Tag Archives: Mating

Stop Stale Eggs, Jobs?

By Robin Hanson · March 17, 2010 9:15 am · Comments (37)

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. Shaw

The average woman is born with around 300,000 eggs … 12 percent of those eggs remaining at the age of 30, and only 3 percent left by 40. … From the mid-30s on, the decline in fertility is much steeper with each passing year. … Female undergraduates significantly overestimated their fertility prospects at all ages. … The biological reality that female fertility peaks in the teens and early 20s can be difficult for many American women to swallow, as they delay childbirth further every year. … The older you get, the more difficult it is to get pregnant and the higher the chance of miscarriage, pregnancy problems such as gestational diabetes and hypertension, and chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome. … The risk of autism increases with a mother’s age.

More here.  Also, Andrew Leigh:

We estimate the relationship between maternal age and child … learning outcomes and social outcomes. … Children of older mothers have better outcomes. … When we control for other socioeconomic characteristics, such as family income, parental education and single parenthood, the coefficients on maternal age become small and statistically insignificant.

Today high status women stay long in school, start careers, and take long to match up with a man before having kids.  They are often too late, their kids have more defects, and the interruption hurts their career.  Low status women more often have an accidental early kid out of wedlock.

Imagine a different equilibrium, where females pick a male at 15, then school more slowly to have kids till some standard age (20? 25? 30?), when females return to full-time school and uninterrupted careers.

While it is not entirely clear if this new equilibrium would be better or worse, it certainly has some positive features.  Kids and moms would be healthier, kids more numerous and less accidental, moms more energetic, older folk would enjoy more grand kids etc., and career interruptions wouldn’t make female employees suspect.

Early parenting would have to be paid for by grandparents or via loans (or perhaps income shares), presumably in trade for some loss of autonomy.  While childhood does seem to be lengthening, it is not clear if this autonomy loss could be accepted.

For the male pattern, there are two obvious variations: males switch life-plans along with females, or males stay on the current plan.  Having males also switch would keep mates at similar ages, promote healthier kids and more energetic dads, and reduce opportunities for gender discrimination.

Randomness in kid timing and number would make it a bit harder to estimate student quality based on student performance – could we find ways to correct for this?  And the fact that low status moms now have kids early makes it harder to coordinate a switch to this new equilibrium.  But still, it seems an interesting thing that never was, about which to ask: why not?

From a conversation with Rob Wiblin, Katja Grace.

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Fairness in Love And War

By Robin Hanson · February 22, 2010 6:40 am · Comments (21)

The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war.  John Lyly, Euphues, 1578.

All’s fair in love and war, we hear at a tender age.  Though this is tempered by schoolboy concepts of fair play and never hit a man when he’s down.  Fair play is reasonable if you don’t mean to win at any cost and the other guy doesn’t mean to kill you, but all that goes by the board in any genuine confrontation. more

Does ethics describe key ultimate wants, or only minor wants, and social norms and signals which instrumentally help us achieve key wants?  Consider the saying “All is fair in love and war.”  It is often quoted, and rarely does a listener respond “Not it’s not.”  Yet folks also often complain loudly about unfairness.  Taken together, these suggest that for most, fairness is largely instrumental.

Those who embrace this saying suggest that a threat of military defeat, and perhaps extermination, would overwhelm most other considerations.  Similarly, they suggest that the threat of not attracting a hoped-for mate also overwhelms most other considerations.

Setting love alongside war as a similar reason to ignore fairness is quite telling.  Wars have often ended extremely, with total victory or total defeat.  But if you don’t attract a particular desired lover, you might well attract a lover nearly as good.  Those who equate the harm of getting their second favorite mate, vs. their favorite mate, with the harm of losing vs. winning a war, seem to say that mate quality is overwhelming important.  Little matters nearly as much – certainly not fairness (or racism).

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Mate Racism

By Robin Hanson · February 20, 2010 11:40 am · Comments (91)

The latest Time:

My Race-Based Valentine. Why online dating is the last refute of overt racial preferences.

