domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
CrispyFriedBarnacles
5m ago
I think one of the really frustrating aspects of these conversations in the broader public sphere, particularly when strong progressive voices are present, is that so often this conversation devolves into a litany of scolding for young men, while young women are treated as victims, and at the same time, caricatures of traditional societies are still held up as the thing to be avoided. Which is to say, there is an insistence on both a kind of rights based liberal individualism as well as somewhat incompatible oppressor-oppressed dynamics for the male and female classes. It seems like a total dead end.
But (and I guess I'm going to get all Patrick Deneen "Why Liberalism Failed" here) insisting conversations get crammed into these dynamics does a grave disservice to the actual reality of why traditional societies actually worked, and why they worked the way they did. I grew up in a much more traditional religious subculture, and there was an overwhelming sense that people, from birth, were heavily invested in by the broader culture around them (especially by their own parents), and in some sense, they were acting as extreme free riders. And the way that these free riders transitioned from being takers to makers was to settle down, choose an appropriate mate, begin creating families, and pay forward all the ways they had been invested in by the strong, valuable culture that they had had the good fortune to be born into. And in that world, there was an overwhelming sense that young men AND young women who didn't make the transition were not really adults or people of esteem or worth in the community. They were damaging the loving people who had invested so much in them. There was severe cultural pressure for both young men and young women to fulfill that duty. And of course, there absolutely were gender roles that focused on high, distinct standards for both young men and young women, with a notion of complementarity to roles that, one assumed, were supposed to align favorably with existing biological differences between men and women, bolstered external pro-social needs, and help grease the wheels of those interactions, helping men and women find each other valuable and distinct... But in an important way, the specifics of the gender roles were less significant than the broader framework of the role of individuals in relationship to the larger community that had nurtured them.
And obviously, that kind of world can feel restricting. But it can also feel entirely sensible and worth investing in to all parties involved, because that fundamental relationship, between the individual invested in and that broader community that nurtured them, was something worth investing in. And there was absolutely a virtuous feedback loop, too - it might be restrictive to live up to hard pro-social ideals, but you get the benefit (ideally) of other people, especially mates, living up to hard, pro-social ideals too.
This is the framework I can't help but see and compare to when I look at the "young men need to be scolded, young women are always victims" public discourse, because at a basic human level, it just seems so totally anti-human and disconnected from reality. It has a strong "the beatings will continue until morale improves" vibe. Every time I hear it, all I can think is, why in the world would anyone think that young men are going to continue listening to this, taking it seriously, and accepting its authority? And indeed, I think my internal sense of that, for the last decade, is proving more and more well-calibrated.
I totally understand (neverminding questions of faith or metaphysics) how those more traditional societies are suppose to work, just in game theory terms. It's like joining the marines - you have to live up to hard, pro-social standards, and maybe that sucks, but then you get the benefit of being around other high trust individuals who also live up to hard, pro-social standards.
But I can't understand, at all, or figure out what's in it for young men to tolerate the current general public progressive world of atomized individual liberal oriented around rights and liberation (with a strong denial of basic cause and effect) plus oppressor-oppressed dynamics with young men as the enteral oppressor.
And as should be totally obvious from how I'm writing, my sympathies have very much drawn back to those older forms of cultural organization that I was raised in, despite my leaving it in my early young adulthood. I think I, and a lot of people like me, threw a lot of babies out with the bathwater.
hydroacetylene
8m ago
Bridesprices are Lindy(as is borrowing from Shylock to afford it), though, and most urban European women from the high Middle Ages until the first sexual revolution married in their twenties- post conventional college age.
It’s true that those women were generally not spending their time getting certificates in literacy, but in broad strokes it’s nothing unusual.
TIRM
13m ago
There is another possible framing: many women should reevaluate their standards. The bottom 50% ugly, mean and poor women can settle for someone on their level or choose no one at all.
Like a very poor person saying they would like a car, but insisting on only a brand new Range Rover. They should instead consider options that are attainable given their circumstances.
