I respect the courage in posting this on LessWrong and writing your thoughts out for all to hear and evaluate and judge you for. It is why I’ve decided to go out on a limb and even comment.
take steroids
Taking steroids usually leads to a permanent reduction of endogenous testosterone production, and infertility. I think it is quite irresponsible for you to recommend this, especially on LW, without the sensible caveats.
take HGH during critical growth periods
Unfortunately, this option is only available for teenagers with parents who are rich enough to be willing to pay for this (assuming the Asian male we are talking about here has started with an average height, and therefore is unlikely to have their health insurance pay for HGH).
lengthen your shins through surgery
From what I hear, this costs between 50k − 150k USD, and six months to an year of being bedridden to recover. In addition, it might make your legs more fragile when doing squats or deadlifts.
(also do the obvious: take GLP-1 agonists)
This is sane, and I would agree, if the person is overweight.
So if Asian men are perceived to be relatively unmasculine, you want them to feminize themselves? This is a stupid and confused statement.
I believe that what you mean is some sort of costly signalling via flamboyance, which does not necessarily feminize them as much as make them stand out and perhaps signal other things like having the wealth to invest in grooming and fashion, and having the social status to be able to stand out.
Saying Asian men need to feminize reminds me of certain trans women’s rather insistent attempt to normalize the idea of effeminate boys transitioning for social acceptance, which is an idea I find quite distasteful (its okay for boys to cry and to be weak, and I personally really dislike people and cultures that traumatize young men for not meeting the constantly escalating standards of masculinity).
Schedule more plastic surgeries in general.
I see you expect people to have quite a lot of money to burn on fucking with their looks. I think I agree that plastic surgeries are likely a good investment for a young man with money burning a hole in their pocket and a face that they believe is suboptimal. Some young men truly are cursed with a face that makes me expect that no girl will find them sexually attractive, and I try to not think about it, in the same way that seeing a homeless person makes me anxious about the possibility of me being homeless and ruins the next five minutes of my life.
Don’t tell the people you’re sexually attracted to that you are doing this — that’s low status and induces guilt and ick.
You can tell them the de facto truth while communicating it in a way that makes it have no effect on how you are perceived.
Don’t ask Reddit, they will tell you you are imagining things and need therapy. Redditoid morality tells you that it is valid and beautiful to want limb lengthening surgery if you start way below average and want to go to the average, but it is mental illness to want to go from average to above average.
This also applies to you, and I think you’ve gone too far in the other direction.
Don’t be cynical or bitter or vengeful — do these things happily.
Utterly ridiculous, don’t tell people how to feel.
I think the tone of my recommendations was a bit too flippant and polemical, as the post was written with a much smaller, more high-context audience in mind. I would like to give some defense of the substance of those recommendations though.
First, a lot of dating advice given to men doesn’t reflect base reality (e.g. a woman recently told a male friend of mine, who is already a very nice and conscientious person, that he needed to “just be a nice person, that’s it”), or the advice given is true, but contains little alpha as you are already incentivized to do those things in all other aspects of your life (e.g. collect more money, more status, lose weight, improve your hygiene, etc.). This makes me take more seriously encouraging men—especially those operating from a serious deficit in moral luck—to push to think more deeply about options further out in the Overton Window. A central example of this is the shin-lengthening surgery—expensive, painful, difficult, but even more than all of those factors you are going to receive a lot of social shaming for even thinking about doing such a thing. But it is simply accurate that height is enormously consequential for men’s romantic and sexual outcomes, so height interventions are valuable. So yes you should take seriously the expense, pain, and logistics of undertaking such a procedure. But you should downweigh the social shaming you’re going to hear—these people, intentionally or not, are not speaking with your interests really in mind.
Second, on the expense. Yes a lot of the interventions I’m recommending are expensive. The median Asian American household income is >30% higher than the average American household. I am also writing on Less Wrong and in tech spaces where incomes are very high overall. I think it is appropriate to recommend people do expensive things, even if they are speculative, as many of the people I have in mind are distressed about matters of love and sex and have a lot of disposable income.
I see you expect people to have quite a lot of money to burn on fucking with their looks. I think I agree that plastic surgeries are likely a good investment for a young man with money burning a hole in their pocket and a face that they believe is suboptimal. Some young men truly are cursed with a face that makes me expect that no girl will find them sexually attractive, and I try to not think about it, in the same way that seeing a homeless person makes me anxious about the possibility of me being homeless and ruins the next five minutes of my life.
