Stuart Anderson

• Stuart Anderson 22 Jan 2020 3:20 UTC

  1 point

  on: Disasters

  I live in Aus­tralia. The en­tire coun­try burns, floods, or is in drought pretty much con­stantly. We do gov­ern­ment dis­aster re­sponse very well. There are also sig­nifi­cant cul­tural fac­tors that aid in deal­ing with dis­asters.

  I’m not against prep­ping, but I think it is less about dis­asters and more about deal­ing with day to day events. If you do enough to not be caught short then you’re prob­a­bly go­ing to be fine.

• Stuart Anderson 22 Jan 2020 3:09 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: Disasters

  I’ll be knock­ing on the neigh­bour’s door to drink out of their swim­ming pool. I can’t speak for any­where else, but there’s more than enough wa­ter for more than 2 weeks.

  I have some food, but I could go with­out food for two weeks. Most peo­ple could, even if they were un­happy about it. The big­ger prob­lem with food is that if power goes out then so does re­friger­a­tion, so you’re go­ing to be stuck cook­ing and/​or eat­ing a lot of food quickly. Peo­ple aren’t used to how quickly food spoils be­cause they’re used to re­friger­a­tion and other mod­ern preser­va­tion tech­niques.

• Stuart Anderson 16 Jan 2020 16:25 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Olomana's comment on: What are be­liefs you wouldn’t want (or would feel ap­pre­hen­sive about be­ing) pub­lic if you had (or have) them?

  I have no such qualms, so I’ll do it.

  Sin­gle moth­ers are a dis­aster area. They make their chil­dren’s lives ob­jec­tively worse on ev­ery sin­gle met­ric we can mea­sure.

  We over­whelm­ingly give cus­tody of chil­dren to the statis­ti­cally worse par­ent *in spite* of the child’s well be­ing be­cause so­ciety cares more about women than it does chil­dren (or any­one or any­thing else, for that mat­ter).

  Find­ing some­one to crit­i­cise fathers and ab­sent fathers is easy, find­ing any­one to call out sin­gle moth­ers and their dele­te­ri­ous in­fluence is im­pos­si­ble. We hear non-stop about toxic mas­culinity, the pa­tri­archy, and gen­er­ally how men are the worst of the worst, but noth­ing is said about the sin­gle moth­ers at home, and the ma­jor­ity fe­male teach­ing en­vi­ron­ment, rais­ing chil­dren and cre­at­ing the dis­mal out­comes they do.

  When your perfor­mance in a task is di­rectly cor­re­lated to the pres­ence or ab­sence of an­other, what does that say about your value in that task?

• Stuart Anderson 28 Dec 2019 3:36 UTC

  1 point

  on: Vac­cine… Help? De­pro­gram­ming? Some­thing?

  Cars are un­safe. They maim and kill a non-triv­ial num­ber of peo­ple ev­ery sin­gle year. Is that suffi­cient rea­son to avoid cars?

  Safety and util­ity are always a trade off. The prob­lem when it comes to vac­cines is that peo­ple are so cod­dled by a life with­out dis­ease and death that they don’t un­der­stand the util­ity they’re gain­ing from vac­ci­na­tion. To them, noth­ing is hap­pen­ing (which isn’t un­true, as vac­ci­na­tion is pre­vent­ing the ab­nor­mal state that is dis­ease) and thus vac­ci­na­tion feels cor­re­lated with other un­re­lated events (like autism di­ag­no­sis). Hu­man minds are tuned to find mean­ing (ar­guably all minds are, if Sk­in­ner boxes are any in­di­ca­tion) and will sub­sti­tute bul­lshit and su­per­sti­tion if none is found.

  If there is to be any rem­edy for your rel­a­tive’s po­si­tion, I’d imag­ine it would be found in talk­ing to peo­ple with di­rect ex­pe­rience of pre­ventable dis­eases. Life with­out vac­ci­na­tion and an­tibiotics is within liv­ing mem­ory and you need only go to a nurs­ing home to get it. Direct ex­pe­rience of po­lio can be had in the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion. If you want to know what life was like when peo­ple just got sick and ei­ther just promptly died, or spent a life­time with dis­abil­ity as a re­sult, then just ask the peo­ple that saw it, or it hap­pened to.

