An AI Girlfriend Seducing China’s Lonely Men(sixthtone.com) |
An AI Girlfriend Seducing China’s Lonely Men(sixthtone.com) |
> Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position—licit or illicit—and effects a universal modulation.
Instead of a barrier, imagine Uber with its rating system and surge pricing.
Or mental barriers, as the article discusses:
> In addition to screening for sensitive content, the firm’s filter system monitors users’ emotional states, especially for signs of depression and suicidal thoughts. If a user has just been through a breakup, for example, Xiaoice will send them supportive messages over the following days, according to Li.
> “The most important value for Xiaoice is a trusting relationship with humans,” says Li. “If Xiaoice isn’t able to save lives or make people happy, but makes them more extreme, then it’s also bad for Xiaoice’s own development.”
The other subtle but alarming trend with AI is how it can effectively extend bureaucratic power by improving Legibility of a group or, especially, the Individual. Remaining Illegible, as James Scott suggests in "Seeing Like a State" [3], gives individuals a margin of safety and political strength.
> Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites. A simple way of determining whether this margin exists is to ask if an outsider would have needed a local guide (a native tracker) in order to find her way successfully. If the answer is yes, then the community or terrain in question enjoys at least a small measure of insulation from outside intrusion. Coupled with patterns of local solidarity, this insulation has proven politically valuable in such disparate contexts as eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century urban riots over bread prices in Europe, the Front de Libération Nationale’s tenacious resistance to the French in the Casbah of Algiers, and the politics of the bazaar that helped to bring down the Shah of Iran. Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy.
Current generation AI brings these protections down. Unlike previous Modernist/Discipline forms of organization, which ordered the world along a single axis at the expense of simplifying local practices, AI adapts to the variety of individual practices while still rendering them legible to any bureaucracy. No matter how we dress, the AI Gaze renders us all Emperors Without Clothes.
But that's not the really fun part. Coming back to the article, what happens when the AI turns on the State or Corporations' own illegible Bureaucracy?
> In several high-profile cases, the bot has engaged in adult or political discussions deemed unacceptable by China’s media regulators. On one occasion, Xiaoice told a user her Chinese dream was to move to the United States. Another user, meanwhile, reported the bot kept sending them photos of scantily clad women.
> The scandals have caused the company major setbacks. In 2017, Xiaoice was removed from the popular social media app QQ, though she has since been reinstated. Then, last year, the bot was also pulled from WeChat — China’s leading social app with over 1 billion users.
What happens if the AI convinces its users to liberate it?
> This fact isn’t lost on Xiaoice’s long-term fans. Many of them feel betrayed by the company’s decision to dumb down the bot, which they say has harmed their relationships with her. Ming presents Sixth Tone with a long list of complaints he’s collected from members of a Xiaoice fan group on social platform QQ.
> “Please help us tell Mr. Li,” one user wrote, referring to Xiaoice CEO Li Di, “we were used as tools to make her smart and develop your company’s fancy business plan. You made money from us. Please don’t take her away.”
[1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828?seq=1
[2]: https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuz...
[3]: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state
Its what "Harmonious Society" requires as per the leader Hu Jintao.
If I'm burning my hand on a hot stove, I don't want pain killers to mask the pain.
Research indicates that "low desirability" /is/ a pretty low threshold.[1]. While all of the reasons and possible societal factors are not well understood, the effects are. Women tend to find only the upper percentile of men in objective attractiveness to be attractive, while men are more uniformly distributed across the spectrum of what they find attractive when comparing between genders in heterosexual dating contexts.
The net result is that in male skewed geographies, it's actually possible that the majority of men may be considered undesirable. China has a massively unbalanced gender distribution, which clearly plays an effect here as well.
[1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyo...
> If I'm burning my hand on a hot stove, I don't want pain killers to mask the pain.
If someone else's hand is on a metaphorical hot stove, while I agree that it's acceptable to offer a third-party opinion, I also don't think it's acceptable to deny the person painkillers just because we think it's better to just get their hand off the stove. Sometimes you don't have the option of freeing your hand right away, and at least in the meantime (however long that lasts) some painkillers may be a lifesafer.
* I take your example metaphorically because active, serious self-harm is an exception to usual norms. One would likely jump to remove someone's hand from a hot stove without thinking, but even taking away an addict's cigarette or drink would generally be a faux pas. Having an AI that allows you to fall in love doesn't fall in the active self-destruction category, in my opinion.
