An Open Letter to a Smart Young Man About Dating Women

0.

Dear [redacted],

It’s been a while since we spoke. You’re finishing high school and starting college soon, no? Very good. One of your parents (I won’t say which) asked me to talk to you about dating issues. It’s not that they couldn’t tell you some of this stuff themselves. It’s just that teenagers often don’t want to listen to things coming from their parents.

From your point of view, this is basically unsolicited advice. The first rule of interpreting unsolicited advice is that it is nearly always actually about the person dispensing the advice, and only somewhat about the person to whom advice is being given. Solicited advice is fundamentally different in this regard. Usually, the most heartfelt, passionate advice that people give is addressed to a younger version of themselves, no matter who the nominal audience is. It is usually about the mistakes they made that they now understand better, but also sometimes about great triumphs they had which their younger self wouldn’t have envisaged. These two possibilities complicate matters. It's somewhat like Freud. He was wrong on the specific point that everyone secretly wanted to have sex with their parents, but right on the broader point that if you want to understand someone's personality, you need to start with the relationship they have with their parents. So it is here. It doesn't mean that unsolicited advice is wrong, it just means you should consider the extent to which you actually fit the same case as the younger version of them, and adjust accordingly. I’ve tried to tailor this as much as possible to a) the parts I think you might actually listen to, and b) the things you might not figure out on your own. It as much about you as possible, subject to the caveats above.

1. 

This is not primarily advice about how women work, or how to find one to date. For that, read the Chateau Heartiste archives, especially the early stuff. You can learn a lot from Heartiste, but you need to be careful. He is at his best talking about applied evolutionary psychology. Follow what Heartiste says, and you will get laid. For a man of your age, this is almost certainly your main concern. But make sure you keep an eye on the positive - how the world works - versus the normative - how ought you act in your life with this knowledge? This is distinct. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you ought to. And we're back at the point above – Heartiste’s advice, like everyone’s, is probably going to be slanted towards being somewhat self-serving. There's a normative suggestion that endless philandering is something that you should do, that it's a life well lived. Well, that's the rub, isn't it? Do you want to end up like Heartiste, at least as much as you can estimate what his life is like?

But you're busy. You don't want to spend weeks reading old blog posts (though you should, they're very entertaining too). Okay, fine. Let me give you the condensed Cliff notes version, as much as I understand it.

Lesson #1.

On average, women will be attracted to behaviors and traits that would have been associated with the alpha male chimp in pre-historic society.

Being big and strong, obviously. But more importantly, how you carry yourself. Are you confident? This is nearly universally stated by women as being attractive. Being confident in a chimp society, if you weren't the top chimp, was a fast way to get yourself killed. Now it isn't, of course, but our brains are still wired the same way. Similar things apply for status and social proof. Acting like you have options with women, and could take it or leave it with any particular girl, is paradoxically more likely to succeed than acting very eager and desperate. Girls can smell desperation at a thousand miles. If you are desperate, it’s all the more important to act like you’re not.

You're a smart young man, and like most smart young men, your social status will probably go up as you leave high school, not down. The dumb jocks peak at age 14. But in the interim, you'd be amazed just how far "fake it" can take you as advice. If you pretend to be confident, it works almost the same as the real thing. Easier said than done, of course, but that's life.

Lesson #2.

In any battle between women's stated preference and their revealed preference, bet on their revealed preference.

Applying this takes some skill, because you have to pay attention to what women's revealed preference actually is, and society tends to give you bad advice on this front. Moreover, you will be tempted to make the worst common mistake that many young men make - if in doubt, they substitute the question "what would I want in this situation", which is generally a very poor strategy. The traits and behaviors that you would want in a woman are generally not the same traits and behaviors that a woman wants in you.

For instance, suppose a woman says that she wants a sweet, funny guy who buys her roses and cuddles her at night. She's not lying, she does want this. But what it's important to realize is that when she says this, she's imagining Brad Pitt doing these things. When a man is high in status, displays of commitment are desired, because the primary worry is that he's going to leave. You, however, have the preliminary problem - how to I become more of a facsimile of Brad Pitt? Not a movie star necessarily, but how do I carry myself like Tyler Durden in Fight Club? This is the problem you need to solve, but women won't tell you this. If you start out being Bob from Accounting and act like their stated preference claims, you'll get fired. If they say they want sweet guys and instead keep going out with the @**hole bass player from the band, you'd do far better learning how to play bass and give less of a damn when dealing with women.

A crude but effective approximation of “bet on revealed preference” is just “act as much as possible like the guys who are successful with women”.

Lesson #3.

Don't be pathetic.

The reason I like this version is that it condenses many things down into one idea, because we all kind of know what "pathetic" looks like. Like many things in life, game advice eventually hits diminishing returns. And the biggest benefits actually come early on, from cutting out the left tail of pathetic, cringeworthy behavior. If you do nothing else, read Heartiste's hilarious "Beta of the Month" series. This will give you a range of examples of terrible behavior to avoid. If you just avoid this kind of thing, you'll be way ahead of the curve.

As they used to say when people still wrote blogs, go read the whole thing. There are only a few blogs I've gone back and read from start to finish. Heartiste is one, and Moldbug is the other.

2. 

At some point, I decided that I was only going to write blog posts about things that I hadn't actually read elsewhere. So think of this letter as an addendum to the kinds of things I've seen written in game blogs, and a way of avoiding the pitfalls that might come from taking 2010-2018 manosphere advice too literally.

Chief among these is the following. One of the most consistently unpopular messages in human society is the reality of the budget constraint. Telling people that life has hard, unpleasant binding tradeoffs, and that something inevitably has to be sacrificed, is a truth that it is human nature to resist as far as possible.

It is extraordinarily unlikely that you will get everything you want. If you are lucky, you will get some or most of what you want, depending on how expansive are your wants. The right choice, in a big picture sense, will very likely involve giving up something else you want, with all the attendant regret that entails.

The fact that people generally don’t want to hear this message goes doubly so for those who write about self-improvement. They’re right to do so for the purpose they have. For game in particular, imbuing a sense of irrational self-confidence is very important when approaching women, especially among self-doubting beginners. It’s not for nothing that I began by saying “read Heartiste first”.

Being irrationally overconfident when it comes to women is great tactics, but not great strategy. In other words, when approaching any one woman at a bar, you absolutely want to be irrationally overconfident. But it doesn’t follow that you also want to be irrationally overconfident about your long-term budget constraint, and what tradeoffs it implies.