  Noth­ing is perfectly safe, vac­cines in­cluded. How­ever, the al­ter­na­tives to vac­cines are well known and in­finitely worse than any­thing that vac­cines can do. Even if a few peo­ple die or get side effects that still a bet­ter deal than ev­ery­one hav­ing to have 5-6 chil­dren per fam­ily just to make up for in­creased in­fant mor­tal­ity from epi­demics.

• Stuart Anderson 8 Dec 2019 5:43 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: jkaufman's comment on: How To Change a Dance

  If this is a post about strat­egy then strat­egy can be dis­cussed. It’s not a van­ity post from my per­spec­tive, but even if it is I’m not mar­ried to au­tho­rial in­tent.

  As for any group be­ing too small to in­fil­trate for gain, that hasn’t been my ex­pe­rience. It only takes 3 mem­bers for en­try­ism to oc­cur, as only one needs to defect from the es­tab­lished or­der. You see this in cases of adultery within a so­cial group all the time. Lots of peo­ple lose their part­ner and their ‘best friend’ at the same time.

• Stuart Anderson 2 Dec 2019 11:42 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis's comment on: How To Change a Dance

  As you point out, whether some­thing is en­try­ism or politick­ing isn’t par­tic­u­larly clear. I look at what OP has writ­ten—that they had a pop­u­lar vote go against them, that they re­fuse to ac­cept that, that they want to in­crease their level of au­thor­ity by bad faith ac­tion, that they’re co­or­di­nat­ing an agenda with al­lied in­di­vi­d­u­als, etc. - as in­di­ca­tors that OP is new to the group. This is con­duct that is es­sen­tially an­ti­so­cial within a group, and the an­ti­so­cial get weeded out over time.
  
  As to OP’s agenda be­ing rele­vant to the group, the no vote and OP’s re­ac­tion to it sug­gests oth­er­wise. I also se­ri­ously doubt that OP just one day de­cided to be an iden­tity poli­tics ac­tivist out of the blue. This ide­ol­ogy is ba­si­cally a non-the­is­tic re­li­gion and is pushed with all the zeal you’d ex­pect from any bible thumper. That be­ing said, peo­ple have a right to their be­liefs, and if those around OP choose to as­so­ci­ate with OP whilst OP acts on those be­liefs then there (prob­a­bly) isn’t a prob­lem here. Quib­bling about bath­rooms and word­ing at a dance isn’t re­ally that big of a deal in the scheme of things.
  
  All that be­ing said, I don’t know OP, I don’t know the situ­a­tion, and it’s none of my busi­ness.

• Stuart Anderson 30 Nov 2019 18:22 UTC

  1 point

  on: How To Change a Dance

  En­try­ism is eth­i­cally bankrupt.

  If you wouldn’t want en­try­ism done to the groups you care about then don’t do it to the groups of oth­ers.

• Stuart Anderson 19 Nov 2019 11:41 UTC

  9 points

  on: Steel­man­ning so­cial justice

  You must adapt to the world, not the other way around. Ex­pect­ing oth­ers to fix your prob­lems, es­pe­cially at their cost, is both un­rea­son­able and ir­re­spon­si­ble.
  
  If you want the aid and re­spect of oth­ers then you have to earn that. You fit in, you put in the work, you be­come re­spectable in the com­mu­nity. Then you don’t have to worry about “us and them” be­cause you be­come part of the “us”.
  
  Tan­gible harms are to be dealt with by law that ap­plies to all. In­tan­gible harms are not a prob­lem for so­ciety to deal with. Your own thoughts and emo­tions are your re­spon­si­bil­ity to deal with.
  
  Peo­ple tend not to like bi­gots. It’s one thing to build a ramp for some­one with mo­bil­ity is­sues, it’s quite an­other to have racial hiring quo­tas. The former is a dis­abil­ity, the lat­ter is not. The former in­creases fair­ness, the lat­ter does not.
  
  It doesn’t mat­ter if your apartheid is for or against a par­tic­u­lar class, it is un­just ei­ther way. Also, it’s only a mat­ter of time be­fore it gets used on you. That’s how weapons work.

• Stuart Anderson 31 Oct 2019 4:42 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  A so­ciety is a group of peo­ple. Much as with any group, the more that peo­ple care and are on the same page, the more you get done.

