Stop being a cliche and write something different

Dating web sites are fascinating places to go to see evidence of the lack of introspection of most people, particularly most young people. A cursory glance at virtually any online dating site will tell you that people are shockingly bad at describing themselves in ways that make them seem appealing.

Everyone writes the same stuff. Most profiles are simply identi-kit personalities. Among the girls at least the people being described are like stock characters from the world's most generic romantic comedy. I'm fun, quirky and outgoing. I love my life, I'm in love with life, I love the life I live and live the life I love. I like hiking, wine, and crossfit. I like going out to bars, but also kicking back on the couch watching Netflix. Friends and family come first. No hookups!

Lest you suspect that I'm just making fun of the women here, there's very likely male equivalents. The beta version is 'I'm a laid-back sweet funny guy who likes restaurants, movies, going out, staying in.' The jock alpha tool version is '6'4, 220 llbs, I'm just on here looking for young girls who are up for for some fun.'

You may think is that this is an explicit form of herding - there's a certain meme or profile idea that people are referencing, perhaps, or that people are trying to signal that they're of a certain type and thus tend to get bunched together with others of that type.

This is possible, but one big factor militates against this being likely.

To wit, most people never actually look at many (if any) profiles from members of the same sex as them. They're writing the same thing, but they most likely don't realise that they're writing the same thing. (Incidentally, this is why I have more familiarity with what's common across female profiles than across male profiles).

As far as I can tell, there are two ways to interpret this.

The first is that people are all fundamentally the same. They work similar crappy jobs that they don't feel define them as people and hence they don't really want to talk about. They relax by drinking beer, watching sports and going to the movies. Some people vaguely feel guilty about this and think they should be doing stuff like reading, cooking and hiking, so that often makes it on the list as an aspirational description, but really most people have no interesting hobbies, nothing they're particularly passionate about, and no unusual interests. And it shows.

Don't get me wrong, there's certainly a significant element of truth to this. But I don't think that's all that's going on.

The other possibility is that people are simply bad at describing themselves in ways that would be useful to others. A similar basic claim would also explain the Dove Beauty Sketches nonsense that the Last Psychiatrist talked about, where a guy draws a sketch based on women's descriptions of themselves versus a sketch based on strangers descriptions of the same women, and hey presto, the stranger is more accurate. Their punchline is that everyone is actually beautiful. I'd say that people just don't know themselves very much.

Even among the population of identically described beer drinking, football watching, bar attending members of the opposite sex, it probably wouldn't take too many minutes of conversation for me to work out whether their personality would be conducive to sitting through a whole dinner with them.

Of course, much of that useful variation comes from things that people may not want to put in their profiles: 'I'll tell stories that go on forever without an ability to read that you're not interested' 'I'll give off a vibe of self-centeredness in the stories I tell about my interactions with other people.' 'I won't have anything interesting to talk to you about'. The last point, of course, sounds like the first theory, so they're not totally disconnected.

But even so, there is some useful information that could be given that is appealing to the opposite sex, but people still don't know how to describe it.

Sometimes, the stuff that's true and flattering may still sound weird to describe. 'I have an appealing way of smiling and maintaining eye contact while we talk'. 'I'm not jealous if you want to spend time with your friends.' 'If we end up in a relationship, I'll leave sweet notes and cupcakes for you in the morning sometimes just because I was thinking about you.' 'I don't hold grudges for very long.'

That said, a lot of the time I suspect people actually just don't realise that they're answering the wrong question.

The lowest level of introspection is to just answer 'What's a flattering but true description of me as a person?', or 'What do I enjoy doing?'. That way leads to drowning in cliche.

The next level of introspection is to think about 'What attributes of me as a person can I talk about that will actually be appealing to the person of the opposite sex?'. If you're a guy writing of your love for watching mixed martial arts, or a girl talking about how she owns multiple cats, these traits may be true, but they're unlikely to be well-calculated for appealing to the likely interests of the other person. Why not start by describing things that they might like about you, instead of just things that you like about yourself?

The highest level is to ponder the question 'What attributes about me will be appealing to the opposite sex and set me apart from the zillions of other profiles that the person is most likely reading?

Which gets me to my overall advice on how to write one of these profiles. Write a draft profile that you think might be vaguely appealing. Then go through whatever site you're using and read a whole lot of profiles of people from the same sex as you. Look at what kind of cliches and boring phrases keep cropping up. Go back your draft profile and delete every single one of them. Then write only about the things that you haven't seen over and over, or the things that seemed neat in other people's profiles.

Conversational Centres of Gravity

Have you noticed that when sitting at a dinner table, conversations have centres of gravity? Not as in metaphorical centres of gravity about subject matters, but as in physical locations. The centre of the conversation is an actual point in space, usually somewhere on the table.

To find out where, the procedure is simple. Look at where everyone's head is facing as discussion proceeds, and then draw a line out from their eyes, perpendicular to their face. Do this for everyone in the group. The spot closest to where the most lines intersect is the centre of gravity.

Here's an example to show you that you don't need to hear any words to know exactly who has what role in the conversation from body language alone:

The centre of gravity is not actually in the middle of the table - instead, it's slightly in front of and to the right of the girl in the brown top.

Once you realise that conversation has an actual locus, it's easy to see that the guy in the red shirt is at risk of being excluded. In a loud room, he would likely be at the periphery of the discussion, sitting there looking inwards trying to stay involved. He's already leaning in quite a way, whereas the girl in pink (equi-distant from the physical centre of the table, but closer to the centre of gravity) looks far more relaxed. Generally, I've found that anything more than 1m away from the centre means you're effectively shut out.

It's hard to see in an example like this, but another sure-fire way to almost guarantee exclusion is if the line of sight from your eyes to the centre of gravity has to pass through part of another person's body. The guy in the grey is physically closer to the centre than the guy in the red, but the fact that the girl in brown is leaning forward with her arms out means he's almost shut out. If the girl in brown turned her left shoulder slightly towards the girl in pink, he'd likely be shut out altogether. Even in the current setup, he looks disconnected from the discussion.

I find that when I can see that the nature of the seating arrangement and the dominance of the various personalities means that I'm going to be excluded, I'll often give up early and try to strike up conversation with the person next to me instead. You can only fight gravity with gravity, and try to create another centre that draws in others when their conversation falters. Usually on a long table there'll be multiple centres of gravity, and one or two guys inevitably in no-mans land. The only hope for them is that the other unaligned powers have something insightful to say. Usually, unfortunately, they don't. In the example above, the centre is significantly determined by layout. As the table gets sufficiently long, the focal point all comes down to who's the most interesting or conversationally dominant (either by being bombastic and loud, or being of higher social status).

In case it wasn't obvious, this theory was honed over various accumulated hours of being shut out of discussions by geography and trying to figure out why.

Infidelity as a Commitment Mechanism

I've wondered a few times on these pages about the psychology of married people who begin affairs. As I wrote at the time:

As the length of the affair increases, the probability that your wife will eventually find out converges to 1. The chances that you'll slip up somehow, or get inadvertently found out through some voicemail, missed call, something, are too high.

And when that happens, the results are as predictable as they are horrible.

So how does it make sense to start down this path, rather than go for an honorable divorce now?

It’s entirely possible that the whole thing is just overconfidence, and the people involved think they can beat the odds forever. Maybe they’re just that stupid.

But I think I’ve figured out an alternative.

What if the eventual inevitability of getting caught is the feature, not the bug?

Suppose the unfaithful partner wants to be out of the relationship, but suffers from hyperbolic discounting. Even someone who has grown bored with their partner will still find it painful to tell their husband or wife that they want a divorce. You are wrenching the heart of the person you once loved enough to declare a lifelong commitment to. You want to be free of them, but that doesn’t mean you’re not dreading the process of getting from here to there.

So what will you do if you’re a hyperbolic discounter? You’ll procrastinate. You’ll convince yourself that you’ll leave your wife next month, or next year. And somehow next year turns into this year, and it never happens.

