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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
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:
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.
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.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?
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.
I think you are a little too young to remember the before-times -- this is what bars were for. If you didn't have anyone to go out with, you could go to one, sit down at the bar, have a drink -- and start talking to people.
You probably still can (if you can't find a bar that hasn't gone out of business yet), but it won't get you laid unless you are into aging drunks.
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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?
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Sure!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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