  When you don’t give a damn at all, or when your tribe is fight­ing the other tribes, you have less time and in­ter­est in pro­gress­ing. For you to labour effec­tively your labour must mat­ter and it must be con­struc­tive.

• Stuart Anderson 31 Oct 2019 4:27 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TurnTrout's comment on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  The CDC data has figures on num­bers of re­la­tion­ships, in­clud­ing mar­riages, by age and gen­der in the ta­bles at the end of the doc­u­ment. The data and con­clu­sions about STDs is ir­rele­vant to me in that, I am in­ter­ested in what hap­pens to peo­ple’s pair bond­ing abil­ities as their num­ber of sex­ual part­ners in­creases.

  Promis­cu­ity ap­pears to have effect there, which would im­ply that it is at the very least a cor­re­late with re­la­tion­ship failure (and there­fore rele­vant to the topic of pair bond­ing). Is it causal, are there other fac­tors at work? I can’ t an­swer that ques­tion, I can only do the best with what I have. Un­sur­pris­ingly, re­search into pos­si­ble nega­tive effects of promis­cu­ity on men­tal health, life out­comes, self re­ported met­rics on hap­piness, etc. isn’t ex­actly well funded. This is an area of re­search that is made ra­dioac­tive for so­cial rea­sons.

  I will say the same thing to you that I did to pjeby: I made a mis­take in try­ing to cover too much ground. For me to ad­dress ev­ery lit­tle point pjeby makes (be­cause from my per­spec­tive a gi­ant por­tion of what pjeby writes are claims that have noth­ing to do with any­thing I’ve writ­ten, or are mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions, etc. For ex­am­ple, he makes a false equiv­alency be­tween his ex­pe­rience as a mem­ber of the class and the en­tirety of the class) it turns into an es­say, which then feeds straight back into the whole *death by a thou­sand cuts* game. I’ve cut that right off with pjeby be­cause I’m not in­ter­ested in that kind of a back and forth and I don’t think it’s pro­duc­tive.

  On the other hand, you’ve asked a sin­gle ques­tion, and I’ve given you a sin­gle an­swer. That’s man­age­able. You can just go ahead and tell me I’m full of shit and it ends right here, no di­ver­sions or *whaddabout-isms* or *not alls*.

• Stuart Anderson 31 Oct 2019 4:03 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  Dis­in­cli­na­tion and pro­scrip­tion aren’t the same.

  The Tragedy of the Com­mons is the prob­lem here. If ev­ery­one (or enough) chooses them­selves over the com­mon good then the com­mon good will suffer as a con­se­quence. Every­one wants the util­ity of the next gen­er­a­tion, no­body wants to ac­tu­ally give birth to them.

  It’s very clear that sex­u­ally di­mor­phic be­havi­ours work. They’re pre­sent in thou­sands of species. What isn’t pre­sent in thou­sands of species is hu­man so­ciety. Biol­ogy just hap­pens but so­ciety must be cre­ated and main­tained, some of which is con­trary to our biolog­i­cal im­per­a­tives. If we want the ad­van­tages of the kind of so­ciety we live in then we’re go­ing to have to make a lot of com­pro­mises on our biolog­i­cal im­per­a­tives. Every­one, not just women. In many do­mains. Either we give up on the util­ity we gain from so­ciety or we start en­sur­ing that util­ity is main­tained.

• Stuart Anderson 31 Oct 2019 3:49 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Elizabeth's comment on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  All ex­pec­ta­tions on the cit­i­zenry from the state come with the threat of vi­o­lence for non-com­pli­ance. If we can draft men to ex­tract util­ity from them at their risk, then un­less there’s spe­cial plead­ing go­ing on we can do ex­actly the same to women. I don’t think that’s the an­swer, but it’s a pos­si­bil­ity and is con­gru­ent with other ar­eas of cus­tom and law.
  
  Violence is un­nec­es­sary here, all that is re­quired is for the state to pick up the re­spon­si­bil­ity that women don’t want. I don’t want to re­move women’s agency, I want to re­move so­ciety’s de­pen­dence on their ges­ta­tion. If women don’t want to have ba­bies that’s fine by me, but so­ciety needs ba­bies so it’s go­ing to have to source them from some­where else. This is a sup­ply and de­mand prob­lem.
  