Goodguy
14m ago
I think that most men who are in about the top 80% of male attractiveness could find a girlfriend or wife if sufficiently motivated, even without changing their income or physical appearance. I agree with @2rafa. Much of this is about motivation. Many guys are just content to do things other than seeking out women. Also, some men are holding out for the most desirable women instead of being willing to lower their standards. I think a third factor is that women are no longer as much expected socially as they probably were in the past to have the kind of men-pleasing, friendly, docile personalities that a large fraction of men find sexually desirable, which explains part of men's motivation problem. The more fun and personable that a man finds the average woman, the more motivated he will feel to go out and interact with women, as opposed to sitting at home. I'm sure that this goes both ways, and many women find themselves far from impressed with the average man's personality.
WhiningCoil
15m ago
So, I know a couple that tried to do a good thing. They adopted a young ghetto boy as an infant, removed him from all the bad influences that afflicted his community, and raised him in a middle-upper class environment with the best private schools, institutions and cultural guidance western civilization could provide.
The boy has terrorized that poor family for over a decade now with no signs of relenting. If this were a nature versus nurture debate, nurture is in a fetal position, ribs kicked in, begging for death as nature relentless curb stomps her.
It's all well and good to want to plant seeds, and failing to plant your own, nurture what you can find. Just make sure you aren't nurturing some virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
19m ago
There is no true free market. Give me a market, and I will provide a counterexample to how free it is.
But there is truth behind "All is fair in love and war": I would agree with primax3 that dating is one of the free-est of markets, which may also be why there's so much complaining about it.
hydroacetylene
20m ago
A repeat of the second Congo war in Nigeria seems likely to send refugee waves towards Europe, this is true(although North African countries are very willing to just butcher transmigration from sub Saharan countries in the Sahara, if Europe tells them to just stop it in exchange for aid while being nonspecific about the how).
I think a flare up in central/Southern Africa would send refugees towards the much more stable and prosperous southern African countries they already migrate to illegally(SA, Botswana, etc). And an Egypt-Ethiopia water war is unlikely to send refugees fleeing through the conflict zone.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
21m ago
Yeah, gardening leave is legal, but again in the UK you can argue that the gardening leave is preventing you from exercising your skills and keeping them up to date, but this is a more complex argument that doesn't just insta win the first time a judge takes a look at the case like challenging a 2 year non-compete would and so you as the employee need to spend more and go through a lot of hassle, just to avoid a period of time where you're being paid for doing nothing... Naturally very few people challenge gardening leave and most prefer to just wait it out and work on personal projects in the meanwhile.
The company gets to protect its IP, the employee gets a long very well paid holiday and both are happy, but that doesn't mean the provision itself is legally watertight.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
25m ago
Briefly on procreation, the population crisis, homelessness, and foster care:
I'd like to have children for pro-social reasons. I believe that failing to give back to the world when it has given so much to you is somewhat of a metaphysical thievery. My position isn't that everyone needs to have children, but I have contempt for old men who fail to plant trees whose shade they won't enjoy, especially when they have plenty of land and seeds. It's a narcissistic and hedonistic rot.
I'll focus on the word have, though, because my partner and I are not particularly well-positioned to have biological children. I feel that the base urges we have to literally procreate are just that - base urges. I am not Genghis Khan. There are 7 billion people on Earth, and cosmically my specific genetics are not even a footnote within a footnote in the story of humans. My siblings and cousins have me covered anyway when it comes to the genetic progeny of our bloodline, anyway. While the concept of creating something so awesome from almost nothing is romantic, it strikes me a bit as a novelty when put into a modern global context.
The factoid that I always try to bring up concerning homelessness in the US is that, depending on the source you cite, between ~30% and 50% of every homeless adult spent time in the foster care system. Like many social programs, the issues lie with the "cliff": when foster children turn 18 they age out of the system overnight. In 2025, it's a near impossibility to support oneself at age 18 entirely independently, especially if you're struggling to graduate high school or obtain a GED. To be a bit cliche, 22 is the new 18 (and 26 is the new 22, according to health insurers). It seems like, if you were to try to provide better than the "median" fostering experience, you would go a long way by simply supporting the foster child to age 22 instead of age 18.
