Patri Friedman

• Patri Friedman 15 Jul 2026 17:41 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: The Weird­ness of Dat­ing/​Mat­ing: Deep Non­con­sent Preference

  I disagree that what is happening is that she “never consents to anything that’s going on“. There are constant micro-consents in a wanted flirtation—whether it’s the tone of her laughter, her body language, her face leaning in slightly, whatever.

  I’ve always been comfortable flirting in that way, I enjoy it as an art form, and every time you describe it with these terms I wince. Not saying out loud “Yes keep flirting with me” != “never consenting”. Not in the slightest!

• Patri Friedman 15 Jul 2026 17:32 UTC

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: The Weird­ness of Dat­ing/​Mat­ing: Deep Non­con­sent Preference

  Yes! I think this is some insightful texture on why women like it organic—it lets them flow through many micro interactions of turn on /​ turn off that (with skill) make it easy to go deeper /​ disengage based on her signals.

  Most people don’t like saying no to someone where there are potential social consequences. And women, like VCs, have to say no a lot. So ofc they want it to be a smooth and low-risk process, and a man’s ability to offer that is (due to the attunement, self-control, etc) a meaningful demonstration of his capacity as a lover/​boyfriend/​etc.

• Patri Friedman 15 Jul 2026 17:26 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: The Weird­ness of Dat­ing/​Mat­ing: Deep Non­con­sent Preference

  It damages the illusion that this is happening to her independent of what she wants

  I think this is a subtle but important mistake. You’ve given evidence that women wish seduction to proceed organically without explicit check ins. And then concluded here (and similar phrasing some other placed) that a typical woman wants the seduction to happen to her regardless of what she wants.

  But if she isn’t into the guy, she’ll view the seduction attempt as “creepy”. Just because she wants it organic doesn’t mean her preferences aren’t involved—they are profoundly involved. Caring deeply which men flirt with /​ seduce her is a well-known and extremely consistent part of the female perspective!

  Wanting to play out the dance of organic seduction doesn’t mean a lack of communication or signals. It just means they take some skill & experience to read. The dance she wants is not one of you ignoring her signals, but about keeping them as the constant subtle subtext, an interaction happening in parallel to the surface interaction. But read her desire wrong and you’ll quickly find out how invested she is in which guys push forward with her.

• Patri Friedman 18 Mar 2021 18:32 UTC

  30 points

  0

  on: Poli­tics is way too meta

  In some worlds /​ topics /​ countries this would be a really good point. But we have 50 years of Nobel Prize winning economics (“public choice”) and empirical evidence showing that large democracies are not at all “machines for passing good policies”. So in the US, the benefits of a policy proposal are, unfortunately, almost irrelevant. We have essentially infinite lists of suggestions for better policies; adding more does basically nothing. The entirety of the problem is the construction of the law-making machine; and so to me, your suggestion in that sphere is that we deny the only thing that matters: the sausage-making machine.

  Now, in other spheres, this is (fortunately) not the case. For example, in the part of EA that’s about “how to do the most good”, not about “how to grow the EA movement”, there is the potential for a good suggestion to get seen by a decision-maker and adopted. Having more content-based discussions makes a lot of sense there. Or, with a trusted friend. Or, in a well-run company. Or even in a small democracy where public opinion on beneficial policies actually sometimes translates to those policies being passed.

  If you want to produce good outcomes from nations, learn fields like public choice, or law & econ, and then influence activists to choose more informed strategies. (For example, I choose to work on charter cities for this reason). Otherwise you’re acting within an idealized system that doesn’t match reality in a way such that your strategies are basically useless. Your personal experience of being convinced by object-level examples to change your politics just don’t translate to the behavior of a 350M person democracy.