I have a little “luck” story. My first, and so far only, girlfriend, was a person who my mom saw one day working in a video store. Being concerned with my personal life, she called me and recommended I go to the store to flirt with the girl. I did, and it went pretty well, though I didn’t ask her out. Then I came home and googled her name. Well, it turns out that her first name, alone, (which was on her name tag) identifies her uniquely in the world. (It’s not that weird just looking at it, but still.) And she had a livejournal. Which I read. And she had just broken up with her last boyfriend. After that, e-mailing turned into phone calls and dates and then real dating. I broke up with her after a while—I wasn’t lucky enough to get someone extremely compatible, but I look back on it now and appreciate that we were pretty damn compatible, and in many more ways than could be expected just by updating on a few surface-level signals, which was all I had available at first.
I broke up with her after a while—I wasn’t lucky enough to get someone extremely compatible, but I look back on it now and appreciate that we were pretty damn compatible, and in many more ways than could be expected just by updating on a few surface-level signals, which was all I had available at first.
I would not break up with a woman just because we are not “extremely compatible”. (I might break up with a woman because I met someone else who is more compatible, but that is different. One reason that is different is that I tend to think that it is a lot easier to interest woman # 2 in a relationship if you are still with woman # 1, and part of the reason for that is that a man in a relationship exhibits subtle non-verbal signs that women can pick up on that are very costly or impossible for most men to learn to exhibit at will for the duration of the courtship phase. Or so it seems to me.)
A large challenge for young people is to get to a place where their social connections, income, net worth and general knowledge of the world provides a nice cushion or source of resilience. A significant proportion of young people get stuck along the way to that place of resilience with the result that they never reach the destination or, if they do, they languish for years or decades in poverty, depression, social isolation or in some other form of unpleasantness.
Having a girlfriend or a wife makes a man significantly more resilient. This is because when a woman loves a man, all or almost all of the woman’s “ego skills” (a term used or formerly used by the psychotherapy profession to mean something like what writers on this site mean when they say “instrumental rationality”) are available to the man. In contrast, the ego skills of a doctor, social worker, psychotherapist or such are generally mostly not available to the patient or client even if the patient or client is paying the doctor, psychotherapist or such $100 or $200 an hour (though that would definitely increase the expected rate at which the ego skills transfer). In other words, the rationality, the intelligence, the cognitive skills (particularly those having to do with the mind or with human society) of a person are available to the individual owner of those skills, but not in general to the persons the owner is trying to help—and training, e.g., M.D. programs and Ph. D. programs in clinical psychology generally does not change that very much in my personal experience and in my interpretation of what I have read. But the sexual bond does drastically change that—not always, but in a significant fraction of ordinary relationships. And having the knowledge of a few yares of experience—knowledge about, e.g., which sort of woman is likely to bond strongly to you and how to create and maintain that bond—brings that probability up to at least .7 or .8 if you’re smart enough to follow along on this site.
In other words, the expected helpfulness of a person in your life can be modeled as the product of the rationality of the person (where “rationality” is defined as the ability to achieve the goals the person is expected to want to achieve multiplied by how much the person really cares about you. And the medical profession, the social-worker profession, the psychotherapy profession and such do not have a lot more control over that second factor than anyone else does.
But you know this already pdf23ds! You wrote a comment on it just today or yesterday. Sex changes that general rule. As soon as a woman starts having sex with you, well, then all of a sudden you are the most wonderful person in the world, or one of them anyways, and what happens to you is some significant fraction as important as what happens to the woman herself (according to her way of assigning importance).
I have gone without the love of a woman for 24 of the 32 years since I left home at the age of 17. (I am 49 now.) So, what I said above is not the usual lazy human after-the-fact justification or rationalization of a decision or a life strategy decided on through other, unspoken means. Also, like you, pdf23ds, I have had some significant handicaps which have caused me to need all the resiliency I can get.
So, pdf23ds, now that you know a little about how I think about these things, could you explain your policy of requiring extreme compatibility and breaking up if that requirement is not met?
