would on average tend to hurt the wife more.

But I would expect that the worst marriages in the country tend to hurt the wife more on average, so allowing the market to choose which marriages get broken up in the normal fashion should help wives more on average.

Historically, divorce was very difficult to obtain, and it was more likely than not that the father would retain custody of the children (so there were definitely cases where the wife was blackmailed with "if you ever want to see your kids again..."). If a woman was at fault in a divorce, she was ruined socially and probably economically as well. Even where the husband was the offending party (e.g. cruelty or infidelity), a divorced woman still found it difficult to resume her life afterwards.

So for various reasons, it was men who usually initiated divorces. Move on to the 20th century, and we get the Reno Divorce, where now (if you are sufficiently wealthy to be able to afford it) you can get a divorce after spending enough time to qualify as a resident of Reno, Nevada.

Now women were initiating divorces, and as the decades passed, expectations for marriage changed, economic stability outside of marriage became possible for women, and changes in the attitudes of the law towards alimony and child support and child custody, as well as property and asset division, began to favour women, the balance tilted towards women being the ones who had the upper hand in divorce.

However, the shoe on the other foot is earning ability: if you're a housewife with custody of the kids, you have more expenses and now have a reduced income (whatever alimony was awarded to you). If you're not working, your situation does become worse than it had been. If you are working, can you get decent job or are you stuck because you haven't established a career before and during marriage?

Romantically, men - it seems - are much more reluctant to partner up with a woman who has children. So the ex-husband may be able to find a new wife and start making babies with her, but the ex-wife finds it more difficult to find a partner.

I think that the desire for independence, and that now you don't have to stay in an unhappy marriage and put up with a possibly abusive husband, still over-rides any downsides perceived for divorce. And I think that applies to men as well as women - I don't think men would want to stay in an unhappy marriage just because 'I'll be the loser economically' otherwise.

I think that the desire for independence

The desire for independence is a meme.

I spotted this in the mod queue, with the Volunteer Jannies considering this a bad post, but this isn't really anywhere close to bad enough for me to put my mod hat on, but as a prolific user in good standing, I'm sure you could do better than that.

Pithiness/brevity isn't outright disallowed, but if you're going to dismiss an effort-post, or at least a line of it, going into more detail would be desirable. Or at least do more than just call it a meme.

Historically, divorce was very difficult to obtain, and it was more likely than not that the father would retain custody of the children (so there were definitely cases where the wife was blackmailed with "if you ever want to see your kids again..."). If a woman was at fault in a divorce, she was ruined socially and probably economically as well. Even where the husband was the offending party (e.g. cruelty or infidelity), a divorced woman still found it difficult to resume her life afterwards.

This is why I'm not against divorce legally or even culturally (cue: But TollBooth, aren't you a TRAD?). I've been in enough relationships (and exited them) to understand that the same person who you feel deeply connected and wholly in love with in Month 2 can be the same person who you literally never want to speak to again in Month .... 8. I've been safe enough to avoid getting married, but it is not at all hard to understand that some couples in the exact same situation - and millions of similar ones - would. If that turns out to not be a good match, an exit ought to be possible.

But the costs of divorce for both partners seem quite high. What's more, I've seen no evidence that pre-marriage cohabitation (i.e. a practice run) helps. Anec-datally, I've seen it do the opposite. So, we've a situation in which lots of people are entering into an agreement that will entangle them deeply for a long period of time. Financial and social penalties abound. It's very hard to actually tell if you and the other person are going to "make it" no matter what you do.

Quick aside: Pre-marriage counseling, usually in a religious context, in my opinion, does nothing to help with the choosing of a partner. Instead, I think, it mostly just doubles the level of commitment on the part of each party and kind of builds in a fatalist co-dependence. As Catholic as I am, I've seen many catholic marriages that probably should've ended drag on (til death!) out of a grim determination to the idea of marriage. More on that later.

Yet, it's close to self-evident that a stable, two parent household is the basic building block of society. If they start to disappear (even more than they already have (!)) bad things happen. But The Institution hasn't kept up from its 1000+ year history of being, at its core, an economic contract for mutual survival and reproduction. I don't know how to fix that, but I have a hunch it's important.

On folks who get into and stay in marriages because of an external commitment to an idea / ideal (mostly the very religious) ... That selection bias ought to be obvious. Anyone who can commit themselves in a meaningful way to an abstract idea, ideal, or metaphysical concept is going to have a level of self-discipline, thoughtfulness, self-awareness etc. that puts them into pretty safe territory across a whole host of Big Decisions in life. That's not the audience that matters.

But the costs of divorce for both partners seem quite high. What's more, I've seen no evidence that pre-marriage cohabitation (i.e. a practice run) helps. Anec-datally, I've seen it do the opposite.

I'm in a bit of a different situation. I don't see how a long-term relationship can be successful without a practice run, especially given the complaints around chore splits and finances.

Yet you're correct in that the data suggests rolling directly from living separately -> marriage is more successful. It doesn't compute for me. I've always ascribed the difference there to "only the most religious/susceptible to social pressure can resist cohabitation before marriage" and so will stick out relationships at a higher rate.

It's my belief that Cohabitation undermines the ultimate marriage between the same couple, because it throws off the stakes and the leverage between parties. A lot of couples get into bad habits during cohabitation, and it is difficult and muddy to straighten them out after marriage. When you get married without having lived together, you have a clean slate.

One other thing pre marriage counseling offers is some basic conflict management tools that many young people especially young people with a single digit number of relationships may not have developed naturally.

So...what gives? Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?

I think this can be explained by how women stand to gain more by initiating divorce , and also have more options afterwards. They can rebound faster.

I think the stat is that 80% of divorces are filed by women, which is different than "initiated by". If your husband cheats on you, or hits you, and you file a divorce, who really initiated it?

I was a regular Manosphere reader back when that scene existed and found most of their arguments compelling, no matter how cringey that sounds to most people. Based on what I’ve seen and read there and elsewhere, I think the idea that a significant chunk of married men in any modern feminized Western society of unrestrained hypergyny beat their wives and/or cheat on them is simply preposterous. The large majority of men aren’t even in a position to cheat. Either way, all of that aside, if domestic violence, cheating and similar behaviors (drug addiction etc.) were indeed the cause of most divorces, then logically about 40-50% of all divorces would be initiated by the husbands. But this isn’t the case, far from it.

You might be too optimistic. Stats vary but a depressingly high portion of people do apparently cheat. Male likelihood to cheat, as well as abuse a partner, are both higher than a woman’s so you wouldn’t expect an equal ratio.

I don't think there is a consensus. The claim that a wife who divorces makes her situation better is simply socially disfavored, and the posters chiming in to say otherwise were bringing the weight of that social consensus in behind their posts.

Romantically, I would guess the wife's situation at divorce is very poor; she doesn't want to be with her husband. So even if her situation sucks more than she thinks afterwards, she may be making only a lateral move.

she doesn't want to be with her husband

But whomever she finds later, assuming she still wants a long-term relationship, is likely to be even worse than her husband - that's the point.

There’s a pretty simple explanation- most divorces are mutual and in our culture paperwork is the woman’s job.

But also, yes, women are misled about what divorce can do for them. Otherwise it probably wouldn’t be mutual so often.

The other possibility is that men are the ones who give cause for divorce at very high rates. I think the evidence opposed this though.

That paperwork comment made me laugh out loud. Yes, if my husband and I were approaching divorce, I would have to initiate the formal process. Just like I do our taxes, pay our bills, handle all the child's appointments, plan our travel, etc.

So...what gives? Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?

It might be useful to look at the reasons people give when they get divorced. The top reason (75% of couples cite) is lack of commitment, followed by infidelity (60%). A substantial number also cite substance abuse (35%) and domestic violence (25%). If your husband is cheating on you or beating you maybe you don't care that getting divorced is economically bad for you.

