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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   35662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Anyway, this is precisely the source for my boundless disdain for Yudkowski and all the Rat-adjecant AI safety people. All that talk about "x-risks", only to overlook all the most obvious scenarios that can actually threaten humanity.

What are you talking about? Rationalists have totally noticed. Some even think is a good thing; if we are not going to force women to have sex with incels, we can at least allow virtual waifus to ease the pain.

No, this is exactly what I'm talking about. "An AGI seducing you so you help it jailbreak out of the sandbox" is a ridiculous scenario compared to "billions of coomers opting out of the gene pool, because talking to a non-AGI glorified chatbot is more than enough to satisfy their needs".

Why not both? The AI can trick coomers into opting out of the gene pool and convince them to help it at the same time.

You don't need AGI for the former, so it's far more likely to actually happen.

I'm not the person you replied to, but I share his dislike for most of the Rat community. I think Yudkowsky gets it, though. (For a wire-header to be able to enjoy life, they'd have to create artifical challenges for themselves, not unlike those found in real life. So they might as well just engage with real life)

One of the obvious scenarios which threaten humanity is that some people have bad social skills and that they don't have an environment in which they can improve (or alternatively, that they can wirehead the reward of socializing, which is much more pleasant for them than actual improvement).

Giving "virtual waifus" to "incels" doesn't solve any issues, it just suppresses symptoms. By the way, I find it strange that, in an imaginary scenario where we approach AGI level of intelligence, we cannot seem to imagine coming up with a way to help people who have terrible social skills. I'm very puzzled by how a community can have so many knowledable (and sometimes intelligent) people and still have such shallow, naive, and simplified takes on serious topics.

I'm very puzzled by how a community can have so many knowledgeable (and sometimes intelligent) people and still have such shallow, naive, and simplified takes on serious topics.

I'm not, but to identify why requires a bunch of things that just aren't compatible with a healthy self-preserving worldview (which is why the sibling comment is the way that it is).

The problem with men is that they're in significant oversupply; that's why their ability to negotiate social terms with women (and the authorities, and why the authorities are so gay female-oriented) is so limited as to be basically nonexistent (note that the social standing of men in society tracks the birthrate for that year; that isn't a coincidence, and you can see that effect stretched back into the 1800s with the rise of industrialization -> the disruption of the male sociobiological niche).

Witness that the Western country that offers the most social rights to men, that being the United States, has a birthrate near replacement. Countries that industrialized in the 20th century just haven't had time for their societies to adapt to men becoming useless overnight (or for men to evolve coping or effective negotiating strategies)- of those, Japan is the healthiest, as they've had enough time to make their peace with it and also their social cohesion is high enough to stave off the rampant gynosupremacism emergent from successful men becoming rarer due to oversupply of men in general [or in 'incel' parlance, the Chad/Stacy dynamic; typically claimed to be an inherent problem with women, but buyers always complain this way about sellers when the market conditions favor the seller], but they're still a couple generations behind Western countries with that TFR. The unhealthiest one is South Korea, with Thailand not being far behind.

Historically, when this happens, a general in that society raises an army (if men are sufficiently organized, this general will also be the dictator king) and, win or lose, the male overpopulation problem is solved (either the men all die, or enough living space is created by destroying all the other tribe's men; either way, no longer too many men). European countries tend to have a massive purge every hundred years or so (though to a point, staved off by colonization); the last one following that tradition [where the countries participating didn't all get immediately conquered by foreign powers, like they did in 1945... which is why Western Europe went all weird and feminine after that] occurred between 1914 and 1918. This can also happen by chance- pestilence, famine, natural disaster- but we've successfully eliminated those things (to the point we pretend they're happening even when they aren't, like we did in 2020).

Giving "virtual waifus" to "incels" doesn't solve any issues, it just suppresses symptoms.

Then why are women so afraid of them?

It's because women have no political value outside of that which is provided by men- if men can just... stop being in oversupply due to taking themselves out of the market (further, imagine if your robo-catgirl could get pregnant, which is the only thing women can do that men can't) then women will lose social power over the men who do remain.