To connect the dots, adoption and / or fostering seems to be a great way for this old man to plant trees, especially if biological children are completely ruled out. There is undeniably a population crisis and replacement rate is an issue, but from a (gross?) utilitarian perspective the population crisis is about productive members of society. Adopting and / or fostering well kills two birds with one stone: it reduces the population that is at-risk for homelessness, and creates more productive members of society.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
26m ago
Far from being stable, this society regularly engaged in revolutions and warfare.
Sure, if you game the metrics you can prove whatever you want. All these wars made less of a dent than what's happening with the birth rates.
Goodguy
29m ago
Let's take one popular example of a society that practiced a more old-school approach to dating: Europe up until about 100 years ago. Far from being stable, this society regularly engaged in revolutions and warfare. If you plotted every battle location from the years 1000-1918 on a map of Europe, it would be so covered you'd hardly be able to see any other geographical features. There were numerous peasant revolts, usually brutally suppressed. There were massive wars like the Thirty Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, and WWI. There were bloody revolutions like the French Revolution. There were assassinations, feuds, political plots. Personal crime wasn't low, either. It's hard to estimate the homicide rate from hundreds of years ago, but it was high enough that most people seemed to be fine with using brutal public executions to address it. It wasn't a politically stable society, either. This was the society that invented liberalism, communism, and the modern concept of women's rights to begin with.
Of course technological changes account for much of this. My point is that what to me is the most obvious example of the kind of society you're talking about was, in fact, not actually stable.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
32m ago
People normally engage with the world using preconstructed schemata, so once a set of expectations is in place, everyone's pleasure or disappointment in you gets measured in terms of those expectations.
I don't know what to tell you except for: not they don't. Like, where did you get this idea? The world you describe is completely alien to me anecdotally, and if you push me I could probably even justify it academically. As far as I can tell people like to engage in some of the old Noticing, but the moment your break a pattern in a visible way, they reassess you individually. I'd sooner believe in actual misogyny-driven patriarchy, than I would in a bespoke expectations-driven "implicit bias" system.
Even what you say about the cat sounds deranged to me. I aged out of caring about it, but a pet like this would be... well, I think the kids these days would call it "a cure for the male loneliness epidemic".
TheDemonRazgriz
35m ago
I disagree quite strongly with this, I think it represents a failure of imagination on your part. Yes, that war was brutal, involved many players, and had a lot of civilian casualties (especially if you include deaths from famine and disease). But it was frankly not that large of a war. Over the entire conflict only a few hundred thousand combatants, at most, were involved across both sides (Wikipedia actually estimates it as less than 100,000 total). Most combat was in the form of skirmishes; daring but small-scale raids; guerilla actions; and cyclical series of atrocities against civilians, reprisals for the atrocities, reprisals for those reprisals, and so on. You have to consider the possibility of much more industrialized warfare between countries with much larger populations with the ability to raise much larger armies. Consider the possibility of a “water war” between not just Sudanese rebel groups and Ethiopia, but between the Ethiopian and Egyptian armies. Or a war involving the likes of Kenya, or Nigeria. These aren’t realistic possibilities in the short term, it’s true, but after another 10 or 20 or 30 years of population growth and industrialization, maybe throw in some unexpected coups or stronger dictatorships… the worst case scenario is much, much worse than the Second Congo War.
And, perhaps more importantly from a Western perspective, the modal “poor African civilian” has a lot more options for migration— and, crucially, awareness of those options— today than at the time of that war. Not to mention the sheer explosion of population. Even another war of the same scale as the Second Congo War would likely trigger a much larger wave of migration to the West today than it did at the time, never mind a war with armies (and often civilian populations) an order of magnitude larger.
Note that these newly massive populations are also youth-heavy, which means a lot of disaffected fighting-age men. Sure, a lot of the time this just leads to civil war, but all it takes is one charismatic dictator to direct that energy into outward aggression and you could have yourself a good old-fashioned war of conquest. Get two of these situations going at once and you could have a catastrophe. A lot has changed in Africa from 2000 to 2025, and a lot is going to change from 2025 to 2050.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
36m ago
I hate cutting weight. My lifts (never impressive to start with, but acceptable) have gone to crap and I feel tired all the time.
