That is useful, thanks.

Any suggestions for how I can better ask the question to get useful answers without apparently triggering so many people so much? In particular, if the answer is in fact "most men would be happier single but are ideologically attached to believing in love", then I want to be able to update accordingly. And if the answer is not that, then I want to update that most men would not be happier single. With the current discussion, most of what I've learned is that lots of people are triggered by the question, but that doesn't really tell me much about the underlying reality.

Update 3 days later: apparently most people disagree strongly with

Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I'm skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it's hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.

Most people in the comments so far emphasize some kind of mysterious "relationship stuff" as upside, but my actual main update here is that most commenters probably think the typical costs are far far lower than I imagined? Unsure, maybe the "relationship stuff" is really ridiculously high value.

So I guess it's time to get more concrete about the costs I had in mind:

• A quick google search says the male is primary or exclusive breadwinner in a majority of married couples. Ass-pull number: the monetary costs alone are probably ~50% higher living costs. (Not a factor of two higher, because the living costs of two people living together are much less than double the living costs of one person. Also I'm generally considering the no-kids case here; I don't feel as confused about couples with kids.)
• I was picturing an anxious attachment style as the typical female case (without kids). That's unpleasant on a day-to-day basis to begin with, and I expect a lack of sex tends to make it a lot worse.
• Eyeballing Aella's relationship survey data, a bit less than a third of respondents in 10-year relationships reported fighting multiple times a month or more. That was somewhat-but-not-dramatically less than I previously pictured. Frequent fighting is very prototypically the sort of thing I would expect to wipe out more-than-all of the value of a relationship, and I expect it to be disproportionately bad in relationships with little sex.
• Less legibly... conventional wisdom sure sounds like most married men find their wife net-stressful and unpleasant to be around a substantial portion of the time, especially in the unpleasant part of the hormonal cycle, and especially especially if they're not having much sex. For instance, there's a classic joke about a store salesman upselling a guy a truck, after upselling him a boat, after upselling him a tackle box, after [...] and the punchline is "No, he wasn't looking for a fishing rod. He came in looking for tampons, and I told him 'dude, your weekend is shot, you should go fishing!'".

(One thing to emphasize in these: sex isn't just a major value prop in its own right, I also expect that lots of the main costs of a relationship from the man's perspective are mitigated a lot by sex. Like, the sex makes the female partner behave less unpleasantly for a while.)

So, next question for people who had useful responses (especially @Lucius Bushnaq and @yams): do you think the mysterious relationship stuff outweighs those kinds of costs easily in the typical case, or do you imagine the costs in the typical case are not all that high?

men are the ones who die sooner if divorced, which suggests

Causality dubious, seems much more likely on priors that men who divorced are disproportionately those with Shit Going On in their lives. That said, it is pretty plausible on priors that they're getting a lot out of marriage.

I think you'll get the most satisfying answer to your actual question by having a long chat with one of your asexual friends (as something like a control group, since the value of sex to them is always 0 anyway, so whatever their cause is for having romantic relationships is probably the kind of thing that you're looking for here).

That's an excellent suggestion, thanks.

Yes, the question is what value-proposition accounts for the romantic or general relationship satisfaction.

Here's a place where I feel like my models of romantic relationships are missing something, and I'd be interested to hear peoples' takes on what it might be.

Background claim: a majority of long-term monogamous, hetero relationships are sexually unsatisfying for the man after a decade or so. Evidence: Aella's data here and here are the most legible sources I have on hand; they tell a pretty clear story where sexual satisfaction is basically binary, and a bit more than half of men are unsatisfied in relationships of 10 years (and it keeps getting worse from there). This also fits with my general models of mating markets: women usually find the large majority of men sexually unattractive, most women eventually settle on a guy they don't find all that sexually attractive, so it should not be surprising if that relationship ends up with very little sex after a few years.

What doesn't make sense under my current models is why so many of these relationships persist. Why don't the men in question just leave? Obviously they might not have better relationship prospects, but they could just not have any relationship. The central question which my models don't have a compelling answer to is: what is making these relationships net positive value for the men, relative to not having a romantic relationship at all?

Some obvious candidate answers:

• Kids. This one makes sense for those raising kids, but what about everyone else? Especially as fertility goes down.
• The wide tail. There's plenty of cases which make sense which are individually unusual - e.g. my own parents are business partners. Maybe in aggregate all these unusual cases account for the bulk.
• Loneliness. Maybe most of these guys have no one else close in their life. In this case, they'd plausibly be better off if they took the effort they invested in their romantic life and redirected to friendships (probably mostly with other guys), but there's a lot of activation energy blocking that change.
• Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I'm skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it's hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.
• Wanting a dependent. Lots of men are pretty insecure, and having a dependent to provide for makes them feel better about themselves. This also flips the previous objection: high maintenance can be a plus if it makes a guy feel wanted/useful/valuable.
• Social pressure/commitment/etc making the man stick around even though the relationship is not net positive for him.
• The couple are de-facto close mostly-platonic friends, and the man wants to keep that friendship.