OK, another thing. I now remember that a bigger reason than the lack of compatibility that I broke up with my girlfriend was that I had almost no respect for her, possibly quite unfairly (but nevertheless), and I felt that with this asymmetrical situation, staying together was not at all fair to her. I still don’t see how I could possibly have enough respect for a person to not feel this way unless they’re very compatible with me.
I really appreciate your exploring this topic with me. Feel free to continue the conversation by private email.
I have not so far experienced significant difficulty winning women I go on to continue to respect. What most rapidly decreases my respect for a woman (and the same thing goes for all my friends and indeed, if I am not forgetting something, all human being or at least all human being who were raised in the Western tradition) is habitual lying, particularly, lying in order to obtain a personal benefit (fraud in other words) or other violations of basic ethical standards around which there has been widespread agreement (at least in the West) for thousands of years.
The girlfriend of 5 years who just dumped me? More probably than not, she never lied to me. But part of the reason for that is that I would regularly proclaim to her that I have never lied to her in the slightest matter (which was and remains true) and that I expect the same behavior from her to me. If she did lie to me, almost certainly it was in a series of “misdemeanors” or petty matters. I did not observe her to lie to any of her friends as far as I can recall. If she did, it was something small. It is extremely _un_likely that she would ever do serious harm to any of her many friends through fraud or other clear violations of the basic ethical standards. My first girlfriend (of 3 years) I am almost sure never lied to me or cheated me in any way. The government and major corporations? Different story. But never anything “actionable” (anything that could result in her getting sued or prosecuted.) Before my first girlfriend, I considered defrauding the government or a major corporation just as bad as defrauding a person. So that first relationship definitely got me to become more tolerant of that if it is minor. I still think people should treat fraud of major corporations as just as bad as fraud on a individual, but my first relationship got me to face the fact that most people—and most “good” (ethical, worth befriending) people do not see it the way I see it.
This brings up the issue of self-deception because some people are so stained by self-deception that they cannot even tell that they are committing a sophisticated fraud, because their tendency towards self-deception (and to “willful ignorance) is so strong that are just incapable of, e.g., seeing a conflict from the other person’s point of view. By “a conflict” I mean a negative-sum game where the winner is determined by which player is successful in imposing on the people involved (the two players and any third parties like for example the judge in a court case) an interpretation or frame of the facts favorable to themselves. I used to be very intolerant of self-deception or willful ignorance, but lately I have noticed a softening and I intend to continue to soften my intolerance of it because the reason for my historical intolerance might easily have been the fact that I was severely burned by self-deception and willful ignorance in my childhood. So was my latest girlfriend, which is probably one of the things that made us compatible. (“Both our mothers were ostriches,” is how she put it.) But the point that I want the reader to take away is that the experience of being in a relation for 5 years with a women who shared my aversion to self-deception is that I have come to think that I could tolerate more self-deception in my next girlfriend. Well, more precisely, tolerate it but watch what happens, and if I get burned or I see anyone else get burned by the self-deception, then go back to my old level of intolerance. That is, my requirements or “compatibility expectations” have loosened a bit, which I consider a very valuable thing because it increase the set of people I can have deep personal relationships with.
I could go on for a long time, but enough! To summarize, what I need to respect a girlfriend is basically that she adheres to the same standards I expect of anyone else I interact with—except that her adherence and the consistency of that adherence is more important to me that the adherence of, say, someone with whom I am involved in a commercial transaction.
Let’s talk about lying! It is a topic very much like dating, but without dividing people.
You talk about thousands of years of consensus on lying, yet you also talk about learning that most people, even most “good people” disagree with you. I suspect I’m just not parsing something here, but the need for careful parsing seems like a bad sign.
I’d like to hear more about self-deception about lying. I think most people don’t notice most lying that they do, having put it in some other bucket. But that looks to me to be a very different belief than your belief about self-deception. I’d think that only people who want to express righteous indignation about lying (like you) would need to self-deceive.
I wasn’t lucky enough to get someone extremely compatible
could you explain your policy of requiring extreme compatibility and breaking up if that requirement is not met?
