ChristianKl comments on The map of cognitive biases, errors and obstacles affecting judgment and management of global catastrophic risks - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Loading…
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (63)
Do you have actual evidence that this happened or is it just a hunch? I've read a bit about it, and my understanding is that there were other factors... e.g. Musk was pushing the team away from open source and towards using Windows Server for everything.
I'm familiar with this school of thought, and I think it's a useful perspective to keep in mind. My impression is that its prominence online has more to do with it plugging in to the rage-generating part of a man's brain (helpful for virality) than it having a solid evidential base. (It seems similar to leftist SJW canard in this regard.) Note the lack of citations in the essay you link to. Here are some data points that cause me to think the Red Pill folks overstate their case:
Cuckoldry seems relatively rare in non-self-selected populations.
Data does not seem to support the notion of extreme sexual inequalities based on how good looking a man is.
Only 3-5% of mammals pair bond. Humans are in that 3-5%. If women cheated with bad boys as consistently as the Red Pill types claim they do, pair bonding behaviors would have been selected against. (Note: I believe, though I have no evidence to prove it, that women use their relationship with their father as a cue re: whether to perform more of an r-selected or K-selected mating strategy. If their father is absent, that's evidence that r-selected mating is working out better in the current environment, and hence she feels low self-esteem, feels insecure that no man will ever love her, and assuages that insecurity by hooking up with high status men to prove to herself that she's worth something--or something like that, I don't know the exact psychological mechanism evolution has used to implement this. The takeaway is to date women who have good relationships with their fathers if you want a long-term monogamous partner, not women with "daddy issues".)
"Now it may be true that modern life leaves most men testosterone-deficient. But if that’s true, the culprit isn’t feminism. It’s bisphenol-A, low protein diets, fructose, alcoholism, vitamin A & D deficiency, and porn addiction." (JD Moyer) Men being weak and sheep-like seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Famed psychologist Philip Zimbardo has the story.
Notice the contradiction in the Red Pill worldview. The Red Pill crowd thinks that women ruthlessly choose to mate with assertive, dominant men due to their biological imperative. The Red Pill crowd also notes that the vast majority of guys are milquetoast, submissive "beta" men. But if women have a biological imperative to mate with assertive, dominant men, then why isn't the population of men already made up of 100% assertive, dominant men? You'd expect the submissive "betas" to have been selected out of the population by now.
Even if there's something about modern society that has unleashed hypergamy in women, wouldn't one expect to see a corresponding unleashment of assertiveness and dominance among men?
My answer: It's not so much that women are hypergamous as they seek a baseline level of competence and confidence. For an emotionally stable woman, a committed relationship with a respected brave is far better than a fling with the chief. And men of the past typically possessed this baseline level of competence and confidence:
Source. Do you think a man who intentionally flies a fighter jet in to a thunderstorm is a "weak, emotionally-manipulated, directionless sheep"? Do you think the men who built the Empire State Building in a year were also "weak, emotionally-manipulated, directionless"?
Younger British men are less likely to feel completely masculine than older men. Young women complain that men are afraid to initiate conversations with them in real life, preferring to arrange hookups via Tinder. And then there's this tidbit:
How does the Red Pill crowd explain that? I'll give you some hints: I don't think there's been some kind of sudden evolutionary pressure for erectile dysfunction in young men, and I don't think it's a feminist conspiracy (both perpetual Red Pill bogeymen--analogous to "cishet white males" on the SJW side of things). It has to be something in the environment, like JD Moyer suggests. See also.
I'm suggesting this as a first step to fixing your issues with "weakness" and "directionlessness". To a first approximation, I think emotionally stable women (the sort who make good long term partners) are attracted to the product of how good a man is and how powerful he is. So it makes sense to address the area you're weaker in.
Not exactly. While someone with "bad genes" usually produces children with "bad genes" someone who has "good genes" doesn't always produce children with "good genes". Mutations happen and most of them are bad.
Being able to walk upright on two feet is key to reproductive success, and thus the fraction of babies that are born crippled (due to mutations) is quite low. If being dominant and assertive has been key to reproductive success among men for a long time, one would expect the fraction of male babies that are born nondominant/nonassertive (due to mutations) to be quite low.
Not necessarily. Historically, once you get too many "dominant and assertive" men in close proximity, they start to kill each other. Their reproductive success is conditional on not being dead and in evolutionary terms that condition ceased to be very important only a moment ago.
It's still pretty important, it's not like modern homicide rates and ancestral homicide rates are totally incomparable. Even if you don't get killed, gangsters are at risk of going to prison, and I hear prison is not a good place to meet girls.
But there's a lot of room between "weak, emotionally-manipulated, directionless sheep" and "violent enough to be at risk of getting killed or jailed". And it's a puzzle, to me at least, that this middle zone gets filled so rarely nowadays. Most traits are distributed on a bell curve, and one would expect to see the same for this trait, with most men having some mid level of "firefighter masculinity" that would be enough to impress women but not so much to be at serious risk of homicide or imprisonment. This doesn't seem to be the case, and I offered some possible explanations above. (Insofar as there's a two-humped distribution, my guess is that the humps are based (a) easy access to streaming pornography during childhood or (b) need to overcompensate for deep insecurities through hypermasculine show behaviors. BTW, it's incorrect to think that gangsters are secure in themselves.)
Where do you get your sample from? Do you think that your conclusion applies to, say, rural Idaho? or to blue-collar working men?
Being able to walk upright is a binary criteria. The fact that having a high IQ correlates with being tall suggests that there are a lot of basic genes involved in high IQ or being tall. There are many different genes that can mutate and that slightly reduce effectiveness of the organism.
Being unable to walk is mostly due to single mutations that can be removed easier by evolution.
Few people are dominant and assertive when they are weaker than their peers. People are usually dominant and assertive as a result of being stronger.