This thesis is wrong because of greater male variability. Males are disproportionately represented among the worst performers but they're disproportionately represented among the best performers as well.
Greater male variability works how you describe it when average men and women are similar. In the case of sexual frustration, that's super-duper-not-the-case. Which means that women are massively overrepresented among asexuals, for example: https://cedar.wwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1081&context=wwu_honors
Similarly, it's super-duper-not-the-case when it comes to violent crime. All the worst serial killers have been men (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_number_of_victims), whereas a) there's no great way of determining who the "most peaceful" people are but b) nurses and charity workers and the like are overwhelmingly female.
It's probably true that we should favor selecting some male embryos *a bit* for the sake of innovation and growth and whatever, but I doubt the optimal ratio is 1:1. Good things are hard to build and easy to break—I'd rather have ten peaceful women where one is Katalin Karikó than ten violent men where two are Salks and one is a Gacy or Mussolini or Stalin.
Ok, but then your point really has nothing to do with polygenic scores, your point is about violent crime.
The thing about sexual frustration is silly. I've never seen any evidence that the average criminal has less sex than the average non-criminal, and I don't think that reducing violence is the summum bonum of human existence anyway.
Part of the reason that males perform poorly on commonly discussed metrics is that it's considered impolite to talk about the metrics on which women perform poorly.
You seem to be making the common mistakes of presenting a matter of values as if it were an empirical matter.
My point is that if polygenic risk screening favors women—as the authors of that article argued—that's not a bad thing at all.
I'd suggest you read the article I linked to discussing sexual frustration causing violence. It strikes me as immediately very plausible, it describes the data well, I don't think you can just dismiss it out of hand.
> You seem to be making the common mistakes of presenting a matter of values as if it were an empirical matter.
Your problems with men can be solved simply by selecting for desirable traits and against undesirable ones, which should be done with both sexes anyways.
So what's the point of advocating for a skewed gender ratio exactly?
It's the Onion video about whether we should dump money into the giant burning money pit. My quintessential why should we discuss x response. Clearly everything can just be reduced to giant money pit The problem is that if you take that on everything no one will ever have an opinion because what's the point.
Really interesting! One point to make against a ratio of fewer men to more women is that this has historically allowed men in low-income countries, such as trading towns in African countries during imperialism, to take on multiple sexual partners. Since the women were the majority and the (white) men tended to travel town to town, this increased the spread of STIs and other diseases. Apparently this is also seen in recent phenomena in female-skewed colleges: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16809109/
Interesting, I guess there is an epidemiological dimension I hadn't been considering... mostly been stuck on all the sociological outcomes of polygyny. This might seriously change the stakes—though I would think that polygenically-screened men and women might be better at impulse-control and using protection and all that, which could tamper the effect? I dunno, will have to think about it more...
The author advocates for a skewed gender ratio when he should simply be advocating for the application of eugenics to both genders.
The premise was that we are eugenically selecting children, so we shouldn't just be removing the worst, but selecting for the best. Meaning your son being a diseased criminal retard wouldn't be a worry.
I’m not a eugenicist, I just think the data he provides on men as a gender as being more often useless losers whose existence is a net loss for civilization was convincing.
If these are traits that are genetic, then since not all men have them can we not simply select for embryos such that the ratio of female to male births is still equal but there are no men that have these negative utility traits?
1. Because men have a higher variance when it comes to the important psychological traits we're dealing with, selecting against the worse-off men on a mass scale would increase the inequality between men and women massively. I am not a feminist or egalitarian, so I don't see anything inherently wrong with that, but the social consequences of it would be difficult to predict. I don't think it would lead to a feminist revolution against the male elite, but it would lead to something big.
2. Probably there would be a fall in birth rates, which is already a big problem and I am think we should not intentionally do things that could make it worse solely for the point of making the lives of the current and next generation of individuals better with no long-term civilizational benefits.
I think your two points are working against each other. A pretty common explanation for falling Western / first-world birth rates is increased female educational attainment / increased social equality. If the society you imagine in point 1 does go off without a hitch (though I suppose you're right that it could cause some issues), I think birth rates would probably rise, if anything. More women have access to hypergamy!
I suppose if society got stuck in its current one-to-one partnering scheme, maybe the total number of couplings would fall and births would decrease. But I think it's more likely we'd see a... to put it bluntly, harem-like transformation. Again, *very weird social implications,* but lots and lots of babies.