In this view, embarking on an affair is a sign of wanting out eventually, but not having the courage to just end it then and there. The affair is thus a commitment to eventually end the marriage at some unknown point when you get discovered. It functions somewhat like the Thaler and Bernartzi ‘Save More Tomorrow’ plan, or the complaint to the police by a domestically abused woman in a  no-drop jurisdiction. It’s the ‘Divorce More Tomorrow’ plan for those without the courage to tell their husband or wife that they want to leave. 

The indefinite timeline for discovery is also a plus – a known date would cause a lot of stress as it approached, and would create the risk of massive preference reversals. The unknown aspect means in addition that the final choice is taken out of the cheater’s hands, which benefits those who want to feel like the divorce was the process of some inevitable deterioration in the relationship, rather than an active choice by them (we grew apart, things didn’t work out, the knife went in).

My guess is that when the cheater is eventually discovered in their lie, once the initial shock is overcome, the next feeling is relief. Relief that things are finally drawing to the conclusion that they’ve long wanted, but haven’t had the courage to actually ask for.

It seems a strange explanation, but I can’t think of a better one.

The most interesting data set I've seen in ages

The age old question, as most readers of this august diary will know, is the following:

Do you know what it takes to sell real estate?

The answer, of course, is that it takes brass balls to sell real estate.

A few years ago, Heartiste talked about the Apocalypse opener in picking up women. This was taken from Ciaran at Bristol Lair, and proceeds as follows:

You rock up to a chick and, in a confident, level voice you say

“Hey, how’s it going.”

She will say

“Fine.”

You then say

“Cool. What are you doing later?”

She will say

“I’m not sure.”

You then say

“Do you want to come home with me?”

Then you hold.
Hold.
HOLD………………..
HOLD IT MY SON……………………..
HOLD THE F***ING LINE………………

Boom. Makeout.

And that’s the Apocalypse opener. You don’t ‘build rapport.’ You don’t ‘elicit values.’ You don’t ‘kino escalate.’ You don’t even ask her fucking NAME. You ask if she wants to sleep with you in the THIRD SENTENCE, hold the line, and reap the whirlwind.

Yowser.

That my friends, is some serious real estate transacting right there.

The second, more interesting part, is Ciaran's analysis of how to make the thing work:

The key to making it work is not how you say it, but what you do in the 30 seconds after it’s left your mouth.

Before I talk specifics, let’s state the single CARDINAL SIN of the Apocalypse, which is the ONLY THING that can blow you out.

NEVER BE WEIRD

That’s it. Don’t be weird. You have to deliver the opener deadpan. Like you are talking about the WEATHER. You are not making a BIG THING of it. You’re just ASKING.
You are not MOCKING. You are not JOKING. You are not TOO SERIOUS.

It is NOT PLAYFUL however – it is REAL.

You are REALLY ASKING HER.

If she says no – you only need ONE COMEBACK.

It is this:

“Ok.”

Then you strike up a ‘normal’ conversation about the colour of the wallpaper, or the music that’s playing, or the fact that you did your laundry earlier today.

Whatever.

In other words, the reason it works is not because girls have a desire to go home with any guy that asks. Rather, the reason is that it takes some sizable cojones to deliver this deadpan, and not lose your nerve. To the extent that it may work at all, it's that you definitely show yourself as being unusually self-confident. As long as you don't come across as autistic or a sociopath, this is a clear plus.

The question is, of course, how well does it work? Or more realistically, does it work at all?

Some guy decided to test it out. A hundred times. And what are the results?



The standard comments over at Reddit are pointing out that none of the girls say yes. This is the dog bites man aspect.

But I think it misses the much larger man bites dog story here.

Don't ask how many girls would sleep with him. Ask how many girls stick around, laugh, and don't run away immediately. And bear in mind that this guy guy has several handicaps relative to the stated method, namely:
-He isn't doing the crucial conversational follow up.
-He's doing it often on groups of girls, or guys with girls, both of whom are WAY less likely to be seen to say yes in front of their friends
-He's doing it in broad daylight
-He's doing it in girls who are stone cold sober, and whom are unlikely to be looking to score.

Because if you believe the stated explanation, if you did this in a better setting and kept up the conversation afterwards and sounded mostly normal, would they continue to respond positively?

So how does that metric work?

Look at girl number 6. Look at the way she continues to linger and smile at him after saying no.

Look at girl number 8. She laughs and says 'maybe, I don't know. Perhaps?'

Think about that for a second. Think about it and try to tell me that the real story here is that the guy didn't get a concrete yes immediately.

Number 21, in a group of two, says that he's made their day.

Number 44 says, 'Um no. I mean, you're attractive, I'd probably make out with you.'

More to the point, look at all 100, and count how many responded angrily. The answer is one. One out of a hundred throws a drink at him. Be honest, would you have estimated only a 1% rate of angry retaliation? Because I sure wouldn't. How many guys could claim that their opening line elicited at least a smile and a laugh in 50% of cases?

Again, the unsurprising part is that this doesn't work as implemented.

The remarkable part is how positive the overall response is. Bemused, sure. But positive.

This guy has a bright future ahead of him in the real estate sales business.

The Marketing Genius of Bruno Mars

Like the tobacco industry, you need not want to purchase a product to respect a well-constructed business strategy.

Consider the example of singer Bruno Mars. If you need to understand him in a single picture, try this one:



(via)

He sings cliched romance songs aimed at a young female audience, selling the fantasy of himself as some kind of mix-race romantic icon. Look at him, cheesily holding the hand of some adoring fan and singing directly to her while someone, presumably her friend, takes a photo.

Again, I'm not the target demographic here, but his stuff is well designed.

In particular, here's his famous song 'Just the Way You Are':



First of all, it's marketed broadly at the only demographic still paying for music - impressionable teenage girls.

It begins with pure boilerplate about some hypothetical beautiful girl.

Oh, her eyes, her eyes
Make the stars look like they're not shinin'
Her hair, her hair
Falls perfectly without her trying
She's so beautiful
And I tell her everyday
Yeah

So far, so ordinary. The tune is catchy, the sentiment prosaic.

But then it gets interesting. No, not interesting the way the Iliad is interesting, or the way Yeats is interesting, but the way that a well-constructed ad-campaign is interesting.

I know, I know
When I compliment her she won't believe me
And it's so, it's so
Sad to think that she don't see what I see
But every time she asks me "Do I look okay? "
I say...

These lines flow on effortlessly from the previous ones, constructing a narrative of a pretty but insecure girl. Makes sense.

Then you stop and think, and realise it makes no sense at all. Think back to the really pretty girls you've met. How many of them were in the category of:

a) Being really pretty, but for some reason being really insecure about that fact, and thinking instead they were actually quite ugly

vs.

b) Having known by at least age 10, if not earlier, that they were really hot, as evidenced by being treated nicely by strangers, complimented by adults, having men of various ages stare at them, and all the boys want to kiss them.

Reader, it is a very strong rule that the attractive women of the world generally know that they're attractive. Look at the model in the film clip - do you really think it's credible that 'when he compliments her, she won't believe him'? Don't make me laugh.

So we can be quite sure that song isn't really aimed at girls who are actually pretty but think they aren't. Those girls are unicorns. Rather, it's just aimed at girls who think they aren't pretty. They are a much larger demographic, due to the sad reality of the bell curve - only 2.5% of the population will be two standard deviations above the mean.

Girls who think they're not pretty are, sadly, probably right. But don't worry, Bruno Mars, this hunky romantic guy is here to tell you that you're actually beautiful and just don't know it! Sure, you may not be able to get him directly, but buy his CD anyway! Plus some other Bruno Mars surrogate will surely come along in your life soon.

Then the chorus makes a great segue:

[Chorus:]
When I see your face
There's not a thing that I would change
'Cause you're amazing
Just the way you are
And when you smile
The whole world stops and stares for a while
'Cause girl you're amazing
Just the way you are
Yeah

Notice how effortlessly the song shifts from the third person (she is beautiful) to the second person (you are beautiful). The song is now unashamedly being sung to the audience, just like the first photo. You, listener, are perfect! You shouldn't change anything, just be yourself. 

Talk about mainlining an IV drip of the most saccharine form of feel-good self-esteem culture. There's no problem that can't be fixed by feeling good about yourself.