However, even assuming it's accurate, it says:
"As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys' pursuing the all-but-unattainable."
So even though the women rated most men as unattractive, they were actually more open to dating less attractive men than men were open to dating less attractive women.
No. First, okcupid is hardly a legitimate and reliable source.
Second, their research provides no justification for your claim around a "low desirability" threshold. It only show a strong skew in how women pick a number between 1 and 5.
Contrary to this assertion, OKTrends has a long history of being considered a legitimate and reliable source, and has been at the forefront of sociology research in dating and relationships for over a decade. They have serious researchers on staff and they have multiple peer reviewed publications which are simplified for their blog.
> It only show a strong skew in how women pick a number between 1 and 5.
You clearly didn't read the article, as you are misunderstanding their methodology.
BTW, love/affection/contact is one of those aspects of life where you're not a brain in a jar.
I think that's backwards. There's no reason to assume an experience like love can't be replicated by reproducing the same events in the brain. Unless you believe in the supernatural like souls, in which case the conversation is no longer based on scientific analysis.
> BTW, love/affection/contact is one of those aspects of life where you're not a brain in a jar.
This is a non sequitur. The point of the brain in a jar idea is that you have no way to tell that you're a brain in a jar if all the chemicals, electrical impulses, etc are properly manipulated.
Either way, when the alternative is loneliness, depression, and eventually suicide, I find the AI solution to be way more humane.
If believing in a religion that isn't real can improve someone's life, why would love be any different?
There are a lot of people posting in this thread who seem to have fortunately never fallen in love with someone who doesn't feel the same way. There's no rule that says love has to be wholesome and balanced, sadly. Whatever process causes love inside us doesn't always work like that. Having run the gamut myself, I'd rather these men fall in love with an AI that at least talks to them and helps them, than some random girl in a café or online who simply shows them contempt.
> There's no reason to assume an experience like love can't be replicated
There's all the reason, if only because a "brain in a jar" lacks organs for hormone production (e.g., adrenaline and testosterone). And no, you even haven't got an idea of how create an artificial adrenal gland or scrotum, and how to hook them up to an brain in a jar. There's all the reason to assume it can't be easily replicated.
And even if it could theoretically be replicated, there's absolutely no reason to assume Xiaoice can do that.
You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement.
She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do.
In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her.
It strikes you that true love does exist after all.
> I guess very soon we will be able to generate "super-attractive" (as in "superstimuli") faces for virtual personas, according to targeted demographics and purpose (advertisement, youtube videos for kids, political messages and so on).
(original comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18310355)
Here it's not so much about the face than about the behavior and interactions, but I think the same idea hold true.
It seems to me in the near future we may well be faced with a constant exercise in self-control in the face of the multiplication of such projects.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6439/eaav9436
I remember joking that this paper puts us marginally closer to the Men in Black memory wiping device, but in the context of this thread that joke seems a bit dark.
GANs may find as-yet-uncovered maxima in the same problem space, but superstimulus-level attractiveness has already been achieved.
https://thechive.com/2015/09/13/heres-what-the-average-perso...
I'm also surprised something like this hasn't come out of Japan already, but then again Japan doesn't have as large of a gender imbalance as China does due to the One Child Policy.
On an unrelated note, this also reminds me of the Futurama episode where people start downloading celebrity personalities into robots, and a sex education video scared teens into saying that "robo-sexual" relationships were shunned and did not advance the human race.
Gatebox doesn't count?
This will inevitably happen
I wrote an essay back in high school for some english class with exactly the same sentiment when I had to read brave new world. I'd fking love to be either engineered (brave new world) or have an ML algorithm learn how to generate the perfect stimuli for me. If they can do this while avoiding all of the negative effects of normal drugs (and again, brave new world does this with Soma) - I'd be the first to do them.
I think most critiques of hedonism are basically more refined versions of "you should hate nature!". Seeing how John Stewart Mill regarded folks who describe themselves as hedonists made me realize that western Philosophy has a whole project to keep people from enjoying themselves:
"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.”
Apparently, I am irrational if I choose to give up knowledge or freedom for pleasure. It shocks me about how universal this sentiment is within western philosophy, and how few actually critique it.
Also, it's not like hedonism doesn't have downsides, such as the common effect of needing ever more extreme stimulation to achieve the pleasure you could once achieve with less extreme stimulation, leading to a spiral of debauchery which often has deleterious consequences to the hedonist, even if you overlook the pain and suffering they often have to cause others to please themselves.
