“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Mark Twain (note that attribution is in question)
Back in 1990 (I was still a teenager), a reader wrote into Parade magazine to Marilyn vos Savant (whose claim to fame was the highest IQ in the Guinness Book of World Records)
about the Monty Hall problem. I actually remember reading about it at the time because I was a regular reader of Parade.
“Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?”
Although it seems counterintuitive, the correct move is to switch which is tied to the statement above “the host who knows what’s behind the doors”.
Vos Savant’s response was that the contestant should switch to the other door.
This has been validated in simulations and real world trials. Interestingly, approximately 10 years later at the beginning of my MBA program sitting in my Quant class the professor posed this same question. I was able to give the correct answer remembering the vos Savant column, but couldn’t remember the reasoning.
OK, where am I going with all this? The main point is not the correct answer to the Monty Hall problem, but in the response that vos Savant received:
After the problem appeared in Parade, approximately 10,000 readers, including nearly 1,000 with PhDs, wrote to the magazine, most of them claiming vos Savant was wrong (Tierney 1991).
Consider that fact. The majority of 1,000 PhDs GOT IT WRONG. They misunderstood the statistical probabilities of the problem. And those were presumably vetted PhDs, not self-proclaimed “Internet” PhDs.
Credentials can be important, and can often indicate a higher level of knowledge and expertise than the lay person, but are NO IRONCLAD assurance the argument is correct.
A very common argument technique many people use is to cite Person XYZ and consider the matter case closed. It is essentially an appeal to authority which is a logical fallacy.
So when a supposed PhD starts making claims or arguments listen and evaluate but also take it with a grain of salt. Even legitimate PhDs are fallible. Of course, if it bolsters (apparently) your talking points you will take it unquestioningly and run with it and repeatedly assert what an awesome takedown it is.
Here is the original comment from Dalrock’s blog:
Kelly says:
This is never going to make an impact, but as a PhD statistician I am going to tell you why all this red pill crap is wrong. Women peak sooner,
The first thing to note is that there is no way we can verify she is a PhD statistician. All we have is her self-proclamation. Maybe she is a PhD statistician, and maybe she is toll booth collector, or cafeteria worker. I have no idea, but I certainly wouldn’t cite as an *authoritative* source in a Big Bold Heading a random commenter on a blog with absolutely no evidence that this person actually is a PhD in stats. *Even if she is*, as I demonstrated above with the Monty Hall problem, PhDs can get things horribly wrong at times.
Now Kelly attempts to deconstruct and refute a particular graph of male and female SMVs over time. In this post I simply want to address Kelly’s argument (and follow ups to her argument), and not the issue of female SMV in great detail. I intend to address that as well in the future but like many of my mating/dating beliefs there is a lot of nuance and complexity. I generally eschew cartoonish simplifications that some enthusiastically embrace.
I’ll make one point on the matter. I believe women are *capable* of maintaining reasonably high SMVs into their late 30s, 40s, even 50s in some cases but these are the rare exceptions, not the rule. There is a reason the expression “Follow the money” is often used. Markets reflect real preferences, not bullshit answers that people think they are supposed to give. So one can look at porn (specifically male preferences) to get a sense of female SMV versus age. There are a number of successful pornstars in their late 30s, even early 40s. Hell, Racquel Welch was still “very doable” at 71.
But here is the thing. Very few 30-45 year old women have the bodies of 40-year old pornstars. Of course, on the flip side some women look better at 32 than most 22-year olds. And I’d argue that maybe less than 1% of 50+ women look like Racquel Welch at 71. When a woman’s SMV “plummets” can be highly variable depending on things like her skin condition and when she starts to get really fat. Some women might maintain a fairly attractive bodyweight all through their 40s and keep a higher SMV and then at 50+ they really pack on the pounds.
Another study that I suspect would be revealing would be to compare the escort/prostitution rates of 20-25 year old Playboy/Penthouse caliber women vs 30-35 year old women vs 40-45 year old women vs 50-55 year old women. This would be another way to assess pure/raw ***sexual*** market value.
OK, enough on female SMV…back to Kelly and her “statistical arguments”:
Those graphs are wrong because, with a fixed number of people in the world, equal between the sexes, you have to scale the curves so that the area under each one is the same.
This is pure gobbledygook here. There is no fundamental reason the areas under the curves have to be the same. This is simply argument by assertion. There are mathematical items that are fundamentally inherently true like the commutative or distributive properties.
But there is nothing fundamentally true about the statement the areas under the curves must be the same. If you were to restate that algebraically the equation would be Cumulative Lifetime Male SMV = Cumulative Lifetime Female SMV. This *could* be true, but there is absolutely no reason whatsoever it has to be true. In fact, I would argue for the most part that male SMV and female SMV are independent of each other just like successive coin flips. Kelly’s argument has the unstated premise that they are dependent on each other.
Here is Han Solo’s critique:
The notion that “you have to scale the curves so that the area under each one is the same” is utterly ridiculous.
People don’t have a finite amount of sexual value to distribute across their life. There is absolutely no basis whatsoever for claiming that the area under the man and woman’s curves should be the same.
The sexual value function versus time is simply how much a person is desired for sex at a given time and has no direct relationship to some supposedly fixed total amount of sexual value that they can allot in a rapidly peaked burst or in a lower-peaked more gradual hill-like shape.
Rather, the the trajectory of a person’s SMV over time depends on both the genetics and environment the person lives in and how well they take care of themselves.
To see this more simply, some women and men can reach their peak value and then drop off quickly due to getting fat or aging quickly (not to suggest that men’s SMV is primarily due to his looks, though it’s a component). Others will hit their peak and plateau for a long time. There’s no uniform SMV curve shape for men or women (though you can draw rough approximations or averages) so there is no area under the curve that can be required to be held equal, either between men and women, or between different men, or between different women.
This supposed PhD, Kelly, sounds like an ignoramus and a fraud, more of a troll than anyone with something serious to say.
Because if there are 50 men who are 7.5′s, and there are only 30 women, then men’s actual score and actual value on the dating market is downgraded because he can’t just choose a 7.5 and take her. He is downgraded by competition in the market.
This is laughable. Pretend we have a remote isolated island so it has its own SMP set aside from the rest of the world. Now we populate this island with 100 tall, good-looking, fit, intelligent, charismatic men who are basically 8-9s across the entire male population, and put them with 20 morbidly obese women with disfigured faces. Do we “downgrade” these men to 4-5s simply because they are in excess of this SPECIFIC MARKET? The notion is ludicrous. What if this were a reality show? Would all the female viewers at home suddenly see these men as 4-5s? Or would they continue to see them as very desirable high SMV men? The notion of “adjusting” SMV values for particular markets is simply a disingenuous way of shooting the arrow first then painting the target around it. If you are 55-year old overweight woman with a minute fraction of the SMV of a super fit 24-year old, then you simply redefine your “market” to be only other 50-60 year old women with only 55-70 year old men evaluating. Voila, like magic, your SMV skyrockets!
Instead of acknowledging that quoting a random commenter as an authoritative PhD was a mistake, and that this “equal areas under the curve” concept is balderdash/mathematical sophistry, Aunt Giggles quadruples down on this losing bet and makes this “equal areas under the curve” the quicksand on which her flimsy straw house argument sits.
She cites a comment of mine on a blog (Rational Male) which she claims she does not read or follow, and highlights it as if I intended the comment to be a fully developed argument.
So let’s walk through Susan’s post here. First, let me give credit where credit is due. Susan is quite articulate, and has a masterful command of rhetoric. No doubt, she would have been a successful lawyer. I’m sure she is very persuasive to those without a sufficient IQ and critical thinking skills to see all the holes in her Swiss cheese arguments. When it comes to basic logic though, she often stumbles in contradictions and non sequiturs. I believe this is because she often starts with what *feels right* to her and then tries to fit the data and construct arguments to support that feeling. As a side point, I think many intelligent women struggle with the battle between their emotions and feelings versus their intellect. Most often, emotions and “what feels” right is the master, and the intellect becomes the servant.
Let’s start with the title of the post. Note the use of the word “Conclusive” in the title. This is a rhetorical gimmick. If something really is conclusive, then the data and analysis can stand on its own. The reader does not need to be told what follows is “conclusive”. The word is simply there to plant in the minds of less discerning readers a false sense of authority. This is the sort of thing that does work on most people to set the tone. The Game parallel to this technique is what is called Frame Control.
She goes on to state:
“was apparently incensed by her argument, emailing me this vaguely ominous message:”
Actually I was not incensed…perhaps that is projection on her part but I was a different “i” word. I was incredulous that she was making the foundation of a post a random commenter claiming to be a PhD, and clearly not even understanding the details of the mathematical argument. It is understandable that Susan might have some trouble with the math here. In a recent comment, she made the statement that men over 35 lose 7 pounds of muscle a year. Clearly, if one stopped to think about that point for even one second before making it, one would realize the basic arithmetic is absurd as you would lose 210 pounds of muscle by age 65. To her credit, she did correct this egregious error, but it does point out that perhaps she has some difficulty with “math and stuff”.
She goes on to say:
“but he is correct IF AND ONLY IF you believe that the homo sapien male is inherently more valuable sexually than the homo sapien female.”
Ahhhh. Note the use of the CAPS and the emphatic IF AND ONLY IF which excludes all other possibilities. She is so sure of herself. Of course, this is demonstrably false. If we assume for the sake of argument that this “area under the curve” notion has any meaning, then the OTHER POSSIBILITY where the areas could NOT be equal is if the “homo sapien female is inherently more valuable sexually than the homo sapien male”. To be clear, I’m not outright rejecting that possibility. One logical possibility is that the peak value of a typical female is orders of magnitude higher than the peak value of the male, but that the value decreases at a much more accelerated rate. The key is that whether you start the top of the Y-axis from 10 or 100, that represents the peak value for each sex, not an absolute number you can compare between the sexes. When dealing with “math and stuff” and comparing different data sets with different value ranges, this is called normalization of the data:
In the simplest cases, normalization of ratings means adjusting values measured on different scales to a notionally common scale,
So conceivably, the 10 or 100 for a guy could be a lower absolute value compared to the 10 or 100 for a girl. It is an interesting question. Who has a higher absolute sexual value? The 23-year Sports Illustrated swimsuit model with 36″ legs, a perfect body, and face of an angel, or the 38-year old tall, charismatic, handsome, wealthy hedge fund manager? But they both could be at their respective peak values of 10 or 100 or whatever scale you normalize to. What I’ve described here with normalizing the data is yet another reason this whole “area under the curve” business is just gibberish.
Let’s hit this from yet another angle. When we depict SMV on a chart like this, we are essentially showing a price path or trajectory in value. The path of the line over time and the corresponding Y-axis value is the informational content, not the cumulative area under the line. If a woman was super-fit then gained 50 pounds, then lost it, the path of that line would show a sudden collapse and rebound. It would be nonsensical to start analyzing the area under her particular SMV value line. In a sense, this is basically just like plotting a stock price over time. It is the stock price at a particular point in time that matters, not how much area is under the stock price line. This whole “area under the curve” business is almost as nonsensical if I grabbed two random stock tickers, plotted them and then stated that somehow the areas under the curves must equal.
She also performs some “unbiased analysis” on OKCupid data to arrive at her “mean values” are equal. Han Solo is going to take this one on in a follow-up post so I will not address it in this post.
Reading through both Kelly’s original argument and Susan’s Rube Goldbergesque elaboration of it, I’m reminded of a couple of things when it comes to quantitative analysis:
1. GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out
2. “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” John Maynard Keynes
The first one means that if your input values are way off, or your premises are incorrect, than any conclusions are absolutely worthless. The second refers to the fact that is better to get the general concept right with a large error band, then make an exact statement that is completely wrong.
The fact of the matter is male and female SMV have completely different underlying makeups. Female SMV is almost entirely based on physical looks (note that relationship/marriage value has a lot more to it). Whether those peak at 19 or 22 or 25 is within that “roughly right” zone. What isn’t up for dispute is that for the majority of women, a 35- year old body can’t hold a candle to a 22- year old body, and a 50-year old body can’t hold a candle to a 35-year old body. I will add that a certain sort of feminine playfulness can add to SMV just as arrogant bitchiness can detract from it.
The makeup of male SMV is much more complex as it includes NOT just physical looks (which do peak around the late 20s, early 30s) but intangible things like “confidence”, charisma, social and career status. The same woman stubbornly insisting that male SMV peaks at 26 or 28 based only on physical looks is the same woman who has the used the term “sexy ugly” many times. The fact of the matter is male sexual value can be derived from other sources besides physical looks. Presumably, for some men (of course not all) life experience and path creates a scenario where their confidence, career, and status are much, much higher at 36 or 38 compared to 24. In some cases, that gain will more then offset the loss of physical looks. This is where the peak in the 30s come from.
I want to add this positive note for women. There is no reason your SMV has to plummet at 30 or 40. There are all sorts of things you can do to slow down the aging process and physical deterioration, and stay more youthful looking and thus slow down that drop in the SMV curve. Most of which applies to men as well.
I do want to address this final point from Aunt Giggles:
It’s important to recognize that some men display a motive for artificially elevating the SMV of aging males, so ignore any wisdom characterized as “red pill.”
I personally doubt many “red pill” men are going to make the argument that a man’s SMV automatically goes up from 25 to 35. That fat, balding guy who slouches and works at 7-Eleven. Nope, his SMV didn’t go up from 25 to 35. Now the 35-year old year old guy who is a portfolio manager versus being a junior analyst at 25, and still works out 4 days a week and has 12-14% bodyfat and runs a 6 minute mile, and has developed his Game and “confidence” over the prior decade. Yeah, that guy’s SMV is off the charts higher compared to 25.
This has been a fairly long post, but it was necessary to cover the broad scope of material. To summarize, to make yourself a better consumer of information and arguments, you have to be on the lookout for those who would invoke credentialism as a substitute for a valid and logically coherent argument, and be aware of all the various logical fallacies people routinely employ in making arguments, particularly those that appeal to math and science that upon closer examination are gibberish.
One particularly important point about any sort of quantitative analysis or mathematical calculations (I work with large datasets all the time) is just because you can combine various variables together into some mathematical calculations where the math is correct does NOT mean the output is telling you anything meaningful. You have to have some underlying valid logic why to include variables X, Y, Z or calculate a mean, or use a median instead or why you might exclude or include certain data in analysis. SOLID LOGIC and THINKING precedes throwing a bunch of numbers into a spreadsheet and performing random calculations to “prove your point” that you “feel is right”.
One last example before I close out. Han and I were debating some quantitative analysis on marriage with an individual who prides himself on his “data analysis” skills. Long story short, this individual was including 15-year old boys as part of the analysis. Now I don’t know anywhere in the United States of America where 15-year old boys are viable candidates for marriage so including them in the analysis can only demonstrate one of two things, either the person genuinely cannot think logically, or willfully includes irrelevant data to distort the conclusion. THIS KIND OF THING HAPPENS ALL THE TIME WITH DATA ANALYSIS. There is a lot of data analysis that is pure bunk that was concocted to “support” a predetermined narrative. I’ve been part of meetings where much deliberation goes into what data and calculations will be shown, and how they will be shown in order to “tell the right story”.
Bottom line, when someone tells you they have “conclusive” analysis supported by data analysis that relies on fallacious concepts, grab your wallet and hold on tightly.
ADDENDUM to original post
Fun video on the Monty Hall problem
Note that it is counterintuitive, and that what “seems right” is in fact incorrect.
“… What if this were a reality show? Would all the female viewers at home suddenly see these men as 4-5s? Or would they continue to see them as very desirable high SMV men? The notion of “adjusting” SMV values for particular markets is simply a disingenuous way of shooting the arrow first then painting the target around it. If you are 55-year old overweight woman with a minute fraction of the SMV of a super fit 24-year old, then you simply redefine your “market” to be only other 50-60 year old women with only 55-70 year old men evaluating. Voila, like magic, your SMV skyrockets!”
On this particular point, from the perspective of someone (male or female) who wants to increase their chances of finding a mate or getting results, it absolutely makes sense to consider “targeting the right market” as it were. There are three main strategies–you can either improve yourself, improve your market, or both. If you target a different “market” that perceives you as more attractive, then your success rates can shoot up dramatically. This is precisely the strategy of male sex tourists and other middle class guys from the US or UK who go wife hunting in Ukraine, Thailand or Colombia.
Less extremely, guys can do social circle game and their success rates for everything (dates, sex) will be much higher, other things equal, than if they approach women cold. Same guy + Different market = Different SMV (and therefore potentially radically different results).
Now you may say “well, that’s cheating.” But the vagina that’s getting wet, or the penis that’s getting hard, doesn’t know the difference between what’s cheating and what’s not, do they?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
This is one of the fatal flaws I see with the whole curve concept to begin with. It’s ostensibly claiming to measure something “objective” as if these values are written in the stars. But in reality it’s just measuring, *at best*, the subjective preferences of the general population. And that is quite a limited exercise, if it’s useful at all.
The fact that many people automatically, subconsciously screen for particular “customers” when they’re out and about just makes things that much more complicated, and efforts to universalize and homogenize that much more problematic.
Interesting, Morpheus. It’s kind of early, and I’m only on my first cup of Joe…and I haven’t taken any comprehensive math in many many years (and I have the retention of an iguana these days anyway). But I’m not sure I agree with the following point:
“This is laughable. Pretend we have a remote isolated island so it has its own SMP set aside from the rest of the world. Now we populate this island with 100 tall, good-looking, fit, intelligent, charismatic men who are basically 8-9s across the entire male population, and put them with 20 morbidly obese women with disfigured faces. Do we “downgrade” these men to 4-5s simply because they are in excess of this SPECIFIC MARKET? The notion is ludicrous. What if this were a reality show? Would all the female viewers at home suddenly see these men as 4-5s?”