This is sort of the attitude that I’m trying to point at as being bad? Plastic surgery is okay, but only if you’re “fucking with your looks” and have a lot of money to burn, which seems to imply that plastic surgery is only good if you’re really, really ugly or kind of bored and pushing for the final optimization. Facial attractiveness is very consequential, hedonic returns on cosmetic surgery are generally very high, regret is very low, and it seems to me that basically everyone could benefit by improvements on the margin. It shouldn’t be an issue where you banish the non-extreme cases from your mind. I’m assuming from the way you’re phrasing the stuff about homeless people that you’re indicating that you do take this attitude but on some level don’t really endorse it?
Third, on the feminization I’m saying two things:
First I’m doing a bit of hedging. All of these studies show that Western women of every group find Asian men to be under-masculine and this causes them to say they are unattractive. It is understandable to conclude immediately from this that Asian men have reason to make the faces more masculine. On the other hand, I think many cultural critics accurately observe (with that Contrapoints tweet I linked being an example) that androgyny plays a very important role in beauty. So maybe there are two strategies that you can choose from: machismo and androgyny.
Second, I think the facial attractiveness literature makes this tension make more sense. It seems that “feminine” features really are more beautiful—for basically anyone. Hence my recommendation that Asian men need to masculinize their bodies (don’t let yourself have an unathletic skinny-fat build), but feminize their faces (softer face contours really are just more universally appealing that you would think).
Indeed, and I apologize for not being more diplomatic.
a lot of dating advice given to men doesn’t reflect base reality
I agree.
I think it is appropriate to recommend people do expensive things, even if they are speculative, as many of the people I have in mind are distressed about matters of love and sex and have a lot of disposable income.
Seems fine if your intention was to bring it to the attention of these people, sure. I still feel somewhat wary of pushing people to take steroids out of a desire to be perceived as more masculine: it can go really badly. In general, I am wary of recommending extreme interventions to people without having a lot more context of their situation. It is hard to steer complex systems to outcomes you desire.
Facial attractiveness is very consequential, hedonic returns on cosmetic surgery are generally very high, regret is very low, and it seems to me that basically everyone could benefit by improvements on the margin.
Seems very plausible to me. On the other hand, I believe that the highest ROI interventions for most lonely people do not look like getting cosmetic surgery done to improve their ability to date. Location, social circle, and social skills seem to matter a lot more. Perhaps you take it as a given that these things have been already optimized to the extent possible.
It shouldn’t be an issue that you banish the non-extreme cases from your mind. I’m assuming from the way you’re phrasing the stuff about homeless people that you’re indicating that you do take this attitude but on some level don’t really endorse it?
I was communicating how I deal with certain ugly facets of reality, not necessarily stating how I believe people should deal with these facets of reality. Would I ideally interact with such people from a place of empathy and not-worrying-about-myself? Sure.
Second, I think the facial attractiveness literature makes this tension make more sense. It seems that “feminine” features really are more beautiful—for basically anyone. Hence my recommendation that Asian men need to masculinize their bodies (don’t let yourself have an unathletic skinny-fat build), but feminize their faces (softer face contours really are just more universally appealing that you would think).
Okay, I see what you mean and consider it plausible.
I still feel somewhat wary of pushing people to take steroids out of a desire to be perceived as more masculine: it can go really badly. In general, I am wary of recommending extreme interventions to people without having a lot more context of their situation. It is hard to steer complex systems to outcomes you desire.
Yes this is very good. I think due to doing martial arts I’m more comfortable with steroid usage than I should be. I am also realizing that the two times I heard people around me say they were considering doing steroids for what I thought were insufficiently serious reasons, I told them very strongly not to do that.
I guess my mental model is something like this: some people get negative desirability points for things like their race. Those race demerits still exist legibly even when you do plausible amounts of compensation by ordinary means. So consider exogenous interventions (hence steroids, among other things). But those interventions should be narrowly tailored to compensate for the relevant invariant, and as you’re very correctly pointing out people are going to do that incorrectly by default.
