I’m currently twenty-two years old. Over the last two weeks, I’ve discussed with a couple friends that among the “millenial” generation, i.e., people currently under the age of thirty-five, people profess having goals for some kind of romantic relationships, but they don’t act in a way which will let them achieve those goals. Whether they:
are lonely and want companionship,
want to stay single, but have more sex,
want a monogamous but casual relationship,
want a more committed and serious monogamous relationship,
want to find someone to one day marry and have children with,
want to find someone to love and love them to become happy, or happier,
want romance for any other usual reason,
it seems the proportion of young people who are and stay single is greater than I would expect. I don’t just mean how the fastest-growing household configuration since the 1980s (in the United States) has been single adults. I mean how most of my friends profess a preference for having some romantic relationship in their life, yet most of my single friends stay single, and don’t appear to be dating much or doing something else to correct this. Maybe popular culture exerts a normative social influence which favors people in relationships over single people, and so young single people feel pressured to signal a preference for being in a relationship. However, I can’t determine who is just professing fake preferences to signal. It still seems single people aren’t seeking or successfully finding relationships at a rate which corresponds well to genuine preferences for a relationship. Why aren’t single people trying harder to find relationships?
One answer could be “dating and romance are hard, especially for young people”. If that’s vaguely true, it doesn’t satisfy my curiosity. I think it has in large part to do with the extended adolesence of people born after, e.g., 1980. More committed relationships, higher frequency of dating, and/or marriage seem to people around my age something we’re supposed to do more when we’re “real adults”. That happens some time after you get a “real job”. Or after you complete a degree. Or after the age of twenty-five. Something like that.
It also seems dependent upon changes in dating culture in North America. I’m aware there are more hookups and one-night stands among young adults of the current generation than there was for prior generations. In terms of who one settles down with, or marries, people get married at greater ages. I don’t know if it’s because we young adults are pickier with whom we choose for long-term relationships, or what. This is where I don’t know exactly what’s going on, so I could use your help. If you (think you) can explain what’s going on, please share.
Anyway, what I’ve concluded so far is that, as someone who doesn’t date very much, a sensible strategy would be to date more often and more early to satisfy relationship goals. That is, while many of my generation have similar goals and expectations for dating, relationships and/or marriage compared to previous generations, the styles and culture of such in North America are very different. If young adults wait until their mid-thirties before they start fulfilling long-term relationship goals, it might take longer than they expect, and by that point seeking relationships may cut into time developing other valuable aspects of one’s life, such as career. Dating earlier and more frequently allows one to discover what one initially wants in a partner, how to navigate the dating pool and social scenes comfortably, adapt to potential setbacks and heartbreak, and mature.
Now, there are lots of young adults in graduate school, or going through a period of time when prioritizing a romantic relationship wouldn’t allow the time and attention to fulfill more immediately important goals. During the period(s) of life when you have downtime, if busy young adults aren’t satisfied with being single, I think it makes sense for us to try dating and relationships more, because there may not be as much time and opportunity as we hope later in life. What do you think of this model/strategy?
I have something sort of a potential explanation to it, but it is difficult to formulate it in a way that it will be not misunderstood in the wrong way. Please everybody try to take this post with maximal charity and benefit of doubt.
History tends to swing from one extreme to another, as people tend to OVERreact to the problems they see.
Given that it is an OVERreaction, they are usually wrong, but it also points out a problem. You can diagnose the original problems from the overreactions to them.
These overreactions are sometimes exaggerated only in “quantity”, in which case a more moderate version of them would be okay, or they often get the direction completely wrong, still they point out how something is a problem and the issues they raise often have SOME truth to them.
For example, Communism/Bolshevism was a huge OVERreaction to the condition of workers under capitalism, it was not a good solution at all, and even making it more moderate (a moderate, limited dictatorship of people who call themselves proletarians?) would not help much, but it pointed out a problem and now we have better solutions to that problem, such as unions striking when they want a wage raise or something. Or some laws like minimum wages.
In the same vein The Red Pill / Manosphere is an OVERreaction to a problem, yes it is wrong, both it tone and content, misogynistic and so on, misrepresenting history etc. wrong in both quantity and direction, yet it DOES point out a problem, and some ideas when saner and kinder people work them over and remove the jaded or hateful elements of them, are actually useful.
Essentially this is the problem:
Dating is hard for young straight men, not for everybody. Few gays complain, and of women only seriously overweight ones complain and even that is changing, there is more fat acceptance now. And being a straight male 35+ is far easier, have some achievement and don’t be fat and you almost see women 32+ throwing themselves at you.
One issue is that a lot of straight young men lack the experiences that would turn them into, well, it depends on your point of view, but you could say: masculine men, or you could say: grown-ups, adults. Being a grown-up or being masculine / manly is NOT the same, but they have a common opposite: a child, a boy is NEITHER. And that is what we have, many young men stay children because their formative experiences are school and videogames, which is not formative at all in this sense. They lack a lot of things, like challenges that require grown-up self-responsibility, or dangerous feeling things that would make them build courage and confidence.
SOME, not all, some women are indeed hypergamous. And SOME, not all, men are polygamous. This basically means that instead of having 100% attention and dedication from one man of lower attractiveness, they rather have 25% of a very attractive man. Although the “spinning plates, soft harems” the RPers speak about are probably exaggerated bullshit, I do see highly attractive men have really fast series of hookups and breakups, lots of fast and short mini-relationships that in practice end up with multiple women “orbiting” one man. (I am NOT talking about real, serious “poly” people, they are still a minority, I am talking about people who think they are monogamous, just they end up starting and ending three relationships during one month.)
This distorts the dating “market”. As a very broad model, you have the top 50% women with the top 25% men, you have the next 25% of women and next 25% of men having the usual kinds of monogamous relationships, and you have the bottom 50% of men trying to chase the bottom 25% of women, and that bottom 25% is, not to be too offensive, but these days tends to be… “big”. Of course the bottom 50% of men are often not a big catch either, videogaming man-boys without any confidence or adult responsibility. At any rate, the bottom 50% men often give up as they don’t think having to compete for the “big” girls 2:1 is better than porn (and pot: a powerful combination), and the “big” girls often seek refuge in cats and sugar too.
4/B) To give you a good example how inequal is the dating market: when people describe sexual relationships as “I don’t know, we just got drunk and it happened”, very roughly this happened with 80% women and 40% men, at best. At least half the guys are not attractive enough to “just happen”, many of them won’t even get to the point where it could, as not getting drunk with women or not going out at all. “Just happened” is a narrative of women and handsome / attractive / grown-up / masculine / confident men, it is not a universal human one and for the bottom 50% of men it looks like something happening from a sci-fi.
5/A). There is another issue. RPers tend to blame feminism, I guess it is better to blame the inbalanced social adaptation to feminism, but basically the bottom 50% of guys think “well, I am not much as a man, but I can get an engineering degree, hold down a job, make money and could support a family, does that count for something?” and the answer is today “nothing AT ALL” because now almost every woman can make enough money. Even when they complain about making 77% of what men make or some similar figure, in a first-world society that is still enough to live comfortably without children. And now women rarely want children before 32. In the past, a man could be unattractive but being a breadwinner helped him a bit in finding a mate, now it is not the case. Now a degree in software engineering may still increase a mans chances in India, but not in the US, Canada or Germany.
5/B) The point is here, that since women can make a living on their own, men should probably adapt into being less of a worker bee and more focusing on his attractiveness. Yet it is far harder for the bottom 50% of men than just getting a software engineering degree and working. Besides, his parents may still push him towards this breadwinner role. And frankly this all sometimes feels “unnatural” probably because we are trying to undo thousands of years of historical adaptation to social roles, so it is learning a really uncharted terrain here. We don’t have much historical experience in how to make all men attractive to women of a similar income and social status. Formerly it was not really needed. About half the men figure it out sooner or later, but the other half does not.
Maybe things get easier, if feminism, if ever, fully wins 100%. Currently it is totally confusing because it won in some things but not in some other things. Women can now do almost everything men can, yet it seems the most attractive guys are still the ones conforming more or less to traditional concepts like being strong, tall, brave, unfazed / no-fucks-given, and so on.
One good example in how the current kind of feminism-won-halfway-not-fully makes things confusing. Sheryl Sandberg, a highly powerful and successful woman, really a feminist role model, saying “When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them.” So basically she is saying that although not for marriage, for dating still the old, pre-feminist male archetypes, the traditional masculine archetypes are ideal! Sheryl is a feminist at work/career but not at dating, although at marriage probably yet again! Of course it confuses a young man who has no idea how to be attractive anymore! Be her bad cool crazy commitment phobic (i.e. treating women as sex objects only) boy which is an old-fashioned, 1950′s on a motorbike, pre-feminist and borderline misogynistic or be marriagable nice guy in which case wait until 35 or so?
RP is wrong, but it is pointing us towards real actual problems that are begging for a better explanation and solution.
We really need some statistics, because I’m not certain this is actually a real trend. At one point in time, 17 women reproduced for every one man. In more recent history it’s 4 to 5 women for every man, as a global average (I don’t know what they define “recent history” as though.)
In the same vein The Red Pill / Manosphere is an OVERreaction to a problem, yes it is wrong, both it tone and content, misogynistic and so on, misrepresenting history etc. wrong in both quantity and direction, yet it DOES point out a problem, and some ideas when saner and kinder people work them over and remove the jaded or hateful elements of them, are actually useful.
What do you mean by “misogynistic”? The word is commonly used to mean believing that there are significant differences between men and women. If you mean something else by this word feel free to explain it.
Maybe things get easier, if feminism, if ever, fully wins 100%.
What do you mean by feminism 100% wins? Do you mean human nature will change? And if so to what?
What do you mean by feminism 100% wins? Do you mean human nature will change? And if so to what?
This is highly debated how much human nature is hardcoded in this regard. The No 1. feature of human nature is the ability to adapt to wildly different circumstances. For example there is absolutely no such thing as an ancestral or paleolithical diet. Human nature is tribal, we still manage to have nations and supranational organizations somehow. Once could just as easily argue every political organization above kinship based tribes is against human nature. Yet we manage to do it… just with some unintended consequences (like tribalism rearing its head in politics, kicked out the door, it comes back the window).