I think this is a communication error. I didn’t mean that I require extreme compatibility—my phrasing was perhaps a bit idiomatic or even idiolectic. My very vague and silly guess is that among women in my age range, she was more compatible than about 49⁄50 of the others. And what I’m looking for is more like 1⁄300 or 1⁄400. Is that level of compatibility extreme? Am I being too picky? Well, if I thought that, I would be less picky, obviously, so I give it a .5 chance. As I implied above, my estimate of her compatibility has risen a lot since when I broke up with her.
I would not break up with a woman just because we are not “extremely compatible”. [...] Having a girlfriend or a wife makes a man significantly more resilient. [...] And having the knowledge of a few yares of experience—knowledge about, e.g., which sort of woman is likely to bond strongly to you and how to create and maintain that bond
I would now agree, and regard my breaking up that soon a mistake, though I didn’t ever believe that we had anything long-term. Due to my own issues, the bond was quite asymmetrical, heavier on her side, which is how I could have overlooked its value.
My very vague and silly guess is that among women in my age range, she was more compatible than about 49⁄50 of the others. And what I’m looking for is more like 1⁄300 or 1⁄400.
Thank you for clarifying what you mean by extreme compatability. I did not misinterpret what you meant.
Consider all the women between 22 and 60 in the eastern part of Marin County, California. Note the extremely broad defintion of “my age range.” (Again I’m 49) Not all the single women, but all the women, single and looking, single and not looking or married. My next girlfriend will come from this set with probability .9 or more unless I move, which is very unlikely. (Of course she is more likely to come from the subset of those not now married.)
Now (using Pearl’s language for causal models) do surgery on my model of reality so that I am already in a sexual relationship with one of these women picked at random. Do additional surgery so that she and I already know each other at least as well as couples usually do. Acquiring this knowledge is very time consuming and entails costs like dinners and entrance fees to cultural events. Note that this second bit of surgery allows me to consider the merits of the woman picked at random without regard to whether those cost (again, mostly my time and attention but also entrance fees, etc) are better spent on a different woman.
Marin County is among the top 3 most affluent counties in California. Demographics similar to Silicon Valley, but replace the nerdy component with earthy-crunchy and new-age components. Probably .1 (10%) of these women work out with weights regularly and a significant fraction employ personal trainers to help them keep in shape. (An ordinary trip to the supermarket is often a very distracting and very vivid experience for me )
There is a higher than .5 probability that I would choose to stay in the relationship until she dumped me or 36 months have gone by. The only reason the 36 months is in there is so that I do not have to consider the effects on my attractiveness to women (and consequently, my dating options) of a significant change in my circumstances.
The most likely reason I would choose to dump the woman is that her thinking is significantly distorted by some ideology, and I consider progressive political beliefs an ideology—in fact, it is IMHO the most common ideology in these parts. Or maybe what I am reacting to is just a high amount of the Big Five personality trait agreeableness. (I am quite low in agreeableness.) Speaking of Big Five, I am an extreme introvert, so strong extraversion is probably something else that would drastically lower the probability that I would choose to try to keep the relationship going as long as possible (inside this 36-month interval that defines our current universe of discourse). I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
Would I prefer that she has read all of Eliezer’s writing on the art of human rationality? Of course.
But I would be delighted, overjoyed, elated if she just knew the correct definition of “sexual selection” or understood that the poor people in the England of Charles Dickens were in fact materially better off than almost any other poor population at that time or at any previous time in history. (Define “poor population” as the first seven deciles of individuals distributed by material welfare in some natural category of people, e.g., residents of a nation state or linguistic community.) In other words, delighted, etc, if she had enough rationality, basic knowledge of things like the timing of the Industrial Revolution, and curiosity to seek out the hard numerical data which contradicts and overrides the fictional evidence of dramatizations on PBS of Charles Dickens novels. I just ended a 5-year relationship with a woman who did not know these 2 things. (She dumped me.)
I think it’s pretty relevant that the pool I was talking about was in rural northeast Texas. I’d say the selectivity would be much smaller in a liberal metro like Austin (where I now live). I’m not even including things like being even familiar with the words “transhumanism” or “rationalism”. My standards are even less than you talk about having. (Which is why selectivity numbers suck as a way of communicating about this subject.)