60% infidelity seems insanely high. Figures from the UK* show adultery given as the reason for divorce by 7.5% of men and 8.7% of women. Crime victimhood figures show 5% of adults being victims of domestic violence. Either Americans are far worse than I thought or those figures are wrong. My money is on the latter.

*It's worth noting that until 2022, the divorcing partner was forced by law to given a reason for divorce. Hence most divorces were either codifying separations that had already happened (one of the reasons allowed) or recorded as 'unreasonable behaviour', which was the essentially the dump stat for amicable divorces.

If 5% of adults are domestic victims, and 25% of divorcees report domestic violence, that only requires 5% / 25% = 20% of adults get divorced at some point. Which is quite achievable. There’s a lot of ways these proportions could be screwy, but it passes the sniff test.

As for infidelity, well, it’s 8% that seems low to me. The UK has similar rates to the US. It’s hard for me to imagine divorcees having a lower adultery rate than the national average. I’d have guessed a comorbidity—adulterers usually also being “unreasonable” or commiting violence—but the UK data specifically has a “combination” category, and it’s nearly empty. Maybe a reporting stigma, where giving adultery as the reason has some legal effect or just is embarrassing?

IIRC in the US before no-fault divorce, if you could prove your spouse knew about the affair and slept with you anyways you could get the divorce denied by spousal reconciliation(no idea how often it happened), and it wouldn’t surprise me if something like that really affected division of assets in the UK. It might also have just been easier to check ‘unreasonable behavior’ than to include evidence of an affair if such is required.

Notoriously, there was a period between the late 1980's and the final legislative adoption of no-fault divorce in 2022 when the "law in lawyers' heads" was that even trivial unreasonable behaviour was grounds for divorce if the filing party's subjective opinion was that it was intolerable. So you could file for divorce on the grounds that "he leaves the toilet seat up and I find it intolerable to continue living with him as a result" and the husband's lawyer would advise him that he had no chance of defending the divorce, and should accordingly concede to avoid legal costs.

So the vast majority of divorces were filed on grounds of unreasonable behaviour because it was a de facto no fault divorce. Whereas if you alleged adultery the respondent could demand that you prove it. Even if you could prove adultery, your lawyer would advise you to file on grounds of trivial unreasonable behaviour to avoid unnecessary costs and acrimony. So the only people who filed on grounds of adultery were the people who wanted an acrimonous divorce and were willing to ignore their lawyer's advice to get one.

The Major government attempted to fix the problem in the 1990s by moving to no-fault divorce but only after compulsory mediation and a one-year waiting period. The law was never brought into force - I am not sure why.

I remember reading a while back that China saw the divorce rate go down after requiring a mere thirty days cooling-off period before you could proceed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/18/china-divorces-drop-70-after-controversial-cooling-off-law

But of course marriage rates are down too so it's all a big muddle of cause and (maybe) effect.

Fundamentally I think the big factor that even gov't can't easily control is the perception that there are more options out there than ever which is to say someone who is contemplating divorce and looks around to see what they could (in theory) get instead find it more appealing even if that is an unrealistic expectation.

I remember reading a while back that China saw the divorce rate go down after requiring a mere thirty days cooling-off period before you could proceed.

This goes for prettymuch every major life decision, though. People are prone to inertia and frequently the straw that breaks the Camel's back only does so for a short while.

Apparently the source is this study of 52 divorced couples who had gone through a certain pre-marital counseling program. Another 2012 study had 37% of couples reporting infidelity as a reason, 22% drug or alcohol problems, and 13% physical violence. I think one obvious reason for the discrepancy is the UK numbers seem to be coming from legal filings while the US numbers are from reports of divorced people.

I agree that men are more likely to tolerate bad marriages and generally just to become passive actors in relationships.

Women are more agreeable and neurotic than men

I would zero in on neuroticism. Women are just predisposed to be unhappy. Period. Their husband is probably the adult they are around the majority of the time, and they just decide he must be at fault for all their negative feelings. It's neuroticism looking for blind justifications. Our culture which just blames men for everything only justifies and amplifies this impulse.

I've heard not a few stories of women who buy into this narrative and throw away their husband, which was probably the best thing they had going for them. Then when someone better fails to come along, or fails to commit, they wonder what the fuck they were thinking. Why did they do what they did? It's like they were in a trance.

Women live in a world where they are told from the youngest age that their every negative emotion is the fault of men. It's only natural they toss out their husbands when the going gets rough.

Ah, another borderline comment makes it into the mod queue.

So far this has, adjusts glasses, two reports for antagonism.

I personally disagree with that assessment, pointing out perceived moral failings or group differences (at least in a negative light) is in itself not something against the rules.

However, I think the sweeping proclamations about:

Women are just predisposed to be unhappy. Period. Their husband is probably the adult they are around the majority of the time, and they just decide he must be at fault for all their negative feelings.

Comes across as somewhat uncharitable, but once again, not to the extent I feel I have to do anything about it. I would, of course, prefer you extended more charity, maybe if you had tried to justify your observations (or at least caveat them).*

Consider this an unnecessarily verbose way of saying this comment is slightly subpar, just a tad bit more than I am okay with leaving entirely unaddressed. Or to the people who did report it, please don't bother if it's this mild.

*(A quick Google search tells me it's probably factually incorrect, in that the papers I saw showed a rather significant finding of greater life satisfaction/happiness in women than men, but I don't think the mods are here to adjudicate matters of fact that don't hinge around the rules of The Motte itself)

It's seldom the case that failure of a marriage responsibly falls on only one of the parties involved. But I think a world in which marriages are at least 'partly' arranged fare better than the ones predicated entirely on the ephemeral attractions of two consenting adults.

Kinda borne out by the stats indicating that women are just less happy in general than decades past AND having higher rates of mental health disorders despite marriage rates going down over that time.

Indeed, this is pretty decent evidence in favor of "women are harder to please" hypotheses. Almost every metric that feeds into human happiness has improved over the last 100 years, and yet women as a class appear just as discontent with the situation as ever, if not moreso.

If women are more prone to unhappiness in general, the ones in a marriage can attribute that to their husbands, but the ones out of it can attribute it to [Capitalism/Climate Change/Astrological Signs].

https://neurosciencenews.com/women-happiness-psychology-23862/

https://www.nber.org/papers/w29893

Lesbian marriages have the highest divorce rates so it goes. Also, their stated reasons for divorce are just the same. I’m not sure about gay men.

It's neuroticism looking for blind justifications. Our culture which just blames men for everything only justifies and amplifies this impulse.

Our culture also just generally validates neuroses. The likelihood of being told, "your feelings are valid" is much higher than being told, "well, tough shit, everyone feels that way sometimes".

I do feel like all analysis that depends on self-reported happiness needs to deal with the fact that reporting that one is happy is (for someone sympathetic) often a strategic mistake.

Say you're unhappy and, if you are loved, the next question that comes is "what can I do to make things better for you?" Say you're happy and, since you're already okay, you get passed over. Saying you're happy is saying that you don't want free stuff. Some can be naïve enough to not get it or principled enough to refuse it, but what we incentivize, we get more of, and here it's "self-reported unhappiness."

I actually think it's worth challenging the idea that there are more important things in the world sometimes than individual happiness.

I think you’re both right- everyone in our culture could stand to hear ‘yeah, sometimes it sucks, deal with it’ a little more often but men currently hear it at least a little bit and women very rarely do.

It's worse. Stoicism is now considered toxic.

Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?

Why isn’t the most direct explanation—that many women are unhappy in their marriages and leave because of that—on the table?

Everyone who bothered to chime in seemed to agree with the notion that divorce is usually a net negative for the wife, both romantically and economically

I don’t really understand how one can objectively rule out that they were really unhappy in the marriage and are happier outside of it, even though they’re poorer or have fewer partners or whatever afterwards.