I am wary of recommending extreme interventions to people without having a lot more context of their situation
Fwiw I think your recommendation just puts steroids onto my radar, and I still feel fully responsible for researching the associated risks. I think it’s fine to push risky interventions, even to push them really hard, fram ng them as a way for people to get something they really care about.
I think you can reasonably recommended testosterone and expect somebody to encounter the appropriate warnings on their way to acquire them.
But also to add some color on recommendations here. The two people that I shot down on steroid usage IRL were about to take trenbolone, which is a truly terrible idea. For attractiveness purposes, cycling a medical dosage of anavar (i.e. 2.5 mg daily) is more than sufficient. For context, that’s a dose that is anywhere from a fourth to a fiftieth of what athletes and bodybuilders take. This is not going to destroy your fertility, and is not going to add significant cardiovascular risk as far as I can tell.
I think it is highly irresponsible to recommend potentially damaging interventions to people without even mentioning the risk.
Of course, people should also do their own research, as a second line of defense, but Less Wrong is a place where I come with expectation of the debate being more reasonable than the rest of the internet, so I am more disappointed when someone provides dangerous advice without mentioning the risks.
We already have enough people in the Bay Area who keep advising others to take dangerous drugs, with “trust me bro, I am a rationalist, I did my research online”… but then we have overdoses and suicide and people going crazy. Or a few months ago, we had on Less Wrong an article about how to do massage, written by a self-taught enthusiast who recommended practices that could seriously hurt people (“just push strongly, in any place and direction”, “it is not a problem when it hurts”, “yes even if you massage pregnant women”) and bragged about how many people IRL he already taught his “technique”.
We already have enough people in the Bay Area who keep advising others to take dangerous drugs, with “trust me bro, I am a rationalist, I did my research online”… but then we have overdoses and suicide and people going crazy.
I have plenty of frustration with (mostly psychedelic) drug use in the Bay Area, but I really don’t think this is at all a reasonable summary of a pattern. Did we even ever have any overdoses anywhere?
I also don’t really think approximately any suicides are correlated with drug use. My guess is they are anti-correlated, though mostly for confounder reasons.
I do think some people go crazy because they take psychedelics, but I really don’t think anything would change if people put more disclaimers into their discussions of those drugs. People already put really a lot of disclaimers places.
(I don’t have a take on the massage thread the other day. My prior is that people overall are vastly vastly too hesitant to make recommendations as a result of a liability mindset where you will be held responsible for things going wrong, and not rewarded for things going right, and this is destroying really a huge amount of value in the world, so my guess is I am in favor of the massage guy getting to make his massage recommendations, but I really haven’t done anything but the most cursory skim of that thread)
Personal experience observing certain trans women doing it in in-person and online group conversations, in a part of my social circle that is composed of queer and trans autistic people.
rationalist social circle? To me, that is pretty unusual behavior. I read it as if you meant to point out a general phenomenon perpetrated by specific trans women online that the reader might know about.
I know a lot of trans women online and off and I’ve honestly never seen this behavior, except in spaces like 4chan, where it’s piled under at least 4 layers of self-hate, irony, and sadism. One of the “gender ideology” (i.e. mainstream trans) platitudes you hear over and over again is that gender identity ≠ gendered behavior ≠ sex and people should only transition if they want to, to better match their gender identity. The whole point is that acting masculine doesn’t disqualify you from being a woman, nor does acting feminine make you one (whether you agree with that or not).
Pressuring an effeminate boy into transitioning if he doesn’t experience gender dysphoria is immoral. If you or anyone else reading this comment has examples of people doing this online, please link them in reply to this comment, I would be interested to see how this is happening.
Koreindian didn’t order anyone to do anything. He suggested a different frame and some ideas to consider. I wouldn’t even call it a recommendation of any particular idea.
In addition, it might make your legs more fragile when doing squats or deadlifts.
There’s actually no reason to believe it’ll help. Increasing your height this way doesn’t make your body proportionately taller, and being out of proportion is unattractive.
This is just another case of geeks carrying ideas to weird conclusions without doing sanity checks.
I posted some literature on limb lengthening outcomes in this comment.
There is also more natural variation in limb proportions than you are allowing for. Just ask your bouldering friends for anecdata about ape index variation. I have taught many of my friends how to squat and deadlift. There is enormous natural variation in shin/femur ratios. It does not at all seem ridiculous to me that many men could add two inches to their femurs without going outside natural variation.