Is it really “laughable”? SMV is a very fluid variable, not an absolute one. A market (any free market) is based on supply and demand. So, it stands to reason (to me at least) that SMV would depend a LOT on the environment proper, and not on what some arbitrary outside population would rank it. I’m sure a female 9 in Wisconsin is different from a female 9 in California, for instance.
Let’s take this to an extreme and imagine all the women in the world look like Natalie Portman (assuming Natalie Portman does it for you):
Imagine dating…you have a girlfriend and find out she’s a psycho, then another…but she keeps reminding you of that stupid crack you dated back when. You wouldn’t be able to get beyond it. And the magazine covers. Natalie Portman on the covers of Cosmo, Self, Teenbeat, Vogue, Time. Your wife, girlfriend, aunt, mother, grandma. Every single month and every year until the end of time. Women would be like air. No one says, “Hey, the air in Sweden is really exceptional! And you should smell that air in the Netherlands…”. The porn industry would die. One singular unusual-looking obese lady driving by on a little rascal scooter with an oxygen tank would be considered a hot piece of strange in an environment like that. Men would write ballads about her mystical flesh folds.
As per usual Susan is completely wrong.
The OKCupid data shows exactly what it is supposed to show — that men are having sex equal to that of women. This is pretty obvious. Area under the curve should be equal on a chart like this.
However, that does not show “potential of SMV” (e.g. interest in the opposite sex) and the fact that men maintain garner interest and maintain it longer than women do beauty. Look no further than celebrities like George Clooney. When is the last time a supermodel woman maintained the interest of men longer than a decade much less 3 decades? Women are always being replaced as their beauty starts to decline in the late 20s. Unfortunately for the “haters” over at HUS this is observable reality.
Additionally, such a chart from OKCupid does not account for the fact that the top 20% of men garner nearly 60% of the sex, while the top 10% of men have about 40% of the sex. It’s a summation and average of the entire male population (sex of the entire male population = sex of the entire female population), but does not take into the effect that relatively fewer men are garnering much of the sexual interest. Note the same thing occurs in the female population with attraction, but since men’s attraction filters are wider than women the cluster of popularity at the top is less than of men’s interest.
These are the problems with the application of a *potential* of a single individual (SMV chart) to a broad population based chart such as the OKCupid graph. Rollo’s SMV chart is about individuals and cannot be broadly applied to populations, nor can an OKCupid graph about populations be applied to a single individual.
Way too much effort is being expended in supporting and deconstructing this graph.
To me, it is supposed to illustrative what an ideal man/woman can accomplish. The woman who optimizes her SMV in each time frame will peak quickly and then probably have a serious decline in her late 20s because she simply cannot hold on to her looks.
Men on the other hand can build up a wide variety of attributes and improve their SMV over time. Because of that, a properly built man will not reach SMV max until much later in life.
That’s it. But people have hard time understanding text so it gets put into a graph. Obviously the graph is going to be wrong, but it is better to be generally right than exactly wrong.
Common complaints:
1. There are lots of 40 year ugly men. Yes. So? They have fucked up their SMV and are living way below potential. Also most men won’t peak in their late 30s because they aren’t building right. My thought is that most men will peak in early 30s. Probably me, too. It’s hard to build yourself into uber-mensch. Also reminds me of Apex fallacy…only remembering the high SMV men in mid 20s and comparing them to ALL men of late 30s.
2. I am hotter than I was in my early 20s because I improved my looks and confidence and girl game. Okay, good for you. You fucked up your prime years and improved. An intelligent, perfect girl, who had spot-on girl game and spot-on makeup, etc, would still peak in early 20s in terms of SMV.
3. George Clooney is dating a 32 year old. Okay. So? Women do have things to offer besides their vagina. That doesn’t mean the 32 year old is more attractive than the 22 year old. Yes, you have things to improve BESIDES your looks, but you aren’t doing that, you are reading Eat, Pray, Love, so don’t pat yourself on the back.
4. The areas aren’t equal. Seriously, this is pointless. A peak SMV man, IMO, is probably going to be more valuable than a peak SMV woman. THIS POINT HAS BEEN MADE MANY TIMES. The biggest losers are Beta Guys and Top-10 women who can no longer lock down Top-10 Man, because Top-10 men are Gods. Thus his area would indeed be larger. Men run the world, remember? Bill Clinton’s SMV over the course of his lifetime will dwarf Kate Upton, because Kate Upton peaks and falls and then competes against newer women, while Bill Clinton still retains a huge, huge fraction of his SMV. These graphs do not compare normal people, they compare potential, IIRC, and therefore you are comparing Gods Amongst Men.
5. I get hit on more now. Okay, congrats. That doesn’t prove anything because the decision to “hit on” women depends on numerous things. One of the girls I considered insanely hot in high school never had a date because she hung out with omega men who were way too intimidated to hit on stuffed animals let alone a hottie. If her SMV is declining, and the Omega are improving, they may hit on her because there is a calculation that they have a chance. It does not mean she is more attractive.
I do not women to get that impression that they are dead at age 30 or have men high-five each other because their SMV peak is coming. The first saddens me, the second disgusts me. Rudimentary girl game and style improvements makes a girl approachable, which we saw from that Ted Talk of that ugly-ass woman getting 10,000 messages from Internet Betas. Rudimentary guy-game will not get you to peak SMV at 38, that involves a comprehensive life-building strategy, similar to what BB promotes, and involves a ton of work.
So, even at 30, the average girl has an easier time improving herself than the average guy. The difference is that you turned both into Gods with perfect knowledge, the girl will still decline over time, and the guy will improve. Her path is easier, a gentle sloping hill upon which she will have to tread a little harder but can she still walk up, provided she does not have too much baggage.
The guy is climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. It is a steep climb. But if he gets the top, it’s far, far, far higher.
It does no good for men to high-five each other at the bottom, talking about how awesome it is going to be at the top, AND THEN NEVER FUCKING CLIMB. But he can still CLIMB. He has the opportunity. She does not.
Guys and girls are different.
Also, the reason why this is getting so much attention is because they think it is easily debunkable, and by debunking this they can debunk all game. Of course this graph is easily debunkable if your criteria is 100% accuracy. And of course if you think “1 wrong, all wrong!” then you can “debunk” game.
But who the fuck cares? Let the results speak for themselves. That’s why I am here, that’s why everyone else is here.
Because it WORKS.
I absolutely agree that localized market peculiarities can have enormous effects on relative mating success, but I think that SMV as a commonly used shorthand probably has to reflect intrasexual competition to some extent, to be a generalized concept used for a theoretical beauty-type pageant in which participants are drawn randomly.
For instance, we might agree that Roseann Barr is an SMV 2 and that Megan Fox is a 10. It would be at least theoretically possible to construct a scenario—perhaps a remote island populated exclusively by thousands of shipwrecked male sailors—in which Barr actually became a highly prized sexual asset. But then of course to make a fair comparison we’d have to consider the impact if Megan was parachuted into the same situation. If we kept moving Roseann Barr around in clever ways in order to find her optimal mating environment, we could end up obfuscating her true standardized SMV test score and then the term would lose its convenient short-hand meaning and always require contextual modification (i.e., if my buddy Seth tells me that the girl he is dating is about an 8, I would have to ask him if this is an “8” in the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska or an “8” in a southern Brazilian beach town).
If you ask an evolutionary psychologist about relative mating attractiveness over time, he or she would probably say that, in a state of nature (the EEA), men would prefer teenagers for LTRs and females in their mid-20s for STRs. The logic is fairly straightforward: in an LTR, the woman’s entire future “fertility career” would be prized; in an STR, the woman’s current fertility level would be prized.
I don’t think there is much controversy about why this would be the case: obviously men who had these preferences would ultimately outbreed those that did not (ceteris paribus), and of course the successful strategic preference sets would be conserved by Nature over time, leading to male attraction triggers being set like spring-loaded traps.
In terms of what this means in the current SMP, however, I think we have to be more cautious about making any sweeping statements. The EEA model assumes that:
1) Sex is a relatively scarce resource, requiring active male investment and consideration of opportunity costs. You could possibly add a twist to SMV calculations if A) STR mating strategies were more successful at a particular age cohort and/or B) if men had absolutely trivial search costs.
2) Men can accurately determine a woman’s age. The EEA did not feature expert make-up products, Botox, breast augmentation, hair extensions, waxing, Miracle Bras, etc., etc. We all know the effects that these can have.
So you could cause some interesting results if 35 year old women were able to pass as 25, if men were able to send buckshot blasts of low-cost probes to many women at once (online dating, Facebook), and if women of a certain age bracket were known to put out more readily than were women of other, perhaps even younger brackets. These features would not really be violations of the EEA beauty triggers per se; they would be ways in which social operators in the modern environment might be trying to piggyback on them.
I guess this is both good and bad news to women in their 30s and up: on the one hand, they can potentially retain very high SMV scores. On the other hand, it might require an increasingly exhausting, stressful, and expensive regimen designed to keep them looking young at practically all costs. I personally prefer to date women in the 34-38 age range (I am 41), and they do seem to routinely complain about how much this aspect of dating sucks.
re: the relative SMV curves. One potential problem is that male SMV arguably contains inputs that are normally distributed (physical attractiveness) mixed with inputs that are most definitely non-Gaussian (income, status, etc.) These variables may of course vary differently in terms of value vs. time, and it is notoriously difficult to unpack them when it comes to female mating selection. The impact of each variable on SMV may be non-linear.
I think that it is generally safe to say that if a man’s SMV is going up over time, he’s either really taking care of himself physically and addressing his presentation OR his wealth and social status are increasing more rapidly than his physical appearance is declining OR he’s doing both. I would certainly advise a young man that he can enjoy many good years, but he should not be complacent about this and expect it to just come to him. On the contrary, he will need to continually and patiently reinvest in himself so that he can fully enjoy these later harvests.
Insofar as female SMV calculations are almost entirely based on a woman’s physical attractiveness, female SMV would probably be normally distributed, at least in the macro view.
In Kelly the Statistician’s defense: if male SMV was solely based on a man’s physical beauty and prowess, then I would have to admit (with deep regret) that the male peak of physical power is probably in the late 20s *for the majority of men.* You need an age waiver to start BUD/S if you are older than 28. The average age of male Olympic athletes is about the same, and most world-class guys are retired by 33-34. I hate admitting this to myself and I try to fight the clock as best I can, but I just can’t pull off the same wild animal-crazy stuff I did at age 25, or even 30.
However, in terms of short-term mating, a woman would theoretically want to know if you were a good sperm donor, which is very different from asking if you are at your physical peak *right now*. What she would need to know is if your physical peak, when you were at your physical peak, is/was higher than the physical peak achieved by other men (i.e., is she getting great genetic material for her babies). So it may be that, for STRs at least, women would be interested in your lifetime peak SMV (LTRs, different story: she needs you to be able to Provide and Protect not just today, but until the youngest child she has with you would be physically self-reliant).
IP,
While changing your market is important, this meme grates me. The topic normally comes up whenever we have any sort of discussion regarding “objective” SMVs. The reason it’s brought up is largely to cover up the fact that men have a more difficult time generating interest because they generally don’t have a lot of fast-acting attraction traits.
Oh, it’s all your fault, you don’t target the right markets!
I agree with you, you gotta be smart about your strategies and the markets you pick. There’s absolutely no way I can do club game. I am functionally deaf and I am not attractive enough. Social circle game works far better for me, and that means building a social circle.
That doesn’t change the SMV calculations one tiny bit. George Clooney can walk in a room and I can walk in a room and George Clooney will command it and I will not. I develop different strategies to respond to that. Hell, in the long-run, I might even actually do better than George Clooney!
That does not change that George Clooney is hotter than me and can do 10,000 things I cannot, mother-fucking period.
To make an analogy to military affairs:
Certain militaries are more powerful than others. It’s really hard to make objective comparisons, but it’s OBVIOUSLY true that the US is vastly more powerful than everyone else. It is not so objectively true that Britain is stronger than France. If France and the UK fight over Belgium, France is gonna wooop the UK’s ass. On the other hand, France has no power projection, so it cannot even supply troops in Mali for long without the UK’s help.
And then you get into naval comparisons. I like British anti-ship missiles but the French at least have an aircraft carrier.
Hard to make an “objective” comparison.
Then you get into cases where both sides employ different strategies.
For example, the Viet Cong and North Vietnam bleeding South Vietnam and the US into nothingness. Despite objective inferiority, hell, they won!
That does not change the fact that the US is stronger and can basically explode any nation they want with ease.
This “market segmentation” discussion pretends that these objective differences do not exist. Oh, see, Vietnam beat the US! Therefore, Iraq, you shouldn’t whine about objective power differences and that the US just came in and wrecked your nation because it wanted to. You should adopt a different strategy and that will overcome everything!
See, there’s no REAL power difference between the nations
While it’s true strategies can make up for differentials, what the manosphere is about is pointing out that there are big SMV differences and a breakdown in societal institutions has resulted in massive abuses and a lot of Beta Guys being left out in the cold. Betas need to adapt to compete on any level.
Then there is the difficulty of the whining about anything women don’t like. They like “strategy,” they like “inner game,” becuase those terms are very “neutral.” In practice? It means that if you are dating a girl for 3 months and she doesn’t put out, her ass is nexted unless she’s a virgin. But that smacks of “oppression,” so that strategy and inner game is actually cad game and bad strategy.
Again, to make the analogy to military affairs, it’s like women talk about how great “strategy” is, then whine about guerilla warfare because it is “immoral” and “unsportmanslike.” They like the term strategy until it gets down to the messy, nitty-gritty details, because they can pretend there exists some strategy of defeating the US military that does not involve guerilla warfare.
OK, without going into a long tirade about this “overblown” issue, I’ve got to agree with everything you stated. Most people have missed the point – and maybe that’s because Rollo actually colored the area underneath – more of a graphical design problem, than anything else. Anyone that has to present “data” for a living understand that the visual is very important – because 99% of the people in the audience will never look at the details.
First of all – there is not way to get to “if all things being equal” – any more than we can do that with stocks. Nothing is equal in the marketplace – we can group thing all we want, by every single stock/company/fund/index has their unique qualities. It’s not different in the world SMP/SMV – it is a “perceived” market place. And depending on your own personal goals – all things depend on the individual – a 65 year old hag may “do”. In another instance, the only thing that will do is a 22 year old hard body swimsuit model.
I’m talking about personal goals – what does that individual want to achieve in the SMP. Think of your own SMV as the money you have in your pocket (what you have to trade) – the key is understanding what you are trading it for. Nothing else is relevant. My goals will be completely different depending on that….
1) If I want an wife to bear my children – there will a significant view of the SMP and the criteria for your purchase within it.
2) if you are looking for a ONS – once again, different criteria. You’re looking to get in and out – no fuss, no muss.
3) If you are a divorced woman, with three young kids to support – guess what, she has a goal in mind, realizes “what she brings to the table” is a difficult sell – so she better bring the goods.
4) I you are a 45 year old woman, not wanting to work, running out of the cash and prizes from you divorce – once again, you have figure out how to sell yourself.
In all cases, it’s about being realistic about your SMV (what you bring to the market) and the SMV of whoever you attract. We are always trying to get the “most value for our money” regardless of which side of the X/Y chromosome debate you sit on.
But good post, I enjoyed it.
lolz
- I applaud the effort of debunking an advocate by using logic. Hows that working? all that effort can be used against you, see, now you’re sweaty and smelly.
– Making the areas “equal” requires you to see SMV as currency. Imagine there’s a fixed amount of SMV points which are going to be distributed across ages and genders, at the end, regardless of where and how each one peaks, the area under both remain constant because no SMV can be added or subtracted from that population. The real question though is why on earth would you apply this to the SMV, and how does it bring any light to the fact that Kate Upton is peaking now and will be very well past her peak in 10 years, while Clooney peaked decades ago and still has a few more good years ahead? does it help you understand it, no?
– If women peak sooner and men peak latter, Kelly is reaffirming the graph, not debunking it.
The genders peak:
A) Men and women peak at the same time
B) Women peak sooner
C) Men peak sooner
And the genders retain their peak:
1) Men and women retain their peak for the same fixed amount of time
2) Women’s peak last longer
3) Men’s peak last longer
To get the answers, check the peaks in the SMV and tell me what you see.
Then adapt your strategy.
————
And as a personal note, I was younger, of course, 10 years ago, when I was 27. And I was fresher looking and arguably better looking when I was 22. Though I was getting no interest from women, which I get now at spades when Im 37 years old, and with a few grey hairs. Why?
Because my 22 year old persona was shy, awkward, insecure, afraid of hot women, almost homeless, and quasy a virgin – while my 37 year old persona is meticulously crafted empire of raw awesomeness.
Women want more than a pretty face, they have their laundry lists. The best man is one who mets the laundry list with no intentional effort – he just matches it. It takes time to become that man. I have no doubt I would have made a killing on my 20s if I had the laundry list back then, but I didnt, so I couldnt purchase the ferrary, even though I was probably more suited to drive fast back then. Makes sense? now I can buy the ferrary and they keep sending me offers.
For most men this will take time to achieve, if they ever go there, but most men are going to see a bump up in value as long as they are building it right.
For women there’s nothing to build really. Other than the development of the physical attributes, all the things that require time, ageing, and accumulation, go in detriment of their SMV. With the exception of emotional intelligence and wisdom, which can be developed and accumulated over time… but how many women do you know who actually accumulate those things.
Anyway.
Morpheus:
“grab your wallet and hold on tightly”
This reminds me of a quote I love – “the louder he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
ADBG “Oh, it’s all your fault, you don’t target the right markets!”
Don’t forget “you need to stop going after girls who are out of your league!”
I like the IP and I’m not bagging on him, but ADBG has a point too, it’s easy to conflate telling someone “play in the right markets” and “you’re not that attractive and I’m going to feed your man-hamster instead of advising you how to up your value.” Again not disagreeing with IP, just saying that guys need to get really good guidance on “objective attractiveness” versus “niche marketing.” This is especially true if you are weak in some traits you can’t or don’t want to spend time improving. For example, I am pretty good in terms of fitness, height, deep voice, good job, interesting hobbies, but I’m very introverted and don’t care at all for the kind of fratty beer-pong party scene that a lot of young nubile women in my area seem to be down for. I’ve accepted that I’m going to forgo opportunities with a lot of those women, and instead of trying to be someone I’m not, I put a lot of effort into meeting women in places I am NOT going to be automatically second-tier in value.
