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Cultural progress is harder to predict, and can be much swifter than genetic or technological progress (at least historically; we are in an incredible moment of rapid technological progress, and it would be difficult to construct an explicit metric for this). Especially if genetic engineering is on the table, I don't see why it is necessarily impossibly more difficult to affect people's senses of "intolerability" either as an aside/effect or as a goal. Literally the original subcomment in this subthread is:
That's a fair point, that one could genetically engineer people's sense of "intolerability." I do think there would have to be some sort of significant political/religious will behind developing and executing that kind of genetic engineering at a population level which would also of course be required for things like making women less hypergamous, etc. or changing birth sex ratios. I suppose my belief is that the political/religious force required to develop and implement the genetic engineering to make women more tolerant of losing abundant sexual access outside of marriage would be significantly more than what's required to implement the genetic engineering to make them slightly more male-like in their sexuality.
But you are correct that accurately predicting cultural progression is very hard. My own belief is probably mostly informed by my own lifetime experience of noticing how cultural progression always seems to go. But that's anecdotal and should be valued as much.
If you think it's political/religious force that is important, then, stupid question here, but can't we just futz with that with our magic futzing machine? I was viewing some commentary on the recent paper claiming that there was a developing left/right divide between men/women, and one of the hypotheses was concerning the role of "religiosity", particularly among women. To the extent that we think we could plausibly target hypergamy/neuroticism/hornyness, plausibly one could hypothesize target "religiosity" or other factors that people associate with other cultural/political beliefs.
Moreover, the neuroscience literature has already identified plausible candidates for receptors and genes that relate to pair bonding, some of which even have animal analogs (e.g., there are two closely-related species of voles, one of which pair bonds strongly, and the other which doesn't nearly as much) or which seem to be correlated with measures of "relationship quality" in humans (it would take me a while to dig up some cites; I read this wayyy back in grad school). We could conceivably target something along these lines. Seems like we can think incredibly broadly; we really are considering quite a magic futzing machine.
But we'd also need the political/religious will and force to develop and use this magic futzing machine to change the population's political/religious preferences such that those political/religious preferences compel them to want to (re-)use the magic futzing machine to make women tolerant of losing abundant sexual access outside of marriage. I see this as moving the issue back a step.
Perhaps so. Nevertheless, I don't think I took most of the conversation here to be about the question, "What would actually-existing society actually choose to do with a magic futzing machine, and what would be the effects?" That's a question that would probably require significantly different analysis, and I think it would be even more fraught with potential for just being pure gobbledygook (did not expect spellcheck to recognize that as a word), precisely because cultural responses to new tech, including new biotech, seem wildly unpredictable. See, e.g., the use of masks/vaccines in response to COVID, which was an insanely constrained problem in terms of higher-order effects by comparison.
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