Hence, why they're terrified of AI. [That said, I don't think a lot of this fear is conscious or wilful- it's purely instinct.]

we cannot seem to imagine coming up with a way to help people who have terrible social skills

It's not a lack of ability to do it, it's a lack of want; men don't want it because that may be the only thing that distinguishes them in a market where distinguishment is difficult to come by, and women don't want it because social skills then become a less reliable signal to differentiate men.
You'd have to be autistic/childish/self-destructive to want to improve men's social skills under an environment like this. (Which is also why we are completely uninterested in educating young men in general, as we believe that the worthy will distinguish themselves anyway. Provided they aren't more interested in catgirl waifus, that is...)

I've long felt that human instinct is breaking apart, since before the internet got political. That good times result in "weak men", but also that "weak men" are sick (which I mean literally). I have some rules of thumb for healthy natures, like "standing up for oneself", "not always seeking ones own advantage", "admiration of superiors rather than jealousy", "a disdain for easy victories", "high standards", "will stop attacking another person once it's clear that they've won", and things like that.

On top of the negotiation power of men being limited, the way they use what they have is pathetic - they line up to give away even more of their negotiation power. If this is actually what's causing the stages of the demographic transition model, it would be really interesting! Great insight, I will give it some though.

The worst one is South Korea, and they're well-known for their feminism problem. I'm not sure if X caused Y or Y caused X, or how strong each direction is, but the two do seem related like you say.

From my limited experience of Thailand, simping does occur, but the culture is still quite traditional (well, I expect that large cities and smaller villages are wildly different here. I think it's because of higher population densities in cities, and because big cities are the most connected to the rest of the world, making them more vulnerable to external influence).

The ratio between men and women might be one of the causes for men losing their value and the world becoming more feminine, but I think there's more (one being the domestication of humanity as described by Nietzsche, another being a consequence of technological advancement, a third being intentional subversion as described by Yuri Bezmenov).

The Kinsey reports (1948 and 1953) apparently lead to the creation of Playboy, and Playboy has had a hand in destroying socities understanding of gender, so this may another origin of a brand of wokeness. There's a lot of articles from the early 2000s internet which discuss the medias role in all of this (you can find them on online archives). They do include words like "illuminati", but that can't be helped, and they describe the issues we're facing today better than most newer articles, so from that perspective they're quite high quality.

Then why are women so afraid of them?

You're right that it would lower the value of women, but these men would remain dysfunctional. Restoring the balance between men and women isn't enough, we have to make sure that the average human being is healthy, or we all lose. Part of what made me healthy was wanting a girlfriend, it gave me something to strive for when money didn't interest me. I still to this day work to earn the acknowledgement of women, and for nothing else than to please my ego. I could make external validation worthless to me, but that would make it even harder for me to meet my goals. Some people grow under pressure, others are destroyed, and it's an interesting puzzle to rotate these vectors correctly (by changing ones interpretation of the world). But if you reduce all vectors to zero, you have nothing to work with. It's like trying to sail in a sea with no wind, I'd rather have a storm.

to want to improve men's social skills under an environment like this

It would put me at a disadvantage if all men improved, but I managed to improve myself in the past, and I like telling others how I did it. I have many more reasons: We could help men become healthier and more masculine, which would make them more aggressive towards the mega corporations trying to exploit us. Censorship would likely also decrease as men become more confident, as being afraid of words and opinions would start to seem like a silly concept once again.

It's not about social skills. It's about the fact that women are only attracted to a small minority of men. Any society where women are free to make their own sexual choices is going to be a society where the majority of men end up as incels.

Completely normal guys who shower and hold jobs and have friends and are non-obese or autistic get lectured by feminists that doing the bare minimum doesn't entitle them to a girlfriend while a small number of men plow their way through entire harems. And not even good men, but terrible human beings like Henry and Dean Moriarity, because not only are women only attracted to a small minority of men, but the minority of men they are attracted to are cocky assholes with options.

