I like the careful way you’ve picked this apart and have upvoted your comment.
However, I’m wary that the logic has no bottom. If everyone gets worse to compete (there is no reason to suppose that only men who are scrupulous, or even only men who suppose themselves scrupulous, will do this), where is the floor? You have to hard-code in some deontic principle to prevent everyone from trending less and less careful. Depending on how fast things change, female choice on the whole could become irrelevant (if you ignore her when she says “no” once, and then ignore her twice to compete, and then four times because everyone got the last memo and you don’t stand out anymore, and then...). If that happens, there’s no way for the entire female gender to go “oh, crap! We don’t like this at all and will start preferring sweet guys to incentive the behavior we want!” Female preference no longer needs to enter into the equation if ignoring it is the way to “succeed”. Yes, this is a horror story; but I’m not actually sure it doesn’t resemble things that happen on a smaller scale in some places.
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
It’s fun to watch you discover the visceral horror of natural selection, especially sexual selection. Yea that’s right, there is no ground floor, you fall forever. If females exhibit even a mild preference for bigger tails, or bigger brains, or higher persistence, or whatever else, then in relatively few generations the tails or brains or persistence will grow preposterously huge.
About your last paragraph: everywhere in nature runaway sexual selection involves females selecting males for a disproportionate value of some characteristic, never the other way around. A population’s changes depend on the mating criteria of females, not the mating criteria of males.
everywhere in nature runaway sexual selection involves females selecting males for a disproportionate value of some characteristic, never the other way around.
Although I have said “chooser” and “chosen” wherever possible, the terms map onto female and male in most species. Male choice does occur, however, in monogamous (or quasi-monogamous) species like sea horses and humans, where both mates have a similar interest in their brood and are willing to spend time assessing, and being assessed by, potential mates. A very few species thoroughly reverse the usual pattern, making females compete for access to males. Mormon cricket females in food-poor areas actually fight to obtain males’ packages of edible sperm, while the coy males refuse about half the copulations they are offered. Among jacanas, a lily-trotting waterbird, males incubate the eggs while females fight with one another and guard their current males. Moorhen females are larger and brighter than males and more likely to fight and court. Small moorhen males are actually in better condition than big ones, and spend more time incubating. Females compete most for small fat males!
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
No, because if you successfully convince most men to do this, then you will actually increase the selection pressure towards aggressive courting behavior.
That’s the bit that some men get so bitter about—from their perspective, proposals like yours look just like deliberate attempts to weed the “nice guys” out of the gene pool, or at least the dating pool. Thus, the conspiracy theories about how women, the media, and “society” at large are collaborating to give men bad dating advice that increases selection pressures towards “bad boys”—i.e., those who don’t comply with the advice.
(Personally, I think it’s silly to ascribe to malice in this situation what is adequately explained by failure to think in such a systemic and evolutionary fashion… which is too high a bar for the average person, regardless of gender.)
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
So, I take HughRistik’s point to be that this would be a good thing for society to do, or maybe even a community, but that it is ineffective to the point of futility for an individual to do, and thus doesn’t “make sense.”
I, personally, can’t have more then a trivial effect on “the success of the ones who say ‘no’ and don’t mean it,” but I can have a large effect on my own dating success, simply because there are millions of the former and only one of the latter. A lonely boycott of lying women wouldn’t be a good way to change women; it would just leave me with a smaller dating pool.
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
So, I take HughRistik’s point to be that this would be a good thing for society to do, or maybe even a community, but that it is ineffective to the point of futility for an individual to do, and thus doesn’t “make sense.”
Yup. And I’m not (yet) speaking about what is the most moral solution. Maybe it’s the only “moral” solution for men to boycott women who incentivize male behavior that puts their comfort levels (and those of other women) at risk. Still, I think we can only decide the moral solution once we understand the practical problem.
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
A lonely boycott of lying women wouldn’t be a good way to change women; it would just leave me with a smaller dating pool.
Yup. And not just boycotting for “lying” (or misstating preferences), but for incentivizing any behavior that takes risks with women’s comfort levels. If someone wants to ask men to unilaterally disarm themselves of this behavior, that’s fine, but they need to know the consequences of what they are asking, and that it will doom men who listen to spend long periods in saintly celibacy while women compete over less scrupulous men and form seemingly normal and happy relationships with them.
“Follow our moral prescriptions that society doesn’t believe are necessary, and martyr your dating life while changing nothing about society! Sign up here!”
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
Exactly. The ability of individual men like you and me to circumvent this problem, and find women who don’t have problematic preferences sets, doesn’t make the problem go away on a societal level. There are only so many women without those problematic preference sets to go round.