[Han: Fixed that for you]
Another thing that Rollo also mentioned:
Women’s interests change over time, they go from a fun bad boy fucking and emotional drama to a settling down and lets make babies frame over time.
The young bad boys have all the SMP for the younger girls, the older badboys get some of that SMP. Bieber / One Direction vs Depp.
At 30+, men start capitalizing SMV from the women who start phasing out of the fun fuck and want to make babies. These older man also have SMV for the younger girls who also want to settle down, a minority, sure.
You’ll see a bunch of girls saying they want to “marry” these stars. Im pretty sure any woman lusting for Clooney wants to make babies. Because Clooney looks like a husband and someone who would make a good dad. While anyone lusting for depp just want to be fucked kinky.
typo: “in places I am NOT going to be automatically second-tier in value.”
ADBG:
Actually, the issue of targeting the right market is highly relevant to women (in fact, probably more relevant to them than to men). Particularly women as they get older. If you read sites targeting 30+ single women, this is a hot topic. The smart ones advise women to leverage different markets or adjust their expectations.
By talking about George Clooney and the US military, you are proving my point for me: you need to go to the extremes to make this stuff useful. It’s easy to say someone making $1 million a year is probably a lot better off than someone making $20,000. But what about someone making $45k and another making $48k? Technically one is making more money, but the other guy may be living a better life. Maybe a lot better. It’s the vast middle where real people exist.
Perhaps it’s because I’m actually here on the ground on a daily basis and working with guys to improve their lives, but I find it far more important to point out the reality of the Viet Cong’s success than to point out the obvious reality of the American military’s superiority. The fact that the US lost despite having a stronger military speaks volumes–about the many other factors that go into war (politics, culture, humanitarian issues (which prevent them from “exploding any country” they want), etc).
To focus only on the number of warships and soldiers is not a useless exercise. It’s valuable. But that’s not what wins wars or makes history.
Theory is important, but not as important as empirical evidence.
IP,
“Perhaps it’s because I’m actually here on the ground on a daily basis and working with guys to improve their lives”
I guess so, since you’re dealing with the specifics. If you grab the microscope the big picture is less important and all the tiny differences matter.
Whenever I talk to guys in real life it’s all about niche. Im not going to tell them go become Clooney, Im going to tell them how to play their cards right.
Still, in all these micro smaller markets, you can still trace the curves from the big picture.
Say, younger women are hotter, and men retain their value for longer.
Badger–what’s up man!
To me, “objective attractiveness” is all about those universals. However, in the way it plays out on the ground, the dynamic is heavily affected by context. So for instance we don’t have “guy with deep voice” vs “guy with light voice.” Instead we might have “guy with light voice who dresses well and is a friend of the girl’s friend, and a reputed player” vs “guy with deep voice who’s in sweat pants trying to chat her up at the stoplight.”
Objectively or universally, deep voice beats light voice. But the execution is all about context.
“…fratty beer-pong party scene that a lot of young nubile women in my area seem to be down for. I’ve accepted that I’m going to forgo opportunities with a lot of those women”
This is a little unrelated, but the thing is, you can still seduce those same women–you just have to meet them in a time and place where you have an advantage/ natural strength. Don’t meet her in a loud fratty party, meet her in a coffee shop while she’s studying.
This whole mega-discussion has been hilarious, from the smoke and fire disputing a graph whose point is just intuitively obvious to anybody watching the SMP, to Susan cribbing a quote off a blog she claims to hate from an anonymous academic as if it had scientific value, to Vox Day using it as his coming-out party in making SW a regular punching bag.
The thing I don’t understand is Susan’s repeatedly flogging the issue of “old men are not attractive to young women.” She’s had multiple posts about it even before the graph was brough up. I have two questions about this:
-Her blog is supposed to be about coaching young women into durable relationships. What does picking fights with the Manosphere and insulting middle-aged men do to forward that goal?
-If older men are so unattractive to young women, then why is it even an issue that needs to be addressed in the HUS discussion? Wouldn’t it be self-evident? She says she doesn’t discuss LGBT issues because her market is young straight women. Why should smelly old guys be any different?
My guess at the first one is that Susan likes to fight and loves the attention. I’ve known a number of women like this and she fits the profile to a T. I’ve long noticed she always has to get the last word in an online discussion – then complains she’s being constantly bombarded by “divisive” commenters.
As for the second one, I smell a revenge factor – wanting to taunt and show up the guys who write Manosphere blogs. Does she have a batch of readers who are in bad relationships with 30-somethings and she wants to warn other girls off? It strains credulity to think this is going on. All this bragging about an “awesome takedown” is just ginning up to stick it to the Manosphere. Despite bragging about having detached herself, she can’t resist taking shots and link-baiting.
It’s still amazing – and illustrative of a key Manosphere stereotype – that she angrily cast a dozen or more men out of her community simply for the crime of disagreeing with some of her views. Most all of us who used to be daily contributors there were on board with her mission and basically in agreement wrt the big picture, but quibbled with various points here or there.
That’s normal for any large discussion community – strict orthodoxy is a stupid expectation, and if you are looking to evangelize an idea, accumulating fellow travelers is a good idea, casting out those who would be speaking of you in a favorable light, if not in complete agreement, is not a good practice.
It seems a parody of a Manosphere meme that she and her crew of chatterers can’t distinguish between criticism of their ideas (again, comparitively minor quibbles) and criticism of themselves as people.
Another related thing here: when Susan fought with Doug1 and said “provide stats for this or shut up,” she got a number of writers seriously counterarguing her challenge. I’ve come to agree with Dalrock’s exegesis that she probably never really expected men to step up to the plate, and counted on an informal “don’t hit me, I’m a girl” sort of deference that has been the North American code even as women have entered the highest levels of power and influence in the West. I’m sure she’s experienced that many times in life: Susan gets super pissed off about something, and everyone just puts it to rest to keep her from further ruining everybody’s day. She thinks she has won when in reality everyone else just can’t match her insatiable energy for arguing.
I think it would benefit any critic of my graph to go back and read the original intent of it:
http://therationalmale.com/2012/06/04/final-exam-navigating-the-smp/
As for the math and stuff of the graph:
* People debating whether the “areas under the curve” should be equal or not are stuck on stupid. The area under this value vs age curve HAS NO MEANING. It doesn’t communicate _anything_. Rate plots (e.g. velocity, earnings or ) and histograms (counts versus categories) have meaningful areas. A price plot, which this graph is, has no meaning.
Stock charts, plots of price over time, have no meaning in their area under the curve. This is why stock price charts are accompanied by volume charts, which plot the quantity of sales events over time, and allow the computation of total monies changing hands in the process of trading that stock.
* Some people, Susan and her commenters among them, are befelled by a misapprehension that the graph is some kind of supply-and-demand chart, where people at equal SMVs are supposed to end up with one another. Thus their hue and cry over “this plot says a 35-year old man should be dating 22-year old women! Disgusting!”
That also is simply a false assumption. Rollo has explained this so I won’t go into more detail, but it’s revealing how people are making this assumption up out of thin air – it seems to follow from the self-protective axiom that “guys should go after girls who are in their league,” and so only a man who was a 9 or a 10 could consider dating a chick who was a 9 or 10.
Who should pair with whom is never stated on the graph or in the discussion from the people who made it. There again is a big difference between _describing_ reality and _prescribing_ behavior.
Susan IS basically correct that in the general, young 20’s women aren’t dating mid 30’s men in large numbers. Some do but mostly I see young hot girls with young fit douchebags. But that’s not what the plot is describing, it seems very difficult for the critics to understand it is plotting one’s SMV _potential_ or _trajectory_ as a function of age – you have a chance to be a much higher value man in your 30’s than you do in your 20’s. I just think they can’t get past the idea that there will be a time in life when they aren’t the ones with the rock-star power in the SMP.
As for Kelly’s claim that “male value is downgraded by competition,” this is a classic beginner’s fallacy of economic analysis. The price _already includes_ the effect of demand and competition.
Badger #16, good thoughts.
It has absolutely nothing to do with her “mission” and everything to do with her love of drama, contention, one-upping men, and satisfying her ego. If she really believed in her mission then she would have stuck with the proclaimed intent of the reboot and focused on helping young women. And part of it is revenge. Another part of it is she is trying to position herself as the reasonable center between radfems and angry spherists. However, with her touting inflated sexual assault stats, all the old-man shaming and other attacks, she is in reality placing herself more to the side of angry radfems than some sensible center. To create the illusion of radfems and angry spherists being equal and opposite crazy forces, she has to cherry-pick and exaggerate what is said in the sphere. But this, of course, doesn’t help her mission at all. It only attracts more commenters that are excessively distrustful of men.
If her mission were really important to her then she would simply stop mentioning the sphere and tell young women what she thinks is best for them. This would include a healthy dose of debunking radfem and watered-down feminist deceptions and bad advice, instead of inartfully arguing with the sphere, since feminism’s influence on society and negative impact on women is about 100x larger than anything the sphere has done.
Same answer as above. And basically, it’s spite.
OK, so we’re supposed to rely on logic where Susan relies on rhetoric. Got it.
Where’s the data?
To be blunt, statements like “these made up charts are obviously true to anyone who’s been in the SM” gets translated in my brain to “I’m making an unsupported assertion.” (Caveat: I haven’t been active in the SM for quite some time – I have no idea, so nothing is intuitively obvious to me here. Again – where’s the data?)
Badger #18, again, good points about how an SMV plot is about “price” and is not a rate that could be integrated to give a meaningful quantity or area under the curve.
roe #20, look at this post http://therationalmale.com/2013/10/25/smv-is-it-real/ that cites another post http://iconicmen.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/smv-is-it-real/ that presents this chart of sexual frequency for singles:
http://iconicmen.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/smv4.jpg
roe, the plot above is not SMV per se but can be an informative proxy since an actual graph of SMV would be very hard to experimentally create.
ADBG. Agree. The chart is getting dragged around hard. I find it to be useful and accurate ‘enough’ to extract whatever bit of useful awareness I need. More importantly, I find many parallels with reality – my own experience ‘out there’. The rest is interesting to debate and discuss, but doesn’t really do a whole lot.
When stripped down, it seems that it is just the same old denial, dismissal, and obfuscation of the little truths that women on the wrong end of the peak (or whatever metric is in question) want to make into facts. Whatever. Same game when women try to deny preference for tall men, dominance, confidence, and big ding dongs. It only matters if you don’t have those things.
In any case, here is a kind of SMV proxy situation from real life. I got an invite (free ticket – a $35 ‘value’) to go to one of those speed dating things through a social club. I’ve never done it before. There are age groupings. Women 25-35 and 33-47 and men 27-37 and 35-49. The only possibility for overlap is if you are a 33-35 y/o woman or a 35-37 y/o man – in which you would choose which group at registration. You can guess how those groups are paired up for the ‘dating’.
They still don’t have enough women for the 25-33y/o group. Both the men’s groups are full-up. I know the organizer and asked her about the process re: ages. There are NO men age 35-37 signed up in the 35-49 group; they are all in the 27-37 group. There are roughly equal women in both groupings who are in the 33-35 y/o range, but only after free tix were offered. There were no paying women under 35 in the 33-47 group before free tix were offered to flesh out the groupings. There are still vacancies in the 25-33 women’s group even after the free tix.
When I asked if I could be in the 27-37 group even though I am 40, I was declined – not so politely. Apparently, it is a common question as her answer was curt and rather canned. The she (the organizer) asked me why. Of course I answered with a question. I asked her if she really didn’t know why I would want that. Then she got a bit pissy and suggested that maybe this kind of event was not for me. I agreed.
I don’t need to speedily meet 33-47 y/o women. I certainly would not pay to do that. The structure of these things goes against the grain. The overlap of +2 years for the mens group may track with a lot of marriage stats on age differences, but I would think that those close in age probably married young. The 30-and-up ranges present all kinds of SMV issues when forced into what seems like a natural age paring but in fact goes headlong into the SMV divergence issue.
If I get 8 ‘dates’ in this session, and the range is 33-47, (and I’m 40) the chances are there will only be a few women at or below my age. If I need ‘help’ finding women at, near, or older than me, chances are I’m not attractive enough as a man in general. So most of those women, in any age group are not going to be too stoked on me either. While I wouldn’t count out women in the 33-35 range IRL, if given the choice, I’m going to the younger grouping because I have 0 interest in women my own age or older.
SMV or whatever. There are not very women under 33 who need to pay – or even invest the time to meet/date 8 men – of any age. There are a lot of women over 35, even more over 40, who will pay. There are plenty of younger men who will pay and plenty of older men who will pay – and plenty of men who don’t need any of this stuff.
Lets do a little detective work here. On August 1st Susan officially kills commenting on her site. This was her disingenuous reasoning for it at the time (emphasis mine):
Very few of her manosphere commenters (who were already being censored) were surprised by this, but as predicted HUS would reopen heavily censored comments on August 14th, one week after her 15 minutes of fame as a HuffPo video panelist chiming in about the merits of one night stands and how they can pan out into 28+ year marriages like her own.
The commenting halt and the rebrand were carefully timed around this 2 week period. After her ego-love-fest with the HuffPo it was clear that her advertising HUS was in full swing. Where before she had no real twitter presence now her job was to c&p articles – mainly HuffPo articles – and retweet them. She launched a Facebook page dedicated to HUS to support her ‘legitimacy’ as some kind of gender pundit with the HuffPo. My guess is she’s been contracted by the HuffPo or is in some way an employee now.
The problem for her now is that there are so many other ‘gender pundits’ hawking the same tripe she is that her site traffic is failing. Combined with her echo chamber comment censorship, the copypastah schtick isn’t bearing the fruit she thought it would.
Click back through her posts from August forward, about the time she rebranded. Look at the number of comments for each of them. Very few crack 100. The ones that do break the 200+ mark are all instances of her poking the manosphere bear and then retreating back to her comment-censored treehouse. She’s not used to sub-100 comments on her posts and she built HUS’s readership on an indignation that requires confrontation with red pill / manosphere comments mixing the shit pot.
Hell, just look at the comments from when she tried to call me out on the SMV graph and this new post – she knows where the bread is buttered and she’s not getting the eyes on the screen she used to have schlepping reheated AskMen and BlogHer info.
She’s enjoying a bump in traffic as no doubt evidenced by her 3 posts regarding my SMV graph. I wrote Navigating the SMP on June 4th, 2012, my graph isn’t a shock to to her, it’s been there for over a year. She knows damn well that ‘Dr. Kelly’s’ statistical analysis was horseshit, but she also knows her brand.
She knows that the women (and feminized men) who are her target demo want to be told that they’ll be sexually viable past their 50’s, which I’ve also covered here:
http://therationalmale.com/2012/06/12/smv-in-girl-world/
She’s not interested in the betterment of anyone’s lives or dating prospects, she’s only interested in sustaining the HUS brand. If she gets 100 posts from the same 7 commenters who pat her on the back on every post she’s happy.
OK, so we’re supposed to rely on logic where Susan relies on rhetoric. Got it.
Where’s the data?
Roe,,
You are conflating my post with comments by others. My intent here was not to produce an exposition on female SMV….I say that clearly here
In this post I simply want to address Kelly’s argument (and follow ups to her argument), and not the issue of female SMV in great detail.
This is key though, and again this is sort of a logic 101 type thing, the presence or absence of anyone else’s argument has zero bearing on the validity of Susan’s analysis and arguments. Those can be evaluated on a stand alone basis which was my primary intent here.
FYI, I’ve got a day job and support myself. I don’t live off someone else’s income and have all day to devote to this stuff. I’ve suggested some avenues for analysis here. I believe Han has some stuff coming up.
I cannot OVEREMPHASIZE Keyne’s quote too much. People who actually do robust data analysis for a living such as people building financial and trading models understand the limitations of cranking out Excel spreadsheets, and building quant models. Getting concepts roughly right is important. And sometimes to do that, all you have to do is observe the world, take your blinders off, and pay attention.
Good points by Badger, Rollo, and Han about this being a hypothetical time-series. What you would have would be an underlying predictive model that assumed female SMV was largely composed of one variable—physical fertility cue abundance—and then saw how a scoring of that variable reacted to time as plotted on the horizontal axis.
Male SMV would be, in this approach, composed of several variables, of which manifest physical prowess was one, but others included resource control and social status acquisition and so on. Once again, we’d see how male SMV reacted to the passage of time.
In equities market terms, one perspective would be that Company 1 was using debt to finance current-quarter share buybacks while Company B was investing in positive-NPV projects that would begin to generate free cash flows years into the future.
Insofar as men find it easier to raise SMV using growing wealth and status than women find it to appear increasingly fertile over time, we’d expect to see a cross-over point and then an advantage going to men. I think most agree that this is accurate, but this probably should be considered a “prepared” male experience and not a typical/trivial one that men can expect to passively receive; men who did not grow significantly in wealth and status over time would be kind of fucked both in terms of fading looks and fading bucks, and could find themselves unable to compete on any dimension. Female educational and professional attainment means that the bar is getting raised higher and higher, and I would argue that it is likely that this will cause more men to become “invisible” in the SMP, and others to be in even higher demand. The late-blooming winner meme is based on underlying assumptions about men having more tools with which to potentially construct an attractive SMP presentation.
I suppose that another possible point of interest would be to consider using the variable “apparent age” instead of “actual age”, as I think this would properly reward women who were able to maintain a relatively youthful appearance over time, and many women do work very hard to do just that. The idea of a hard-limit “wall” or cliff may be a Manosphere sensation designed to create an ominous, creeping-doom effect in a young woman’s mind; I can see the appeal in promoting that, but a woman who criticized this as theatrical and politically attractive for men would definitely have a point.
