This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Either you are the fastest typist in the world, or you are taking some long rests.
I cited American statistics because America produces the most statistics, they are the easiest to find, And most of the audience of this post would be American. And of course, because we are all living in America.
I live in Dubai. I'll bore you with some details about the dating market here.
It is Nightmare Elder Child Sacrificing God-level difficulty compared to America*. The male-to-female ratio is 3:2. There is a mix of people from all over the world with a much larger contrast compared to even the most "International" cities in the US or Canada. Maybe twice as mixed as Toronto. You have to navigate language**, cultural and religious barriers. People are overworked to shit (worst work-life balance in the world, i.e some people are just too tired to go out after working 11 hour days for 6 days a week).
Also, people are always coming and going. Given that most of them are tied to their work visa, the churn is relatively high (You lose your job, you are kicked out.). I had to cut things off with the last girl I was seeing because she left the country and LDRs really suck. This is a very common story for young (middle-class like me) people here. They end up losing a large chunk of their friend group as they leave for higher education (very common for people to go to Canada/Europe to get their undergrad). More of my high school buddies live in the state of Ontario than in this country. I suppose Americans can relate to this a bit given that the country is large enough that "moving for work" means effectively moving a few countries away.
OLD is even more winner-takes, the mechanisms for which I am not entirely sure of. But I ran an experiment by setting my location to NYC in Tinder 6 months ago. I got roughly 2 matches/100 swipes (this informs me that I am probably average looking, notice the extremely large variance in answers) with location as NYC compared to 0.5/200-300 I get here.
But anyways, I'm not complaining. I am applying to graduate schools in Canada and if all works out, I will escape this current Hellscape.
*My friends who grew up here but live in Canada say as much.
**Language barriers really suck. I can speak 3 languages but heaven for me would be if all languages suddenly disappeared and English was the only one left. Fairly large amounts of nuance are intransmissible even if the other person is proficient in English but not at a native speaker level. I assume my English is closer to that of a Native speaker than whatsoever the rank below it is. It's a shame that we can't communicate easily with large swathes of humanity.
I never said any way there should be any redistribution of means of sexual reproduction. You can assume that I would be sympathetic to such sentiments/narratives, but I am not.
I write a post that hints at my discontent at this issue maybe once a few months. In real life, I am working, earning, lifting, and doing everything it takes to maximize my net worth (for various reasons).
I am a staunch capitalist in matters of Economics and everything else, but that doesn't preclude me from feeling the plight of the poor. And I can wager I am probably more of a capitalist than You. But I do think, I ultimately want my fellow man (and woman) to live better.
Nature is a Molochian hellscape, Deer die because they grind their teeth out and die from starvation. It's a miracle at all that humans can experience Life AND Liberty AND Happiness. And if we are losing some aspects of that, I don't think it's too unforgivable for some to lament that. First world problems or not.
I got your general point. Winners win harder, and More losers, in all domains.
All the examples you listed illustrate the point. But I don't really need to respond to all of them. Yeah, the best rock climbers now are better but there are more worse ones, same for lifters, bankers, programmers, and {literally everything}.
We are all riding on the waves created by the true greats. This is more evident in Computer Science (I'm a programmer) than in any other field. So it's not that we should want less of this. But at the same time, I do feel the plight of those who will drown.
And on a personal level, I am not unfamiliar with winning at all. I am not going to say what it is because it would be too beside the point and bragging, but I am within the top 5 in the world in a not-too-specific thing. Unfortunately (in the context of this discussion), it's not the kind of thing that nets you massive amounts of wealth (in the short term) or something that you can put on your Tinder profile. But nevertheless, winning is soo good that 1 second of being a winner is worth more than a lifetime of not being one.
That's awesome! And realize that I don't criticize your thinking because I think you're a loser who should recognize that you're an evolutionary dead end and hop on an ice flow to spare us the trouble, I criticize your thinking because I think you're a smart talented guy, and this kind of thinking can poison smart talented guys into thinking they are losers and evolutionary dead ends and convince themselves that they should hop on an ice flow to spare us all the trouble. It's what people around here are fond of calling an "infohazard." One should optimize some of one's beliefs for what they provide you, not always for their perceived truth value, which we are astonishingly bad at recognizing in the moment regardless.
So what do you propose doing about it? Nothing? Recognizing how bad it is but leaving it alone?
