29 Comments

Have you asked them about it? What do they say to explain why it doesn't bother them? Have they thought about it before, and are they going to think about it now that they definitely have? (Both in reality, and what they report, especially if they aren't the same.)

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They are unpleasant, but far superior to the problems of previous sexual marketplaces

Did you not read what I wrote? We aren't making enough babies to replace the population. Such a system is self-defeating. By definition it cannot be superior.

The reason people don’t question these SMP problems is probably because when most do they realize the stultifying and immoral sexual norms of the past were so horrible that all our current problems are tiny in comparison.

No the reason they don't question it is because most people are conformists who care more about fitting in than anything else.

The brutally inhuman nature of the modern hook up culture is far more immoral than the system we had in the past. People are treated as things rather than as actual human beings. Add to that the psychological castration of boys at the hands of feminists and the de-feminization of girls at the hands of the feminists. Alienating people from their own human nature is obviously immoral because of the psychological damage it does to the victims.

Of course we haven't even touched on how most average men have been disfranchised from the SMP because feminism unleashed women's hypergamy.

But oh, let's pretend the past was worse instead.

but it’s good to have perspective.

Yes the correct perspective is we live in a far more evil world because the SMP has been dehumanized by liberals.

Getting fat because you have too much to eat is a far better problem than starving

Not enough babies to replace population = dying race. Your analogy does not hold up.

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Of course not.

By the way, caskets are deadly. Everybody inside of one is dead. Everyone not in a casket is still alive.

Ignore this data at your own peril.

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I probably would have been all over the place anyway. I majored in recombinant gene technology 1989-1993 with the belief that one could make a good living in biotechnology. I was, of course, right. I started a Master's in molecular biology with the same idea. But then I got bored, didn't like doing lab work, and changed to a M.A. in English. I now have a Ph.D. in the humanities, and work nights at a hotel. I was quite well informed, and went in a different direction anyway. I would probably have an academic job by now if I weren't such an outspoken libertarian, but that's neither here nor there.

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My initial reaction:

Career goals are claims of the far future. Such claims are notoriously inaccurate; its hard for us to guess what we'll be doing 6+ years in the future. It is therefore rational to select a career goal for its immediate benefits as well as long-term ones. For those who's careers seem especially hard to predict (e.g. most students), immediate benefits would seem to vastly out-weigh long-term ones.

Because of this, we primarily care about the status of career goals. We can estimate the status of these goals by gathering information from our peers. We don't need to understand the realities of these careers to understand the immediate status benefits of claiming the career as a goal. Thus it is not rational for a high school student to spend much if anything on investigating his claimed career goal.

Of course some people (say those with specific talents) have more accurate ideas about what their future career will really be. It makes sense for these people to invest more seriously in this carer.

My predictions:People who know less about their future career choose goals based more on their immediate status effects and investigate these goals less.People who know more about their future career choose goals based more on their long-term effects and investigate these goals more.While status-based goal choices must be plausible to gain the chooser any status, they tend to be more far-fetched than real career choices.

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It would be more correct to say that certain social structures are "falling apart" by implicit consensus, because they need to be disassembled as the first step of the repair process.

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And add one more: Very few macroeconomists have any interest in studying how prediction markets might make monetary policy more effective.

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A substitute for "phon[ing] a few people who are doing your dreamed of career" is watching how such people are portrayed on television, in the movies, in novels, in journalism. And ordinary life experience provides lots of information more directly. Many people intend to follow in the footsteps of one of their parents*, or of another close relative; or they routinely deal with people who are fulfilling the function they aspire to fulfill (school teacher, college professor, general practitioner, dentist, shop clerk, bus driver, traffic policeman, etc.). Finally, the results of phoning job-holders would be biased: people who dislike a certain job tend to quit and take a different job that they like better.

*Aside: my parents were both accountants, so I knew from an early age something I *didn't* want to do.

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Sorry about this, but this is an area I don't know anything about. Could you explain to me what a Baudrillard matrix is?