My “gut instinct” is on the middle way: we can change genders, but with many unintended consequences. (For example, once consequence that is more or less visible already: when people become more unisex, sexual tension drops as it is generated by difference. One of my ugliest (thankfully unproven, conditional) beliefs is that every passionate sex is essentially BDSM, and easing up dominance/submission kills truly burning desire. Dropping birthrates may be another one.)
What do you mean by “misogynistic”? The word is commonly used to mean believing that there are significant differences between men and women. If you mean something else by this word feel free to explain it.
I think it is meant not simply about differences, but when 1) differences are used to justify social customs that reduce the autonomy / choices of people, primarily women 2) differences of the kind that tend to assign lower status to women. So when differences are value-laden in this way, and not purely factual. I think this is the most accepted usage.
However in the case of RP it is not even the usual meaning but something far worse. Really, really ugly lingo, not even “politically offensive” but insulting in that basic human pre-feminism sense, violating every rule of keeping a civil tongue in one’s head. For example blog.jim.com says most modern women are “psychotic whores”. This is not simply un-PC, it was a huge insult far before PC or feminism was invented, 1950 or whatever date you pick. It is not simply un-feminist or anti-feminist lingo, it is the lingo of louts who grew up in the gutter. It is simply incredibly un-classy.
What’s your evidence that RP is in fact wrong?
First of all, statements can be right or wrong. Subcultures never. I think I should write an article about it, but subcultures are largely about like-minded people banding together, often held together by values and moods and personality types but not facts. They are simply beyond right or wrong: you can say that the most important statements a subculture believes are right or wrong, but the subculture as such cannot be reduced to its most important statements, because it is people. Prove them all wrong, and the very same people will band together in a different subculture that has different statements, but the same mood affiliation, the same mindset. Prove them all right, and you can still say the personality, mindset or values are still all horrible or simply bad, harmful. For example, I am an atheist and generally disagree with the major things Catholics believe in, yet I tend to generally like them as a people, it seems our mindset and mood is at some level similar (“Chestertonesque”). I like their subculture and disagree with their statements. It can also happen the other way around. So, context is everything.
The second issue is that good luck about trying to separating facts from values in the fields that are not natural science but more like human, social concerns. For example, Marxists claim to have an entirely factual analysis of how the engine of capitalism works, but it is full with so much value-laden, mood-laden terms, that you cannot really separate the factual proposition from a general value/mood of them disliking hierarchical modes of production.
I think the strategic aspect of RP is not bad, they are the kind of things a man stumbles upon by experience anyway, such as, there are interactions where mock agreement and humorous amplification are appropriate answers. If a girl in a bar would ask me to hold her purse I would probably parade around with it in a super gay way and good laughs would be had. The issue is the context, the values, the mood. For example, the interactions where this kind of answer is appropriate are called “shit tests” and they get referred to as “mercilessly swat down the shit tests”. So you see a general mood of hostility, aggressivity, negativity. And it is really difficult to separate the context from the statements.
So the issue is not that some statements are wrong. They are embedded in a very negative mood/value context.
One useful way to look at it is to say the issue is that RP guys were in some significant sense screwed up BEFORE swallowing the pill. So it is not the pill that is wrong as such, it is the kind of people it attracts. Because the same pill could be embedded in a very different mood and context, one of positivity, cooperation, friendliness and mutual respect.
Also the context I am talking about is actually just one example of a more general category of negative contexts. Similar negative contexts are: The Gervais Principle, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Social Darwinism, Objectivism. Generally ideas that cash out to saying life is all about brutal competition where winners take all and losers get screwed and generally downplaying the role positive social connections, alliances, support networks play in life outcomes, which generally come from “nice” behavior.
These negative contexts are what I called “dark romance” in a former conversation. It is the assumption that we live in a dog eat dog world, where the law of the jungle rules because the assumptions feels so… badass. Well, such things happen indeed. But on the other hand, it is incredibly handy and useful to be “nice” and be the kind of person others like to cooperate with or support. A truly smart sociopathic, evil Machiavelli would not try to project this jaded tough guy image but would be a super mellow nice person, the most agreeable person around, liked by everybody… and in the rare, really rare occasions when it worths it, he would backstab them. But if he is evil only for the sake of actual gain and not for the sake of evil being awesome and badass and darkly romantic… then such occasions are exceedingly rare.
For example there is absolutely no such thing as an ancestral or paleolithical diet.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Clearly you’re not saying that our antcectors did not eat. Are you saying that humans have genetically adapted to different diets since the paleolithic? That still leaves the concept of ancestral diet as important. Are you saying any given human will be just as healthy on any diet? That’s clearly false.
Human nature is tribal, we still manage to have nations and supranational organizations somehow.
By adapting the larger organizations to human nature, yes.
Can we? It’s possible for say men, to cut of their peneses and declare themselves women. (And in the west expect society to declare that they have always been women). However, in my experience the behvior of m-to-f trannies makes more sense if I model them as men who decided to “become women” as part of the especially male tendency to do crazy things.
I think it is meant not simply about differences, but when 1) differences are used to justify social customs that reduce the autonomy / choices of people, primarily women 2) differences of the kind that tend to assign lower status to women.
Does it matter of said customs are rational (say in the sense of leading to better outcomes)?
For example blog.jim.com says most modern women are “psychotic whores”. This is not simply un-PC, it was a huge insult far before PC or feminism was invented, 1950 or whatever date you pick. It is not simply un-feminist or anti-feminist lingo, it is the lingo of louts who grew up in the gutter. It is simply incredibly un-classy.
Yes and in the 1950s a woman who behaved the way a typical women does today (at least in the west, I hear it’s not quite as bad in eastern Europe) would be considered much worse then simply un-classy and loutish. And yes “psychotic whore” sounds about right for what they would of thought of that type of woman.
The second issue is that good luck about trying to separating facts from values in the fields that are not natural science but more like human, social concerns. For example, Marxists claim to have an entirely factual analysis of how the engine of capitalism works, but it is full with so much value-laden, mood-laden terms, that you cannot really separate the factual proposition from a general value/mood of them disliking hierarchical modes of production.
Yes it is. At least it is possible to isolate the factual analysis enough to see that it is false.
Also the context I am talking about is actually just one example of a more general category of negative contexts. Similar negative contexts are: The Gervais Principle, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Social Darwinism, Objectivism. Generally ideas that cash out to saying life is all about brutal competition where winners take all and losers get screwed
Um, are you actually familiar with the philosophies you listed or are you going by the popular caricatures? Of the ones I’m familiar with, this is a rather bad characterization of Machiavelli and an absolute horrible characterization of Objectivism.
And I think this is a good example. The most typically human trait is flexibility because that is what intelligence generates.
This suggests your suffering from the arugment to mederation fallacy.
In the specific case when something is argued to be impossible, taking a middle way seems sensible: almost everything is possible, just often you have to throw the equivalent of a nuke on it, and then you will get all kinds of unwanted consequences.
we can change genders
Can we? It’s possible for say men, to cut of their peneses and declare themselves women.
Really I bet this is not new to you, you just pretend you have never heard the difference…
At least it is possible to isolate the factual analysis enough to see that it is false.
I find it far too optimistic but I figure neither of us has evidence here.
Um, are you actually familiar with the philosophies you listed or are you going by the popular caricatures?
Popular versions, yes, but they are not caricatures simply—more like what people actually believe in. Popularity matters. To give you a reverse example, some people argue the Soviets were never properly, really Communists or Marxist. This means, they did not really believe what some books said. Books matter. But actual history, what people actually do, often matters more. Soviet Communism was the kind of Communism that mattered, because this had nukes and the obscure kind of Communism that had only some books and debating groups mattered far less. The same thing with the ones I mentioned—they were far smarter than this, but based on them there is a popular view of a simplified “dog eat dog” world where everything is competition and winners take all and losers suck and cooperation does not worth for anything.
This jaded view was already disproved by Plato. Justice and efficiency go hand in hand and there is rarely lasting success without a lot of cooperation and fairness.
I often think the jaded views on the right horseshoe into the oppression-oriented views on the left quite nicely, the difference is largely about how to evaluate the same facts and how changable it is, but both extremes would say the world as we know it so far is usually pretty ugly. I think it is not, we are just under the spell of a huge yellow journalism bias. When someone murders their spouse, that is on TV evening news. When people cook their spouse their favorite food or take them to their favorite restaurant, that is not. Reporting is biased towards the negative, largely because it is biased towards the unusual, and it is far, far harder to do something unusually good than unusually bad. Unusually bad deeds are comparatively easy, destroying is easier than building, because things are on the whole pretty fragile. So most unusual i.e. reporting worthy things are bad. However, most usual things are good. Correct for this bias and you find that most human efforts were usually into cooperating and building and were generally constructive. For every one case where someone burned someone for witchcraft (unusual and bad move) there are a hundreds of cases where he just paid a decent price to the witch for an anti-coughing tea (usual and good, mutually beneficial exchange) and so on. Just this did not get reported on. Too usual.
So you’re arguing that the Albanian sworn virgins were (socially) men? The very fact that they were called “virgins”, thus appealing to the ideal of female virginity, should give you a clue. I thought you were smarter than that.
Popular versions, yes, but they are not caricatures simply—more like what people actually believe in. Popularity matters.
Depends on which people. What the followers of the philosophies believe matters, what most people believe about the followers, not so much.
This jaded view was already disproved by Plato. Justice and efficiency go hand in hand and there is rarely lasting success without a lot of cooperation and fairness.
I’m not sure who you think your arguing against here. It certainly isn’t (most of) the philosophies you listed.
So you’re claiming that any human will be just as healthy on any diet?
No, and building straw mans like that is not useful at all. I am just claiming most human groups learned to be healthy on almost any nutrients their environment managed to offer. I.e. flexibility, adaptation ability, due to intelligence.
So you’re arguing that the Albanian sworn virgins were (socially) men?
Yes, the article is very clear about that. What is your point really? There is nothing particularly magic or essential about social roles, although it is clear that hormones play a role in being more suitable or less suitable for them.
Tangentially, how much is it a problem of “dating”, and how much a problem of “dating with sane people”, when the pool of sane people is already small?
When I was younger, I wanted to have a romantic relationship with a person whom I would perceive as intellectually equal (plus or minus the LessWrong level). Since I barely knew such people… not much luck.
If I could send a message in time back to myself, it would be: “It will take decades until you find someone you can have meaningful conversation with. Meanwhile, relax, and try to fuck any nice body, but don’t get attached. Otherwise you will later regret the wasted time.” The only problem is, my younger self would be horrified to hear such advice.