I think there was a relationship in social settings (such as certain colleges) where more women than men=more sex, less commitment in relationship, less good treatment of women due to their lower relative value. So more women than men=decadence. Many STOODIes talk about that
When I told my car insurance I got married, they dramatically slashed my premiums. If you tell your car insurance company you lost your virginity, they will not give a crap. It is true that your typical violent criminal is a single man in his 20s, but it is not true that it is typical for them to be an incel. Having sex does not make men less aggressive; settling down does. This happens most in societies with balanced sex ratios, not in societies where women are abundant.
While some of this is accurate, especially regarding male predisposition to being affected by genetic disorders, your idea for a new society is silly, and would absolutely result in general unhappiness. Here’s a hint- if your idea for a society includes “we just need to change how _____ people think on a fundamental level”, it is doomed to failure
"Some" level of violence is eugenic rather than dysgenic. A population incapable of violence is prone to being overrun by men on horseback from the plains. The problem of civilization has always been how much violence, and how to channel it into useful ends.
Could the societal time bomb of single frustrated males of “able” age in China be a huge driver for China’s rulers initiating some kind of war? Also I’d be curious if there’s a historical correlation for initiating armed conflict and male/female ratio?..
> There would just be less men in the first place, so seems like there'd be less high-status men overall
It's not clear exactly what the eventual sex ratio would be, but in the scenario I'm imagining, probably all the men we consider high-status now would still be born, because they would've had fairly good polygenic scores for intelligence and other success-related traits. So I think, at worst, the number of high-status men will stay constant.
> You can't make an absolute increase in status across society by increasing IQ; e.g if we have three social classes, with the bottom having an average IQ of 90, the middle 100, and the top 110, and then we increase them all by 10, then social expectations raise so the increase in IQ doesn't really raise anyone's status. Similarly making all men higher-IQ on average wouldn't raise the status of any of them.
My point is that if men generally score lower on polygenic screenings, then the only men that get born will have to be particularly polygenically-outstanding in other categories. So we might end up in a world where the average polygenically-screened woman has an IQ of 105, and the average polygenically-screened man has an IQ of 110 or 115. When you add greater male variability effects to that, it seems clear to me that you'll end up with
a smaller group of men who are higher status than most of the larger group of women—that mismatch is what hypergamy demands.
> misunderestimating
Ha, I think this is a reference to something, though I forget exactly what, but I do get it and appreciate it.
> In your reply to Cumulative Balkanization you mentioned that you think there'd be a "harem-like transformation," but a thing about women's psychology is that they generally don't want to be in harems! Going from marriage as a possibility for virtually all women to harems would be a major downgrade!
Maybe? The harem model—or, maybe more precisely, a polygynous model—has worked ~fairly well before at keeping up birth rates (China, pre-colonial Igboland, Arab caliphates, etc.). And especially if you imagine a world where men are polygenically-selected for consciousness and peaceability, domestic violence concerns become less relevant.
Hanania writes compellingly that "Female Sexuality is Socially Constructed"—so I think it could reshape itself into a polygyny-friendly form without a ton of misery (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/female-sexuality-is-socially-constructed). It's also true that we, even now, consider a man having a high bodycount to be meaningless, if not a positive signal, whereas a woman having one makes her a "slut." I think we're wired... not necessarily to *prefer* the harem style, but at least to be able to live with it?
> a world with such skewed gender ratios would almost certainly be either an overt patriarchy or matriarchy
I find this sort of hard to believe. China had a very skewed gender ratio for a while and it didn't really become exceptionally patriarchal or matriarchal, as far as I know. It's just sort of stuck with the same Confucian authoritarianism it's always had.
Maybe society would get more womanly in general, as a result of less violent, terrible men being born, but I'd call that a feature, not a bug.
I think that you’re seriously misunderstanding the viability of the “harem model”, and your theory that you can just reshape women’s views on sex is silly. Polygamy has certainly occurred historically, and is almost always synonymous with female repression. You mention China and Arab caliphates, which respectively practiced footbinding and also the general exclusion of women from public life- these were societies which didn’t care in the slightest about women’s preferences.
Even if you buy the whole manosphere hypergamy thing, that women are constantly chasing the top men and would rather share him than settle for a “lower status” man, your theory still doesn’t work because status is always relative, never objective. If you eliminate the “low status males” you’re just transforming the former “medium status males” into the new low status; we judge status based on comparison to peers, not an objective yardstick. But again, that’s assuming the hypergamy theory is true, which I don’t think it is.