Tbh this kind of sounds like an MRA revenge fantasy. I’m sure that women (and men) probably overestimate their out-of-marriage prospects a bit, which would lead to “too many” divorces, but most people also have a really strong “make it work” determination that probably counterbalances this somewhat.

I don’t really understand how one can objectively rule out that they were really unhappy in the marriage and are happier outside of it, even though they’re poorer or have fewer partners or whatever afterwards.

Sometimes they leave because they're just looking for the "next best thing." And when it turns out they were lied to, they find themselves right back at square one, feeling just as 'unhappy' as they gaslight themselves into feeling, thinking that the grass was greener on the other side. It isn't a new phenomenon that women jump from one relationship to another in their younger years, chasing something fresh and new. Why should anyone think that internal dynamic automatically dissolves, just because they got married? The same relationship fatigue set in for them, just as it did before.

Why isn’t the most direct explanation—that many women are unhappy in their marriages and leave because of that—on the table?

It can be.

But the financial burdens that a divorce triggers will cause a TON of unhappiness as well, so doing the objective calculation would probably make it a net negative for most women to initiate divorce... UNLESS she has a wealthy replacement husband lined up (most women wouldn't).

Given two options with negative utility, are the women actually picking the one that has slightly better utility for themselves, especially over the long run?

And besides, this just pushes the question back:

Why didn't these women pick better partners that they'd be happy with with long-term?

Why are they agreeing to these long-term commitments in the first place? Presumably they intend to maintain them.

If we work off the assumption that women have full agency, then a failed marriage can be avoided by picking a better husband up front, and a divorce is ultimately an admission that they didn't pick well.

, so doing the objective calculation would probably make it a net negative for most women to initiate divorce

Most women don't divorce. If 40% of marriages end in divorce and 80% of these are initiated by women that means 68% of women don't initiate divorce

AFAIK the usual story is either "women grossly overestimate their market value" or "women underestimate how destructive a signal divorce initiation is, initiate to create pressure on the husband, and the outraged men escalate by actually going through with it".

I have no idea whether there's any truth to either of those.

signal divorce initiation

I suppose you mean the act of threatening with divorce initiation used as a signal / as blackmail?

Not sure how exactly it works legally, double unsure whether it works the same way in Germany as in the US, but yes the goal is said to be a signal to the husband along the lines of "see how serious I am, accede to my demands".

I think this is just Simpson's Paradox popping up for two populations. Yes, women that are divorced will tend to be less happy than women that are married, but these are not actually identical populations of people. I find it entirely plausible that people that get divorced improve their lot in life relative to staying married, but that their lot in life is worse than people that just have successful marriages. Thinking about some traits that improve success in marriage:

  • High concientiousness
  • Low neuroticism
  • Financial success
  • High loyalty
  • Low time-preference

I would expect these to correlate with general happiness.

This seems to imply that there would be quite a lot of people who would simply be better off overall never getting married (in that there's no way they can find a partner who will satisfy them long term) and seems like our society doesn't have a ready answer to that particular category.

I don't think men really understand how women think, I certainly don't. I can create models to rationalize behaviours 'oh that handbag is a way of showing status and affirming one's position in the pecking order' but I don't weigh status so highly, so I can't appreciate why they'd spend so much money on them. Designer goods still don't make sense to me.

I suppose women wouldn't understand why I buy Steam games and then don't play them. Anyway, I think their mental state is hard to understand and we should be wary of trying to explain them, given fundamental differences. We're stuck with what they say (not usually too helpful, given incentives) and whatever models we make up. But our models may well be very wrong, since we don't understand their thought process and it's our thought processes that we try to insert on them, since we can't access theirs.

Consider the women on reddit who are like 'hey everyone here is really sex-positive and says it's no problem that I have an Onlyfans but when I bring it up on dates the men get the ick instantly, what's going on'. Their models of men are bad, why would they bring that up? Or the women who get that hideous plasticky Bogdanoff look, they're bad at modelling how men rate attractiveness. Or the highly accomplished 30/40-year old lawyer women who go 'I have this prestigious job and lots of money, why aren't equally prestigious men attracted to me'. Modelling the other sex is very difficult, people fail at it all the time and we should try to do it less.

Consider the women on reddit who are like 'hey everyone here is really sex-positive and says it's no problem that I have an Onlyfans but when I bring it up on dates the men get the ick instantly, what's going on'. Their models of men are bad, why would they bring that up? Or the women who get that hideous plasticky Bogdanoff look, they're bad at modelling how men rate attractiveness. Or the highly accomplished 30/40-year old lawyer women who go 'I have this prestigious job and lots of money, why aren't equally prestigious men attracted to me'.

These three are simple cases of projection, I think.

How am I projecting? I assure you that I am not a highly accomplished or renumerated professional.

I could just as easily go for the 'hey I'm a nice guy with a stable job and I don't beat women why am I not attractive' angle. It's instant mental arithmetic for me to see why these sassy, solvent, sophisticated women struggle finding a partner but it's clearly much harder on their end: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4754914/Where-good-men-gone.html

I presumably have similar blind spots and am unaware of them, underweight them or just can't fully wrap my head around them consistently, like a student who's struggling through some complex, counterintuitive mathematics in class, will probably fail on the test.

I meant the women in these examples, not you.

Modelling the other sex is very difficult, people fail at it all the time and we should try to do it less.

I was with you up until the very last clause. Shouldn't the conclusion be the opposite? Modeling the other sex is very difficult, people fail at it all the time and we should practice it more. In fact, the number one issue seems to be that people aren't even attempting to model the other sex, they are simply typical-minding and assuming the other sex thinks how they think but with the opposite sexual orientation.

I don't think modeling the other sex is easy at all, I'm certainly no good at it (though I'm not good at modeling other people of any sort), but trying and failing and then updating your models iteratively is going to get you way closer than not trying at all.

I think men and women are different. I do not think we are aliens to one another, incapable of deciphering how those strange opposite-sex brains work. That you don't personally value the status signified by a handbag doesn't mean you aren't capable of understanding why a name-brand purse is a status signifier. A woman is perfectly capable of understanding why you collect Steam games and don't play them. She might think it's stupid, just like you think caring about a purse is stupid, but these are not strange alien behaviors, they're just male/female-focused behaviors. The women who affect mystification at the fact that men are turned off that they have an OnlyFans are either in denial, or have genuinely lived in a cultural bubble where, essentially, the men in their lives are lying to them because it's not politic to admit "Yeah, I don't actually want to date a camwhore even if I say it's perfectly legitimate work." Men too fall prey to these fallacies from living in a bubble and then being unable to grasp that sometimes what people in their social circles claim to believe is not actually how most people feel.

You might as well argue that no one is truly capable of understanding a person from another culture. (Maybe you do believe that too, I don't know.)

The women who affect mystification at the fact that men are turned off that they have an OnlyFans are either in denial, or have genuinely lived in a cultural bubble where, essentially, the men in their lives are lying to them because it's not politic to admit "Yeah, I don't actually want to date a camwhore even if I say it's perfectly legitimate work."

It's easy to say this as an older gentleman. But the cloud of preposterous bullshit surrounding gender relations has only gotten thicker and thicker as I've gotten older. I fear the younger generation has no way back. When we were young bucks, "slut shaming" was an extremely online topic, and more or less every person in the real world knew that nobody loved a slut. Liked a slut sure. But nobody loves a slut. You can't make a ho into a housewife was common knowledge.

Now "slut shaming" discourse is practically part of middle school sex ed, and highschools will suspend you for having a private conversation with a buddy that a female classmate might overhear and find offensive. There was an article about just such a case, I believe in my state, but I can't seem to find it now. I'm guessing 2016-2018ish. Lying about how men regard sluts was fringe when we were growing up, now it's institutionalized.