Seems to me that in a relationship people spend much more time talking than having sex. Thus, even if the sex is great, if talking is painful, the relationship as a whole sucks.
And that’s just idle talk… imagine having to solve real problems, or even owning property together, or having children. All the stupid stuff you read about online, happening at your own home.
Before LW, I didn’t know any “sane” community. I did know a few “sane” individuals. But they didn’t have the explicit concept of “sanity”; I was not able to ask them “Where can I find more people like you?” in a way that would make them understand what exactly I wanted. For example, if they had a hobby, they would recommend me other people having the same hobby, but those other people wouldn’t be “sane”. In other words, there wasn’t a place to meet new “sane” people.
If I could be 20 years old again now, my step 1 for a serious relation would be “go to all possible LW meetups”, and the step 2 would probably be starting my own rationalist blog, in hope of attracting attention of someone who doesn’t go to LW meetups (yet). In reality, I already do have a girlfriend, and she helps me organize local LW meetups. I met her completely randomly, and it took me a few decades to have such lucky random event. I obviously can’t recommend that as a strategy.
Actually, until a few years ago I didn’t even have a hope of ever dating a sane person. Probably not even the concept of sanity; only a vague idea of “someone like me”. But that only creates an infinite recursion: where should I go to meet “people like me”, if the problem in the first place is that I don’t know where to go? Where is my Schelling point? Even today, I cannot give a better answer than “a LW community”. (But I was not strong enough to create one. Which is one of the reasons I deeply admire Eliezer.)
Cool, thank you! I can really relate to what you describe, especially the “not knowing any sane people” part.
What are your thoughts on relationships in general? Let me explain—in brief, I agree with the idea that it’s “a form of socially acceptable insanity” (sort of). To obsess and commit to one thing so much seems crazy to me. But not really; it makes people happy and you don’t (always) have to sacrifice too much. So the cost-benefit does seem worth it.
Obsession is nature’s way of making cooperation more resistant to random disruptive events.
I think an important skill in relationships is to be able to see a long-term perspective even when you are in a bad moment. Don’t ruin a mostly great relationship, just because today is the exceptional day that sucks. It can be easy to start a downward spiral. Forgiving is a way to play “tit for tat” in a noisy environment. The simplest hack to make people forgive is to make them blind towards the mistakes. (Which again comes with its own problems, because evolution is so short-sighted. Some people are too blind; some people forgive too much.)
Costly signalling of cooperation is important in situations where there is so much at stake, such as raising children. I am rather conservative about relationships because… well, if I simplify it a lot, conservatism at its core is all about costly signalling.
Sorry, I’m rambling, because of lack of sleep. So I’ll stop now.
In a more general sense, do I think the problem posed in my thinking would be solved if people only tried dating more? Maybe people won’t turn out happier if they just start dating more. I notice for the link I posted, the original question wasn’t just how to start dating, but how to maintain long-term relationships. Maybe dating and relationships are harder now than in the past, so much harder that even the chance of starting a happy relationship is low enough it doesn’t warrant the effort modern dating demands.
Compared to previous generations, young adults today have more emphasis put on careers for them. Also, the idea of a circle of friends is one which is bigger, and more closely knit, than it was before, when our parents or grandparents at our age would have relied on an (extended) family living in a single household. Since less emphasis is placed on the family unit relative to other types of relationships, and there is less pressure to start a family relative to building a career, dating, relationships and marriage might seem less valuable and less incentivized. More young adults might end up with a preference for being single, and that could be okay. If someone really still wants a relationship, or something resulting from that, I think the tactic I proposed still makes sense.
Most of my friends and acquaintances are committed to long-term relationships (mid-late 20s age group). I’ve had trouble in this area due to certain personal reasons, but my personal observations lead me to believe that I’m atypical in this regard.
It still seems single people aren’t seeking or successfully finding relationships at a rate which corresponds well to genuine preferences for a relationship. Why aren’t single people trying harder to find relationships?
It’s possible they just don’t know what they’re doing or are paralyzed by anxiety when it comes to romance.
Yeah, I’ve too much underrated observations like this in building my model above. Looking around, at age twenty-two, I notice most of my friends are still single, maybe 40% of them at most have some kind of relationship in any given month, but those relationships aren’t stable over the long-term. I thought my model still might hold because I notice other people in my social circle at or around thirty are single, too. However, single people could select themselves to hang out with other single people. People closer to thirty than twenty who are single may be unusual in that they’re more likely to hang out with people a few years younger than them, who are more likely to be single than not. So, the only young adults near 30 I’m observing are the ones who are hanging out with younger folk closer to 20 or 25.
I fell prey to confirmation bias here. I had no observations of social circles which are predominantly 25-35, rather than 20-30, which might be lousy with long-term relationships. Maybe this is happening at fondue parties or something, which I and my friends never hear about now, but will be doing in five to ten years. Thanks for the data point(s)! I think I was wrong before, and I think I know why!
Most of my friends and acquaintances are committed to long-term relationships (mid-late 20s age group). I’ve had trouble in this area due to certain personal reasons, but my personal observations lead me to believe that I’m atypical in this regard.
Keep in mind that people with good social skills tend to have more friends, so your selector maybe biased in that regard.
Fair point. I’m less likely to encounter people who sit home all day and less likely to socialize with people who aren’t social. That would skew my observations somewhat.
How do young people get into sexual relationships, any way? I had literally no experience with this in my youth, and not because I spent decades in prison starting around the age of 20 or anything like that. The women I knew as a young man walked around me as a physical object because they couldn’t walk through me, but in general they treated me as socially invisible.
That happens with most women and handsome men, but not all men. A better question is how can men shape up their looks so that it can happen to them. E.g. clothes, muscles, also demeanour, behavior etc.
However attractive, well dressed, confidant you are, you still need to know how to actually approach someone.
A problem is that any attempt to improve attractiveness will lead some people to declare that you are evil or otherwise defective. Its not just PUA stuff, this is far more general: if a guy lifts, that makes him a ‘dickhead’ according to members of my peer group, while a woman not shaving her armpits makes her strong & empowered (does a man not shaving his face make him empowered?). Conversely, some people believe that not taking care of your appearance makes you a slob.
Then there’s the problem that confidence is key. You need to be 110% confident of everything you say, and to truly believe this, you need to internalise it. The problem is then that it spills over into other aspects of life, and you become very badly credence calibrated, potentially leading to serious mistakes because you can’t admit that you might be wrong. When you are in a group containing more than one ‘alpha male’ it becomes impossible to get anything done, even something as simple as choosing a pub to go to, because one alpha male decides to go to one pub, the other decides to go to a different pub, and because they are alpha, they don’t ask anyone else what they want, and so everyone ends up at a different pub.
In fact, its possible that LW rationality is training people to have bad social skills. “How to change your mind” might just be how to look like a weak-willed person who won’t stick to their guns, or if you change your mind about politics, it makes you a traitor.
But if you have too little confidence, you can get stuck in a loop where:
low confidence → little romantic success → low confidence → little romantic success …
Its not just PUA stuff, this is far more general: if a guy lifts, that makes him a ‘dickhead’ according to members of my peer group,
I suggest that you need a better peer group. I don’t know what your options are—this might be worth discussing—but the time you’re spending with your current peer group is time that isn’t available for spending with a better bunch of people.
Actually, I moved away from them a few years ago for various reasons (not feeling on the same wavelength, wanting there to be more to life than alcohol & drugs...), so I don’t spend that much time with them, although there are a few of them I want to stay in contact with, friends who see me as practically family.
I still refer to them as my peer group, because I haven’t really made a new friendship group that lasted. I haven’t really had a social life for over a year, and its quite tranquil in a way. I was starting to get stuck in cycles of social anxiety and I hope this solitude has broken the cycle and given me time to think objectively. For instance, I’ve realised just how many people were attracted to me, but I was not aware of at the time due to a lack of social/romantic confidence and an inability to pick up on any even remotely subtle hint.
When I next move to a new city, I’m going to meet people who have similar interests—for instance at a boardgames club has worked well in the past. And I’m going to display the same level of social confidence as the intellectual confidence I already have, because vicious cycles can run backwards too.
A problem is that any attempt to improve attractiveness will lead some people to declare that you are evil or otherwise defective.
Screw them.
In fact, its possible that LW rationality is training people to have bad social skills. “How to change your mind” might just be how to look like a weak-willed person who won’t stick to their guns, or if you change your mind about politics, it makes you a traitor.
To whom? Screw them.
You can’t please everyone and trying to is a waste of far more than just time.
You worry about that all-important status when you fear losing it.
Want to win? Then focus on winning, not on not-losing. You need to if you want to be seen as high-status, anyway. Fear of loss is low-status, so is worrying about what others think.
Navigate the minefield, sure. But do it from a position of strength, not of weakness.
Of course. There are two relevant terms that I learned in another language, one way to translate them would be to “seek success” or “avoid failure”. Seeking success is pursuing your dream job, avoiding failure is fearing you will not be able to pay bills so accepting any job. Seeking success is far better, but if you are not blessed with sky high testosterone and are thus timid and not driven, you cannot really do much more than avoiding failure. It is not exactly a choice you can make, it is more about what you are. Of course you can try to slowly change what you are i.e. work on developing courage. Wanting to win is in itself a keyword used by the success oriented, who believe they can be / can do better than others. The failure-avoidant want to not prove worse than others, and thus seek to lose, not win. It takes a really lot of working on courage to go from one to another and it is not clear what methods develop this kind of courage best.
Maybe this (courage or self-confidence methods) would deserve a top level.
Its not just PUA stuff, this is far more general: if a guy lifts, that makes him a ‘dickhead’ according to members of my peer group, while a woman not shaving her armpits makes her strong & empowered
If I was young again, I would probably try to hang with either multiple different peer groups or none at (I was terrible at it anyway). But these guys sound like a very bad influence for anyone trying to improve dating skills. I also find it really surprising how they are using media language. “Strong and empowered” is a magazine headline. It is media-talk, almost like advertisement-talk, only one step less artificial than politician-talk. 20 years ago in my peer group anything that sounded like a magazine headline was repeated only ironically / cynically. Or even 10 years ago. Anyone remembers “the coalition of the willing?” Yeah, no normal person ever repeated that without a sneer. And now I see young people talk like popular magazine headlines. Weird. Where is the bravely contrarian counter-signalling? :)
Hypothesis: the lack of cynicism in today’s young is due to much of their social life being done on Facebook and other social media, and in this type of medium it is a common, easy and obvious thing to do to share articles.
