domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
faceh
1d ago
"the incentives are badly aligned, I am not going to try to participate in this" is something which women can do just as much as men. Just substitute porn with ao4 or something.
Unfortunately, I don't think they can, since they're generally less likely to make that sort of move unless they already believe it to be the consensus position amongst their peers.
2D3D
1d ago
True cultured men know the mark of being an intellectual gentleman is to only be attracted to obvious signs of intelligence like girls wearing glasses. Everything else is just window dressing.
I see some of the above replies and while I do acknowledge that there is an attraction to data presented beautifully for its own sake, Aellas entire dataset is just her own experiences. Its a personal journal arranged in the style of a corporate presentation. My personal objection to Aella isn't some slut shaming crusade, rather its the extremely obvious nerd parasitism that she feeds upon which clearly can't exist outside of some specific spaces like rationalist forums and hence my opening about the paraphilias common in rat spaces.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Genes are a complex topic, I’d expect complexities to be discovered.
Even if women would prefer a longer “runway” towards consummating a relationship, it’s the men who get to set the timetable, with their implicit threat of walking away otherwise.
Have to snort if THAT is how this is phrased.
The guy gets to "set the timetable" with their "implicit threat of walking away."
That's generally not how negotiations are framed. A woman has just as much power to walk away, and just as much power to define/set a timetable... assuming she's capable of keeping to her own commitments. "Look, I'll have sex with you by the 5th date if and only if we are exclusive and you've spent ~$400 on me by then" is a valid way to filter out fuckboys... if the guy can reasonably expect that she will keep such a promise.
And a guy is going to walk away only when he doesn't value the sex that highly and/or has multiple other women he can try to hook up with, which devalues sex with any given one of them. There really ISN'T an imbalance in bargaining power here! There's just women who aren't able to state their position and then enforce it, so they don't even attempt to bargain.
From the perspective of virtually every guy who ISN'T trying to solely extract sex, the woman is the one setting EVERY timetable, and even if he does have the power to walk away, he know he can't/won't cajole her into sex unless and until SHE really wants it, he wouldn't even dream of trying to force the issue.
There was a time in my life when I figured that religious rules against premarital sex were at worst arbitrary and at best outdated given modern contraceptives.
Now, I have to accept that they're an ingenious way to create a Schelling Point where both men and women can be truly sure that they'll be getting the thing they're hoping for, and, much like closing on a house, every material part of the transaction will occur at approximately the same time so nobody can duck out of the bargain before coughing up their side of it.
That is, since it is clear many women are susceptible to being manipulated, and some large subset of men are hardcore manipulators, don't set up a complex set of unwritten rules that can be exploited and that women barely understand. Just tell everyone "no sex until marriage" and don't allow any bend whatsoever. That's a rule that everyone CAN follow and can be policed more directly. Men who want sex... get married. Women who want commitment... get married. Don't agonize over how many dates or how long you have to be with them before giving it up, and don't let guys make implicit promises they fully intend to break.
Maybe it is arbitrary, but no less arbitrary than any other boundary you could set, and a hell of a lot easier/more intuitive to enforce.
One of Willy’s more off-putting qualities was his pathological need to gamify sex. On top of the not totally atypical notes app list he kept cataloging every woman he’s ever slept with, fit with a plus or minus sign, Willy had an obsession with using ‘automation’ as a method to get girls. He’d send automated texts, the contents of which ai generated, to thirty something women at a time and kept a spreadsheet of how many responses he’d get in return, how many turned to a follow up date, and how many to sex.
Willy got a similar thrill when girls would send him text-walls expressing their distraught feelings to him, upset with his behavior. He enjoyed defusing them like a bomb, and getting them to be happy with him again, no matter the number of lies necessary and no matter how little he cared about them – he’d laugh at their gullableness.
In a slightly saner world, Willy would probably be dead. One of these girls' fathers or brothers would have confronted him by now and beaten some sense into him or just put him out of our misery.