You only see men being frank about why they wouldn't commit to a slut in stigmatized venues like Andrew Tate, the Whatever Podcast or Pearly Things. Places normies are told not to go, and told horror stories about how they are all evil, vile Nazi's that will try to seduce you into white supremacy. And frankly, it's such a marginalized view, these venues are scarcely the best advocates of it either.

You see young men talking, sheepishly, about being put off when the woman they are dating has fucked 10-20x as many partners as them, and being put off by it. They feel like it's immoral to preserve their own dignity and standards. They seek reassurance that they aren't crazy for being grossed out by it, they've been gaslit to such an extent on the topic.

And the biggest lie told about all of this is that slut shaming is something done by men, especially bitter single men, although this has never been the case anywhere in the world.

So...what gives? Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?

Probably similar to the reason a gambler would keep playing even when they're way up and the odds are not in their favor going forward. They could walk away from the table, stick the money in an index fund and enjoy the benefits of it for years to come, or they could go another round and maybe double or quintuple their money!!!

More directly, people in general are bad at considering the long term costs of an action when they perceive a short term benefit that would remove what they perceive as a source of discomfort.

I also think that women, in particular, when they've grown up being showered with male attention, and the had their pick of suitors, they expect that they'll still be a hot commodity once they're out of their marriage. They have been out of the game so long that they don't realize that a 30+ woman, possibly with kids, is simply not going to command the same sort of attention, especially with newer models on the showroom floor.

I don't know how to get across to a woman whose recollection of the dating world is "I went on fun dates with hot guys who paid for everything" that if she tries that now she'll find herself rejected more often and her pickings will be much slimmer.

(This doesn't explain why college educated women are more likely to initiate divorce, I suspect that has more to do with sheer social status)

IMPORTANT EDIT: college educated women are not 'more likely' to initiate divorce than other groups, only that college educated women who get a divorce are the ones initiating it 90% of the time, and husbands 10%. College educated women are less likely to be involved in a divorce either way.

This is not to say that no women end up happy after initiating divorce. My own mother seems to have ended up being quite happy after divorcing and remarrying (my dad is doing alright too). Just that you would have to take claims that they're happy with a grain of salt because they will be VERY vested in projecting the appearance of happiness and retroactively justifying their decision even if from the financial side of it they are OBJECTIVELY worse off.

Like seriously, how many people would you expect to pull the divorce rip cord, find themselves alone and relatively poor (compared to their previous status) and just as unhappy as before, and would then openly proclaim "I made a big mistake, it was all my own doing, and I have irretrievably worsened my quality of life!"

Does the ego even permit that sort of open admission?

they've grown up being showered with male attention

Well, gosh, now I feel the Victimhood Syndrome coming on. Where was my male attention being showered on me when I was growing up? Clearly, if every single woman in the world gets male attention, this was not alone something I deserved, but my natural birthright. I now demand reparations! Every single man on here owes it to me!

Or conversely, we could all cool it with "the other side gets it all and I get nothing, that's not fair".

There's good points in this comment, but it loses everything for the "women - entitled bitches" trope.

No, I think it's just a basic fact on the ground that in the world of social media, no female will be wanting for male attention unless she is actively trying to avoid it.

The situation is such that even females who don't actively broadcast availability will still get men knocking on their proverbial door to see if they're available.

I don't think there's any benefit to the conversation to deny what seems to be an obvious truth, then reason from there.

Every man on here owes it to me!

Be careful what you wish for. The odds are good but the goods are odd.

The odds are good but the goods are odd.

That's hilarious. First time I read it. Thanks.

I've heard this in reference to fujoshi in the anime community, along with "by and large, they're bi and large."

The odds are good but the goods are odd.

I first heard it from my daughter (at the time an MIT freshman) 20 years ago.

Like Medusa, I can petrify with a gaze, so a host of admiring statues crouched in homage before me?

But then who would you argue with?

They have been out of the game so long that they don't realize that a 30+ woman, possibly with kids, is simply not going to command the same sort of attention, especially with newer models on the showroom floor.

I think you're overhyping this a bit. Many is the couple where the guy suggests an open relationship, not realizing that even their middle-aged wife/partner commands about 50,000x the desirability in the hookup market even if things have evened out a lot in the longterm partner market.

Yes, it isn't nearly as hard for a woman to find sexual partners as it is for men at almost any age.

But if she's expecting to leave the marriage and find someone else who will emotionally and financially support her that's a bigger ask.

I also think that women, in particular, when they've grown up being showered with male attention, and the had their pick of suitors, they expect that they'll still be a hot commodity once they're out of their marriage. They have been out of the game so long that they don't realize that a 30+ woman, possibly with kids, is simply not going to command the same sort of attention, especially with newer models on the showroom floor.

A buddy has a theory that this is how the "Karen" archetype comes into being. A former hot girl abruptly stops getting heretofore assumed male attention because of the tyranny of age and gravity. For some subset (the Karens) their brain cannot process how or why this might be. They cannot shift to a "graceful" aging. Instead, they turn up the volume and demands as they simply believe the world doesn't realize what a hot commodity they have in front of them.

I've never been one for armchair psychology, but this theory is, at least, sort of fun?

It has legs, I'd say.

To me the Karen archetype (I admittedly don't like to talk about it as if its an objectively measurable phenomenon) is a woman who has an inflated sense of self-worth because she's borrowing somebody else's status (usually her husband) to try to get her way. Hence why it seems Karens often have husbands who are in the military or are veterans, or cops, or well-known local businessmen.

But I don't have any objective stats on it.

(This doesn't explain why college educated women are more likely to initiate divorce, I suspect that has more to do with sheer social status)

Importantly, they're not. They're more likely to initiate divorce, conditional on the couple getting divorced. Education is strongly anti-correlated with getting divorced.

Ah, yes, I will correct my post because this is an IMPORTANT point when analyzing the data.

Probably a whole other thread could be thrown down on why more educated couples are less likely to divorce, and I'd bet a BIG one is "they can grasp the financial implications of the action and are less likely to act on impulse."

Relationship therapist Esther Perel has a famous line that "The victim of the affair isn't necessarily the victim of the marriage." In the same way, the person that initiates the divorce isn't necessarily the person that ended the marriage. For a variety of reasons, I speculate that is more likely for men to "quiet quit" on a marriage, in a way that is less possible/likely for a woman. The woman might be the one who files the divorce papers, but in a lot of cases the man checked out a long time ago and has been, sometimes willfully sometimes passive-aggressively, baiting her into filing.

Rarely are divorces truly "out of nowhere," more normally divorce filings formalize the death of a marriage that has already broken down completely. Long processes of fights, counseling (secular or religious), compromises, deals, fights, betrayals, and failures precede the actual legal process. The actual filing often reflects a situation where there is no marriage going.

A man will stop doing anything around the house when he checks out of his marriage. Men typically do fewer chores around the house to start with, and have a greater tolerance for mess/disorder/eating trash. Absent any care for his wife's feelings, most men will have no real interest in doing laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning the bathrooms. Often this extends to kids: he's not scheduling doctors appointments, buying them clothes, keeping track of their schooling.

In my own marriage (which is great and nowhere near divorce), my wife and I have a regular fight about chores that goes something like: she thinks I don't do enough chores around the house, I think that I would totally do them if she would stop doing them first. She's home more than I am for a variety of work reasons, and she has a lower tolerance for seeing dishes in the sink, for seeing a full laundry bin, etc. I'm at work later, left to my own devices I will happily spend a few hours doing all that, but I won't reflexively do it when I get home from work, while she will sit there during the day working and see the dishes and they will bug her and she'll do them.

Because I'm out of the house more for work, as is typical for men, I could also just do another common thing men do and just...stop coming home after work. I'd be perfectly happy eating three dollar egg sandwiches from the local store, spending my time out drinking with friends, showing up back at ten or eleven at night and going to sleep before leaving in the morning.