When I buy gis for jiu-jitsu, I have to buy separate sizes for tops and bottoms and hem the bottoms down. This is because compared to Caucasians my height, my hips start three inches lower. People do not realize that I’m disproportionate in this way by looking at me, and it took me decades to realize this about myself.
I said this to some friends recently:
...people on social media can tell [that shin-lengthening surgery looks weird] because these guys usually go viral after posting before/after photos, and so yeah you can convince yourself that the proportions look weird in that context, but if you saw these guys post surgery on the street you wouldn’t be like “hey everybody get that long-shinned freak!”
People subconsciously assess others’ appearance without consciously and explicitly pointing to particular traits. Just because they wouldn’t look at someone and say “long-shinned freak” doesn’t mean the long shins wouldn’t reduce their perceived attractiveness anyway. They’d look at the person and have a hunch that something is a little weird without being able to pin it down.
Take pictures of men, have women rate them for attractiveness. Choose pairs who got similar ratings. Extend their shins in Photoshop. Now have (other) women compare “man A” vs “man B with extended shins”, and other women compare “man A with extended shins” vs “man B”.
I respect the courage in posting this on LessWrong and writing your thoughts out for all to hear and evaluate and judge you for. It is why I’ve decided to go out on a limb and even comment.
Taking steroids usually leads to a permanent reduction of endogenous testosterone production, and infertility. I think it is quite irresponsible for you to recommend this, especially on LW, without the sensible caveats.
Unfortunately, this option is only available for teenagers with parents who are rich enough to be willing to pay for this (assuming the Asian male we are talking about here has started with an average height, and therefore is unlikely to have their health insurance pay for HGH).
From what I hear, this costs between 50k − 150k USD, and six months to an year of being bedridden to recover. In addition, it might make your legs more fragile when doing squats or deadlifts.
This is sane, and I would agree, if the person is overweight.
So if Asian men are perceived to be relatively unmasculine, you want them to feminize themselves? This is a stupid and confused statement.
I believe that what you mean is some sort of costly signalling via flamboyance, which does not necessarily feminize them as much as make them stand out and perhaps signal other things like having the wealth to invest in grooming and fashion, and having the social status to be able to stand out.
Saying Asian men need to feminize reminds me of certain trans women’s rather insistent attempt to normalize the idea of effeminate boys transitioning for social acceptance, which is an idea I find quite distasteful (its okay for boys to cry and to be weak, and I personally really dislike people and cultures that traumatize young men for not meeting the constantly escalating standards of masculinity).
I see you expect people to have quite a lot of money to burn on fucking with their looks. I think I agree that plastic surgeries are likely a good investment for a young man with money burning a hole in their pocket and a face that they believe is suboptimal. Some young men truly are cursed with a face that makes me expect that no girl will find them sexually attractive, and I try to not think about it, in the same way that seeing a homeless person makes me anxious about the possibility of me being homeless and ruins the next five minutes of my life.
You can tell them the de facto truth while communicating it in a way that makes it have no effect on how you are perceived.
This also applies to you, and I think you’ve gone too far in the other direction.
Utterly ridiculous, don’t tell people how to feel.
Thank you for the passionate comment.
I think the tone of my recommendations was a bit too flippant and polemical, as the post was written with a much smaller, more high-context audience in mind. I would like to give some defense of the substance of those recommendations though.
First, a lot of dating advice given to men doesn’t reflect base reality (e.g. a woman recently told a male friend of mine, who is already a very nice and conscientious person, that he needed to “just be a nice person, that’s it”), or the advice given is true, but contains little alpha as you are already incentivized to do those things in all other aspects of your life (e.g. collect more money, more status, lose weight, improve your hygiene, etc.). This makes me take more seriously encouraging men—especially those operating from a serious deficit in moral luck—to push to think more deeply about options further out in the Overton Window. A central example of this is the shin-lengthening surgery—expensive, painful, difficult, but even more than all of those factors you are going to receive a lot of social shaming for even thinking about doing such a thing. But it is simply accurate that height is enormously consequential for men’s romantic and sexual outcomes, so height interventions are valuable. So yes you should take seriously the expense, pain, and logistics of undertaking such a procedure. But you should downweigh the social shaming you’re going to hear—these people, intentionally or not, are not speaking with your interests really in mind.