I don’t think in 1990 anyone brought me a printed paper mag and asked me to read this article. A handful of times, when it was something truly revolutionary and special, but anything even remotely mainstream not. We did not share our media consumption much. I may have been reading the same heavy metal mag as others, but we rarely discusessed it beyond “Seen that interview with Megadeth?” “Yeah, badass.”
It is through article sharing and shared, communal media consumption how the Facebook generation lost its cynicism against official media headline ideas.
Are younger people less cynical? I honestly don’t know, and I’m curious about your evidence.
My impression is that used to be a lot less debunking around, not that all of the debunking is accurate, either. Who’s reading all those “7 Things You’re Entirely Wrong About” articles from Cracked?
My impression is that used to be a lot less debunking around, not that all of the debunking is accurate, either. Who’s reading all those “7 Things You’re Entirely Wrong About” articles from Cracked?
I understand I am dangerously close to a fully general argument now :) But I think there is a lot of debunking going on because the default stance seems to be to believe the mainstream media, and I think 20 years ago the default stance was to be skeptical about it.
How to put it… I would be really surprised if a friend of mine offered a debunking of the abs trainer sold in TV shop because we are not supposed to believe it at all, that is not the default stance… “everybody” understands it is mainly about scamming suckers. And roughly the same about the media in general.
this is far more general: if a guy lifts, that makes him a ‘dickhead’ according to members of my peer group, while a woman not shaving her armpits makes her strong & empowered
A problem is that any attempt to improve attractiveness will lead some people to declare that you are evil or otherwise defective. Its not just PUA stuff, this is far more general: if a guy lifts, that makes him a ‘dickhead’ according to members of my peer group.
#NotAllPeerGroups.
Seriously, though, I feel for you being in a peer group which could be better at encouraging fellow men while still respecting women, rather than hitting some failure mode because of signaling. I know you wrote only some* people will declare you evil or otherwise defective, but I don’t see a reason not to leave them behind, all else equal. John Salvatier is a man I’m acquainted with, a member of this peer group who writes about improving attractiveness (not just sexual attractiveness, but general attractiveness based on fashion. He doesn’t seem the sort who anyone I know accuses of being evil or otherwise defective. He hangs out on r/malefashionadvice, which seems to have an air of being more about becoming “a gentleman” rather than a “pick-up artist”. Whether it’s women or other men who are calling each other ‘dickheads’, I think we can find better peer groups which engender habits of expressing a desire for self-improvement better, and peer groups which won’t punish individuals when desires are expressed.
In fact, its possible that LW rationality is training people to have bad social skills. “How to change your mind” might just be how to look like a weak-willed person who won’t stick to their guns, or if you change your mind about politics, it makes you a traitor.
I agree that’s very possible. It’s an unfortunate trade-off for bad credence calibration. I’m not sure it’s a trade-off worth undoing, though.
*I’m inferring from your comment you’re a man, but pardon me if I’m assuming too much.
I don’t necessarily think that social confidence and credence should be conflated to the extent that a few replies in this thread of posts have conflated them by use of the word “confidence” to refer to both concepts. It is possible to have confident body language, be an active participant in conversations, and even call others out on their overconfidence while still being a well-calibrated individual.
I think the underlying reason for “improving attractiveness is evil” is largely a mixture of egalitarianism and a disconnect from reality. The idea is:
‘I want to believe that everyone is attractive, therefore anyone who tries to become more attractive is evil. Do they think they’re better than us?’
Now, admittedly, if attractiveness is a purely positional good, then this would make sense. But I don’t think this is the case.
Similarly, I’ve heard the idea that universities giving female students advice on personal safety is evil, because in a perfect world no-one would commit violent crime. The fact that we don’t live in a perfect world does not seem to have occurred to them.
I don’t see a reason not to leave them behind, all else equal.
To a large extent I already have, moving away from them a few years ago. Not that I don’t enjoy their company, but they are rather entropic people.
A second possibility is simply adopting a strong mental attitude of independence. Since reading about cogsci and how the mind automatically accepts everything it hears without making a concious effort to question its veracity, I’ve begun consciously marking opinions I hear as “someone else’s opinion”.
I think we can find better peer groups which engender habits of expressing a desire for self-improvement better, and peer groups which won’t punish individuals when desires are expressed.
Well, this is strongly characteristic of LW. I have attended a meetup where we did assertiveness training, which I would think is far more helpful than advice about ‘just be yourself’.
I wonder what other ways there are to find more positive peer groups? Offline, I have found martial arts people (or, other sports people) are a good start. Online, I wonder if other groups similar to LW have organised meatspace meetups—I used to lurk around many H+ organisations, but not for a while.
I looked at r/malefashionadvice, and it seems a little too ‘what is in this season’. I’d rather have clothes that are timeless, rather then having to reappraise my wardrobe every year. Still, I think this:
becoming “a gentleman” rather than a “pick-up artist”
Seems a good idea.
It’s an unfortunate trade-off for bad credence calibration. I’m not sure it’s a trade-off worth undoing, though.
People have raised the possibility of doublethink wrt this sort of thing—simultaneously believing something with absolute certainty for the sake of social confidence or psychosomatic effects, while also having accurate, calibrated beliefs where necessary. I wonder if anyone has actually got that to work.
becoming “a gentleman” rather than a “pick-up artist”
Seems a good idea.
Be careful. A lot of common missteps in personal presentation, especially in geek communities, come from failed attempts to look gentlemanly; the “m’lady” stereotype of Reddit fame is an extreme example, of course, but the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper. I’m only casually familiar with r/malefashionadvice, but I recall its house style being described somewhere as “dressing like a grownup”, which seems like a better objective to start with.
Apparently the problem is that the “m’lady” stereotype is wearing a fedora with a t-shirt, is overweight and is just essentially low-status. A gentleman wearing a suit with some confidence is a different matter.
Now I want to know how to dress as a badass gentleman...
Sure, that’s the stereotype. But the problem is actually that the signaling model is wrong. Our stereotype wants to associate himself with some concept, so he throws on an item that he associates with that concept: a pinstripe fedora if he likes Thirties mobsters, let’s say, or a leather trench if he’s seen The Matrix one too many times. It’s out of context, it clashes, and the outfit ends up looking worse than the sum of its parts (and being overweight and poorly groomed never helps).
The principle is easy to state: clothes should work in context, including the context of your body. But the point is that those cues are not obvious. There’s a whole visual language that needs to be learned before you can reliably present yourself as e.g. gentlemanly, and keeping a laser focus on whatever stereotype you feel like projecting actually isn’t the most efficient way to get there. Better to start with the basics.
I think how to “dress for success” differs radically between different subcultures. In some you want to look like you stepped out of a fashion ad, in others it’s all about worn jeans and tshirts, in yet others fake fur and el-wire rule...
I wonder, in these circles, do women find a bushy beard attractive? Or do they not have a choice of partner? Or do they make a choice based on some other criteria?
Then there’s the problem that confidence is key. You need to be 110% confident of everything you say, and to truly believe this, you need to internalise it.
The average 16 year old doesn’t have high self confidence. That doesn’t mean that he won’t get laid.
It does. When I try to remember my high school class, finding a girlfriend was by far the hardest problem most boys faced. About 75% suffered from this problem. Getting into a university or not flunking the coming test on the natural logarithm or whatever other challenges we faced, they were easier.
It is sort of hard to tell exactly why. Lack of confidence was surely part of the story, but on a more broader sense, relationships are something adults have and we were stuck in half-childhood.
The guys who managed to find a GF looked and acted like young adults already at 16. Part of it is biological—some of them were already shaving daily even though they weren’t even 18. Puberty ran its full course on them, testosterone working fully. But even the guys who didn’t, and yet were able to find girlfriends, they had this adult demeanor already. For example and uncle could ask them to help in repairing a car and they would approach it like an adult, cautiously, competently and efficiently. Now the guys who were unable to find a GF approached it like a child. Mamaaaah I don’t want this I want to go back to playing videogames, well I guess if I have to do it I will half-ass the tools with one hand and play on the Nintendo with the other, maybe they’ll let me go then, that kind of attitude.
Growing up is seriously hard when people lack the kind of challenges that would make them, and this is why it is extremely hard for many young men to get laid.
Mamaaaah I don’t want this I want to go back to playing videogames
The person who spends their time playing video games instead of going to parties where people get drunk is less likely to be hookup even if he’s confident.
I think when I discovered body building at 17 it helped. Also, being tall. I went to discotheques, dance clubs, and saw there is a fairly uniform look there, hair gel, muscle t-shirts of Replay or Diesel brand etc. it was easy to fit in and later on when I made friends in the university a guy who also went to these clubs and he had a large circle of friends, often 20 people going to a disco together and there getting introduced to another 20, it was helpful because these circles contained women, and once a guy was part of the circle and they liked the looks, the muscles, the designer clothes “uniform” they sent clear indicators of interest. Outside the circle it was harder as they would not send IOIs to completely stranger people, out of fear I guess. At any rate, working on the looks and finding this large circle was very helpful. Nevertheless they did not help at all in the far harder task of actually keeping the newfound girlfriends. The day after, when we sobered up and we got into everyday life, not the glamour of the dance club, they realized I am an unmasculine, childish, timid nerd. So I lost them soon thereafter. Things did not get much better until my thirties when the women who are not married start having more realistic expectations.
If I can go one level above your question, for at least a generation, maybe more*, most young people aren’t getting into frequent sexual relationships. Scott Alexander explains here, in one of the most upvoted comments of all time, why it seems most people, whenever they are or were young, seemed to know a few people who had lots of sex, but weren’t or aren’t themselves having lots of sex. His model seems to hold for heterosexual men and women, which is most people anyway. Essentially, for both men and women, there is a negative skew for sexiness, i.e., which people are most sexually attractive and/or having the most sex. So, it is only the sexiest men and sexiest women having sex with each other often, and the sexiest men and women mostly don’t have sex with people who are less than the sexiest. People who are in between the average and the sexiest may have a moderate amount of sex, but still far less than the sexiest people. Men and women of around average sexiness are having sex infrequently, or not at all. This doesn’t mean “average” levels of sexiness are utterly unsexy. For example, as a heterosexual man, I perceive most women as moderately attractive, and it’s only the rare exception of a woman who proves the rule that people are generally attractive, that is the woman I find utterly unattractive, or ugly. I might be generalizing from my own experience too much, though. Assuming most heterosexual men find most heterosexual women “attractive-ish”, and visa-versa, it’s interesting they’re not having sex with each other.