But noooooooooo instead the sociopaths are allowed free reign so long as they don't run completely afoul of the law because we've left the sexual marketplace to be regulated solely by social shame and rumor-mongering and removed any implicit threat of violence. And Sociopaths aren't effected by social shame.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
1d ago
Regarding 1: i think a missing bit of historical context of both Progressivism and Rationalism's origins as rejection of/reaction against traditional western moral philosophy which due to 2,000+ years of history is inextricably entwined with Christianity. The affinity for Islam and and Orietalism amongst the chattering class is a combination of the natural human attraction to novelty and a naive assumption that the enemy of my enemy must be a friend.
OnlyFans stars for Mohammed (PBH) is just a redressed Queers for Palestine.
This is not the first time you've gone off on this Mandate of Heaven schtick, and I can't help but feel it relies on creating monarchist fanfic only loosely connected to reality. That or it's a bit. You write like Trump is this massively popular figure instead of an incredibly divisive one. Like, in what world does Trump's popularity keep rising? People love rightful royal power?
Is there a reason we should prefer this narrative over the more boring theory that Trump won because of inflation, immigration, and short memories?
wouldn’t be out of place addressed to a Chinese emperor
Or an exceptionally vain toddler. Trump is known to be comically susceptible to flattery, even as the same people shit-talk him behind his back. That is not an indicator of someone who commands respect. I would question the leadership qualities of anyone who wants to be treated in such a manner, and I would question the judgment of anyone who looks at such a figure and sees a worthy leader.
Some types of people are so used to deriving their self worth from their (real or imagined) intellect that they can no longer admit to being influenced by their base human drives. They are Prometheus unbound! ‘Twas their mind that was seduced, not their PP! Aellla provides just enough of a fig leaf to allow her fans to maintain this ruse. It’s a bit hilarious and sad to anyone outside of the bit, its obviously no more intellectual or advanced than a Midwestern boomer AWWOOOOOOOGAA-ing over the local Hooters waitress.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
I think "pathos" is a better and more neutral term for this concept.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia.
Just wanted to drop a quick correction here: “qualia” does not mean “non-physical”. Qualia just means “conscious experience”. The word is entirely neutral regarding the question of what conscious experience actually is or what causes it. It could be physical, or it could be non-physical. But it’s still a qualia all the same.
I say this because the word “qualia” has gotten a reputation in some circles as being a “woo word” which causes people of a more materialist bent to nope out of the conversation whenever it comes up, and I really don’t think that has to be the case. It’s just a convenient word for describing the, well, actual conscious-experience part of conscious experience, as opposed to say its objectively observable behavioral or neurophysiological correlates. It’s just a handy word for talking about a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with. That’s all.
It's a measure of your capacity for destruction
The fact that we only control the capacity for destruction/abuse in men, but not in women, is closer to the root of the problem. Men are normally attracted to women with a high capacity for destruction: social popularity is a direct measure/expression of that capacity (and conversely, creates "nice girls finish last" problems if they can't secure a boyfriend powerful enough to resist hers when she sends him through that social pressure to take your resources).
Punishing women for doing that is harder, which is why it's normally (and traditionally) imposed by men-as-collective at a group level by default. Which makes things harder for the women who are responsible with that power, and something the ones who aren't interested in using it that way will (rightly) complain about being assumed guilty of wanting to abuse it by default.
The woke are once again more correct than the mainstream- gendered violence is a sex crime- it's just that most of the problems in society arise because the female gender isn't punished for its violence (and because feminists are all about encouraging its use...).
phailyoor
1d ago
Maybe not a central example, but the union deleted the rock island railroad by striking even though the company was on the verge of bankruptcy
TIRM
1d ago
Ad hominem? You severely misread my comment and are angrily arguing against claims I never made and don't hold.
aldomilyar
1d ago
Yeah. Simultaneously it can be hard to exactly explain gravity due to nested complexity in the real world, regardless of improved sensory equipment and yet still practical to assume that we're not gonna wake up tomorrow morning and fall into the sky.
Zephyr
1d ago
Sex used to create the expectation of romantic exclusivity, but we kind of bulldozed those expectations. If you want that, make it a condition of having sex with the guy (and if he doesn’t want that, move on).
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1d ago
They did not marry young because they were successful young.
Sure they did/were. A man in the '50s was wildly successful compared to the older cohort of men, and that success was bestowed just for showing up.