The rest of this post is primarily about what some of those budget constraints are, as I see them, and what you should do about them.

3.

Game authors are very good at skewering women's self-deceits and delusions. The largest among these is that they can just date around, prioritise their job and travel, and start thinking about trying to find a husband in their late twenties or early thirties. This is, of course, a disastrous strategy, on average, and comes with a high probability of ending up as a cat lady, or ending up with no children/fewer children than you’d like, if you do find a husband.

But still, there's an equivalent male delusion, and it goes like this.

“Men just keep getting better and better over time.”

It is indeed true that men don't have nearly as steep a decline in sexual market value over time. This is complicated by the fact that wealth and status take on different trajectories, and women's preferences aren't as strictly driven by looks and youth as men's are.

But the basic idea that men just keep getting better seems ludicrous to me, particularly because it violates revealed preference arguments. Limiting oneself to women above the age of consent (here assumed 18), at what age are women the most physically attractive? Probably ages 18-22. Men mostly, but not entirely, have preferences based on age and physical attractiveness, both of which are correlated on average. Great. So who are the 18 year old women actually dating?

The answer is, largely men ages 18-25. The 22 year olds are generally dating men ages 22-28. At least in my observational experience.

Now, part of this is just the mechanics of dating. Who are you actually interacting with? If you're at college, probably other people at college. In a different world, say southern Europe 300 years ago, it may have been much more normal for a 15 year old to marry a 40 year old. But we ain’t in that world. The Smashing Pumpkins put it quite memorably: Love – it’s who you know. At a bare minimum, people the same age have a much higher chance in our largely age-stratified society to meet and interact with hot young women in an environment where dating is on the cards.

But even so, let's consider the hypothesis that 18 year olds are actually more attracted to 35 or 40 year old men. In such a case, we have to posit a fairly significant market failure as to why they aren't dating them. Does Tinder not exist for such women? Could they not just go online and select their desired age range as 35-45? Of course they could. Doesn't revealed preference seem more believable? In this view, your ability to attract 18 year olds probably maxes out at about 22, at least if you’re still in college then. Your ability to date 22 year olds probably maxes out at 26-27. If you're getting better on other dimensions (richer, higher status job), you can compensate partially, but probably only partially.

If you want to date 27 year olds, you'll have a good many years ahead in which you can do this easily. If you want to date college freshmen, you won't. You can still do it, it just involves getting luckier, or drawing from more idiosyncratic bits of the distribution (i.e. paying a cost on some other dimension).

Positing that George Clooney has gotten more attractive to women as he aged is every bit as absurd as saying that Christie Brinkley still looked hot at 50. Neither is remotely representative of the average person's experience. If you want to find out how easy it is for a 40 year old to date 18 year olds, ask a 40 year old. They'll tell you. Or if you don’t believe me, just set up a tinder account yourself with some pictures of decently attractive 40 year old men, set your age as 40, start swiping, and see how many matches with 18 year olds you get.

There is one offsetting aspect to this, however, which is especially apt to confuse some people. Many of the people writing game advice are generally smarter than average. And in my anecdotal experience, smart men who think explicitly about game do so because a) it’s not something that came naturally to them as a teenager, and b) it’s something they only got better at with age. So for these people, the age decline tends to be muted by the fact that their experience with how to interact with women was getting better, at least for some time.

This can indeed offset a good amount of the decline, and as a point estimate will probably actually improve your chances.

But this is best understood as you moving up the cross-sectional distribution over time. It doesn’t change what the age-related decline is for the distribution as a whole.

4.

Why does this matter? Well, in the short term, it tells you that the regret avoidance strategy when you’re just casually dating is to date as young as you can, for as long as you can. There’ll be a good number more years where you can date 25 year olds, but the 18 year olds are going away faster than you think.

But this is a relatively shallow lesson. There’s a more important one.

Suppose you believe, as survey evidence tends to indicate, that marital unhappiness and a woman’s divorce risk increases with her lifetime number of sexual partners. Or, suppose you’re one of the mass of normal men that feels somewhere between uncomfortable, grossed out, or angrily jealous when they think about the idea of one’s dearly beloved having boned other men, especially lots of other men.

Partner counts are a ratchet. They go up, but they never come down.

For any given sex drive that a woman has, her partner count is lower when she is younger.

Add this to the point above, and you have the following.

Your ability to wind up with a wife where you got to enjoy all of her best years and experiences peaks relatively early.

The price you pay is likely giving her most of your best years.

If you choose to spend those years just casually hooking up with random women who you aren’t going to marry, you will get the fun of banging lots of women. But it will probably come at the cost that your wife, when you meet her, will be older, and will have banged more guys already. To make things worse, the longer it takes you to realise this, the more you’ll keep chasing after the dwindling chances of getting the kind of wife you could have gotten if you’d met her at age 22. The longer you wait, the larger the gap between what you ideally want, and what you’re likely to get. At a certain point, you might not end up with anything at all that meets your estimates of minimum acceptable partner.

This is not fun to contemplate, but I think it’s true nonetheless.

I don’t mean this rhetorically to imply one course of action or the other. A budget constraint is not advice. The guys that met their wife when they were both freshmen in college nearly always have regrets about the fact that they didn’t get to have as many years in college and in their 20s being free and single. This message is true, and it tends to get emphasized fairly loudly in the modern world. Which is why I bring up the flip side. The guys that did get to enjoy lots of years of partying in college and their 20s don’t generally get to marry women they met when such women were 18 year old virgins, and go into a relationship with their eventual wife when neither one has very much baggage from past relationships. This doesn’t get talked about at all, because it cuts against much of the grain of modernity to acknowledge that lots of men prefer women to have lower partner counts. It sounds to modern ears like “slut shaming” (a hilarious concept that tries to paper over the reality that the harshest critics of women who sleep around a lot tend to be… other women).

See point zero. The extent to which this applies to you depends to a considerable extent on your preferences.

If you aren’t jealous by nature, great! You can sleep around more in your early 20s and it won’t trouble you that your wife wasn’t a virgin when you met. I think jealousy is an understandable and common human trait, but the more common character flaw comes from having too much of it, rather than too little. If you don’t feel it, I certainly wouldn’t try to talk you into it. You’ve got a preference set that will pose you fewer hard tradeoffs in life. Happy days!

If you aren’t particularly into younger women, also great! You’ve got a much longer horizon in which to meet late 20s and early 30s women. Doubly so if you don’t want to have children. The budget constraint is thus considerably relaxed.