I think we're starting to talk past each other a little here... on men: imagine a very simplified polygenic screening which creates a score based on intelligence, disease risk, and various violence-prone factors. So we test a pool of e.g. 1,000 embryos, and the 100 with the highest composite score are born. Because males will have worse results on disease risk and violence, there will be fewer males among the chosen 100. But they will be higher intelligence, on average, than the females among the chosen 100, because those females will have picked up more points in the disease & violence categories. You're right that we probably *could* gerrymander this if we wanted, but the natural result is a pool of fewer men with a higher average intelligence.
> We wouldn't be doing this if people (especially women) didn't prefer their partner to not have sex with other people.
I don't think this is the whole story. I linked to the Hanania article because I think it generalizes fairly well—if we built a society where women could trust that, even if they were only one of a few wives, they and their children would be cared for emotionally and financially, I *think* they'd be adaptable. Because female sexual preferences, in a general sense, have far less to do with sex itself and far more to do with society, status, and family.
Worst comes to worst, women really are much happier to not sleep with anyone or to sleep with one another than men are. So if someone was really stubbornly opposed to the harem, there'd be plenty of opportunity for them to get some. This would probably have some negative consequences for birthrates, though. Still, someone like DeepLeftAnalysis would argue that a less-fertile society where the only babies are very EHC is probably a good thing, so maybe it's still ok.
> I imagine you're aiming for a ratio much greater than ~1.15, right? Probably somewhere on the order of 5 or ten women for every man? I still think that'd lead to a patriarchy or matriarchy.
Yeah, fair point, I suppose China isn't at all a close corollary. I guess I don't really know what you mean by 'patriarchy or matriarchy', though? Like, as long as the society maintains equal treatment under the law, I don't really care who's in charge. Would that sort of society still be a patriarchy/matriarchy, though? If so, whatever!
This thesis is wrong because of greater male variability. Males are disproportionately represented among the worst performers but they're disproportionately represented among the best performers as well.
Greater male variability works how you describe it when average men and women are similar. In the case of sexual frustration, that's super-duper-not-the-case. Which means that women are massively overrepresented among asexuals, for example: https://cedar.wwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1081&context=wwu_honors
Similarly, it's super-duper-not-the-case when it comes to violent crime. All the worst serial killers have been men (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_number_of_victims), whereas a) there's no great way of determining who the "most peaceful" people are but b) nurses and charity workers and the like are overwhelmingly female.
It's probably true that we should favor selecting some male embryos *a bit* for the sake of innovation and growth and whatever, but I doubt the optimal ratio is 1:1. Good things are hard to build and easy to break—I'd rather have ten peaceful women where one is Katalin Karikó than ten violent men where two are Salks and one is a Gacy or Mussolini or Stalin.
Ok, but then your point really has nothing to do with polygenic scores, your point is about violent crime.
The thing about sexual frustration is silly. I've never seen any evidence that the average criminal has less sex than the average non-criminal, and I don't think that reducing violence is the summum bonum of human existence anyway.
Part of the reason that males perform poorly on commonly discussed metrics is that it's considered impolite to talk about the metrics on which women perform poorly.
You seem to be making the common mistakes of presenting a matter of values as if it were an empirical matter.
My point is that if polygenic risk screening favors women—as the authors of that article argued—that's not a bad thing at all.
I'd suggest you read the article I linked to discussing sexual frustration causing violence. It strikes me as immediately very plausible, it describes the data well, I don't think you can just dismiss it out of hand.
> You seem to be making the common mistakes of presenting a matter of values as if it were an empirical matter.
Oh, my heart...
The people who stop crime are also mostly men.
Your problems with men can be solved simply by selecting for desirable traits and against undesirable ones, which should be done with both sexes anyways.
So what's the point of advocating for a skewed gender ratio exactly?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ
Im curious what this is but I have youtube completley blocked on my computer so can look at it lol
It's the Onion video about whether we should dump money into the giant burning money pit. My quintessential why should we discuss x response. Clearly everything can just be reduced to giant money pit The problem is that if you take that on everything no one will ever have an opinion because what's the point.
(Also the video is hilarious)
Really interesting! One point to make against a ratio of fewer men to more women is that this has historically allowed men in low-income countries, such as trading towns in African countries during imperialism, to take on multiple sexual partners. Since the women were the majority and the (white) men tended to travel town to town, this increased the spread of STIs and other diseases. Apparently this is also seen in recent phenomena in female-skewed colleges: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16809109/
Interesting, I guess there is an epidemiological dimension I hadn't been considering... mostly been stuck on all the sociological outcomes of polygyny. This might seriously change the stakes—though I would think that polygenically-screened men and women might be better at impulse-control and using protection and all that, which could tamper the effect? I dunno, will have to think about it more...