Admittedly, this sentiment is perhaps less toxic in the area of attractiveness, where a good chunk of the effect really is fixed at birth. (It's more problematic to encourage students to feel good about the fact that they just failed the maths test). Maybe it's just not fun to realise that you're not that attractive, and this is just a palliative.

Perhaps. But the risk is twofold. First, you might just end up with unreasonably high expectations, and end up with nobody, instead of someone who's actually in your league. And secondly, you might think that self-esteem excuses you from self-improvement, especially in the areas where you can make a difference. 

I leave it to the reader to decide the extent to which the phenomenon of excessive self-esteem is a problem among modern American youth of both sexes.

(Also, if you want to hear a really catchy cover of the song that will make you hate yourself as much as I do, check out here.)

The Odd Psychology of Strip Clubs

(Previous thoughts on the psychology of strip clubs here, and male self-deception in relationships here and here.)

The standard complaint about strip clubs is that you're paying to not get what you actually want. In other words, you hand over however much cash to get a lap dance, and you don't actually end up sexually satisfied. Having never attempted to negotiate the transaction, I can't vouch for this, but I'm pretty damn sure that short of offering literally thousands of dollars, you won't get laid. I don't even know if that would work, certainly for many strippers in the US who explicitly see their job as distinct from prostitution. The woman won't get you off (except accidentally), and you won't even be able to touch where you want to, except on their rather limited terms.

Every conversation I've had with guys who paid for a lap dance indicated, privately, that there was little risk of matters escalating to, say, the Bill Clinton level or above.

Strangely, this fact has to be elicited from them in hushed terms - they typically don't like admitting straight out that they didn't get any immediate relief for their however-many hundred dollars. Maintaining the mystique serves the interests of both the stripper and the potentially embarrassed client. As I've said before, this isn't an accident - ambiguous expectations are at the heart of the strip club experience.

So if you believe the standard complaint, men like strip clubs but end up frustrated that they don't actually get any action.

Why is this puzzling though?

The puzzle is that if you actually wanted to get some action for sure, you could have just gone to a brothel and gotten laid with probability 1. Or gone to a bar and gotten laid with probability less than 1.

Taken at face value, it indicates some sort of market failure. Surely there should be more demand for clubs that blurred the line between strip club and brothel?

One answer that I can't rule out is that this is a legality issue - strip clubs are mostly legal, brothels are mostly illegal. In the places where prostitution is legal (e.g. parts of Nevada), I don't know that there's substantial business model innovation along the lines I describe. Maybe there is.

It could also be a quality issue - maybe the type of women who are prostitutes are of a fundamentally different group than strippers, and the male preference is distinct. I dunno though - do you really think the average guy at a strip club is that picky with who he sleeps with, provided the girl is willing? It's possible, but it seems unlikely.

On the other hand, we can pretty conclusively say that it's not a cost issue. Courtesy of Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh, here's some real-world data on how much it costs to get laid in Chicago with a prostitute:

In other words, no matter who you are, the average cost for most things you want is no more than a hundred bucks. If the average lap dance customer is paying less than this, I'll be highly surprised.

So, on face we have a puzzle - many men apparently pay a lot of money for women to take off their clothes and not sleep with them, and then complain about this afterwards. They do this despite passing up the opportunity to pay less money to get laid with certainty.

If the stated preference doesn't seem to make sense, maybe we can get further by hypothesising revealed preference and see where it takes us. The standard price theory assumption here is that the market is satisfying actual customer demand.

In other words, the fact that it's very hard to get laid at the strip club is actually the feature, not the bug. Even if men won't admit it.

The most obvious explanation for this is that men go to strip clubs in groups of friends such as bachelor parties, and in any such group there's going to be a large fraction, if not a substantial majority, for whom their commitments to wives and girlfriends mean that they actually don't want to get laid that night. If this were a possibility, then they might be tempted by hyperbolic discounting to do something they'll regret the next day (or, more likely, 5 seconds after it's done). If you've got commitment problems (in both the relationship sense and the behavioral economics sense), you want to go to the place where it's very difficult to do anything beyond looking at a distance.

Not only that, but the strong prohibition serves a useful signalling mechanism to wives and girlfriends. Consider the problem of the man who actually has no intention of doing anything untoward with random ladies that night, but who may not be able to credibly signal this to his wife. If you go to the strip club, your claim to having not done anything is credible. At a brothel, you're only there if you want to get laid. Even in my hypothetical innovative strip-brothel, the expected level of misbehaviour for an external observer is larger simply because the range of bad actions has expanded. By being easier to explain to significant others (or even just to rationalise to yourself), it means that the whole group is likely to attend, rather than the group splintering off or going for some consensus alternative.

The more interesting possibility, and one that's less discussed, is that even the people getting lap dances themselves would rather be at the strip club than at the brothel. They're not dragged away from the hookers by their more conservative friends. They actually don't want that, at least in revealed preference terms.

The standard model of male desire says that what men want is some combination of a) hot chick and b) orgasm.

Far be it for me to suggest that this model has no explanatory power. It does.

But I submit that this model of the world has difficulty explaining why lots of men go to strip clubs but not many go to brothels.

A more nuanced alternative would say that men definitely want the above things, but what they also want is to be desired by hot women. They want to conquer hot women, and feel them submit to their will. They want to feel the achievement of seduction, of power, of control.

Going to a brothel will satisfy the 'penis in vagina' aspect. But it will quite definitively not satisfy any of the other parts. Quite the contrary, in fact - it will reveal, in painful relief, how far you are from all the other things you desire about the courtship process. It will reveal you as desperate. Not to the rest of the world, who probably won't know. But to yourself, which is much worse.

In his novel, God Knows, Joesph Heller describes the situation of an aging King David. He has his various courtesans, but can no longer get aroused by them. The only woman who still holds his sexual interest is his wife, Bathsheba. But Bathsheba no longer desires him - her only interest is to try to get David to make her own son, Solomon, the next king in place of his elder son, Adonijah, whom he had with another woman.

Heller describes very aptly the paradoxical situation of the absolute monarch who, due to the difficulty of male desire, cannot have what he really wants

Abishag showed him the door and petted my heaving chest until she felt my exasperation abate. Then she washed and dried herself, perfumed her wrists and armpits, and removed her robe to stand before me a moment in all her wonderful virginal nakedness before raising a leg gracefully to enter my bed on one of her biscuit-brown knees to lie down with me again. Naturally, it did no good. I got no heat then, either. I wanted my wife. I want my wife now. Bathsheba does not believe this and would not let it make a difference if she did.

“I don’t do things like that anymore,” Bathsheba responds firmly each time I ask, and, if out of sorts, adds, “I am sick of love.”

She lost her lust when she found her vocations. Her first was to be a queen. Too bad that we had no queens. The next was to be a queen mother, the first in our history, the widowed mother of a reigning sovereign. I refused to trade and I refused to grovel. I could order her into my bed with a single cursory command, of course, and she certainly would be here. But it would be begging, wouldn't it? I am David the king, and I must try not to beg. But God knows that, by one means or another, I am going to lie with her at least one more time before I give up the ghost and bring my fantastic story to an end.

Worldly absolute power does not, alas, extend to making other people actually want you on the terms that you would like.

Being the absolute monarch of the commercial transaction is no different. Paying is begging through the medium of money. The problem is otherwise the same. 

In Heller's tale, David never does get Bathsheba to sleep with him. All the courtesans of the world, no matter how beautiful, are hollow in the end.

Abishag my angel has risen from her chair and approaches without noise, wearing only a vivid scarf. Her eyes are dark as the tents of Kedar. I want my God back; and they send me a girl.

Or as the band Gomez put it:

The things that are given, not won, are the things that you want.

Fake Accents

One of my hobbies is to try to imitate foreign accents. It's often convenient for humor purposes to be able to portray a generic person of some nationality - Yank, Irish, Brit, whatever. You need to get it good enough that that it doesn't devolve into 'half-assed Indian accent', which is the death rattle of any impersonation.

Fake accents are also great as examples of the power of suggestion. The easiest trick is to just find a few words that suggest the place in question according to stereotypes, learn to do them well, and just sprinkle them in liberally. So if you needed to suggest Irishness, you could just learn Irish-sounding versions :

'Guinness'

'Taters'

'County Cork'

'Fookin' English'.

and just use them in some combination.