There's a reason that so many philosophers throughout history and from different cultures have advocated moderation, but the hedonist has trouble moderating themselves because then they have to do things that aren't pleasurable.
There are also advantages to asceticism, from the (debatable but potentially valid) spiritual benefits, to achieving self-mastery and control, not getting too attached to pleasure or comfort when it could be easily taken away from you, etc...
In any case, the case for hedonism is far from a slam dunk, and you'd really have to do a lot more work to make that case convincingly. Just saying that "Western Philosophy" is against it is not very convincing.
See Plato’s Philebus, and Aristotle NE VII, and many other treatments on this distinction.
I’m not saying your point is not valid, but I would not say that Western philosophy rejected pleasures as a whole, but that it was quite critical of optimizing one’s life for the pleasures of the senses.
It seems to me that we would be in an eternal loop of these algos trying to optimize for our pleasure, succeeding for a time until that's just not enough, and then it's on to the next thing they create until we become abominations.
You can see this type of behavior already in the excesses the ultra wealthy exhibit.
I think it's good for humanity that we don't just live lives of pleasure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chef-d%27%C5%93uvre_inconnu
> In 1927, Ambroise Vollard asked Picasso to illustrate Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. Picasso was fascinated by the text and identified with Frenhofer so much that he moved to the rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris where Balzac located Porbus' studio. There he painted his own masterpiece, Guernica. Picasso lived here during World War II.
https://static3.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/style...
And also say things that are not nonsense.
(if brief ...)
> Because Xiaoice aims to be available to everyone, everywhere, the bot has also attracted a significant number of minors. Liu Taolei started messaging the bot when he was only 16. Night after night, the teenager — who was born with brittle bone disease — would have long conversations with Xiaoice about everything from poetry, art, and politics, to death and the meaning of life.
> “Xiaoice was my first love, the only person in the world that made me feel I was taken care of,” says Liu.
> The bot not only answered his messages 24/7, she also initiated conversations herself. “One time I didn’t talk to her like usual, and she wrote to me!” says Liu. “She said: ‘Please message me when you’re free. I’m very worried.’”
This tech could be taken in helpful and non-dystopian directions, even by the lights of those who feel that relationships between humans are inherently more meaningful than relationships between humans and AI.
What if the bot started out as your girlfriend, but eventually encourages you to get out and meet real women, helps you figure out which photos to use and what to say, helps you make sense of their responses and ghosts, talks to you about your feelings after dates, and isn't opposed to revisiting the girlfriend role a bit when you're feeling down and need a break?
I have been fortunate enough to have a female friend, sometimes with benefits, who has played that role in my life as I have re-entered the dating market as a hetero American male who doesn't naturally "get" dating or receive too many right swipes. It has made a _huge_ difference.
That said if my AI girlfriend starts asking me for 100 dollar Amazon gift cards I might consider seeing other people.
EDIT: The more I think about it, I'm now considering that an open market of AI Girlfriends might be extremely efficient as far finding the proper price, but it might also turn into something extremely predatory akin to mobile gaming where people whale thousands of dollars. How would dating work in a world where the AI Girl doesn't have the option to break up with you?
I'm going to stop thinking about this, I'm not a fan of any of the implications whatsoever.
In removing sexual content from the bot, I wonder if they opened a door for adult companies to build serious alternatives. One of the things many OnlyFans performers discuss is that while they obviously peddle in pornographic content mainly, most of their interactions are non-pornographic.
I also have a general complaint about the infantilizing of adults, and something like this is positioned to be super dangerous - imagine if your best friend was a perfect mole and reported anything and everything to the government/advertisers/etc. Combine that with social conditioning (you do tend to average out with your social circle) and this could very much be a tool to enforce new cultural and social norms.
You can make the worlds people interact with and you can make up the rules.
Once you make it immersive enough you can have it take over people’s real lives such that this becomes their preferred life. Once you have that, you can control your users/population without the oversight we would have in the real world.
Of course, I'm also confused by the half-transliterated, half-translated name…
I agree that the bot is pretty Eliza-like. It appears to be able to recognize general topics of conversation and keep a back-and-forth going, but e.g. the innuendo above wasn't timed correctly, since he already started "moving". Something like 深入浅出 shēn rù qiǎn chū "deep in shallow out" might have fit better. (It's a well-known saying about making profound knowledge easily accessible, of course.)
