I thought about Aaronson a lot while writing this, and it made me feel terrible because I did have an article not that long ago just, like, ripping into him for an unrelated thing.
I do worry about the stats above, because there's some super-worst-case scenarios it implies. Like the really worst case isn't that the young guys are losing out to older guys, because that means they can just wait for things to get better, as much as that sucks. The worst-case is that this is because of a general change is mores that allows more individual men to fill sex-and-relationship needs for more women. To the extent that's the case, you are now going to the market-failure guy and telling him "well, this is never going to get better for you - just be sad and frustrated forever". And people don't by-and-large have the capacity to be sad and frustrated forever in non-destructive ways, especially 20-something men.
Oh hey! I haven't seen you in a while... are you still at DSL? Are you still working on your chinese?
If you use discord at all a bunch of us (20 regulars but less than 100 total users) are using it as a chatroom. You always had really thoughtful perspectives, and I can send you a link if you think you'd be interested.
Great post! And troubling stats.
It reads like a 7-year-later sequel to SlateStarCodex's "Untitled."
I thought about Aaronson a lot while writing this, and it made me feel terrible because I did have an article not that long ago just, like, ripping into him for an unrelated thing.
I do worry about the stats above, because there's some super-worst-case scenarios it implies. Like the really worst case isn't that the young guys are losing out to older guys, because that means they can just wait for things to get better, as much as that sucks. The worst-case is that this is because of a general change is mores that allows more individual men to fill sex-and-relationship needs for more women. To the extent that's the case, you are now going to the market-failure guy and telling him "well, this is never going to get better for you - just be sad and frustrated forever". And people don't by-and-large have the capacity to be sad and frustrated forever in non-destructive ways, especially 20-something men.
Alexander, not Aaronson ;-)
Scott Aaronson is the topic of Untitled, which was written by SSC's Scott Alexander.
Oh hey! I haven't seen you in a while... are you still at DSL? Are you still working on your chinese?
If you use discord at all a bunch of us (20 regulars but less than 100 total users) are using it as a chatroom. You always had really thoughtful perspectives, and I can send you a link if you think you'd be interested.
You mean you expect a version of socially accepted polygamy to be the final outcome?
No, not really; I'd expect polygamy to amplify this problem, if anything, unless it moved in a historically unique direction.
i can cut my penis for the cause