So they started their lives very early: a huge luxury. As the old get disproportionately more successful compared to the young, the average age young men get married increases. (This is part of a feedback mechanism that naturally depresses TFR when a society is overpopulated, though naturally that lags reality a bit.)
Rov_Scam
1d ago
This was the same argument that Virginia made in Loving and the court rejected it then. Black people are free to marry other black people and white people are free to marry other white people so what's the problem?
But marriage, at least from a legal perspective, is a privilege the state recognizes for people to incentivize the formation of healthy and stable families, which gay people do not do.
Well, at least that's the conservative fantasy. If you look at the way the laws surrounding marriage actually operate, and have historically operated, it's pretty clear that the legal purpose is to regulate property transfers among family members. The only historical precedent which has to do with natural children is the legal presumption that a woman's husband is the father of her children, absent other evidence. While this may be a useful feature these days, it's no longer a necessary one, as states have been keeping records of these things for over a century, and technology has allowed paternity disputes to be resolve fairly easily. Beyond that, historical laws relating to marriage were based on the presumption that women couldn't own property in their own name, that wealth was basically synonymous with real property, and that widows were likely to be an undue burden on society. Today, of course, we live in a property where women are more economically equal than men, where the family farm isn't the primary source of income (or, realisitically, doesn't exist), cash is more important than real property, birth control exists, Social Security exists, etc. As a consequence, the laws surrounding marriage have changed since the turn of the last century to keep up with the times.
An along the way, we've created a whole host of new rights relating to marriage, notably ones concerning medical matters like the right to make certain decisions and the right of visitation. In other words, as the circumstances surrounding marriage have changed historically, the laws have changed along with it, and if you want to figure out the legal purpose of marriage, you have to look at those laws. If you want to believe in an idealized version where the laws that matter are the ones that have "stable families" or whatever as their obvious goal, you're going to be left with very little.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1d ago
Maybe AGPs would be less resistant to the diagnosis if it was framed not as "I have autogynephilia", but rather "I have an 'imagining myself as a woman' kink".
They'd still be highly resistant, because the rest of society can say "kinks/fetishes are optional, so we have the right to tell you to keep it at home and otherwise judge you for it".
It has to be an orientation, because orientations are considered sacrosanct (that was the whole "born this way" fight being hammered out in the '00s). If they fall out of that social protection scheme they predict, correctly, that their social power to do their thing will go away.
aaa
1d ago
Are you suggesting that this proves souls exist and they are also subject to evolutionary processes?
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1d ago
Gay people don't call themselves 'homophiliacs'.
They were going to back in the '70s, but this didn't catch on.
thejdizzler
1d ago
I'm an apple chud unfortunately. I have cold turkey on my computer which works great, but phone is another issue. I seem to always be able to get around the controls.
A first impression: If we take a lot of leftist dogma as being true and discard obvious analogs to reality and claim they might be inaccurate, then we might just be able to explain why our ideology is seemingly not mapping on to the world around us.
Now queue the arguments through analogy, 'what if's' about reality, and a mountain of research motivated entirely by a need to collapse all genetic gravity into a neat environmentalist fold.
Scott Alexander seems to have a good eye for strategy. The article is effectively just an advertisement for a few plucky anti-hereditarian rebels who want to expose the fatal flaw of the hereditarian Death Star. Scott speaks highly of the effort, but obviously signals that he is going to wait until the rebels actually fire a torpedo into the thing. And there in lies the problem for the rebels.
For every alleged fatal flaw exhaust shaft that the hereditarian Death Star has, environmentalism has less than nothing. Every proposed theory has failed to explain the big problems. So... What's the point? What exactly are we doing here?
Crowstep
1d ago
I'm your man!
So I've turned my phone into a pseudo-dumb phone. I've replaced the stock launcher with a minimalist black and white one, deleted any fun or distracting apps and installed an app which blocks the browser (but which allows me to access it for 30 seconds every five minutes for logins etc).
If you want to lock down your phone even more (assuming it's an Android), the Universal Android Debloater lets you uninstall anything, even stock apps like the browser or the app store. ChatGPT helped me set this up despite my lack of technical ability.
All my browsers on my personal and work PCs have site-blockers, blocking mostly news sites. The best ones let you set a password which you can make as a string of numbers which you save somewhere else. Typically you can also add sites without entering the password, but you need the password to remove sites.