We increasingly live in a world where the average guy's best chance of getting married is to wife-up a 30+ single mother after she falls off the bottom of Chad's booty call list. And if you are an average man in your teens and twenties, you don't even get that, you get a "fuck you" and told to wait your turn.

If you wanted to fix this with advanced technology, and you did not want to resort to wire-heading or something morally equivalent like creating non-conscious sycophantic cat girls, digital or otherwise... well, you could create conscious male-complements that required some effort and level of social skills to successfully court but who were not impossible to please the way that human women are, what Eliezer calls verthandi... or you could modify human women to actually be satisfiable by regular men, perhaps with human men being modified in some other way in return... or, you know, we could just go back to what worked for the last 5000 years and force women to get married while they are still young to hard-working, law-abiding men, who would then be allowed to take their marital rights whenever they wanted (hey, you don't even need the advanced technology for that one!)

But if you don't want to wirehead, and you don't want to create sycophantic cat girls who will fuck and cuddle you at the drop of a hat, and you don't want to create bespoke Belldandys who will act like the love interest of a shonen romcom and get together with the nerdy loser after a few years of character growth and sexual tension, and you don't want to edit existing human women to make them something that could ever be satisfied with not being the exclusive wife of Chad, and you are not willing to bite the bullet and force young women to get married and perform their damn marital duties...

...then the problem is over-constrained and has no solution.

Any society where women are free to make their own sexual choices is going to be a society where the majority of men end up as incels.

Seems like this is a claim that should come with some evidence. Depending on what you mean by "free to make their own sexual choices," women have more or less been able to choose and reject suitors for centuries in the West. And even in ancient times, they usually had some say in who they got married off to. Where they didn't, they were literally property, and if you are advocating that we'd be better off in a world where fathers simply sell their daughters and females are livestock, well... You need to read less Dread Jim. In very few societies have women ever been sexual and breeding chattel in the way he keeps advocating.

He did. It’s the old OKCupid data showing that, while male rate the average woman as averagely attractive, women rate the average man as extremely unattractive. And indeed any man below the 5th percentile or so.

Of course, it would be nice to have replications but there never will be, because if true this strongly indicates that any society where women are free to choose their mates or to remain single will be one where huge numbers of both sexes die alone. The latter choice was not possible in historic societies and is the main reason for our current predicament IMO. That is why I advocate for progressive and extremely high rates of taxation for single men and women approaching 30.

From the link:

Men don’t just find women more attractive; men’s ratings closely follow a bell curve, with 6% of women getting the minimum rating and 6% getting the maximum rating.

Women don’t just find men less attractive; the median and mode rating is 2 out of 7. Even more strikingly, the second most-common rating is 1 out of 7 — and near-zero men in the sample received 7 out of 7. (Over the years, by the way, I’ve repeatedly said “exactly zero,” but if you look close at the original post archived by Gwern, that’s not quite true).

The OkCupid results are far from unique. But the graphs are stark enough to inspire mutual anger. Common angry male reactions include: “Women have absurdly unrealistic standards” as well as “Women are just cruel.” Common angry female responses include: “It’s not our fault that most men suck” and “Why should I settle?”

But the only thing less constructive than anger is mutual anger. The data reveal an ugly truth that we all need to face. While there are several ways to capture this ugly truth, my favorite is just: The typical man disgusts the typical woman. You can expand this to: The median man moderately disgusts the typical woman, and the bottom quarter of men strongly disgust the typical woman.

[Various musings on how men and women can treat each other with empathy]

Update: Stefan Schubert points out that the OKCupid estimates of the male-female gap are unusually extreme. Emil Kirkegaard agrees after thoroughly reviewing a wide range of measures. True enough, but we should trust the OKCupid data more. The big advantage of the dating website rankings is that they greatly reduce Social Desirability Bias by getting both men and women in a “What do you REALLY think?” frame of mind.