Keep in mind that men typically control more of the finances. Both in terms of assets and income, and servicing debts and taxes. I would have vastly more ability to mess with marital assets than my wife would: I make more money, I know where the assets are, I would know how to move them around.

This is before we get into things like Exit Affairs, when an extramarital relationship is just a tripwire to make her file, or physical abuse.

So the dynamic is often that a man stops doing anything around the house, stops substantively being a husband, and then a wife files. So the decision these women are making when filing isn't "Happily Married Woman vs. Divorced Woman" it's "Abandoned, but legally married woman with no legal tools to control her spouse's use of marital assets, still expecting divorce vs. Divorced woman, with legal tools to control spouse's disposal of marital assets."

she thinks I don't do enough chores around the house, I think that I would totally do them if she would stop doing them first

This reminds me I should finish my "mental load" effortpost. I got derailed when the war started, so it's almost 2 years old overdue.

Makes sense, too much mental load on you.

Often this extends to kids: he's not scheduling doctors appointments, buying them clothes, keeping track of their schooling.

I don't know that many single dads, be they widowers or divorced, but that seems like an unfair accusation in a comment I mostly agree with. Most dads don't bother with those things because they expect, fairly or not, that their wives will take care of it. The lone dads I know won't let their kids fall sick without treatment, or leave them wearing tattered/undersized apparel. In terms of schooling, well, the bare minimum is making sure their kid is attending one in the first place, and while I do expect they won't be as engaged in the finer details of performance in class, I don't expect them to not care at all.

"Often" is not the same as most or every, but my point still stands.

Dude, read the comment. The comment does not, CANNOT, apply to single dads. This comment is about parents in a collapsing marriage. To be weird about how I'm not inclusive of single dads when talking about dads going through the early stages of a divorce is just...so damn politically correct.

But you do agree with my point:

Most dads don't bother with those things because they expect, fairly or not, that their wives will take care of it.

Exactly. When he's checking out of the marriage, he can safely stop helping out with things like that and assume they will still get done, while putting pressure on his wife at the same time. He doesn't schedule doctor's appointments, but neither does he feel that endangers his children's health, he merely assumes it will inconvenience his wife. A wife is much less safe making the same assumption, and is much less likely to.

A man will stop doing anything around the house when he checks out of his marriage. Men typically do fewer chores around the house to start with, and have a greater tolerance for mess/disorder/eating trash. Absent any care for his wife's feelings, most men will have no real interest in doing laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning the bathrooms. Often this extends to kids: he's not scheduling doctors appointments, buying them clothes, keeping track of their schooling.

It is not at all obvious to me that you're still talking about "checked out dads" after you get to the section where you say that men are doing fewer chores to start with. Most widowers don't care about their wives ongoing feelings (because they're dead), but they do that nonetheless because they care about the kids.

And more than that, most dads, even before they're in the process of divorcing, aren't doing that stuff in the first place! Stating the obvious can sometimes makes a reader implicitly assume that you're trying to make an argument that isn't so.

Of course, now that you've made yourself clearer, I can't say I disagree with your thesis.

Fair enough. Glad we cleared that up.

In the same way, the person that initiates the divorce isn't necessarily the person that ended the marriage. For a variety of reasons, I speculate that is more likely for men to "quiet quit" on a marriage, in a way that is less possible/likely for a woman. The woman might be the one who files the divorce papers, but in a lot of cases the man checked out a long time ago and has been, sometimes willfully sometimes passive-aggressively, baiting her into filing

The problem I have with this response is that it essentially encourages one to disregard hard empirical evidence and then advocates for the exact opposite of what that evidence suggests. Now i understand that marriage and divorce are extremely complicated and also deal with two human beings that can never really be quite understood through sheer empirical analysis, but your point essentially boils down to "majority of women file for divorce, men to blame".

My problem with your comment is the idiocy of identity politics evident in it. My comment doesn't blame men for the breakdown of marriages. It points out the characteristic ways that each gender reacts to a marriage that has already broken down.

My comment doesn't blame men for the breakdown of marriages.

The comment in question:

In the same way, the person that initiates the divorce isn't necessarily the person that ended the marriage.

I speculate that is more likely for men to "quiet quit" on a marriage, in a way that is less possible/likely for a woman.

The woman might be the one who files the divorce papers, but in a lot of cases the man checked out a long time ago and has been, sometimes willfully sometimes passive-aggressively, baiting her into filing.

A man will stop doing anything around the house when he checks out of his marriage. Men typically do fewer chores around the house to start with, and have a greater tolerance for mess/disorder/eating trash.

Often this extends to kids: he's not scheduling doctors appointments, buying them clothes, keeping track of their schooling.

I could also just do another common thing men do and just...stop coming home after work.

This is before we get into things like Exit Affairs, when an extramarital relationship is just a tripwire to make her file, or physical abuse.

So the dynamic is often that a man stops doing anything around the house, stops substantively being a husband, and then a wife files. So the decision these women are making when filing isn't "Happily Married Woman vs. Divorced Woman" it's "Abandoned, but legally married woman with no legal tools to control her spouse's use of marital assets, still expecting divorce vs. Divorced woman, with legal tools to control spouse's disposal of marital assets."

Yes, and?

Let's compare this to the list of statements offered in the comment that suggest women could play a role in the conditions that lead to divorce:

Does it get exhausting finding things to get offended by?

Because I'm out of the house more for work, as is typical for men, I could also just do another common thing men do and just...stop coming home after work. I'd be perfectly happy eating three dollar egg sandwiches from the local store, spending my time out drinking with friends, showing up back at ten or eleven at night and going to sleep before leaving in the morning.

I feel that.

I used to live in Japan, where what you describe is pretty much the stereotypical "salaryman" lifestyle. it's often held up to show how men are so miserable in modern society. But I always thought... it's not that bad. It gives them a lot of freedom and independence to do guy stuff, while also heavily focusing on their career. Guys don't necessarily want to come home at 5PM sharp so that we can cook an elaborate meal, clean the house, and have "family time" watching Disney movies on the couch for 4 hours. Once in a while, sure, but doing that every single day sounds like a nightmare to me.

I can vouch that the pressure/requirement to come home, as opposed to rolling directly into a workout or after-work drinks, sucks.

I also don't think it would be fair to live a salaryman lifestyle. Being a parent from 6:30 AM to 5:30 PM is already pretty tough. Getting together as parents to split the mental load from 5:30 on, most of the time, is worth the investment.

The woman might be the one who files the divorce papers, but in a lot of cases the man checked out a long time ago and has been, sometimes willfully sometimes passive-aggressively, baiting her into filing.

This is going to be very hard to quantify because I'd wager it's always a slow spiral that eventually takes such a sharp downturn that one party finally pulls the chute. Who pulled away first? What was the first defection? I don't think you can draw a strong conclusion as to who pulled away from whom, especially from the outside.

Is it the man 'checking out' of marriage for entirely internal reasons, or is it partially a response to the wife being less sexually available, or putting less effort into housework (esp. if housework is shared,), or has the wife become openly and constantly critical of him even if not directly abusive?

I would sincerely believe that if two people spent 10 years or more together, the ultimate destruction of the relationship is due to the two parties each reciprocating in small wounds which go untended and thus slowly kill the coupling rather than one side unilaterally having changed feelings out of the blue.

What I would guess is that the man is the one who more often wants to fix it rather than throwing it out and buying a new one, vs. a woman seeing no reason to repair what is damaged when it's easy enough to find a replacement.

I would also guess that the woman puts more effort into fixing the marriage in the first round or two of counseling then concludes it can’t be fixed because her husband won’t put in the effort.

If by "fixing the marriage" you mean "making unilateral demands" I can buy it. Otherwise I've literally never heard of a single story of this ever in my entire life. I've never had a friend, man or woman, relate one two me. I've never heard one second hand. I've never seen it written in any sort of blog/editorial. By all means, if you've got anything you can show me, any anecdote no matter how poorly sourced, so show this has happened to anyone ever and been documented, please share.

