Link: Toward Non-Stupid, Non-Blank-Slatey Polyandry
http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2012/09/toward-non-stupid-non-blank-slatey.html
The author gives a shout out to Less Wrong as a community with a perpetually skewed gender ratio, which is precisely the conditions under which polyandry appears to thrive.
Discuss. :)
This probably explains why I never felt the pull towards regular polyamory that many here do. I generally don’t find much value in my romantic or sexual partners being good rationalists let alone familiar with this site, since if I paid much attention to this filter I would have to make large sacrifices on other things. Even general geekiness while nice is just a bonus.
Moderately high IQ, tolerance for occasional philosophical rants and most of all sexy bodies please.
One interesting attempt is to try and make your target public more rational after commitment. I’ve met a super hot girl who was convinced into reading HPMOR by her LWer kiddo. Which makes me now desire to do the same with my girlfriend, who happens to be superhot as well ;) I am in an open relashionship though.
I’d be curious to know why some males in the LW community want females who are also from the LW community in the first place…
It isn’t hard to get partners into whatever you are into early in the relationship when you have lots of oxytocin fuelled pair bonding so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for rationality.
links to http://www.billionwickedthoughts.com/ipad/index.html If that data really can deliver, that would be fascinating and the most valuable part of that post for me. (An endorsement from Pinker does carry weight with me.)
:) As far as I know, there are maybe 4 or 5 LWers total who ever use nicotine gum without having previously smoked. (Although I have no idea how common we are in general.)
Changed it to link to the Google Books result for “cuckold” within the Billion Wicked Thoughts book: http://books.google.com/books?id=jwU8_m8y5X0C&q=cuckold#v=snippet&q=cuckold&f=false
As far as I know, the book is the only place the data are reported, sadly. I agree, it’s juicy if true!
Patches don’t sting your throat and they are easier to cut into precise quantities. I don’t plan on using the gum again. I have never smoked a cigarette and probably never will.
Nicotine lozenges are much nicer than nicotine gum.
[I don’t take them recreationally—I used them to give up cigarettes a while ago] .
What about the patch evaporation problem, though?
Keep them in the freezer perhaps?
Gum may be better suited for a DNB/Nicotine testing scenario though, if it acts faster.
My patches come in foil wrapping, so I store the unused part of the patch inside that and tape it closed. I’m pretty sure it still loses effectiveness over time (after opening), but the remaining sub-patches still have (quite noticeable) alertness effects.
Hm. Maybe I should try out patches. (After my nicotine/DNB experiment, I’ll be pretty low on gum.)
I’m surprised lower dose patches aren’t available
I’m sure there are, but IIRC, one is paying mostly for patches, not dosage (the marginal cost of nicotine being very small), so cutting up patches looks attractive cost-wise.
I use the gum without ever having smoked. I’ve never really minded the slight sting though.
It seems to me that polyandry is intrinsically blank-slatey. A good first approximation of male vs. female reproductive strategy is that males seek to optimize the net quality of their mates, while females seek to optimize the mean quality of their mates. In the former strategy, there is never anything to be lost by adding another mate, while in the latter strategy, there certainly is.
To a second approximation, humans have an astoundingly high level of parental investment than other species and also engage in alloparenting. This throws a proverbial monkey wrench into the first approximation.
Sure. But the “compromise on mate quality in return for resource commitment” strategy has always been fraught with what one might call coordination problems. The whole institution of marriage is basically a massive social engineering project meant to prevent these problems and align the interests of the partners. But marriage as an institution has grown far weaker: divorce, premarital sex, and children born out of wedlock are now seen as commonplace. And because of the increasing financial independence of women, they are less interested in compromising on mate quality in return for paternal investment.
I actually think these trends are going to continue to the point where marriage and male paternal investment are actually the exception rather than the default. Men will give up on “careers” and spend nearly all their time trying to burnish their masculine image by playing sports, playing music, dressing well, practicing dance moves, etc etc. Women will pick mates based on their success in said endeavours, and won’t be at all concerned with boring old bourgeois concerns like financial stability, reliability, potential to be a good father, etc.
Note that I am not trying to discourage or disparage alternative lifestyles; if polyandry works for some people, more power to them. I’m just saying that, to me, it seems to be based on an unrealistic understanding of both human sexual psychology and modern social trends.
I’m certainly “desperate” enough to be willing to accept a “junior husband” type of position...
Yeah, that might help, especially if you spend a year or two in that position and then get dumped, preferably not “nicely”. I was just reading /r/fitness, and the #1 answer given by guys to “why did you decide to turn around your life and start exercising?” seems to be “divorce”. Male attractiveness is very malleable, but it seems people need a powerful shock to start improving. It definitely worked for me.
Female attractiveness is very malleable too. Haircuts, clothes, exercise etc make a huge difference. Most attractive girls, in my experience, spend a great deal of time working on making themselves more attractive.
FTR, I am female, and until I was 22 or so, I had no idea how much difference wearing clothes that suited me and styling my hair would make.
Indeed. I vaguely recall from my high-school days how much less attractive some girls looked in gym clothes, while others actually looked better.
I have a similar feeling about the cliched ‘Hollywood transformation scene’ or Beautiful All Along.
On the one hand, it’s pretty absurd to show ‘geekette into goddess’ since the actress was selected for goddess-potential in the first place—on the other hand, it is empirically demonstrating that the same physical girl* can look geekette vs goddess, and while the average girl does not have the same potential nor access to movie facilities, illustrates that there can be a substantial difference**.
* An assumption that grows less true as time passes, I suppose...
** One does wonder how many girls underinvest in attractiveness, given how common a desire it is, and what the real-world gap is.
That seems like a biased way to formulate the implicit question. Might it not be the case that many people overinvest in attractiveness?
No idea why your comment got downvoted, you raise a valid point. And apart from the issue of over- or underinvesting, for some people the ROI doesn’t seem high or even positive.
I never said the number had to be positive. It’s a complex topic, though, so I couldn’t say with tremendous confidence that the number is negative—it’s not a pure positional game, but has elements of positive, zero, and negative-sum games.
I would expect that the number of women (and men) who overinvest in attractiveness is positive. Ditto the number who underinvest. Both questions are interesting, imho.
If that’s the case, there should be a large number of undervalued-but-hot girls out there. Such a market inefficiency is just begging for some arbitrage. Either guys are failing to pick up on such opportunities, or are not motivated to go after them. Either way, some enterprising LW gentlemen should be getting into the LBO business!
Obviously there are some, but I don’t know whether there should be large numbers. I mean, most girls are well-aware that things like cosmetics and hair-styling exist.
The missing could be no arbitrage at all, in that effort spent finding them, convincing them to improve, and then maybe reaping the benefits (either because the improvement doesn’t work or because the girl trades on up—similar to why employers may be disinclined to invest in employees’ education) could exceed just improving yourself or spending more time going after existing hot girls.
(A little estimating suggests they could be rare: half the dating population, figure given sky-high US obesity rates that you need to halve it again just to get girls in appropriate weight brackets, then figure that even in the transformation scenarios the girl is still somewhat cute to begin with suggesting that they’re only moving up <50 percentiles, halve it again...)
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.
Incidentally, the biggest factor in my current lack of romantic success has been that, for a long time, I simply haven’t put any effort whatsoever into finding anyone. (I do plan to change this. The next time my brother comes over, he and I are going to set up an OkCupid profile for me; I have reason to believe that he’s good at that sort of thing.)
That wasn’t funny.
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