Comments on: The benefits of the bad: they “hit it” (males at least)

By: whiskey

whiskey — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:58:58 +0000

Let me add, there could well be some social disruptions as the Betas try and rejigger things their way. There’s more of them than the Alphas. They are good at tool-making. A whole lot of unattached men, without much hope of a wife (generally a woman no older than thirty, with fertility and some youthful beauty, and without a lot of sexual history / relationship baggage) has never been a healthy development.

China’s periodic rash of riots, revolts, and rebellions, like the Taipeng Rebellion, that killed 20 million with … muzzle loading muskets, is a sign of what can happen. Or it’s wobbly uncertainty and periodic riots (suppressed in the media) today. At some point, the out-group of Betas realizes “hey if we storm the castle, WE can have all the women.” Much social disruption ensues. That dynamic is probably the real driving force behind many insurgencies, like FARC, etc.

By: whiskey

whiskey — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:53:42 +0000

Weird. I just posted on this.

You can see it here.

Basically, women want high-testosterone, socially dominant men who are bigger and stronger than the competition, if there are no penalties for that strategy. If there are penalties, they will shift to the "Beta Male" who ought to be called the tool-maker. Focused on abstract tasks, fascinated by how things work, and can be improved, system-oriented, often "smart" in manipulating or understand tools. Tool-makers are the evolutionary "edge" of humanity. Other species makes a few odd tools, humanity makes and continually improves tools. To extract the maximum amount of resources from an area and beat the competition (other human groups). The society with the most and best tool-makers generally wins also.

Now, with the Welfare State, the pill and condom, random, anonymous urban living (see Roissy's blog for more on that) there is no downside to choosing bad boy after bad boy. Britain's illegitimacy rate is 50%, most of Northern Europe including the Scandinavian nations, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland either exceed that figure or approach it. The Black illegitimacy rate is 70% nationwide, and 90% for the urban core. In 1965 the rate was about 24% or so. The white rate in 1965 was about 4%, compared to about 34% nationwide now. So big, massive social changes in how women choose men have taken place in 40 years or so. Women are choosing not to get married in the first place, and chase after bad boys. Dark Triad indeed.

Another tragedy of the commons. Gobs of fatherless boys running around, seeking to be the baddest bad boy in the neighborhood because that is what gets rewarded. Women seem to avoid men who are "smart" because it seems to correlate with lower testosterone levels.

Up until now, women who did not choose the nerdy tool-maker tradesman, or merchant, or what have you had the choice of prostitute, disposable mistress of a rich aristocrat, or wife of impoverished soldier. No wonder nerdy guys are all over the place in the West, and pretty absent in a lot of other places (like say, Mongolia or Saudi Arabia). Until recently, the Beta male had no problems reproducing.

For people who think talent, ability, and interest in tool-making does not just appear like "magic" in people out of the Ether, but is inherited, what's at stake is nothing less than the West's comparative advantage and entire social basis.

By: gene berman

gene berman — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:44:10 +0000

No, Richard, you’re all wrong.

Why, if things were the way you suggest, the world wopuld be full of phony dukes, counts, earls and the like as well as bogus professors and countefeit doctors. No end of confusion.

By: Richard Sharpe

Richard Sharpe — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:38:08 +0000

Gene:

Between genetically fixed or determined by the lay of the land (and I assumed you meant no double entendre by the latter), my surmise would be that it's a "continuum" sort of phenomenon.

No double entendre intended ... later it struck me that if the choosier sex was weighing characteristics that included non-personal ones (like the amount of resources the other party had) and these characteristics differed across different societies, we would expect to see different preferences in different societies.

And if they were using status as a proxy for resources then we might see what looks like strategy switching, especially as females mature and they find out which male strategies are designed to fool them.

By: gene berman

gene berman — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:54:01 +0000

Jason:

You omitted an even further-strengthening link in your presentation: that the more desirable partners (able to hold partners on the basis of their own desirability as partners will, already, in very many cases (and as a result of their desirability) become partnered with those who are not only highly desirable in a generalized sense but also on their personally-specific value-scale of desirability. A true "virtuous circle" in any society based on (or at least highly valuing) individual fulfillment.

By: gene berman

gene berman — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:28:37 +0000

Richard:

Between genetically fixed or determined by the lay of the land (and I assumed you meant no double entendre by the latter), my surmise would be that it’s a “continuum” sort of phenomenon.

By: Richard Sharpe

Richard Sharpe — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:27:26 +0000

A lot of this discussion seems to revolve around the notion that there is really only one strategy that is worthwhile (fuck as many women as you can) and that only men have strategies in this game.

However, it seems obvious to me that females must have strategies, and that their problems are somewhat more difficult. This is because from the male point of view, most women are acceptable, although, of course, some are clearly more acceptable than others. However, from a woman's point of view, some 10% are the prizes, another 20% are good, maybe another 20% are acceptable, and the rest are dogs (there is good evidence that as many as 50% of males do not contribute to the next generation).

Strategies must abound and there is bound to be several that coexist. What I haven't figured out is if they are genetically fixed or are determined when the players see the lay of the land.

By: ben g

ben g — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:31:53 +0000

Ok, so basically the agreeable guys tend to have fewer women who are very much into them, as opposed to the disagreeable guys who have a huge number of flings with women that are only “sparked” by them? Interesting. My guess would be that extroversion trumps all of this, though.