I'm surprised by this. In every couple I have known that ended up getting divorced, it was the wife who was putting in more effort in order to try and repair the relationship. Now that is only perhaps 5 or 6 couples, and of course I am an outsider, so it's possible things looked different from inside the marriage, but from the outside this was the appearance at least. It was pretty evenly split as to which partner was the one I was talking to, but pretty unilaterally the wife was the one pushing for counselling etc. As far as I know none of them were ended by cheating, but form the "grown apart" perspective. Of those, I think the wife was the one who filed for divorce in one and the husband in another and I am not sure on the rest.

In every experience I have personally had, the woman has always been the one doing the most to maintain the relationship, though, so I think it's likely from the repair perspective as well, which makes sense. Maintaining and repairing a relationship is emotional work which is much more likely to be feminine coded.

Where the wife is having an affair I can see this changing however as the emotional target of their work may well be the other guy. But where the wife maintains an emotional attachment to the husband it seems highly likely she will be the one working most to fix it.

I keep trying to write a thoughtful and well-balanced post recounting my own experiences on this matter, but it always turns into me venting about the wife. So I'll not post anything substantial, but I do have to make a post to stop myself from constantly writing more text only to scrap it again.

Sorry.

No need to be sorry! Sometimes things hit too close, and sometimes a rant is what is needed. Not even high decouplers can generally decouple from everything.

Don't tempt me, lest I spill tens of thousands of words on the subject, to nobody's benefit and everyone's detriment.

it was the wife who was putting in more effort in order to try and repair the relationship.

Describe this effort. Was she sucking his dick more? Giving him more space for his hobbies? Encouraging him to spend more time with his friends? Noticing he needed another beer? Offered to watch his favorite show with him and not ask a million questions because she wasn't paying attention on her phone?

Or was she dragging him to couples therapy so she and the therapist could harangue him that he needs to whittle away even further at the 15 minutes he gets to himself in the shower to hear his own thoughts to fulfill her needs more.

In every relationship/marriage I know of, the man is working more hours doing 50% of the housework, watching the kids, keeping the budget and investing. Their wives are consistently reducing their hours or quitting entirely to be stay at home moms, while still expecting their husbands to go 50/50 on housework and childcare, and still complaining that their "needs" aren't being met.

The number of things their husbands do that "don't count" is astronomical. Only female coded housework like cooking, cleaning and laundry goes on their mental tally. Yardwork, repair, maintenance is all invisible. I rebuilt the wall of our garage that was rotting out and my wife complained that I didn't do anything that weekend. It's a ubiquitous experience among the men I know.

My wife got chickens. She tells everyone she does all the work. I let them out, I feed them, I top off their water, I get their eggs, I put them up at night. I even built their coup and set up the fence for their pen. Lately she's been wanting them to free range, but I've gotten stuck with letting them out, putting them back up, and checking on them from time to time.

Once or twice a month she cleans the chicken crap out of the coup. Now she wants a dog and promises she'll do all the work. My reticence is causing her to invoke a lot of therapy language about her "needs".

A buddy of mine's wife constantly complains that he's not doing enough, when he changed jobs out of his dream career so she could be a stay at home mom, with the house she wanted, and the new car she wants. He moved across the country like she wanted so they could be closer to her family. He sucked it up and had more kids than he wanted because of how she felt. And it all amounts to zilch to her. It's just expected. The bare minimum.

The only world where a man isn't putting in enough effort is a world in which all his contributions are profoundly devalued or ignored. As is often the case I see around me.

Jesus, dude, the marriages you say represent every relationship/marriage you know of sound positively miserable.

I have known of relationships like those you describe, even been in at least one with a woman who would probably fit your personal model of all women (i.e., unreasonable, harrowing, emasculating Void) but I have personally been in, and seen many other, relationships that do not follow that model at all. And yes, I've also seen relationships that fell apart because the woman was putting in the effort and the man had checked out.

That you think "Putting in the effort" means "sucking his dick more and bringing him beer" tells me the problem may not be exactly what you think it is.

If your couples therapist is ganging up with your wife to tell you to cut down on your shower time, you have a truly crappy therapist.

That you think "Putting in the effort" means "sucking his dick more and bringing him beer" tells me the problem may not be exactly what you think it is.

This is kinda antagonistic and unworthy of you.

This whole series of exchanges reminds me that everyone, myself included, is reasoning from first principles that we derive from our own lives and relationships. Check, as it were, our privilege; and set aside our resentments.

In every relationship/marriage I know of, the man is working more hours doing 50% of the housework, watching the kids, keeping the budget and investing.

Then you are in a very different bubble to me. Someone joked up above about how given she does all the households paperwork she would have to file a divorce for him as well, and that rings true to me. My brother's wife is the one who organizes the bills, and the bank accounts, same with my cousins wife and so on and so forth. I don't know a single relationship where I am familiar enough with it, to see those things where the woman is still not doing the bulk of the housework/child rearing and working.

If the work you do is not being valued then you need to make sure your wife understands it and values it. If she doesn't then that is a shortcoming of hers. If she says you didn't do anything, tell her you spent 8 hours fixing the garage. Tell her you spent 2 hours cleaning up and feeding her chickens.

I've been married twice. My 1st wife was a stem cell scientist , my 2nd wife is a lawyer, from different backgrounds and continents. Both of them value (or in the case of my first wife valued before she passed) the work I did for the household and vice versa. I have never ever in my life in any serious relationship not felt valued or that they did not have my back. But part of that is setting and enforcing your own boundaries early on. Your wife doesn't need to give you space for hobbies. You're a grown man. You certainly have to be cognizant of how much time you are spending gaming or whatever, but she doesn't get to tell you no on that. My wife came out the other day while I was raking up the leaves. She told me I had been working for too long, she had made some hot chocolate, that I should come in warm my feet in front of the fire and then go play "your barrel game" (otherwise known as Baldur's Gate 3), so I could relax for part of the weekend. But even if she hadn't it is up to me to make time and space for the things I want to do. You are not responsible for fulfilling ALL of your wife's needs and she is not responsible for fulfilling ALL of yours.

What you are describing are unhealthy relationships where your input and work is not being seen or valued. But that is in my own experience not the norm, either in my own relationships or the majority of those I see around me. If your wife isn't doing her share of looking after the animals she wanted, then tell her she has to. Create, lay down and enforce your own boundaries. Because no-one else will do it for you. Now ideally you should have been doing this from day one. You're complaining essentially about being walked all over, but you are the only one that can change that. Say no when you need to do so. You have to value your own time and work before anyone else will. You are not a martyr. You're the head of your household. In my experience almost every woman responds well to having control taken in a protective and confident way. Draw up a rota and tell her, tomorrow is her turn to feed and clean the chickens and stick to it. You don't take a turn until she does. When she minimizes your work, correct her. In private at first, but if she keeps doing it, simply state the truth to whomever you are talking to. People wanting pets and then not wanting to spend time looking after them is a cliche, everyone knows someone like that. Don't let her make you smaller than you are. You're a fucking rockstar and she is lucky to have you!

For whatever it is worth, I am sorry your work is not noticed and valued in your relationship. I am sorry your wife doesn't have your back in that way. That sounds like it must be a miserable and isolating experience. You sound like you work hard to look after and provide for your family, and to improve their living conditions. I know that takes a lot of work and dedication, and I applaud you for it, even if no-one else does.

Assuming counseling is highly effective. I’ve never seen someone start therapy graduate from therapy. I have seen people with illness stop going to see the specialist once cured.

I think therapy is a racket.

I have graduated from therapy, and I know many others who have.

