Sex Versus

Yep. In the marketplace of ideas, some ideas are not playing fair -- they reward their users in ways beyond "having a good model of the world", for example by increasing their status. We should place an extra burden of proof on those ideas.

I like Jacob's articles. They are nicely written, contain interesting insights, and I generally like reading about sex. But I don't think they pass the extra burden of proof. -- What I wish would happen here, is that each article would get a skeptical opposition. But yes, the social incentives are set in such way that the debate would reward Jacob and punish his opponents. Which may be a reason why the debate doesn't happen.

I don't mind also posting criticism on your object-level claims if I'll get approval from mods to go to very uncomfortable places.

Perhaps if you post the criticism somewhere else, and only post a link here, that would protect LW from the status hit of "hosting objectionable content". Yes it is hypocritical, but there is a difference when a third party quotes something as "this was written on LW" or "this was linked from LW". (I am not a moderator, I am just trying to consider their incentives.)

For me, a useful intuition pump is to imagine the same debate, only replacing sexual marketplace with money. Because the (liberal part of?) society has opposing intuitions here: losers at the sexual marketplace should be laughed at and shunned (unless they are a sexual minority, then the rules are different), losers at the financial marketplace should be empathised with and defended. (Kicking the homeless does not get the same reaction from the crowd as kicking the incels.) Then the analogical article would be something like: "Hey, my name is Donald Trump, and I want to tell you that becoming rich is actually quite easy. Most importantly, you need to be a nice and friendly person, and the first step towards that is overcoming your bitterness from your (frankly, mostly self-inflicted) poverty." Even if this came with many good insights on the financial markets, it probably wouldn't be received well. -- Then of course many people reject this analogy (no analogy is ever perfect), because the lack of sex does not kill you, and the lack of money could. (They would probably still feel bad about a world where each poor person gets exactly as much money as they need to literally survive, but not a cent more.)

The first step towards a high-quality criticism would be to extract the list of statements that Jacob seems to be making, and ideally check that he approves of this interpretation. Then, post the arguments to the contrary. (I am too lazy to actually do this, I am just expressing my preferences about what I'd like to read.)

Now some object-level objections:

Compare this picture (source) with this one. In the first case, Jacob explains (in my opinion correctly) how a small initial imbalance on the dating market (in the specific subculture, in favor of men) can translate into huge disparity of power. In the second case, where the imbalance is in favor of women, Jacob just ignores the huge difference in the gray part of the graph, and concludes that "overall the differences are just not that big" (referring only to relative differences between the non-gray parts of the graph, of course).

So, when an imbalance makes it difficult for some women to find a partner, "I find this genuinely sad. I strongly believe that relationships are preferable to aloneness." But when an imbalance makes if difficult for some men, that is not even worth noticing. -- I assume that Jacob really has a blind spot here, not that he did it on purpose. But that's exactly the meta point, that pointing out a bias, even on a rationalist website, carries a status penalty ("why is Viliam spending his time caring about incels? does this mean he is...?").

Similarly both sexes have a preference for men to be more proactive in flirting and escalating to sex, and there’s also enough variance to allow shy guys and assertive gals to find each other.

Well, this assumes that (1) there are at least as many assertive gals as the shy guys, and that (2) the assertive gals will use their assertivity on the shy guys, as opposed to just any guys they like. Hypothetically, each of these statements could be true; I just don't see any evidence, so this reduces to a just-world assumption.

It may be more possible to argue against this sort of post than you think. Let's start by trying to identify its central point, using quotes.

Men (especially when younger) slightly prefer shorter-term casual relationships and vice versa, but overall the differences are just not that big.

Claim 1: Survey results show that relationship orientation (RO) differences exist between men and women, but these differences are small.

There do exist real differences in mating psychology between men and women but they don’t imply mutually hostile needs. A lot of differences are complimentary...

Claim 2: RO differences between men and women do not imply intersexual competition.

Western society mostly has norms and laws (e.g. economic freedom for women, decriminalizing infidelity, outlawing polygamy) that reduce intersexual conflict while potentially increasing intrasexual competition...

Claim 3: Norms and laws mainly reduce intersexual competition (stronger assertion). They may also increase intrasexual competition (weaker assertion).

Almost everyone else would do better not by trying to trick or coerce what they selfishly want out of reluctant members of the opposite sex, but by finding those of the other sex who want to give it to them...

Claim 4: Intersexual trickery and coercion is a worse tactic than finding an RO-compatible partner.

Dating selflessly is often unfair, painful, high variance, and much harder than it used to be. There are many reasons why people fail, although a lot of them are individually fixable and not a result of the “top 20%” stealing all your partners.

