Swimmer963 comments on Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum - Less Wrong

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Comment author: sam0345 16 November 2012 04:10:52AM *  2 points [-]

Well, duh. Having high status people fall in love with you is an obvious sort of wish fulfillment plot.

Yet in films targeted largely at males, for example James Bond, the sex interest girls are generally low status. High status girls is not a major male wish fulfillment fantasy, whereas in romance, high status guys are as uniform as moaning in porn.. Even when the sex interest girl is a badass action girl with batman like athletic abilities, for example Yuffie the thief, she gets in trouble for stealing stuff, making her low status.

Further I doubt that there are what males would call action scenes in twilight because if there had been, males would have willingly watched it. What you are calling action scenes were probably status scenes involving violence and cruelty. I assume this because many, possibly most, romances have status scenes involving violence and cruelty. Love interest cruelty in romance is as predictable and repetitious as the girl moaning in porn. The point is not action, but to prove the love interest is potentially capable of cruelty and violence.

In an action scene, James Bond is in grave danger. In a romance cruelty scene, the love interest hurts someone really badly without the audience ever feeling the love interest to be in danger. The heroine is never in danger from the love interest, but the main point of the scene is that she could be. He is dangerous and badass. Hence the propensity of the prince to knock off relatives of the princess with that prominent and lovingly depicted sword.

In contrast, the main point of an action scene is that the hero is in danger. For example the henchman Jaws in "the spy who loved me" is way more badass than James Bond, so that the audience believes James Bond is in danger. No one is ever more badass than the romance love interest.

So yeah...there's a pretty high activation barrier for me to get into a relationship at all

That is because all the available guys are roughly equal to you in status. So you don't really want any of them. Not enough immortal vampires to go around. Hence Saint Paul's policy that females should remain silent in church, wear a head covering, etc - harmless ways to make all females in church artificially lower status than all males in church, thus artificially making all males in church hot, thus making it possible to accomplish his directive: "let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband." without the woman having to wait until they run out of eggs in their thirties, thereby causing their status in the sexual market place to drop like a stone until, at last, due to their lowered sexual market place status, they finally find that males are hot enough that they want to put out the necessary effort.

In order to ban hypergamy, Paul had to make females not want hypergamy.

Like Groucho Marx, you will only find them interesting when they start losing interest - hence the extremely low reproduction rate and high fertility clinic attendance rate of intelligent well educated women.

Observe the reasonably high rates of marriage near the age of maximum fertility among Mormons, Palestinians, and Amish.

Comment author: Swimmer963 16 November 2012 11:27:40AM 3 points [-]

That is because all the available guys are roughly equal to you in status. So you don't really want any of them. Not enough immortal vampires to go around.

Well, maybe. But I think one of the serious confounding factors is that I don't actually like sex and all the associated relationship crap. My friend, who does, has been in lots of relationships with guys who seemed low status to me (and yes, I had specifically that thought...most of them so far still live with their moms.) Granted, she's a single mom who hasn't finished her high school, and doesn't give off the impression of intelligence when she speaks (apparently I do)–so perhaps her status is closer to theirs, and maybe she feels that it's lower. So it's possible for her to have a relationship where she doesn't get along great with the guy, and sometimes doesn't even like his personality that much, but the sex is awesome and that balances it out. Wouldn't happen with me. The sex is something I put up with in order to make this weird alien beast happy, so that I can have the other parts of the relationship–I kind of like the whole living together, cooking together, "playing house" thing. And I want kids, and don't want to be a single mom. Honestly, that's probably the main reason I make any effort–I don't get lonely per se being single. (Are you implying that my feelings will change and I suddenly will start to get massively lonely once I perceive that my status has dropped and I'm no longer desirable to males?)

I'm trying to think of times that I did perceive myself as lower status, i.e. high school. Hard to know if I remember correctly, but I had crushes on guys and a few girls. Same as now. If I fantasized at all, my fantasies didn't include kissing or touching–should have been a clue-in, although at that point I was still expecting to be "normal" with respect to those things. I remember dating a guy at the end of high school who, physically, was considered much more relatively attractive than me, enough that people made comments about it to my friends–but I think he considered me similar or even higher status–I was much more independent, living on my own while he lived with his mom, working and paying my own tuition and rent, getting 90s in first-year university while he failed a couple of his first exams. And he was very aware of that and made comments about it. (In hindsight, that may have been a problem in that relationship, and may have contributed to why we broke up. Maybe I should have learned to play lower status in the sense of "act less smart"? Is that what most girls do?)

Comment author: Alicorn 16 November 2012 06:57:54PM 1 point [-]

The sex is something I put up with in order to make this weird alien beast happy, so that I can have the other parts of the relationship–I kind of like the whole living together, cooking together, "playing house" thing. And I want kids, and don't want to be a single mom.

You could date ace people and not have to make this tradeoff.

Comment author: Swimmer963 17 November 2012 03:40:55AM 1 point [-]

I could–now how do I meet ace people?

Comment author: Alicorn 17 November 2012 04:18:56AM 1 point [-]

I believe they have websites, meetup groups, &c. Not all of them will be there, but some will.