215-220 lbs (at 6'2") overall felt great. My lifts were decent, I still had abdominal definition, and running 2-3 times per week (where my long run was probably 6-8 miles) felt pretty good. Some health numbers were trending in a way I didn't like, though, so I signed up for some trail races and have been working on getting my weight down.
I'm now around 195. My health numbers have shot back down to what they were a few years ago, my running distances are up, and I have way more definition, but as I said, my lifts are now terrible and I'm tired all the time. I'm still 3 months from the first race and having another 5-10 pounds gone would make a marathon much easier, but I'm already wishing I could go back to being heavier.
faceh
36m ago
When the entire world is experience a massive decline in relationship formation simultaneously, I think complaints and concern are merited, and the people who are claiming disbelief are in fact being... obtuse.
Y'all start sounding like boomers saying "sharpen up your resume and go and give the hiring manager a firm handshake."
Everyone seems to easily admit that the job market is harder on new entrants than it used to be, and is dysfunctional for the average person. Most would admit that the housing market is WAY harsher on new entrants than before, and is extremely distorted.
Most people can even acknowledge this is due to broad factors that distort those markets, NOT individual action.
But try to say the same thing about the dating market, and they immediately go "Well YOU must be doing something wrong."
Nah bro. You're just being a spiritual boomer.
Of course, I keep pointing this out to @Primaprimaprima, and they keep ignoring the point to drill down to individual solutions, which as we see are just not viable.
GBRK
37m ago
For the 99% of American veterans and their families using the VA, the gender column is a redundant sex column. Its deletion changes very little
Again, nothing was actually deleted, it was a straight rename. If data HAD been deleted, then conversely the liberals would be entirely right to worry-- both at the object level (because it would make it harder to track the health outcomes of people whose sex differs from their stated gender identity), and at the meta level (because it would prove that the VA was staffed by people perfectly happy to delete inconvenient data to serve their political masters.) It's important to mantain all the current data, and to have it clearly placed in a well-defined structure. Storage is much cheaper than compute, and just "having something in the chart" is way less convenient for medical researchers looking to make conclusions about aggregate data than a checkbox. Actually, if you'll let me climb up onto an even taller soapbox-- I privately suspect that a massive fraction of healthcare inefficiency is ultimately caused by incompatible and difficult-to-parse data standards that waste the time of providers and make it difficult to provide care. I don't have ANY of my childhood medical records, for example, because they're stored in hard copy in another state in my childhood doctor's medical office. And unfortunately, the process of taking old bad records and unifying them into a smooth, unified system is beyond nightmarish-- so any attempt to obstruct that where it's happening is literally costing lives.
Gamers know that gaming isn't "cool" in the way alpinism would be cool even if no rich people considered climbing Everest worth their time. Hence the bafflement that Elon tried to fake being good at it, along with taking mild offense that the lie was so transparent.
Path of Exile 2 is not even a game where direct competition or direct cooperation exists in any big proportion, unlike WoW. The entire point of having top gear is to farm top content easier so you get more top gear and currency. There's no fighting the best PvP players, there's almost nothing like completing legendary WoW raids in a feat of top-notch cooperation (party play in PoE is largely done for optimized farming and not as an accomplishment in itself), there's no social status in the larger world because gaming is not Cool(tm). The fact that Elon did it exposes him as an alien who simply doesn't understand people.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
41m ago
This is true, and it's also important to remember that this is happening on the margins, not to everyone. It's not that NO ONE is getting laid. It's that a few percentage fewer people are. But in the same way that an economy with 5% unemployment is radically different than one with 15% unemployment even if the majority of people have a job under either condition, a world where 25% of people are unwilling virgins at 30 is vastly stuff from one with 5%.
faceh
42m ago
The idea that the woman would spend 4-6 years in tertiary education and come into the relationship with $15-50k in debt is a pretty new innovation though. Only about 30 years old, even.