Claim 5: Dating nevertheless involves a lot of suffering, and has become more difficult over time.

There are two assumptions we could make about relationship orientation. If RO is rigid, people prefer dating nobody to dating a partner of incompatible RO. If RO is relaxed, people will accept a partner of incompatible RO.

I don't have access to the data in Jacob's survey, but it looks like the approximate proportions are:

"Not Looking:" 2:1 female:male

"Sex/play only:" 2:1 male:female

"Casual dating:" 5:4 male:female

"Serious relationship:" 10:9 male:female

Since people in the "not looking" category automatically succeed in actualizing their RO, and all other categories are male-skewed, it is men who will consistently fail to find partners under the "rigid RO" model. "Sex/play" looks like about 5% of men, "casual dating" like it's about 30% of men, and "serious relationship" like it's about 50%. Using the eyeballed ratios I gave above, that means that 2.5% of men seek and fail to find "sex/play" relationships, 6% seek and fail to find casual dating relationships, and about 5% seek and fail to find serious relationships, for a total of about 13.5% of men who cannot find the type of relationship they want due to a dating pool of incompatible size.

I lean against the notion of people having "positive rights," but relationships and jobs are two important categories for people's sense of wellbeing. For context, a 14% unemployment rate in the US has been observed in 1937 (2 years before the end of the Great Depression), 1940 (1 year after the end of the Great Depression), and has consistently been under 10% since then, although there have been brief periods within a given year in which the unemployment rate spiked up, such as April 2020 (COVID lockdowns).

So if we think that 13.5% complete, numerical inability to find a compatible relationship is roughly as bad as being an unemployed job-seeker, then, exclusively examining RO and ignoring any questions of how "good" the RO-compatible is, it's about as bad for men as we saw in moderately bad years of the Great Depression.

Men who cannot find a partner have two options. One is to not have a partner at all, and the other is to relax their constraints and accept partners from an incompatible RO. However, this will still leave about 10% of men unable to find any partner at all - as bad as the worst years for unemployment since 1941.

There's a crucial caveat to this analysis. Men in the "sex/play" and "casual dating" categories may not actually want or need a partner on 100% of days. If "sex/play" men can tolerate having that experience only on 50% of the days that women in that category do, then they'll have their needs met. Men in the "casual dating" category" need to tolerate only a relatively modest imbalance. It's really the 5% of men who want serious relationships and simply cannot find one who will truly be SOL - a rate that we tend to see as quite tolerable when it comes to unemployment.

However, this doesn't account for other forms of potential rigid orientations, such as monogamy vs. polyamory. Let's generalize.

Imagine we have 100 men and 100 women. 60 of the 100 men and 40 of 100 women want a serious relationship; the rest want a casual relationship. Let's say that a preference for monogamy vs. polyamory is independent of gender and serious vs. casual preference, with 2/3 of men and 3/4 of women preferring monogamy.

Then 40 of the 60 men and 30 of the 40 women in the "serious relationship" category want monogamy, as do 27 of the men and 45 of the women in the "casual" category. The remainder (20 men and 10 women in the "serious relationship" category, and 13 men and 15 women in the "casual relationship" category) want a polyamorous relationship.

Before we considered polyamory vs. monogamy, a total of 40 people (20 serious men and 20 casual women) couldn't find a compatible relationship. Once we add in this second constraint, that number increases to 42 people. If we continue adding further rigid constraints, we have fewer and fewer people able to find a compatible relationship.

We also need to take into account gender ratios, which may exacerbate or cancel out these incompatibilities. For example, a town with more women than men will tend to cancel out some of the relationship-seeking disparities we see in Jacob's survey data. A town with more men than women, of course, will see even worse problems.

Jacob's analysis in another post where he estimates the impact of gender imbalance on the "quality" of one's partner also seems incomplete to me, because it doesn't account for the common notion that men and women are not, generally, "equal" in terms of the distribution of mate quality. It may be correct as far as rank order goes, but we may care about an absolute rather than ordinal match.

A blame-based narrative seems inappropriate for considering this issue. This is a problem of the distribution of rigid preferences in the population for a pie that cannot be made bigger. Note also that it's possible to argue against this post without resorting to any particularly CW/taboo topics or tone.

I wonder if Georgism might offer some sort of lens on this, since it also is meant to analyze and deal with problems of another critical resource that has a fixed supply?

Without endorsing any other points (not because I agree or disagree, simply because I haven't done my own research on them), I'd like to +1 the sentiment of, "Let us not tolerate status jabs/mocking others."

I feel that the ideal rationalist writing will as a side effect avoid mocking, so it always feels a little out of place and unwarranted to me.