This hardly taught me anything entirely new, but it did remind me of stuff I hadn’t explicitly thought about in ages. Also, it’s reassuring to see that someone else independently reached the same conclusions as me. Upvoted. On the other hand:
The current (as of this writing, “Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex”) title sounds confusing to me: ’“Using evolution”? ‘The hell d’ya mean?’ I can’t think of a perfect one, but what about “Optimizing for short- and/or long-term mating using SCIENCE!!!”?
I had to go in advanced Steelmanning Mode to interpret your language in certain places; fortunately, your extensive disclaimer primed me to do so and in particular you linking to “The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary” demonstrated that confusing language was due to laziness rather than to confusion on your part.
Fact is that it unfortunately happened, and people believe it, despite it being false. Women who begin believing it sometimes force themselves into doing it even more.
Just because something is due to nurture rather than nature (or even to a self-fulfilling profecy) doesn’t make it false. There’s no way the preferences among much of the present-day English-speaking world for very thin women and cleanly shaven men dates back to the EEA, either, but this doesn’t make them any less real.
Discount for population size
Note that being “fairly recognizable” (to steal MugaSofer’s term) (or being on Facebook) can increase your ‘effective Dunbar’s number’, pulling the Dunbar-number-to-population ratio back down. Even though the town I’m in isn’t terribly tiny compared to bands in the EEA (and in particular, due to the university as a much-larger-than-average fraction of dating-age people), I’m very unlikely to go to a dance club or or walk around downtown without meeting someone I already know, if I look at the participants of the Facebook event for a party in a club I see that I have several mutual friends with most of them, and people I hadn’t seen in a while ask me about anecdotes in my life that I wouldn’t have expected them to know (hell, even my mother, who lives where I grew up an hour by car from where I’m now, and teaches in a high school an hour by car from where she lives and an hour by car from where I am, often tells me “a former student of mine told me she saw you in $venue with $wingman last $weekday night”); in this condition, it would be most unwise for me to play pure “numbers’ game” unless I’m very careful with it.
OkCupid
In certain parts of the world, that’s not very popular (there’s no straight or bi woman aged between 18 and 30 who’s been online in the last year within 25 miles of me). I use Badoo instead. (BTW, the same sausagefestness exists here as in dancing clubs.)
ring-finger longer than index-finger
[looks at his own hands] My ring finger looks longer than my my index finger when looked at from the back, but the index finger looks longer when looked from the palm! What gives? (I guess that turning the forearm around pulls tendons causing that, or some optical illusion, or something.)
This hardly taught me anything entirely new, but it did remind me of stuff I hadn’t explicitly thought about in ages. Also, it’s reassuring to see that someone else independently reached the same conclusions as me. Upvoted. On the other hand:
The current (as of this writing, “Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex”) title sounds confusing to me: ’“Using evolution”? ‘The hell d’ya mean?’ I can’t think of a perfect one, but what about “Optimizing for short- and/or long-term mating using SCIENCE!!!”?
I had to go in advanced Steelmanning Mode to interpret your language in certain places; fortunately, your extensive disclaimer primed me to do so and in particular you linking to “The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary” demonstrated that confusing language was due to laziness rather than to confusion on your part.
Just because something is due to nurture rather than nature (or even to a self-fulfilling profecy) doesn’t make it false. There’s no way the preferences among much of the present-day English-speaking world for very thin women and cleanly shaven men dates back to the EEA, either, but this doesn’t make them any less real.
Note that being “fairly recognizable” (to steal MugaSofer’s term) (or being on Facebook) can increase your ‘effective Dunbar’s number’, pulling the Dunbar-number-to-population ratio back down. Even though the town I’m in isn’t terribly tiny compared to bands in the EEA (and in particular, due to the university as a much-larger-than-average fraction of dating-age people), I’m very unlikely to go to a dance club or or walk around downtown without meeting someone I already know, if I look at the participants of the Facebook event for a party in a club I see that I have several mutual friends with most of them, and people I hadn’t seen in a while ask me about anecdotes in my life that I wouldn’t have expected them to know (hell, even my mother, who lives where I grew up an hour by car from where I’m now, and teaches in a high school an hour by car from where she lives and an hour by car from where I am, often tells me “a former student of mine told me she saw you in $venue with $wingman last $weekday night”); in this condition, it would be most unwise for me to play pure “numbers’ game” unless I’m very careful with it.
In certain parts of the world, that’s not very popular (there’s no straight or bi woman aged between 18 and 30 who’s been online in the last year within 25 miles of me). I use Badoo instead. (BTW, the same sausagefestness exists here as in dancing clubs.)
[looks at his own hands] My ring finger looks longer than my my index finger when looked at from the back, but the index finger looks longer when looked from the palm! What gives? (I guess that turning the forearm around pulls tendons causing that, or some optical illusion, or something.)