  For­tu­nately, procur­ing ges­ta­tional ser­vices is a solved prob­lem. Depend­ing on what op­tions you se­lect, a child that is the product of in-vitro fer­til­i­sa­tion, ar­tifi­cial in­sem­i­na­tion, and sur­ro­gacy can be had for about 40K USD. That’s com­pletely within the realms of state spend­ing given the re­turn on in­vest­ment. If Western women don’t want to have chil­dren there are tons of ru­ral In­dian women with no such qualms. Out­sourc­ing tasks that Western­ers won’t do is some­thing the West has been do­ing for longer than I’ve been al­ive.
  
  The ul­ti­mate solu­tion to this prob­lem is ar­tifi­cial ges­ta­tion but we aren’t there yet.

• Stuart Anderson 30 Oct 2019 12:21 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: pjeby's comment on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  My re­sponse is an at­tempt to provide an­swers to a com­plex sub­ject, where the ten­dency of par­ti­ci­pants is to act as if their own catas­trophis­ing of ALL WOMEN or NO WOMEN sce­nar­ios are some­thing that has ac­tu­ally been voiced and sup­ported by me. This eas­ily turns a dis­cus­sion into a death by a thou­sand cuts where ev­ery tiny lit­tle state­ment is at­tacked (po­ten­tially dis­in­gen­u­ously) from ev­ery sin­gle an­gle pos­si­ble.

  Let me give you an ex­am­ple:

  I say:

  > Men do not favour a minor­ity of women

  Then you say:

  > What? Of course they do. I’m a man, I would think I would know if I fa­vored the ma­jor­ity of women. I don’t. Similarly, you state that “men” re­quire re­pro­duc­tive op­por­tu­nity. I don’t. I don’t want chil­dren. So I’m a triv­ial coun­ter­ar­gu­ment on both counts.

  Straight up you make a false con­fla­tion be­tween the in­di­vi­d­ual and the class (I don’t as a part of the class, there­fore no­body/​not enough in the class do to mat­ter).

  I cite the OKCupid data that speci­fi­cally sup­ports my state­ment here. I am say­ing men, as a class, do not favour a minor­ity of women.

  I do not state that men re­quire re­pro­duc­tive op­por­tu­nity *any­where*.

  I can’t re­spond to a false con­fla­tion other than to point it out, I can only give you the cita­tions I can­not force you to read them, and I ab­solutely can­not be ex­pected to defend state­ments I didn’t make and don’t be­lieve.

  I am more than happy to re­spond to any point you wish clar­ified, and/​or to dis­cuss any mat­ter in re­la­tion to this topic, but it’s pretty clear that if we can’t make it six sen­tences with­out two show­stop­per er­rors my usual *word vomit* for­mat isn’t go­ing to work here.

  If you still want to talk, pick the sin­gle most im­por­tant el­e­ment and be as re­duc­tive as pos­si­ble. You are go­ing to ob­ject to *ev­ery­thing* I have to say, so keep­ing a very nar­row fo­cus is the only way this is go­ing to work.

• Stuart Anderson 26 Oct 2019 0:08 UTC

  −3 points

  in reply to: leggi's comment on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  Where are we to get our peo­ple from, if not from our own cit­i­zenry?

  Cur­rently, no Western na­tion (out­side of Is­rael, thanks to their large Ul­tra Ortho­dox com­mu­nity) has a suffi­cient re­place­ment birth rate. If we can­not make more peo­ple to re­place those that die then our so­cieties die. If we strip mine the third world for peo­ple (un­eth­i­cal and un­sus­tain­able) then we face two prob­lems: ei­ther we suc­cess­fully in­cor­po­rate those mi­grants into our cul­ture and effec­tively de­stroy their fer­til­ity as we have our own, or we don’t suc­cess­fully in­te­grate them into our cul­ture in which case our cul­ture dies and is re­placed with a colony of their cul­ture. Either sce­nario re­sults in our death.

  We know the recipe for kil­ling pop­u­la­tion growth, and we’ve de­ployed it suc­cess­fully in Africa (and by ac­ci­dent, here too): ed­u­ca­tion for girls fol­lowed by em­ploy­ment (and you don’t even need birth con­trol to see the dra­matic effects). This recipe has no effect in cer­tain cul­tural groups, namely strict pa­tri­archies like Is­lam, the Amish, Jewish Ortho­dox, etc. Ed­u­ca­tional and em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties for women are strictly con­trol­led in those so­cieties (fun fact: in re­search­ing for this thread I found out that Boko Haram *liter­ally* means *Western ed­u­ca­tion is for­bid­den*).