You should consider that the sample you are looking at to make you believes this is abnormal. People graduate from therapy all the time. Most people with mental illness have some form of stressor(s), if that stressor goes away (mother in law, college, law school, better control over a chronic illness, they age into a better frontal lobe or coping mechanisms) then they may no longer need therapy.

People who are doing ok to well and get therapy anyway are less likely to stop, as are people who are doing really poorly, but plenty of the middle wraps up and moves on.

I think you may be seeing what you want to see here, given how commonly therapy stops.

Anecdotally, I've started therapy and been discharged a few times. First time, college counselor kept asking me if I was suicidal in a way that started to seem like she was encouraging it, then when this led to no changes after several sessions, said to just stop coming. (The South Park script for this one basically writes itself.). The most recent happened because the medication seemed to be working and the therapy side of things was just kinda coasting.

Basically, college counselors suck. Male therapists are more likely to try to problem-solve, if you can find one who wasn't trained specifically not to problem-solve (Dr. K of Healthy Gamer has videos on this, but he puts out so many videos it's a pain to dig up one in particular when commenting from my phone). And a therapist/psychiatrist team is better than either separately. Also, Dr. K's recommendations are better than any therapist I've ever dealt with (the only one that came close, I lost because of losing my insurance for a few months).

I plan to become a psychiatrist, and I think therapy is overrated, at least when considering the vocal segment of the Overly Online who think everyone should be in therapy.

But it is possible to overhype something that is good for some people, some of the time, and the research I've read shows that therapy is pretty effective for many mental disorders, often being considered the first line intervention, such as for depression, anxiety, and so on.

And there are many different types of therapy, from the bullshit Freudian and Lacanian kind to the much better validated CBT. The thing is, even the shittiest forms of therapy that exist, such as the former two examples that are built off pure pseudoscience, work empirically, being better than placebo (or at least no therapy at all), though CBT is usually better. I wager much of the benefit in any of them is purely from the simulation of a helpful, non-judgemental "friend" who'll let you vent to your hearts content and won't tattle on the pain of their friend-card being retracted, and while you could substitute that for an actual friend, apparently those are getting harder to come by and have scheduling conflicts.

Besides, most reputable therapists (especially the ones who aren't into the Freudian crap) at least pay lip-service to the notion that their clients should always be temporary, and that they should be directed elsewhere if several sessions show no benefit. And if the client is showing up to sessions after they're satisfied it's not working, then I lay the blame for their stupidity on them. If they still want to go, well apparently they're getting their money's worth somehow. People go for haircuts and manicures even when the damn keratin just keeps growing back, and barbers aren't a scam.

Don't discount the value of "Freudian" psychotherapy. Part of this is driven by the usual "all the good ideas associated with this have been stolen and become core tenants of the successors" bit. You'd be surprised how much of his stuff is still present and useful.

The other piece is that the "true successor" actually works great. Psychodynamic psychotherapy is probably the most direct on that front, and if you talk to someone who knows CBT, DBT, and Psychodynamic therapy well they'll point out it is mostly all the same shit just with different words for the same concepts.*

The thing CBT primarily does differently is that it attempts to operationalize things by adding in components of homework, written self reflection and so on, but the fundamental insights are essentially the same.

It's tempting to think they are "different classes" but it's more like going to a calculus lecture, and then doing another course with the same content but you get problem sets afterwards.

There are purists out there, especially in Europe but generally people just roll their eyes at them.

Care to share those studies? How many of them are longitudinal?

I originally read that on the Wikipedia page, and when I tried to hunt down the citations, linkrot has eaten the Google Books excerpt that was supposedly cited, at least the one supposedly claiming that metanalysis showed they were all equivalent. However, after some hunting, I did find that claim in a different, well cited meta analysis down below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotherapy

Large-scale international reviews of scientific studies have concluded that psychotherapy is effective for numerous conditions.[8][22]

One line of research consistently finds that supposedly different forms of psychotherapy show similar effectiveness. According to The Handbook of Counseling Psychology: "Meta-analyses of psychotherapy studies have consistently demonstrated that there are no substantial differences in outcomes among treatments". The handbook states that there is "little evidence to suggest that any one psychological therapy consistently outperforms any other for any specific psychological disorders. This is sometimes called the Dodo bird verdict after a scene/section in Alice in Wonderland where every competitor in a race was called a winner and is given prizes".[151]

Further analyses seek to identify the factors that the psychotherapies have in common that seem to account for this, known as common factors theory; for example the quality of the therapeutic relationship, interpretation of problem, and the confrontation of painful emotions.[152][153][page needed][154][155]

Outcome studies have been critiqued for being too removed from real-world practice in that they use carefully selected therapists who have been extensively trained and monitored, and patients who may be non-representative of typical patients by virtue of strict inclusionary/exclusionary criteria. Such concerns impact the replication of research results and the ability to generalize from them to practicing therapists.[153][156]

However, specific therapies have been tested for use with specific disorders,[157] and regulatory organizations in both the UK and US make recommendations for different conditions.[158][159][160]

The Helsinki Psychotherapy Study was one of several large long-term clinical trials of psychotherapies that have taken place. Anxious and depressed patients in two short-term therapies (solution-focused and brief psychodynamic) improved faster, but five years long-term psychotherapy and psychoanalysis gave greater benefits. Several patient and therapist factors appear to predict suitability for different psychotherapies.[161]

Meta-analyses have established that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic psychotherapy are equally effective in treating depression.[162]

The bolded section is the one I can't easily verify, at least not when it's 9 am and I've been up all night studying.

Specifically regarding CBT, I found the following metanalysis-

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23870719/

Results: A total of 115 studies met inclusion criteria. The mean effect size (ES) of 94 comparisons from 75 studies of CBT and control groups was Hedges g = 0.71 (95% CI 0.62 to 0.79), which corresponds with a number needed to treat of 2.6. However, this may be an overestimation of the true ES as we found strong indications for publication bias (ES after adjustment for bias was g = 0.53), and because the ES of higher-quality studies was significantly lower (g = 0.53) than for lower-quality studies (g = 0.90). The difference between high- and low-quality studies remained significant after adjustment for other study characteristics in a multivariate meta-regression analysis. We did not find any indication that CBT was more or less effective than other psychotherapies or pharmacotherapy. Combined treatment was significantly more effective than pharmacotherapy alone (g = 0.49).

Conclusions: There is no doubt that CBT is an effective treatment for adult depression, although the effects may have been overestimated until now. CBT is also the most studied psychotherapy for depression, and thus has the greatest weight of evidence. However, other treatments approach its overall efficacy.

And when speaking of CBT as applied to more psychiatric conditions:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/

We identified 269 meta-analytic studies and reviewed of those a representative sample of 106 meta-analyses examining CBT for the following problems: substance use disorder, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, depression and dysthymia, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, eating disorders, insomnia, personality disorders, anger and aggression, criminal behaviors, general stress, distress due to general medical conditions, chronic pain and fatigue, distress related to pregnancy complications and female hormonal conditions. Additional meta-analytic reviews examined the efficacy of CBT for various problems in children and elderly adults. The strongest support exists for CBT of anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, bulimia, anger control problems, and general stress. Eleven studies compared response rates between CBT and other treatments or control conditions. CBT showed higher response rates than the comparison conditions in 7 of these reviews and only one review reported that CBT had lower response rates than comparison treatments. In general, the evidence-base of CBT is very strong. However, additional research is needed to examine the efficacy of CBT for randomized-controlled studies. Moreover, except for children and elderly populations, no meta-analytic studies of CBT have been reported on specific subgroups, such as ethnic minorities and low income samples.