Anyway, the function of how much sex a person has based on whatever qualities count as attractive seems more like a quadratic function than a linear one. The failure of most of us not in the top tiers of sexiness to have sex is a coordination problem. Their are other factors, which I think are covered in my original post.
*I think as North American culture was more sexually conservative in previous generations, people were just having less sex. I’m not sure about this. I’ve watched some historical documentaries pointing out how the early twentieth century and late nineteenth century people were less puritanical than modern pop culture would have us belief. It’s not like in all places with all people sex outside of marriage, in the year 1920 or 1890, was utterly taboo. There are ebbs and flows in how sexually liberal or conservative North America has been going back at least a century. I figure the further you go back in time, though, the more sexually conservative our culture was on average.
My first thought is that the lack of strategic approach isn’t surprising—there are tons of instances in which people are extremely unstrategic, and this doesn’t seem to be too particularly unstrategic.
My second thought is that this is an area in which it’s particularly easy to procrastinate. Because initiation is hard and scary (to most people).
A lot of Millennials have moved back in with their parents (boomerang generation). Especially for men, this makes any kind of romantic life very difficult. Mostly I think many Millennials have serious anxiety/social dysfunction and a bad case of Peter Pan Syndrome. For example, cultural favorites of Millennials include superhero/comic book movies and My Little Pony.
I’m currently twenty-two years old. Over the last two weeks, I’ve discussed with a couple friends that among the “millenial” generation, i.e., people currently under the age of thirty-five, people profess having goals for some kind of romantic relationships, but they don’t act in a way which will let them achieve those goals. Whether they:
are lonely and want companionship,
want to stay single, but have more sex,
want a monogamous but casual relationship,
want a more committed and serious monogamous relationship,
want to find someone to one day marry and have children with,
want to find someone to love and love them to become happy, or happier,
want romance for any other usual reason,
it seems the proportion of young people who are and stay single is greater than I would expect. I don’t just mean how the fastest-growing household configuration since the 1980s (in the United States) has been single adults. I mean how most of my friends profess a preference for having some romantic relationship in their life, yet most of my single friends stay single, and don’t appear to be dating much or doing something else to correct this. Maybe popular culture exerts a normative social influence which favors people in relationships over single people, and so young single people feel pressured to signal a preference for being in a relationship. However, I can’t determine who is just professing fake preferences to signal. It still seems single people aren’t seeking or successfully finding relationships at a rate which corresponds well to genuine preferences for a relationship. Why aren’t single people trying harder to find relationships?
One answer could be “dating and romance are hard, especially for young people”. If that’s vaguely true, it doesn’t satisfy my curiosity. I think it has in large part to do with the extended adolesence of people born after, e.g., 1980. More committed relationships, higher frequency of dating, and/or marriage seem to people around my age something we’re supposed to do more when we’re “real adults”. That happens some time after you get a “real job”. Or after you complete a degree. Or after the age of twenty-five. Something like that.
It also seems dependent upon changes in dating culture in North America. I’m aware there are more hookups and one-night stands among young adults of the current generation than there was for prior generations. In terms of who one settles down with, or marries, people get married at greater ages. I don’t know if it’s because we young adults are pickier with whom we choose for long-term relationships, or what. This is where I don’t know exactly what’s going on, so I could use your help. If you (think you) can explain what’s going on, please share.
Anyway, what I’ve concluded so far is that, as someone who doesn’t date very much, a sensible strategy would be to date more often and more early to satisfy relationship goals. That is, while many of my generation have similar goals and expectations for dating, relationships and/or marriage compared to previous generations, the styles and culture of such in North America are very different. If young adults wait until their mid-thirties before they start fulfilling long-term relationship goals, it might take longer than they expect, and by that point seeking relationships may cut into time developing other valuable aspects of one’s life, such as career. Dating earlier and more frequently allows one to discover what one initially wants in a partner, how to navigate the dating pool and social scenes comfortably, adapt to potential setbacks and heartbreak, and mature.
Now, there are lots of young adults in graduate school, or going through a period of time when prioritizing a romantic relationship wouldn’t allow the time and attention to fulfill more immediately important goals. During the period(s) of life when you have downtime, if busy young adults aren’t satisfied with being single, I think it makes sense for us to try dating and relationships more, because there may not be as much time and opportunity as we hope later in life. What do you think of this model/strategy?
I have something sort of a potential explanation to it, but it is difficult to formulate it in a way that it will be not misunderstood in the wrong way. Please everybody try to take this post with maximal charity and benefit of doubt.
History tends to swing from one extreme to another, as people tend to OVERreact to the problems they see.
Given that it is an OVERreaction, they are usually wrong, but it also points out a problem. You can diagnose the original problems from the overreactions to them.
These overreactions are sometimes exaggerated only in “quantity”, in which case a more moderate version of them would be okay, or they often get the direction completely wrong, still they point out how something is a problem and the issues they raise often have SOME truth to them.
For example, Communism/Bolshevism was a huge OVERreaction to the condition of workers under capitalism, it was not a good solution at all, and even making it more moderate (a moderate, limited dictatorship of people who call themselves proletarians?) would not help much, but it pointed out a problem and now we have better solutions to that problem, such as unions striking when they want a wage raise or something. Or some laws like minimum wages.
In the same vein The Red Pill / Manosphere is an OVERreaction to a problem, yes it is wrong, both it tone and content, misogynistic and so on, misrepresenting history etc. wrong in both quantity and direction, yet it DOES point out a problem, and some ideas when saner and kinder people work them over and remove the jaded or hateful elements of them, are actually useful.
Essentially this is the problem:
Dating is hard for young straight men, not for everybody. Few gays complain, and of women only seriously overweight ones complain and even that is changing, there is more fat acceptance now. And being a straight male 35+ is far easier, have some achievement and don’t be fat and you almost see women 32+ throwing themselves at you.
One issue is that a lot of straight young men lack the experiences that would turn them into, well, it depends on your point of view, but you could say: masculine men, or you could say: grown-ups, adults. Being a grown-up or being masculine / manly is NOT the same, but they have a common opposite: a child, a boy is NEITHER. And that is what we have, many young men stay children because their formative experiences are school and videogames, which is not formative at all in this sense. They lack a lot of things, like challenges that require grown-up self-responsibility, or dangerous feeling things that would make them build courage and confidence.
SOME, not all, some women are indeed hypergamous. And SOME, not all, men are polygamous. This basically means that instead of having 100% attention and dedication from one man of lower attractiveness, they rather have 25% of a very attractive man. Although the “spinning plates, soft harems” the RPers speak about are probably exaggerated bullshit, I do see highly attractive men have really fast series of hookups and breakups, lots of fast and short mini-relationships that in practice end up with multiple women “orbiting” one man. (I am NOT talking about real, serious “poly” people, they are still a minority, I am talking about people who think they are monogamous, just they end up starting and ending three relationships during one month.)
This distorts the dating “market”. As a very broad model, you have the top 50% women with the top 25% men, you have the next 25% of women and next 25% of men having the usual kinds of monogamous relationships, and you have the bottom 50% of men trying to chase the bottom 25% of women, and that bottom 25% is, not to be too offensive, but these days tends to be… “big”. Of course the bottom 50% of men are often not a big catch either, videogaming man-boys without any confidence or adult responsibility. At any rate, the bottom 50% men often give up as they don’t think having to compete for the “big” girls 2:1 is better than porn (and pot: a powerful combination), and the “big” girls often seek refuge in cats and sugar too.
4/B) To give you a good example how inequal is the dating market: when people describe sexual relationships as “I don’t know, we just got drunk and it happened”, very roughly this happened with 80% women and 40% men, at best. At least half the guys are not attractive enough to “just happen”, many of them won’t even get to the point where it could, as not getting drunk with women or not going out at all. “Just happened” is a narrative of women and handsome / attractive / grown-up / masculine / confident men, it is not a universal human one and for the bottom 50% of men it looks like something happening from a sci-fi.
5/A). There is another issue. RPers tend to blame feminism, I guess it is better to blame the inbalanced social adaptation to feminism, but basically the bottom 50% of guys think “well, I am not much as a man, but I can get an engineering degree, hold down a job, make money and could support a family, does that count for something?” and the answer is today “nothing AT ALL” because now almost every woman can make enough money. Even when they complain about making 77% of what men make or some similar figure, in a first-world society that is still enough to live comfortably without children. And now women rarely want children before 32. In the past, a man could be unattractive but being a breadwinner helped him a bit in finding a mate, now it is not the case. Now a degree in software engineering may still increase a mans chances in India, but not in the US, Canada or Germany.
5/B) The point is here, that since women can make a living on their own, men should probably adapt into being less of a worker bee and more focusing on his attractiveness. Yet it is far harder for the bottom 50% of men than just getting a software engineering degree and working. Besides, his parents may still push him towards this breadwinner role. And frankly this all sometimes feels “unnatural” probably because we are trying to undo thousands of years of historical adaptation to social roles, so it is learning a really uncharted terrain here. We don’t have much historical experience in how to make all men attractive to women of a similar income and social status. Formerly it was not really needed. About half the men figure it out sooner or later, but the other half does not.
Maybe things get easier, if feminism, if ever, fully wins 100%. Currently it is totally confusing because it won in some things but not in some other things. Women can now do almost everything men can, yet it seems the most attractive guys are still the ones conforming more or less to traditional concepts like being strong, tall, brave, unfazed / no-fucks-given, and so on.
One good example in how the current kind of feminism-won-halfway-not-fully makes things confusing. Sheryl Sandberg, a highly powerful and successful woman, really a feminist role model, saying “When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them.” So basically she is saying that although not for marriage, for dating still the old, pre-feminist male archetypes, the traditional masculine archetypes are ideal! Sheryl is a feminist at work/career but not at dating, although at marriage probably yet again! Of course it confuses a young man who has no idea how to be attractive anymore! Be her bad cool crazy commitment phobic (i.e. treating women as sex objects only) boy which is an old-fashioned, 1950′s on a motorbike, pre-feminist and borderline misogynistic or be marriagable nice guy in which case wait until 35 or so?
RP is wrong, but it is pointing us towards real actual problems that are begging for a better explanation and solution.