  I know things that are true, and that I don’t par­tic­u­larly like. It doesn’t make those things less true. I didn’t make the prob­lem, and I don’t have the solu­tion for the prob­lem (I’m not even sure there is one, or if there is even time left to im­ple­ment it). The one thing I won’t do is pre­tend there isn’t a prob­lem that is there for all to see.

  As for men do­ing the bulk of the work, we’ve had re­li­able birth con­trol for less than a cen­tury, labour has been gen­der seg­re­gated for the en­tirety of hu­man his­tory up to this point, and men and women have sig­nifi­cant biolog­i­cal differ­ences. The cir­cum­stances for women to be equal play­ers have barely been around and things take time to change. That be­ing said, I in­vite you to con­sider who built your house, who makes sure the power and wa­ter come to it, that the sew­er­age and garbage leaves it, who comes to put it out if it catches on fire, and who would come and help you if you were in trou­ble and called the po­lice.

  As­sum­ing gen­der par­ity in labour is even pos­si­ble it won’t hap­pen un­til you and I are both long dead. Give it a cen­tury at least. His­tory moves slow, even the weird his­tory we find our­selves in right now.

  As for the scoffing at men’s pro­tec­tion, I think the best (and most tragic) ex­am­ples of what men with guns do for a coun­try is see­ing what hap­pens to xenophilic baizuo that de­cide to prove how *safe* Is­lamic coun­tries are. Raped, mur­dered, be­headed. Mul­ti­ple cases. The uni­verse isn’t a nice safe place, and cod­dled Western­ers are free to walk out­side of the bor­ders that pro­tect them and find that out any time they like. Priv­ilege is in­visi­ble to those that have it.

  Hon­estly, I think some peo­ple walk around with a re­al­ity dis­tor­tion field pro­tect­ing them from in­con­ve­nient in­for­ma­tion. That build­ing I live in de­signed, built, and ser­viced by men? I guess that house just built it­self and looks af­ter it­self, no men to be seen! Th­ese safe streets I walk, I don’t see men with guns on the kerb, I guess the street is just nat­u­rally safe! All these things around me just, poof, into ex­is­tence! Where *does* stuff come from?!

  No­body’s ask­ing you to give men a medal, or to even thank them in any way at all. It would just be nice if you saw them as *peo­ple* rather than util­ities.

• Stuart Anderson 25 Oct 2019 21:38 UTC

  −4 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  If women choose to mate with the win­ners, then male sex­ual agency is men do­ing what­ever is re­quired to look like a win­ner. Is now a good time to men­tion that cod­pieces were a thing?

• Stuart Anderson 25 Oct 2019 21:20 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis's comment on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  When you un­der­stand that this is just a mod­ern pu­ri­tan non-the­is­tic re­li­gion play­ing out then all the de­nun­ci­a­tion makes perfect sense. You don’t need to de­nounce some­one that’s demon­stra­bly wrong, you just point out how they’re wrong. Heresy on the other hand, well, there’s no ar­gu­ing with that, is there? You ar­gue with bad ideas, but you *burn* sin­ners lest their cor­rup­tion in­fect you.

  What ex­actly do peo­ple think is the endgame of de­nun­ci­a­tion? If de­nounc­ing me is enough then by all means, do that and for­get about me. I would ar­gue that if peo­ple feel that strongly about it then they need to do a lot bet­ter than that. You don’t de­bate in­tractable idiots in the pub­lic fo­rum for the benefit of the idiot, you do so for the fo­rum. The ma­jor­ity say noth­ing, they just listen.

  Since I’m play­ing the role of the Devil already:

  I speci­fi­cally said I offered no solu­tion in that post. I had hoped that peo­ple would be more ra­tio­nal and less pissed off, but you win some you lose some. It’s as good a place as any to raise my solu­tion to the prob­lem.

  The fun­da­men­tal prob­lem is biolog­i­cal. Women have an ex­clu­sive gate­keep­ing role on re­pro­duc­tion. We aren’t that far away from ar­tifi­cial ges­ta­tion. The solu­tion isn’t to take away women’s choices, it’s to take away their re­pro­duc­tive monopoly and give it to ev­ery­one. Women and men can get their ba­bies from the fac­tory. The gov­ern­ment can sim­ply or­der a bunch if there’s a pro­jected pop­u­la­tion short­fall. The evolu­tion­ary need for sex­ual di­mor­phism will dis­ap­pear, evolu­tion will take care of the rest. This is the path to *true* gen­der equal­ity.