There are NO men age 35-37 signed up in the 35-49 group; they are all in the 27-37 group. There are roughly equal women in both groupings who are in the 33-35 y/o range, but only after free tix were offered. There were no paying women under 35 in the 33-47 group before free tix were offered to flesh out the groupings. There are still vacancies in the 25-33 women’s group even after the free tix.
Tasmin,
For guys open to short-term, there is one hell of an arbitrage opportunity there.
SMV or whatever. There are not very women under 33 who need to pay – or even invest the time to meet/date 8 men – of any age. There are a lot of women over 35, even more over 40, who will pay. There are plenty of younger men who will pay and plenty of older men who will pay – and plenty of men who don’t need any of this stuff.
The proof is in the pudding so to speak. There are all sorts of interesting social experiments that could be devised/run but I suspect they are far too politically incorrect to get funding or greenlighted. The super hot 22-25 year old woman has sexual power/value off the charts. I believe many businesses understand this, and utilize extremely attractive women in certain types of sales positions.
FWIW, I think Susan’s point about women not facing a sudden, violent Jack-in-the-Box moment at age 30 or thereabouts is correct and she was right to point this out. Perhaps we should consider this aspect of the proposed time-series in a more nuanced way.
I’m trying to be fair here rather than HUS-sympathetic; Susan appears to think less of me than she does virtually anyone else.
@Han Solo – Thank you – Interestingly, those charts seem to support Susan’s advice that the optimal age for women to marry is 25.
Also interestingly, Susan cites an OKCupid “desirability” (the amount of interest they pull as a dating prospect – presumably including both looking for short- and long-term encounters) chart, whereas the Kinsey chart is based on the hard (heh) data point of vaginal sex in past n weeks.
So, considering Susan’s target audience, and the Manosphere’s target audience, it appears both sides are recruiting data which is a tighter “fit” to their actual dating goals (to strongly generalize).
If you want to optimize “the area under your curve” (heh) of PiV encounters, the solution seems to be marriage!
How validating…
Its actually true women cant accept that men think differently than them. A man’s idea of sexual market value is based on an absolute scale, physical beauty. A woman’s is based on a relative scale, competition. This is why they think the area under the curves should be the same. They think the graph should be desirability/availability as a function of time, and even then it doesn’t make sense unless you assume it to be 1 over a lifetime for both men and women. But anyway, hence the shit test to make you think their unattainable, while really all men care about is the size of your boobs. Of course one could “disprove” this by showing statements from beta’s. But blue pill men are so self deceived that they’ll say anything, if their subconscious thinks it will add a 1 % chance of them getting laid.
@ roe
The way I interpreted the same data that the Kinsey post uses, I actually saw a relatively close matchup with the OKCupid data, and my data clearly validated the graph that Susan is criticizing. It also shows a clear cliff for women in their 30s.
http://www.justfourguys.com/quantifying-sexual-market-value/
Bastiat, I entirely agree that a woman’s looks don’t get cut in half from age 23 to 30. I would guess that a 7 at 23 would age down to about a 6.5 by 30, if she doesn’t get fat. The typical kind of putting on 15 lbs could drop her another 1/2 point to a 6. And some will fall more or less than this, some sooner, some later. I think the sphere should be more accurate in portraying how a woman’s looks actually change. But I think that here at JFG we are honest and fair about that. I also will point out that Rollo was talking about sexual value and not looks per se. I think he would agree that a woman’s looks don’t typically get cut in half from 23 to 30 (though he can speak for himself) but if we think it terms of pure value in having sex with a woman, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine that sex with a 7 in looks might be 2x as valuable as when she has declined to be a 6.
That is how I make sense of the big decline in the Rollo graph.
And no need to point out that you’re trying to be fair and not HUS-sympathetic. You have shown your fairness and reasonableness time and time again. And here, we’re interested in the ideas more than whose side one appears to be on. Your voice is very much welcomed here and you can always feel free to point out cases where Susan or anyone else has a point or where we might be wrong.
@Morpheus – Your analysis of “PhD Kelly’s” comments were fine – considering we’re discussing charts which are admittedly completely made-up based on personal observation – but you went on to make some (to my reading) pretty strong assertions as to how SMV actually works in the second half of the post, mostly. I’d like to know on what basis those assertions were made. My point being, the claim to be using “logic” is a very strong one, which demands a much a more stringent reading then would be usual for a manosphere post.
roe, the fact that there is sparing between Susan and some of us doesn’t negate the fact that some of her advice is good and certainly much better than what radfems are teaching. So, her advice to marry in one’s mid 20’s is much better than the common thought of only after 30 or 35 that more career-promoting feminists proclaim.
I also will have more to say about the OkCupid graph so check back on Monday.
As to sex frequency, being married does increase the frequency, and being partnered does over being single…at least for probably 90% of men. I believe I saw another study, though, where cohabiting people had more frequent sex than married. Part of this could be due to the novelty of more recently being together and another part is that cohabs last much shorter than marriage, on average, so marriages allow for more time to pass and the people to lose some of their mojo.
WRT HUS:
Couple of things got my attention: She spent a long time talking about alphas, dominance, attraction cues associated with high-T, etc. Then we have a column on the fabulous attractiveness of the creative guy, casually hypo-ing small, skinny, poorly dressed. And she said the conventional guys–probably the old commenting bunch– were going to get their tighty-whities in a bunch. Creative guys can have all the rest of it, but she chose to go the other way, deliberately cutting out all the proper things guys were supposed to be/do.
At one point, dominance among and status awarded by other guys was Good, and at another point, it was irrelevant.
That said, all this number stuff makes my head hurt. In order for this to be useful, a person has to do the actuarial thing in his life and encounter the Large Number situation. Certainly, you can increase the number of encounters, but the eventual number will be far less important than the actual details of one or another encounter. For example, happened to be in a Sturgeon Bay restaurant some years ago. My wife asked for low-cal dressing. The waitress said, “Honey, I haven’t seen that in fifteen years since I came up her from Chicago.” If you like thin women,you’d do better further south. But not ‘way further south.
I’ve been told, had one or two experiences validating but not large enough numbers, that the place to see the most and the highest proportion of really good looking young women in an event not designed to collect good looking young women is at a large church in a high-income area of the south in the spring. Not at all the same in a low-income area.
So, if you were choosing churches based on non-doctrinal issues, you’d go to the first. But the number, even of the large number, of women on the market would be maybe a dozen, tops. The rest would be ineligible for a number of reasons including having a BF already.
Good idea to improve your odds, but none of us live long enough to take advantage of large numbers.
Still, the discussion is interesting for itself.
@Morpheus – Your analysis of “PhD Kelly’s” comments were fine – considering we’re discussing charts which are admittedly completely made-up based on personal observation
Roe, keep in mind, and this should really be obvious only heterosexual men can “rate” women in terms of SMV TO MEN. Lesbian women may actually have a different “rating system” which is why in real life most lesbians are actually physically repulsive unlike the “lipstick lesbians” that show up in porn marketed to men. Obviously, one or two or five, or 10 men are not enough of a “market” to form an accurate rating but many thousands of men is a different picture. The issue is you are not going to be able to measure a woman’s SMV like you would measure specific gravity. On some level, there is some element of personal subjectivity since beauty has both universal components and idiosyncratic components. Some men like brunettes, some like blondes, but almost ZERO are going to like a crewcut on a woman. Some like long and slender, some like a bit more thick and curvy, but almost ZERO are going to like morbidly obese.
I think one fact here and I think this comes down to the sexes not grokking each other’s perspectives and preferences, but I suspect very few women really understand or want to understand just how critically important physical looks are to sexual value for a man, because it doesn’t have the same magnitude for them. I suppose for some women this can be a terrifying prospect, but it also offer the opportunity for tremendous improvement.
My SO and I go to the gym every Saturday around the same time. For month, after month, after month, I see the same girl on the cardio machines. She is there when we get there, she is still there when we leave. The transformation really has been remarkable. I’ve considered approaching her, and just acknowledging her with some encouragement but it is tricky how she might take that. Next step for her is a new hairstyle, and learn to properly apply makeup and a girl who was a 3-4 12 months ago could be a 7-8. Yeah, that’s my personal observation as a guy.
– but you went on to make some (to my reading) pretty strong assertions as to how SMV actually works in the second half of the post, mostly. I’d like to know on what basis those assertions were made.
This is a general statement. Pull out the specific sentences/points you have issue with, what you think the flaw is, and I would be happy to try and respond.
@ Morpheus
I remember back at HUS when Susan did her usual appeal to authority and demanded to know what qualifications I had to judge the physical attractiveness of females. Apparently the fact that I’m a cold-blooded heterosexual male isn’t enough to qualify me for judging female attractiveness.
“You might think you find aging women physically unattractive, but they’re actually physically attractive. Trust me.”
@Han Solo – I believe I saw another study, though, where cohabiting people had more frequent sex than married.
My guess would be marriage is more often associated with having kids, and having kids is many couples’ gateway to a sexless relationship (ironically).
@Morpheus
Not just physically. Many seem to don the worst aspects of masculinity without considering the best.
@Morpheus
Not just physically. Many seem to don the worst aspects of masculinity without considering the best.
Yes, this is absolutely true. For example, men on average do tend to be more aggressively assertive, and challenging, more inclined to fight. That said, in my experience, and I have some direct work experience in this area, most men seem to have some innate sense of when it is time to “back down” either from physical escalation or continued verbal arguments. Aggressive and assertive women seem to lack this same sense of restraint or knowing when to back off.
Some male traits like say assertiveness or aggressiveness are actually horrible things when they are unaccompanied by male virtues like loyalty, duty, principles, honor, restraint. Some women have the former to a high degree but utterly lack the latter.
When you watch a MMA fight, most guys are attempting to beat the shit out of each other. But when it is over, most shake hands or hug and acknowledge each other. It isn’t personal, it is business. Female aggressiveness has a sort of mindless viciousness and lashing out.
@Morpheus – Sure – I’ll quote you twice:
The makeup of male SMV is much more complex as it includes NOT just physical looks (which do peak around the late 20s, early 30s) but intangible things like “confidence”, charisma, social and career status. The same woman stubbornly insisting that male SMV peaks at 26 or 28 based only on physical looks is the same woman who has the used the term “sexy ugly” many times.
I suspect very few women really understand or want to understand just how critically important physical looks are to sexual value for a man
There’s nothing in any of the data to suggest a “complex male SMV” and I’m unaware of any scientific literature which shows this conclusively. The relationship between age and male SMV could be as simple as older men were generally perceived by female as “more genetically fit” in the evolutionary environment. Again this is something the manosphere takes as “intuitively true” (and I’m actually inclined to agree) but it hasn’t been subjected to rigorous standards of proof anywhere that I know.
It appears neither men nor women believe physical looks are the totality of each other’s SMV. But SMV is a subjective matter – so why should we take men’s belief about how women assess SMV seriously, but not women’s belief about how men assess SMV?
If both genders have motivation to lie to themselves about the opposite gender’s SMV assessments, why are men the final arbiters of female SMV but female assessment of male SMV to be viewed skeptically?
Off topic comment: Guys, just passing by to leave some theme suggestions as highlighted in these two comments on the Rational Male blog: click here and here to view the comments/discussion. Thanks.
@Badger
Bingo.
Through this whole saga I’ve said I completely understand if Susan wants to take her blog in another direction. Sometimes a business decision is just a business decision.
But her and her commenters’ continued obsession with the sphere shows she has little interest in anything but picking fights.
“The super hot 22-25 year old woman has sexual power/value off the charts. I believe many businesses understand this, and utilize extremely attractive women in certain types of sales positions.”
Morpheus: My sister has a friend who was super-hot back in the day. There were three girls in the family and the dad had either died of split, can’t recall. So they used to talk to my father about stuff.
The oldest, my sister’s friend, was being recruited by a pharmaceutical company. My dad told her any position but sales. ’cause when you’re selling Hot, sometimes you’re pressured to “produce”.
And the various times I’ve been in doc’s offices and seen sales types come in–except for insurance for some reason–they’re frequently pretty young women.
Kelly’s wrong, but not for the reason you think she is. She’s reading the graph wrong. She’s assuming that the graph is SMV distribution across the male population instead of the rise and fall of a particular individual’s value over time. She’s also assuming, falsely, that the units represent a matching value, ie that there is a females 7 for every male 7, and so on. Under those assumptions, yes, the area under the curves should be the same, because the sum of each person times their value is equal for both genders.
But really, who cares? The units are arbitrary and the people in question are idealized. A 34 year old male who’s unemployed and out of shape probably isn’t in the prime of their life. Rollo’s just trying to make an observation about how men and women age differently.
A final point, if you make significant contributions in the field sometimes you get a unit of measurement named after you (volts, teslas, etc). I propose we call these arbitrary 1-10 numbers Rollos.
IP,
I’ll second what Yohami said. You can draw curves in the micro-market that come from the macro-market. Understanding the underlying structures helps to define your target market anyways and helps to develop strategies that might be useful.
Fundamental Blue Pill Guy wants to differentiate himself and picks up basket-weaving. Still fundamentally Blue Pill. Therefore does not initiate and never escalates.
Fundamental Red Pill Han Solo picks up basket-weaving. Gets put into contact with a lot of girls, knows how to escalate.
It’s okay to do the basket-weaving if you have the support structure behind it to capitalize on your opportunities.
What we have now is a Red-Pill Han Solo basket-weaving and Red-Pill Yohami siging and Red-Pill Vox MMA’ing. Then we try to point out some similarities that they have in common, and Blue Pill feminists just whine and scream that they are NOTHING alike, while thinking that this wide differentation in interests means “there is someone for everyone” and Blue Pill Beats don’t really have to do anything to improve their lives, they just need to market segment some more.
Clearly they just haven’t market segmented enough.
However, Blue Pill guy cannot effectively capitalize on ANY strategy. He’s always playing at a handicap because he’s Blue Pill.
My thought is that most of the Red Pill guys focus a lot on calibration, defining target markets, adjusting strategies, etc. I’ve seen a number of posts about them myself.
However, that does not mean SMV does not exist. It means it’s a small part of the bigger puzzle.
Another example? People who argue against economics because they don’t like basic supply and demand. They get their panties in a bunch about that without realizing everything the field has around it. It’s like they think economists just draw supply and demand graphs all day long….
SMV=small part of a wider concept. It is used to illustrate some concepts. It is not meant to explain every single situation in life.
Rollins are sweets/candy over here. Does that count?
Decking spell check (sic)
Rollos are sweets, rather nice ones too
I saw a woman with a shopping bag today and had a thought…if women keep going up in value into their 30’s, why is the store called “Forever 21″? Why not “Forever 30″? As Obsidian says, to ask the question is to answer it.
Scratch that, forever 45.
@ roe
It has been demonstrated my several evolutionary psychology studies. See David Buss’ papers for example:
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/29156/0000200.pdf?sequence=1
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/busslab/pdffiles/SexDifferencesinHuman.PDF
I think there is consensus, at least among men, that physical looks determine the majority of female SMV.
Because simple observation shows that you can evaluate a girl’s physical attractiveness by asking men how hot the girl is, and that this attractiveness is directly very well correlated to how many guys are trying to get the girl.
Simple observation shows that the men with the most girls after them have certain traits, such as being well-established in their career.
With regard to ADBG and IP…as I get older I have come to realize that there’s a certain pluralism of truth in the world…you can have multiple memes or assertions that are all simultaneously true. For example in this case, it can be true that there are general factors that underlie the SMP of almost any man, while at the same, a man can dramatically change his results by choosing the right social circle and niche. The question is not who’s right, the question is what is the best course of action for an individual man – should he work on getting fitter, better-dressed and higher status in general, or should he devote more time and attention to cultivating the right kind of lifestyle that makes his particular value points stand out? In a lot of cases, a guy can do a bit of both so it’s not a big deal, but you need to be aware of both.
I had a post about this sort of thing called “reciprocal scarcity,” and philosophers and mathematicians have a term for a situation that LOOKS like a contradiction but actually isn’t: a paradox.
It’s important to note that rhetoricians (politicians, marketeers, public relations types, and some bloggers) often specialize in trying to minimize or discredit one side of the plurality, denying that the alternate view is valid or deserves examination. It’s especially common to see this behavior when a paradigm makes someone uncomfortable or challenges their self-concept and requires them to resolve cognitive dissonance.
Now, there are times when it is good to focus on just one perspective, but not to the degree that the other is being completely denied or dismissed as unworthy. Likewise, it’s good to acknowledge both perspectives but not to the point that you are trying to cast them as equal when one may be more impactful than the other.
For example: whenever divorce is discussed on the Internet and it is brought out that women file two-thirds of divorces, somebody (usually a gal) always objects and puts forth a “men do it too!” kind of argument, like “my aunt Carol married this guy and he wound up leaving her so what you’re saying is wrong!!” or “men leave their wives too so it doesn’t matter who is doing the filing” (this response tries to dismiss men’s well-founded risk concerns about marrying in today’s climate).
Another example would be the oft-discussed dichotomy that for MOST men, getting female attention and sex is very difficult. For a small subset of men (and it is notable that who is in this subset changes as men age and women prize different things) getting dates and sex is almost trivially easy. So you have that commenter from a few posts ago who said after much discussion “well I still don’t believe you that men have a difficult time getting sex these days.” The existence of some guy she knew who got laid like tile, or her belief that such a man existed (from her friends’ stories, or shit she saw on TV or whatever) was enough to override any appreciation that “men” is really two groups of men with very different problems.
“SMV=small part of a wider concept. It is used to illustrate some concepts. It is not meant to explain every single situation in life.”
It is very funny how whenever Manosphere concepts are discussed in the wider media, there are always a bunch of comments to the effect of “ranking someone’s self-worth by their sexual attractiveness is so disgusting and wr0ng!1!”