But if you do feel the above things, you might want to ponder such a tradeoff in advance. You’re probably going to have to give up something, unless you get lucky and meet a hot 18 year old when you’re 29 who’s super into you.

On average, by definition, people do not get lucky.

5. 

Gary Becker modeled the marriage market as being a matching problem. Men and women assortatively match on some set of traits, whether income, race, intelligence, attractiveness, or what have you. Gary Becker was a God damn genius, so I don’t mean to cast aspersions on this view. But I think there’s another aspect worth understanding that’s better described as an optimal stopping time problem.

If I had to sketch out the model, it would look as follows. Women come along according to some Poisson process. They are drawn from a distribution of quality and interest in you / compatibility. You can date each woman for some time period, during which you stop receiving a flow of new women. Your utility function is increasing in the number of women you hook up with, and with the average quality multiplied by the duration of the women you’re hooking up with. Finally, the average quality rate of the women you meet decreases with time, as per the point above. Your choices are a) which women to date versus reject, b) if you’re going to date them, for how long, and  c) when to pick a single woman to stick with for the remainder of your time period.

Solve for the optimal strategy.

One lesson from this is that the required quality threshold for marriage should be higher when you’re younger to settle on a person as a wife. This holds even if you know the true quality distribution, and would get worse if you were trying to learn about, e.g. how much is that I really love this girl, and how much is this just what nice long term dating feels like?

Another is that anything that increases the rate of meeting women (e.g. online dating) will have large increases in welfare. A lack of new arrivals is the biggest cause of failure to find a wife. If your life station is preventing this from happening, think very hard as to whether it’s worth it.

Yet another is that you should be particularly careful whom you “casually” date for extended periods of time, because this is going to reduce the rate at which you meet someone you might actually settle on. You will feel like you’re still single-ish, but if you’re not actively looking, you’re less likely to find someone.

Still another is that the greater your risk aversion, the more you’re going to settle on a medium quality partner early on.

But for our purposes here, the biggest philosophical difference is that the “optimal” part of optimal stopping time only holds in an ex ante sense. Once you stop, you’ll never really know what else would have come along. Unlike in a matching model where one sees the whole distribution, here you never do. Whoever you pick will always end up containing what ifs and uncertainties.

This setup also highlights the problem of having standards that are too high. I think this is another area where one can get mislead by with manosphere writings. It’s easy to enumerate a list of stuff that’s important in a woman, or stuff that’s a deal-breaker. Women do the same thing all the time, with their endless point checklists.

Rather, what’s hard is know the actual distribution of potential traits that you want, and which combination you might be able to plausibly get.

The “combination” part is especially hard. If you’re someone with options, you can probably score very highly on any one trait that you like in a woman. But the danger is in wanting too many traits at once, each of which is individually attainable. Even if the probabilities are independent, you start multiplying them out, and you realize you’ve got a pretty small chance of meeting them all.

The stereotype of bad women’s checklists is that they all want a 6’4 male model billionaire with rippling abs. But this understates the universality of the problem. The giveaway is “billionaire”, which is shorthand for “unattainable all on its own.”

Rather, the more pertinent problem is if you want a blond, 18 year old, hot, slim, smart Christian virgin with a sweet personality and a sense of humor (and I want to have banged a hundred girls before I met her).

This is the equivalent. But there’s not one single trait that gives it away. You probably could get at least any one trait if you really tried, or perhaps several. It’s unlikely you’ll get all of them.

This problem gets even worse if you fail to account for the likelihood that at least some of the traits you want are probably negatively correlated. For instance, one tradeoff I’ve noticed – being smart, and being easy going (broadly defined) are negatively correlated in women. Not hugely negatively correlated, but negatively correlated. Being smart tends to go with career ambition, and higher than average chances of teeth and claws ball cutting lawyer-like behavior. This is just one example. Being hot and smart might be another. Being hot and a nice person might be another still. When the world is willing to put up with all your b.s. because you’re very attractive, it’s hard to not turn into a bit of a b****. Having a high sex drive and low partner count is a definite one.

This is hard enough to forecast when you know the correlations, let alone if you’re not thinking about them.

Very few people in the manosphere write about which negative traits you should just lump it and put up with in order to compromise, because your wife is going to inevitably have things about her that you don’t like, just like there’ll be things about you that she doesn’t like. It doesn’t fit the “get irrationally overconfident!” vibe.

But I assure you that being irrationally overconfident that you’ll marry a blond, 18 year old, hot, slim, smart Christian virgin with a sweet personality and a sense of humor is not a recipe for winding up happy, if it causes you to reject all sorts of very eligible women who don’t meet that standard, and you only realise your mistake once your pool of options has shrunk.

Compromise is easier to stomach when you’ve got both tradeoffs in front of you, and you can see exactly what you get in return – in other words, when you’re choosing between two direct options. It’s much harder in an optimal stopping time world. Because you’ll have the lingering uncertainty that perhaps if you’d just waited longer and gotten a higher draw, the compromise might not have been necessary in the first place. This is the problem of the optimal stopping time psychology.

But if you set your standards high enough, you only end up with a wife if you effectively win the lottery. Or, even worse, if you win the lottery at the right time in your life, when your optimal quality threshold is sufficiently low that you’d actually take it.

6. 

The above is just one example of the point that the budget constraint problem is made much worse when the person doesn't realize that what they want is either impossible, mutually contradictory, or so negatively correlated as to be astonishingly unlikely.

To a psychologist, unlike an economist, the idea that people want impossible and contradictory things is not unusual. Rather, it's par for the course.

So what, in the generality, do men want?

I think they want three things.

First, they want to have a beautiful wife/long term girlfriend figure, who is sweet and caring, loyal and faithful only to them, that they can fall asleep next to at night and wake up next to in the morning.

Second, they want to be able to bang a wide range of hot young women on the side in a casual, no-strings-attached way, in a manner that makes them feel powerful and attractive (which, as I've noted before, rules out prostitution, which is begging for sex via the medium of money).

Third, they want to not feel like a hypocritical @**hole who goes around hurting those near and dear to them.

If you are lucky, you get to pick two out of three. Unless you are a sociopath, and they tend to have other problems. If you are unlucky, maybe you get one or none.

This is a fairly hard tradeoff. The number of women that are genuinely happy with a one-way open relationship is very few. The number of men who are genuinely happy with a two-way open relationship is similarly few.