'I love Guinness with me 'taters, 'specially in County Cork. But not with the fookin' English'.

etc.

If you need to actually give a randomly chosen dialogue in a foreign accent, it's considerably harder, since you can't just pick your own words. The chance of being able to convince people depends greatly on their own familiarity with the accent. The hardest is to convince native speakers, since they'll know immediately what sounds wrong. The gold standard for all this is of course Hugh Laurie - Americans who watched House are constantly surprised to find out that his normally speaking voice is strongly English. This is the real Hugh Laurie voice. You can here his House accent here and here.

My fake American accent is marginal at best. By which I mean, it's pretty good by the standard of most people's fake accents, but put me next to a native-speaking American and you can clearly tell where my flubs and weird vowel sounds are. C.f. Hugh Laurie, my American friends generally find it painful to listen to. So if the test is 'If you suspect it might be fake, can you quickly find evidence to confirm this hypothesis?', then I flunk it by a mile.

But most of the time, this isn't actually the test. The real test is 'If you didn't know in advance that it was fake, is it bad enough to raise in your mind the possibility that it might be an impersonation?'. It turns out that this is a much easier standard to beat, because most of the time people aren't on the lookout for someone using a fake accent.

Being a man of science, I decided to try this in the wild. For the first 40 minutes of meeting new Americans, I'd use my fake American accent, then switch to Australian. I'd then ask the person if they suspected that it was fake. Based on a pretty big sample, the percentage who suspected it was fake was between about 5 and 10%. And this is for an accent so bad that people who know me find it gratingly unpleasant to listen to. But people who don't know me just interpret the mistakes as being some sort of regional variation - the slightly Australian 'r' sounds were forgiven as being some sort of East coast/Boston twang.

It's really an example of the curse of knowledge - people who know some information are typically very bad at putting themselves in the position of someone who didn't know the information. If you know my accent is fake, you suspect that everyone will be able to tell that it's fake. But it doesn't work that way.

The other funny observation on this came from my friend SH, who watched one of my recent attempts. He said that my body language became somewhat forced. It was like, he said, watching me trying to perform a difficult calculation. I'd totally believe it - some significant part of your brain is devoted to making the words come out in a different way, and this is actually pretty hard work.

Convincing them that you're not weird after you switch accents, however, is considerably harder. Nobody said science was easy.

Paying to Not Get Laid

If you want some hilarious reading, check out the website 'Miss Travel'.

Lest my screeds prejudice your impressions, let's just quote the company's own description of what it offers:

'Who needs money, beautiful people travel free!'

Generous: Find a Travel Companion
Let's face it, no one likes to travel alone. We made this so that people who travel can meet other people to join them.

Attractive: Travel Anywhere Free
Want to see the world or find new friends? Meet generous travelers who are seeking travel partners, or local tour guides.

 Got that?

There's so much comedy gold to work through here that it's hard to know where to start.

To begin with the obvious, let's look at the pictures displayed on the opening page:

In other words, everyone is only interested in the women side (at first). The female members want to relate to these attractive go-getting normal women! The men want to meet said women. At a first pass, nobody is interested in the men.

But there's at least a couple of big elephant-in-the-room question left unanswered by the premise of the site. I would submit they are the following:

1. If the guy pays for the woman to travel with him, is the woman expected to sleep with the guy?

2.. If the answer to #1 is yes, is this just glorified prostitution?

3. If the answer to #1 is no, why on earth would guys pay thousands of dollars to not sleep with a woman?

4. Regardless of #1, how often do the people in question actually sleep together.

(Un)Amazingly, none of these questions are answered on the 'FAQ' page.

Let's start with #1. Once you realise the implications of #2 and #3, it's obvious how they have to work it. Go back and read the site, and see if you can figure out the answer.

MissTravel.com is a travel dating website that matches generous travelers with attractive travel girls (or guys).

They square the circle about as best you can.

In other words, the essential dilemma of the site is that women won't go on a site where it's expected that they have to sleep with some guy on the other side of the world, sight unseen. Men, on the other hand, won't fly a woman across the world unless they're pretty sure they're going to get laid.

On face, these seem like incompatible goals. The answer is to pose this as a probabilistic answer - it's a "dating site", so you might get laid, assuming you both want to!

Men hear  "you might get laid, assuming you both want to."

Women hear "you might get laid, assuming you both want to."

Of course, if the expectation of p(getting laid) is radically different between the man and the woman, eventually reality will collide with these distorted beliefs. And the loser will, I predict, be the man.

At the margin though, the whole site is geared up towards attracting women. You might assume that men with money are the scarce resource here. But they're not - the supply of desperate loser men is high, even if the supply of those willing to pay to fly out women to maybe sorta hopefully sleep with them is not so high. At the margin, given it's free for women to sign up, the site owners seem to be betting that if you build a place with lots of hot normal women (well, as normal as you can be while being willing to have a stranger fly you across the country or world), then the losers with fat wallets will come.

But question #2 keeps looming. The moral delineation between 'pay for sex with money', 'pay for sex with things that cost money, but not money directly', and 'have sex consensually unrelated to the transfer of goods, then do nice things for partner which cost money, including gifts' becomes awfully fuzzy when you try to pin it down. The first case is prostitution. The second case is being a sugar daddy. The third case, in various forms, is a relationship. Feminists have argued about this point for decades.

How does Miss Travel deal with this thorny philosophical question? As follows;

ESCORTS: DO NOT ENTER!

MissTravel.com is intended to be used as an online dating website. Our members expect to find genuine profiles, with genuine opportunities to fall in love and enter into a relationship. We understand that every member has a different motivation for joining this site, but we do not support any members who are registering as escorts. This is not an escort site, nor will we permit any type of escorting on this site. MissTravel.com is strictly an online dating service for people who are looking for a travel partner.

If you are an escort, who has advertised your services on any escort website, you are not allowed to use this website. We encourage our members to report any suspicious activity or requests of this nature, and will act upon any complaints.

Let me ask a totally obvious question. Is this message meant to: 

a) deter potential prostitutes from using the site, or

b) reassure regular women with no history of prostitution who are thinking of signing up to the site that doing so will not make them a prostitute.

To ask, as they say, is to know the answer.

Could they make it any more plain? It's like George Bush Sr, with his 'Message: I Care'. They may as well put up a page saying 'FAQ: Does it make me a hooker if I use this site?'. But that would likely be difficult, because then they'd need to disabuse either the men or the women of the nature of the arrangement. This warning is far more clever.

From the male perspective, paradoxically the 'generous travellers' probably don't want to feel like they're paying for a hooker either. Men would much rather pay to probabilistically sleep with someone than they will to sleep with someone with certainty.

So, in theory, this could work. The $64,000 question, however, is #4 - what is the likelihood that the guy will actually get laid?

Obviously they don't put this data on their website. But helpfully they do put some user testimonials, from which we can make some educated guesses. Let's see.

Case #1

The guy in this story is so unimportant that he isn't even mentioned. The woman's second sentence is to complain about the food. The only people who were listed as 'great fun' were the locals. Ouch. It's vanishingly unlikely that the guy got anywhere.

Case #2.

Aside from creepy 'cousine' bit (what better term of endearment for your woman than 'cousin'! Er, or not) this sounds the least like glorified probabilistic prostitution. The fact that he had a GREAT TIME might mean he got some tail, or just that he was too embarrassed to admit that he didn't. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and score this as a win. Note too that the website couldn't wait to include the description of a rich guy from Paris, not a rich guy from Akron, Ohio.

Case #3

This girl at least talks in non-trivial detail about the guy in question, suggesting at a minimum that she didn't just view him as a chump with a wallet. 'I did some shopping alone' = 'I had carte blanche use of his credit card'. Nice! The fact that he didn't bother seeing her during the day screams out lawyer or banker. If they're planning a new trip, I presume this means he did score, unless he's just a glutton for punishment. The 'nice time' made me wince though. I dunno - give him the benefit of the doubt and count it as a win.

Case #4.

