whpearson comments on Love and Rationality: Less Wrongers on OKCupid - LessWrong

19 Post author: Relsqui 11 October 2010 06:35AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 15 October 2010 12:37:04PM 7 points [-]

I think women want guys with values, in principle, and are tempted by guys without values, in practice, because they like "masculine" or "alpha" behavior. It doesn't mean that the desire to date a good person isn't a real desire. If someone desires to get work done, but also procrastinates, would you say she doesn't "really" want to get work done?

I think women would prefer a good person who hits the right masculinity/dominance buttons than a bad person. (Read or watch Gone With The Wind again -- Rhett is actually the male character with the most integrity and smarts.)

I think you're entirely right that men who are pretty awful people can be very attractive to women. But I think that's because they have certain social skills that they've developed and relied on. And anyone can learn social skills. There's not a one-to-one relationship between horribleness and attractiveness to women -- you never hear about women being hot for Jeffrey Dahmer. Rappers swagger, make it obvious that women can't resist them, and they're typically in great shape. They're popular for completely predictable reasons.

You're probably right that some women gravitate to assholish men because they're just not thinking (just like some men gravitate to women who have nothing going for them but their beauty.) But it's unfair for a man to assume that every woman is going to do that, and I'd find it sad if a man compromised his more serious principles just to pick up the less self-aware women. You can make yourself more attractive without becoming a person you'd hate.

Comment author: whpearson 15 October 2010 01:34:52PM 2 points [-]

There's not a one-to-one relationship between horribleness and attractiveness to women -- you never hear about women being hot for Jeffrey Dahmer.

I had to google him, I also googled his name and sexy and found this. :(

He gets 28,800 hits for jeffrey dahmer sexy. Out of 275000 hits. So a sexy ratio of 0.1. I'm not sure if this is high or low for a public male figure, a lot of it will be incidental mentions.

Steve Buscemi gets a ratio of 0.03, brad pitt get 0.13. Harold shipman (another serial killer but not so handsome or gruesome) gets 0.06.

I'm not sure of my methodology, I suspect that I might do better looking for the phrase in quotes.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 15 October 2010 01:53:45PM 14 points [-]

I'm not sure of my methodology

Dead elephant gets a ratio of 0.59.

Comment author: whpearson 15 October 2010 02:27:49PM 0 points [-]

Ah thanks. Quotes it is, although it will under report.

"Dead elephant is sexy" gets none, as does Harrold Shipman.

Steve buscemi does better this time. 60/935000 = 6*10^-4

Jeffrey Dahmer gets 4/264000 = 1.5*10^-4

Jay Leno gets 112/4.7million = 2*10^-4

Brad pitt gets 14700/17.1 million = 8 * 10^-3

While not falling foul to the dead elephant problem, I'm still not happy with it methodologically. This is probably the best information we can get without searching for all the variants of "X is hot".

Hmm, this might make a good small web app, a more advanced version of google fight that looked for relative popularity of adjectives.

Comment author: Document 16 October 2010 02:02:30AM 0 points [-]

Not quite the same, but Googlism is sort of a simple version of that. Also, I suspect a trolling element in the Jeffrey Dahmer page you linked, although that could be optimism at work.