This has an important lesson.

The hallmark of a good life decision is that it will probably feel vaguely unsatisfying, and there will always be a "grass is always greener" aspect. Beyond a certain point, the married man will vaguely envy the single man's variety of women. The single man will envy the married man's companionship and life certainty. The faithful will vaguely envy the freedom of the man with the selfish courage to have an affair or sleep with a prostitute. The cheater will envy the faithful man's ability to sleep peacefully at night and not have to hide his phone and lie about his whereabouts.

It is unlikely that the right decision will leave you with no regrets whatsoever, unless your preferences score very low on one of the three points above. Way down the line, one should not take the fact of vague regrets as indicating that you’ve made some mistake. The same problem exists on a smaller scale in any long term relationship.

7.

You’re thinking, “Come on Holmes, I’ve barely started in college. I’ve got better things to do than worry about either finding a wife now, or some weird scenario where I’m having difficulty finding a wife at age 40.”

Fine.

I can only end with the prompting to think further ahead, with a kind of empathy of what things might feel like at the time, and what you might do today as a consequence. This is not most people's default way of thinking.

This sounds very downbeat, but it’s not. Quite the contrary. Get it right, and you've got a lifetime of happiness ahead of you. More importantly, only in the fullness of time will you realise just how many options you had in front of you right at this moment, and how much possibility lay ahead of you. It’s an exciting time, and many is the old man who wishes he could be back in your shoes.

Good luck.

Your friend,

Shylock.

On Predicting Divorce

Divorce, like death, is one of those things that deep down everyone assumes will only happen to other people. People believe this despite all the statistics and reasoning to the contrary. Also like death, it usually takes a divorce happening to someone close to you for the full gravity and horror of the situation to become apparent. But if it comes, there's a good chance it will take you by surprise. Maybe your marriage gets randomly run over by a bus. Maybe it develops a debilitating and malignant lung cancer, until when the end finally arrives it almost comes as a relief. Of course, divorce doesn’t have to happen to you. But maybe that’s just because the other inevitability steps in first. On a long enough time frame, the survival rate for everybody drops to zero, after all. If we lived for a million years, would any marriage last that long?

I have not been divorced. I have not even been married. Which makes me wholly unqualified to talk on the subject. But then again, even the most ardent real life students of the topic probably only have a few first-hand experiences on the subject. And knowledge on the subject is almost by construction going to be piecemeal. The people with the most firsthand experience of what it’s like to go through one are likely those with relatively less understanding of why it tends to occur. Or they’re bizarre gluttons for punishment.

If one is interested in forestalling divorce, there are two questions to ask. The first is how you should act in a marriage, conditional on your spouse. For this you can go to your local marriage counselor, or Dalrock, or Heartiste. Weight the three according to taste.

But there’s a second question – whom should you marry in the first place? I’ve probably spent more time thinking about this question, because it’s the Russian Roulette of high-stakes inference. And if I spend more time thinking about it than most people, perhaps oddly so, I at least have the defense that I think that most people spend an insufficient time thinking about it in cold, concrete terms.

So what might be things I’d look for?

The first, which doesn’t require much insight, is divorced parents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, etc. Everything is partly heritable, so a fair amount of behavior will come from genetics. But this is one of those cases where you don’t really care where the predictive power comes from. The bit that’s environmental is being passed down too. Freud may have been wrong about the specific hypotheses he had on how children relate to their parents, but he was right on one thing – if you want to understand the child, look at their parents, and the child’s relationship with their parents.

Some people end up explicitly modeling themselves as a rejection and reaction against their parents’ failings. But most people end up subconsciously taking in expectations of what “normal” behavior looks like. Marital breakdown is like a car crash. Because crashes are quite infrequent, you probably want to spend more time analyzing near misses, where there’s a lot more frequent data to go on. In the marital domain, I find a quite illuminating question to be “how often did your parents tend to argue when you were a kid”? Everyone assumes their answer holds across the board for everyone. It doesn’t. Try it out.

So then we turn to characteristics of the person themselves. What traits are worrying?

To me, the biggest personality trait I’d worry about is selfishness and self-centredness, broadly defined. And importantly, you can’t look to how they are with you. You have to look at how they are with other people, especially those they don’t really like. Sacrificing and making an effort when in the first flush of excitement and love is very different than doing it after ten years when you’ve got two young children and you’re chronically underslept. The latter is when it actually matters. How does the person behave when they’re tired, and stressed, and having to do something they don’t really like?

Selfishness and self-centredness aren’t the same thing, of course, but they overlap. Selfishness is probably something that people are more apt to notice and avoid instinctively – is the person just stingy and rarely generous in unsolicited ways, unless they’re getting something out of it? This is probably likely to make your marriage unpleasant, leading to a visible deterioration. But it’s also something that is likely to make you avoid marrying someone in the first place just as an experiential aspect, regardless of the specific divorce question.

I suspect that self-centredness is both harder to diagnose, and more likely to get you blind-sided by a surprise divorce. In other words, does the person think that the main question to be answered is “Is this marriage something that makes me happy?”. If this is the relevant question, you might be surprised how their behavior turns on a dime when the answer switches to “no”. When things are going well and marriage makes them happy, a self-centred person might do lots of nice things for their spouse. But once it doesn’t, suddenly their desire to be generous decreases a lot in a way that seems surprising from the outside.

So how do you spot someone who’s not self-centred? Self-centredness can have a number of opposite traits, which manifest in different ways. One is empathy – genuine empathy, that is. Genuine empathy frequently asks the question “I wonder how that would feel to the other person?”. Someone who asks this frequently will wonder far in advance what divorce would be like for their husband, and their children. Self-centredness can coexist with kindness to others, and even compassion. This is the main way people don’t tend to spot it. Doing well-understood nice things to other people, because it feels good, is not the same thing as habitually thinking about how one’s words and actions will affect those around them. A self-centred person might do sweet things like buy a present for someone, but then later inadvertently hurt them with some carelessly chosen phrase, because they just weren’t really thinking about how it would impact the other person.

Another opposite trait is a sense of duty. Duty is a very old-fashioned word. Someone who has a concept of the duties of a wife is not just thinking about themselves. I suspect that a general sense of duty across the board is useful. Do they call their parents often, for instance? Do they have a sense of religious obligation? Even beyond their specific views on marriage, duty says that there are more important questions than just whether something makes you happy in the short term, or even at all. Some things just ought be done. And the broad sense of duty does not need to require a specific set of saint-like devotion to husbandly happiness. Good luck finding that in the Current Year (or, honestly, probably in any year). It’s probably enough to just have a stubborn insistence that one is obligated to work out one’s marital problems no matter what, because divorce is just not done.