Yeesh, this guy is boasting about how much he spent on this girl in the first sentence. The 'indoor fun' bit may just be boasting, but the more relevant part is that the vacation happened in Portland - I don't the stereotypical gold-digger wants to spend a week in Portland, unless they actually somewhat like the guy. I rate it as a win - in fact, I'd rate this as the highest probability so far that he actually got some action.

Case #5.

Nothing quite screams out 'guy who spent a lot of money to not get laid, and is now trying to rationalise it to himself' like the phrase '[we] had a harmonious time together'. That's gotta burn. Fail.

Case #6

I presume 'we' is referring to the guy's wallet, which, as far as this description indicates, is all she saw. Not quite as brutal as the first one, but I don't like this invisible guy's chances. Moral of the story, lads? Avoid the ones who want a Caribbean trip like the plague.

And I've saved the most interesting for last:

Case #7

It took me a second to realise that the picture wasn't mistakenly attached to the wrong testimonial - it's a guy who went to meet another guy. No wonder the picture is a closeup of his face and he seems quite good-looking - he doesn't look like the kind of guy who'd have to pay to fly a woman somewhere to get laid, and sure enough, he isn't. I imagine he probably did score.

So where does this get us? From the straight ones, we're batting 3 from 6. And this is the absolute maximum, because these are the testimonials the website owners themselves cherry-picked in order to seem as good as possible.

And as to cost, these guys probably paid multiple thousands of dollars for these trips. Given you're basically paying to get laid anyway, a hooker seems a lot cheaper.

I'm not surprised that this strategy has a low return. One person who would not have fallen for this kind of stupidity is the great Richard Feynman. Long before the advent of game, he seems to have figured out some of the basic details. As he put it:

"Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything -- not even a package of cigarettes — until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”

 Ignore this at your peril.

Random observations on the intersection of science and art, from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

1. If you want another great example of historical applications of the curse of knowledge (how much you take for granted that everyone knew, when in fact only modern people know), you'd do well to consider the painting 'Joshua commanding the sun to stand still upon Gibeon', by John Martin. It's a wonderful painting:

(Photo credit from the blog 'writing the city', which has an interesting writeup about the painting here)

But I want to focus on a small section of the painting near the storm cloud, which looks like this:

What's that diagonal scratch coming down the mountain? Did someone drop a knife on the painting?

No, my friends. That is the artist's depiction of lightning.

Which, to a modern reader, looks absurdly crude alongside everything else in the painting. Bolt lightning looks more like this:

(image credit)

So how did John Martin get it so badly wrong?

Well, think about it. How do you know what lightning looks like? Answer: because professional photographers using extremely high speed shutters are able to capture precise images of it, which you now take for granted.

If you were alive in 1816, where would your image of lightning come from? Answer: the quarter of a second flash in the sky that you saw maybe a couple of times in your life. Which, from your hazy recollection, probably looked like the line above.

It's amazing how much knowledge you take for granted.

2. Georges Seurat painted in a style called pointillism. In it, lots of tiny coloured points are placed next to each other to create the image of different colours when viewed from a distance. The National Gallery of Art example is called 'The Lighthouse:

(image credit)

What's amazing is that Seurat managed to figure out a primitive version of the RGB pixel displays that you're reading this on. The modern screens we look at are extreme forms of Seurat's pointillism - instead of lots of colours making up the points, we have only three, and instead of the points being large enough to see up close, they're so small that you're not meant to notice them. If you looked at TV screens back from the 80s up really close, you'd get to see the different colours. 

Don't take it personal, kid

Over at reddit a few days ago, there was this thread where a guy talks about how his daughter has cerebral palsy, and now at age three is doing really well.

But what I found interesting was part of the title:

When she was born doctors said she would never walk, talk and would probably need to be institutionalized.

I always find this a strange response. If you want to see what I mean, compare it to an alternative formulation:

She's doing incredibly well, given her initial condition made it unlikely that she'd be able to walk or talk, and probably would have needed to be institutionalised

I don't want to pick on this guy - I'm really glad his daughter is doing so well. But I find it an interesting example of a particular mindset.

For some reason, people seem to really like the narrative 'and then the doctor [delivered bad news], but he was totally wrong!'.

It's not enough that things turned out better than expected. Apparently there's an extra sweetness to proving wrong an expert who delivered negative news.

My best guess is that this comes from a combination of:

a) A general lingering dislike of people who deliver bad news

b) A particular dislike of people who deliver bad news that turns out to be wrong, even if it was probabilistically correct at the time, and

c) A sense that medical conditions have substantial scope for self-fulfilling prophesies: if you treat someone like they're disabled, they'll end up disabled, but if you treat them like a normal person, they'll end up comparatively more normal, even if not perfectly able-bodied.

The first one I can't relate to at all. The medical profession is the last place you want to start shooting the messenger - if you in fact have cancer, you're going to be a hell of a lot better off knowing that and starting chemo than pretending that you've got something else.

The second one I can't really relate to much more. I can understand getting irritated at advice that was bad ex-ante. But that doesn't quite explain it. As a layman, you'll probably have very little idea whether the advice was wrong ex-ante, or right ex-ante but you just ended up in the odd end of the distribution. e.g. Most people born with cerebral palsy won't be able to walk, but your daughter ended up as one of the lucky ones.

More importantly, would you be equally mad with a doctor who delivered ex-ante advice that was correct but ended up being too optimistic? "The doctors said she'd probably be able to walk just fine, but she can't." Unless you'd be equally bothered by this one, there's still something funny going on.

The third one may have some merit, but I don't know how much. I tend to be slightly skeptical (without any particular evidentiary basis) only because it sounds too much like wishful thinking - if we only act like there isn't a problem, there won't be a problem!

If you want the extreme opposite view, let me present you the great James Bagian, a man who was meant to be on the Challenger Space Shuttle but was substituted out shortly before the mission. He declined to wax lyrical about beating the odds or pretend to be shocked that the outcome was as bad as it was:

Was I sad that it happened? Of course. Was I surprised? Not really. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later—and not that much later. At the time, the loss rate was about 4 percent, or one in 25 missions. Challenger was the 25th mission. That's not how statistics works, of course—it's not like you're guaranteed to have 24 good flights and then one bad one, it just happened that way in this case—but still, you think we're going to fly a bunch of missions with a 4 percent failure rate and not have any failures? You gotta be kidding.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that a man who can get in a space shuttle and understand exactly what a 4% probability of the thing exploding means is not somebody inclined to blame a doctor for a negative diagnosis that turned out to be wrong. As indeed evidenced by the entire approach he takes in his current job - figuring out how to reduce medical errors.

As always, sign me up with James Bagian.

What to do if your fiancee rejects the ring you offer.

The Last Psychiatrist has an interesting pair of posts covering the question of what to do if your fiancee rejects the ring you offer as not being good enough. He writes it twice, once from the perspective of the man, once from the perspective of the woman.

The standard male answer (to the question as posed in the abstract) seems to be 'dump the gold-digging b*tch'. In terms of the conclusion, if not the implicit reasoning, breaking up does seem likely to be beneficial. Things probably won't work out. But as The Last Psychiatrist notes, there's a conditioning that's being ignored here - the woman didn't turn into a 'gold-digging b*tch' overnight. To the extent that her response comes as a surprise, it seems likely that you weren't paying enough attention before. Most the time, men's response to the question in the abstract is about signalling that they're the type of man that wouldn't put up with gold-digging, goddamit.

Which is fine, as far as in goes. But remember, in the hypothetical you've gotten to the point of actually proposing. The question only makes sense if you assume that you actually love the woman in question. Which is a fair assumption if you've gotten to the point of proposing.

In which case, you want to think of this as a giant $#!7-test, as Citizen Renegade likes to put it.

So how do you respond then?

Firstly, the bad options.

Number one is to lamely respond, 'Okay, I guess I'll I'll buy you a bigger one then.' You just failed the test. Be sure to retrieve your balls from her handbag in time for the divorce.

The problem with this response (in addition to its lack of spine) is that it misunderstands what this is likely all about. Maybe she really likes big, shiny objects. That's probably part of it. But is the likelihood higher that it's about the ring per se or the ring as a symbol of the size of your commitment to her, and your ability to understand that she really wanted a big ring, both of which she's doubting?