Yes, this applies to apes as well. If an attractive woman offered me sex and I refused (most likely due to being busy with something or someone else), I’d want her to offer it again later. But in refusing I don’t lie about my preferences: if I really mean to answer “never” I say “never”, and if I mean “not now” I will say “not now”. This is a frequent complaint leveled at human females: they often say words to the effect of “never” but later behave as if they’d said “not now”, and vice versa.
I can see why that would be troubling as well. While User:Alicorn has provided clear reasoning why a human could reasonably turn down apey things—just as I might turn down paperclips in the right circumstances—it still does not make sense to claim you desire no paperclips, when you simply want to take possession of the paperclips later.
Apes often use words to achieve their goals, not just to make true information known. Claiming a falsehood may be beneficial. The ape may not even understand that it’s making a false claim. For example, if persistence is genetically determined and good for reproductive chances, female apes will start filtering male apes for persistence by telling them “no” without meaning it (and maybe without understanding that they don’t mean it). But even though such behavior is advantageous for individual female apes, ape society as a whole could benefit from denouncing it.
For example, if persistence is genetically determined and good for reproductive chances, female apes will start filtering male apes for persistence by telling them “no” without meaning it (and maybe without understanding that they don’t mean it).
The antecedent doesn’t seem likely to be true to me: wouldn’t a high value male have lots of opportunities for mating, and thus not bother wasting time persisting in the face of someone who doesn’t seem interested?
Grossly simplified, it works like this. If you’re a low-value woman, you won’t be testing a high-value man for persistence. If you’re a high-value woman, a high-value man will still need persistence to get you. So being persistent doesn’t hurt the man in either case.
Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it was in the middle of manufacturing a larger batch via a process that could not safely be interrupted, but want the opportunity to recur when it was finished; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that the offerer would, contingent on its acceptance, destroy a larger number of paperclips, but want the opportunity to recur when the destroyable paperclips were in the safe zone; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that, by acting unpredictably/as though it has high standards for numbers of paperclips an offer must include to be accepted, it would be offered more paperclips.
All of these scenarios have analogues to primate acceptance of offers to mate. (“I’m taken”; “he looks like he’d cause negative utility to me”; “I can’t just take every offer that comes by or people will think I’m a slut and nobody decent will want me”.)
The most relevant scenario, however, is not one that would cause Clippy to reject paperclips under analogous circumstances. Clippy values paperclips qua paperclips and is less picky about them than the typical human is about romantic/sexual relationships. I can’t think of a reason Clippy would reject an offer of paperclips when accepting wouldn’t result in other paperclips being destroyed or not made and when the transfer of paperclips could be kept a secret. However, primates are often acting in accordance with their values in turning down clandestine, low-risk sexual relationships while single.
I like the careful way you’ve picked this apart and have upvoted your comment.
However, I’m wary that the logic has no bottom. If everyone gets worse to compete (there is no reason to suppose that only men who are scrupulous, or even only men who suppose themselves scrupulous, will do this), where is the floor? You have to hard-code in some deontic principle to prevent everyone from trending less and less careful. Depending on how fast things change, female choice on the whole could become irrelevant (if you ignore her when she says “no” once, and then ignore her twice to compete, and then four times because everyone got the last memo and you don’t stand out anymore, and then...). If that happens, there’s no way for the entire female gender to go “oh, crap! We don’t like this at all and will start preferring sweet guys to incentive the behavior we want!” Female preference no longer needs to enter into the equation if ignoring it is the way to “succeed”. Yes, this is a horror story; but I’m not actually sure it doesn’t resemble things that happen on a smaller scale in some places.
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
It’s fun to watch you discover the visceral horror of natural selection, especially sexual selection. Yea that’s right, there is no ground floor, you fall forever. If females exhibit even a mild preference for bigger tails, or bigger brains, or higher persistence, or whatever else, then in relatively few generations the tails or brains or persistence will grow preposterously huge.
About your last paragraph: everywhere in nature runaway sexual selection involves females selecting males for a disproportionate value of some characteristic, never the other way around. A population’s changes depend on the mating criteria of females, not the mating criteria of males.
It’s almost that absolute, but not quite. Regarding role reversal in sexual selection, Alison Jolly writes in Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution, page 88-89:
No, because if you successfully convince most men to do this, then you will actually increase the selection pressure towards aggressive courting behavior.
That’s the bit that some men get so bitter about—from their perspective, proposals like yours look just like deliberate attempts to weed the “nice guys” out of the gene pool, or at least the dating pool. Thus, the conspiracy theories about how women, the media, and “society” at large are collaborating to give men bad dating advice that increases selection pressures towards “bad boys”—i.e., those who don’t comply with the advice.