Between the two, empathy avoids self-centredness by being able to reason on-the-fly about what other people around them are thinking and feeling. Duty is the conservative, Chesterton’s Fence version – because most people will insufficiently be able to reason out all the ways to make social arrangements work, we should roughly codify the parts that seem to be best practice. The former is more useful in a wide range of social situations, but probably also harder to find. The latter is scalable to more people, but of course we as a society don’t bother doing that scaling anymore.

There’s an additional component at play here, but it requires more honest introspection. Having a partner who isn’t self-centred is especially important if you yourself are self-centred. Because that’s exactly the nightmare kind of situation. When you’re both in the first flush of love, it will bring you pleasure to do nice things for each other, the other person’s nice behavior will bring out more niceness in you, and you’ll think it will last that way forever. But when things deteriorate, you’ll both start making excuses to start looking out for number one.

The one trait that I think is a) true and b) more likely to be emphasized by marriage counselors than Heartiste is the other person's ability to communicate about problems, figure out reasonable solutions, and stick to them. If I don’t dwell on this one at length, it’s not because I think it’s less important, just that I think it’s sufficiently obvious that you don’t need to come here to hear about it.

The final trait I would look at is the extent to which the person bears grudges, or how they act towards people they hate. Do they just try to move on and remain civil, or do they dwell a lot on the subject of people they dislike? It’s not so much that this predicts the possibility of divorce, but I suspect it surely predicts how they will act if and when it comes about. The central mistake that causes people to underestimate how bitter their divorce will be is that when they imagine the process of divorce, they’re imagining their wife or girlfriend now who loves them deeply. This is a terrible failure to do statistical conditioning. Conditional on getting divorced, the person hates your guts. So how does this person act towards people whose guts they hate? More importantly, are they willing to be reasonable and compromise, or are they willing to pay a price to stick it to someone they hate? This is the difference between a grudging and terse two hour conversation about who gets what and $500 in lawyers fees, vs $200K and two years of utter misery. Once the arms race train gets started, it’s very hard to stop. And people underestimate the arms race. Your lawyers will emphasise the part that ends with the divorce settlement. They won’t emphasise what it’s like to have to see that person you now loathe every second weekend to pick up the kids.

But sometimes, to paraphrase Sherlock (not Shylock) Holmes, we have to decide when the R² of the regression is not as good as we would like it to be. And this is one of those cases. It is hard not to feel that, when all is said and done, one’s best calculations may not help one much here. One cannot, after all, pick a constellation of personality traits. One can only evaluate the girlfriend or boyfriend in front of you, and make a call one way or the other without knowing in any concrete way who the actual counterfactual girlfriend you haven’t yet met is. So you go with your gut, and roll the dice.

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

The good news is that, having rolled the dice, one can then (or hopefully sooner) turn all one’s attention to the second question of what to do once you’re in a marriage.

The bad news is that that, too, is subject to the Kundera problem.

Sometimes, despite everything, death happens to you too.

The Thirty-Something Single Man's Ghost of Christmas Future

Part 1, from Junot Diaz - The Cheater's Guide to Love. If you take out the infidelity part (which, ultimately, is only a plot opener for the real dynamic of a great love lost by one's mistakes), the rest sounds rather believable.

Part 2, from SMBC, which is unambiguously the best comic in existence today:

Legal institutions are sticky things, often stupidly so

I cannot for the life of me understand why courts still award alimony.

Not child support - that still mostly makes sense in principle, though in practice it has its own problems , like the fact that it can be spent on any number of things other than care for the children. There also particularly revolting versions like California's paternity arrangements whereby a man who is duped into believing that someone else's child is his own has only two years from the birth of the child to challenge paternity, otherwise he's stuck paying child support forever, genetic testing be damned. And even if he files in time, the court may still decide it's not in the child's interests - the man's interests, having been the subject of a vicious con that is the male equivalent of rape, are of less importance.

Where was I? Oh yes, the basic principles of child support are reasonable.

But what in the name of all that is holy is the justification for alimony in this day and age? When you marry someone, apparently you are entitled to a certain standard of living from that person in perpetuity. Phrased this way, it is bonkers.

For the feminists on this blog, here's a story a friend of mine told me today. His brother in law was married to a woman, and they had a child. The woman was a lawyer, but decided she wanted to stop working. She wasn't actually involved any more than the man in raising the child - they had nannies to take care of the child. Instead, the woman just lived a life of leisure, and never returned back to work. At some point she got bored, began an affair, and divorced the man. She claimed alimony, which she was awarded, based on the lifestyle she had before. She could still go back to her legal career now, obviously, but why would she? The man will be stuck paying alimony unless the woman decides to remarry. Of course, since there's now enormous financial disincentives against her remarrying, the smart money predicts she'll just move in with her new boyfriend and never remarry, so as to keep the cash flowing.

How on earth did we end up with such a bizarre arrangement? It seems obvious that nobody in their right mind would design this monstrosity today. But it's a holdover from the years long past when
a) women couldn't work outside the home, so couldn't support themselves short of remarrying,
b) divorces were only granted by fault, so if the man wanted to just pack up and leave, he would be slugged with alimony, but if the women was having an affair and the man sought a divorce, bad luck for the woman.
and
c) the social pressure on people to remarry the subject of their affair after the divorce was large, hence 'alimony until remarriage' was a reasonable estimate of the length of financial hardship.

It's pretty clear that none of this holds any more. There is a very limited grounds for alimony when a woman has given up several years of a career to raise the family's children. But once the children are at school age, it's hard to know why courts should subsidise permanent leisure. And between nannies and daycare, there are plenty of ways for both parents to go back to work within a length of time that won't be massively disruptive to a career, certainly for the one point something children that the average couple has.

There are good policy reasons to make sure that a non-working partner doesn't get totally left in the lurch, particularly when children are involved. But remember, even without alimony most of the time the non-working partner is going to get a significant fraction of the assets, so they're not going to be totally broke. And if there are still reasons to grant payments under a limited form of alimony, it seems that they should be something like unemployment benefits - payments for a limited number of time while the person finds a new occupation. Why one should get alimony indefinitely without working is beyond me. And if there are no children involved, it is absolutely inconceivable what the justification for alimony is. Get a damn job!