Which is why I think attacking that particular factor might bear fruit, although women will flip out about it.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
43m ago
PoE2 is not a player versus player game, and as far as I recall Elon was not on any leaderboard.
jkf
44m ago
Gamers are not flattered because no one but Elon ever wanted to be an accomplished PoE player on top of a world-class business career, and Elon did it in such a cringe way that if anything, he tanked their status along with his.
If they are so much better than him, they should be able to slaughter him despite his PtP account though, right?
Maybe the gamers feel low status because all their grinding doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the end.
The thing that REALLY gets me is that financial troubles are easier to weather with a partner. It's easier to build wealth with a financially sensible co-tenant, even if you aren't joining all your funds together. It just is, by any sane approach.
So guys who are trying to build wealth in order to become worthy of a woman are, BY SHEER DEFINITION, going to take longer than usual to build that wealth and thus will be dating much later in life, missing out on vital experience and still ending up poorer overall.
I'm pretty much moved on from my Ex, but every time I think about how much more financially better off we'd be if she had stuck around I cringe in mild mental pain.
Previously we could split our approximately $2200/month basic living expenses down the middle. And split chores, and helped out with basic stuff like watching the dogs (instead of paying for boarding) or splitting food deliveries and such.
Upon her leaving, I immediately went from shouldering $1100/month in living expenses to just about the whole $2200. In addition, she is now going to have to shoulder a $1300-1600/month for her own separate living expenses.
Granted I could have downsized, and I didn't, but at least now I'm almost immune to lifestyle inflation, can't afford to upsize!
So I, personally, am now $14,000+/year poorer than I would have been in the counterfactual world where she stayed.
Between the two of us, we're collectively like $24,000+/year poorer than we'd have been than if we'd continued splitting expenses.
There's a lot of stuff that could have been done with that money. I guess in a Keynesian sense that having that extra economic 'activity' is somehow better overall, maybe. But there's no doubt that we'd both be wealthier and have a better financial future.
So this logic that "you have to have your own life together and be completely financially independent before you seriously start dating", which is peddled to women AND men, is ass-backwards from my perspective.
Also, I've seen enough Caleb Hammer episodes to know plenty of people will NEVER. EVER. get to that point.
Its financially sensible to find someone reliable earlier on to help contribute to your mutual growth. That's a big point to getting married at all.
And as per usual, I'm starting to lose my mind when the response to this is to put more and more pressure on men to step up, without examining what the actual incentives are, and why the problem is so widespread.
(add in the fact that women are increasingly likely to have a student debt burden as well, so the man will be paying for THAT too!)
Like you say:
This no longer sounds like a problem that can be fixed merely through self-improvement.
Its not viable, UNLESS there is more incentive/pressure on women to date guys who aren't yet financially independent but have all green flags otherwise.
Which is to say, pressure women to settle, and settle earlier. But good fackin' luck finding any voice saying anything like that, meanwhile the amplified message is "don't ever lower your standards girlie, in fact, raise them. If you can't find what you're looking for its just proof that you're too good for this world. You owe nothing to men, and their concerns don't matter."
The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional.
Yep. But saying it out loud marks you as lower status, "hah, this guy is poor and can't get bitches." Well maybe, but a bunch of us are poor and can't get bitches, and if we can't talk about the problem it'll get worse for everyone.
When do we admit the current advice is insufficient?
jkf
48m ago
I mean it's certainly possible to release your training code as well as the resulting weights for an LLM -- now I'm curious as to whether this company is actually doing that or not?
If not, agreed that "OS" is a big misnomer here -- there are certainly lots of individuals floating around who might like to train their own version of this and could afford to do so (FIRE startup retirees spring to mind) and "you can use our weights" is quite different from "you can try to make improvements on our process". More like free beer than free speech.
Some thoughts that immediately jump to my mind on this subject:
All of these are great cannon fodder to get the red tribe of the culture war fired up, but I personally think they're pretty weak in terms of showing actual flaws in blue tribe principles. There are plenty real flaws in blue tribe principles that these don't really make me lose any sleep.
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