It’s like they are incapable of compartmentalizing their thinking at all, and understanding that looking at a particular slice of people’s traits is useful for appreciating their lives without it being the whole story. We just happen to talk a lot about it because we recognize the ways in which it helps or hurts someone’s day to day life.
Meanwhile these same news sources think nothing of painting other people into faceless boxes like “the rich” or “the poor.”
However, I think there is an aspect of projection there – many politically liberal groups (people reading these MSM articles) are obsessed with seeing people as entries in demographic bins and even seeing themselves that way, people who are super-invested in their status as a “woman” or a “feminist” or an “educated person.” So it’s easy for them to think we are saying that people should consider their worth flowing from their SMV.
@ Morpheus — “Female aggressiveness has a sort of mindless viciousness and lashing out.”
I know your point was not to “make this point” by itself – but earlier in your comment you said that within the context of Men and MMA – they are vicious during the fight, but shake hands afterward – it’s only business.
I would say in addition to your comment above – that for women, it’s always personal, and if it’s not, they will take it there. It is a nuclear shit test – regardless of the situation – it’s at test to see who is really dominant. Being a Man of a Certain Age – we were told to be nice to girls, don’t fight with them (either physically or verbally), treat them with respect – you are bigger and stronger than they are. Well the programming stuck – and during my marriage, since my wife was the oldest and had to take care of brothers, and I was the youngest, with three older sisters – she had all the training she needed to run right over me. And all I was doing was staying true to my programming.
//end hihack
[…] http://www.justfourguys.com/fun-with-numbers-graphs-and-phds/ […]
Wanted to note also that the Monty Hall problem has not just been validated by simulations, but by basic probability trees. IOW it can be proven with theory and doesn’t need As much as people holler and squirm, it’s a pretty simple problem. Wikipedia has some good discussion on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
One way of shorthanding it is to consider that you have a 1/3 chance of picking the door with the car, in which case switching to the other door will lose, and 2/3 chance of picking a door with a goat, in which case switching to the other door will win. So your rational move is to switch, because it’s twice as likely that you switch to the winning door, since you are twice as likely to have chosen a losing door to begin with.
Slick.
Pardon the vulgarity but in essence their is a difference between a dump fuck and commitment.
All else being equal the graph probably is incorrect concerning one night lay value but is absolutely correct concerning commitment value.
My guess is that women are conflating the one night lay value with commitment value. Look at Katie Bullock, I’m sure for most guys she has high one night lay value but her commitment value (she’s basically barren and over the hill) is quite low.
Wanted to note also that the Monty Hall problem has not just been validated by simulations, but by basic probability trees. IOW it can be proven with theory
Badger, you are absolutely correct. I am reaching deep into the memory banks, but I think this is exactly how the quant professor showed it in theory using probability trees
Here is a fun video on it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_djTy3G0pg
To me the important takeaway of this exercise is just how counterintuitive it is to switch. It “feels right” that it is 50/50 and switching should NOT increase your odds, but the math is what the math is.
Going back to the point of the post, I think for Susan and perhaps others it “feels right” and the “intuition” is the areas under the curve should be the same, but the simple fact is there is no mathematical reason it has to be true.
There is an easier explanation for the SMV graph. Even if every 30-40 year old woman was an 8 or 9 and looks hadn’t diminished for them youthfulness would have.
So 30-40 yead old males would still go for the younger one as it’s always been. It’s the curse of getting old for women. Why do you think it’s women who turn to comestic cirurgy? Cause they know looks and youth matter.
“It is very funny how whenever Manosphere concepts are discussed in the wider media, there are always a bunch of comments to the effect of “ranking someone’s self-worth by their sexual attractiveness is so disgusting and wr0ng!1!””
Women are absolutely comfortable doing exactly that, as long as men, not women, are discussed. So this complaint can safely be dismissed as female BS.
I think this idea that one’s SMV changes just due to age is nonsense. People seem to believe that a woman who’s a 6 at 16 magically becomes something like a 8 when she’s 21 and then becomes a 6 again at 29 and then a 4 at 42 or something. It doesn’t work that way. A 8 is a 8 throughout her life, unless she gets disfigured in an accident or develops an eating disorder.
[…] “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Mark Twain (note that attribution is in question) Back in 1990 (I was still a teenager), a reader wrote into Parade magazine to Marilyn vos Savant (whose claim to fame was the… […]
In a later write-up here:
http://www.hookingupsmart.com
She says,
”Women need to understand that the male curve lags the female curve by about five years, is flatter and a little wider. That means you’ll have more competition from younger women as you age. You will never be hotter than you are at 22, so plan accordingly.”
That seems to be gist of everyone’s argument, so I’m not sure you all aren’t arguing over essentially identical things. She seems to be goading you the rest of the time over specifics. I think she wants to increase her readership, and honestly I found your site first and would have never seen hers without it (though if she is increasing your readership too, this is a good thing…assuming it works both ways).
From my perspective the Okay Cupid chart seems a bit closer to practical reality. I know I wouldn’t want to compete with my 22-year-old self, but it would hardly be a total wipeout (though perhaps if we were both mutes). I know this thread isn’t intended to discuss SMV, but it’s a bit difficult when…that’s what the chart is about.
Badger,
No problem with the pluralistic truth. You’re absoutely right. And I don’t think that IP is really wrong about anything he says here. Most people are in the “mushy middle” as we might say, with relatively small differentiations. We have to pull back to extremes sometimes to get at some of the underlying concepts, but we need to revert back to the mushy middle before issuing a bunch of recommendations.
In that sense, IP is right, and if he has more experience with helping guys improve, he might be better at that than most anyone here.
The only disagreement most of us seem to have with him, and I’ll be honest I usually stop reading when IP and Obs start dominating the thread, is that he underestimates how tough it is for Beta Guys and how girls more or less have the world handed to them. Not that girls don’t have problems, of course, they do, but they have a substantially easier time than guys do.
That’s more nuance than anything, IMO. YMMV.
First run-in with pluralistic truth was Oligopolistic Competition when I was 20. The teacher was going long and hard about this model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cournot_competition
Now keep in mind that college is intellectually a workout for me, so while he was describing this model, I jumped back through my notes, and found another model that COMPLETLEY contradicted this model.
WTF? They can’t both be wrong!
I got an argument with myself for about 5 minutes, before I realized:
they were both right.
They were just describing different market conditions.
It took another a year before I realized that they, along with models, were wrong. But they tell us something useful.
You can actually see the WIki entry on it under Bertrand vs. Courtnot
Similarly, if you go to Vox’s blog, you will see him mentioning the IS-LM model. Which is absolutely a great comparison to make. In particular, the IS curve is a series of equilibriums in the saving market, which never occurs, because there is always, always, always inventory investment, which is often undesired.
Note that this also relates to GDP measurements, and inventory accounting for a GDP is a GREAT signal to see who makes a good logical thinker and who doesn’t in econ classes. If, when discussing GDP, someone figures out that something fuzzy is going on with inventory, you got someone who can think and won’t just accept what’s getting shoved down his throat.
Re: compartmentalized thinking, agree 110%. Just because someone is more attractive does NOT mean that person is more valuable. Who the fuck would be that dumb? Half of red-pill social critiques is that this evaluation along a single metric creates negative incentives that destroys character and investment on the part of Beta Guys.
What it comes down to is not wanting to be called ugly.
Bunch of ninnies if you ask me.
ADBG: “Just because someone is more attractive does NOT mean that person is more valuable. Who the fuck would be that dumb?”
PZ Meyers for one.
But it’s not stupidity, it’s a straw-man attack. You’ll also note that guys like PZ won’t attack Walsh or OKcupid for saying the exact same thing. Instead, he will attack you guys for “going off the reservation” because you are expressing forbidden thoughts.
The thoughts themselves are not forbidden, since women may make the same observations, you are forbidden to think them.
When talking about sex, never attribute to incompetence what can adequately explained by malice.
@Sir Nemesis: Thank you. The Buss papers you referred to collected data from samples of people getting married – which would be an indicator of MMV, not SMV. The papers show a strong female preference for resource acquisition cues – which is a pretty one-dimensional value assessment, not a complex one, yes?
I’m skeptical of anything stated “by observation.”
To tether this exercise back to the point, I’m supposed to believe Susan Walsh starts with an a priori conclusion that “feel right” and argues towards that confusion, whereas the fine folks here are arguing from unassailable logic. What I see, is both sides drawing from personal experience & intuition, bolstered with a bit of data collection, to support a position on the SMV which is contoured to the goals and preferences of their target audience. Nothing wrong with that, but let’s be honest about it, and let’s not pretend the approach here and elsewhere in the ‘sphere is inherently superior to what Susan’s offering (despite the obvious animosity on both sides).
roe, you seem to want to imbue “science” with a power it doesn’t have and can’t possibly have. Enumerative science is not the best way to understand and describe human behavior. It’s been failing on its own terms for at least a century and yet we as a culture keep trying to squeeze water from that stone because of our root assumption that only the methodology of modern natural science can produce knowledge, everything else is opinion or worse, a “value.”
I’ve tried to explain this elsewhere with not much luck (Hi, MegaMan!). This is a very good explanation, much better than mine:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/science-and-non-science-in-liberal-education
roe,
“Susan Walsh starts with an a priori conclusion that “feel right” and argues towards that confusion, whereas the fine folks here are arguing from unassailable logic.”
You got it.
“One logical possibility is that the peak value of a typical female is orders of magnitude higher than the peak value of the male”
This here strikes me as the key.
I think to some extent in these discussions “reproductive value” gets mixed up with SMV. Now, surely RV is a contributor to SMV and a proxy for it, there is a ton of overlap, but at the end of the day the two are not identical.
Clearly, the RV of the average woman (within her fertility window, however long that is, but say, 15-45) is higher than that of any male. Only at the extremes would this not be true, e.g., The Most Interesting Man in the World (“stay thirsty, my friends”) v. a particularly overweight, unattractive, unintelligent woman prone to certain diseases. And even then, purely from a numbers perspective, if you’re trying to repopulate a colony, you can get by with one of him, but you’d still be better off with two the unattractive females than with two of him.
(Though you still have to wonder how valuable these thought experiments really are because in the real world, you need genetic variety for a healthy and stable population. So men’s RV tends to rise somewhat. The “sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive” formula is a truism, and like all truisms, it captures something important, but otherwise leaves a lot out.)
Then the question is, does this higher overall RV for women translate to a higher overall SMV for females over males? I think you can argue this either way, but I am inclined to the view that it does. Over the course of a lifetime, men seem to expend more effort chasing women than the reverse. That dynamic may eventually change and even reverse past a certain age (for both) as the chart would predict, but if there were a way to measure energy expended over a lifetime, I expect on average that men expend more. We simply want women more than they want us. We’re also much more willing to “settle”, to take the one or two SMP point deduction in a mate as “good enough” and still be satisfied, than they are. They may take the deduction out of necessity but remaining satisfied is another matter.
On the other hand, when you look past the average or “class” to the peak or “standard,” the picture changes a bit, also in a way that illuminates the chart. That is to say, at the very highest level—the “super 10s” or transcendent 10s—who are more valuable, the women or the men? Cleopatra or Caesar?
I think it’s clear here that the man is. Not simply because of civilization, science, and all that. Though those are important. Achievement is a much larger component of men’s SMV than it is of women’s. But also, and more importantly, because any man who cannot land for himself the super-10 will just set his sights down to the 9.9999 and keep lowering them until he scores. Unless the best he can do is a 3, most men are going to be more or less happy with what they get. Men don’t pine for the 10 they can’t have in the same way that women do. Because beauty is the primary driver of a woman’s SMV in a man’s mind, he can more easily just move on to another beautiful woman (assuming she’ll have him). And eventually, unless he is a total omega, he’ll find one who meets his criteria.
Women OTOH are not nearly so happy making the same calculation. Caesar can always have a harem if he wants one. No woman can have a harem. She can bang a lot of guys—the super-10 will never want for sex. But men are not going to line up to be her polyamorous long-term lovers the way that women will for the top men.
So, in the end, it’s too simple to say that women have a simply higher aggregate SMV overall. On the “class” or average level, they do, but when you look to the “standard,” they don’t.
@Escoffier – Thanks – maybe science can answer these questions, maybe it can’t (nobody knows what science can or can’t *ultimately* do) – the point I’m arguing for is stating upfront which standards of proof have or haven’t been met.
Escoffier,
Yes, as a whole women have more SMV than men. But it’s a pyramid. At the top you have a few men, followed by most of women, followed by most of men, then the leftovers (mostly men).
The average girl has more SMV than the average man, why? because more men want to mate with the average girl than girls want to mate with the average man, because women filter through competition and want the best they can get, while men want variety and can easily bang anything within a few points below their own SMV.
The males are the ones pushing and buying sex, the females are the sellers and control that market.
But, the girls are on their own market, competing and buying for alpha seed. And the alphas control that market.
And yes. Success is what ultimately determines the value of a man. Success is how men rank themselves, and success is the craddle for a bunch of behaviors we see as manly, high value, etc, girl melters.
Girls are attracted to successful men, men are attracted to fertile women.
Most men are fertile, only a few guys are successful.
There you have the whole thing in one line.
*most [WOMEN] are fertile, while only a few men are successful.
roe, you’re overcomplicating it
What’s your own perception on the matter? the graph, etc.
Roe, I think your skepticism is warranted, but you may yet find some satisfaction in published results. One academic piece that you may find interesting is a much-cited 1990 paper by Townsend & Levy. IIRC, the authors split men into two categories based on pure physical attractiveness—“a plain” or “homely” category and a “handsome” category. The plain man was then shown wearing a tailored blazer, Rolex, etc. and was given a high-status label (“medical doctor” or “investment banker” or something). The handsome man was shown in a plain white shirt (label: “teacher”) and in a Burger King uniform (label: “trainee”).
Women were then asked to rate the attractiveness of each example. The attractiveness was considered from the standpoint of different levels of romantic involvement, ranging from casual sex to marriage. One might have expected that the well-dressed homely man would have dominated the serious dating/marriage end of the spectrum because of some kind of SMV-MMV gap that occurs as women get serious, but this was not what occurred: women were more willing to engage in *any* type of relationship with the higher-status, less-attractive man.
Now imagine that you took a hot female and placed her in a Burger King uniform vs. a plain woman in, say, a Valentino corporate powerwoman suit and asked men who they preferred. Yes, as you might have guessed, men overwhelmingly prefer the hot BK server to the homely corporate executive.
The experimental results have been independently confirmed many times since. That same year, Kenrick reported that females in his experiment would only consider steady dating and marriage with men who had an earning capacity placing them in the 60th (dating) and 70th (marriage) percentiles of other men. Thus we have a situation similar to Lake Wobegon, but in this case the women only want men who are above average.
Another battle took place between the SSSM popular with sociology-leaning feminists and evolutionary psychologists. The SSSM claim was that the majority of the effects in the “Burger King” study could be traced back to patriarchal power bases which caused women to prefer affluent males simply because men enjoyed control of resources. So the prediction was that women with high earning power would respond very differently, as they did not need men for economic support. Given resources, they would now, like the men, prefer the hot BK employee to the plain executive (“gender is just a social construct”). Evo psychologists predicted that the alpha-earning women would prefer even HIGHER levels of male income and status.
The evo psych prediction was affirmed—women with higher status/income developed ever-more demanding selection criteria and required that even more wealth/status/power be manifested by their male romantic prospects.
This does not mean that women ignore looks; they would ideally want the handsome man in the bespoke suit. A hot guy with his act together will dominate and there may not be a hell of a lot that other men can do about it. What I noticed when I ran a casual version of the same experiment in a recent class (and reported in another thread) was that the women found reasons that the well-dressed guy was more attractive (they were quite generous with their appraisals of his looks), and found reasons why the BK guy was less attractive (they were very detailed and knit-picky about his flaws).
My guess would be that a similar type of rationalization process would follow if we showed photos of a handsome man with the caption “cheated on his girlfriend with hookers and blow” in contrast with a photo of a homely man with the caption “gave a kidney to save his girlfriend’s life”; I believe that the first guy’s physical attractiveness would be subject to a harsh critical microscope and the second guy’s attractiveness would be viewed with the proverbial rose-colored glasses (I must stress once again that this is speculative on my part).
This probably won’t strike you as conclusive, but I personally believe that it is generally safe to assume that male calculations of female SMV are based primarily on physical attractiveness as classically defined by fertility cues, while female calculations of male SMV are more complex and multi-dimensional. This is a “victory” for men only in the sense that theoretically a man has more tools with which to build his SMV; however, this will often require very hard work, while very attractive women may not have to work very hard at all.
What do you think…?
To understand the hierarchy of SMV, a (somewhat) apt analogy is cattle breeding. The bull could arguably have more SMV than the cows and the cows more than the steers. Or in nature, the top male peacock has higher SMV than the peahens who have higher SMV than the lesser males.
#75: “My guess would be that a similar type of rationalization process would follow if we showed photos of a handsome man with the caption “cheated on his girlfriend with hookers and blow” in contrast with a photo of a homely man with the caption “gave a kidney to save his girlfriend’s life”; I believe that the first guy’s physical attractiveness would be subject to a harsh critical microscope and the second guy’s attractiveness would be viewed with the proverbial rose-colored glasses (I must stress once again that this is speculative on my part).”
Lol! Ouch…I think you have it exact.
@Yohami – It’s a little weird to be accused of overcomplicating it in responding to a post which applies fairly advanced statistical logic to a graph which was, from the start, completely made up.
Frost did a post on this on Thumotic and I basically agree with that post – that the graphs are a pedagogical tool which are just “rough sketches” of how things work like those used in economics.
Basically, when you claim your position is based on “logic”, you can either meet that standard, or you can’t. And from what I’ve seen, neither HUS nor the manosphere has met that standard. Which is fine, you can say lots of useful stuff without meeting that standard, but I take the word “logic” very seriously as you can probably tell.
@Bastiat Blogger – Thanks for that. To be clear, if male SMV is complex, it’s going to take a great deal of science to fully understand how it all works. This is pretty straight-forward – a more complex system requires us to bring to bear more evidence to understand how all the moving parts work.