This Valentine’s Day … relatively few women on mainstream dating sites will bother to respond to overtures from men of Asian descent. Likewise, black women will be disproportionately snubbed by men of all races. …  Chemistry.com requires users to identify their ethnicity; like eHarmony, it considers members’ racial preferences when suggesting matches. Match.com lets users filter their searches by race. The site’s profiles include space to indicate interest (or lack thereof) in various racial and ethnic groups. …

Among the women, 73% stated a [racial] preference. Of these, 64% selected whites only, while fewer than 10% included East Indians, Middle Easterners, Asians or blacks. … 59% of [men] stated a racial preference. Of these, nearly half selected Asians, but fewer than 7% did for black women. … In October, [OkCupid.com], 80% of whose members choose to input their race, studied the messaging patterns of more than a million users and concluded on its official blog that “racism is alive and well.” …

But do racial preferences amount to racism? Or is overlooking an entire ethnicity as innocuous as filtering out redheads or people under a certain height? “Just because you take race into consideration in your dating preferences and are aware of race doesn’t make you racist,” says Dr. Nicole Coleman, a psychology professor at the University of Houston. Minorities who prefer to date within their own race or ethnicity — and who look for potential mates on niche sites like BlackPeopleMeet.com and Amor.com — would probably agree with her.

So dating is our last refuge of overt racism because … preferring people based on race isn’t racism if its for dating, especially if minorities do it?!

Of course its racism, if anything is.  But is it good racism?  The obvious reason to allow mate racism is that people better enjoy mating when they better like their mates, and people think they care about the race of their mates.  But this same reason suggests allowing racism by firms, schools, and clubs.  Firms are full of people, including employees, customers, suppliers, and investors, any of which might care about the race of folks they must deal, mingle, associate, etc. with.  At schools, the teachers, students, and ultimate employers of those students may also care about race.

Yes people may be mistaken about how much they care about the race of their associates, and perhaps this justifies government policies forbidding overt racism at firms, schools, or clubs.  But why doesn’t this apply just as well to mating?  Sure it is impossible to legislate away all racism in dating, but the same is true for hiring etc.  Why don’t we at least forbid overt mating racism, such as race-based searches?  We could even collect stats on the race of folks that people contact at dating sites, just as we check now on rates rates in hiring at firms, etc.

One explanation is that we naively think that imposing rules on firms only hurts those abstract entities, not the people associated with them.  Or we think such rules only hurt investors and managers, who we don’t care about.   Perhaps we only dislike racism that changes incomes, not happiness — yet mates often change income a lot.  Another explanation is that we only don’t care about racism in the “personal” sphere, though this just changes the question to what exactly is “personal” and why do we care differently about such things.  What do you think?

Added: The UN definition supports the “personal” theory:

“Racial discrimination” shall mean any … preference based on race … which has the … effect of … impairing the … enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of … fundamental freedoms in … any … field of public life.

Added 25Feb: A Post article encouraging black women to date while men.

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New Paleolithic Mating

By Robin Hanson · February 14, 2010 6:00 am · Comments (36)

Two women on modern mating.  Lori Gottlieb:

A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay for the Atlantic titled “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough,” in which I said that having found myself still single at 40 … had I known when I was younger what would make me happy when it came to marriage and family, I would have made very different choices in my dating life. … The majority of single women who responded to a survey I sent out said that getting 80 percent of what they wanted in a mate would be “settling.” The majority of single men said finding a woman with 80 percent of what they wanted would be “a catch.” …

Many single women — mostly those in their 20s — went wild with rage and disdain for my confession: … I’d happily take the 80 percent, if only it was as available to me as it had been when I was 30. …  Suddenly I was “ageist,” “sexist” and “anti-feminist.” … I’ll admit, just a few years earlier, I might have been one of the women bashing this Lori Gottlieb chick for saying the unthinkable. I, too, felt that women should “have it all” (whatever unrealistic ideal I took that to be) and that anyone who suggested otherwise was out of touch, offensive or just plain off her rocker. Compromise? No way. That would mean not being true to myself.  A lot of women my age and younger grew up thinking this way. … We’re supposed to have high standards, and if a guy doesn’t meet them, we should be gloriously fulfilled on our own. … According to some readers, I was an affront to the entire women’s movement … I remember watching a group of young women on the “Today” show discussing my article and the fact that they’d rather be single than with Mr. Good Enough. …

It’s probably no accident that once women adopted this “I don’t need a man” attitude, many were left without men. According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of never-married women ages 25 to 44 more than doubled between 1970 and 2006. …  Another woman proudly said she could easily get her sexual needs taken care of without marriage. So what? … 4 percent of women said what they wanted most from marriage was sex, while 75 percent said it was companionship.