None of this will happen, of course. Feminists like alimony because they live in a Stalinist 'who, whom' universe, where extracting resources from beta male schlubs is an end in itself.

The only chance whatsoever for alimony reform is that as women's incomes start rising, the number of cases where lazy men are claiming alimony from their working ex-wives is on the rise. That might finally strike feminists as being unfair and deserving of reform, but just about nothing else will.

Speaking of which, in that story I told you, I did alter one minor detail. The main protagonist was actually my friend's sister-in-law. The lazy parent who stopped working, began an affair and successfully claimed alimony? That was the husband.

And you know what? The absurdity and injustice is exactly the same.

Mail Order Brides - Applied Inference, High Stakes Edition

Those of us who enjoy collecting correlations as a hobby sometimes yearn for a higher stakes version of our craft, something like the Correlation Olympics. The premise would be simple - you're given a small amount of information about a person, and asked to infer as much stuff as you possibly can about them. Points would be given both for being right, and for the non-obviousness of the conclusion you drew.

The closest real-world equivalent would be getting a mail-order bride. The market for lemons being what it is, I do not anticipate that getting a mail order bride is likely to be a sensible decision on average. And it really is a market for lemons - there are almost certainly decent men and women on both sides that could have quite happy pseudo-arranged marriages, but the problem is the high risk of golddiggers (on the one side) and abusive creeps (on the other). The bad prospects drive out the good.

That said, I don't think the people who do it are all necessarily broken or crazy (though many of them probably are). The reason is that I would wager that the international dating market is probably likely to have a higher chance of mispricing than the domestic one. Like every market, the fewer the people are who are attempting to trade on perceived mispricing, the more likely mispricing is to exist.Then again, lots of people go broke buying penny stocks on the same rationale. Illiquid markets just say there might be mispricing, not that your personal hunches will be able to sniff it out.

But I still retain a perverse fascination with the idea of choosing a mail order bride. This would be somewhere between Russian (pun intended) Roulette and the World Series of Poker when it comes to correlation studies.

Think about it - in the extreme form, for each person you've got 5 photos and a one paragraph description, possibly written in broken English, and from that you have to decide on somebody to spend the rest of your life with. In other words, you have to extract every single drop of useful information out of what you're presented with. What are they wearing? What are they doing? Is there anyone else in the photo? What's their body language? Where were they taken? How many photos are they smiling in? You need to devise an entire assessment of a person's character from such tiny scraps, and then be willing to back it up with a marriage commitment.

If you get it wrong, financial and emotional misery await. If you get it right, you may have finally found a happy life partner and a way out of a previous lonely existence.

Talk about high stakes. For reasons I can't express well, the prospect of backing one's judgment to such an outrageous level seems both terrifying and thrilling at the same time.

Of course, one doesn't actually have to gamble one's life on the outcome to play a practice version - just go to one of the many sites and look at a few profiles, and decide which one you would pick if you had to make a choice, and why. Playing poker for matchsticks is not the same as playing for bearer bonds, but you probably don't want your first game of poker to be the latter.

Better study those correlations, son!

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.

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.

On the Supreme Court and Gay Marriage

-First and foremost, read the damn decision. Otherwise you'll be one of those absolutely insufferable people who view every court decision as a 'Gay Marriage Yay!' or 'Gay Marriage Boo!' pantomime. These people have zero conception that there actually is a question of law going on, and that a badly decided case with a desirable policy outcome will create other problems down the road that the pantomime crowd never think about.

You can find a pdf of it here. I heartily recommend reading Scalia's dissent, even if you're broadly happy that gay marriages in one state will now be federally recognised. In fact, you should especially read Scalia's dissent if you're broadly happy with the policy aspects of the decision.

-As I mentioned to you a few months ago, Justice Scalia predicted way back in 2003 that the Supreme Court was going to legalise Gay Marriage, and that Lawrence v. Texas (which overturned the Texas anti-sodomy statue) was merely a prelude to this result, the Court's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

Well, the Court this time decided not to settle the Elephant in the Room question of whether for a State to prohibit gay marriage violates the 14th Amendment equal protection clause  (which, if they did, would have decided the issue once and for all). Instead, it was held that for the Federal government to define marriage to exclude gay marriages in states which allowed them was a violation of the 5th amendment because it served no legitimate purpose and thus was a violation of basic due process. From the majority opinion:

DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment. This opinion and its holding are confined to those lawful marriages.

In other words, we're not deciding the substantive issue of gay marriage, just one part of it. Roberts wrote separately just to emphasise this point:

But while I disagree with the result to which the majority’s analysis leads it in this case, I think it more important to point out that its analysis leads no further. The Court does not have before it, and the logic of its opinion does not decide, the distinct question whether the States, in the exercise of their “historic and essential authority to define the marital relation,” ante, at 18, may continue to utilize the traditional definition of marriage. The majority goes out of its way to make this explicit in the penultimate sentence of its opinion. 

In other words - listen up you lower court punks, don't think we've given you carte blanche to insist on gay marriage everywhere.

Scalia mocks the majority super hard for this feint of judicial modesty:

The penultimate sentence of the majority’s opinion is a naked declaration that “[t]his opinion and its holding are  confined” to those couples “joined in same-sex marriages made lawful by the State.” Ante, at 26, 25. I have heard such “bald, unreasoned disclaimer[s]” before. Lawrence, 539 U. S., at 604. When the Court declared a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, we were assured that the case had nothing, nothing at all to do with “whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter.” Id., at 578. 

I haven't forgotten Lawrence, you clowns.

Now we are told that DOMA is invalid because it  “demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects,” ante, at 23—with an accompanying citation of Lawrence. It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here—when what has preceded that assurance is a lecture on how superior the majority’s moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is to the Congress’s hateful moral judgment against it. I promise you this: The only thing that will “confine” the Court’s holding is its sense of what it can get away with. 

In other words - at least own up to what you're proposing, rather than maintaining this nonsense that this is all just about the solemn dignity of states to define marriage however they wish (a notion that will last about 5 minutes into the oral arguments for the next case).

I do not mean to suggest disagreement with THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s view, ante, p. 2–4 (dissenting opinion), that lower federal courts and state courts can distinguish today’s case when the issue before them is state denial of marital status to same-sex couples—or even that this Court could theoretically do so. Lord, an opinion with such scatter-shot rationales as this one (federalism noises among them) can be distinguished in many ways. And deserves to be. State and lower federal courts should take the Court at its word and distinguish away. 