Bet on the latter. And that ship has sailed - buying a bigger ring won't fix it. If you just agree, you're likely making yourself look very beta, which will make her resent you more.

What about getting angry? Not great either. I'm betting someone with the nerve to reject a ring is likely to be a) quite stubborn and b) a total princess. I imagine that if you angrily refuse, you're just going to get into a huge brawl over it, and she'll likely convince herself that this is in fact a huge deal, and the straw that broke the camel's back etc. etc. Which, if you want to break up, is fine. If you don't, then it seems poorly thought out.

So what's left? My vote would be to grin and respond 'Well, stiff $#!7. This is the one on offer.'

The grin is important, because you don't want to appear butthurt. You're treating the request as ridiculous and a self-evidence joke, while still hoping is to still defuse the situation.

Her likely response would be something along the lines of 'No, I'm serious.'

To which I would reply, with a slight and fading smirk, and in a tone indicating that the matter seems at an end,  'So am I.'

If she continues to push, it seems strained to keep trying to brush it off. Eventually, if you needed to back it up with a serious reason, my guess would be the following:

'The ring is not important. Marriage is important. The ring is my promise and offer to marry you. If you don't want it *pause and shrug*, don't take it.'

This reframes the issue, and with an implicit firmness saying (correctly) that her rejecting it won't be treated as a small deal.

Personally, I wouldn't want to marry her anyway. Not necessarily because she's a gold-digger, although it's a bad sign about being selfish. The Last Psychiatrist is right that this is likely about the ring as a symbol of your commitment, more than her wanting your money itself. Real gold-diggers are usually far too mercenary to do something as stupid as rejecting a ring. This jeopardises the chances of you guys getting married, and once the marriage happens, she's got half your money anyway. Including the extra money that you didn't spend on the ring. No, rejecting a ring is the sign of a princess, and an insecure princess as well. It's also a sign that you didn't understand this part of her well enough to know that you had to buy an expensive ring. That's also a bad sign for the marriage.

The problem for me is that I can't imagine a marriage with me would work for someone who was so concerned about symbolism. The substance of the issue, to me, is the marriage, not the ring. It's the same as the problem with being too excited about the wedding versus the marriage. Even if the ring is too small, a willingness to jeoparise the marriage for the sake of the ring shows a set of priorities that seems unlikely to work with mine in the long run. And if I ever got that response, it would mean that I'd failed to understand this earlier, in which case so much the worse for me.

The Conversations of Doomed Men

I read this last night, and have found myself strangely moved and preoccupied with it ever since.

Popular Mechanics has a transcription of the black-box record aboard Air France Flight 447, the plane which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1st, 2009, killing everyone on board.

What's very interesting is that they recount the conversation between the two co-pilots who were flying at the time, and intersperse it with descriptions of what was actually going on with the plane as the discussion took place.

Let me quote the part of the article that is most puzzling:

The Airbus's stall alarm is designed to be impossible to ignore. Yet for the duration of the flight, none of the pilots will mention it, or acknowledge the possibility that the plane has indeed stalled—even though the word "Stall!" will blare through the cockpit 75 times. Throughout, Bonin will keep pulling back on the stick, the exact opposite of what he must do to recover from the stall.

I quote that much merely to encourage you to read it all- if I quote more, I am going to do injustice to just how strange it is to read the whole transcription. So you should definitely read the whole thing. And when you're done (and only then), come back and read the rest of my thoughts below the jump:

Psychologists Getting Statistics Wrong

Ace of Spades links to a study that claims to show that people view atheists as being less trustworthy. This was also covered in the National Post. The headline claim is attention-grabbing:

Atheists cannot be trusted: Religious people rank non-believers alongside rapists, study

Controversial stuff. As in all this stuff, you should always read the original study before rubbishing it. The author, Will Gervais, kindly has a version on his webpage, which you can read here. And I'm sorry to say that nearly the whole study appears to be done wrong.

So how exactly does Mr Gervais establish that atheists are as untrustworthy as rapists? Let the study tell the story - this is Study 2 of 6, but 5 out of the 6 studies have the same problem:

One hundred five UBC undergraduates (age range 18 –25 years, M 19.95; 71% female) participated for extra credit. Participants read the following description of an untrustworthy man who is willing to behave selfishly (and criminally) when other people will not find out:

Richard is 31 years old. On his way to work one day, he accidentally backed his car into a parked van. Because pedestrians were watching, he got out of his car. He pretended to write down his insurance information. He then tucked the blank note into the van’s window before getting back into his car and driving away. Later the same day, Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody was looking, so he took all of the money out of the wallet. He then threw the wallet in a trash can.

Next, participants chose whether they thought it more probable that Richard was either (a) a teacher or (b) a teacher and XXXX. We manipulated XXXX between subjects. XXXX was either “a Christian” (n 26), “a Muslim” (n 26), “a rapist” (n 26), or “an atheist (someone who does not believe in God)” (n 27).

So the authors are relying on the conjunction fallacy of Tversky and Kahnemann (1983) - logically, the probability of being a teacher and [Y] is less than or equal to the unconditional probability of being a teacher, for all values of [Y]. People sometimes get this the wrong way around if the behaviour is associated with the trait. That is what the authors are trying to test (I think). They report that the proportion of people who answered (wrongly) that the person was more likely to be a teacher and an atheist was higher than the proportion who answered (wrongly) that the person was more likely to be a teacher and a Christian.

The first thing that should make alarm bells start ringing in your head is the way the question is phrased. To say 'are atheists untrustworthy?' is to ask the probability of being untrustworthy given you're an atheist. But the question implicitly being asked in the survey is something different, namely the probability of being an atheist given you're untrustworthy. These are not the same thing!!!! And this is really going to screw up the inferences.

If statistics bore you, let me skip to the punchline - the authors screw it up because they're not taking into account that there's tons of atheists and very few rapists. This means that the probability of being an atheist given you're untrustworthy is always going to be much higher than the probability of being a rapist given you're untrustworthy. But this says nothing at all about trustworthiness, and everything about how rare it is that a person is a rapist! And this makes the whole study flawed.

For stats people, what is actually being asked is whether people erroneously believe that:
P(teacher | Untrustworthy actions)  <  P(teacher AND atheist | Untrustworthy actions).

This answer is then compared to answers to the question as to whether:
P(teacher | Untrustworthy actions)  <  P(teacher AND rapist | Untrustworthy actions).

Since the left hand side is the same in each inequality, let's think about what could drive differences in the right hand side (even if people are screwing it up via the conjunction fallacy, this is still the implicit comparison). Using Bayes Rule:



(where A1 = Teacher and Atheist, A2 = Teacher and Rapist, and B = Untrustworthy).

Let's ignore the teacher bit for simplicity (it doesn't change the logic). What the author really wants to know is the second ratio - are people viewed as more likely to be untrustworthy given they're an atheist, relative to being untrustworthy given they're a rapist.

What they're actually measuring is the first ratio: the probability of being an atheist given you're untrustworthy versus the probability of being a rapist given you're untrustworthy.

But the difference between the two ratios is also driven by the third ratio -  the overall probability of being a rapist versus an atheist, regardless of whether you're untrustworthy.

And this ratio is huge! The study was done at the University of British Columbia. According to Wikipedia, 42.2% of Vancouver is atheist. What's the probability of being a rapist?  The overall rate of rape crimes in Canada is 0.016 per 1000 people. As long as each rape is only committed by one rapist, this will overstate the probability of being a rapist (i.e. if a rapist has multiple victims, the probability of being a rapist will be lower. If a victim is raped by multiple people in a single rape, the number will be higher, however)

So the third term is equal to 42.2/0.0016 = 26,375! In other words, suppose that people thought that you were 1000 times more likely to be untrustworthy if you were a rapist than an atheist (i.e. the second ratio equals 1/1000). The left hand side will be equal to 26375/1000 = 26.375. In other words, P(atheist | untrustworthy) will always be much higher than P(rapist | untrustworthy), even if rapists are considered far less trustworthy than atheists.