The problem with the theory that this will lead to social unrest is simple. It is more or less self-evident that as long as there is a basically meritocratic system underlying the selection process, any rebellion will fail, because the people who would rebel are already selected failures, and anyone who could rebel would first need to make themselves a success. This goes for antiwork and similar communist efforts of the modern left*, it goes for HBDers as per our own @DaseIndustriesLtd , it goes for the incels. Guys who truly can't get laid on the current system are some heavy mixture of short, poor, stupid, introverted and not outgoing, antisocial, ugly, weak. By the time one gets the charisma sufficient to actually lead, he'll be co-opted by the system, and the provision of pussy will soften his resolve to conquer. The Revenge of the Nerds ends when the boys get laid, they don't then need to burn down the other frat house or something to prove their point. For any of them to get energized enough to do anything about it would require acquiring exactly the traits that are still enough in the partial-meritocracy of today's dating market to make good.
PS: Reading your thoughts on Dubai, I apologize for being pedantic about n/10 scoring, it makes more sense if you're talking about your experience in Dubai as being somewhat unique (ie you're an NYC 8 but a Dubai 4 or something like that) which is much more coherent.
*This gets into the conspiracy theory that college affirmative action is primarily an effort of The Man to keep strong Black communities from forming. The Talented Tenth is plucked right out of the ghetto, feted with scholarships and biglaw jobs out of Harvard (or Howard), and coalesces into part of the system. Without affirmative action as it is currently practiced, the Talented Tenth would be leading the local Panthers chapter and building local businesses; with affirmative action they get a DEI sinecure at Blackrock while Blackrock's REIT buys homes in their community and rents them back at a huge profit.
I'm not entirely sold on this line of thinking. Sure, the pragmatic value of a belief is at odds with its truth value. After all, I won't tell my mom she's being a bitch if even she is (armchair psychologists would say there is a lot to unpack there). But outside of close interpersonal relationships, And regarding matters of ones model of The World. I do think, thinking as such as at the root of many of todays irrationalities, the inability to stare at the uncomfortable truth at its face.
Speaking in less abstract terms. Let's say being 'blackpilled' is infohazardous. In so far as it prevents a guy from exerting disproportionate effort towards "getting laid" because he knows his effort is disproportionate. Ultimately leading to an unhappy and lonely life. That's a failure mode for sure.
But one man's infohazard is another man's wisdom. If the non-Blackpilled guy fails left and right, he has a dim chance of figuring out exactly why (assuming BP is true). The BPed guy at least knows how to chisel away at the problem.
Knowing it's all fucked. But having the resolve to carry onwards anyways is a more than good enough approximation of the Heros Journey. Lest we not gimp the strong to protect the weak. The people who "deserve" it the most as per the purest meaning of that word.
I believe absolutely nothing can be done about it; in the absence of forcing people to do things they really really don't want to do.
I don't have a good enough mental model to describe the process that encompasses all the variables. But I intuit that there are many things we want that are tradeoffs against other things we want. For example TFR (weak proxy but lets use it for now) might just be inversely correlated with Economic strength. In other words, it's a control system.
And if we want to be really pessimistic. I don't think humans want it any other way. I don't think the drive to pair bond in humans is that much of strong one (across both sexes). After all, we do possibly have twice the number of female ancestors. In the simplest of words, I got nothing. If I was Tsar, there is absolutely nothing I could do. You can't have an ELO system without losers, its not possible.
But let's assume as a Tsar, my people don't expect too much from me. I am tasked with just restoring male sexlessness to the early 2000's level. Then there is still not much I can do that isn't overtly authoritarian, the cats are out of their respective bags. I might think about this and post a top-level later.
The relationship blackpill is best approximated by the online discourse around "hardgainers" in lifting, which given you're a lifter and online I'm sure you're familiar with, where beginner after beginner hops on /r/fitness or /r/weightroom and announces that they just can't gain/lose weight, it's not working and I'm doing everything right. Most of them are not doing everything right, or even most things right, 50% of self-described hardgainers have their calorie counts wrong, a good amount of the remainder literally aren't doing the exercises they said they were doing if you dig in a little, and almost all simply haven't been trying long enough to say whether they are hardgainers or not.* The lifting community basically rejects the idea of hardgainers because individuals are so bad at determining whether they are personally hardgainers, everyone thinks he's a hardgainers when he isn't jacked after eight weeks or whatever the magazine promised him. I've been around long enough to have seen it over and over in real life, I'd guess that 80% of lifters will at some time think they are a hardgainer, and that less than 10% are true hardgainers (can't achieve an above average physique with reasonable normal efforts).