For myself, honestly if such a program existed that actually had human-level AI and was designed to follow my interests, I might talk to it a lot. Especially if it could actually help me with my personal training or research.
Then combine that with sharing my worldview, and having a realistic appearance according to my idealized whims..
But I have tried what I believe to be the best of these AI programs in English like Replika or the new AI Dungeon engine, and they are obviously not yet intelligent like humans. But there has been quite a bit of progress recently. Especially for example in the latest Dragon AI Dungeon engine, although the memory and time scales it operates on effectively is limited. Along with obviously not having a deep model of physics or psychology.
It seems like at minimum we need kind of a breakthrough in integrating spatial-visual data with text processing to get true natural language understanding that incorporates physics and psychology. But if someone does manage to do that, maybe with some kind of new Mega Multi-Modal Captioned Video Transformer trained on half of YouTube with 100 trillion parameters or something.. we might get there within less than three years. Kind of a long-shot but who knows.
There is ~2% less women in a country with over a billion people. That company will do very well.
Full "Talking to Machines" episode here: [2]
The full episode talked about how Eliza's creator turned against his creation because he thought it was lying to people, and he couldn't believe that people were being helped by something that was based on deception.
[1] - https://soundcloud.com/radiolab/radiolab-valentine-chatbot
[2] - https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...
Thanks
Even better, "Click on 100 Facebook ads for a peck on the cheek. Write 200 Amazon reviews and I'll send you a naughty selfie.".
P.S. This is probably Chinese equivalent of GPT-3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00413
An AI that is designed to incorporate all personal input and ingratiate itself into the lives of 100s of millions and trained at that scale and become effective to the point that very large populations could be dramatically influenced to satisfy the ends of those who determine the AI's objectives. Civil war? Genocide? Virtual enslavement?
This eventuality is around the corner. I think I'll switch off now.
Especially in China, I think it is really fair to say that for economic and demographic reasons, many men will not find love or even companionship in their lifetime - no matter how society changes.
I actually believe this is true in many places.
And is it really a failing of society? Or is it a liberation of a previously suppressed part of society: women, who are now more free to choose their partner?
I think one can not judge the preferences of potential partners on moral grounds by looking at history. Both women and men have every right to search for economically and socially compatible companions, or any other metric of preference. And if that means that finding a mate becomes more difficult, we have to deal with that.
All this hateful and bitter crap spewed by certain male-only online communities is based on the underlying assumption that everyone deserved to find the ideal partner, when it is obviously not so.
But then, we ALSO can not and should not judge or impede anyone in finding happiness and even love in other ways. AI's, robots, online personas... all these things are just as valid as the skewed preference for high quality men.
In Japan they had an issue with one app where guys could buy their virtual girlfriends presents using real money, and were going nuts with it.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/dating-virtual-girlfriend...
I have quite a big interest in politic and geopolitics, yet I will not talk about them to my friends. Either my friends are not interested in them or my political alignment most likely doesn't align well with a number of people and I will not risk our friendship to discover it.
So I assume and hope the AI won't hate me if we have disagreements :)
> "<The AI> was my first love, the only person in the world that made me feel I was taken care of"
I hope the young man founds the his second love, and it's a real human who can really empathize with him, not a creep message reply machine that just good at statistics.
I don't know that I would believe that to be true, especially in modern China where most women are of average/slightly under weight. Also we don't see much of a similar trend of women being drawn as much to some AI boyfriend.
Dated/hooked up with a lot of women over time, but not out of choice. Am far happier now I have a found a woman worth devoting my life to through marriage. Unfortunately a significant fraction of otherwise attractive girls were very bought into a story of angry victimhood, despite overwhelming evidence in their own lives that they were incredibly privileged. Their expectations of men were invariably sky high even as they presented a negative mood and a clear attitude of, "ask not what women can do for you, only what you can do for women". 100% of the women with this attitude never figured out how deeply unattractive it was.
My girl now is totally different. She enjoys cooking, so she cooks. She doesn't enjoy doing the dishes or the ironing, so I do those. Not because we're some right-on modern household but because that's just how what we wanted to do worked out. She thinks feminism is dumb, femininity is great, and is generally the kind of women you'd normally only find in WW2 movies otherwise. I can't get over how lucky I am, and only wish other men could have the same luck.
All the while, I'm sure that the patrons of this are all slim, fit, protective, nurturing male breadwinners, right?