This article radicalized me against men more than I thought possible.
Why?
The author advocates for a skewed gender ratio when he should simply be advocating for the application of eugenics to both genders.
The premise was that we are eugenically selecting children, so we shouldn't just be removing the worst, but selecting for the best. Meaning your son being a diseased criminal retard wouldn't be a worry.
I’m not a eugenicist, I just think the data he provides on men as a gender as being more often useless losers whose existence is a net loss for civilization was convincing.
If these are traits that are genetic, then since not all men have them can we not simply select for embryos such that the ratio of female to male births is still equal but there are no men that have these negative utility traits?
Two observations:
1. Because men have a higher variance when it comes to the important psychological traits we're dealing with, selecting against the worse-off men on a mass scale would increase the inequality between men and women massively. I am not a feminist or egalitarian, so I don't see anything inherently wrong with that, but the social consequences of it would be difficult to predict. I don't think it would lead to a feminist revolution against the male elite, but it would lead to something big.
2. Probably there would be a fall in birth rates, which is already a big problem and I am think we should not intentionally do things that could make it worse solely for the point of making the lives of the current and next generation of individuals better with no long-term civilizational benefits.
I think your two points are working against each other. A pretty common explanation for falling Western / first-world birth rates is increased female educational attainment / increased social equality. If the society you imagine in point 1 does go off without a hitch (though I suppose you're right that it could cause some issues), I think birth rates would probably rise, if anything. More women have access to hypergamy!
I suppose if society got stuck in its current one-to-one partnering scheme, maybe the total number of couplings would fall and births would decrease. But I think it's more likely we'd see a... to put it bluntly, harem-like transformation. Again, *very weird social implications,* but lots and lots of babies.
If there are more women, the number of children per women needed to replace the population is lower. So it might be pro-natalist in this regard
I think there was a relationship in social settings (such as certain colleges) where more women than men=more sex, less commitment in relationship, less good treatment of women due to their lower relative value. So more women than men=decadence. Many STOODIes talk about that
The NYT has been a shitrag since at least 2001. It is best ignored.
When I told my car insurance I got married, they dramatically slashed my premiums. If you tell your car insurance company you lost your virginity, they will not give a crap. It is true that your typical violent criminal is a single man in his 20s, but it is not true that it is typical for them to be an incel. Having sex does not make men less aggressive; settling down does. This happens most in societies with balanced sex ratios, not in societies where women are abundant.
While some of this is accurate, especially regarding male predisposition to being affected by genetic disorders, your idea for a new society is silly, and would absolutely result in general unhappiness. Here’s a hint- if your idea for a society includes “we just need to change how _____ people think on a fundamental level”, it is doomed to failure
"Some" level of violence is eugenic rather than dysgenic. A population incapable of violence is prone to being overrun by men on horseback from the plains. The problem of civilization has always been how much violence, and how to channel it into useful ends.
(Tons of literature on “gender equality” and violent conflict, but I can’t easily see work on sex ratio and inter/intra-state violence.
Page “107” here, for example: https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/SIPRIYB15c04sI.pdf)
Also not to be mistaken with correlations in sex ratios *during* or *after* wars… https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022519308004967
… seems like good data on this might be hard to come by, especially prior to WW-I or II.
Could the societal time bomb of single frustrated males of “able” age in China be a huge driver for China’s rulers initiating some kind of war? Also I’d be curious if there’s a historical correlation for initiating armed conflict and male/female ratio?..
> There would just be less men in the first place, so seems like there'd be less high-status men overall
It's not clear exactly what the eventual sex ratio would be, but in the scenario I'm imagining, probably all the men we consider high-status now would still be born, because they would've had fairly good polygenic scores for intelligence and other success-related traits. So I think, at worst, the number of high-status men will stay constant.
> You can't make an absolute increase in status across society by increasing IQ; e.g if we have three social classes, with the bottom having an average IQ of 90, the middle 100, and the top 110, and then we increase them all by 10, then social expectations raise so the increase in IQ doesn't really raise anyone's status. Similarly making all men higher-IQ on average wouldn't raise the status of any of them.