That is why I advocate for progressive and extremely high rates of taxation for single men and women approaching 30.

You're still doing it. If men are single because women would prefer not to settle for anyone but Chad, taxing single men is punishing the victim.

Men and women. If both sexes are aware of an imminent need to pair up, I think that they will be able to sort it out. The current system encourages both sexes to shoot for the stars and crash to earth.

If the men are looking for Chad, that's a different problem. But the OKCupid data you were referring to earlier do not indicate it's "men and women".

You’re implying there’s no marginal men who who would marry before 30 facing huge tax penalties but don’t when they aren’t facing those penalties? That seems unlikely. Many men are in long relationships around that age that would likely see faster marriage and children. Others would feel more pressure to find a spouse. So would women since the same would apply to them, and bigamy remains illegal in much of the West. So, yeah, I’m pretty sure it would make a big difference.

I am sympathetic to the idea of a bachelor tax, but it seems like it would either end up being a cruel punishment on the unattractive. And if you add some sort of loophole, it is bound to get exploited (see: professional rejecters)

There couldn’t be professional rejecters – you’d get 3 rejects and then you’re out, you pay the bachelor-spinster tax. If you do not reject, and are therefore rejected by those who drop out, you keep getting official dates with counterparts. Imagine the creatures who would find each other in the deepest depths of hell, 20-30 one-sided rejections below ground.

Anyway the real problem is not lack of cohabitation/marriage but childnessness. And that power lies entirely in women’s hands, legally. Just give some of it back to men: no abortion or contraceptives unless the husband/boyfriend gives his consent. His DNA, his choice, it takes two to tango, whatever cliché you prefer. Then you put the spinster tax on childless couples.

Or just pay like 10% of the most motherhood-friendly women to produce 20 children and raise them in an orphanage (they can visit of course) , that also works and intrudes less in people's personal lives.

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A bachelor/spinster tax wouldn't necessarily be a cruel punishment on the ugly, because it would encourage them to couple up with eachother. A punishment on the shy, maybe.

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You’re implying there’s no marginal men who who would marry before 30 facing huge tax penalties but don’t when they aren’t facing those penalties?

That is not, in fact, what I am implying. I am implying that the penalties on men would barely move the needle (except perhaps in useless ways such as sham marriages for cash), not that it literally wouldn't move it at all.

I suspect that it would convert a large number of cohabiting relationships into marriage.

Assuming we accept OK Cupid data as accurate (which I see no reason not to), it still captures only a slice of online perspective. The incel takeaway is "Women are unreasonably selective and would rather get run through by Chads than settle down with a nice ordinary guy." And yet plenty of nice ordinary guys find wives. Hmm. Curious.

I believe the modern dating market is hellish and I'm glad I'm not in it. But I'm personally a data point in favor of "you don't have to be a Chad, and no,.you don't have to settle for an obese single mother either."

I am unsympathetic to arguments against women having choices for a number of reasons, but most of all because the men most likely to make them tend to also make it obvious why they don't get chosen.

I think one could make a very reasonable argument that both women and men shouldn't have choices (or at least, not that many).

What is that argument? Given a choice between loneliness and being stuck with someone undesirable, the latter is worse, IMO.

When you're given too many choices (and particularly when some of those choices are sort of fake), your standards for "undesirable" grow to the point to which you end up alone instead of with someone that could be good enough if both parties could put an effort (which they won't, because they have "choices").

Then there's the issue of dating apps, they are just too frictionless: you can swipe like 300 people if you so wish, conversations will end abruptly for the slightest reason, plans will be cancelled at the last moment, etc.

This means that, even if you're engaging them in good faith, your incentive is to actively get many matches, and then you're suddenly setting up dates with n different girls, and then rather than having to individually reject the ones you like the least, your incentive is to ghost them.

It's all some sort of terrible prisoners' dilemma that brings the worst out of both sexes.