By: Jason Malloy

Jason Malloy — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:37:19 +0000

Ben,

A lot of this is discussed above and in the same thread you reference. The problem is interpreting simply "more sexual partners" to mean women prefer men that treat them poorly, that traits that achieve some goal must be preferred because they can be identified as such, or that men with more sex partners are "more desirable" (i.e. "Too perfect" Mitt Romney must have less mate value than thrice-divorced Giuliani). As I showed above the opposite is more true. Number of sexual partners can mean a lot of things, among them is inability to maintain a functional relationship. More desirable men are more monogamous both through preference and ability (i.e. more desirable men can hold a partner's affections, while less desirable men keep getting dumped and moving on) The 'dark' personality traits discussed in particular involve the willingness to deceive and use others, which is associated with criminality and cad orientation. Just because women can be used and deceived doesn't mean they prefer it.

RE: the MR thread. Agreeableness is highly attractive both in the abstract in survey data, and in rating real men and women. Jensen-Campbell et al found:

"In summary, the substantive message here is that perception of agreeableness in a partner is a major contributor to interpersonal attraction, for both men and women. Agreeableness is a large star, around which rotates the much smaller, dark moon of dominance."

By: ben g

ben g — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:12:24 +0000

here it is:

JM on Marginal Revolution linked to a study which showed the opposite of this one as far as agreeability:

"Research from social psychology and evolutionary psychology show women are attracted by the personality trait dominance (leadership), and both men and women are attracted by the personality trait agreeableness. (the opposite of jerkyness)"

So which one is it??!

By: Jason Malloy

Jason Malloy — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:44:22 +0000

You did — promiscuous women aren’t happier than non-promiscuous women — but your comment is still valid. See my comment on multimillionaire females above.

By: Thursday

Thursday — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 07:47:38 +0000

I think I misunderstood Jason Malloy’s analysis.

By: Thursday

Thursday — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 07:29:22 +0000

WRT promiscuous women being happier, I wonder if they are happier _because_ they are more promiscuous or because of some underlying factor that makes them both happier and more prone to promiscuity. For example, would higher teststerone levels make them less prone to depression?

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:07:22 +0000

There’s a continuum. A lot of guys have small to moderate amounts of badboyness. Some nice guys even learn to fake it.

Some of this is connected to the fact that girls like to have fun too, and excessively serious, excessively careful guys are no fun. Fun is amoral, but it’s a big part of courtship.

By: ben g

ben g — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:03:16 +0000

1.) What the hell? I thought agreeability was an attractive trait… In fact, I even remember Jason Malloy citing a study which purported to show that.

By: Voyageur Occidental

Voyageur Occidental — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:09:35 +0000

But how likely is it that free market eugenics will result in asexual males?

Well, once genetic modification becomes commonplace, the variance of human behaviours would increase... you would have folks choosing to use "get rid" of inequality derived from our biology. For example, instead of a feminist complaining about women lagging behind in academia, she could engineer her daughters with the male brain, and drive, and the personality to match it. If a guy believed "making himself less shallow" really wanted to care about a girl's personality rather than her looks, he could tweak his brain to be purposely that way.
It will open up way more choice.

Ironically, the leftist academic denial of evo psych won't help society reaching equality, but finding the biological bases of the inequality will. Biotech will be able to change it.

Sure I bet the general public wouldn't be eager to get rid of traditionalist norms so fast but the variance of lifestyles would increase dramatically.

ie. Look at how much variance in lifestyle there is now compared to 200 years ago, 1000 years ago. From luddite hippies to nerdy Asperger's syndrome hackers, I've sure the variance in lifestyles will increase way more, as people have more control not just over memes but genes.

By: Jason Malloy

Jason Malloy — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:35:52 +0000

I hope one day biologically and psychologically we can transcend our petty bad-boy-loving instincts and gold-digger tendencies (for girls) and sex-craziness (for guys) and transhumanism allows us to destroy the facets of evolutionary psychology and gender inequality we hate!

But how likely is it that free market eugenics will result in asexual males instead of more tragically charismatic bad boys? Just as free market selection has resulted in a tragedy of the commons problem in China and India, it's questionable if genetic engineering choices will make society better or just saddle us all with generations of bare branches and deaf lesbians.

I don't think I've come across any evo-psych saying women have 'gold-digger' tendencies, per se. One way dinners and diamond rings, etc, are used is to test for unfakeable signals of commitment and weed out the bad boys.

A bad boy who could or would "fake" a traditional courtship wouldn't be a bad boy by definition.

By: agnostic

agnostic — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:23:04 +0000

I hope one day biologically and psychologically we can transcend our petty bad-boy-loving instincts

Remember, though: it's more likely that the bad boys are charming and disarming -- evading detection -- rather than girls liking their bad traits per se.

To fix this, we'd have to engineer females so that their trust of males' motives were incredibly low. This would allow them to detect and screen out bad boys, but it would also put non-bad-boy males (the vast majority) through the ringer, even to speak to her. I doubt that's something the non-bad-boys would enjoy. You can ask guys who go to clubs or bars in DC what that's like (or read the Roissy-sphere for the digest).

Type I vs. type II error.

By: Voyageur Occidental

Voyageur Occidental — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:13:05 +0000

By: Jason Malloy

Jason Malloy — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:33:24 +0000

It wasn't an article, it was my examination of survey data. And the GSS isn't longitudinal so it can't answer that question.

What I can do is point you to this paper which reviews plenty of longitudinal papers on the effects of marriage. Marriage does have a big effect on happiness and health for males and females.