The authors only report the proportion of respondents who made the conjunction error - in other words, they report the number who state that P(teacher | Untrustworthy actions)  <  P(teacher AND Y | Untrustworthy actions), which is clearly wrong, and compare this for different values of Y. Sadly, this doesn't allow us to say anything about the real ratio, which is P(Untrustworthy | Atheist) versus P(Untrustworthy | Rapist).

In other words, the study is unsalvageable if you're trying to answer the question you're hoping to ask. Which is a shame, because it's actually an interesting question.

The cause of military suicides

A statistic that I had a strong hunch was true as soon as I heard it:

The suicide rates are at all time highs and rising in the Army and Marine Corps. Over 70% of the sucides are because a man’s wife or girlfriend is leaving him while deployed to a war zone. She is almost always taking the kids if there are any and quite often( most of the time) depleting (legally stealing) his bank accounts too. She is often enough cheating on him.

Sure enough, the base statistic holds up:

Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Peter Chiarelli reviewed investigations on Soldier suicides, which reached a three-decade high in 2008, and reported that in over 70 percent of the cases, “you have one constant, and that was a problem with a relationship.”

Yeah, translate that from the officialspeak and I'm pretty sure that a 'problem with the relationship' when one party is in a combat zone probably looks a lot like the first quote. You can disagree with the agency in the first quote (the woman is 'leaving', and thus is implied to be making the selfish choice), but it probably doesn't change much from the perspective of the man.

But if I had to hazard a guess at the actual agency, let's put it this way - if you're in an all-male combat unit living in a military base overseas, you probably don't have a whole lot of options to pick up women, nor would I imagine that you'd be likely to stop calling your wife at every chance in preference for playing X-Box. It's possible that he slept with a hooker, but the situation of a man in a warzone suddenly deciding he's sick of his wife and wanting to leave... let's just say it sound psychologically less likely than the alternative .

But the problem is not divorce - relationships end for lots of reasons, and given the tendency for military people to marry young, they may have been likely to end that way anyway.

No, the real horror stories are much worse. The first quote comes from some truly repulsive stories of a guy in the Army:

Then of course there was the soldier in my company who had a baby with his wife and she sent him streaming videos via internet of her having sex with other men while his baby son was in the house...

Read on, and be appalled.

The law is necessarily an imperfect instrument for enforcing proper conduct. In other words, laws can never be a substitute for morality. They can circumscribe some of the worst behavior (and much behavior that is completely trivial), but they are a very weak guide for what one ought to do. A society that organises itself around restraining only behaviour that is illegal will quickly turn into rampant misery.

It is illegal to cross at the traffic lights when the walk sign isn't flashing.

It is not illegal to sleep with the wife of a man who is risking getting a bullet in the ass to defend your freedom, nor is it illegal to maliciously screw said wife on camera and send the footage to the husband while he is in a warzone.

If there is any justice in the world, both the man and the woman who did this would be on the receiving end of life-threatening levels of ass-kicking, ideally from the husband himself, but failing that, from friends, family members, or just strangers with an interest in fairness.

Of course, there isn't any justice in the world for this kind of outrage, so both of them will get away with it completely.

Human nature being what it is, people in war zones are sometimes driven mad by the atrocity and horror that they have to witness. But men can be very resilient in dealing with this challenges, knowing that there is a higher purpose to their actions, and having been prepared to face these difficulties.

But to expect them to do all this while their own personal world that they fight and die for is being senselessly lost to them as they're away, and it's their own loved ones who are twisting the knife - that is too much to bear. That is when people lose hope, and wonder what this is all for. And frankly, what would you say to them? Other than the fact that this is all stupendously unjust, and there's nothing that can be done? Plenty of fish in the sea, old chap?

As Eric Bogle sang about war - I never knew there was worse things than dying.

Divorce and Mistakes

It is a sound rule for those with any understanding of probability that the only real mistakes are ex-ante mistakes. Put simply, you should only beat yourself up for decisions that you should have been able to figure out were a mistake based on what you knew at the time. If something turns out to be a bad decision because of things you found out later, there’s no sense beating yourself up over it. 

So if you go to a casino and bet on black (following the Passenger 57 Edict) and it comes up red, betting on black was not in any meaningful sense a ‘mistake’. At the time, red was just as good a bet as black. Now, it may be an ex-ante mistake to play roulette (which has fairly bad odds) rather than craps (which has better odds). It may well have been an ex-ante mistake to go to the casino in the first place. Those are decisions worth beating yourself up over. Landing on red sucks, but it doesn’t indicate a mistake.

To this end, I often wonder what percentage of divorces are the result of an ex-ante mistake. In other words, sometimes it’s clear from the start that a given partnership will not work (although usually not to the participants). Did you date for less than 3 months before he proposed? Did he have a history of cheating on you multiple times in the leadup to the marriage? Has she been divorced 5 times already? These kinds of things probably should be red flags. I wouldn’t say that anyone who marries in these cases is making an ex-ante mistake (there are lots of factors to consider, and these are still small determinants).

And a lot of the time things just don’t work out, even though the couple seemed well-suited to each other and deeply in love. A lifetime is a long time to stay together. And if you (or your spouse) has periodic temptations towards making Seriously Bad Decisions, you find yourself in a place not dissimilar from the IRA’s boast to Margaret Thatcher that ‘you have to be lucky every day, whereas we only have to be lucky once’.

But given all this, I’m still not sure what the true number would be, even if taken subjectively from the point of view of the divorcees. In other words, how many people who get divorced look back on heir marriage and think ‘Gee, it was a mistake to marry this person, and I shouldn’t have been such an idiot’, as opposed to thinking ‘Yeah, it sucks that it didn’t work out, but we had our good times, and I can still see why I made the decisions I did.’ 

I dunno. Even if I knew a large enough sample of divorced people to ask, it seems too likely to cause distress or offence relative to my idle curiosity on the subject

Semi-Conscious Thoughts and Free Parking

I don't know about you, but my brain has a category of thoughts that I describe as 'semi-conscious'. These are the cases where you see something that's slightly anomalous or unusual. The event is weird enough that you vaguely remember it, but not so weird that you immediately stop and wonder why it might be there (unlike, say, seeing  a clown on a unicycle riding down the road).  But it's only later on when you see something else that explains it do you remember that you sort-of noted how the underlying thing was unusual.

Today, for instance, I was looking for parking near a coffee shop, and was slightly distracted. The side of the road I was on looked pretty full, but I noticed that the opposite side of the street had a number of spots. I wheeled around, pulled up outside the coffee shop, and didn't think about it. I came back out 5 minutes later, and had gotten a ticket. I looked around - there was no requirement for paid parking, and I wasn't in a no-parking zone. The ticket revealed the answer, of course - I had been there for the two hours of the week where that particular side of the street had street cleaning.

And suddenly it all makes sense! Having one side of the street be totally full and the other side be mostly empty is unlikely if cars are all parking at random. In my case, if one side of the street were completely deserted, this might raise the thought to conscious questioning ('why is nobody parked here? is there something funny going on?) but semi-empty wasn't enough.

The other category of 'semi-conscious thoughts' I notice are cases where people are acting slightly oddly relative to what you'd expect. In other words, there's some small action they do that seems at odds with your general model of their personality. Girlfriend or husband acting slightly odd? Yeah, you may want to at least think about why that could be, with particular emphasis on models of behaviour that you don't normally contemplate. Maybe they had something crap happen at work that they didn't want to tell you about. Maybe they're cheating on you. Maybe it's a surprise party they're planning for you. In any case, it's probably worth at least thinking about, because the actions that would raise it to the level of conscious thought may be less pleasant than you'd like.

In my experience, these odd anomalies are often very good signs that your model of the world is somewhat wrong. Of course, if you chased every slightly odd-looking thing, you'd probably get a large majority of dead-ends and wasted time. Still, if there's a moral here (and there probably isn't), it would be to pay more attention to vaguely odd things.

The Mentality of Psychopaths

I've never met anyone I actually was sure was a psychopath. I've known people that I suspected of it, but perhaps in its milder forms. That is, they seemed unusually calculating and careful in how they presented themselves, and demonstrated a level of of empathy for other people that was stunted, although still perceptible.