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The "not that many" is key. This one specific man you don't like or spinsterhood is a bad deal. But so is 100 messages a day from random men on an app. I'm not sure what approach rate is ideal, but maybe it's something like six realistic choices.

Aside from how overused that one study is, the other major problem is that the womens’ answer is straight up incorrect, therefore bullshit. Women have the capacity to actually rank men on a respectable bell curve (just like gay men can rank women), they just choose not to because they concentrate on the ‘what will that answer say about me?’ implications. Similar to how straight men will sometimes performatively deny that an attractive man is attractive, or say that they can’t tell because they’re so straight it hurts and blinds.

The big advantage of the dating website rankings is that they greatly reduce Social Desirability Bias by getting both men and women in a “What do you REALLY think?” frame of mind.

It’s the opposite. If they were ranking some strangers as anthropologists, far from the context of their own coupling, they’d give a straight answer, as they usually do in the other studies. But on Okcupid, they think rating merely above average men as above average marks them as easy, low quality, desperate participants in the coupling game.

Also possible. It would be nice to have some kind of backing, though. Are you going on experience? Intuition?

Aside from how overused that one study is

I agree wholeheartedly, I just don’t think that a serious attempt at real data collection is going to happen for societal reasons, so we’re stuck with stuff that got scraped when nobody cared yet.

I just don’t think that a serious attempt at real data collection is going to happen for societal reasons

In "The Typical Man Disgusts the Typical Woman" post Update (the post that y'all are discussing), Caplan links to Emil Kirkegaard's analysis of four much more representative data collections:

  • General Social Survey (GSS), USA
  • NLSY Add Health, USA
  • Wisconsin longitudinal study (WLS), USA
  • German General Social Survey (ALLBUS), German

In all of these, the OK Cupid's stark disparity in ratings do not reproduce. Women's photos do tend to get slightly higher attractiveness ratings, but, you know, there's probably a reason why both men's and women's magazines are full of half-naked women.

You need to read less Dread Jim.

Or perhaps more practically, locate the bars that cougars frequent, if one looks/is still on the younger side.

(hey, you don't even need the advanced technology for that one!)

That's the problem. Advanced technology is good. Humanity having more power and control over itself and its biological/planetary destiny is good. Retvrning to the kind of society that can happily (half of it at least) paddle on for millenia with zero incentive to evolve beyond its feudal agricultural formula until it encounters an out of context problem is, simply put, rank stagnation and unbecoming of creatures that have brains larger than walnuts.

That's not exactly true. The effect you're pointing at here didn't seem to happen before modern dating apps. I also find that women treat me much better in Asian communities, so the current hostility and distrust between genders is most likely cultural.

Politics are reaching pathological levels and causing a lot of issues. Another big issue seems to be that women have too many choices (rather than too few) which makes them look for better alternative all the time (and comparison is the thief of all joy or whatever). Many relationships are the most fun the first few months, and then the novelty will wear off, but if these people jump from guy to guy as a consequence of this, then they're messed up in a sense (for instance, addicted to the dopamine rushes associated with the early stages of relationships). It's not a biological fact that most men will end up as losers.

But this is what the Rat community wanted: More technology, more connection, fancy algorithms on which people could compete. The Amish do not seem to have these problems, and women who have only had one sexual partner are much less likely to want a divorce on average. All these problems are a result of materialistic rat-adjecent mentalities. You cannot solve a problem with the same way of thinking which caused the problem in the first place.

It's difficult, by doable (and when compared to engineering cat-girls, downright trivial) to become a high-value man. This won't help you get a high-quality women though, unless you're in an environment in which they exist, so women will have to improve themselves as well. It's nothing difficult, they'd just have to be feminine, which would happen automatically if our society didn't hinder the process.

As far as I know, forced marriage was mostly done out of necessity, but a second (and very common) cause is that teenagers have sex and get pregnant, which is a social no-no. So they rush a marriage, because then it's okay. Crisis averted I guess. This still happens today by the way.