We really need some statistics, because I’m not certain this is actually a real trend. At one point in time, 17 women reproduced for every one man. In more recent history it’s 4 to 5 women for every man, as a global average (I don’t know what they define “recent history” as though.)
That paper doesn’t quite imply what you think.
What’s your evidence that RP is in fact wrong?
What do you mean by “misogynistic”? The word is commonly used to mean believing that there are significant differences between men and women. If you mean something else by this word feel free to explain it.
What do you mean by feminism 100% wins? Do you mean human nature will change? And if so to what?
This is highly debated how much human nature is hardcoded in this regard. The No 1. feature of human nature is the ability to adapt to wildly different circumstances. For example there is absolutely no such thing as an ancestral or paleolithical diet. Human nature is tribal, we still manage to have nations and supranational organizations somehow. Once could just as easily argue every political organization above kinship based tribes is against human nature. Yet we manage to do it… just with some unintended consequences (like tribalism rearing its head in politics, kicked out the door, it comes back the window).
My “gut instinct” is on the middle way: we can change genders, but with many unintended consequences. (For example, once consequence that is more or less visible already: when people become more unisex, sexual tension drops as it is generated by difference. One of my ugliest (thankfully unproven, conditional) beliefs is that every passionate sex is essentially BDSM, and easing up dominance/submission kills truly burning desire. Dropping birthrates may be another one.)
I think it is meant not simply about differences, but when 1) differences are used to justify social customs that reduce the autonomy / choices of people, primarily women 2) differences of the kind that tend to assign lower status to women. So when differences are value-laden in this way, and not purely factual. I think this is the most accepted usage.
However in the case of RP it is not even the usual meaning but something far worse. Really, really ugly lingo, not even “politically offensive” but insulting in that basic human pre-feminism sense, violating every rule of keeping a civil tongue in one’s head. For example blog.jim.com says most modern women are “psychotic whores”. This is not simply un-PC, it was a huge insult far before PC or feminism was invented, 1950 or whatever date you pick. It is not simply un-feminist or anti-feminist lingo, it is the lingo of louts who grew up in the gutter. It is simply incredibly un-classy.
First of all, statements can be right or wrong. Subcultures never. I think I should write an article about it, but subcultures are largely about like-minded people banding together, often held together by values and moods and personality types but not facts. They are simply beyond right or wrong: you can say that the most important statements a subculture believes are right or wrong, but the subculture as such cannot be reduced to its most important statements, because it is people. Prove them all wrong, and the very same people will band together in a different subculture that has different statements, but the same mood affiliation, the same mindset. Prove them all right, and you can still say the personality, mindset or values are still all horrible or simply bad, harmful. For example, I am an atheist and generally disagree with the major things Catholics believe in, yet I tend to generally like them as a people, it seems our mindset and mood is at some level similar (“Chestertonesque”). I like their subculture and disagree with their statements. It can also happen the other way around. So, context is everything.
The second issue is that good luck about trying to separating facts from values in the fields that are not natural science but more like human, social concerns. For example, Marxists claim to have an entirely factual analysis of how the engine of capitalism works, but it is full with so much value-laden, mood-laden terms, that you cannot really separate the factual proposition from a general value/mood of them disliking hierarchical modes of production.
I think the strategic aspect of RP is not bad, they are the kind of things a man stumbles upon by experience anyway, such as, there are interactions where mock agreement and humorous amplification are appropriate answers. If a girl in a bar would ask me to hold her purse I would probably parade around with it in a super gay way and good laughs would be had. The issue is the context, the values, the mood. For example, the interactions where this kind of answer is appropriate are called “shit tests” and they get referred to as “mercilessly swat down the shit tests”. So you see a general mood of hostility, aggressivity, negativity. And it is really difficult to separate the context from the statements.
So the issue is not that some statements are wrong. They are embedded in a very negative mood/value context.
One useful way to look at it is to say the issue is that RP guys were in some significant sense screwed up BEFORE swallowing the pill. So it is not the pill that is wrong as such, it is the kind of people it attracts. Because the same pill could be embedded in a very different mood and context, one of positivity, cooperation, friendliness and mutual respect.
Also the context I am talking about is actually just one example of a more general category of negative contexts. Similar negative contexts are: The Gervais Principle, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Social Darwinism, Objectivism. Generally ideas that cash out to saying life is all about brutal competition where winners take all and losers get screwed and generally downplaying the role positive social connections, alliances, support networks play in life outcomes, which generally come from “nice” behavior.
These negative contexts are what I called “dark romance” in a former conversation. It is the assumption that we live in a dog eat dog world, where the law of the jungle rules because the assumptions feels so… badass. Well, such things happen indeed. But on the other hand, it is incredibly handy and useful to be “nice” and be the kind of person others like to cooperate with or support. A truly smart sociopathic, evil Machiavelli would not try to project this jaded tough guy image but would be a super mellow nice person, the most agreeable person around, liked by everybody… and in the rare, really rare occasions when it worths it, he would backstab them. But if he is evil only for the sake of actual gain and not for the sake of evil being awesome and badass and darkly romantic… then such occasions are exceedingly rare.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Clearly you’re not saying that our antcectors did not eat. Are you saying that humans have genetically adapted to different diets since the paleolithic? That still leaves the concept of ancestral diet as important. Are you saying any given human will be just as healthy on any diet? That’s clearly false.
By adapting the larger organizations to human nature, yes.
This suggests your suffering from the arugment to mederation fallacy.
Can we? It’s possible for say men, to cut of their peneses and declare themselves women. (And in the west expect society to declare that they have always been women). However, in my experience the behvior of m-to-f trannies makes more sense if I model them as men who decided to “become women” as part of the especially male tendency to do crazy things.
Does it matter of said customs are rational (say in the sense of leading to better outcomes)?
Yes and in the 1950s a woman who behaved the way a typical women does today (at least in the west, I hear it’s not quite as bad in eastern Europe) would be considered much worse then simply un-classy and loutish. And yes “psychotic whore” sounds about right for what they would of thought of that type of woman.
Yes it is. At least it is possible to isolate the factual analysis enough to see that it is false.
Um, are you actually familiar with the philosophies you listed or are you going by the popular caricatures? Of the ones I’m familiar with, this is a rather bad characterization of Machiavelli and an absolute horrible characterization of Objectivism.
No, saying that even in the paleolithic they were adapted to wildly different diets, because they were intelligent and they could make the most of whatever grew near them. http://hells-ditch.com/2012/08/archaeologists-officially-declare-collective-sigh-over-paleo-diet/ If they found wild rice, that was okay. If they found whale blubber, that was also OK.
And I think this is a good example. The most typically human trait is flexibility because that is what intelligence generates.
In the specific case when something is argued to be impossible, taking a middle way seems sensible: almost everything is possible, just often you have to throw the equivalent of a nuke on it, and then you will get all kinds of unwanted consequences.
Come on, you are smarter than that, you know the difference between biological sex and social gender. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_sworn_virgins
Really I bet this is not new to you, you just pretend you have never heard the difference…
I find it far too optimistic but I figure neither of us has evidence here.
Popular versions, yes, but they are not caricatures simply—more like what people actually believe in. Popularity matters. To give you a reverse example, some people argue the Soviets were never properly, really Communists or Marxist. This means, they did not really believe what some books said. Books matter. But actual history, what people actually do, often matters more. Soviet Communism was the kind of Communism that mattered, because this had nukes and the obscure kind of Communism that had only some books and debating groups mattered far less. The same thing with the ones I mentioned—they were far smarter than this, but based on them there is a popular view of a simplified “dog eat dog” world where everything is competition and winners take all and losers suck and cooperation does not worth for anything.
This jaded view was already disproved by Plato. Justice and efficiency go hand in hand and there is rarely lasting success without a lot of cooperation and fairness.
I often think the jaded views on the right horseshoe into the oppression-oriented views on the left quite nicely, the difference is largely about how to evaluate the same facts and how changable it is, but both extremes would say the world as we know it so far is usually pretty ugly. I think it is not, we are just under the spell of a huge yellow journalism bias. When someone murders their spouse, that is on TV evening news. When people cook their spouse their favorite food or take them to their favorite restaurant, that is not. Reporting is biased towards the negative, largely because it is biased towards the unusual, and it is far, far harder to do something unusually good than unusually bad. Unusually bad deeds are comparatively easy, destroying is easier than building, because things are on the whole pretty fragile. So most unusual i.e. reporting worthy things are bad. However, most usual things are good. Correct for this bias and you find that most human efforts were usually into cooperating and building and were generally constructive. For every one case where someone burned someone for witchcraft (unusual and bad move) there are a hundreds of cases where he just paid a decent price to the witch for an anti-coughing tea (usual and good, mutually beneficial exchange) and so on. Just this did not get reported on. Too usual.
So you’re claiming that any human will be just as healthy on any diet?
So you’re arguing that the Albanian sworn virgins were (socially) men? The very fact that they were called “virgins”, thus appealing to the ideal of female virginity, should give you a clue. I thought you were smarter than that.
Depends on which people. What the followers of the philosophies believe matters, what most people believe about the followers, not so much.
I’m not sure who you think your arguing against here. It certainly isn’t (most of) the philosophies you listed.
No, and building straw mans like that is not useful at all. I am just claiming most human groups learned to be healthy on almost any nutrients their environment managed to offer. I.e. flexibility, adaptation ability, due to intelligence.
Yes, the article is very clear about that. What is your point really? There is nothing particularly magic or essential about social roles, although it is clear that hormones play a role in being more suitable or less suitable for them.
That was rude to jump right to without further justification.
Tangentially, how much is it a problem of “dating”, and how much a problem of “dating with sane people”, when the pool of sane people is already small?
When I was younger, I wanted to have a romantic relationship with a person whom I would perceive as intellectually equal (plus or minus the LessWrong level). Since I barely knew such people… not much luck.
If I could send a message in time back to myself, it would be: “It will take decades until you find someone you can have meaningful conversation with. Meanwhile, relax, and try to fuck any nice body, but don’t get attached. Otherwise you will later regret the wasted time.” The only problem is, my younger self would be horrified to hear such advice.
I feel the same way on “dating with sane people”. I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this.
Seems to me that in a relationship people spend much more time talking than having sex. Thus, even if the sex is great, if talking is painful, the relationship as a whole sucks.
And that’s just idle talk… imagine having to solve real problems, or even owning property together, or having children. All the stupid stuff you read about online, happening at your own home.
