Firstly, thanks for you comments and for taking the time to think through this.

Firstly, I contest your underlying assumption that the natural state of the mating market is free of manipulation. The natural state of courtship is full of probing, testing, manipulation, assessment and generally devious 0-sum fuckery. We just don't notice because most of these behaviors are subconscious. So at a basic level, there's no consequentialist reason to think the subconscious manipulations are more ethical than conscious manipulations. There is reason to think the opposite because I can at least consider the consequences of my conscious manipulations.

So... shit-testing allows you to select a better partner... but at the same time, "being the kind of person who shit-tests their partner" makes you a worse partner. (Which is kinda your partner's problem, not yours, but still...)

You can shit-test for lots of different attributes. Your comment mostly assumes I would shit test for loyalty, which I agree is a really bad idea.

• Firstly, it's the most unethical form of shittest because you're training the person to follow your commands unquestioningly, which is really bad for them.
• Its the most hackable shittest.
• There's a failure mode where you fall in love with the power or they fall in love with it or something like that
• Finally, I don't actually think my mate retention is correlated with testable loyalty (Christians and non-Christians get divorced at the same rate despite different loyalty norms). I suspect the best mate-retention strategy is to maintain your own attractiveness (behaviorally and physically) over the relationship. Have good conflict resolution skills. There's probably a bunch of evidence-based methods from positive psychology to use as well.

In contrast, I think shittesting for hard to observe and hard to fake traits is a dank and ethical strategy (epistemic status: P(T)= .75).

• It saves both of us time because I can reject candidates earlier before we bond (I bond way too fast).
• If I get rejected for shit-testing on a first date, I have only lost the time it takes to replace the candidate. I can politely leave the dinner and resign myself to ~20 hours of app use. NOTE If I was the majority in my mating market and I wanted a shorter relationship, I would revise this
• The cost of falling in love with someone who lacks these attributes (its a narrow set) is really high. I have to hang out with that person for years! Once I stare into their eyes, I'll start ignoring their bad attributes, which is really bad for me!

Conditions

I do not accept your proposition that waiting for natural stimuli is as a rule more ethical than shittesting, mainly because everyone benefits from assessing each other's attributes quickly and accurately.

So when is a shit-test ethical and when is it unethical? After reading your comments I would propose the following.

• Loyalty tests are more unethical and less instrumentally rational than attribute shittests
• Shittesting later in a relationship is less ethical and less IR than in the beginning

Agree, and this is an area where we should be precise in our language. Coming up with justifications for regular healthy testing, then labeling them with a name for toxic power moves, risks spreading confusion at best, and bad behavior at worst.

Thanks for bringing up Goodhart's law. It's a real problem. Rwanda girl probably did figure out intuitively that I wanted low NFC and respond to it. Fortunately for me, those attributes are hard to fake. Honestly I wouldn't trust myself to shittest for fakable attributes like affection, loyalty, interest and social status.

Is testing anti-correlated with self respect and competence? That seems likely. If I had greater social intelligence I would shittest less because I would be more confident to assess attributes naturally. And I should assume my partners have better social intelligence than me.

There probably are cases where a shit-test is justified - the time savings of fast-failures is worth the false-positives and additional friction that the artificial filter will create. But for many many cases (of romantic and other relationship-based exploration), you're best off looking for natural experiments than intentionally creating stressful situations.

I agree with this. I plan two shit-test per relationship. And in a different mating market I would do none.

Another problem is that if the test is different from your normal behavior, you're likely to see a different response than you would to your normal behavior. The differences will be correlated with just how different the test is from your baseline activities and signals.

Good point! I don't think it's actually a problem when selecting long-term partners. You want to see the full spectrum of behavior, not just how they respond to you. Hence the "watch how they treat the waiter" advice.

Interestingly, people actually just give tons of unqualified reinforcement to partners during courtship (unconsciously of course). DF argues that unqualified reinforcement helps show you the full range of the persons behavior. This is a valuable adaptive behavior, because you want as much info about the person as possible. For example, unqualified reinforcement might reveal that someone is very selfish or prideful. I've just realized this probably works on me.

Those are some cool phrases to pull apart different types of testing partners. I think using that phrase would change people's moral attachments to the same behavior. I also think they are generally more precise which is cool.

Mate is very good. I should write an entire post reviewing the book.

Much of the value from Mate is that it helps you understand your own experience. The most valuable single chapter in Mate is the chapter on mating markets. The effect size of moving mating markets is so huge that its obvious to me. Of the five mating markets I've explored, by far the largest factor is the demographic ratios. When I was 24 and in a terrible mating market, my friends really did tell me the market didn't matter and the problem was my behaviors. I felt so unnatractive and stupid and socially incompetent while in that market. In retrospect the religious customs of that country just made dating a foreign atheist impossible. My mate value determined my outcomes much less than I thought.

If any straight readers are in a terrible mating market I have three recommendations. Read "Mate" then watch "Sex and the City". Also, consider moving.

I don't agree that I should be required to anticipate all counterarguments. That seems a bit silly.

The main complaint people make about shittesting is that its irrational or unfair. That complaint was addressed by my post by reframing it from the perspective of the tester and their goals. I did not make that argument explicit to avoid insulting the reader and to stay within my own experience (robustness).

People have raised an additional claim that some forms of shittesting are used for abuse. This is a rare complaint and I was interested to learn it, but I was not obligated to scour the interwebs for complaints before pointing out the value of an oft-maligned behavior.