My own research on the matter is mostly in Gangestad & Simpsons’ work on preference shifts across the ovulatory cycle, which is the most provocative I’ve seen as it basically supports alpha fux beta bux – but it’s based on very small statistical blips so it’s not super-strong evidence. Also, the researchers believe flucuational asymmetry in the male is the major overriding factor in female mate choice during the luteal phase.
Which I take to mean the relationship as to how social status and looks contribute to male SMV is not at all settled.
I think evo psych is a young field, still very controversial for many reasons (not just because it ruffles the feathers of the social justice set), but asking very useful questions – it’s certainly not plausible that evolution stopped at the neck.
Note that the manosphere’s view of male SMV is that it’s malleable – which is very convenient given the aims of the ‘sphere (noble as they may be in this respect). To be criticizing Susan for pandering to her audience’s preconceptions strikes me as very much living in a glass house. (Not attacking the truth of malleable SMV for either gender – just pointing out it’s a bias that needs awareness)
“Science” the way you mean it–enumerative science following the “scientific method” of Descartes and Kuhn–cannot answer these questions. It never has been able to. We today obsess over its (in)ability to do so because we believe that only “scientific” knowledge is truly knowledge. This is a recent, modern conception of knowledge. There are assumptions that underlie it which we not only no longer question, we have forgotten that they are even there.
Enumerative science has a bias in favor of counting and things that can be counted. That works great for a lot of fields, but for human behavior and emotions, not so much. If science worked in this sphere, it would be predictive, as it is for physical phenomena. But it’s predictive power for human behavior is abysmal.
@Escoffier – Since you don’t know what science will look like or be able to do in the future, you can’t say with certainty that anything is immune to scientific inquiry (Well, maybe certain quantum events). Science used to not be very predictive in areas which it is now. The direction of travel for science is making more and better predictions.
(Oh, and I never said, nor do I believe, that scientific knowledge is the only valid knowledge)
@ roe
That’s because in many societies, the marital marketplace is the sexual marketplace. In such societies, most instances of sexual intercourse occur within a marriage.
You can find similar papers by David Buss and others suggesting various other cues (such as looks, confidence, non-incestuous immune system, etc.), using a quick Google search.
That’s often good practice. Anecdotal observation is rather unreliable, though when something is readily verifiable by your own observations (e.g. if someone tells you the sky is blue, you can verify it by looking up at the sky – you don’t need to find a study confirming it).
That’s right.
No. We here at JFG do not contour our positions to the goals and preferences of our target audience. That’s the difference between us and Susan Walsh. We’ll state the truth as we see it, even if we may not like it (I for example, wish male SMV peaked a lot earlier than it actually is).
Certainly, experience & intuition plays a large role in our conclusions. If you look at Susan’s posts, however, it becomes clear that her conclusions are based not just on experience & intuition, but also (perhaps primarily on) her feelings and emotions.
@ Escoffier
Not in comparison to the humanities.
PV=nRT
You don’t need to understand the physics of gases at the atomic and molecular level to be able to use the Ideal Gas Laws to get results in the real world. The approximations work well enough on the statistical level to deliver results in the vast majority of non exotic conditions.
So while feminists may demand absolute proof, which is not realistically going to happen anyway, before being forced to abandon blank slate / men and women are basically the same ideologies…well, men should feel free to apply the sniff test to the various models and ask which offers the best insight into the world they live in. Bastiat’s comment describes what I see around me for what women seem to want, and what I want as a male. Hot men aren’t often seen around with smart fuglies, hot women can be found on the arm of rich old farts. While not proving red pill truths in toto it certainly holes men and women are the same below the waterline.
By all means keep an eye on developing theories and experiments, but to pretend that the competing theories have only equal insight in the meantime is playing into feminist lies to hurt men. Both sexes have their pretty lies, let’s see them both as they really are.
Take the red pill, the blue pill is designed to screw over men. Anyone telling you to hold off putting the red pill to your sniff test is not your friend, she’s your enemy.
@ Liz
I don’t think that it is affecting the amount of readership of either blog by a large margin (although we have seen a small bump in readership, especially considering it’s the weekend).
Susan Walsh is obsessed with attacking the “bad boys of game”, and “middle-aged men” (I’m 22 by the way) in the manosphere.
A little bit of history though: all the JFG authors used to comment at HUS (although some also commented at MMSL, and Obsidian had his own blog). We found the HUS comments section (not so much the blog psots) to be a good niche for us, because it was neither highly religious nor focused on pickup and racking up the partner counts (prior to JFG, most game blogs seemed to fall into one of these two categories). There was a lot of good intellectual discussion going on there, as well as good intersex dialogue. However, there were also a lot of driveby misogynist comments, and these driveby comments caused a lot of animosity. A lot of us male commentators made suggestions about improving the moderation policies to ban such misogynist comments. Instead however, over time Susan started becoming increasingly hostile to us regular male commentators, and started seeking arguments with us, and then started banning us individually.
We saw the writing on the wall and took our comments elsewhere. Thus, JFG was born.
At that point, we were happy to go about our business and wished HUS all the best. However, Susan apparently doesn’t want to let go of the crusade against us, and wrote these recent posts attacking some of the JFG authors in very personal fashion.
Being men, the guys here are not going to let insults to their honor go unanswered, and are setting the record straight instead.
Thank you for the background context, Sir Nemesis.
Especially in comparison to the humanities.
Yes, I can say with confidence that “science,” which has been trying to explain people for 500 years–or 350 if we want to give it the benefit of the doubt–will similarly fail over the next 500 years. It imposes on the subject a methodology alien to the subject. Then, when that fails (over and over) its only answer is “more science!” Or “better science,” which is really the same thing. Science=progress, if it can’t do something now, there is always implicit faith that in the future it will be capable of anything.
Nemesis 84, that’s it.
I’d even add: there was guilt by association. Anything that tangentially could have been possibly interpreted as misogynist (as opposed to the rather overt taunting of Doug1, YaReally, Piper, or the cold defiance of Rollo or Vox) were all lumped together.
Hence, Han and INTJ were lumped in with the PUAs, along with Desiderius and Wavevector who committed thoughtcrime. Ted and Escoffier occasionally got a bit verbose, but were unfailingly polite.
The sad thing is now the honest intersex dialogue, that used to live only at HUS, is now happening on more *male* terms, at SSM’s place. It’s a bit too religious for me to participate fully.
Psychohistory–Hari Seldon–required huge numbers. It’s an interesting field of speculation, if not study. But for individuals, the theories derived therefrom are most useful for explaining what just happened, whatever that may have been.
You do the best you can and hope–some of us would, anyway–that you’d beat the odds.
OTC, you should read the comments over there now. The knives are really out. I, who once was quoted by Susan in one of her posts, and was asked to contribute to one of their girl game challenge posts this year and did so am now painted out to be some kind of sexual assault apologist. lol What a joke that site has become and all the bitter female commenters there. I was simply saying that the radfems were overblowing the “pull out your cock and put it in her hand” and conveniently omitting the context it was stated in, that it was after making out, fondling, and finger banging her to orgasm. Only then do you take out your cock. But no, the radfems and fearmonger Susan omitted any of that context and provided their own, making it sound like he was saying you should do that with a complete stranger! Utter cat shit.
And Anacaona made the ridiculous claim that 2 out of 10 men in her homeland, the Dom. Rep., will kill their woman. Utter nonsense. Such a murder rate would lead to a hugely imbalanced male/female ratio and would likely lead to a complete collapse of society, which isn’t happening.
Also, regarding Hoinsky, I did say his advice seems a bit too pushy (or could be interpreted that way) and that his field report from Japan crossed the line in terms of pushing too hard for sex. So I am not some utter Hoinsky apologist. I was simply focusing on the “pull out your cock” phrase being taken wildly out of context.
Roe,
FWIW, I appreciate your comments on this thread. I’ve got no problem whatsoever being challenged on the basis of the strength of the argument and the logic, and you’ve raised some good questions. I will again point out though there is a 180 degree difference between successfully rebutting someone else’s argument and a successful presentation of your own case. In a criminal mystery, if I present exculpatory evidence for one individual that is a separate issue from who actually committed the crime.
I think Escoffier makes some great comments about the limitations of science, particularly the obsession with “exact counting”. There is a reason I’ve reiterated the Keynes quote about being roughly right. Male and female SMV and the trajectories are probably best understood as general concepts with general trajectories, and not specific values out to the 6th decimal place.
[…] I didn’t think I had one more of these in me, but after having read Morpheus’ most recent debunking of Aunt Giggles’ third plea for manosphere site traffic help with her failed rebrand,..SMV analysis, I thought […]
@Augustus
Looks like Rollo wrote a post in line with your suggestions.
Late to the conversation and haven’t read the other comments, but when I read this post I immediately thought of this article about the high frequency of major statistical inference errors in medical research. I’m sure the same argument could be made in spades about studies cited by bloggers, journalists, advice columnists et al.
Regarding the use and (potential) abuse of numbers, let me put it this way.
There is a consistent objection to the kind of analysis in this thread (and elsewhere) that considers it unreliable, if not outright illegitimate, because it is in sufficiently enumerative. Often enumerative and “rigorous” or “precise” are used synonymously. This is not the case however, as can be demonstrated—but only through a philosophical analysis of the meanings of “rigorous” and “precise” and so on. Enumerative social science’s first instinct is to deny the validity of any such philosophical analysis as invalid because imprecise. Once it realizes (assuming it does realize) that it has presumed the thing it is attempting to prove, it moves on to the assertion that the two endeavors are fundamentally incompatible: enumerative science deals with the concrete and the empirical, whereas arguments about the meaning of rigor, precision, empiricism and such are “metaphysical.” Perhaps not inherently illegitimate, but not germane to what enumerative science is trying to do. From here, one can show that enumerative science itself depends on certain concepts borrowed from philosophy (above all formal logic) that science itself didn’t invent, can’t establish on its own terms, and can’t even judge without further recourse to philosophy. So, in the end, science and philosophy or “metaphysics” are not as distinct and independent as science would prefer to believe.
This points to the problem that “empirical” is also not a synonym for “enumerative.” Up-thread it was mentioned that knowledge can’t be based on observation or, at the very least, observation must be considered suspect until it can be confirmed by enumeration or in some way by the scientific method. Sticking with the issue at hand, one can see how this claim is itself problematic.
So, we are considering the SMV of various people, of cohorts within the population or of the population at large. Observation tells all or nearly all of us that SMV varies widely, but not randomly, there appears to be a rather typical probability distribution or “bell curve.” A few extremely attractive people of both sexes way out on the right tails, a few very unattractive people on the left, and the broad masses somewhere in the middle. That the curves may differ for men v. women is not so important to the point here.
For convenience sake, we use a numerical scale. 10s for the hottest, 1s for the ugliest. This is enumerative, but inherently imprecise. People will disagree. Tastes differ. The principle of ranking is however itself sound: all who are being honest will admit that SMV varies. However, the imprecision is mitigated (if not eliminated) the wider we case the net. The more people you poll to assign a numerical value to the SMV of this or that individual, the more that a clear mean and median will emerge. Despite the variance of tasted, SMV will turn out to be judged remarkably consistently by the population at large.
Science still will object that the “method” is flawed. Observation is not science, and hence can’t yield knowledge. You must count and use rigor. So, we do so, through polling ganging responses to photos, etc. running regressions and so forth. And we get the same result. Science confirms! “Studies show”! We can now, without fear of rebuke, state common sense findings in public because they have been vindicated by the authority of “science.”
But really we didn’t need to in order to confirm the basic thesis: that SMV varies and that how each sex judged the SMV of the other is remarkably consistent from person to person, even after accounting for variance in individual taste. Everyone already knew that from ordinary observation and experience. The knowledge derived from that observation and experience turned out to be no less “empirical” than the “scientific” polling which attempted to “prove it.” Indeed, the only reason we went through with the (useless) exercise of scientific polling is because science bullied us into it, by saying that pre-scientific knowledge is not knowledge unless science affirms it.
Then if it wants to (as it often does) science can go further. It will point to various flaws in the method. It will attack the imprecision of the 10 point scale. It will insist that all the “noise” in the data from outliers and disagreements based on taste fundamentally corrupt the result. “Eye of the beholder.” It will cite the lack of universal assentation as fatal to any trustworthy conclusion. It will then design very complex mathematical and statistical formulas that it insists are much more methodologically rigorous. Lo and behold, these will “demonstrate” why the common sense understanding is wrong: there is no SMV in any precise way that science can validate hence, in science’s assertion, there is no SMV.
And now science has left us dumber than where we started.
And now science has left us dumber than where we started.
I believe that “science” is often used as a propaganda tool to influence/control the masses. It serves the same function in the modern age that the Catholic Church served centuries ago….as an “official” source of what is “correct” that the masses should not question.
I think things get problematic when we expect a certain level of precision where none exists. The chorus becomes “where is the data”, “where is the data”, “where is the data”, when all you have to do is pay attention to stories like Tasmin’s speed dating event. Data and science become substitutes for the ability to simply think logically.
There probably should be some classes in philosophy and critical thinking in high schools.
“There probably should be some classes in philosophy and critical thinking in high schools.”
Only if I get to set the curriculum.
Only if I get to set the curriculum.
Works for me!
IMO, I’m not thinking about stuff like Anselm’s ontological argument or Heidegger, but just basic stuff like Intro to Logical Fallacies. My experience is that the majority of people are highly influenced by sorts of fallacious reasoning. To me, much benefit would be gained if we simply could get people to distinguish between rhetoric and sound arguments that flow from defendable premises through sound reasoning to conclusions. The elitist in me though says below a certain IQ this is not possible. And I will admit, and frankly I very much wish this was not so, it really does bother me, but my experience tells me that women are far more susceptible to rhetorical and emotional arguments over logic than men. For example, you could preface/frame any argument from the perspective of “what about the children”? If you go to any feminist site like Jezebel the comments are 99.9% about emotions and rhetoric. Of course, I think I read once that a feminists criticize logic as a “patriarchal” construct.
I would be less quick to condemn rhetoric. There is a distinction to be made between useful/noble rhetoric and bad rhetoric, or sophistry. Rhetoric has a place. In particular, good rhetoric is needed to shape the opinions of those who (as you point out) can’t be won over by philosophy or dialiectic. So, it’s not either/or, more good v. bad.
BTW, Liz and others, here is the data
http://iconicmen.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/smv-is-it-real/
It confirms the sky is indeed blue
(I am half kidding)
please view fun with numbers videos on http://www.redonkulas.com
Correction to the video: at one point he (you?) says that 2/3s of women file for divorce. I don’t know if that’s just a slip but the real figure is that 2/3s of divorces are filed by women. Important distinction.
You can probably correct numbers, but leave any spelling errors alone…
Cool videos, I like the guy. I’ll check for ones I haven’t seen before, tomorrow.
But why visit when the nice Mr Popp delivers? Service with a smile (and frequently a beer as well). Whattaguy!
I rewatched the Popp videos (I had indeed seen them before), they deliver a lot of the same numbers and methods as have been seen around here, but in an amusing way…definitely recommended. Check out his youtube channel too, lots of laughs used to deliver lots of tasty red-pill truth.
I’d like to leave a +1 to this analysis, her articles rarely bother me but this one screamed about needing correction.
Lokland, good to see you. I was wondering how you were doing.
Lokland, I second Han, its good to see you, stop by and comment whenever you have time and feel like it.
I’ll admit a pet peeve of mine is the abuse of mathematical and scientific arguments. There are times when reasonable people can disagree on methodology and conclusions, and there are times when the argument screams total bullshit.
I hope everything is going well for you
Good to see you Lokland.
[…] Susan Walsh, and SMV. Related: Some more on Walsh’s errors. And some […]
The prodigal Lokland comes home…cool
“I believe this is because she often starts with what *feels right* to her and then tries to fit the data and construct arguments to support that feeling.”
This highlights a profound difference in how men and women attempt to make sense of the world in general.
When trying to get to the heart of a particular matter, men tend to try and detach themselves from it as much as possible in order to reach a totally objective and unbiased understanding of a subject/dilemma.
Women on the other hand, tend to put themselves right in the middle of it – see how it makes them feel – and then attempt to reveres engineer a reason that would explain that emotion.
On the occasions a woman does stumbles backwards onto a truth, she seem intuitive but when she get it wrong, she just appears irrational/neurotic.
“When trying to get to the heart of a particular matter, men tend to try and detach themselves from it as much as possible in order to reach a totally objective and unbiased understanding of a subject/dilemma.”
I wish that were true. If that were the case we wouldnt have religions nor politics nor feminism.
What men do is attach to a bigger thing, and let that thing dictate the bias.
Good point by NMB and Yohami’s insight is quite profound. That bigger thing may be God. In an environment where people believe in God, much better to have him be the source of authority rather than just a man…because, how can you argue with God? And “science” is another example. Look at the exaggerated fear mongering of global warming (no warming in ~15 years now) and how in spite of evidence to the contrary, the high priests of global warming just say the science is settled, and when the lull in temperatures is pointed out, they shift the goal post and say the heat is hiding in the deep layers of the ocean (in spite of the fact that these regions are not adequately measured to make such a claim).
Great article. I didn’t read the comments. So many blogs to read. Anyways, I would argue a females SMV peaks between 14 and 18, due to the theory that a man who forms a bond with a younger age female has a longer time period to produce offspring with her. This is a more appropriate theory from a paleo-huntergatherer type environment, sans birth control and fertility treatments, but I believe we still have a significant evolutionary bias towards the teen years of woman as being the best bet in maximizing one’s offspring. This couldn’t, and probably shouldn’t work in the modern era, but should/could and is are not the same. I would never pursue a girl that young, but I won’t deny my attraction to such youthful femininity either.
#117: “That bigger thing may be God. In an environment where people believe in God, much better to have him be the source of authority rather than just a man…because, how can you argue with God? And “science” is another example.”