  We’re go­ing to be­come a post biolog­i­cal species sooner or later, we may as well speed up the timetable to deal with the birth rate crisis into the bar­gain.

• Stuart Anderson 25 Oct 2019 20:13 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Elizabeth's comment on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  A sta­ble so­ciety is one where vi­o­lence is low and en­gage­ment is high, and where the re­place­ment rate is both pos­i­tive and high enough to ac­count for nat­u­ral at­tri­tion at least. I be­lieve the former is im­pos­si­ble to sus­tain with­out the lat­ter.

  Progress is hav­ing all the sup­port­ive ap­para­tus of so­ciety in or­der and func­tion­ing to the de­gree that the peo­ple who cre­ate dis­pro­por­tionate im­prove­ments in sci­ence that feed back into the so­ciety are sup­ported and pro­moted. If I want the benefit of a Stephen Hawk­ing then I need to have a smelter for the metal in his chair, a chip foundry for his com­puter, a school for his doc­tors and nurses, a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal fac­tory for his medicine, etc. Ba­si­cally, cog­ni­tive work has the biggest and most com­pli­cated sup­ply chain prob­lem pos­si­ble. Without a sta­ble so­ciety progress will diminish and even­tu­ally fail.

• Stuart Anderson 25 Oct 2019 20:00 UTC

  −1 points

  in reply to: pjeby's comment on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  Some of these state­ments are ridicu­lously ob­vi­ous, but given the re­duc­tive as­sump­tions counter ar­gu­ment has already popped up I’m just go­ing to try to cover it all:
  
  * What’s good for an in­di­vi­d­ual and what’s good for so­ciety are not the same thing. So­cial con­tract is re­stric­tive and oner­ous and that’s the en­tire point of it.
  
  * Women de­cide whether sex oc­curs or not. Cir­cum­stances shape ev­ery­one’s will­ing­ness to pur­sue the choices open to them.
  
  * Fe­male mate se­lec­tion isn’t an av­er­age dis­tri­bu­tion (http://​​archive.fo/​​https://​​the­blog.okcu­pid.com/​​your-looks-and-your-in­box-8715c0f1561e). Men do not favour a minor­ity of women.
  
  If you have an even num­ber of men and women, then given the above vir­tu­ally all women that want sex are get­ting it, many men that want sex are not get­ting it.
  
  * Sex is a pacify­ing agent. It is the strongest in­cen­tive we have. So­ciety un­der­stands and ex­ploits that. All so­cieties do.
  
  * Monogamy and mar­riage are ar­tifi­cial so­cial con­structs de­signed speci­fi­cally to place limits on our biolog­i­cal im­per­a­tives. Hu­mans are pri­mates, and pri­mates are not monog­a­mous.
  
  * If sex was the only thing that mat­tered in re­la­tion­ships, and was neu­tral on so­cial sta­tus in so­ciety, then men pay­ing for pros­ti­tutes would be a non-is­sue. Un­sur­pris­ingly, men that have to pay a woman just to touch them tend to have differ­ent at­ti­tudes to both women and so­ciety thanks to be­ing cut out of the so­cial con­tract.
  
  * The pay­ment of the so­cial con­tract (for men) is sex *and* re­pro­duc­tion, the re­quire­ment is util­ity. Without pay­ment, men have no in­cen­tive (be­yond self in­ter­est) to provide their util­ity to any­one but them­selves. Good luck try­ing to wring 60 solid years of slav­ish labour from a man that has checked out of the race and just wants to play xbox. We don’t have robots for ev­ery­thing yet, so labour still mat­ters.
  
  Even to­day, post suffrage, post Pill, post rad­i­cal fem­i­nism, with women in­creas­ingly chained to the mil­l­s­tone as men have been, the so­cial con­tract for men and women is not even re­motely equiv­a­lent.
  