Addressing the specific claims of similar efficacy to the forms of therapy based on pseudoscientific principles:

CBT for depression was more effective than control conditions such as waiting list or no treatment, with a medium effect size (van Straten, Geraedts, Verdonck-de Leeuw, Andersson, & Cuijpers, 2010; Beltman, Oude Voshaar, & Speckens, 2010). However, studies that compared CBT to other active treatments, such as psychodynamic treatment, problem-solving therapy, and interpersonal psychotherapy, found mixed results. Specifically, meta-analyses found CBT to be equally effective in comparison to other psychological treatments (e.g., Beltman, Oude Voshaar, & Speckens, 2010; Cuijpers, Smit, Bohlmeijer, Hollon, & Andersson, 2010; Pfeiffer, Heisler, Piette, Rogers, & Valenstein, 2011). Other studies, however, found favorable results for CBT (e.g. Di Giulio, 2010; Jorm, Morgan, & Hetrick, 2008; Tolin, 2010). For example, Jorm and colleagues (2008) found CBT to be superior to relaxation techniques at post-treatment. Additionally, Tolin (2010) showed CBT to be superior to psychodynamic therapy at both post-treatment and at six months follow-up, although this occurred when depression and anxiety symptoms were examined together.

Compared to pharmacological approaches, CBT and medication treatments had similar effects on chronic depressive symptoms, with effect sizes in the medium-large range (Vos, Haby, Barendregt, Kruijshaar, Corry, & Andrews, 2004). Other studies indicated that pharmacotherapy could be a useful addition to CBT; specifically, combination therapy of CBT with pharmacotherapy was more effective in comparison to CBT alone (Chan, 2006).

Anyway, therapy seems to beat placebo, and works synergistically with drugs, even if you cynically notice that therapy based off nonsense does much the same thing as more considered approaches, but it's not in dispute that it works. At least I have the consolation of being able to throw drugs at people instead of just talking at them if/when I'm a licensed shrink, for all the quibbling about if SSRIs work, ain't nobody claiming their ADHD isn't being helped when they're zooted up on stimulants.

I wonder how much of this dynamic is the systemic fault of counseling being female-coded: highly subjective, no rules allowed for assigning blame except the “yes, dear” dynamic, no logical framework undergirding the conversations, etc.

Once I discovered a mental health paradigm which worked due to being the opposite of the above, I dove in with both feet and have never regretted it.

Is it the man 'checking out' of marriage for entirely internal reasons, or is it partially a response to the wife being less sexually available, or putting less effort into housework (esp. if housework is shared,), or has the wife become openly and constantly critical of him even if not directly abusive?

Probably. I'd bet from each perspective they are justified in their actions. The point I was making was less that either side is more or less likely to be a bad partner, or more or less likely to fix it if its broken, than that men typically have an easier time disappearing on the job, where women draw more benefits from formally filing for divorce.

So for something like this

I would sincerely believe that if two people spent 10 years or more together, the ultimate destruction of the relationship is due to the two parties each reciprocating in small wounds which go untended and thus slowly kill the coupling rather than one side unilaterally having changed feelings out of the blue.

the man is going to tend to take more informal steps (spending less time at home) and covert steps (my paycheck stops going into a joint account without explanation), where the woman will benefit more from an overt step like filing for divorce.

That's a good clarification.

I think the incentive is for the man to hedge bets by trying to avoid the divorce while preparing for such an event given how disruptive it would be.

For the woman, that time is spent working up to the point where she actually decides to do it, then doing it without much preparation for afterwards.

I know that most studies on divorces and breakups show that they're rarely impulse decisions, but more often something the person has done a lot of thinking on but of course appears impulsive to the partner who was not privy to that thought process.

It is not possible to live in peace and dignity with someone who persistently name-calls, hits, and engages in significant deceit. When that marriage ends, no matter who initiates the divorce, it will not be true that both are equally responsible. One person's behavior made peace and dignity impossible.

Indeed, I'd be in favor of rejecting such a person from polite society entirely.

You can say, "The abused bears some responsibility for staying!" but this stretches what we mean by the word responsibility, doesn't it?

Right. But I feel it is fair to ask the question:

If you were not coerced into the marriage, it wasn't an arranged marriage, you had other options around you, and you had adequate time to 'vet' the person...

Why'd you commit to a long term relationship with them?

Note that I'm perfectly prepared to accept explanations such as:

A) He/she had some mental health break or injury that completely shifted his/her behavior from the norm.

B) He/she was utterly sociopathic and hid all his/her flaws from me until it was too late.

I'm less inclined to accept:

C) I folded due to social pressure.

As a real excuse, if you live in a Western Country.

But I think most of these situations are well-explained by basic human irrationality. "I never thought he'd hit me," or "I believed she would mature/change/grow with time." The classic "well they're fine 99% of the time and I just tolerate the horrific 1%" (especially if 1% is more like 10%)

Honestly, for the vast majority of history, pairings between humans, marital or not, were just based on convenience rather than anything like compatibility. We're in a rare and perhaps unstable period where we're able to choose mates from a large pool, and I'd argue our basic instincts are not up to the task.

I would never imply that fault is always perfectly 50-50 (no point in even attempting the calculation, imho) but so much of it can be attributed to "why am I putting up with [minor inconvenience] when I could just find something better?" And then simply never addressing or fixing the inconveniences as they pile up over time, so blame is very hard to ascribe.

Honestly, for the vast majority of history, pairings between humans, marital or not, were just based on convenience rather than anything like compatibility. We're in a rare and perhaps unstable period where we're able to choose mates from a large pool, and I'd argue our basic instincts are not up to the task.

Note that in cisHajnal cultures the novel thing is the "large pool". Arranged marriages were an exclusively aristocratic thing, with working and middle class young adults choosing their own partners .

The other thing that has changed, in my view for the worse, is the institution of the boyfriend/girlfriend. Pre sexual revolution, even people choosing a spouse for themselves knew they were choosing a spouse, and acted accordingly. Now people start by choosing someone to have a semi-casual fun-orientated relationship with, and only evaluating them as a spouse if that works out. If you know you want a spouse in the end, this is stupid. But "no matter how much you like your boy/girlfriend, if you wouldn't marry them you should dump them yesterday" is profoundly countercultural advice.

Seems like these two things would be intrinsically related.

If your pool of potential spouses were like a couple dozen large at most, you'd be expecting to get married on the 'first try' and thus you'd focus on picking a spouse from that pool at the start.

If you've got 100+ 'potential' mates, a more casual approach makes some sense as a way to 'test drive' the available options before committing to a purchase, since your odds of getting 'the one' on the first try are small.

What IS definitely different and problematic is the fact that relationships seem to advance at a glacial pace. People are BF/GF for a year, then they move in, then MAYBE they get engaged after another year, and the engagement lasts a year.

A lot of time spent in that interstitial space where technically either side can leave for another partner scott-free.

I think the most common one is D) I am attracted to people who are a bad match.

With men this usually doesn't result in marriage (e.g., they pine for stacies), but sometimes it does (she has a temper, but the makeup sex is great). With women it's a relatively more common "taming the beast" trope, where she's attracted to dark triad traits.

I’d want to see stats before drawing those conclusions, because for every dynamic there’s a just-so story.

“I can fix him” vs. “must protect.”

Both are arguably a form of attraction to bad matches, but one is way more male-coded than the other.

If the statistics were the other way, nobody would even bother doing all this rationalization and theorization to explain away the reasons one party is much more likely to want a divorce than the other. This is all coming from a strong prior of "there's no way it could be meaningful in a way that reflects negatively on them that women usually initiate the divorce".

Not only could it be rationalized, "Men are worse off than women after divorce but file anyway" would be explained quite easily, @faceh already did: their wives stopped having sex with them.

Which is justified by repeating the housework/mental load justifications. In the end, you must remember that women are wonderful.

One more that i've not seen anyone mention yet: men cheat to fuck, women cheat to upgrade.

When a man finds a mistress, he keeps it as secret for as long as he can. If and when the wife finds out, she files.

When a woman finds a mister, she keeps it a secret only for as long as necessary to set up an exit strategy. When she has one, she files.

Certainly not the only reason but a contributor at least.


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