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Konkvistador comments on Polyhacking - Less Wrong
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If the hypergamy hypothesis is correct this isn't so at all.
Also consider these stats from the CDC:
Something's wrong with those numbers. Medians of integer-valued quantities are always integers or half-integers.
EDIT: I've taken a look at the report, and it doesn't say anything about how they calculate medians, so I don't know how they're fudging their numbers to get these out.
EDIT 2: I should also say "good job for looking at the research and getting numbers", even if I'd like these researchers to be more transparent as to what they're actually reporting.
An uninformed guess: those medians are presumably based on survey data, so they might've been adjusted using the survey's sampling weights.
It's almost certainly true, perhaps doing a weighted average of the medians of subgroups. However, any method that does that is not producing a median. A good way of doing that adjustment might give "cooked" numbers for the various options, but the point where 50% are below and 50% are above would still almost certainly be an integer. And if it is actually balanced (highly unlikely with so many data points), so that any number greater than X and less than X+1 divides the population in two, then the convention is to report X + 1/2. There is no information about the median that anything past the decimal point can actually convey.
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Just to ensure clarity, you meant to say; "every time a male has sex with a new female [partner], their opposite-sex partners rise by one. Correct?
One other thing which could skew the statistics is the fact that people that have had many sexual relationships can die, and the dead are not often counted in statistical surveys, while some of their partners might be.
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The true mean values should be close, but the medians etc can be very different.
While I agree that some attempt should be made to explain the data, it's a bit much to say it's "wrong". There's no real fault in just reporting the results you actually got without speculation, and there might well be a good explanation.
That is a good heuristic.
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You forgot to follow that with "...in a sexist culture with a very strong monogamy taboo and a tendency to punish women unequally for behavior considered slutty".
I'm struggling to come up with a reason why female and male average tendencies wouldn't differ from each other on this.
Women's unavoidable investment in reproduction for most of our history is something that rewards very different strategies between women and men in nearly any sexual marketplace conditions that I've so far thought of.
You need to read "Evolution's Rainbow" and to a lesser extent, "Sex at Dawn". Neither are perfect but they are strong antidotes to this kind of "sexual strategies" thinking, which is heavily contaminated with cultural assumptions.
In the last post I'm just wondering why the attraction hardware would differ in predisposing us for desiring different physical types but not behavioural types (independent of the question if hypergamy is or isn't such an adaptation).
As to the recommendation, that has been on my to read list for a while now, I guess I'll bump it up. :) The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature was the last book with a similar subject if not conclusion that caught my interest.
Check out Male, Female by David Geary. It's more rigorous than the Red Queen.
Watch out for biology too. That stuff is heavily contaminated with sexism and doesn't pay the proper respect to politically correct ideals. We should ostracize it.
Both of the books above are biology. Sex at Dawn is by non-biologists but Evolution's Rainbow is by an evolutionary biologist. Her complaint is that actual biology is being misread in ways that distort the science, including the science of evolution, by people whose interpretations are culturally biased.
But hey, you can also wave brain-stop words like "political correctness" around if you want.
Let me translate in to overt. The following statement-reply pair:
Is overwhelmingly strong evidence that your beliefs on this subject are not optimally correlated with reality.
Sure it is quite possible (and likely) that a lot of people are wrong about what sexual strategies are used. But not that there are sexual strategies and not that it should be startling to find that the sexual strategies turn out to be symmetric. It should be difficult for Konkvistador to think of reasons for that to occur, because it would be a miraculous coincidence.
Why? From what I know of Sex at Dawn, the book's claims would lead us to expect sexual strategies for both men and women that involve many partners.
You're making claims and ignoring sources without giving a shred of evidence yourself.
I think the burden of proof is on one who claims that different things are equal. "Involve many partners" is extremely vague, it's not so fine-grained a similarity that for it to be a common strategy for both men and women would be miraculous, it's not a strategy at all any more than "theism" or "atheism" are philosophies.
If someone were to claim that Mercury has exactly as much mass as a moon of Jupiter plus or minus one kilogram, I wouldn't feel the slightest discomfort at not having a source to back up my expectation they'd be different, and I would not be convinced without a mountain of evidence.
Things don't magically align like that in nature. I could find out tomorrow that every study ever showing differences between men and women was too contaminated by culture to be useful, I'd still not believe that no significant differences exist. So long as I'm not claiming to know exactly what those differences are, I don't have the burden of proof.
This discussion started with:
mention of "hypergamy", the usual definition of which simply treats marriage (by implication, either monogamous or polygamous) as the default
stats purporting to show that women seek fewer partners.
followed by Julian pointing out that the stats come from a particular culture (and later pointing to research that looks at many cultures).
Mind you, the evidence I mentioned over here does seem consistent with a broader definition of "hypergamy". But again, this comes from the same culture.
Why do you implicitly assume that mating behavior is determined by culture, rather than vice versa? Humans had mating strategies long before we had language, let alone anything resembling modern societies. A priori is seems a lot more plausible that human cultures evolve to fit our natural behaviors, or perhaps that mating behaviors and traditional cultures co-evolved for long enough to become inextricable.
Because families that moved between societies don't retain some kind of genetic memory of the rituals used by their ancestors.
Humanity has lived in cities for around 10,000 years. Evolutionarily a blip - we've been Homo Sapiens for 200,000 years. 10,000 years is long enough for simple, useful evolution (such as the spread of a gene for digesting milk). Not enough for complex behaviors, especially with a huge transnational interbreeding population tending to stir up genes and cause "regression toward the mean".