  Up un­til the pre­sent the labour of one sex was the pay­ment for the other. That equa­tion has shifted, and it is still mov­ing. Per­haps my con­cerns re­gard­ing an­ti­so­cial effects are pre­ma­ture given that these things play out on his­tor­i­cal time scales and we’re right in the mid­dle of it and lack the per­spec­tive. I can’t an­swer that ques­tion. I don’t think it’s un­rea­son­able to have the dis­cus­sion we are, ei­ther way.
  
  * The day that a team of women come to fix a burst sewer main at 3am is the day that I value their non-na­tal con­tri­bu­tions equally to men’s. Women aren’t use­less but let’s not pre­tend they have equiv­a­lent util­ity to men. They don’t, and women’s life­time nega­tive tax con­tri­bu­tions are ev­i­dence of that.
  
  * The CDC has data on promis­cu­ity and pair bond­ing (https://​​www.cdc.gov/​​nchs/​​data/​​nhsr/​​nhsr036.pdf). I can find no data that in­di­cates neu­tral or pos­i­tive effects for promis­cu­ity.
  
  * I’ve yet to meet a sin­gle woman that is happy with *set­tling* for a meal ticket she thinks she’s bet­ter than. I know an in­creas­ing num­ber of men that aren’t in­ter­ested in shack­ing up with a woman with 300 notches on her bed­post. No­body wants to be stuck with some­thing that’s be­neath their ex­pec­ta­tions (re­al­is­tic or oth­er­wise).
  
  * As for apex men hav­ing a limited abil­ity to mate, sim­ply search for pic­tures of Leonardo DiCaprio on beaches with mod­els. He’s com­ing up on 30 years of dozens of mod­els a week (al­though he does share them with his friends, so that’s nice of him).
  
  * Depend­ing on the ju­ris­dic­tion, pa­ter­nity test­ing can be ille­gal or ig­nored by the courts. How­ever, it isn’t ig­nored by biol­ogy, as am­ply demon­strated by the Cin­derella effect. Also, good luck try­ing to sue a woman for pa­ter­nity fraud—that’s never go­ing to hap­pen.
  
  * Swing­ing is a fringe adap­ta­tion to the death of mar­riage and monogamy. It’s an at­tempt to bring sta­bil­ity and cer­tainty to an en­vi­ron­ment with­out fidelity. As far as I’ve seen it takes all the drama of or­di­nary re­la­tion­ships and makes it even worse. I’m sure that some­one has made it work, I’ve just never met them. Sex and re­pro­duc­tion aren’t syn­onyms, not in gen­eral and not in swing­ing. Un­less things have changed rad­i­cally it’s still a faux pas to knock some­one else’s wife up, swinger or not.
  
  * Harem be­havi­our is vol­un­tary in the West. The harem is like a pie, and just as with any pie, a smaller slice of a gi­ant world class pie is bet­ter than the whole pie from the dol­lar store. It’s a log­i­cal choice, but it has con­se­quences like any choice does.
  
  His­tor­i­cally, harem be­havi­our is com­pli­cated. Sex­u­ally di­mor­phic be­havi­our is paired. Harem be­havi­ours from women wouldn’t work if men weren’t re­cep­tive to them. His­tor­i­cally, harem be­havi­our in­creases male dis­pos­abil­ity and vi­o­lence. Either the sur­plus males at­tack the so­ciety (which is ar­guably what’s go­ing on in the West, greatly nul­lified by our bread and cir­cuses) or they at­tack other so­cieties to kill their men and gain ac­cess to the women (ISIS, Boko Haram, etc.).
  
  The lack of eco­nomic op­por­tu­nity for women and their offspring is always noth­ing com­pared to what hap­pens to men in the same en­vi­ron­ments. Even in the worst of situ­a­tions, women can fuck their way to sur­vival. Men just get butchered. Wombs are valuable, se­men not so much.
  
  * Polygamy in strict re­li­gious con­texts breeds many of the is­sues I’m talk­ing about (there’s a good rea­son these so­cieties are prim­i­tive). Is­lamic polygamy is de­pen­dent on male at­tri­tion by vi­o­lence. Amish polygamy is de­pen­dent on ex­pel­ling ado­les­cent males from the com­mu­nity. What these ex­am­ples don’t suffer from is the birth rate crash of the West. Women are in a role where they are ex­pected to stay in the home and re­pro­duce, and they do. Is­rael is the only Western coun­try on the planet with a pos­i­tive re­place­ment rate thanks to their large Ul­tra Ortho­dox com­mu­nity. If you cur­tail women’s choices, they will marry and re­pro­duce with­out ob­jec­tion (as ev­i­denced by plenty of these com­mu­ni­ties be­ing in the mid­dle of Western coun­tries. Any woman can walk straight out the door, onto welfare, and into a life of promis­cu­ity and free­doms when­ever she likes).
  