There are, of course, a percentage of men who are genetically cursed, who simply don't put on muscle from ordinary exercise (just as there are men who put on muscle seemingly without ordinary exercise). But if the lifting community embraced hardgainer memes, if the conventional wisdom online was "if you think you're a hardgainer you're probably a hardgainer and should give up/take steroids" rather than "you're not a hardgainer try harder," what would happen is that the 10% of true hardgainers would say "phew, now I don't have to waste my time on this" and have slightly better lives, but the much bigger group of guys who think they are hardgainers will stop lifting and never find out they weren't hardgainers after all and their lives would be much worse.
The latter is the problem with forwarding black pill narratives online. My belief is that most, if not all, men go through In(voluntarily)Cel(ibate) phases in their lives. I suspect that if I had found the modern, polished black pill discourse when I was 17 I might have thought to myself "yup, that's me" and never grown into myself. And, moral cards on the table, I guess I value the suffering of the true hardgainers banging their heads against the wall less than I value the possible winners who never discover their potential. The former's lives were probably going to suck anyway, the latter have a chance to do something really great. And when we talk about "a bigger percentage of men never getting laid could destabilize society," the latter are the marginal cases and also far more important than the former.
I'm interested to read your ideas on What is to be Done?. Looking forward to it. Just do me a favor and never sell yourself short irl.
*Speaking personally, my "hardgainer" phase in lifting consisted of doing bad rep schemes, and at one point literally being too stupid to realize that my old barbell was 10 lbs lighter and my sand-filled vinyl plates were off.
I don't think it is. Not because of ideological reasons but because I think it's sloppy thinking. Lifting is a points-based system, there are metrics. It's not an ELO system like finding a mate is.
I understand that there is a common factor of people overestimating how much they are doing to achieve said goal. And that's what the analogy is for, well and clear to me.
Nonetheless, I don't think much more needs to be said about this. Because you are arguing from a different frame than what the initial post was about. I don't need to be convinced of a change of mindset at this moment in time.
I'm writing up a post about "The System". As in a more comprehensive model of the "mating market". Any why I think the modern market is somewhat different than it used to be in the past. It's going to be abstract and mathematical.
Spoiler: What is to be done? Get famous.
I'm aware that specific topics give off too many "bad vibes" even to bring up. I recently had a girl tell me I am "too depressing and dark" for talking about the state of the world economy post covid and post-Ukraine war; Not a single thing I was discussing wasn't factual, and the discussion was strictly about the facts. Point is, to speak to the audience.
As for marketing, I'll let the product sell itself. There's not much I can do besides correct information asymmetries.
More options
Context Copy link
As I'm often inclined to do, I'll addend your observations on the lifting community by saying that this exact phenomenon replicates itself in the running and cycling communities. I guess there's an except to that, in that the /r/running community and others like it are kind of rah-rah, blackslappy bullshit that tells everyone they're doing great, and that it's not their fault that they're slow, but that sort of shit doesn't really fly as soon as you're into boards that are actually more performance-oriented. If someone say they're having success running 30 miles per week, the answer is going to be "congrats on the talent, but you'd be a lot better if you ran more". If someone insists that they don't get significant aerobic fitness gains from running big miles at easy paces, the response is going to be, "post your logs and we'll help you figure out what you're doing wrong". Pretty much no one accepts that someone is running 70 miles per week, knocking out legitimate track reps and tempo work, but just stuck at a 21 minute 5K. Doesn't happen, not real outside of legitimate medical issues.
Of course, in both worlds, there are going to be legitimate differences in genetic talent and ability caps partly determined by what you did in early life, but the reality is that the vast, vast majority of people that would like to run decently fast, put on significant muscle mass, or ride up Alpe d'Huez in under an hour can do so with tried and true training methods. The best advice for almost everyone is going to be based on helping them figure out what they're doing wrong rather than coddling people and telling them that it's not their fault.
More options
Context Copy link
That can't be more than, what, 5%, right? Being able to put on muscle would be a hard requirement for survival historically, even in agriculture-time, so evolution should provide it. Now, 'ordinary exercise' would have to mean 'committed weight training + good diet, sleep, etc', as opposed to 'going jogging sometimes'.
The specialized definition to work with here is "putting on muscle" to mean something like "having noticeable defined muscle mass compared to an untrained individual." Which I'm not sure exactly how one relates all that back to survival, humans have found a lot of ways to skin that particular cat over the millenia.
I would probably guess that 5-10% of people will just never really get there, either because of specific muscle building issues, or because of other debilitating conditions that prevent them from training properly. But I'd guess that multiples of that percentage will, at some point in their journey, believe that they are in that 5-10%.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link