I was just about to come here to ask the question “Why is SSC so much
more obsessively racist than it is sexist?” But I see now that the
timing is not ideal for that particular assumption to pass unquestioned.
Maybe I’ll circle back in a week or two.
Yeah, this week’s culture war thread includes sneering at women’s suffrage, complaining that criticizing the historical exclusion of women from political power “isn’t giving our ancestors enough credit” because it was totes consistent and justified, and someone “steelmanning patriarchy”. Better luck next week, I guess...?
women opinion writers live in NY and couple of other cities in which
women are extremely successful and so their dating/reproduction
possibilities are limited because they don’t want to marry down.
“People being successful is evolutionarily bad because have your pick
of the litter means your options are too numerous to…uh…look, women
having money is just bad, guys, can we just agree on this and move
on?”
Well it used to be that women could withhold sex and men could withhold money. There was a relatively more equal balance of power.
Now that women have everything men have and can still withhold sex, it's created a population of men that are sexually frustrated on average.
Widespread legalized prostitution would help to make the situation less lopsided though.
Did you know there's a rule in orthodox judaism for the minimum frequency for how often a man is supposed to have sex with his wife? A man who didn't sleep with his wife enough was viewed as not fulfilling his duties as a husband, especially because women were viewed as the lustier sex.
Just an interesting thing to know.
Yeah, sadly I can. If you insist on viewing all human activity as straightforwardly self-interested and transactional then this is where you logically end up.
I have my own pet theory that there's a trap that people with just enough knowledge of economics fall into. Market mechanisms are incredibly powerful and have very low requirements to function well. They can occur spontaneously from humans interacting in a myriad of ways and can provide incredible insight into plenty of things that don't involve money.
But the things markets are good at producing aren't quite the things people want. There's an alignment issue, to borrow another rationalist term. The requirements to function are low, but they're not nonexistent. They can often be manipulated for good or ill by a small number of properly positioned actors. And a lot of human interaction is neither self interested nor straightforwardly transactional; or if it is it's so complex and multivariate that it's not really useful to model it in those terms.
There's a normal point in an economics education where the student understands the first paragraph but not the rest. Unfortunately, some students choose that point to stop learning and start applying to the real world and more often than not this is where they land.
> I have my own pet theory that there's a trap that people with just enough knowledge of economics fall into.
The only thing worse than somebody who has taken no economic courses is somebody who has taken a few and assume they know have found the fountain of all human knowledge.
I was just about to come here to ask the question “Why is SSC so much more obsessively racist than it is sexist?” But I see now that the timing is not ideal for that particular assumption to pass unquestioned. Maybe I’ll circle back in a week or two.
“People being successful is evolutionarily bad because have your pick of the litter means your options are too numerous to…uh…look, women having money is just bad, guys, can we just agree on this and move on?”