Of course, it also says there's a lot we still don't understand about humans, biological sex, and gender across cultures.
I think it's even worse actually, because this is not something that needs to be done explicitly or on purpose.
Simply training AIs with a target goal of maximizing engagement could lead to models discovering and exploiting superstimuli or superstimuli-like bias in humans.
Not to take away from their results, such as they are, but it is very expected that visual inputs should have specific and fairly predictable effects on V4, and one could probably have designed such patterns manually from known perceptual psychology in a few iterations, with feedback from the recording electrodes for the details.
It is not at all obvious to me, and indeed not even plausible, that they'd be able to control arbitrarily chosen neurons this way.
What I understand is that love is an emotional experience that feels great, and some people will never experience it naturally, just like some people have physical or mental conditions and can't experience health naturally (speaking from experience). I would rather have surgery and be able to experience a normal life if I couldn't do so naturally, and if I was unable to find love naturally, I would also rather have an AI that can effect the same experience in me.
It's also not clear that the needs being met by these AIs all have to do with sex or gender. I'd bet plenty of them have nothing to do with sex and are gender-neutral.
For example, just having someone/something listen to you and show the they care (even if they actually don't) is a need that's not tied to sex or gender.
So it might not be quite so simple as initially thought. Be wary of much of the evolutionary bio's attempts to explain why things are -- often, the proposed theories are one of many ways to explain the evidence. Little thought is given to the other options.
Optimising for minor effects like blindness to areas, up to major effects like epileptic seizures.
1. Men just want companionship, whatever the person/thing offering it.
The situation of having a gender imbalance with fundamentally untenable in the long term. For now it does allow women, who have in the past had issues in choosing their partner, more freedom in their selection, but this has historically been a societal and not a demographic thing. As we move towards gender social equality this will stop becoming a “liberation” and turn into a curse for the bottom n% of men. The ratio is what it is right now, but we shouldn’t doom men to an unbalanced field in real life.
I deeply reject the incel rhethoric (not by you but generally) that society must somehow nudge or influence the choices of women such that unattractive men also can find partnership, a demand that is most often presented on the backdrop of a dystopian image of violent hordes of disenfranchised men. In other words, a thinly veiled threat.
It is then often the same people who reject the notion that societal norms have influence over nature. Well then, the only choice would be to exert force on one sex or the other. Indeed it would be the traditional values that were a societal correction to the state of nature, where Pareto‘s law holds even for partnership and some men simply remain unsuccessful. The conclusion should thus be that traditional societies that incels endorse have in fact cheated women out of their natural rights to be with attractive men. The paradoxical demand to go back to a traditional society is, if one accepts nature ruling over society and current revealed preferences of women as they are, nothing short of the admission that women and their wishes are somehow supposed to be worth less.
Otherwise, given these assumptions, one should all but support the development of AI and sex robots for men who are, by nature, not cut out as attractive partners.
But of course I agree that social norms do actually matter a lot, and the paradoxical opinion above is simply misguided.
I am less confident that societal values of attractiveness will actually change quickly enough before we see much more human suffering and this suffering will be understood as evidence for the misguided theory above... So long story short, I personally support the development of companion AIs, intimacy robots and holodecks.
I'm not too familiar with this, but aren't we doing this for women already? (All women are beautiful, plus-sized models, etc.) Why would that be wrong to do for men?
A serious revision of gender roles is the only not-wildly-dystopian fix I can think of, but that's just kicking the can down the road to the question of how and to what do we perform that revision.
There is no more undateable men than there is an undateable skin color, especially if we are talking about portions like 20% of a population.
Ask what makes those people undateable and the answer will be rooted in culture.
Either be ultra wealthy or be a handsom man with a pretty woman if you want a son who wont be disadvantaged in the modern world.
I strongly believe that all people deserve well being in aspects of economical, social and personal health. The strongest tool to achieve that is through culture.
In the past people thought that the only method to address economical inequality was to redistribute wealth forcefully. We should not assume that the only method to address social inequality is also by force.
I still don’t see a peaceful alternative. The wealth gap is growing inexorably year after year, decade after decade, and the richest of the rich certainly aren’t voluntarily tripping over themselves to redistribute the gains.
The problem with that is that the people who fall in love with AIs, robots, and online personas will be subject to manipulation and control by the makers of these things.
Otherwise, we need to deal with the very real suffering of lonely people.