Ha!

In my opinion, however, the view that this Court will take of state prohibition of same-sex marriage is indicated beyond mistaking by today’s opinion. 

If there's anyone in the country who disagrees with the last sentence, I'm yet to meet them.

-Laws are complicated things. I am quite certain that the vast majority of the people who are sure that the Defense of Marriage Act is a hateful piece of legislation designed only to injure gays have not tried to deal with the mess that is overlapping definitions of different terms when the laws of different jurisdictions come into conflict. Even the notion of a 'US Resident' is virtually impossible to get a clear answer on - there's tax residence, and immigration residence, and driving license requirements (which I've heard dozens of answers about) etc. So even if you didn't want to limit the federal definition to exclude gay marriage, there are plenty of other reasons why you might want a uniform definition. Scalia mentions some of them:

To choose just one of these defenders’ arguments, DOMA avoids difficult choice-of-law issues that will now arise absent a uniform federal definition of marriage. See, e.g., Baude, Beyond DOMA: Choice of State Law in Federal Statutes, 64 Stan. L. Rev. 1371 (2012). Imagine a pair of women who marry in Albany and then move to Alabama, which does not “recognize as valid any marriage of parties of the same sex.” Ala. Code §30–1–19(e) (2011). When the couple files their next federal tax return, may it be a joint one? Which State’s law controls, for federal-law purposes: their State of celebration (which recognizes the marriage) or their State of domicile (which does not)? (Does the answer depend on whether they were just visiting in Albany?) Are these questions to be answered as a matter of federal common law, or perhaps by borrowing a State’s choice-of-law rules? If so, which State’s? And what about States where the status of an out-of-state same-sex marriage is an unsettled question under local law? See Godfrey v. Spano, 13 N. Y. 3d 358, 920 N. E. 2d 328 (2009). DOMA avoided all of this uncertainty by specifying which marriages would be recognized for federal purposes. That is a classic purpose for a definitional provision.

If you are expecting the boosters of the recent decision to provide you with a clear answer to any of the above questions, I would advise you not to hold your breath.

-As for myself, I find myself broadly disliking the decision, but for conflicting reasons. As a matter of policy, I'm fine with gay marriage. If I were minded to vote (or registered to vote. Or allowed to vote), I'd vote to allow it. So to that extent, while it's not high on my list of priorities, I'm happy enough with the practical aspects of the outcome (subject to the previously mentioned practical concerns).

But I deeply hate judicial activism. It poisons the legal certainty that lets people organise their lives according to well-settled precedent. Democracy may have plenty of flaws, but the makeup of the current Supreme Court seems to have managed to reproduce most of the maladies and perversions, just on a micro scale. We've got 4 (mostly) conservative justices, not all of whom can be relied on to produce politically conservative outcomes, 4 consistently liberal justices who can unfailingly be relied on to produce politically liberal outcomes, and Justice Kennedy playing the role of the entire swing voting electorate -  inscrutable, unpredictable, and of principles that are, shall we say, difficult to forecast. The voters in this case are definitely smarter, but do you think the policies produced are better?

Judicial activism - combining all the disfunction of democracy, but without the benefit of the law of large numbers and De Moivre's theorem!

In other words, judicial activism is just one more manifestation of the many ways that this republic has decayed from the original founders' vision. I second the Moldbug critiques of such a vision, but it's certainly a zillion times better than the monstrosity we're currently saddled with.

At the risk of this post being an 'All-Scalia-All-The-Time' one, I cannot help but excerpt his closing remarks

We might have covered ourselves with honor today, by promising all sides of this debate that it was theirs to settle and that we would respect their resolution. We might have let the People decide. But that the majority will not do. Some will rejoice in today’s decision, and some will despair at it; that is the nature of a controversy that matters so much to so many. But the Court has cheated both sides, robbing the winners of an honest victory, and the losers of the peace that  comes from a fair defeat. We owed both of them better. I dissent.

As do I.

The sadness of things coming to an end

A breakup song that I would wager was not inspired by an actual breakup:

‘Go on now, go! Walk out the door!
Just turn around now, you’re not welcome anymore.
Weren’t you the one who tried to break me with desire,
Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die?’

A breakup song that would wager was:

‘The single saddest thing I ever heard you say,
Was on the day I told you I had to go away,
You said ‘Darling baby please, if you really mean to leave,
Can’t I just hold you a little while longer?’

It's not even my breakup, and it twists my heart to hear it.

Among the best things to recommend about a lifelong marriage is that one never needs to go through another breakup, at least until death do you part.

That must be an immensely relieving feeling.

End the Engagment Ring Arms Race

As they said in Wargames, the only winning move is not to play.

Over at Priceonomics, they had an excellent piece recently with the arresting title 'Diamonds Are Bulls***'.

I challenge you to read through the whole thing and come to the end asserting that diamonds aren't in fact bulls***, but are actually worthy demonstrations of love and investments of money. The reasons for the Priceonomics headline include, but are not limited to, the fact that:
-The whole thing was started by a marketing campaign in 1938 by DeBeers to get people to buy more diamonds
-We could make flawless diamonds industrially for very little money
-They lose tons of value immediately after purchase, and
-Even experts barely know exactly how to value them.

The point the article doesn't answer, of course, is how this practice persists given that most men already know, either instinctively or by reading this stuff before, that this whole thing is an outrageous con. No man is genuinely, honest-to-god happy about spending thousands of dollars on an engagement ring. They might do it because they love the woman, and know she's excited about it. But they'd sure as hell wish that the woman would be equally excited to accept by way of a substitute a really nice restaurant meal, an expensive watch, or a trip to the Bahamas. All of which in combination you could probably buy for less than a mid-level engagement ring.

So we all agree this is an egregious scam perpetrated on us by DeBeers.  These monopolist turdbags have managed to convince women and men that this is something that you have to do, Serious You Guys, to show your love for a woman. The reason this works is that marrying someone is an important decision that many men are nervous about. DeBeers has found a way to capitalise on this by creating a perception that society all agrees that we need to buy diamonds to show our love. Just like in a strip club, when you don't quite know what you need to do and are afraid to ask, you'll spend money to make the problem go away.

This problem is particularly strong because proposing to someone is something that men don't generally talk about a great deal beforehand - not to their friends, and even less so to the future bride. So they don't really know what they should be spending, and are thus ripe targets to be scammed by salesmen and their own nervousness. And it's difficult to boycott, because at the point you're proposing to someone, you're meant to be declaring your love. Proposing, while simultaneously explaining why there's no ring because that's stupid, is likely to come across somewhat awkwardly, to say the least.