Additionally, I’m on the verge of resigning myself to the possibility of remaining single indefinitely. This definitely has the effect of raising my standards.
The above analysis neglects IQ. One of my girlfriends was definitely above one standard deviation above the mean in IQ and the other 2 were probably above that line. The math of the normal distribution is such that only 16% of the population is above one s.d. above the mean. (The mean IQ in Marin County is probably higher than the national mean, but I am using the population here, not the national population, as my standard of reference for thinking about IQ.) One s.d. above the mean BTW is defined as an IQ of 115.
So multiply the .5 figure in my original comment by .16 or so, pushing us down to 1⁄12 of the women in the set defined above. And since it took me several hours to realize I had overlooked such a crucial factor (.16 -- that’s 2.6 bits of entropy!) there are probably other factors I’ve overlooked, so push the figure down some more.
The reason IQ has 2.6 bits or so of “importance” is that (again) the usefulness of the girlfriend is roughly the ability of the girlfriend to achieve goals and make good decisions in her own life multiplied by “caring”, and that first factor is very heavily reliant on IQ—more so than for example income is reliant on IQ IMHO.
And now my attention is caught by that second factor in the equation usefulness_to_me == rationality * caring: how much she really cares about me relative to how much she cares about herself. One of my girlfriend was above .5 on that measure, another probably above it or approaching it. (The third was below .1 -- definitely below .15 -- and I only got involved with her because she was very nearby and conveniently at hand during a time in my life when for me to have to travel even a few miles to get together probably would have been a dealbreaker. And she was spontaneous and childlike and fun and pretty.)
Knowing that prospective girlfriends who pull above .5 on the caring measure are available, I probably will not settle for one who does not (unless there is some countervailing consideration, but let us forget about that possibility and hope it all comes out in the wash). So that adds another requirement for my next girlfriend, and I would say that out the set of women defined above, .25 meet this latest requirement given of course that I could win the women, which in most case I cannot. (It would be higher if I were pursuing a more conventional life path. For certain life paths that women identify with or approve of, like doctoring, say, that number might go as high as .4. Nonremunerative blogging about the far future, not so much.) (“Win the woman” by the way is polite language for “persuade the woman to have sex with me and to keep having sex with me or at the very least spending a large fraction of her time with me and promising not to have sex or even seriously discuss having sex with anyone else. The reason it is defined that way is that those condition are almost always necessary for the caring factor to approach anything like .5) OK, so now the figure—the “compatability quotient” we might call it—is down to 1⁄48, and (like I said above) there are probably factors I have not taken into account yet.
In all this multiplying (.5 times .16 times .25) by the way I have been remembering to search my model of reality for reasons to expect a significant conditional dependence of one factor on a different one, but I have not found anything really worth reporting or taking into account.
Hey, pdf23ds, please speak up if you do not welcome attempts by me to help you, and I will shut right up, but could it be that the reason you feel the need for such a high level of compatability is that you consider it necessary for you to understand her and for her to understand you sufficiently well? Women are quite different than you and I! They are from a different planet! (Not really, of course, but it is an apt metaphor.) But I think I understood my girlfriends well enough to steer the future into quite wonderful territory even though they’re from another planet. The best roads to understanding are the study of evolutionary psychology and simple experience being in a relationship. (Again I have 8 years.)
Women are quite different than you and I! They are from a different planet!
This is called “othering”. It is not nice. Certain amounts may be required for accuracy, but this much is uncalled for.
Edit: If you think something is wrong with my identification and/or evaluation of othering, I’d be interested to hear it. I brought it up because the parent commenter has mentioned wishing to speak more sensitively in the past.
Voters: since I explicitly asked Alicorn to point out objectifying language to me, and that sort of thing, it pains me that her doing what I asked is currently costing her 3 karma. Yeah, I think some of the writers who favor terms like “objectifying language” and “othering” are silly and counterproductive, but Alicorn strikes me as quite sensible and a good person to teach me concepts that will help me get along better with people high the Big Five personality trait agreeableness.