Second, on the expense. Yes a lot of the interventions I’m recommending are expensive. The median Asian American household income is >30% higher than the average American household. I am also writing on Less Wrong and in tech spaces where incomes are very high overall. I think it is appropriate to recommend people do expensive things, even if they are speculative, as many of the people I have in mind are distressed about matters of love and sex and have a lot of disposable income.
This is sort of the attitude that I’m trying to point at as being bad? Plastic surgery is okay, but only if you’re “fucking with your looks” and have a lot of money to burn, which seems to imply that plastic surgery is only good if you’re really, really ugly or kind of bored and pushing for the final optimization. Facial attractiveness is very consequential, hedonic returns on cosmetic surgery are generally very high, regret is very low, and it seems to me that basically everyone could benefit by improvements on the margin. It shouldn’t be an issue where you banish the non-extreme cases from your mind. I’m assuming from the way you’re phrasing the stuff about homeless people that you’re indicating that you do take this attitude but on some level don’t really endorse it?
Third, on the feminization I’m saying two things:
First I’m doing a bit of hedging. All of these studies show that Western women of every group find Asian men to be under-masculine and this causes them to say they are unattractive. It is understandable to conclude immediately from this that Asian men have reason to make the faces more masculine. On the other hand, I think many cultural critics accurately observe (with that Contrapoints tweet I linked being an example) that androgyny plays a very important role in beauty. So maybe there are two strategies that you can choose from: machismo and androgyny.
Second, I think the facial attractiveness literature makes this tension make more sense. It seems that “feminine” features really are more beautiful—for basically anyone. Hence my recommendation that Asian men need to masculinize their bodies (don’t let yourself have an unathletic skinny-fat build), but feminize their faces (softer face contours really are just more universally appealing that you would think).
Indeed, and I apologize for not being more diplomatic.
I agree.
Seems fine if your intention was to bring it to the attention of these people, sure. I still feel somewhat wary of pushing people to take steroids out of a desire to be perceived as more masculine: it can go really badly. In general, I am wary of recommending extreme interventions to people without having a lot more context of their situation. It is hard to steer complex systems to outcomes you desire.
Seems very plausible to me. On the other hand, I believe that the highest ROI interventions for most lonely people do not look like getting cosmetic surgery done to improve their ability to date. Location, social circle, and social skills seem to matter a lot more. Perhaps you take it as a given that these things have been already optimized to the extent possible.
I was communicating how I deal with certain ugly facets of reality, not necessarily stating how I believe people should deal with these facets of reality. Would I ideally interact with such people from a place of empathy and not-worrying-about-myself? Sure.
Okay, I see what you mean and consider it plausible.
Yes this is very good. I think due to doing martial arts I’m more comfortable with steroid usage than I should be. I am also realizing that the two times I heard people around me say they were considering doing steroids for what I thought were insufficiently serious reasons, I told them very strongly not to do that.
I guess my mental model is something like this: some people get negative desirability points for things like their race. Those race demerits still exist legibly even when you do plausible amounts of compensation by ordinary means. So consider exogenous interventions (hence steroids, among other things). But those interventions should be narrowly tailored to compensate for the relevant invariant, and as you’re very correctly pointing out people are going to do that incorrectly by default.
Fwiw I think your recommendation just puts steroids onto my radar, and I still feel fully responsible for researching the associated risks. I think it’s fine to push risky interventions, even to push them really hard, fram ng them as a way for people to get something they really care about.
I think you can reasonably recommended testosterone and expect somebody to encounter the appropriate warnings on their way to acquire them.
Yes I was hoping for this sort of reaction.
But also to add some color on recommendations here. The two people that I shot down on steroid usage IRL were about to take trenbolone, which is a truly terrible idea. For attractiveness purposes, cycling a medical dosage of anavar (i.e. 2.5 mg daily) is more than sufficient. For context, that’s a dose that is anywhere from a fourth to a fiftieth of what athletes and bodybuilders take. This is not going to destroy your fertility, and is not going to add significant cardiovascular risk as far as I can tell.
I think it is highly irresponsible to recommend potentially damaging interventions to people without even mentioning the risk.