My tablet has a whitelist of sites I'm allowed on, with the parental control PIN set to the aforementioned password. Previously I let my wife set the PIN number which also worked.
Finally, if I want a complete digital break (say, to read a book), I'll activate SelfControl which completely disables the browser on my laptop.
Now of course, all of these things can be reversed if I want to (except SelfControl while a block is active). What seems to work for me is that the pain of setting everything up makes me less willing to e.g. simply uninstall the browser extension.
I still slack off at work more than I should, but this makes it much easier to get back to what I should be doing. Also having books easily accessible for when I want to proactively rest is helpful.
kky
1d ago
There are at least three pieces at play here: first, the question of deterministic heritability of mental characteristics; second, the question of how genes as we currently understand them map to mental characteristics; and third, the question of what, precisely, IQ is measuring in relation to mental characteristics.
As far as mental characteristics go, I think it’s fair to say that some are pretty clearly innate and inherited and others are not. There are a lot of children out there who pretty obviously derive their mental abilities from whatever their parents have. However, that’s not the whole story. There are habits of thought that can dramatically improve or sabotage a person’s performance. A simple example is just whether someone cares or not. When I play chess, my level of play whiplashes severely based on how focused I am, on the order of a few hundred Elo. When I’m not focused and don’t really care, I just play moves. I believe this replicates across most fields of activity, and that caring has a very strong cultural component. Of course, a few hundred Elo is not multiple standard deviations of performance, but I think it could explain half an SD pretty easily, which is actually quite a lot.
Genes are a stickier question. My rough viewpoint is that our current understanding of genetics is far too coarse to pick up on anything but the simplest behaviors, where a gene encodes a pretty straightforward protein with one real use case. But in real life, all of the body’s systems are expected to interact quite intricately, and we should expect some novel properties to emerge at the intersection of genes. I’m far from an expert here, so this is all I’ll say. I’m not surprised that efforts to reverse engineer the hack job that is evolution are hitting difficulties, but all it proves is the lingering inadequacy of our science.
IQ is the fun part. On the one level, it’s quite simple: IQ is just a measurement of how you do on a specific batch of tests. But those tests claim to be an imperfect measurement of intelligence, and that intelligence is a singular value. This I am not remotely convinced of.
The typical argument is that because different mental functions correlate, there must be some underlying characteristic that powers all of them, and that they’re all secretly linked. But this doesn’t hold much muster with reality. If our various mental abilities were merely outward expressions of a single underlying scalar, we would expect to see people at the far reaches of intelligence be great at everything. In reality, we tend to see them be amazing at one thing, and somewhere between good and terrible at the rest. Another personal example: I am >3SD on the right for analytical intelligence (measured, in this case, by visual puzzle solving) and dead middle on “processing speed”, which means the rate of quickly mapping trivial inputs to trivial outputs, as measured by a professionally administered adult IQ test. This is irreconcilable with the notion that both are just expressions of an underlying “intelligence.” How could that intelligence be both perfectly average and massively out of the ordinary at the same time? It’s nonsensical. What actually makes sense is that these are different capabilities of the mind, and for whatever reason I am much stronger in one than the other. That leaves the question of why these disparate capabilities correlate in most cases, to which I’ll just leave two hypotheses: first, adverse circumstances that lower all abilities, like how being severely obese will undermine pretty much all athletic performance; second, that humans are sorted into classes in a social hierarchy and that these traits are then selected for in groups based on what the class does. Those are explanations that are plausible and do not require a general intelligence.
Anyway, interesting topic, and I do agree that too many of the opinions here come down to faith over examining what’s going on and flexibly adjusting based on new information.
Sloot
1d ago
I'm always looking for the hack supplement that will improve my athletic performance, the one blog post that will turn my opinion of the world on its head, the one connection on social media that will become my best friend or romantic partner, the one big experiment that I can do that will get me my PhD.
A hack some academics—such as a recently departed female Harvard professor—have stumbled upon is just making up the data, because p-… hacking… is too much work.
Broke: Carefully planning, preregistering, and performing meticulously designed experiments
Woke: p-hacking and garden-of-forking-pathsing
Bespoke: Just making up the data
Pun intended?
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