Charlotte Allen:

The very day, March 17, 2005, that Scott Peterson—sentenced to death in California for killing his wife and unborn son and throwing their remains into San Francisco Bay—took up residence on San Quentin’s death row, he received three-dozen phone calls from smitten women, including an 18-year-old who wanted to become his second wife. According to an April story in People, Peterson is still being flooded with letters from female admirers almost five years later, many of the mash notes containing checks to pay for his commissary charges. That’s par for the course on death row, where the rule is: The more notorious the killer, the more fan mail and marriage proposals. The most fan-mail-saturated killer in San Quentin is Richard Allen Davis, who in 1993 kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas at knifepoint from her home in Petaluma, Calif., killed her, and buried her in a shallow grave. … Continue Reading "New Paleolithic Mating" »

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Hunger, Racism Sexy

By Robin Hanson · February 13, 2010 12:00 pm · Comments (4)

In celebration of Valentine’s, I offer some handy mating tips:  

For Men:  To find a fertile woman to impregnate, look for a racist:

We examined the effects of changes in conception risk across the menstrual cycle on intergroup bias and found that increased conception risk was positively associated with several measures of race bias. This association was particularly strong when perceived vulnerability to sexual coercion was high.

For Women:  If you think yourself heavy (most do), then to attract a man, make him hungry:

Peckish males prefer females who are heavier, taller and older.   The research … confirms and expands upon two previous papers: a 2005 study that concluded heavier women are preferred in cultures with scarce resources, and a 2006 British study that found hunger influences judgments of female physical attractiveness.  The latter report … concluded that males with empty stomachs preferred heavier females.

HT Rob Wiblin.

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The Future of Sex

By Robin Hanson · February 7, 2010 1:40 pm · Comments (36)

Our descendants will be different from us. In a competitive world, they’ll have to be; our design is hardly optimized for their world. But since they will evolve incrementally from us, they won’t be completely different.  For example, many features of the ways we talk between minds, and within minds, may lock in as interface standards.  Also, our descendants will prefer to reuse and modify complex workable modules rather than reinventing such things from scratch.

Which brings us to everyone’s favorite topic: sex. Our minds have been evolved in great detail to handle human sex. How might our descendants reuse and adapt those well-honed capabilities to deal with future mental challenges?

First, it is pretty obvious that within a century or two at most our descendants just won’t be creating descendants by randomly mixing the features of two parents, any more than firms today design new products via random mixes of old product features. No, our descendants will be more deliberately designed, with design components inspired by, if not directly taken from, a great many predecessors.  They just won’t make babies the bio-sex way.

Even so, our distant descendants will continue to form long-term alliances between minds whose qualities and loyalties are opaque. Even when one can directly peer inside, most complex minds simply have no clear place to look to see their overall abilities and loyalties. Such features are instead spread across such minds and best seen in actual behavior.  So to infer such features it can help to probe and test such minds in particular ways.  Our mental sexual toolkit is full of such ways to probe and test.

Also, when complex minds last longer than the multi-mind tasks they tackle, they must choose which minds combine to do which tasks.  And to create good incentives, minds must share some consequences of their joint performance, while committing in certain ways to outcomes they might not prefer after the fact.  Our sexual toolkit also has many useful ways to deal with these issues.

Our descendants will therefore likely recruit variations on our sexual toolkit to such tasks.   They will distinguish flings from “true love” while adapting human feelings of lust, romance, attachment, jealousy, and intimacy, and also variations on our mating dances of watching, displaying, flirting, wooing, testing, seducing, accusing, betraying, etc.

Our descendants may also distinguish male from female patterns of such behaviors. For example, some will pursue while others evaluate, some will take more risks while others play it safer, some will invest more vs. less in each relation, and some will protect against outside dangers while others nurture inside growth.

Our mental adaptations to sex are subtle and well-tuned for our mating task of slowly teasing out the abilities and intentions of others while becoming increasingly committed to and dependent on those others.  Our distant descendants will likely adapt such abilities for their many purposes.  Future sex may well change greatly to meet future needs, but it will still be recognizably sex all the same.  Long live sex!