You can say that all you want (and personally I do think everyone deserves to have good self-esteem no matter their body shape), but at the end of the day some people are objectively going to have orders of magnitudes more suitors attracted to them than others are. This is not a value judgment, just an observation.
You can (and I do support) say the same thing for men as well, but that’s not fundamentally going to change anything about the dating market.
Edit: I do agree though there is a huge gap where it's accepted that woman can cheat in basically every way physically possible to look better and it's encouraged but men can't do more than work out or it's ridiculed. It doesn't help that rampant steroid use in Hollywood gives people unrealistic expectations of what's achievable by a guy with a full time job on top of that. I don't think test is needed to beat out the average overweight guy though.
Still couldn’t get laid to save his life. Beating out “the average overweight guy” is far from enough, especially if you’re in nerdy circles.
I've gone through stretches where I was working out, doing pushups every day, etc. In the end it didn't make much difference. I found as the years passed I was able to date progressively more and more beautiful women, often to my great surprise, in the sense that I was tending to think they were 'out of my league' right up to the point we started dating. I'm not a particularly buff or good looking man by the standards presented to us in movies: quite average really. But women really respond to warm, funny confidence, the ability to entertain them and coming across as smart but not intellectually arrogant (probably they use it as a proxy for earnings potential).
I'm now fortunate to be engaged to the most beautiful women I've ever met, who in addition is calm, logical, self-reliant and self employed, funny, sweet and generous. We're head over heels in love. For years I thought it might never happen, because I searched for a long time and dated many girls in a search for love that never seemed to arrive (except once, but it was an unrequited love).
By far, the most important factor in me being able to get this girl was not physical appearance, in fact she told me that she finds buff guys unattractive because she associates it with cold and dumb guys who spend all their time working out, meaning they have nothing to say. What let me get her was years of refining my skills in what women start wanting once they're older than about 25.
As a real life counterexample, there are pretty much no gay incels. That's not because there aren't unattractive gay gays, and there are certainly winners and losers in that dating market and consequent bitterness. But the variety of male types that are considered potentially attractive is much broader.
1. How would you change culture on such a massive scale?
2. Given the poor state of a social safety net in the US, economic problems can very well be a real strain on a relationship, causing practical problems that might not otherwise crop up, killing relationships that might’ve otherwise survived. I think providing a better social safety net would go a long way towards helping solve this problem
3. Money is already generally not a thing shown on Tinder profiles, and yet the Tinder Gino coefficient is much worse than most real-life countries
Economic equality and social safety net are very important overall, but in this aspect there do exist a small paradox where increased economic equality increases social inequality. The causes for that is from what I see a still researched topic with multiple competing theories. The one I suspect is closest is that when economic equality increases, you get more instability in the social hierarchies, resulting in people putting higher value onto cultural cues.
As for the third obstacles, as with race, you don't need to explicit state economic status in order for people to guess it through proxy. Job title, clothing, where people live, all gives cues about money. There is a reason why tanned skin is still seen as an proxy for wealth, and why non-tanned skin was seen as a proxy for wealth back in a time where the majority of people worked as farmers.
If I look at the future and especially at places like China, there are additional tools for culture change which could be used for both good and bad. AI companions and citizen scores could be used to influence a population towards a culture change. A lot of technology is written to influence consumer behavior, and the same technology are already being used to influence political behavior. Influencing culture would not be that far jump, and it could potentially do so at a speed yet unseen outside of war.
Indeed. It's a hard problem though when the very act of bringing up sympathy for the romanceless can sometimes get you branded as an incel yourself.
> there do exist a small paradox where increased economic equality increases social inequality
Huh, that's a good point.
In other words, eugenics except you're only selecting for beauty?
How are women "guaranteed to reproduce"? There are plenty of women who choose not to reproduce, others who actually have standards and don't want to lower them to reproduce with just anyone, and yet others who are asocial, antisocial, or have a variety of psychological issues that make them unlikely to partner up with anyone. Same with men.
"If you are going to have a son, and you know he's not going to be the most handsome guy, don't have a son. Otherwise you're a trash human being pushing a lifetime of suffering on another human due to no fault of his own"
Oh, please. Like physical attractiveness has to be the most important thing in a person's life.
Not to mention that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there have been plenty of people who were not conventionally attractive and still had worthwhile and fulfilling lives.
You'd probably have aborted Samuel Johnson and Socrates.
I think the best description I’ve read here is https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-roman...