Also “country” (patriotism, and all that). Thought the following was a pretty good (related) writeup:
http://accordingtohoyt.com/2013/11/02/narratives/
“I don’t know anywhere in the United States of America where 15-year old boys are viable candidates for marriage . . .”
You were doing great right up until the argument by ignorance at the end. A quick web search would have shown that in many states (my own NY for example) there are legal means to marry at the age of 14 and some states have no statutory age limit at all, the question of issuance of a marriage license being left entirely at the discretion of a judge for people below a certain age.
Perhaps you will argue the “viable.” Marriage at the age of 15 may be unusual and dependent upon unusual circumstances, but it is both legal and not unheard of. In some areas, even here in America, not any particular matter of social approbation.
I’m not claiming that the model was correct, simply that the inclusion of 15 year olds does not make it inherently incorrect, although making the cut off 16 would likely strengthen the model, removing the factor of judicial approval.
kfg, the problem in including down to 15 year olds wasn’t an issue of whether they are legally allowed to marry but whether their rates are very different from zero. They are nearly zero and so by including them it allowed a certain commenter to make it appear like divorce happens less.
Basically, his argument was, “See? Only 20% of American men have been divorced! Therefore the sphere’s talking about divorce and frivorce is overblown.” Well, when I dug into the data he used it turned out that only roughly 2/3 of the “men” (15 and over) had even ever been married so right off the bat he was being rhetorically deceptive since the 1/3 of never-married men could NOT have possibly been divorced. So, instead of 20% it was more like 30% of ever-married men had divorced. Since the vast majority of males, 15-19 have never been married they could not have been divorced either so by including them it made the divorce rate lower.
And even there, it’s still rhetorically misleading because it’s a snapshot of how many people have divorced but it includes a lot of people that have not YET divorced but will.
I pointed all this out to him. I also said that the more informative stat is what % of people will eventually divorce. That is over 40% for Boomers and will likely approach 40% (may stay a bit under) for Gen-X. Gen-Y is still too young to really know.
So, now you understand the story behind Morpheus’s reference to including 15 y/o’s.
kfg, but you are correct, 15 y/o’s can marry. Morpheus could have been clearer in what he wrote, referring more to the fact that an incredibly low % of 15 y/o males have married and so their inclusion only serves to bias the ever-divorced stat lower than what it would be if you included only men who had ever married. I suppose if you only included men that had ever married then it would remove the vast majority of 15-17 y/o males since nearly 100% have never married. But if you’re going to use the ever-divorced stat and include never-marrieds then it makes less sense to include a group that like 99% (don’t have the number off the top of my head) have never married.
#116 “I wish that were true. If that were the case we wouldn’t have religions nor politics nor feminism.”
It is true… “Men are governed by lines of intellect – women : by curves of emotion”. (JAMES JOYCE)
As for religion, politics and feminism…
The reason every known civilisation developed a form of religion is not because it is rational to believe there is a God but that it is rational to want to live in a society where every body lives as though there is a God/ultimate unavoidable justice.
Politics is a perfectly rational/male construct designed to allow men in power to hear all sides of an argument before making an informed decision. The success of civilisations can be directly related to the complexities of their political institutions.
The rise of feminism is not the fault of men! The rise of feminism is a direct result of the introduction of the contraception pill in the 60s. Which meant that for the first time in history women were freed from the natural consequences of their biology and simultaneously a hundred thousand years of male authority. With this one event the delicate power balance that had existed between the sexes for millennia was tilted massively towards the feminine. Most Men, society in general and ultimately women themselves are yet to come to terms with the sheer magnitude of our currant predicament and its catastrophic social implications.
NMTB,
“The reason every known civilisation developed a form of religion is not because it is rational to believe there is a God”
No, really.
“it is rational to want to live in a society where every body lives as though there is a God/ultimate unavoidable justice.”
The important part there is the “want to”, which is all about desire, and desires dont need any rational mind to be validated, nor to exist. The rational mind is just a tool. The want-tos rule.
In truth, nobody wants that society, where everyone lives by a unavoidable justice, and the proof is that we dont have it. What we do have is a society where everyone wants the biggest piece of the cake. Build a system, any system, with strict rules, and the winners of such system will bend the rules so they not longer apply to them.
If (bible) God is real, he’s the mayor fucker of the rules. Rules dont apply to him right? he cannot be judged – he’s the judge. Say, he can fuck rape a virgin and be his own father, destroy cities because he doesnt like their sexual orientation, drawn a whole planet in rain because he doesnt like how things are going, order to kill practitioners of other religions, sacrifice himself in the name of your sins (because he made you imperfect), so he could remove the curse he himself placed on you when he was angry with you because he placed you somewhere you would be tempted by some bad shit he also placed near you…
Nothing irrational there.
Anyway, rules dont apply to him either. People still want to qualify to him. If he makes a mistake its not a mistake, it’s your fault for not understanding his wisdom. If he seems not to be just, its your fail for not understanding his justice. Etc.
What people are adoring there has nothing to do with rationality. God is a portrait of a Narcissist. And what it shows is how people can be turned into codependents easily, and that the ultimate goal of most people is to become the top narcissist of a population, the bigger that population the better, and that most people are going to be happy to be their codependents and live by kissing their asses. That is a very strong imprint we have that shaped the whole civilization thing, and is at the core of Game, Religion, Politics and anything else we attempt to create.
What people want is not ultimate justice. What people want is power, influcence, resources, security, and dominion. And then to be cattered to, pleased, entertained. People are not pretty, nor is civilization, nor is the God they decided to believe in, nor the Gods/Servants game we play constantly.
“Politics is a perfectly rational/male construct designed to allow men in power to hear all sides of an argument before making an informed decision.”
Right, that’s exactly whats going on. Obama has politics so he can hear all sides of debate and take… yeah right!
I’ll leave it to ADBG to fix my mistakes or describe how this really was.
We had kings. Sitting next to the King he had left and right, the rich and the intellectuals, giving him advice, but the King would ultimately say his word and do as he pleased. Then Napoleon killed the king and left and right people found ways to switch places at the throne and impersonate the King for a while, never too long so the other party wouldnt get too pissed off.
Its a game of will to power. Its not a game designed to fix problems and its not what the society “needs” to function, but a reflection of what the society “wants”
“The success of civilisations can be directly related to the complexities of their political institutions.””
True!
“The rise of feminism is not the fault of men! The rise of feminism is a direct result of the introduction of the contraception pill in the 60s. Which meant that for the first time in history women were freed from the natural consequences of their biology and simultaneously a hundred thousand years of male authority. With this one event the delicate power balance that had existed between the sexes for millennia was tilted massively towards the feminine. ”
Eh. Feminism is a rebranding of Marxism, and Marx was a wanker who did his theory with so many plot holes and inconsistencies its impossible to believe the thing was accepted… if it wasnt for its emotional content. The division between the exploited and the exploiter, the servants and the kings, the workers and the owners. Lets kill the kings / gods / owners / exploiters so we can all have what they have. There you go, that’s your marxism, and in practice and logic it doesnt resist the minimal logical analysis because it’s too flawed.
Feminism took that and made it about men and women. Men = god / owner / exploiter and women = worker / servant / exploited.
Are these the male / female dynamics you were talking about? because feminism is pushing women to be owners / gods / exploiters… and the result is as shitty as you would expect.
But none of this would happen without the coed of men. Men creating the bullshit ideologies, becoming sheep for such ideologies, and willing to white knight die and kill in the name of that big thing, the big esotherical cock with a throne on top of it and a narcissistic alpha god calling the shots and directing the BIAS, but ultimately pussy whipped. So yeah, feminism is also a creation of men. Women dont have what it takes to do this kind of thing, they need the men to do it for them.
So, rationality my ass. We’re ants. The rational mind is just a tool at the service when we need to refine the puzzle.
“Most Men, society in general and ultimately women themselves are yet to come to terms with the sheer magnitude of our currant predicament and its catastrophic social implications.”
Agreed.
#124: Yohami, I’m kind of lost to the point. And, frankly, your post above was painful to read. What are you espousing, precisely? Religion is bad, government bad…solution is? Anarchy? We have abundant examples of religious tyranny. That’s exactly why we have separation of religion and state.
It’s true that tyranny is definitely not desirable. We’re conditioned to hear the word tyranny and repel, and pepper our sentences with bromides about how very very bad tyranny is…but the least desirable alternative isn’t tyranny, it’s the horrors that occur when violence is given free reign, and those are well demonstrated throughout history and even quite recently in places like Somalia, the Congo, et al.
For singular instance, untold millions died as warlords in China fought back and forth after anarchy followed the fall of their government. In a single 5 month period in 1929, the city of Iyang changed hands 72 times via various bandit armies, andyone who was suspected of possessing any wealth whatsoever, or suspected of having ever possessed any property they might have hidden, was kidnapped and tortured along with their family members. Even if one believes that the government is no better than a large band of thieves, a band of one settled group of thieves is usually better to live with than a continuous run for one’s life from ever more violent and predatory bandits who clash and loot under anarchical conditions. At least governments have some incentive to let citizens prosper, if only to collect more tax money.
So, respectfully, I must agree with NMTB, “The reason every known civilization developed a form of religion is not because it is rational to believe there is a God but that it is rational to want to live in a society where every body lives as though there is a God/ultimate unavoidable justice.” But in place of the word “want” I would substitute “need”. There’s a reason why religions tends to be far more important, and comparatively unyielding in more primitive societies, and less so in more advanced. Humans need a moderating influence, so that society doesn’t reflect what it would if everyone actually subscribed to the concept you mentioned, the “ultimate goal of most to become the top narcissist of a population, the bigger that population the better.”
Per the assertion that “people don’t want justice”…Ask a person who has been deprived of justice without recourse exactly how important they think justice is. People do want justice, that’s why superhero vigilantes are so popular in comic strips. Yes, that’s entertainment. It’s also a coping mechanism because the concept of justice is so important to human psyche.
Liz,
Im just refuting the original assertion than men are prone to detach themselves from the issues, taking all the data in, and make un-biased decisions – as opposed to the red-pill accepted proposition that women are more likely to be all personal and make biased decisions.
My point is that men detach from themselves, but only to attach to a bigger bias.
Then I ranted a bit about how stupid people are, how the whole power hungry thing separates society in narcissists and codependents.
Religion, politics bad? of course they are bad. Anarchy? anarchy is merely the same set of impulses which make religon and politics bad, sans the structure. The structure at least gives you something to hold on, so of course any sort of institutional bullshit is going to work better than free for all caotic bullshit.
What do I espouse? enlighment, responsibility, truth seeking, owning yourself, brutal honesty, all win win stuff.
“Per the assertion that “people don’t want justice”…Ask a person who has been deprived of justice without recourse exactly how important they think justice is.”
That brings us to our other conversation. Justice is not what you want for yourself, its what you want for everyone, and you want to see applied strictly, even if it fucks you up.
Ask that same person when the injustice is being done in their favor and they have get used to it so the entitlement has settled in, and you’ll invariably hear another tune. You’ll see that they see losing their entitlements as “unjustice” even if the system is a whole more just. So, the people who’s been treated unjustly simply want more, plus want to retain what they’ve already got. Not necessarily want what’s just.
Example. Ask anyone in the second / third world demanding social justice, to return all their country capital plus interests to whatever third world country they took the money from hundreds of years ago. Which would be just. Hear how the “Justice” turns into a “not my problem”.
*Ask anyone in the second / FIRST world demanding social justice […]
Liz, justice and monkeys.
Grab two monkeys, make them do the same work, give one a lot of nuts to monkey A and give less nuts to monkey B. Monkey B is going to see the injustice of this system and rebel. Stop.
Start again. This time repeat the experiment but give more nuts to monkey B and less nuts to monkey A. Monkey A is probably going to see the injustice, but what about B?
Did B learn? is B going to keep seeing the injustice and share his nuts with A, or is he going to enjoy the privilege and rationalize it away, which is what A was probably doing when it was his turn?
* * *
Turn back to the world. The people demanding justice are invariably the losers. The winners are always abusing the justice.
It doesnt matter who’s winning, the structure keeps intact. Take any justice-demanding person from the losers and put them in a winning positions – they switch to the other band, become “corrupt”, justice becomes entitlement.
Unbiased proposition: this is not really about justice / we’re using “justice” as a word to describe something that doesnt fit the meaning. Selfishness / self interest fits the bill better.
Justice, as a contrast, would be a rigid game that doesnt switch sides – the winning monkey shares quota with the losing monkey, and the losing monkey doesnt take advantage of winning monkey, doesnt become a slacker. This game has no proponents in the real world.
It doesnt matter who’s winning, the structure keeps intact.
This is far from true. Every revolution is founded on some (either real or imagined) injustice. The structure doesn’t stay intact. And societies rise and fall all the time based on such intrinsic merits.
should have added…or defects.
Liz, missed this one:
“Humans need a moderating influence, so that society doesn’t reflect what it would if everyone actually subscribed to the concept you mentioned, the “ultimate goal of most to become the top narcissist of a population, the bigger that population the better.” “”
I also added how easy is for somebody to become codependent, and that the two sides of the chain are in effect. Gods and servants.
Imagine what this would be without the top narcissists (politics, religion, entertainment) and the thousands following their every step. These top figures are not selling content – they are selling personality, and the higher they are the less the normal rules (justice) applies to them. They are untouchable, and their word is law. If they make mistakes and do awful stuff, people inside of their sheep group are unable to see through it and rationalize it away, its somebody elses fault, etc. Its not Obama’s fault, or its not Bush fault, its not the Popes fault, its not Miley Cirus fault, its not lady Gaga, its… you cannot criticize the head of the herd. Whatever bullshit is going on, attack a neighbor herd instead. Use science to dethrone religion, use religion to dethrone science, use the left to dethrone the right and the right etc. There’s no truth, its just a game.
So imagine this world, but remove the top narcissistic figures and remove the hundred million codependents who follow and sniff every move and are ego invested in things beyond their control. Remove the head and the herd, what’s left?
There’s no world?
My description is fit then.
Liz,
“Every revolution is founded on some (either real or imagined) injustice. The structure doesn’t stay intact.”
The one with the shorter end of the sticks rebels. What happens then?
Do they then keep the injustice-fighting spirit and become good leaders for everyone, or do they become the next exploiters who need to be dethroned?
“What do I espouse? enlighment, responsibility, truth seeking, owning yourself, brutal honesty, all win win stuff.”
Yes. If only those people throughout history who had bad deals had only been more “enlightened” and “responsible”, actively sought the truth, owned themselves, used brutal honestly, and all that “win win stuff” everything would have been swell.
Liz,
“If only those people throughout history who had bad deals had only been more “enlightened” and “responsible”, actively sought the truth, owned themselves, used brutal honestly, and all that “win win stuff” everything would have been swell.””
Hum. People with bad deals or in bad situations / against obstacles have to fight back. If other herds strike, strike back. If nature strikes, strike back. If you have a goal and there are obstacles, or if you want something and other group / people are fucking you up – fight, conquer, win.
This is survival though, we’re not talking about justice, again.
If people dont like the situation they can fight back and destroy and change everything. This doesnt need to be “just” though, and I doubt historically it has ever been “just”.
* * *
The other day we were talking about justice with the context that women have no innate sense of justice. In this conversation you keep pointing at something that is “felt” by someone whos having the bad deal, the short end of the stick.
I cannot imagine a better example to give you as to whether women have no clue about justice, or, at least, at to what men perceive justice to be.
For men justice is a grand scheme. It’s a mechanical, logical scheme. Justice means that if I do A then B ensues. Men put that scheme on top of themselves and are more likely to make the scheme work, even if they themselves lose because of it = let the best man win.
On the other hand you point at the people with their bad deals and crying injustice.
Seems like for you “justice” is that feeling when somebody doesnt get what they expect, doesnt matter what it is.
At least, I’ve seen a lot of girls crying “injustice” when they are actually getting a better deal than anybody else. Or “injustice” about stuff that its unrelated to justice. Like. “Its unjust that I girls have menstruation and men dont”.
Justice though has nothing to do with it. People with a sense of justice apply justice where it fits, even in their own detriment.
The issue of fairness and justice doesn’t seem to be so much an issue for the disempowered group–their wanting a better deal probably is closer to fairness and justice. The issue arises once and if the out-of-power group becomes the in-power group. Do they continue to seek fairness (particularly for the vanquished and other disempowered groups) or do they forget about fairness and just bask in their newfound power?
Justice can be a number of things, Yohami, but for the purpose of this discussion we’ll speak of geopolitics. Not menstruation. You certainly have gotten a lot of mileage out of my link to the monkeys, which was a small, side anecdote to explain that even monkeys have a sense of right and wrong (ergo we silly solipsistic girls/womenz must have one too).
Yohami, your polemic sounds very much like an argument asserting that there are no right or wrong way to do things, only winners. I couldn’t disagree more. There are better ways to do things.
“If people dont like the situation they can fight back and destroy and change everything. This doesnt need to be “just” though, and I doubt historically it has ever been “just”.
Spoken like an armchair general.
Important addon:
I dont know if you’re familiar with game theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
In my own words: Its a two player game. You play the game in turns, and every move costs you three points. On every turn you select to play “share” or “take”, and both players reveal their move at the same time.
– If both players select “share” they get 5 points each
– If one selects “share” and the other selects “take”, the taking one receives 10 points and the sharing one receives 0 points.
– If both select “take” they both receive 0 points.
* * *
These are the rules, and the rules are the justice system. Justice would mean that the rules dont change in your favor when you mess up, and that the rules dont change to favor their rival. Justice here means that if you play share with a taker, you lose, and they win, and if you play take with a sharer, you win and they lose, and if you play take with a taker you both loser, and if you share with a sharer you both win. In short, the rules are the justice. Thats a male approach to justice btw. At least in its pure form.