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Swinger Trends

By Robin Hanson · January 29, 2010 11:00 pm · Comments (25)

Swinging has switched from a male to a female focus:

Apart from the numeric growth of the phenomenon, swinger behaviour has also greatly changed over the last 25 years. Both in Italy and in the rest of the world. Twenty-five years ago couples sought almost exclusively other couples or single females; now a days couples seek other couples, single males and groups of males. The phenomenon has thus evolved from situations in which the centre of sexual intercourse was the male component of the couple to “harder” situations in which the centre of sexual intercourse is the female component and the male takes his pleasure from sharing his companion with other men. … Now a days an increasing number of single males seek swingers rather than prostitutes, since swinger women are considered more participative than prostitutes.

A swinger party price list:

Couples: $90, MFF Trios: $120, MMF Trios: $170, Single Females $25

Some patterns:

  • Swingers tend to have at least one person per couple with a college degree.
  • The typical rule is that it must be couples, no singles allowed.
  • You must first present a negative STD test, and agree to be routinely tested.
  • Many have restrictions on outside sex … you [may not] “cheat on the group.”
  • [First talk] on the internet for a long … time before anyone will approach you.
  • [Then] several “dates” where they meet the new potential couple.
  • Groups also sort themselves according to their preferences for activity types.

I’m not sure I’ve got the right picture here – not even sure these are the same kind of swingers.  When many men are on one women, the other women are just sitting around being ignored?  Back in the day when men were the focus, were several women on one man while other men were being ignored?

My guess on the focus switch is that women less fear seeming slutty today.  Whereas once swinging women might have been with several men in one night, they drew the line at being seen doing many men at once.  Now that line has moved.

Added 9a: Apparently, men in couples mostly initiate the move to swinging, but some women become very enthusiastic converts, and become the female centers.  In the past such women were less visibly slutty, with one man at a time.  Many men are overconfident, and learn they attract few women at such events.

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Cheater Finder Fee?

By Robin Hanson · December 19, 2009 4:00 pm · Comments (67)

Today tort law lets folks sue others for harms outside the scope of a contract. Consider:

If it would have been hard for you to negotiate a deal where someone might pay you for your help, the law might also want to let you sue that person, asking for some estimate of the value of the help you gave.

Half of my recent law & econ final exam was to analyze:

If A informs B that spouse C is cheating on B with D, should A be able to sue B for compensation for this service?

My forty students mostly disagreed; 50% of A students and 75% of below A students said no.  The obvious pro arguments are less cheating and earlier discovery of cheating. Con arguments:

  • Estimating value gained is hard; only count cash gains.
  • They could have paid someone else to check for cheating.
  • Many spouses would rather not know of cheating.
  • The cheating spouse and partner lose if exposed.
  • Some might make fake evidence to gain money.
  • Some might entrap folks into cheating.
  • The legal process is costly, as is law change.

Now fraud and entrapment could be obvious exceptions, and the cost of law argues equally against all law.  The difficulties and signaling penalties of contracting with folks well placed to notice incriminating evidence suggests we apply tort law principles.  And only paying a fraction of cash gained in a divorce settlement would mainly help wives, who get most such cash.

Instead, I’d suggest a standard finder’s fee of 5% of annual income for the first direct clear evidence of cheating in a declared exclusive relation (e.g., marriage) lasting over two years.  This seems to me a conservative estimate of an average value of learning that your spouse is cheating, while still enough to induce lots more stranger efforts.

My students also opposed cuckolded men suing for compensation; some said it was his fault too if she was unsatisfied.  It seems most students think cheating should not be discouraged more than it is; if cheating seems a good bet to you given your chance and level of punishment, they seem to say go for it.  Yes they might not want to say it that directly, but is there any other contrary data out there?