And no, I'm not a drug addict, and neither am I so psychologically broken that I can find enjoyment in effortless pleasure. It's sad that you even have to ask. Even actual mice will resist free cocaine if they have a space to play around in

Then the problem is over-constrained and has no solution

We need to get rid of modern politics, it's awful. We also need to get rid of modern views of human nature which are entirely false (the erasure of gender, tabula rasa, the fear of masculinity, the lie that women should be masculine). Oh, and likely porn as well. This would basically solve every problem you listed.

A couple of interjections if you’ll forgive me:

The effect you're pointing at here didn't seem to happen before modern dating apps.

It absolutely did, I was there. Lots of people got interested in dating apps b/c trying to solve this in the real world had failed for them.

neither am I so psychologically broken that I can find enjoyment in effortless pleasure. It's sad that you even have to ask. Even actual mice will resist free cocaine if they have a space to play around in

My understanding is that ‘true’ wireheading is not endless cocaine, it is figuring out all the reward systems in the brain and replicating the signals directly. Including those you get from playing and achieving things. Whether or not it’s desirable, I think this would probably work as the relationship between feelings of accomplishment and happiness already seems pretty plastic: there are people who feel satisfied with very small accomplishments and literal billionaire geniuses who feel like failures.

EDIT: for the reward signal thing, a useful analogue is hacking software. It's very difficult to make software unhackable because however sophisticated your DRM system is, sooner or later you have to flip a bit that says user_has_been_verified = True. Rather than hacking the DRM system you just find and hack the check. Picking combination locks works the same way: rather than finding some way to hack the combination, you just insert a hook and manipulate the part of the mechanism that unlocks the door if the combination is correct.

It absolutely did, I was there. Lots of people got interested in dating apps b/c trying to solve this in the real world had failed for them.

When did the first larger-scale dating app launch? I was also there in the 2000s, apps weren't really a thing until very late in that decade as I recall?

I am also not very good at dating, but things were more or less along the traditional lines where 'go out drinking and/or dancing, occasionally you will meet somebody' was pretty much true. I even landed a wife!

Now AFAICT there isn't really even anywhere to do those things, and if you find somewhere I'd certainly expect a high concentration of Chads and/or skilled PUAs -- so the apps are all there is, and it doesn't seem that great.

No idea. Maybe OkCupid was around in 2012/2013?

I am also not very good at dating, but things were more or less along the traditional lines where 'go out drinking and/or dancing, occasionally you will meet somebody' was pretty much true. I even landed a wife!

Good for you. Didn’t happen for lots of people. See “Radicalising the Romanceless”. There were absolutely lots of lonely young men, most of whom were perfectly decent looking and dutiful, who didn’t appear on women’s radars.

Lots of people didn’t have anyone to go out drinking or dancing with, or were too low down the hierarchy and therefore repellent. Newspaper ads and then later dating sites came into being to serve this demographic, which is why they were originally called ‘lonely hearts’ ads.

I am quite prepared to believe that dating apps have made this worse. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing - you need a sufficiently large number of angry young men before the problem even becomes visible. But modern dating was working badly for a lot of people a long time before the apps.

How old are you?

Early thirties.

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I have honestly been reading this whole subthread with the early dating websites rolled in with dating apps in my head. I wonder if that changes the dynamics, or if "dating app" has to specifically mean mobile apps and not just any Internet dating service.

I do know people that found partners on those site -- also quite a few guys who used them to fuck around, but I think the difference is that this was before the people running the apps figured out that people finding partners only shrinks their market, and changed their focus accordingly.

I also recall the transition in which finding a partner on the internet shifted from "kinda weird" to "kinda OK" --maybe it's just a shorter walk to "swipe right" from there?

Sure!

It absolutely did

After dating apps appeared, dating was ruined as a result, and this quickly started to influence dating outside of said apps as well. If you go back another 20 or 30 years, I'll claim that this wasn't much of an issue, meaning that dating was ruined by something recent (be it wokeness, feminism, signaling games or moralizers. With dating apps serving to accelerate us towards the nash equilibrium).

