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Agreed on analyst, good catch although people who aren’t in finance don’t know or understand the distinction between analyst and associate and so that alone doesn’t prove it’s fake. What does prove it’s fake is the VC thing which is 100% bullshit and that, as you say:
Rationalist or otherwise autistic online dating metrics obsession (of TRP, ‘cel and ‘normie’ variety) assumes class and social circles aren’t real and the market is efficient. In reality almost all mating is assortive, working class men aren’t competing with rich men and vice versa, dating down in terms of class is very low status and dating up in terms of class is more rare than at any time since the early 20th century. If one is an affluent white PMC, one is competing in the pool of this class. Even on apps, most people date in the same class, a working class makeup artist is subconsciously more likely to respond to the same guy with a good blue collar job, tattoos and a truck compared to in a suit or in khakis at the country club and with a generic PMC job, in part because she knows the former is more who she’s ‘supposed’ to date.
Rich women mostly don’t have to worry about losing on marriage to men of their social class to pretty working class girls who work as hairdressers or airport check-in agents. PMC men likewise need not fear handsome plumbers even if they make more on paper than they do.
Doesn’t this usually mean petty, low level crypto scammer / hustle bro now? It’s always funny how the drive of the Du Cap in Antibes is full of American and English tourists staying in some cheap shithole in Nice but getting the ‘iconic’ shot they must have seen on some rich person’s page that they follow for themselves. Every Ferrari is rented, every first class seat was bought via churning / points, travel is cheap since airline deregulation etc. The only way you know is when you get their full name and can look them up on LinkedIn, that tends to have enough to predict pretty accurately.
I don't think rationalist or other spaces that discuss online dating metrics assume markets are efficient, nor that social circles aren't real, nor that assortative mating isn't real. After all, dating and relationships come with tremendous search costs, transaction costs, switching costs, information asymmetry, conditions that introduce substantial friction and make markets less efficient. I'm quite certain such spaces are familiar with the notion of assortative mating, far more so than the complement of their union (i.e., mainstream blue-pill spaces).
I view dating market efficiency (or lack thereof) and assortative mating as completely orthogonal; one could just consider assortative mating as another factor in an agent's utility function just as one could allow assortative mating when setting up a population genetics simulation (instead of assuming random mating).
I mostly agree that people tend to pair-up assortatively when it comes to marriage. However, mostly is doing a lot of work here, likely too much. At some point, pretty hairdressers and handsome well-earning plumbers do pose a sufficient source of competition, even if we're talking about competition for rich women vs. PMC men (I parse "rich" as more elite than mere "PMC", PMC women tend to be much more threatened by working class women than are their male PMC counterparts and working class men). Plus, someone from a working class background can always re-brand via some Russell Conjugation as they make the up-jump. The hairdresser becomes a stylist, the well-earning plumber becomes a small business owner.
As a side note, "airport check-in agents" (and flight attendants) can be PMC-adjacent, depending on country and perhaps airline, with multilingual and education requirements, de facto or de jure. I know in many countries they're basically like glorified fast casual restaurant workers.
People have varying levels of naivete and cynicism, so you can fool some of the people all of the time, and some people will accuse you of being a fake poser no matter what you do. Of course, it helps to manage the lifestyle in their profile(s) to be consistent and authentic in a way that's perhaps reminiscent of the Diderot effect. There's also a notion of faking it until you make it: If you're the type of guy who can minmax your life to consistently and authentically fake being actually rich, at some point the hindbrain of a sufficiently large quantity of young attractive women will just view you as actually rich. You might actually have became the mask and are actually rich. Having evidence of other hot chicks in your life reinforces the illusion/reality.
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