In the process of trying to rewrite what I said, I realized that I had no insight into pdf23ds’s reasons for adopting the (1/300 to 1⁄400) compatability target, so I should have kept silent.
(I would have deleted my comment, but now it is the subject of responses.)
And if you do eventually manage to screw things up...looking back and not having anything to say but “I got lucky” is pretty damn disheartening.
I have a little “luck” story. My first, and so far only, girlfriend, was a person who my mom saw one day working in a video store. Being concerned with my personal life, she called me and recommended I go to the store to flirt with the girl. I did, and it went pretty well, though I didn’t ask her out. Then I came home and googled her name. Well, it turns out that her first name, alone, (which was on her name tag) identifies her uniquely in the world. (It’s not that weird just looking at it, but still.) And she had a livejournal. Which I read. And she had just broken up with her last boyfriend. After that, e-mailing turned into phone calls and dates and then real dating. I broke up with her after a while—I wasn’t lucky enough to get someone extremely compatible, but I look back on it now and appreciate that we were pretty damn compatible, and in many more ways than could be expected just by updating on a few surface-level signals, which was all I had available at first.
Your mom is quite the wingman.
That word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Wingmom?
I think “matchmaker” is the traditional term.
pdf23ds writes:
I would not break up with a woman just because we are not “extremely compatible”. (I might break up with a woman because I met someone else who is more compatible, but that is different. One reason that is different is that I tend to think that it is a lot easier to interest woman # 2 in a relationship if you are still with woman # 1, and part of the reason for that is that a man in a relationship exhibits subtle non-verbal signs that women can pick up on that are very costly or impossible for most men to learn to exhibit at will for the duration of the courtship phase. Or so it seems to me.)
A large challenge for young people is to get to a place where their social connections, income, net worth and general knowledge of the world provides a nice cushion or source of resilience. A significant proportion of young people get stuck along the way to that place of resilience with the result that they never reach the destination or, if they do, they languish for years or decades in poverty, depression, social isolation or in some other form of unpleasantness.
Having a girlfriend or a wife makes a man significantly more resilient. This is because when a woman loves a man, all or almost all of the woman’s “ego skills” (a term used or formerly used by the psychotherapy profession to mean something like what writers on this site mean when they say “instrumental rationality”) are available to the man. In contrast, the ego skills of a doctor, social worker, psychotherapist or such are generally mostly not available to the patient or client even if the patient or client is paying the doctor, psychotherapist or such $100 or $200 an hour (though that would definitely increase the expected rate at which the ego skills transfer). In other words, the rationality, the intelligence, the cognitive skills (particularly those having to do with the mind or with human society) of a person are available to the individual owner of those skills, but not in general to the persons the owner is trying to help—and training, e.g., M.D. programs and Ph. D. programs in clinical psychology generally does not change that very much in my personal experience and in my interpretation of what I have read. But the sexual bond does drastically change that—not always, but in a significant fraction of ordinary relationships. And having the knowledge of a few yares of experience—knowledge about, e.g., which sort of woman is likely to bond strongly to you and how to create and maintain that bond—brings that probability up to at least .7 or .8 if you’re smart enough to follow along on this site.
In other words, the expected helpfulness of a person in your life can be modeled as the product of the rationality of the person (where “rationality” is defined as the ability to achieve the goals the person is expected to want to achieve multiplied by how much the person really cares about you. And the medical profession, the social-worker profession, the psychotherapy profession and such do not have a lot more control over that second factor than anyone else does.
But you know this already pdf23ds! You wrote a comment on it just today or yesterday. Sex changes that general rule. As soon as a woman starts having sex with you, well, then all of a sudden you are the most wonderful person in the world, or one of them anyways, and what happens to you is some significant fraction as important as what happens to the woman herself (according to her way of assigning importance).
I have gone without the love of a woman for 24 of the 32 years since I left home at the age of 17. (I am 49 now.) So, what I said above is not the usual lazy human after-the-fact justification or rationalization of a decision or a life strategy decided on through other, unspoken means. Also, like you, pdf23ds, I have had some significant handicaps which have caused me to need all the resiliency I can get.
