Us guys, we see women saying that they want guys with intellectual and moral values, but then we often seeing women going for men who seem unlikely to exhibit those traits, and we get... confused.

This confuses me, because it seems to imply that men need to believe that a simple personality heuristic can be applied to all or almost all women. Why is it an unacceptable answer that some women like one thing, and some like another? Or did you mean the same group of women in both cases?

I used to hate the idea of gender dynamics in dating. But then I gave them a try, and found that some of them are actually pretty fun.

By "gender dynamics" in this case do you mean doing the things that you're expected to do because of your gender? If so, yeah, some of them are pretty fun. And some of it is stuff we're hardwired to like; I won't argue with that. The trouble is just when we limit ourselves to broad heuristics about the whole population which gloss over the degree of individual variety, and then try to apply those on the individual scale.

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.

Imagine that people who look at your profile are scoring you

I came across a profile once that had a scoring game in the "message me if" field. Specifically, it was a list of traits the author found desireable, numbered by powers of two, and an invitation to send him the sum of the traits which applied to the reader. I was pretty amused by that.

ETA: disregard this comment, it's completely wrong because of my poor knowledge of English.

I thought some more and don't understand your point about factors vs dealbreakers. There's no distinction. If including salary on my profile will make more women message me, then salary was a dealbreaker for those women. A factor that doesn't make or break any deals has zero importance.

I would agree 100% if that were one of the choices. The options are "has 1 child," "has children," "likes children," "dislikes children," and "doesn't want children." The first two are certainly wrong, I don't have a strong enough opinion about children to choose either of the next two, and I haven't made up my mind about the last one yet.

(Hmph--I tried several times to make that a bulleted list, using as far as I can tell the syntax in the help, but it didn't work and eventually I gave up.)

I've left the "children" field blank, for example, because I don't want them now but might some day, so neither "wants" nor "doesn't want" is correct.

I think this might be a mistake. I usually specify "Doesn't have children" when I do a match search and I'd guess this is fairly common. If you leave this question blank I believe you won't show up for people who are filtering on that search criteria.

There will be a net positive to society by measures of overall health, wealth and quality of life if the government capped reproduction at a sustainable level and distributed tradeable reproductive credits for that amount to all fertile young women. (~85% confident)

mattnewport:

You still have to be able to translate your superior relevant knowledge into odds in order to set the terms of the bet however. Do you not believe that this is an ability that people have varying degrees of aptitude for?

They sure do, but in all the examples I can think of, people either just follow their intuition directly when faced with a concrete situation, or employ rigorous science to attack the problem. (It doesn't have to be the official accredited science, of course; the Venn diagram of official science and valid science features only a partial overlap.) I just don't see any practical examples of people successfully betting by doing calculations with probability numbers derived from their intuitive feelings of confidence that would go beyond what a mere verbal expression of these feelings would convey. Can you think of any?

If you accept that true alpha exists (and the evidence suggests that though rare a small percentage of the best investors do appear to have positive alpha) then what process do you believe those who possess it use to decide which investments are good and which bad?

Well, if I knew, I would be doing it myself -- and I sure wouldn't be talking about it publicly!

The problem with discussing investment strategies is that any non-trivial public information about this topic necessarily has to be bullshit, or at least drowned in bullshit to the point of being irrecoverable, since exclusive possession of correct information is a sure path to getting rich, but its effectiveness critically depends on exclusivity. Still, I would be surprised to find out that the success of some alpha-achieving investors is based on taking numerical expressions of common-sense confidence seriously.

In a sense, a similar problem faces anyone who aspires to be more "rational" than the average folk in any meaningful sense. Either your "rationality" manifests itself only in irrelevant matters, or you have to ask yourself what is so special and exclusive about you that you're reaping practical success that eludes so many other people, and in such a way that they can't just copy your approach.

What's your opinion on prediction markets? They seem to produce fairly good probability estimates so presumably the participants must be using some better-than-random process for arriving at numerical probability estimates for their predictions.

I agree with this assessment, but the accuracy of information aggregated by a prediction market implies nothing about your own individual certainty. Prediction markets work by cancelling out random errors and enabling specialists who wield esoteric expertise to take advantage of amateurs' systematic biases. Where your own individual judgment falls within this picture, you cannot know, unless you're one of these people with esoteric expertise.

I agree with your second. Was your third supposed to be high or low? I think it's low, but not unreasonably so.

mattnewport:

Given your position on the meaninglessness of assigning a numerical probability value to a vague feeling of how likely something is, how would you decide whether you were being offered good odds if offered a bet?

In reality, it is rational to bet only with people over whom you have superior relevant knowledge, or with someone who is suffering from an evident failure of common sense. Otherwise, betting is just gambling (which of course can be worthwhile for fun or signaling value). Look at the stock market: it's pure gambling, unless you have insider knowledge or vastly higher expertise than the average investor.

This is the basic reason why I consider the emphasis on subjective Bayesian probabilities that is so popular here misguided. In technical problems where probability calculations can be helpful, the experts in the field already know how to use them. On the other hand, for the great majority of the relevant beliefs and conclusions you'll form in life, they offer nothing useful beyond what your vague common sense is already telling you. If you start taking them too seriously, it's easy to start fooling yourself that your thinking is more accurate and precise than it really is, and if you start actually betting on them, you'll be just gambling.

If you're not in the habit of accepting bets, how do you think someone who does this for a living (a bookie for example) should go about deciding on what odds to assign to a given bet?

I'm not familiar with the details of this business, but from what I understand, bookmakers work in such a way that they're guaranteed to make a profit no matter what happens. Effectively, they exploit the inconsistencies between different people's estimates of what the favorable odds are. (If there are bookmakers who stake their profit on some particular outcome, then I'm sure that they have insider knowledge if they can stay profitable.) Now of course, the trick is to come up with a book that is both profitable and offers odds that will sell well, but here we get into the fuzzy art of exploiting people's biases for profit.