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Naked Promiscuity

By Robin Hanson · December 17, 2009 11:10 pm · Comments (17)

Most wives are offended to see their husbands make a direct pass at another woman in front of them.  They mind less if he seems unconsciously attracted to a woman, but does not consciously act on that attraction.  A wife might mind her husband buying a sports car if his conscious intention was to attract other women for short term sex, but mind less if his main conscious reason was to race.  These things depend on how conscious and deliberate are his efforts to attract other women.  Now consider this:  It seems men are eager to visibly help heroically and financially, and to spend on visible status symbols, mainly to seek promiscuous short-term sex!  Data:

Men in the mating condition … said they would spend more money on the conspicuous luxuries. … Women in the mating condition … said they would spend more time on conspicuous pro-social volunteering. … Mating-primed women … said they would spend more on generosity-signalling conspicuous spending; mating-primed men did the same. Also, mating-primed men … said they would do more heroic helping, but not more non-heroic helping. … Moreover, men who were most interested in promiscuous, short-term sexual liaisons showed the largest increase after the mating priming in both generosity-signalling conspicuous spending and in heroic benevolence. …

Only the mating-primed men showed a higher interest in the socially dominant pro-social behaviours, and this effect was carried mostly by highly promiscuous men. … High-promiscuity men were more willing to borrow fashionable clothes from a friend to impress a potential mate rather than a new boss, whereas low-promiscuity men would rather impress the boss. Women showed no difference. …

High-promiscuity men who looked at photos of eight attractive women … said they would spend more money on items such as designer sunglasses or an elaborate car stereo rather than inconspicuous products such as low-cost jeans or a toaster, … [but] this is only the case when the potential mating situation is a short-term hook-up rather than a long-term relationship.  There was no shift for mating-primed low-promiscuity men or for women in either study. … Women rated a man driving a Porsche Boxster as more attractive for a short-term sexual relationship than a man driving a Honda Civic.  But the Porsche did not make the man more attractive as a possible marriage partner. Men rating women were uninfluenced by the type of car she drove.

So what would happen if we all became conscious of the above behaviors being strong clues that men are in fact actively trying for promiscuous short term sex?  Would such behaviors reduce, would long term relations become less exclusive, or what?  Maybe we just couldn’t admit that these are strong clues?

If these clues aren’t strong enough, imagine facial expression reading software could reliably tell when men are actively trying to attract short term sex partners.  How would we deal with such naked promiscuity?

Hat tip to Holden Karnofsky.

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Married Sex

By Robin Hanson · December 6, 2009 4:40 pm · Comments (145)

“Oh, my God! You’re actually getting married in a few hours! I mean, everything’s gonna be all different. Carla, you never have to have sex again except for when you actually want to.”  Elliot from Scrubs.

Husbands often complain about too little sex:

One in five couples, he says, have a sexless marriage (having sex 10 or fewer times per year) and that if they want to get out of this painful rut, they’ll have to work together. … “The man says ‘Why don’t we have more sex?’ And the woman says ‘Why don’t we have more intimacy?’ ” he explains. … Most often, he says, the problem is much more mundane: “The sexual charge no longer is there.”

Well the charge must be there for him, or he wouldn’t ask.  So the charge isn’t there for her; what does she want?   The authors of Why Women Have Sex:

Women’s sexual attraction tends to be far more nuanced. It’s affected by … how a man smells … sense of humor and confidence, social status … other women’s judgments of how attractive he is … in addition to the visual cues. … Some women reported having sex to give someone else an S.T.D. or to extract revenge on someone who had wronged them. … Young women today … had sex just for the pleasure of it, … they wanted to be sexually experienced and add “another notch on their belt”; they had sex because they were competitive with other women—they wanted to win; and they were curious—they had sex just to see what it was like with men of different ages, ethnicities, careers, and penis sizes. …

I’m personally betting on the “Mr. Right Hypothesis,” which suggests that women use sexual orgasm, in part, as a mate selection device. Men who are attentive to the woman, sexually unselfish, take the time to learn what turns her on, etc., tend to make good partners and possibly good dads. … Some women came to the conclusion, after being with one partner for several years, that they were just not very sexual creatures. Then when they switched to a different partner, all of a sudden they started to blossom sexually. … Women are all different in their sexual needs. Don’t assume that what worked in the last relationship will be as effective in the next.

This complexity allows women to be honestly confused about what they want, but it can also hide motivated differences between what women say or think they want, and what really drives their choices.  For example, reduced sex might come from wives respecting husbands less than before, from seeing overly willing wives as lower in status, or from withholding sex to gain bargaining power on other issues.

The most emailed NYT article today is Elizabeth Weil’s account of trying to improve her marriage: Continue Reading "Married Sex" »

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