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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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This might just be small sample bias on my part, but most of the stable reliable guys I know are getting laid, usually in long-term relationships. And it is usually with attractive women.

This is almost definitely not due to a small sample bias, but rather selection bias. How many stable reliable guys who have such small social presence that they're literally invisible to you do you know? Given that "being noticeable" is correlated with (some, including myself, would argue causally) "being attractive," whatever observations of people you notice are observations about a population that's more attractive than average.

I figure that most stable, reliable guys at least participate in the workforce. The fraction of them who are independently wealthy or have joined a monastic order is very small. So if there is a large number of stable, reliable guys who are incels I figure that I would be encountering more of them in the workforce, at least in Zoom calls, and in the work-tangential world like at the kind of upscale-ish or trendy bars where people tend to go after work. I could be wrong, though.

If an otherwise stable, reliable guy is introverted, has little social skills and has no girlfriend/wife, he's unlikely to be embedded into your social circle to the extent that you have a mental awareness of him even existing. You'll "know" him but you won't know him.

in the work-tangential world like at the kind of upscale-ish or trendy bars where people tend to go after work.

Zoom calls and in the workforce, perhaps, but this seems like a leap. The group of guys with such small social presence being talked about would be the ones to disproportionately not go to these work-tangential events and/or spend minimal time in those. And even in those settings, the ones you actually are able to talk to enough to say that you actually "know" these people would likely be disproportionately not from that group. Same would go for other social spaces and clubs and such.

Yeah, the idea that one can judge the fraction of the workforce that’s single and lonely based on who goes to trendy bars after work is ludicrous. Like determining what fraction of the population is religious based on a D&D campaign. (But jokes on all of us, my friends who play D&D — I don’t — are Baptists.)