Before LW, I didn’t know any “sane” community. I did know a few “sane” individuals. But they didn’t have the explicit concept of “sanity”; I was not able to ask them “Where can I find more people like you?” in a way that would make them understand what exactly I wanted. For example, if they had a hobby, they would recommend me other people having the same hobby, but those other people wouldn’t be “sane”. In other words, there wasn’t a place to meet new “sane” people.
If I could be 20 years old again now, my step 1 for a serious relation would be “go to all possible LW meetups”, and the step 2 would probably be starting my own rationalist blog, in hope of attracting attention of someone who doesn’t go to LW meetups (yet). In reality, I already do have a girlfriend, and she helps me organize local LW meetups. I met her completely randomly, and it took me a few decades to have such lucky random event. I obviously can’t recommend that as a strategy.
Actually, until a few years ago I didn’t even have a hope of ever dating a sane person. Probably not even the concept of sanity; only a vague idea of “someone like me”. But that only creates an infinite recursion: where should I go to meet “people like me”, if the problem in the first place is that I don’t know where to go? Where is my Schelling point? Even today, I cannot give a better answer than “a LW community”. (But I was not strong enough to create one. Which is one of the reasons I deeply admire Eliezer.)
Cool, thank you! I can really relate to what you describe, especially the “not knowing any sane people” part.
What are your thoughts on relationships in general? Let me explain—in brief, I agree with the idea that it’s “a form of socially acceptable insanity” (sort of). To obsess and commit to one thing so much seems crazy to me. But not really; it makes people happy and you don’t (always) have to sacrifice too much. So the cost-benefit does seem worth it.
Obsession is nature’s way of making cooperation more resistant to random disruptive events.
I think an important skill in relationships is to be able to see a long-term perspective even when you are in a bad moment. Don’t ruin a mostly great relationship, just because today is the exceptional day that sucks. It can be easy to start a downward spiral. Forgiving is a way to play “tit for tat” in a noisy environment. The simplest hack to make people forgive is to make them blind towards the mistakes. (Which again comes with its own problems, because evolution is so short-sighted. Some people are too blind; some people forgive too much.)
Costly signalling of cooperation is important in situations where there is so much at stake, such as raising children. I am rather conservative about relationships because… well, if I simplify it a lot, conservatism at its core is all about costly signalling.
Sorry, I’m rambling, because of lack of sleep. So I’ll stop now.
That’s very interesting, I never thought of it like that before.
No need to apologize—If you want to keep rambling, I’ll be listening.
How do you suggest people actually implement this ‘just date more’?
Well, if people agree with me, but dating more is easier said than done, here are some pointers from LessWrong in particular.
In a more general sense, do I think the problem posed in my thinking would be solved if people only tried dating more? Maybe people won’t turn out happier if they just start dating more. I notice for the link I posted, the original question wasn’t just how to start dating, but how to maintain long-term relationships. Maybe dating and relationships are harder now than in the past, so much harder that even the chance of starting a happy relationship is low enough it doesn’t warrant the effort modern dating demands.
Compared to previous generations, young adults today have more emphasis put on careers for them. Also, the idea of a circle of friends is one which is bigger, and more closely knit, than it was before, when our parents or grandparents at our age would have relied on an (extended) family living in a single household. Since less emphasis is placed on the family unit relative to other types of relationships, and there is less pressure to start a family relative to building a career, dating, relationships and marriage might seem less valuable and less incentivized. More young adults might end up with a preference for being single, and that could be okay. If someone really still wants a relationship, or something resulting from that, I think the tactic I proposed still makes sense.
Most of my friends and acquaintances are committed to long-term relationships (mid-late 20s age group). I’ve had trouble in this area due to certain personal reasons, but my personal observations lead me to believe that I’m atypical in this regard.
It’s possible they just don’t know what they’re doing or are paralyzed by anxiety when it comes to romance.
Yeah, I’ve too much underrated observations like this in building my model above. Looking around, at age twenty-two, I notice most of my friends are still single, maybe 40% of them at most have some kind of relationship in any given month, but those relationships aren’t stable over the long-term. I thought my model still might hold because I notice other people in my social circle at or around thirty are single, too. However, single people could select themselves to hang out with other single people. People closer to thirty than twenty who are single may be unusual in that they’re more likely to hang out with people a few years younger than them, who are more likely to be single than not. So, the only young adults near 30 I’m observing are the ones who are hanging out with younger folk closer to 20 or 25.
I fell prey to confirmation bias here. I had no observations of social circles which are predominantly 25-35, rather than 20-30, which might be lousy with long-term relationships. Maybe this is happening at fondue parties or something, which I and my friends never hear about now, but will be doing in five to ten years. Thanks for the data point(s)! I think I was wrong before, and I think I know why!
Keep in mind that people with good social skills tend to have more friends, so your selector maybe biased in that regard.
Fair point. I’m less likely to encounter people who sit home all day and less likely to socialize with people who aren’t social. That would skew my observations somewhat.
How do young people get into sexual relationships, any way? I had literally no experience with this in my youth, and not because I spent decades in prison starting around the age of 20 or anything like that. The women I knew as a young man walked around me as a physical object because they couldn’t walk through me, but in general they treated me as socially invisible.
I think in general ‘it just happens’, which generally means alcohol.
That happens with most women and handsome men, but not all men. A better question is how can men shape up their looks so that it can happen to them. E.g. clothes, muscles, also demeanour, behavior etc.
However attractive, well dressed, confidant you are, you still need to know how to actually approach someone.
A problem is that any attempt to improve attractiveness will lead some people to declare that you are evil or otherwise defective. Its not just PUA stuff, this is far more general: if a guy lifts, that makes him a ‘dickhead’ according to members of my peer group, while a woman not shaving her armpits makes her strong & empowered (does a man not shaving his face make him empowered?). Conversely, some people believe that not taking care of your appearance makes you a slob.
Then there’s the problem that confidence is key. You need to be 110% confident of everything you say, and to truly believe this, you need to internalise it. The problem is then that it spills over into other aspects of life, and you become very badly credence calibrated, potentially leading to serious mistakes because you can’t admit that you might be wrong. When you are in a group containing more than one ‘alpha male’ it becomes impossible to get anything done, even something as simple as choosing a pub to go to, because one alpha male decides to go to one pub, the other decides to go to a different pub, and because they are alpha, they don’t ask anyone else what they want, and so everyone ends up at a different pub.
In fact, its possible that LW rationality is training people to have bad social skills. “How to change your mind” might just be how to look like a weak-willed person who won’t stick to their guns, or if you change your mind about politics, it makes you a traitor.
But if you have too little confidence, you can get stuck in a loop where:
low confidence → little romantic success → low confidence → little romantic success …
I suggest that you need a better peer group. I don’t know what your options are—this might be worth discussing—but the time you’re spending with your current peer group is time that isn’t available for spending with a better bunch of people.
Thanks for your advice.
Boring personal details:
Actually, I moved away from them a few years ago for various reasons (not feeling on the same wavelength, wanting there to be more to life than alcohol & drugs...), so I don’t spend that much time with them, although there are a few of them I want to stay in contact with, friends who see me as practically family.
I still refer to them as my peer group, because I haven’t really made a new friendship group that lasted. I haven’t really had a social life for over a year, and its quite tranquil in a way. I was starting to get stuck in cycles of social anxiety and I hope this solitude has broken the cycle and given me time to think objectively. For instance, I’ve realised just how many people were attracted to me, but I was not aware of at the time due to a lack of social/romantic confidence and an inability to pick up on any even remotely subtle hint.
When I next move to a new city, I’m going to meet people who have similar interests—for instance at a boardgames club has worked well in the past. And I’m going to display the same level of social confidence as the intellectual confidence I already have, because vicious cycles can run backwards too.
Screw them.
To whom? Screw them.
You can’t please everyone and trying to is a waste of far more than just time.
Yes, but it is pissing against the wind of a huge part of human biology where status withing the tribe is all-important. Don’t expect this to be easy.
You worry about that all-important status when you fear losing it.
Want to win? Then focus on winning, not on not-losing. You need to if you want to be seen as high-status, anyway. Fear of loss is low-status, so is worrying about what others think.
Navigate the minefield, sure. But do it from a position of strength, not of weakness.
Of course. There are two relevant terms that I learned in another language, one way to translate them would be to “seek success” or “avoid failure”. Seeking success is pursuing your dream job, avoiding failure is fearing you will not be able to pay bills so accepting any job. Seeking success is far better, but if you are not blessed with sky high testosterone and are thus timid and not driven, you cannot really do much more than avoiding failure. It is not exactly a choice you can make, it is more about what you are. Of course you can try to slowly change what you are i.e. work on developing courage. Wanting to win is in itself a keyword used by the success oriented, who believe they can be / can do better than others. The failure-avoidant want to not prove worse than others, and thus seek to lose, not win. It takes a really lot of working on courage to go from one to another and it is not clear what methods develop this kind of courage best.
Maybe this (courage or self-confidence methods) would deserve a top level.
I applaud this attitude, and I think the first step should be for people to get enough self-confidence to say “screw them”!
Where will the self-confidence come from? I prefer the Nike slogan: “Just do it.”
If I was young again, I would probably try to hang with either multiple different peer groups or none at (I was terrible at it anyway). But these guys sound like a very bad influence for anyone trying to improve dating skills. I also find it really surprising how they are using media language. “Strong and empowered” is a magazine headline. It is media-talk, almost like advertisement-talk, only one step less artificial than politician-talk. 20 years ago in my peer group anything that sounded like a magazine headline was repeated only ironically / cynically. Or even 10 years ago. Anyone remembers “the coalition of the willing?” Yeah, no normal person ever repeated that without a sneer. And now I see young people talk like popular magazine headlines. Weird. Where is the bravely contrarian counter-signalling? :)
I’m not sure anyone actually verbally said “Strong and empowered”, this would have been in a clickbait article someone shared on facebook.
… and then I became enlightened.
Hypothesis: the lack of cynicism in today’s young is due to much of their social life being done on Facebook and other social media, and in this type of medium it is a common, easy and obvious thing to do to share articles.
I don’t think in 1990 anyone brought me a printed paper mag and asked me to read this article. A handful of times, when it was something truly revolutionary and special, but anything even remotely mainstream not. We did not share our media consumption much. I may have been reading the same heavy metal mag as others, but we rarely discusessed it beyond “Seen that interview with Megadeth?” “Yeah, badass.”
