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DanArmak comments on Irrational hardware vs. rational software - Less Wrong Discussion
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That's why I qualified that example with "which do not have enough supporters to make up for it ingroup-style", i.e. causes which don't have enough supporters who will then find you hyper-sexy.
Granted, but you only need a few. Dunbar's Number being what it is, a group so small that no one's ever heard of it outside can still generate enough internal status to make up for whatever you lose in external status; just look at all the cults founded essentially to get their founders laid.
And since external persecution is somewhat proportional to perceived threat, and perceived threat's somewhat proportional to size, I think you'd need a very small and very weird group for the fitness equation to work out negative purely on those grounds. Ideally a group of one, Ted Kaczynski style.
That worked out well for the founders; not so well, I'd argue, for most of the followers.
Your pool of actual mates (with whom you have sex, let alone with whom you have children) is typically much smaller than Dunbar's number, but your pool of potential mates is typically much bigger - especially in modern large cities. A bigger pool means people can find more individually suitable mates (i.e. different people value the same prospective mate differently). It also means greater chance of mating for those with low prospects (you can find others who also have low mate-value, and you have a bigger pool to just get lucky with).
Are there actual fitness calculations that tell us at which sizes ingroup mating tends to be a winning strategy?
Of course if the group is preselected on a basis of e.g. sharing rare sexual fetishes then it's going to be successful. But if it's preselected for e.g. supporting an outlawed political cause, I would by default assume a disrtibution of sexual preferences that is broadly similar to that of the general population. (Exceptions certainly exist, like political causes related to reproductive rights.)