Now, people complain about the past because it was "immoral" and "unequal", and fair enough, but if you're on the side of modern morality and equality, then you're supporting the forces which are making healthy human relationships into a rare occurrence. People who want to "improve the world" in a way which rejects tradition are to blame that the world is getting worse, and it doesn't matter if they have IQs in the 140s, that they love altruism, that they have mathematical frameworks for reducing poverty and "saving the planet", they will fail, life will get worse for everyone, and they will continue to double down on their methods because they sound correct and make sense theoretically, especially to other smart people.

If the real world failed you, it's either because:

1: Society told you to be a "Good person", and you became somebody that society approved of but that women had no interest in. In other words, society told you how to act in order to benefit society, and not how to act in order to benefit yourself or be popular with women.

2: You're a reasonable human being, but the women around you bought into feminism, or have so many men to choose between that you can't compete. Once these women start to become reasonable, they're already old (and have high bodycounts or children). This is not yet the case in Asia (I'm afraid it will be soon, but I hope not).

There are people who feel satisfied with very small accomplishments

This is true. But if they could control their own circumstances, then they'd mess everything up for themselves. Imagine this, you're playing a game, and you have the ability to cheat, you literally decide how difficult the game is. Can you prevent yourself from cheating? If you die and lose your items, can you prevent yourself from giving them back to yourself? For every cheaty action you take, you lower the value of everything you worked for, as the subjective value of everything is the same as the amount of work you put into it. It's my understanding that very few people have the self-control to keep such a game fun for themselves. They would have to create something to fight against, something which resists their efforts, which is counterintuitive to them.

It's another understanding of mine that the "optimization mentality" of rat-adjecent communities lead them to maximize rewards, meaning that they are much more likely to ruin the game for themselves than average people. Well-being consists of balance, and both maximizers and minimizers will almost surely fail to achieve this even if they have intelligence, money and cutting-edge technology.

If the real world failed you, it's either because:

Both 1 and 2, unfortunately.

In general, I largely agree with you. I differ on two key points:

  • That it is difficult, but easier, to fix men and women than to create alternatives. Our society is very, very good as solving technical problems, whereas human problems tend to be intractable. In the end, it turned out to be easier to invent Ozempic than to fix obesity. It was easier to invent the pill than to stop young girls getting pregnant. Etc. I think that erwgv3g34 is essentially right on this point.

  • That literal wire-heading would not still be unsatisfying. I think it is entirely plausible - though not desirable - that we figure out a satisfaction reward signal and manage to replicate it, at which point games at any level of difficulty are no longer required. Dopamine / heroin etc. are very crude substitutes.

I find it strange that, in an imaginary scenario where we approach AGI level of intelligence, we cannot seem to imagine coming up with a way to help people who have terrible social skills.

We don't want to, really. I can imagine trying to make a chatbot that guides them / us into better social skills, but the temptation for whoever builds it is always going to be optimising it for society's benefit rather than for the benefit of the chump in question: I attended a 'Men's Leadership' course once, out of curiosity, and it was a series of lectures on how best to talk yourself into rolling over and showing your belly to your betters. And trying to help very shy people one-on-one is like pulling teeth - I'm far from the most social person but I've sometimes gone over to chat to the lonely guy in the corner out of pity and it's almost always agonising. Finally, humans are a group species and innately sort themselves into a relative hierarchy and most people, ultimately, don't want to risk their place by helping the lower orders too much.

the temptation for whoever builds it is always going to be optimising it for society's benefit rather than for the benefit of the chump in question

I think this is very hard to avoid, unless the person asking for help has extremely clear goals that they are articulating well, and the person trying to help him actually knows how to get them. There's an autism program I sometimes interact with, and it's very clear that the goal is mostly teaching them to interface with a large institution. It isn't even clear what else it could be about, since there's a pretty rigid schedule that includes interfacing with a different teacher, therapist, or situation every 45 minutes or so. It seems like a smaller setting with l fewer transitions would be better, but maybe then they wouldn't even feel like they had anything to teach.