(Personally, I think it’s silly to ascribe to malice in this situation what is adequately explained by failure to think in such a systemic and evolutionary fashion… which is too high a bar for the average person, regardless of gender.)
So, I take HughRistik’s point to be that this would be a good thing for society to do, or maybe even a community, but that it is ineffective to the point of futility for an individual to do, and thus doesn’t “make sense.”
I, personally, can’t have more then a trivial effect on “the success of the ones who say ‘no’ and don’t mean it,” but I can have a large effect on my own dating success, simply because there are millions of the former and only one of the latter. A lonely boycott of lying women wouldn’t be a good way to change women; it would just leave me with a smaller dating pool.
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
Yup. And I’m not (yet) speaking about what is the most moral solution. Maybe it’s the only “moral” solution for men to boycott women who incentivize male behavior that puts their comfort levels (and those of other women) at risk. Still, I think we can only decide the moral solution once we understand the practical problem.
Yup. And not just boycotting for “lying” (or misstating preferences), but for incentivizing any behavior that takes risks with women’s comfort levels. If someone wants to ask men to unilaterally disarm themselves of this behavior, that’s fine, but they need to know the consequences of what they are asking, and that it will doom men who listen to spend long periods in saintly celibacy while women compete over less scrupulous men and form seemingly normal and happy relationships with them.
“Follow our moral prescriptions that society doesn’t believe are necessary, and martyr your dating life while changing nothing about society! Sign up here!”
Exactly. The ability of individual men like you and me to circumvent this problem, and find women who don’t have problematic preferences sets, doesn’t make the problem go away on a societal level. There are only so many women without those problematic preference sets to go round.
Hmmm… If someone offered me paperclips, and I turned down the offer, I would want the being to keep offering.
I don’t know how this applies to apes, but it’s something to think about.
Yes, this applies to apes as well. If an attractive woman offered me sex and I refused (most likely due to being busy with something or someone else), I’d want her to offer it again later. But in refusing I don’t lie about my preferences: if I really mean to answer “never” I say “never”, and if I mean “not now” I will say “not now”. This is a frequent complaint leveled at human females: they often say words to the effect of “never” but later behave as if they’d said “not now”, and vice versa.
I can see why that would be troubling as well. While User:Alicorn has provided clear reasoning why a human could reasonably turn down apey things—just as I might turn down paperclips in the right circumstances—it still does not make sense to claim you desire no paperclips, when you simply want to take possession of the paperclips later.
Apes often use words to achieve their goals, not just to make true information known. Claiming a falsehood may be beneficial. The ape may not even understand that it’s making a false claim. For example, if persistence is genetically determined and good for reproductive chances, female apes will start filtering male apes for persistence by telling them “no” without meaning it (and maybe without understanding that they don’t mean it). But even though such behavior is advantageous for individual female apes, ape society as a whole could benefit from denouncing it.
The antecedent doesn’t seem likely to be true to me: wouldn’t a high value male have lots of opportunities for mating, and thus not bother wasting time persisting in the face of someone who doesn’t seem interested?
Grossly simplified, it works like this. If you’re a low-value woman, you won’t be testing a high-value man for persistence. If you’re a high-value woman, a high-value man will still need persistence to get you. So being persistent doesn’t hurt the man in either case.
Yes, but you would never turn down the offer in the first place, so it’s moot.
Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it was in the middle of manufacturing a larger batch via a process that could not safely be interrupted, but want the opportunity to recur when it was finished; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that the offerer would, contingent on its acceptance, destroy a larger number of paperclips, but want the opportunity to recur when the destroyable paperclips were in the safe zone; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that, by acting unpredictably/as though it has high standards for numbers of paperclips an offer must include to be accepted, it would be offered more paperclips.
All of these scenarios have analogues to primate acceptance of offers to mate. (“I’m taken”; “he looks like he’d cause negative utility to me”; “I can’t just take every offer that comes by or people will think I’m a slut and nobody decent will want me”.)
The most relevant scenario, however, is not one that would cause Clippy to reject paperclips under analogous circumstances. Clippy values paperclips qua paperclips and is less picky about them than the typical human is about romantic/sexual relationships. I can’t think of a reason Clippy would reject an offer of paperclips when accepting wouldn’t result in other paperclips being destroyed or not made and when the transfer of paperclips could be kept a secret. However, primates are often acting in accordance with their values in turning down clandestine, low-risk sexual relationships while single.
Thank you for this explanation. It makes more sense now. You’re a good human. c=@