So, pdf23ds, now that you know a little about how I think about these things, could you explain your policy of requiring extreme compatibility and breaking up if that requirement is not met?
OK, another thing. I now remember that a bigger reason than the lack of compatibility that I broke up with my girlfriend was that I had almost no respect for her, possibly quite unfairly (but nevertheless), and I felt that with this asymmetrical situation, staying together was not at all fair to her. I still don’t see how I could possibly have enough respect for a person to not feel this way unless they’re very compatible with me.
I really appreciate your exploring this topic with me. Feel free to continue the conversation by private email.
I have not so far experienced significant difficulty winning women I go on to continue to respect. What most rapidly decreases my respect for a woman (and the same thing goes for all my friends and indeed, if I am not forgetting something, all human being or at least all human being who were raised in the Western tradition) is habitual lying, particularly, lying in order to obtain a personal benefit (fraud in other words) or other violations of basic ethical standards around which there has been widespread agreement (at least in the West) for thousands of years.
The girlfriend of 5 years who just dumped me? More probably than not, she never lied to me. But part of the reason for that is that I would regularly proclaim to her that I have never lied to her in the slightest matter (which was and remains true) and that I expect the same behavior from her to me. If she did lie to me, almost certainly it was in a series of “misdemeanors” or petty matters. I did not observe her to lie to any of her friends as far as I can recall. If she did, it was something small. It is extremely _un_likely that she would ever do serious harm to any of her many friends through fraud or other clear violations of the basic ethical standards. My first girlfriend (of 3 years) I am almost sure never lied to me or cheated me in any way. The government and major corporations? Different story. But never anything “actionable” (anything that could result in her getting sued or prosecuted.) Before my first girlfriend, I considered defrauding the government or a major corporation just as bad as defrauding a person. So that first relationship definitely got me to become more tolerant of that if it is minor. I still think people should treat fraud of major corporations as just as bad as fraud on a individual, but my first relationship got me to face the fact that most people—and most “good” (ethical, worth befriending) people do not see it the way I see it.
This brings up the issue of self-deception because some people are so stained by self-deception that they cannot even tell that they are committing a sophisticated fraud, because their tendency towards self-deception (and to “willful ignorance) is so strong that are just incapable of, e.g., seeing a conflict from the other person’s point of view. By “a conflict” I mean a negative-sum game where the winner is determined by which player is successful in imposing on the people involved (the two players and any third parties like for example the judge in a court case) an interpretation or frame of the facts favorable to themselves. I used to be very intolerant of self-deception or willful ignorance, but lately I have noticed a softening and I intend to continue to soften my intolerance of it because the reason for my historical intolerance might easily have been the fact that I was severely burned by self-deception and willful ignorance in my childhood. So was my latest girlfriend, which is probably one of the things that made us compatible. (“Both our mothers were ostriches,” is how she put it.) But the point that I want the reader to take away is that the experience of being in a relation for 5 years with a women who shared my aversion to self-deception is that I have come to think that I could tolerate more self-deception in my next girlfriend. Well, more precisely, tolerate it but watch what happens, and if I get burned or I see anyone else get burned by the self-deception, then go back to my old level of intolerance. That is, my requirements or “compatibility expectations” have loosened a bit, which I consider a very valuable thing because it increase the set of people I can have deep personal relationships with.
I could go on for a long time, but enough! To summarize, what I need to respect a girlfriend is basically that she adheres to the same standards I expect of anyone else I interact with—except that her adherence and the consistency of that adherence is more important to me that the adherence of, say, someone with whom I am involved in a commercial transaction.
Let’s talk about lying! It is a topic very much like dating, but without dividing people.
You talk about thousands of years of consensus on lying, yet you also talk about learning that most people, even most “good people” disagree with you. I suspect I’m just not parsing something here, but the need for careful parsing seems like a bad sign.
I’d like to hear more about self-deception about lying. I think most people don’t notice most lying that they do, having put it in some other bucket. But that looks to me to be a very different belief than your belief about self-deception. I’d think that only people who want to express righteous indignation about lying (like you) would need to self-deceive.