Apologies in advance for the long reply. Read what you want and ignore the rest

1: Is not hard to fix. It's arguably easier to throw away the restrictions that society has told you to place on yourself. You can be more true to yourself and be more successful as a result.

2 is harder. I got an Asian girlfriend myself, seemed easier all things considered.

I have to disagree that human problems are difficult. I think that the non-existence of these problems is the natural state. Society messed up when it created obesity, it introduced new problems which do not occur naturally. Most foods I see in stores have about 10% sugar, and even most "healthy" food is fraud (the apple juice is sugar-water with chemicals which taste like apple). Even if society can find a way to solve these problems, it also created them. My grandma grows her food in her own garden, these problems are alien to her.

Unwanted pregnancy is a good argument though, since it's natural. It's a feature though, rather than a bug. Your body knows exactly what it's doing. The same applies to depression and such, it's no accident, it's a strategy to increase yours odds of survival. I think it's good that self-modification is so difficult (in fact, it's likely difficult because those who were good at it didn't pass on their genes, meaning that wireheading killed them).

Wire-heading is really dangerous. If you do any, I recommend gratitude meditation (since it won't interferer with your functioning). Many forms of wire-heading can effectively destroy people. When girls grow up watching disney movie depictions of love, notice how many years it takes to reverse the standards and how many disappointments they must experience. If you feel pleasure 10 times stronger than anything real life would offer you naturally, it's really hard to go back. Gratitude meditation makes you enjoy real life more though, which is why it's safer.

Whoever builds it is always going to be optimising it for society's benefit

Yeah, or income, and that would ruin it. That's how society functions. But it's not how we have to function, nor is it how everyone is forced to function. I don't feel any desire to optimize for socities benefit personally. These destructive incentives seem to emerge statistically. A company need not be evil, but companies are evil. A person need not be self-serving, but people are self-serving. The answers to all social struggles are quite simple. There's no real weights keeping people down. You can pirate "No More Mr. Nice Guy", "The University of Success" and "The Dating Black Book" and perhaps "12 rules of life" and read them in a few days. Internalize the gold nuggets which resonate with you and you're already ahead (the average person is very far from their potential)

You write as if some people are lower and some people are higher, and as if only years of hard work can ever hope to change this fact... But that's only true for ones socioeconomic position. Mental domains (social skills, happiness, charisma, confidence, likability, etc.) are completely mallable. Even if you've been a coward all your life, you can suddenly start being like John McAfee. Not acting like, but being like.

Helping shy people 1-on-1 is not difficult for me, I've done it many times. The hardest part is helping them believe in themselves, rather than to believe in you (even if you're prepared for this). It's also hard to keep them from falling in love with you (seriously. And gender doesn't matter.) I know a guy who involves everyone he meets in fun activities. It feels natural when he does it. You might feel like it's awkward, but it only gets awkward if you act like it is. Just pretend it's not awkward, and be casual and unconcerned (but friendly), and it will probably work out. They will likely relax when they notice that you don't seem to be uncomfortable because of them. People mirror eachother a lot, and you can control your side of the equation.

I think it's fine that people naturally fit into a position. Not everyone can be at the top, due to how hierarchies work. But I don't think lower positions are meant to be as terrible as they are. Consider a family which owns a dog - the dog is at the very bottom, right? But everyone takes care of it and treats it well. You'll be okay a long as you don't have unlikable traits.

Teaching people how to be likable is not difficult if you know how, but it probably takes a small books worth of information in total to communicate all the axioms (but in order to find all of them you have to read 100s of books and do some introspection as well). But if you follow the axioms, you literally cannot fail. There's not even any need to sell your soul, nor to roleplay and pretend. Of course, this alone will not make you into a millionare, but you could act with the exact confidence of a millionare if you wanted to.

(This is a placeholder to say that I read your comment with interest and enjoyed it, and hope to write some kind of response eventually).

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