I'm interested in both actual data and anecdata. What am I missing here? What available evidence points strongly to some of these over others?

Edit-to-add: apparently lots of people are disagreeing with this, but I don't know what specifically you all are disagreeing with, it would be much more helpful to at least highlight some specific sentence or leave a comment or something.

Fun point! If I just pull some numbers out of my ass and naively plug them into the equation:

• Superalignment-relevant research tasks take time on the order of a year to a decade.
• Taking 1 hr as the current task-time models can handle, we'd need ~13-16 doublings.
• ... so on METR's model, that's about 8-10 years from now.

Of course that's assuming the model holds. A useful heuristic for trends which have just been published for the first time is that they break down immediately after publication. If it holds up for another year or two, then the model will look a lot more plausible.

Although I wouldn't dispute the stats that you are citing here, John, I would guess these might be downstream from above difficulties.

I think that's the right counterargument to make (kudos :) ). Building on it, I'd say: ok, the causal arrows go both ways here. The field draws less impressive people, who do kinda junk research, which draws less impressive people. So the different sciences end up in different equilibria, with different levels of competence among the scientists. But then, what determines the equilibrium? Why did physics end up with more competent people doing more competent work, and psychology with less competent people doing less competent work, rather than vice-versa? Unless we want to claim that it was luck of the draw, there has to be something endogenous to the underlying territories of physics and psychology which cause their sciences to end up in these different equilibria.

Once the question is framed that way, it suggests different answers.

One could maybe tell a story like "psychology is more complex than physics, so physics had more impressive work earlier on, which drew in smarter people...". That could explain the different equilibria. But also, it feels like a just-so story; one could just as easily argue that smarter people tend to be drawn to more complex systems, where they can properly show off their merit.

Explanations like noisy data or difficulties with controls seem similar. Like, any explanation of the form "psychology is harder for reason X, so physics had more impressive work earlier on, which drew in smarter people..." feels like a just-so story; it seems at least as plausible that more competent people will be drawn to more difficult problems. (Note that both the hypotheses put forward in the OP are of this form, so this is also a response to the OP.)

Feedback loops look a little more plausible as an explanation: "insofar as it's harder to get clear feedback on models in psychology compared to physics, it's easier for bullshit to thrive in psychology, so smarter people go to physics where success is relatively more a function of smarts rather than academic politics, ...". I don't really buy that explanation, since getting feedback on models seems-to-me comparably difficult in physics and in psychology; it's a core hard part of any science. But it's at least plausible.

The infiltration of "social reality" is another plausible explanation, which I personally find much more probable. The model would be roughly: "insofar as psychology is largely about modeling social reality and adjacent topics, psychology itself becomes a relevant battleground for social-reality-level competitions, and also people predisposed to thinking in social reality will find psychology more appealing than physics. Alas, both focus on social-reality-level competitions and predisposition for thinking in social reality are extremely strong negative predictors of one's competence as a scientist, so psychology ends up with a lot more incompetent people than physics, ...". I probably wouldn't endorse that exact model as worded, but I'd put a fair bit of probability on something in roughly that ballpark.

The usual explanation is that human behavior is simply more complex than physical systems.

Maybe that's the usual explanation among people who are trying not to offend anyone. The explanation I'd jump to if not particularly trying to avoid offending anyone is that social scientists are typically just stupider than physical scientists (economists excepted). And that is backed up by the data IIUC, e.g. here's the result of a quick google search:

I disagree pretty strongly with the headline advice here. An ideal response would be to go through a typical sample of stories from some news source - for instance, I keep MIT Tech Review in my feedly because it has surprisingly useful predictive alpha if you invert all of its predictions. But that would take way more effort than I'm realistically going to invest right now, so absent that, I'll just abstractly lay out where I think this post's argument goes wrong.

The main thing most news tells me is what people are talking about, and what people are saying about it. Sadly, "what people are talking about" has very little correlation with what's important, and "what people are saying about it" is overwhelmingly noise, even when true (which it often isn't). In simulacrum terms, news is overwhelmingly a simulacrum 3 thing, and tells me very little about the underlying reality I'm actually interested in.

Sure, maybe there's some useful stuff buried in the pile of junk, but why sift through it? I do not need to know a few days or weeks earlier that AIXI is being gutted. I do not need to know a few weeks earlier that the slowdown OpenAI found in pretraining scaling had been formally reported-upon. (Also David and I had already noticed the signs of OpenAI having noticed that slowdown back in May of 2024, though even if we hadn't suspected until it was reported-upon in November, I still wouldn't need to know about it a few weeks earlier.) Just waiting for Zvi to put it in his newsletter is more than enough.