  Fe­male cen­tric polygamy is just a sub­set of Western polygamy which is it­self a sub­set of promis­cu­ity. There’s lit­tle of value there when it comes to cre­at­ing a proso­cial struc­ture to re­place monogamy and mar­riage. Even if it did help, I se­ri­ously doubt that would map to enough of so­ciety to be work­able.
  
  Polygamy is a crappy an­swer in a so­ciety with an equal num­ber of men and women. Our evolu­tion­ary her­i­tage and biolog­i­cal im­per­a­tives will never match what is re­quired by our so­ciety. Na­ture’s long stand­ing solu­tion to this prob­lem is to kill lots of men. I think that’s not a great solu­tion, but I can’t ar­gue with the effi­cacy of it.
  
  * My ar­gu­ment re­lies on a tip­ping point at which ag­gre­gated con­se­quences of de­ci­sions made by in­di­vi­d­u­als have syn­er­gis­tic nega­tive effects on the en­tirety of so­ciety. That’s true of many choices by many groups, when lots of peo­ple do the same thing then the con­se­quences pile up.
  
  * Given I *speci­fi­cally* cau­tioned against peo­ple rais­ing their own ‘solu­tions’ as ob­jec­tions and speci­fi­cally state against any course of ac­tion, I’m won­der­ing how to go about dis­en­tan­gling what I ac­tu­ally want to dis­cuss from peo­ple dis­gorg­ing their psy­ches in front of me. There’s a ton of su­per in­ter­est­ing stuff that comes up ev­ery time and countless tan­gents, but un­less I want to write an es­say in re­ply to ev­ery com­ment I’m go­ing to have to figure out how to pull back hard. I’m not sure how to go about that.

  This turned out to be ev­ery bit as di­s­or­dered as I feared.

• Stuart Anderson 25 Oct 2019 12:09 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TurnTrout's comment on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  What I mean is that peo­ple will hap­pily ob­ject, but they won’t say what they ob­ject to, or how, or offer any al­ter­na­tive or con­trary hy­poth­e­sis.

  Peo­ple make choices and those choices have con­se­quences. That’s rarely con­tested *un­til* that per­son is speci­fi­cally a woman and speci­fi­cally mak­ing choices *ex­clu­sive* to the do­main of women. The ac­cep­tance of the premise I’m talk­ing about is in the ob­jec­tion not to what I’ve said, but to *who* I said it about. We don’t get to a real dis­cus­sion be­cause peo­ple are already burn­ing me for heresy.

  If I’m in­cor­rect, that’s fine. If I’m in­cor­rect be­cause of *who* I’m ques­tion­ing, that’s not fine. When you look at re­sponses from my per­spec­tive it be­comes very difficult to sort whether a re­ply is com­ing from the former or the lat­ter (es­pe­cially when all I get is one sen­tence to work with).

• Stuart Anderson 23 Oct 2019 4:26 UTC

  7 points

  on: What are some un­pop­u­lar (non-nor­ma­tive) opinions that you hold?

  Peo­ple be­come en­raged by this, so I think it qual­ifies:
  
  Women’s agency, es­pe­cially their sex­ual agency, is con­trary to a so­ciety’s progress and sta­bil­ity.
  
  Men do the bulk of the work when it comes to cre­at­ing, main­tain­ing, and defend­ing ev­ery­thing in so­ciety. They are paid for their labours with ac­cess to sex and re­pro­duc­tion. Women’s agency causes there to be noth­ing to pay men with, be­cause if women are given a choice they favour a minor­ity of males, harem be­havi­our, promis­cu­ity, child­less­ness, etc. When women have agency, they choose to un­der­mine the so­cial con­tract on mul­ti­ple vec­tors.
  
  This premise seems to be al­most un­con­sciously ac­cepted by ev­ery­one I raise it with. The part that peo­ple be­come en­raged by is their own solu­tions to the prob­lem. I merely state the premise, not any course of ac­tion to be taken.