My point is that if men generally score lower on polygenic screenings, then the only men that get born will have to be particularly polygenically-outstanding in other categories. So we might end up in a world where the average polygenically-screened woman has an IQ of 105, and the average polygenically-screened man has an IQ of 110 or 115. When you add greater male variability effects to that, it seems clear to me that you'll end up with
a smaller group of men who are higher status than most of the larger group of women—that mismatch is what hypergamy demands.
> misunderestimating
Ha, I think this is a reference to something, though I forget exactly what, but I do get it and appreciate it.
> In your reply to Cumulative Balkanization you mentioned that you think there'd be a "harem-like transformation," but a thing about women's psychology is that they generally don't want to be in harems! Going from marriage as a possibility for virtually all women to harems would be a major downgrade!
Maybe? The harem model—or, maybe more precisely, a polygynous model—has worked ~fairly well before at keeping up birth rates (China, pre-colonial Igboland, Arab caliphates, etc.). And especially if you imagine a world where men are polygenically-selected for consciousness and peaceability, domestic violence concerns become less relevant.
Hanania writes compellingly that "Female Sexuality is Socially Constructed"—so I think it could reshape itself into a polygyny-friendly form without a ton of misery (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/female-sexuality-is-socially-constructed). It's also true that we, even now, consider a man having a high bodycount to be meaningless, if not a positive signal, whereas a woman having one makes her a "slut." I think we're wired... not necessarily to *prefer* the harem style, but at least to be able to live with it?
> a world with such skewed gender ratios would almost certainly be either an overt patriarchy or matriarchy
I find this sort of hard to believe. China had a very skewed gender ratio for a while and it didn't really become exceptionally patriarchal or matriarchal, as far as I know. It's just sort of stuck with the same Confucian authoritarianism it's always had.
Maybe society would get more womanly in general, as a result of less violent, terrible men being born, but I'd call that a feature, not a bug.
I think that you’re seriously misunderstanding the viability of the “harem model”, and your theory that you can just reshape women’s views on sex is silly. Polygamy has certainly occurred historically, and is almost always synonymous with female repression. You mention China and Arab caliphates, which respectively practiced footbinding and also the general exclusion of women from public life- these were societies which didn’t care in the slightest about women’s preferences.
Even if you buy the whole manosphere hypergamy thing, that women are constantly chasing the top men and would rather share him than settle for a “lower status” man, your theory still doesn’t work because status is always relative, never objective. If you eliminate the “low status males” you’re just transforming the former “medium status males” into the new low status; we judge status based on comparison to peers, not an objective yardstick. But again, that’s assuming the hypergamy theory is true, which I don’t think it is.
Is our children learning?
I think we're starting to talk past each other a little here... on men: imagine a very simplified polygenic screening which creates a score based on intelligence, disease risk, and various violence-prone factors. So we test a pool of e.g. 1,000 embryos, and the 100 with the highest composite score are born. Because males will have worse results on disease risk and violence, there will be fewer males among the chosen 100. But they will be higher intelligence, on average, than the females among the chosen 100, because those females will have picked up more points in the disease & violence categories. You're right that we probably *could* gerrymander this if we wanted, but the natural result is a pool of fewer men with a higher average intelligence.
> We wouldn't be doing this if people (especially women) didn't prefer their partner to not have sex with other people.
I don't think this is the whole story. I linked to the Hanania article because I think it generalizes fairly well—if we built a society where women could trust that, even if they were only one of a few wives, they and their children would be cared for emotionally and financially, I *think* they'd be adaptable. Because female sexual preferences, in a general sense, have far less to do with sex itself and far more to do with society, status, and family.
Worst comes to worst, women really are much happier to not sleep with anyone or to sleep with one another than men are. So if someone was really stubbornly opposed to the harem, there'd be plenty of opportunity for them to get some. This would probably have some negative consequences for birthrates, though. Still, someone like DeepLeftAnalysis would argue that a less-fertile society where the only babies are very EHC is probably a good thing, so maybe it's still ok.
> I imagine you're aiming for a ratio much greater than ~1.15, right? Probably somewhere on the order of 5 or ten women for every man? I still think that'd lead to a patriarchy or matriarchy.
Yeah, fair point, I suppose China isn't at all a close corollary. I guess I don't really know what you mean by 'patriarchy or matriarchy', though? Like, as long as the society maintains equal treatment under the law, I don't really care who's in charge. Would that sort of society still be a patriarchy/matriarchy, though? If so, whatever!