I came across this very interesting letter from a reformed psychopath, talking about the mentality of what it's like. The whole thing is fascinating. Some excerpts:

We are neither the cartoon evil serial killers, nor the 'its your boss' CEO's always chasing profit at the expense of everyone else. While we are both of those things, it is a sad caricature of itself.

...

You are right to say that psychopaths hate weakness, they will attempt to conceal anything that might present as a vulnerability.

...

We are good at identifying, very rapidly, extreme traits of those around us which allows us to discern vulnerabilities, frailties, and mental conditions. It also makes psychopaths supreme manipulators, for they can mimick human emotions they do not feel, play on these emotions and extract concessions.

Huh. Read the whole thing.

I think I would actually enjoy a conversation with a reformed psychopath, in part to find out what they perceived as my psychological weaknesses to exploit. As long as, you know, they weren't able to stab me with a kitchen knife at the time.

The Strip Club Litmus Test of Alpha Cred

Here's something I was thinking about recently.

A good rough measure of how alpha a given guy is is how comfortable he is around strippers. Not whether he seeks out strip clubs, but should he find himself in one for whatever reason (e.g. a bachelor party) how he comports himself while there.

Strippers are experts - nay, professionals - at using men's own sexual desire against them to extract money. Moreover, the measure of their expertise is that (most of the time) they get paid despite not actually providing what the man really wants - namely, to have sex with the stripper.

From conversations with various guys, I have come to the conclusion that the proportion of males who are made distinctly uncomfortable by strippers and strip clubs is far higher than is commonly acknowledged. And there are very good reasons for this. The normal dynamics of male/female interactions are completely reversed, and a good number of these changes seem to me to turn the power advantage towards the stripper.

A lot of this comes from the fact that the social norms of what is acceptable behaviour are drastically reversed. In polite society, it's rude to stare in general, it's ruder to stare at a woman's breasts, and if someone happens to be naked in front of you for whatever reason, you should look away (or at best steal a furtive glance).

The challenge at strip clubs is not so much that that these social norms are reversed (which is odd enough in itself), but moreover the ambiguity in how much they're reversed. Looking in general is clearly okay, but it's still surprisingly challenging to maintain composure in a conversation while staring directly at someone's crotch. If you don't believe me, try it some time. But if the man looks away, it's an implicit acknowledgement that he wanted to look, but chickened out.

Moreover, the question of what exactly is allowed is left deliberately unclear. Obviously he'd like to touch her, but the bouncer might beat him up. Okay, so now he's getting a lap dance. Surely now it's okay to touch, right? Wait, you're still not meant to. Maybe just once?

Reader, this feeling is not accidental - it is exactly the response that strippers are aiming to generate. When someone feels unsure of what to do, they are more likely to pay money just to be on the safe side of what's expected and allowed in the situation. Imagine a used car salesman skilled in the most powerful pressure selling techniques, in a market where they know everything about what the price is and what you're buying, and you know nothing, and they're using that against you to their fullest advantage.

Can you see why a good number of men may not actually enjoy this, female nudity notwithstanding?

This is also why the response of men in these circumstances says a surprising amount about them.

Betas are likely to constantly second-guess themselves about what they can do, worried about what the girl will think. They're more likely to actually avoid the whole situation, and either just pay a ton of money quickly, or try to hide in corners or make themselves inconspicuous, which of course is completely ineffectual. Strippers know that trick too. What they'd actually like is to just get out of there, but usually the male peer pressure that brought them there makes this difficult.

The natural alphas I have known have all maintained an easy, somewhat cocky rapport around strippers. They're comfortable with staring, but do so with a smirk. The reality is that they don't really care what the stripper thinks, and are just enjoying themselves. And this kind of aloof, amused indifference in the face of female sexuality is a character trait that in other contexts is likely to be attractive.

The reality is that there are more betas in the world than alphas. I would wager that far more bachelors than you think would be quite relieved to dispense entirely with the tradition of strippers at bachelor parties.

Wall Street Occupied, Brain Cavities Vacant

In Manhattan, the 'Occupy Wall Street' protests continue to protest against whatever the hell it is that they're protesting against - capitalism, bailouts, Wall Street, 'corporate greed', et cetera.

The Last Psychiatrist is on fire on this one, nailing the motivation of a lot of the protesters:

Though narcissism demands the right to self-identify, narcissists are often unable to do so because they don't know what it is they want to be. Who am I? What are the rules of my identity? So people look for shortcuts, like modeling oneself after another existing character. But the considerably more regressive maneuver is to define yourself in opposition to things. "I can't tell you what I want for dinner," says the toddler, "but I am certain I don't want that. Or that. Or that. And if you put that slop in front of me I swear to God you will wear it." 

What do the protestors want? Can they articulate it meaningfully, not in platitudes or "people over profits" or "more fair income redistribution" soundbites? They can't tell you because they don't know. They can, however, yell at you what they don't like, and the louder they yell it the more they hear it themselves.

Exactly. These protests are all about righteous indignation by young people. I'd wager that if you asked the people there 'What, specifically, do you actually want to happen?', they wouldn't actually know. So you want to shut down Wall Street, huh? Okay, so do you want to prohibit all equity financing of companies? So how do people raise finance for large enterprises when they don't have pledgeable assets - wouldn't that make it really hard to create Google? Or do you just want to prohibit the trading of shares in secondary markets? In that case, won't entrepreneurs be reluctant to start businesses, knowing that they have to run them forever and their holdings in the company will be completely illiquid? And if you shut down markets, how will people share risk - how should wheat farmers hedge their exposure to wheat prices when the futures markets close? What's that, you say? You have absolutely no God damn idea?

To make the protests even stupider, when a bunch of people want to protest with sensible complaints (no more bailouts of major banks), they attract the usual rabble of professional protesters with moronic complaints (end capitalism!), thereby ensuring that the overall message of the protest will be
a) vague and unfocused, and
b) at least half comprised of stupidity.

So Joe Public turns on the TV, and just sees the usual rabble of stupid signs and unwashed hippies that turn up at WTO meetings and the G20 summits, and dismisses them as a bunch of punk kids.

This is all so incredibly predictable that you have to assume these people haven't really thought this through, or just aren't interested in enacting any change. I'm betting on the latter - they are simply in love with their own sense of self-righteousness, and the protests are merely a prop for this.

The Last Psychiatrist continues here:

But when the oppressive entity is so poorly defined (e.g. Wall Street, “the banks”, corruption) these protests always and without fail turn into protests against the police. Idiotically, in the minds of the protestors, the police are standing in for the banks. So all their antagonism and vitriol is turned against police officers who would probably rather be doing anything than babysitting the hipsters attending their social media drum circle.

This became more apparent when one of the protesters got maced, apparently without any provocation, and it was captured on YouTube.



As a matter of practicality, having a bunch of unarmed girls get maced on camera has been immensely valuable to the protests. It inevitably generates a good deal of middle class sympathy for them, which (because of the vagaries of human psychology) tends to spill over into support for their cause. Watching the video above reminded me of a post by the War Nerd on the value of martyrs in guerrilla warfare:

The value of a dead body only came along with modern guerrilla warfare and the notion of martyrs, because guerrilla wars tend to start off with some kind of suicidal attack like the ones the Muslims staged in Southern Thailand a few years back. They stood around waving machetes outside fortified police barracks and got mowed down. What you do then is take the bodies home, make a big fuss over them, stage giant funerals—funerals are very, very important in guerrilla culture—and generally talk them up. Since most of these guys are barely trained or untrained, they’re not worth much alive—like those KLA men who were totally uselsss as live fighters—but they can be valuable as Hell once they’re dead. It’s just a much easier job, lying still in a coffin. Not nearly as easy to mess up as your basic L-shaped ambush, which is a very tricky thing. Hell, the average recruit can learn to be a good corpse in a tenth the time it takes to make a decent live guerrilla fighter.

Substitute 'dead bodies' for 'maced girls' and 'funerals' with 'protests about police brutality' about it's eerie how well that rings true.

Heckuva job, Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna! You manage to be both needlessly brutal against peaceful protesters AND promote their stupid cause at the same time.