But then this is a game, and you want to win it, to amass points, so we have strategies. The strategy becomes a game on its own, and as which, the game has a God (someone whos better at this strategy, someone to emulate), an enemy, and its own sense of justice. This is not longer about what justice is, but what about its “justice for me”, or, “how I wish the game to work in my favor” which is, well, inherently unjust.
The best sustainable strategy is to play share-share, as long as the players are stable. If there’s an unlimited supply of players who can be coherced or convinced into playing “share”, then “take” is the best strategy.
Not trying to mess with ethics but talking about the system itself.
* * *
Here are the 4 strategies:
– Play as a pure taker, play take every move. If they play “share” you win big. If they play take, well, keep playing take, they dont deserve any better even if you both go to hell. In this strategy, avoid takers, and distrust people who you might think would take. Go with the sharers only, so you can win big, taking on every turn without ever sharing. When the other players go bankrupt, replace them. This strategy can produce big wins fast, of course, and also melt down your life as soon as you run out of disposable players. Psychopaths fill this role easily. Dictatorships, kings, strong hand military occupations, domination, etc.
– Play as a strategic taker. You’re going to play take, but with enough instances of share so your opponent is less likely to abandon the game. When they catch you taking, rationalize it away (censor, deflect, blame, project, gaslight) and go back to share, then switch back to take for a big win. Eventually you switch players, blame the failed game into the other player (he was a taker!), lure the new player into share, and take. Then repeat. Narcissists fill this role easily. Politics, softer powerplays.
– Play as a pure sharer. You’re going to lose a lot and be taken advantage of from takers, strategic takers and casual players, but at least on every move you do the “right thing”. You can also be obsessed about how “share” is the only real win move in this game, you you play it once and again even when the odds are against you, say, when the other player is a pure taker and is squeezing the shit out of you, or when the situation is unbeareable but you keep that gamble ON, aiming to win someday, like, for example, when your opponent realizes they can also “share” with you instead of doing “take” all the time. You’re going to play “share” so consistently that everyone is not going to have any other option to also “share” with you, or that’s what you think, because you’re more likely to get ruined by a pure taker, since you really didnt understand the possible strategies of the game. Codependends fit this role easier. Anyone belonging to a herd big enough they are afraid to leave, anyone invested on the outcome of a bigger group and put in a place where they have to give their trust and resources “or else”, anyone “trapped” in a bad relationship, etc. Pure takers try to make everyone else a pure sharer, for obvious reasons.
– Play as a strategic sharer. Share and attempt to pair with other sharers or pure sharers, use “take” as a defense against takers and keep “take” as long as its needed, but move back to “share” as soon as possible. Sane people fit this role, but, this kind of smart game requires players to be able to really read into the game. Pure takers and strategic takers push you into sharing unconditionally (submission) for their own, so taking this kind of stance against them requires both social saviness, game smarts and strength, which usually dont go in hand with “share”
* * *
If you undertand the game then you can see how everything is “just”. Play share against a taker, and they take. Play take against a taker and both lose, but the more giving one loses more. Play share against a sharer and both win.
But then how about self-perfeived justice, strategies and Gods?
The pure taker may very well find unjust that he’s not able to find enough sharers to make his profit, as opposed to guy B who’s been making a killing. Oh injustice.
The pure sharer may find that its unjust that he’s lost all his points against the same taker, and that the taker is not getting the cue that is their turn to play share back… instead they are complaining that our pure sharer stopped sharing for a moment, they want more! they are also crying injustice… oh injustice.
The strategic taker might find unjust that the other players are not buying into the “share” lures, so they have been unable to take big for a while. Oh my where have all the good players gone? oh injustice.
Gotcha?
Takers might hate other takers, pure sharers might hate strategic sharers because of the strategy aspect to their game and prefer pure takers instead… at least they know what to expect from them and they are honest… go figure. This is where a system, a set of rules, merges with an aspect of it, a winning strategy, and herds are born. The static system becomes an animal, develops a head, and a herd, a group, is formed. Then its us vs them and good and bad get redefined by each group as the concepts fit them, because its not longer about what the game is, but about how the game serves me.
That happens pretty quickly. The moment from where you’re learning the rules of chess or monopoly, to the moment where you are actually figuring out how to win at it, the moment where the game becomes “your” game.
I think men have that phase of abstract game observational thinking, and women skip that to get to their game directly. The end result, though, its anything but unbiased game playing. The bias enhances the game playing, limits the options, makes everything more manageable, fastens the response time, makes you more adept – and then succeding at the game increases your mating chance (as a man) which is why you were playing the game to begin with.
Liz,
“your polemic sounds very much like an argument asserting that there are no right or wrong way to do things, only winners.”
For all the things that Im saying, you pick the things that Im not.
Though, the winners are the ones determining what’s the right or wrong way to do things.
“I couldn’t disagree more. There are better ways to do things.”
For example?
Han, exactly.
Liz, about justice, or, “why is the grass greener somewhere else”
http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com.ar/2013/11/a-portrait-in-female-solipsism.html
Of course some people have really bad, and some others really really bad, and some have it so good. But nobody knows that. What everyone knows is what they have, what they want, and where they rank among others. And everyone wants a bigger cake.
This is extremely useful from a biological perspective, and we could even build a justice system on top of that – but that drive itself is nothing like justice.
Suffering and demanding more, or just wanting more, is just that.
I see people conflating “more” and using “justice” in the same line, and I know they dont know what they are talking about.
The girl in that post – what do the other girls around her age, in her same position, but without the talents nor the awards think of her?
Observant readers (with an eye for the ironic) may have noticed that YAHAMI has attempted to refute my assertion – that Men tend to detach themselves as much as possible from a subject/dilemma in order to reach a totally objective and unbiased understanding of it – by detaching himself from the subject/dilemma and giving us his totally unbiased understanding of it.
I didn’t say that male logic was always right. Just as I didn’t say female emotions are always wrong.
NMTB,
Its Yohami, bro.
I detached myself, but because Im attached to a bigger thing called “truth seeking” and “stop the bullshit”, in which Im heavily emotionally invested in. So there you go.
@Han, Morph, Jimmy, St. Swift
Thanks, I’ll probably begin commenting more when I have more time.
All in all life is good. I hope the same for all of you.
“I’ll admit a pet peeve of mine is the abuse of mathematical and scientific arguments. There are times when reasonable people can disagree on methodology and conclusions, and there are times when the argument screams total bullshit.”
Yes, reading that was almost physically painful.
Yohami: “The other day we were talking about justice with the context that women have no innate sense of justice. In this conversation you keep pointing at something that is “felt” by someone whos having the bad deal, the short end of the stick.
I cannot imagine a better example to give you as to whether women have no clue about justice, or, at least, at to what men perceive justice to be.
For men justice is a grand scheme. It’s a mechanical, logical scheme. Justice means that if I do A then B ensues. Men put that scheme on top of themselves and are more likely to make the scheme work, even if they themselves lose because of it = let the best man win.”
Your experiences and mine are obvious far different. My opinion of the concept of justice has in fact been influenced by the opinions of many men. For example, a Serb I met (elderly gentleman, a scientist who worked for DARPA several years ago) explained the reason the Blakans were experiencing genocide. He still remembered when ethnic Albanians came to his little village and cut the eyes out of a child and forced the father to eat them. He felt rather emotional about the whole experience, actually. Such a girl. Yohami, I find it very hard to have a conversation with you. Sorry.
Liz,
I dont know the history there. I guess you mean the Blakans are getting genocied because they did terrible stuff before? they are experiencing a payback?
“He still remembered when ethnic Albanians came to his little village and cut the eyes out of a child and forced the father to eat them. He felt rather emotional about the whole experience, actually.”
Your friend is rightly to feel emotional about it. That’s unrelated to “justice” though. Anyone can feel they are being treated unjustly when bad shit happens to them. Then they will be likely to do something about to rectify the situation until they are pleased.
Which is totally unrelated to “justice” because they are operating from emotion.
Justice is blind and all. As long you’re operating for your own benefit your motor is not justice but your own well being. Chances are that if you manage to get in a more favorable position and continue to operate from your self interests you’ll be the one inflicting unjustice in others. So your whole motor wasnt “justice” at all, but something more primal.
An example for you.
Some little kid with lousy parents is getting bullied at school. He picks a gun and kills 45 other kids and teachers. Was that justice? what if he only kills the bullies and his own parents? what if…
” Yohami, I find it very hard to have a conversation with you. Sorry.””
Dont worry about it.
It was a typo, Yohami. I meant to say Balkans. They have a long history of genocide over there, and we became involved (against the Serbs) in an airwar after the Srebrenica massacre (when the Serbs attacked and occupied a UN area that had offered protection, policed by Dutch peacekeepers…who had disarmed the occupants and Serbs killed every male, including children, within the UN safehaven).
This is one example…there are so many. This is directly related to the concept of justic. It is in fact universally acknowledged that peace without justice is no peace at all. It’s always a very very emotional issue and when geopolitics are concerned it often takes place over a very long period time. It isn’t menstruation or one dipshit teenaged girl’s random perception of life in general. A more micro example of the concept of justice and how emotion relates to it (not just for us solipsistic, dumbass girlzzzz) would be the manosphere in general, and this forum in particular. We’re all here because we perceive injustice, correct? It’s an emotional issue, or we wouldn’t be posting about it.
FWIW, Yohami, I apologize if I’m coming across badly (and reading above, I think I am). From ten to about four years ago, discussing politics/justice, et al was really important to me (probably because I had an extremely vested interest at the time). I’ve done so so many times it’s like a reflex now…I have to respond (because it’s an emotional trigger point for me), but my response isn’t as informative or thoughtful as before. Kind of burnt out on it over the years.
Liz,
No problem. And I didnt know you were involved in these real issues.
Justice applied there, what form would it take? payback, retaliation, honoring…
BTW when I talk about justice I mean something completely different. I mean a code. Its unrelated to the feeling of being injured – which can be experienced by anyone, male or female, without requiring any fair universal code.
“peace without justice is no peace at all””
Incited me to research what you’re talking about, found this
http://www.npwj.org/
In short, given the premise that the “human rights” and that kind of thing is “real”, this organization seeks punishment and control for forces who violate such human rights.
Here’s the tie up with what I’ve been talking about.
The ability to come up with a macro order of things, an attempt to create universal rules and then attempt to impose them universally, even if they may go against your own power and interests, is a male thing.
For example. Lets say this organization succeeds and traps some of these bad boys. Probably their own adherence to the code would impede them to violate the “human rights” of their prisoners. The code is more important than themselves = male trait.
But you will see a bunch of people, mostly women, who dont care about the code. They want these aggressors being hung from their genitals. So its not about the code but about feelings and feelings only.
* * *
Then it gets deeper. The reason why the code is stablished, on and itself, is arbitrary.
I sympathize with the human rights idea. However its human made, it is serving an agenda, and it will be modified, change, etc, depending on what the core feeling says its “just” at the moment.
Example.
The code doesnt say that humans have the right to not go to war – they are not fighting against the empire which is recruiting soldiers.
The code doesnt say that nations should not impose over others with military force or economical forces. Otherwise they would prevent the ONU from existing.
The code doesnt say that debt slavery is a crime. Otherwise they would have to fight the international banks.
Etc. Whatver “justice” is writting in the code, it is biased, and it serves an agenda.
Men, the male form, is to bend to that major thing and if the belief is strong enough, it will trump any daily life commodities that breaking the rules would bring. Example, if they believe torture is bad, they wont torture the torturers. The “I dont agree with what you say but I’d die to defend your right to say it” kind of thing.
Find me women operating that way?
Women operate in a more domestic manner. Changing the rules as they fit.
Big ideals be damned.
“The overall objective of the FGM program is to foster the engagement of national governments, parliaments and activists to promote the adoption and enforcement of effective laws banning FGM as a violation of human rights and to reinforce cooperation at regional and international levels.”
So why exactly are they not fighting circumcision?
“The overall objective of the LGBTI Program is to achieve full and international recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender, intersex people and those with HIV through impact litigation, education and public policy work.””
So why are they not fighting feminism, which is doing serious damage to heterosexual men, and women?
How about religion? shouldnt they be targeting christianity as one of their enemies?
* * *
No? because of bias.
My whole point is that men are not less likely to engage in bias. They just surrender to the bias of the code. While women surrender to their own, which is governed by the herd as long as she needs the herd for supplies.
Found out that the founder of NPWJ is a woman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Bonino
Kudos to her, so far
NMV. She’s kind of fighting for feminism. And the organization could be called “Selective International Retaliation” and keep operating just fine. Misuse of the word justice.
I’ve never actually heard of this organization, and didn’t obtain the quote from this source. Not sure where I heard it from, or if I heard it from anywhere in particular…but it definitely predates the ICC (I used it before the Rome Statute was ratified).
Its fine, I was just doing some research. Feel free to share what you mean by it.
Checking back, it was a quote from Antonio Cassese, former president of ICTY (International Criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia). Seems to sum it up well enough…meaning exactly what it would seem to mean. I don’t know how to state it more clearly.
So its about punishment for crimes
It’s about conflict resolution.
People need to believe there is a recourse for offenses against them. They have to believe some justice is available. That’s (along with deterence) a fundamental reason why law exists.
Thanks.
It was a typo, Yohami. I meant to say Balkans. They have a long history of genocide over there, and we became involved (against the Serbs) in an airwar after the Srebrenica massacre (when the Serbs attacked and occupied a UN area that had offered protection, policed by Dutch peacekeepers…who had disarmed the occupants and Serbs killed every male, including children, within the UN safehaven).
This is way OT, but I do want to mention it. In the Balkan conflict, ALL sides were guilty of atrocities, not just the Serbs. The Albanian Muslims also were guilty of horrendous atrocities.
Part of the problem is the country of Yugoslavia was a country of various ethnic groups with tension and enmity going back decades if not hundreds of years. One issue is when states like Croatia were allowed to secede from Yugoslavia the same respect for autonomy was not given to geographical regions that had been historically Serb for centuries. If Croatia is allowed to secede, than the part of Croatia that is mostly Serb should have been allowed to secede from Croatia and join Serbia. The decisions on who was granted autonomy and self-government were very inconsistent.
FWIW, during World War 2, Croatia was a Nazi puppet state engaged in genocide. In contrast, the Serbs were with the Allies, and numerous U.S. fighter pilots who were shot down were rescued by Serb resistance fighters.
For those interested in geopolitical history, this is a good read:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Serbs-Guardians-Gate/dp/0880294132
Yohami @ 138
Great stuff…I really like your categories
- Play as a strategic taker. You’re going to play take, but with enough instances of share so your opponent is less likely to abandon the game. When they catch you taking, rationalize it away (censor, deflect, blame, project, gaslight) and go back to share, then switch back to take for a big win. Eventually you switch players, blame the failed game into the other player (he was a taker!), lure the new player into share, and take. Then repeat. Narcissists fill this role easily. Politics, softer powerplays.
These can be really difficult to identify because some of them are masterful at cultivating and reinforcing the false image of them as sharers. This becomes even trickier when you are not dealing with actual physical or financial resources, but say social capital and resources. I’ve been thinking about this one a lot. My sense is you really have to pay attention to inconsistencies such seeing an instance of taking while the person repeats over and over they are a sharer. Over time the “exceptions” and “anomalies” of taking start to mount.
- Play as a strategic sharer. Share and attempt to pair with other sharers or pure sharers, use “take” as a defense against takers and keep “take” as long as its needed, but move back to “share” as soon as possible. Sane people fit this role, but, this kind of smart game requires players to be able to really read into the game. Pure takers and strategic takers push you into sharing unconditionally (submission) for their own, so taking this kind of stance against them requires both social saviness, game smarts and strength, which usually dont go in hand with “share”
This is generally what I try to do.
* * *
The strategic taker might find unjust that the other players are not buying into the “share” lures, so they have been unable to take big for a while. Oh my where have all the good players gone? oh injustice.
Seems like the key to the strategic taker is always having a new supply of players willing to play the game. And get rid of the players who figured out the taker strategy is what is being played.
“In the Balkan conflict, ALL sides were guilty of atrocities, not just the Serbs. The Albanian Muslims also were guilty of horrendous atrocities.”
Indeed they were, the reason I mentioned the Serbian scientist’s perspective of his village experience in his youth. In point of fact, I’ve found in my travels that Serbians are very much like US culture, unlike the people we defended. But the world can’t just sit on its hands when a UN safehaven is attacked and the members it has promised to protect slaughtered in cold blood. Correct?
Per the rest, Keep in mind the most recent experience outside of WWII the Serbs had anti aircraft that could really reach out and touch you. And before the first flight out by NATO forces, the pilots were told the world wide media was waiting (on the Serbian side) and would broadcast a live execution as soon as they shot down and captured NATO pilot. This after they’d already shot down the first stealth plane that had ever been shot down (the B2). They shot down quite a few drones as well.
Indeed they were, the reason I mentioned the Serbian scientist’s perspective of his village experience in his youth. In point of fact, I’ve found in my travels that Serbians are very much like US culture, unlike the people we defended. But the world can’t just sit on its hands when a UN safehaven is attacked and the members it has promised to protect slaughtered in cold blood. Correct?
Agreed. It really was a clusterfuck from Day 1. No thought was given on how to peacefully breakup a country with centuries of ethnic fighting, and no thought to what transpired in World War 2 and was still fresh in the memory. Western Powers including the U.S. were largely responsible for the degree of bloodshed that took place. When a building is destroyed, the demolition is controlled with a thought out plan. You just don’t blow it up, and say “Hey, whereever it lands oh well”.
Per the rest, Keep in mind the most recent experience outside of WWII the Serbs had anti aircraft that could really reach out and touch you. And before the first flight out by NATO forces, the pilots were told the world wide media was waiting (on the Serbian side) and would broadcast a live execution as soon as they shot down and captured NATO pilot. This after they’d already shot down the first stealth plane that had ever been shot down (the B2). They shot down quite a few drones as well.
The strength, ferocity, and resourefulness of Serbs has often been underestimated throughout history. In case you were wondering, the answer to the question is yes.