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Manfred comments on Cultural norms in choice of mate - Less Wrong Discussion
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Tsk, tsk. The norms were set up by a culture of powerful men, in order to benefit powerful men. Who benefits from the changing norm? Anyone who isn't a powerful man.
Did you ever watch that film A Beautiful Mind? Spreading out romantic advances is the pareto optimum. If nobody is sleeping with the older women, then also nobody is sleeping with the non-powerful men. Changes in sexual patterns can be thought of as victory for the average human.
And it's certainly not all sunshine and roses for the young women. Power imbalances in relationships are a risk factor for things like marital rape, controlling behavior, and general bad stuff. Oh and there's the whole "treated like property for large chunks of history" part. And as we go a bit younger, do you know what a fistula is? Yeah, just... I'm really glad the sexual norms have changed.
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Would you care to expand on that? It doesn't seem particularly plausible to me. Different people have genuinely substantially different preferences, which means that the most obvious reason for it to be a zeroish-sum game doesn't apply.
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The reason why I think choice of partners isn't very close to zero-sum is precisely that I don't think there is a single scale of desirability; different people have different preferences, and a change in partner assignment can easily make everyone happier or everyone less happy.
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No. The point is that desirability is subjective, and therefore "winning" or "losing" at desirability is a two-place word.
What about a general shift for males to be more heterosexual than homosexual? Not saying this happens, but your statement obviously can be false. It is possible for all women to win.
I'm not sure that would be a net win for all women. Suppose a similar proportion of women are lesbians to the proportion of men who are gay, and if more men were straight instead of gay, lesbians would face increased competition for bisexual partners.
That is an excellent point. I didn't notice this since we've (for the entire post) operated under pretty restrictive heteronormativity. It wouldn't be a win for all women, but it would be a win for all women that we've been talking about.
I'm not totally sure what you mean by "wins" and "loses" here - you seem to mean increasing or decreasing some sort of relative attractiveness (to the average potential mate? To your definition of beauty, which seems universal?), which would then be zero-sum for whatever group it's normalized over.
But just because something is called winning, doesn't mean you can rely on it to describe human behavior - humans have a much more complicated set of motivations than "maximize relative attractiveness."
How so? AFAICT it's entirely possible for World A to have a higher fraction of people experiencing long-term involuntary celibacy than World B.