The reason there is not a “School of Super Bad Ass Black Belt Rationality” could be as simple as…. It doesn’t make people want to mate with you. It’s just not sexy in human terms.
You’re saying people only do sexy things. Can you really not think of the many things that many people do although they make them definitely unsexy?
Enter monasteries, the Catholic priesthood, and other long-term organizations where they forswear sex entirely.
Publicly proclaim affiliations, and work for causes, which make them persecuted—often killed by states and organized religions—and which do not have enough supporters to make up for it ingroup-style. Extreme examples: self-immolation suicide as protest? Hunger strikes in prisons where the expected outcome is that they die of hunger?
Dedicate their lives to obscure pursuits and personal goals which no-one else appreciates. Like many now-famous scientists and researchers, and like many more still-not-famous people (aka “geeks” or “nerds”) whose work didn’t turn out to be extremely useful a few centuries later...
I wouldn’t say so. There’s not much you can do short of killing yourself (in such a way as to destroy any viable genetic material) which outright sets your expected reproductive success to zero, but statistically speaking there’s a lot you can do to handicap yourself—including most of DanArmak’s examples. “Unsexy” seems as good a way of describing this as anything.
(I’m not sure about the persecuted causes example, though. Suicidal devotion has obvious issues, but short of that identifying yourself with a persecuted group strikes me as high risk/high reward.)
That’s why I qualified that example with “which do not have enough supporters to make up for it ingroup-style”, i.e. causes which don’t have enough supporters who will then find you hyper-sexy.
Granted, but you only need a few. Dunbar’s Number being what it is, a group so small that no one’s ever heard of it outside can still generate enough internal status to make up for whatever you lose in external status; just look at all the cults founded essentially to get their founders laid.
And since external persecution is somewhat proportional to perceived threat, and perceived threat’s somewhat proportional to size, I think you’d need a very small and very weird group for the fitness equation to work out negative purely on those grounds. Ideally a group of one, Ted Kaczynski style.
just look at all the cults founded essentially to get their founders laid.
That worked out well for the founders; not so well, I’d argue, for most of the followers.
Your pool of actual mates (with whom you have sex, let alone with whom you have children) is typically much smaller than Dunbar’s number, but your pool of potential mates is typically much bigger—especially in modern large cities. A bigger pool means people can find more individually suitable mates (i.e. different people value the same prospective mate differently). It also means greater chance of mating for those with low prospects (you can find others who also have low mate-value, and you have a bigger pool to just get lucky with).
Are there actual fitness calculations that tell us at which sizes ingroup mating tends to be a winning strategy?
Of course if the group is preselected on a basis of e.g. sharing rare sexual fetishes then it’s going to be successful. But if it’s preselected for e.g. supporting an outlawed political cause, I would by default assume a disrtibution of sexual preferences that is broadly similar to that of the general population. (Exceptions certainly exist, like political causes related to reproductive rights.)
There is still a unique definition of “sexiness”, the evolutionary one: expected number of grandchildren or some such. That’s what I had in mind, and so did the OP, I believe.
You’re saying people only do sexy things. Can you really not think of the many things that many people do although they make them definitely unsexy?
Enter monasteries, the Catholic priesthood, and other long-term organizations where they forswear sex entirely.
Publicly proclaim affiliations, and work for causes, which make them persecuted—often killed by states and organized religions—and which do not have enough supporters to make up for it ingroup-style. Extreme examples: self-immolation suicide as protest? Hunger strikes in prisons where the expected outcome is that they die of hunger?
Dedicate their lives to obscure pursuits and personal goals which no-one else appreciates. Like many now-famous scientists and researchers, and like many more still-not-famous people (aka “geeks” or “nerds”) whose work didn’t turn out to be extremely useful a few centuries later...
I could go on...
“Definitely unsexy” seems like a very questionable idea given widespread variance in human sexuality.
I wouldn’t say so. There’s not much you can do short of killing yourself (in such a way as to destroy any viable genetic material) which outright sets your expected reproductive success to zero, but statistically speaking there’s a lot you can do to handicap yourself—including most of DanArmak’s examples. “Unsexy” seems as good a way of describing this as anything.
(I’m not sure about the persecuted causes example, though. Suicidal devotion has obvious issues, but short of that identifying yourself with a persecuted group strikes me as high risk/high reward.)
That’s why I qualified that example with “which do not have enough supporters to make up for it ingroup-style”, i.e. causes which don’t have enough supporters who will then find you hyper-sexy.
Granted, but you only need a few. Dunbar’s Number being what it is, a group so small that no one’s ever heard of it outside can still generate enough internal status to make up for whatever you lose in external status; just look at all the cults founded essentially to get their founders laid.
And since external persecution is somewhat proportional to perceived threat, and perceived threat’s somewhat proportional to size, I think you’d need a very small and very weird group for the fitness equation to work out negative purely on those grounds. Ideally a group of one, Ted Kaczynski style.
That worked out well for the founders; not so well, I’d argue, for most of the followers.
Your pool of actual mates (with whom you have sex, let alone with whom you have children) is typically much smaller than Dunbar’s number, but your pool of potential mates is typically much bigger—especially in modern large cities. A bigger pool means people can find more individually suitable mates (i.e. different people value the same prospective mate differently). It also means greater chance of mating for those with low prospects (you can find others who also have low mate-value, and you have a bigger pool to just get lucky with).
Are there actual fitness calculations that tell us at which sizes ingroup mating tends to be a winning strategy?
Of course if the group is preselected on a basis of e.g. sharing rare sexual fetishes then it’s going to be successful. But if it’s preselected for e.g. supporting an outlawed political cause, I would by default assume a disrtibution of sexual preferences that is broadly similar to that of the general population. (Exceptions certainly exist, like political causes related to reproductive rights.)
There is still a unique definition of “sexiness”, the evolutionary one: expected number of grandchildren or some such. That’s what I had in mind, and so did the OP, I believe.