Of course, people should also do their own research, as a second line of defense, but Less Wrong is a place where I come with expectation of the debate being more reasonable than the rest of the internet, so I am more disappointed when someone provides dangerous advice without mentioning the risks.
We already have enough people in the Bay Area who keep advising others to take dangerous drugs, with “trust me bro, I am a rationalist, I did my research online”… but then we have overdoses and suicide and people going crazy. Or a few months ago, we had on Less Wrong an article about how to do massage, written by a self-taught enthusiast who recommended practices that could seriously hurt people (“just push strongly, in any place and direction”, “it is not a problem when it hurts”, “yes even if you massage pregnant women”) and bragged about how many people IRL he already taught his “technique”.
I definitely want less of this.
I have plenty of frustration with (mostly psychedelic) drug use in the Bay Area, but I really don’t think this is at all a reasonable summary of a pattern. Did we even ever have any overdoses anywhere?
I also don’t really think approximately any suicides are correlated with drug use. My guess is they are anti-correlated, though mostly for confounder reasons.
I do think some people go crazy because they take psychedelics, but I really don’t think anything would change if people put more disclaimers into their discussions of those drugs. People already put really a lot of disclaimers places.
(I don’t have a take on the massage thread the other day. My prior is that people overall are vastly vastly too hesitant to make recommendations as a result of a liability mindset where you will be held responsible for things going wrong, and not rewarded for things going right, and this is destroying really a huge amount of value in the world, so my guess is I am in favor of the massage guy getting to make his massage recommendations, but I really haven’t done anything but the most cursory skim of that thread)
Thanks for correcting me on the overdoses.
(I will keep my opinion on the massage thread.)
sincere question, do you have a source for this?
Personal experience observing certain trans women doing it in in-person and online group conversations, in a part of my social circle that is composed of queer and trans autistic people.
rationalist social circle? To me, that is pretty unusual behavior. I read it as if you meant to point out a general phenomenon perpetrated by specific trans women online that the reader might know about.
I know a lot of trans women online and off and I’ve honestly never seen this behavior, except in spaces like 4chan, where it’s piled under at least 4 layers of self-hate, irony, and sadism. One of the “gender ideology” (i.e. mainstream trans) platitudes you hear over and over again is that gender identity ≠ gendered behavior ≠ sex and people should only transition if they want to, to better match their gender identity. The whole point is that acting masculine doesn’t disqualify you from being a woman, nor does acting feminine make you one (whether you agree with that or not).
Pressuring an effeminate boy into transitioning if he doesn’t experience gender dysphoria is immoral. If you or anyone else reading this comment has examples of people doing this online, please link them in reply to this comment, I would be interested to see how this is happening.
Koreindian didn’t order anyone to do anything. He suggested a different frame and some ideas to consider. I wouldn’t even call it a recommendation of any particular idea.
There’s actually no reason to believe it’ll help. Increasing your height this way doesn’t make your body proportionately taller, and being out of proportion is unattractive.
This is just another case of geeks carrying ideas to weird conclusions without doing sanity checks.
You are overconfident about this.
I posted some literature on limb lengthening outcomes in this comment.
There is also more natural variation in limb proportions than you are allowing for. Just ask your bouldering friends for anecdata about ape index variation. I have taught many of my friends how to squat and deadlift. There is enormous natural variation in shin/femur ratios. It does not at all seem ridiculous to me that many men could add two inches to their femurs without going outside natural variation.
When I buy gis for jiu-jitsu, I have to buy separate sizes for tops and bottoms and hem the bottoms down. This is because compared to Caucasians my height, my hips start three inches lower. People do not realize that I’m disproportionate in this way by looking at me, and it took me decades to realize this about myself.
I said this to some friends recently:
People subconsciously assess others’ appearance without consciously and explicitly pointing to particular traits. Just because they wouldn’t look at someone and say “long-shinned freak” doesn’t mean the long shins wouldn’t reduce their perceived attractiveness anyway. They’d look at the person and have a hunch that something is a little weird without being able to pin it down.
This could be verified experimentally.
Take pictures of men, have women rate them for attractiveness. Choose pairs who got similar ratings. Extend their shins in Photoshop. Now have (other) women compare “man A” vs “man B with extended shins”, and other women compare “man A with extended shins” vs “man B”.
Wait for the next round of ACX grants. :)