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Konkvistador comments on Polyhacking - Less Wrong
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I'm not necessarily talking about marriage or women seeking material comfort here. I'm referring to the mechanisms of female and male sexual desire and how they on average differ in more than just the parameters of the physical attributes the sexes seek in mates.
For most women their sexual attraction is in itself partially dependant on how desirable she thinks other women find the male in question. It also depends heavily on his status. And status as we know is basically zero sum.
My impression is that men are also influenced by how attractive other men think a woman is.
Semi-Anecdotal evidence of this: Tina Fey reports that she was never seen as "hot" until after she became famous.
Evidence that I suspect says more about Tina Fey's past insecurities than about scarcity bias. She is hot enough that she would have been seen as such even in school. Unless American high schools really are like they appear in movies. The hot girl isn't hot until she has a makeover involving taking off her glasses and letting her hair down!
It's plausible that people weren't talking about in public where she could hear it about how good she looked until she became famous.
Also, excuse me if I'm mistaken about this, but there's something about your phrasing which leaves me thinking that there's something weird about a woman who's attractive to you being insecure about her looks. There seems to be huge cultural pressure in the US for women to think they don't look good enough, and what's surprising to me is immunity to it.
No. I've met enough people who fit that category that I don't find it weird at all. A little annoying and something to be discouraged if convenient but not particularly weird.
Tina Fey lost a bunch of weight just before she got on TV. Given that there isn't really anything else to explain.
That would do it. She'd have been pretty and even attractive with the extra weight but 'hot' is rather more specific in this culture.
When I was in high school, most of the girls around me seemed to me to be as beautiful as anyone I ever saw on television or in the movies. Most high school girls are significantly hotter than the woman of median hotness in the population as a whole (getting older tends to make women less beautiful), so they would have to be even hotter than that in order to stand out.
I know what you're talking about and I think it's a mistake. Specifically I think it's an exemplar of a larger category of cases where a marginalized group's adaptation to unfavorable circumstances is mistaken by culture (and by evo psych, which has an alarming tendency to make excuses such things) as being a fundamental facet of their nature.
Historically male chances of successfully reproducing have been significantly smaller than female chances, at least this is what the difference in genetic legacy shows.
Also male variation is greater than female variation on practically any trait.
This together with our (perhaps culturally maintained) intuitions about unexceptional men being worth less than unexceptional women point to men being disposable.
I'm confused by you using the word 'adaptation' and differentiating that from a fundamental facet of their nature. If women predisposed to be hypergamous outcompeted women predisposed to not be hypergamous (because hypergamy is the game-theoretically correct plan), then shouldn't we expect there to be more women predisposed to hypergamy now? The counterargument would have to be that sexual selection strategies can't be inherited.
I was perhaps confusing in my use of language. To clarify, I mean volitional behavioral adaptation, not evolutionary adaptation. Or to spell it out, the people in the marginalized group have made a (contextually) sensible decision to advance their agendas by seizing the opportunities for power, resources, status etc which the restrictive social system leaves open to them.
For example, a poor Indian woman gaining resources through marriage (because she can't dream of being independently rich by her own effort), or a working-class woman in England trying to marry a footballer and raise her status (because social mobility is broken and it's that or a career in Asda).
Because people can and do adapt their behavior very simply and quickly, and we have an inheritance for this kind of flexibility, there isn't a need to produce a hypothesis of inherited behavior. And in fact, producing that hypothesis pretends that a social misfeature, sexism and its side effects, is somehow hardwired and thus blameless. Which is hogwash.
You can't derive an ought from an is; the hypothesis that a trait is "hardwired" (that is, that there exists a biological predisposition towards that trait) does not imply that the trait is blameless. Failure to appreciate this point leads to confusion: in particular, we must be careful not to reject hypotheses that might be true, just because they are unpleasant or even horrifying to contemplate.
Since our culture links misdeeds to volition, things not volitional are generally considered blameless. But I wasn't implying that the hypothesis is right, quite the opposite. I was implying that people are making untrue excuses by deflecting blame onto spurious made-up instincts.
How do you explain men marrying down?
They don't care about status so much?
My previous flippant response misread Jack's comment
One assumes- but why? Surely there are just as many poor Indian men who can't dream of being independently rich by their own effort, shouldn't they be marrying the daughters of footballers?
TV Tropes explains male gold diggers:
Maybe because the culture tries to influence men into not depending on their wife's family for money? An example of vows made in some Indian weddings:
During kanyadaan, the bride’s parents give their daughter away in marriage. The groom makes three promises – to be just (dharma), earn sufficiently to support his family, (artha) and love his wife (kama).
Of course, this kind of expectation is hardly unique to one culture. My thinking is that many cultures that encourage women marrying up will encourage men marrying down. In a culture that encouraged women to marry down, men would likely be encouraged to marry up.