It is through article sharing and shared, communal media consumption how the Facebook generation lost its cynicism against official media headline ideas.
Are younger people less cynical? I honestly don’t know, and I’m curious about your evidence.
My impression is that used to be a lot less debunking around, not that all of the debunking is accurate, either. Who’s reading all those “7 Things You’re Entirely Wrong About” articles from Cracked?
I understand I am dangerously close to a fully general argument now :) But I think there is a lot of debunking going on because the default stance seems to be to believe the mainstream media, and I think 20 years ago the default stance was to be skeptical about it.
How to put it… I would be really surprised if a friend of mine offered a debunking of the abs trainer sold in TV shop because we are not supposed to believe it at all, that is not the default stance… “everybody” understands it is mainly about scamming suckers. And roughly the same about the media in general.
You need a better peer group.
#NotAllPeerGroups.
Seriously, though, I feel for you being in a peer group which could be better at encouraging fellow men while still respecting women, rather than hitting some failure mode because of signaling. I know you wrote only some* people will declare you evil or otherwise defective, but I don’t see a reason not to leave them behind, all else equal. John Salvatier is a man I’m acquainted with, a member of this peer group who writes about improving attractiveness (not just sexual attractiveness, but general attractiveness based on fashion. He doesn’t seem the sort who anyone I know accuses of being evil or otherwise defective. He hangs out on r/malefashionadvice, which seems to have an air of being more about becoming “a gentleman” rather than a “pick-up artist”. Whether it’s women or other men who are calling each other ‘dickheads’, I think we can find better peer groups which engender habits of expressing a desire for self-improvement better, and peer groups which won’t punish individuals when desires are expressed.
I agree that’s very possible. It’s an unfortunate trade-off for bad credence calibration. I’m not sure it’s a trade-off worth undoing, though.
*I’m inferring from your comment you’re a man, but pardon me if I’m assuming too much.
I don’t necessarily think that social confidence and credence should be conflated to the extent that a few replies in this thread of posts have conflated them by use of the word “confidence” to refer to both concepts. It is possible to have confident body language, be an active participant in conversations, and even call others out on their overconfidence while still being a well-calibrated individual.
I think the underlying reason for “improving attractiveness is evil” is largely a mixture of egalitarianism and a disconnect from reality. The idea is:
‘I want to believe that everyone is attractive, therefore anyone who tries to become more attractive is evil. Do they think they’re better than us?’
Now, admittedly, if attractiveness is a purely positional good, then this would make sense. But I don’t think this is the case.
Similarly, I’ve heard the idea that universities giving female students advice on personal safety is evil, because in a perfect world no-one would commit violent crime. The fact that we don’t live in a perfect world does not seem to have occurred to them.
To a large extent I already have, moving away from them a few years ago. Not that I don’t enjoy their company, but they are rather entropic people.
A second possibility is simply adopting a strong mental attitude of independence. Since reading about cogsci and how the mind automatically accepts everything it hears without making a concious effort to question its veracity, I’ve begun consciously marking opinions I hear as “someone else’s opinion”.
Well, this is strongly characteristic of LW. I have attended a meetup where we did assertiveness training, which I would think is far more helpful than advice about ‘just be yourself’.
I wonder what other ways there are to find more positive peer groups? Offline, I have found martial arts people (or, other sports people) are a good start. Online, I wonder if other groups similar to LW have organised meatspace meetups—I used to lurk around many H+ organisations, but not for a while.
I looked at r/malefashionadvice, and it seems a little too ‘what is in this season’. I’d rather have clothes that are timeless, rather then having to reappraise my wardrobe every year. Still, I think this:
Seems a good idea.
People have raised the possibility of doublethink wrt this sort of thing—simultaneously believing something with absolute certainty for the sake of social confidence or psychosomatic effects, while also having accurate, calibrated beliefs where necessary. I wonder if anyone has actually got that to work.
Be careful. A lot of common missteps in personal presentation, especially in geek communities, come from failed attempts to look gentlemanly; the “m’lady” stereotype of Reddit fame is an extreme example, of course, but the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper. I’m only casually familiar with r/malefashionadvice, but I recall its house style being described somewhere as “dressing like a grownup”, which seems like a better objective to start with.
(Failed attempts to look badass are even worse.)
Apparently the problem is that the “m’lady” stereotype is wearing a fedora with a t-shirt, is overweight and is just essentially low-status. A gentleman wearing a suit with some confidence is a different matter.
Now I want to know how to dress as a badass gentleman...
Sure, that’s the stereotype. But the problem is actually that the signaling model is wrong. Our stereotype wants to associate himself with some concept, so he throws on an item that he associates with that concept: a pinstripe fedora if he likes Thirties mobsters, let’s say, or a leather trench if he’s seen The Matrix one too many times. It’s out of context, it clashes, and the outfit ends up looking worse than the sum of its parts (and being overweight and poorly groomed never helps).
The principle is easy to state: clothes should work in context, including the context of your body. But the point is that those cues are not obvious. There’s a whole visual language that needs to be learned before you can reliably present yourself as e.g. gentlemanly, and keeping a laser focus on whatever stereotype you feel like projecting actually isn’t the most efficient way to get there. Better to start with the basics.
I think how to “dress for success” differs radically between different subcultures. In some you want to look like you stepped out of a fashion ad, in others it’s all about worn jeans and tshirts, in yet others fake fur and el-wire rule...
It’s also mugging the competition :-D
In certain circles it does—“there’s a word for people without a beard: women”, etc.
I wonder, in these circles, do women find a bushy beard attractive? Or do they not have a choice of partner? Or do they make a choice based on some other criteria?
The average 16 year old doesn’t have high self confidence. That doesn’t mean that he won’t get laid.
It does. When I try to remember my high school class, finding a girlfriend was by far the hardest problem most boys faced. About 75% suffered from this problem. Getting into a university or not flunking the coming test on the natural logarithm or whatever other challenges we faced, they were easier.
It is sort of hard to tell exactly why. Lack of confidence was surely part of the story, but on a more broader sense, relationships are something adults have and we were stuck in half-childhood.
The guys who managed to find a GF looked and acted like young adults already at 16. Part of it is biological—some of them were already shaving daily even though they weren’t even 18. Puberty ran its full course on them, testosterone working fully. But even the guys who didn’t, and yet were able to find girlfriends, they had this adult demeanor already. For example and uncle could ask them to help in repairing a car and they would approach it like an adult, cautiously, competently and efficiently. Now the guys who were unable to find a GF approached it like a child. Mamaaaah I don’t want this I want to go back to playing videogames, well I guess if I have to do it I will half-ass the tools with one hand and play on the Nintendo with the other, maybe they’ll let me go then, that kind of attitude.
Growing up is seriously hard when people lack the kind of challenges that would make them, and this is why it is extremely hard for many young men to get laid.
The person who spends their time playing video games instead of going to parties where people get drunk is less likely to be hookup even if he’s confident.
I think when I discovered body building at 17 it helped. Also, being tall. I went to discotheques, dance clubs, and saw there is a fairly uniform look there, hair gel, muscle t-shirts of Replay or Diesel brand etc. it was easy to fit in and later on when I made friends in the university a guy who also went to these clubs and he had a large circle of friends, often 20 people going to a disco together and there getting introduced to another 20, it was helpful because these circles contained women, and once a guy was part of the circle and they liked the looks, the muscles, the designer clothes “uniform” they sent clear indicators of interest. Outside the circle it was harder as they would not send IOIs to completely stranger people, out of fear I guess. At any rate, working on the looks and finding this large circle was very helpful. Nevertheless they did not help at all in the far harder task of actually keeping the newfound girlfriends. The day after, when we sobered up and we got into everyday life, not the glamour of the dance club, they realized I am an unmasculine, childish, timid nerd. So I lost them soon thereafter. Things did not get much better until my thirties when the women who are not married start having more realistic expectations.
So there these people called PUA’s investigating that question, you may have heard of them.
If I can go one level above your question, for at least a generation, maybe more*, most young people aren’t getting into frequent sexual relationships. Scott Alexander explains here, in one of the most upvoted comments of all time, why it seems most people, whenever they are or were young, seemed to know a few people who had lots of sex, but weren’t or aren’t themselves having lots of sex. His model seems to hold for heterosexual men and women, which is most people anyway. Essentially, for both men and women, there is a negative skew for sexiness, i.e., which people are most sexually attractive and/or having the most sex. So, it is only the sexiest men and sexiest women having sex with each other often, and the sexiest men and women mostly don’t have sex with people who are less than the sexiest. People who are in between the average and the sexiest may have a moderate amount of sex, but still far less than the sexiest people. Men and women of around average sexiness are having sex infrequently, or not at all. This doesn’t mean “average” levels of sexiness are utterly unsexy. For example, as a heterosexual man, I perceive most women as moderately attractive, and it’s only the rare exception of a woman who proves the rule that people are generally attractive, that is the woman I find utterly unattractive, or ugly. I might be generalizing from my own experience too much, though. Assuming most heterosexual men find most heterosexual women “attractive-ish”, and visa-versa, it’s interesting they’re not having sex with each other.
Anyway, the function of how much sex a person has based on whatever qualities count as attractive seems more like a quadratic function than a linear one. The failure of most of us not in the top tiers of sexiness to have sex is a coordination problem. Their are other factors, which I think are covered in my original post.
*I think as North American culture was more sexually conservative in previous generations, people were just having less sex. I’m not sure about this. I’ve watched some historical documentaries pointing out how the early twentieth century and late nineteenth century people were less puritanical than modern pop culture would have us belief. It’s not like in all places with all people sex outside of marriage, in the year 1920 or 1890, was utterly taboo. There are ebbs and flows in how sexually liberal or conservative North America has been going back at least a century. I figure the further you go back in time, though, the more sexually conservative our culture was on average.
My first thought is that the lack of strategic approach isn’t surprising—there are tons of instances in which people are extremely unstrategic, and this doesn’t seem to be too particularly unstrategic.
My second thought is that this is an area in which it’s particularly easy to procrastinate. Because initiation is hard and scary (to most people).
A lot of Millennials have moved back in with their parents (boomerang generation). Especially for men, this makes any kind of romantic life very difficult. Mostly I think many Millennials have serious anxiety/social dysfunction and a bad case of Peter Pan Syndrome. For example, cultural favorites of Millennials include superhero/comic book movies and My Little Pony.