The other macabre genius of the plan is that it's difficult for couples to agree ahead of time not to do it, because to plan in advance 'Oh, when I propose to you, I'll do it in this way' ruins the surprise. As a consequence, even men who are 90% sure that their fiancee doesn't care much for an expensive ring will probably err on the safe side and spend the cash anyway, just to be sure. If they could have a conversation and confirm their hunch, they'd just skip it. But they can't. So DeBeers wins again.

Frankly, I find this immensely unsatisfactory. Not only is this wasteful, zero-sum arms race spending, but it's a scam perpetrated by the most successful cartel in the history of the world.

If there's one thing I hate, it's monopolists jacking up prices. Boy, do I hate monopolists. Nothing would please me more than to see those clowns reduced to being insurance salesmen or something actually productive.

So, how do we destroy DeBeers? How do we stop the arms race?

Here's the Shylock three step plan for how, as a society, we can stop flushing money down the toilet on worthless trinkets.

Step 1. Tell all future dates, well in advance of any proposal date, that you think expensive diamonds are a crock and a fraud, and that you won't be buying one, regardless of whom you marry.

Step 2. Follow through on it.

Step 3. There is no step 3.

Step 1 is the key part. What you need to do is make the conversation about the principle of the ring in the abstract, divorced from any implication about the girl in question. In other words, make it known that this isn't about the girl you're with, it isn't because this is on your mind since you're thinking of proposing soon. No, just as a moral stand, you're refusing to enrich a price-fixing cartel to satisfy an arbitrary demand about how romance should be.

The girl may object that she likes diamonds and finds them pretty. The immediate answer is that she likes them because the DeBeers corporation decided that she should like them. Why else would society just magically start liking them all of a sudden in 1938? And if you just like sparkly things, why not a cubic zirconium? Why not an artificial diamond? What on earth is the difference, other than burning money?

More to the point, the receptiveness of the girl to this argument is a great screening mechanism. Just like women who don't pine after massive weddings, the women who don't pine after expensive engagement rings are also, on average, the ones you actually want to be marrying. A girlfriend who agrees that this whole thing is a con and are happy with a cheap ring, a fake ring, or no ring at all is, paradoxically, the one worthy of the expensive ring. But thankfully, that's not even needed!

The real question is, do you go the hardcore route and insist on no ring at all, or do you just buy a small artificial diamond for a few hundred bucks, or a cubic zirconium for ten bucks?

The answer to that depends on how tolerant the other party is, and how much you feel like contributing positive externalities. Taking a stand to not buy any engagement ring (and just having the wedding ring) is risky, but decreases ever so slightly the societal expectation of having to spend money like this. It's providing a true public good. You won't be thanked by many people, but you'll always be an honorary member in exemplary standing around this humble corner of the internet.

Buying a fake ring will cost you not much more, but is implicitly acknowledges that you're catering to the societal demand by pretending you bought an expensive ring. And pretending is all it is, because it's unlikely anyone else will be able to tell the damn difference.

I can see the argument for the second one, if only to make the fiancee's life easier so that she doesn't have to explain to everyone why there's no ring at all. That's perhaps too big an ask in the short term. But even being willing to have a small ring is an improvement. Like all social attitudes, they change slowly.

One thing is for sure. If I decided to get married, DeBeers isn't getting a red cent out of me.

This may seem like an extreme position, but frankly if you've put up with the rest of the somewhat outrageous things I say, is this one really much worse?

Assortative Mating of Celebrities

A fairly robust fact about celebrities is that they tend to date and/or marry other celebrities.

The most obvious explanation for this is that celebrities are the apex of the dating distribution, and hence this is simply a sorting on quality. In other words, everybody wants to marry Scarlett Johansson, but you have to be Ryan Reynolds to get a chance. This is the most depressing (but likely) possibility, and I imagine it explains most of the effect.

The more interesting hypothesis, albeit probably a smaller factor, is that celebrities might prefer to date other celebrities because these are the only people that they can be sure aren't dating them just for the novelty of their celebrity. People who are rich have a similar dilemma - if your husband or wife has much less money than you, can you be really sure that they aren't with you for the money? Sure, they'll hopefully like you as a person too, but you'll never really know the counterfactual. And the not knowing can become a nagging doubt in itself.

The other related factor is that the life of a celebrity almost certainly has its own peculiar problems and miseries, but these are likely difficult to explain to people who aren't themselves famous. Well, you can explain them, but you'll probably just sound like an ingrate - "boo hoo, unlucky me, I'm such a famous movie star that now I can't get a litre of milk without someone wanting a photo, if only I were a no-name janitor instead." Being rich is the same - sure, you have the enormous problem of how you're meant to stop your kids turning into spoiled brats (if you give them money) or resentful and bitter (if you don't give them money). But the average joe will just ask why you don't just give the money away if this is such a problem.

The most cynical answer, I think, is simply a marketing one - most celebrities have a tenuous grip on their status, and will go to huge lengths to stay in the spotlight. Dating or marrying other celebrities is a way to keep the tabloids interested, which is your very oxygen if you're some 'famous for being famous' talentless celebrity.

What these explanations have in common is that they provide very little avenue for you as Joe Public to ever actually date a famous person. So relax! You really aren't good enough for them, so you may as well just enjoy your life.

500 Days of Summer

I ended up watching '500 Days of Summer' the other day. After checking my testes at the door, it actually wasn't that bad.

For a great review of how much of a beta the main male lead is, Heartiste has a discussion here.

I remember a friend of mine once telling me that the over-arching theme of all of Oscar Wilde's work was to treat the serious things lightly, and the light things seriously. All the rest of the humour flowed from there. This helped me understand his work a lot more, but did spoil some of the surprise of it somewhat.

In the same vein, the twist to 500 Days of Summer is that they take stereotypical real-life (not movie-life) behavior of men and women , but reverse the sexes of the main characters.

(Some plot spoilers below the jump, but none that I think will impact your enjoyment of the movie).

Methinks the douchebag doth protest too much...

If you've ever had cause to say 'I'm not like those other guys', it is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are, in fact, exactly like those other guys.

The guys that are truly different almost never need to explicitly state this. It's just one more example of the 'Message: I Care' mistake, which Jonah Goldberg calls "reading the stage directions".

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.