Not strictly true. I'm from India and have heard many stories of men asking their fathers-in-law for money for large expenditures such as building/buying houses. Both in my extended family and in my friends circle.
Also, the dowry system in India is a strong evidence against this hypothesis. The amounts of money that are paid in some parts for highly educated young men boggles the mind. The dowry amounts seem to depend both on the bridegroom's qualifications (higher for doctors etc) and also on the bride's own attractiveness.
Interesting. Thanks for your perspective. I think you probably know more about this topic than I do. What do you think the expectations are for the husband, and for the wife's family? It seems that there is an expectation that the husband is able to earn money (ie. since you mentioned that large amounts of money are given to highly educated men, my assumption is that the wife's family is expecting him to earn money with his education, but if you think that's untrue I'd be interested to know your reasoning). However, you seem to be saying that there is also the expectation that the wife's family will help him with money. Is this expectation generally only for a short duration of time or is it considered a long-term obligation? Is there any expectation in the reverse (that the husband help the wife's family with money)?
Status is zero sum? I highly doubt it. I am certain that it's not something you can simply wave at with an "as we know".
It is, more or less by the practical meaning of being a ranking of all individuals in the group in question. You really can't all come first in a (rat) race. Encouragement awards don't count.
The more interesting thing to consider is how our internal measures of status and outward indicators of status can be manipulated such that we can get better results from those instincts in a positive sum way. This is definitely possible, at least to some degree.
Before you posted that I'd have said it was a pretty obvious idea. Can you develop your objection more?
The reason it seems obvious to me is that status is measured relative to the rest of the tribe. If you climb up the social ladder, that means someone got bumped down. Zero net change.
Imagine two islands, each with some tiny population - let's say, 10 each. Nobody ever interacts with anyone off-island, and the resources and living standards are the same. Now if I told you that people on island 1 are higher-status than people on island 2, does that strike you as a nonsensical statement? To me, it does not; it means that there is more mutual respect on island 1. I think that parsing that as "status" is justified, because it's not synonymous with how nice they are to each other, how much they like each other, or any other such variable (though of course it would tend to correlate with those).
You may disagree, but you should consider whether a definition of status which is tautologically zero-sum is likely to be blinding you to positive-sum interactions that are best interpreted as status-related (as opposed to friendship- or kindness-related).
"Mutual respect" could stand to be more rigorously defined.
Here's how I would imagine it: island 1 has specialists who divide the tasks of survival among themselves according to comparative advantage; everyone can say "I'm the best there is (on the island) at what I do" and does what they're best at most of the time. Island 2 has a king and nine cringing slaves.
Yup, good point. I have no idea what "should" count as the "gold standard" for status. If it had been the case that status was "really" a ranking, and therefore inherently zero sum, then it could produce one of those cases where people would be better off if they were consistently wrong about their actual status - if they consistently overestimated it. However, since status is a vastly fuzzier thing than, for instance, height or weight, it isn't at all clear what counts as correctly estimating one's status.
To me; it would, in principle, be nonsensical. However, in actuality, for this problem to be proposed, there must exist at least one person who knows of both island 1 and island 2, and it is that persons ranking that is being referred to. So they rank the people of island 1 higher than those of island 2. Perhaps because there's more mutual respect on island 1.
Those are entirely understandable in a zero-sum model. Put simply: those people are co-operating to increase their status, yes, but by doing so they are decreasing the status of those they overtake.
Note that I'm not sure which description of status is more useful yet, I just thought I'd chime in with some "thoughts so far"
Are those responses epicycles, or are they really part of your original model?
The first half is part of my original model. Status only ever exists relative to a particular community.
Imagine the two islands, island 1 and island 2 came into contact; but the people of each island were extremely patriotic.
On island 1, the people of island 2 would be low status. BUT on island 2, the people of island 1 would be low status.
In the same way one can lose status in one community (ie. a church-based community) while gaining it in another (ie. the rationalist community) through a single action (ie. abandoning their past religious faith)
The second part (explaining how a zero-sum model can justify behaviour that isn't LOCALLY zero-sum) is, quite simply, obvious to me; because it is so analogous to the zero-sum nature of energy in physics (energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but there are plenty of ways for you to get your hands on more of it)
The main thing that comes to mind is that status is not a one-dimensional variable. Somebody may have high status among LW posters, low status among goths, and moderate status among window-cleaners. If you could arbitrarily construct social groups and assign people to them, as well as deciding everyone's status in each group, you could construct such a set of social groups that every human belonged to at least one group where he was high-status.
Of course, in practice you can't do that, especially since people typically prefer hanging out in the social groups where they're high-status and avoid the groups where they're low-status.