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You should think about Douglas North's notion of institutions and their role in shaping human behaviour. The educational institutions are very important and they would not want too much individual discretion in selecting future jobs. Think about it as the allocation of parking spaces in a parking lot. Too many individual preferences can burden the system.

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Such as, why do people participate in the current sexual marketplace? Look at what the mainstream SMP produces: a high divorce rate (which also acts to destroy wealth) and reproductive failure in the form of below replacement fertility. Yet there is not widespread questioning of the system in place.These are higher-level problems, problems that you get when you transition to a superior system from an inferior one. They are unpleasant, but far superior to the problems of previous sexual marketplaces (getting stuck in a loveless marriage, lack of careers for women, etc.). The only reason they seem worse is that you're experiencing them now. The reason people don't question these SMP problems is probably because when most do they realize the stultifying and immoral sexual norms of the past were so horrible that all our current problems are tiny in comparison. Just because they're smaller problems doesn't mean they're not problems, but it's good to have perspective.

A good comparison would be obesity. Getting fat because you have too much to eat is a far better problem than starving, but people today have conniptions about obesity because it's right there in front of them. Another comparison is hoarding, it's bad, but better than being poor and having no stuff at all.

Things are not "falling apart," we're just having problems, like people have always had since the dawn of time. Eventually we'll solve them and move onto new (hopefully better) problems.

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Even without any specialized training you can just go to grad school. Such a person can eventually end up in corporate law, investment banking, consulting or academia.

Funny you should say this, sounds kinda like the story of my life (ah except that idea of getting into computer science, that quickly disappeared when I tried the curriculum)

Yes, you get a general degree (econ, business or some such, I would not do humanities though), move into a top tier consulting firm and a few years later you are none the wiser. Then you do an MBA at a top Bschool to finally figure out what to do with your live in your late twenties. After 1/3 of b-school, I've figured out a whole bunch of things NOT to do but not really what to do. Problem is, this game can be played for *decades* all the while making decent to good money (contrary to what everyone believes, compensation in top tier consulting in the lower ranks is good, but far from spectacular)...

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Like I said: we are living in a third stage Baudrillard matrix. This 4-stage life model is an excellent example of why things are going unquestioned and why things are falling apart.

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As far as I can tell, there are 4-ish life stages that we consider conceptually distinct.

Childhood.CollegeWorking Adulthood (maybe young, and full adulthood).Retirement.

In general, there seems to be moderate discouragement of anyone doing anything much out of order. Retired folks working is between suspicious and unfair. Children working, or thinking much about work is too.

Of course, I think that Eric's answer is very important in the explanation too. There is no strong obvious correlation between school and work (except mathy stuff), and lots of folks change careers. Focus on what you will be doing is silly.

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As a parent I have a different response. Most of the highly paid professional jobs are somewhat boring even to a motivated high school student. The main variants of business, law, academia, medicine, and technico-engineering cover the gamut. We need for kids to get an idea of which general area they would be good at and then decide which they would like much later. Given the huge number of people who crash and burn at pop music, acting, or other expressive professions, as a parent my first job is to direct them away from unremunerative jobs that might be "fun." If you tell me that I can show them how hard the job is by finding sufficiently large numbers of failures, you miss the point. I don't have time for this. I just keep them away from temptation by filtering their initial life choices.

Competence and ability signaling are more important. If they truly have passion for something, they can adjust later. I'd rather my kids start towards a respected bourgeois profession and change their minds later than start for something that won't pay or is out of most people's reach and then go back to middle class respectability too late.

The poorer the background society the middle class wishes to escape, the more this basic wisdom is understood. See India and China and middle class immigrant strivers in the US.

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I actually wonder about this a lot.

Maybe, though, it's simply escaped notice until recently and when it has been noticed, it generally hasn't been in circles that are data-driven. The humanities seems to talk about this sort of thing a lot, for example, and likely has more students who fell into this trap.

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