Hmm, long comment. Let me start at the end.
I think this is a communication error. I didn’t mean that I require extreme compatibility—my phrasing was perhaps a bit idiomatic or even idiolectic. My very vague and silly guess is that among women in my age range, she was more compatible than about 49⁄50 of the others. And what I’m looking for is more like 1⁄300 or 1⁄400. Is that level of compatibility extreme? Am I being too picky? Well, if I thought that, I would be less picky, obviously, so I give it a .5 chance. As I implied above, my estimate of her compatibility has risen a lot since when I broke up with her.
I would now agree, and regard my breaking up that soon a mistake, though I didn’t ever believe that we had anything long-term. Due to my own issues, the bond was quite asymmetrical, heavier on her side, which is how I could have overlooked its value.
Thank you for clarifying what you mean by extreme compatability. I did not misinterpret what you meant.
Consider all the women between 22 and 60 in the eastern part of Marin County, California. Note the extremely broad defintion of “my age range.” (Again I’m 49) Not all the single women, but all the women, single and looking, single and not looking or married. My next girlfriend will come from this set with probability .9 or more unless I move, which is very unlikely. (Of course she is more likely to come from the subset of those not now married.)
Now (using Pearl’s language for causal models) do surgery on my model of reality so that I am already in a sexual relationship with one of these women picked at random. Do additional surgery so that she and I already know each other at least as well as couples usually do. Acquiring this knowledge is very time consuming and entails costs like dinners and entrance fees to cultural events. Note that this second bit of surgery allows me to consider the merits of the woman picked at random without regard to whether those cost (again, mostly my time and attention but also entrance fees, etc) are better spent on a different woman.
Marin County is among the top 3 most affluent counties in California. Demographics similar to Silicon Valley, but replace the nerdy component with earthy-crunchy and new-age components. Probably .1 (10%) of these women work out with weights regularly and a significant fraction employ personal trainers to help them keep in shape. (An ordinary trip to the supermarket is often a very distracting and very vivid experience for me )
There is a higher than .5 probability that I would choose to stay in the relationship until she dumped me or 36 months have gone by. The only reason the 36 months is in there is so that I do not have to consider the effects on my attractiveness to women (and consequently, my dating options) of a significant change in my circumstances.
The most likely reason I would choose to dump the woman is that her thinking is significantly distorted by some ideology, and I consider progressive political beliefs an ideology—in fact, it is IMHO the most common ideology in these parts.
Or maybe what I am reacting to is just a high amount of the Big Five personality trait agreeableness. (I am quite low in agreeableness.) Speaking of Big Five, I am an extreme introvert, so strong extraversion is probably something else that would drastically lower the probability that I would choose to try to keep the relationship going as long as possible (inside this 36-month interval that defines our current universe of discourse). I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
Would I prefer that she has read all of Eliezer’s writing on the art of human rationality? Of course.
But I would be delighted, overjoyed, elated if she just knew the correct definition of “sexual selection” or understood that the poor people in the England of Charles Dickens were in fact materially better off than almost any other poor population at that time or at any previous time in history. (Define “poor population” as the first seven deciles of individuals distributed by material welfare in some natural category of people, e.g., residents of a nation state or linguistic community.) In other words, delighted, etc, if she had enough rationality, basic knowledge of things like the timing of the Industrial Revolution, and curiosity to seek out the hard numerical data which contradicts and overrides the fictional evidence of dramatizations on PBS of Charles Dickens novels. I just ended a 5-year relationship with a woman who did not know these 2 things. (She dumped me.)
I think it’s pretty relevant that the pool I was talking about was in rural northeast Texas. I’d say the selectivity would be much smaller in a liberal metro like Austin (where I now live). I’m not even including things like being even familiar with the words “transhumanism” or “rationalism”. My standards are even less than you talk about having. (Which is why selectivity numbers suck as a way of communicating about this subject.)
Additionally, I’m on the verge of resigning myself to the possibility of remaining single indefinitely. This definitely has the effect of raising my standards.
The above analysis neglects IQ. One of my girlfriends was definitely above one standard deviation above the mean in IQ and the other 2 were probably above that line. The math of the normal distribution is such that only 16% of the population is above one s.d. above the mean. (The mean IQ in Marin County is probably higher than the national mean, but I am using the population here, not the national population, as my standard of reference for thinking about IQ.) One s.d. above the mean BTW is defined as an IQ of 115.
So multiply the .5 figure in my original comment by .16 or so, pushing us down to 1⁄12 of the women in the set defined above. And since it took me several hours to realize I had overlooked such a crucial factor (.16 -- that’s 2.6 bits of entropy!) there are probably other factors I’ve overlooked, so push the figure down some more.
The reason IQ has 2.6 bits or so of “importance” is that (again) the usefulness of the girlfriend is roughly the ability of the girlfriend to achieve goals and make good decisions in her own life multiplied by “caring”, and that first factor is very heavily reliant on IQ—more so than for example income is reliant on IQ IMHO.
And now my attention is caught by that second factor in the equation usefulness_to_me == rationality * caring: how much she really cares about me relative to how much she cares about herself. One of my girlfriend was above .5 on that measure, another probably above it or approaching it. (The third was below .1 -- definitely below .15 -- and I only got involved with her because she was very nearby and conveniently at hand during a time in my life when for me to have to travel even a few miles to get together probably would have been a dealbreaker. And she was spontaneous and childlike and fun and pretty.)
Knowing that prospective girlfriends who pull above .5 on the caring measure are available, I probably will not settle for one who does not (unless there is some countervailing consideration, but let us forget about that possibility and hope it all comes out in the wash). So that adds another requirement for my next girlfriend, and I would say that out the set of women defined above, .25 meet this latest requirement given of course that I could win the women, which in most case I cannot. (It would be higher if I were pursuing a more conventional life path. For certain life paths that women identify with or approve of, like doctoring, say, that number might go as high as .4. Nonremunerative blogging about the far future, not so much.) (“Win the woman” by the way is polite language for “persuade the woman to have sex with me and to keep having sex with me or at the very least spending a large fraction of her time with me and promising not to have sex or even seriously discuss having sex with anyone else. The reason it is defined that way is that those condition are almost always necessary for the caring factor to approach anything like .5) OK, so now the figure—the “compatability quotient” we might call it—is down to 1⁄48, and (like I said above) there are probably factors I have not taken into account yet.
In all this multiplying (.5 times .16 times .25) by the way I have been remembering to search my model of reality for reasons to expect a significant conditional dependence of one factor on a different one, but I have not found anything really worth reporting or taking into account.
Hey, pdf23ds, please speak up if you do not welcome attempts by me to help you, and I will shut right up, but could it be that the reason you feel the need for such a high level of compatability is that you consider it necessary for you to understand her and for her to understand you sufficiently well? Women are quite different than you and I! They are from a different planet! (Not really, of course, but it is an apt metaphor.) But I think I understood my girlfriends well enough to steer the future into quite wonderful territory even though they’re from another planet. The best roads to understanding are the study of evolutionary psychology and simple experience being in a relationship. (Again I have 8 years.)
This is called “othering”. It is not nice. Certain amounts may be required for accuracy, but this much is uncalled for.
Edit: If you think something is wrong with my identification and/or evaluation of othering, I’d be interested to hear it. I brought it up because the parent commenter has mentioned wishing to speak more sensitively in the past.
Voters: since I explicitly asked Alicorn to point out objectifying language to me, and that sort of thing, it pains me that her doing what I asked is currently costing her 3 karma. Yeah, I think some of the writers who favor terms like “objectifying language” and “othering” are silly and counterproductive, but Alicorn strikes me as quite sensible and a good person to teach me concepts that will help me get along better with people high the Big Five personality trait agreeableness.
In the process of trying to rewrite what I said, I realized that I had no insight into pdf23ds’s reasons for adopting the (1/300 to 1⁄400) compatability target, so I should have kept silent.
(I would have deleted my comment, but now it is the subject of responses.)