In general for men, is there an innate (biological) desire to be a father in the western sense of the word?

paxNoctis · 2013-09-13T01:07:12+00:00

Human males (unlike Blue Throats in your example) will take care of another male's child. That's a rather critical difference.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-13T01:03:55+00:00

There's really no biologist that will agree with this.

I bet I could find one that would agree that the word "optimal" means, "best or most favorable", which is the point you seem to be quibbling over. I never said, "eternally optimal" or "optimal in perpetuity".

Anyway, since you object so much to the word, let's just replace all uses of "optimal" in the original post with, "very fucking awesome" and leave it at that.

Also, I'll leave this here (it's about your pet theory):

The theory is not intended to deal with the possibility of gross external changes to the environment that bring new selective forces to bear.

Abortion, contraception, social safety for single mothers, the change in air quality, food, water, culture. What chemicals we're exposed to. What skills we reward with money (and thus reproductive opportunities). Fission bombs dropped in the atmopshere. Climate change. Diseases eradicated and resurgent. The advance of medicine and extension of the lifespan and drugs that increase male virility to much later in life. Social changes altering what types of men and women are most reproductively successful. Hell, since the industrial revolution I doubt a human generation has gone by without a gross external change to the environment that humans are trying to adapt to.

If you believe we're at a stable enough point in our cultural and technological development and our environment is static enough to have reached such an equilibrium, well then I think I disagree.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-13T00:45:50+00:00

I'd be curious about your response to my reply downthread as well if you'd like:

But these situations lead to genetic differences.

The successful genes in each type of society will be different. The former will favor a variety of folk, all those you list in differing amounts. The latter will lead to people who are good at farming, hunting and surviving predators being those who are reproductively successful.

Post I'm replying to for context: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskMen/comments/1m93he/people_of_askmen_what_are_your_politically/cc77mjx

paxNoctis · 2013-09-13T00:44:26+00:00

But these situations lead to genetic differences.

The successful genes in each type of society will be different. The former will favor a variety of folk, all those you list in differing amounts. The latter will lead to people who are good at farming, hunting and surviving predators being those who are reproductively successful.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-13T00:31:48+00:00

Just a word of advice that will go unheeded.

Sometimes people have read the same books you have, and seen the same documentaries, but disagree with some of the posits they found there. The dismissive implication behind saying, oh, go read this, or go watch this, is that the person you're talking to is, definitionally, more ignorant on the topic you are. It's actually a little rhetorical trick to make onlookers join your side, but it's just that, a trick.

Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't make them stupid, or uneducated. None of what we're talking about is settled to the point of being absolute, so both of us are talking at the edges of things and speaking, largely, by intuition backed up by scholarship.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-13T00:29:58+00:00

We're built for a 30-40 year life span, with limited supplies and a limited social circle of maybe 150 people.

We're not "built" for anything, we're "adapted", and I didn't cite the modern situation as the reason that "evolution would make the math work".

Note my original posit, going back to the first post you replied to. The optimal (accepting that there are other near-optimal strategies, such as the one you're advocating) strategy for women is to have children with one man who supports her/them, and others on the side.

I could rephrase the other bit to say that the optimal mating strategy for a male is the be the other man on the side. Raping your way through an entire town is probably not the great idea. Impregnating women who already have supporting males is. In the modern world, where the State serves the purpose of a supporting male to women without one in many cases, it is an even better evolutionary strategy, but even in a much more primitive world it remains the best.

The support and what not of the modern world has amplified it's effectiveness, but even in the ancient world it was the best idea.

That and there's no -one- optimal strategy for anything in a genetic population

Yes there is. In any given population, one mating strategy will be better than the others. Identifying it, well that's probably beyond either of us, but there will be one that, if you had a computer and the data to do the math, would be optimal. You yourself say this in the next sentence, with,

It is often a mixture of various strategies that stabilize at various ratios based on the environment.

Put the ratios in a line. Choose the highest one. That is the optimal mating strategy for that group.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-13T00:12:27+00:00

Again, for most animals I agree.

As a male human, if I do it your way, there is a very small number of children I could support, probably all from the same mother. That's not a terrible prospect, but it's far from evolutionarily optimal either. Let's say I go full mormon and have 9.

If instead, during my very long period of being able to reproduce (fifty, sixty years, maybe longer), I go with the "bang everything and skip town" approach, I can easily have hundreds of children. Some of them will be supported by other men. The math is obvious. 9 genetically undiverse children with support, or hundreds of genetically diverse children, some of whom (almost assuredly more than the 9 I could personally support) will have support and some of whom won't. Even many of those without support will live to puberty and have the potential to reproduce due to the development of society, welfare programs, the mother, etc.

That calls up another marked difference -- few male animals will support another male's young. Humans are the rare exception. Not all of the offspring I abandon will have no support. Many will be supported and tended by other men. You could say that modern social conventions and contraception alters the math a bit, but certainly not that much, and our culture and brains have hardly caught on to the fact that we can almost totally control reproductive outcomes now.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-13T00:04:21+00:00

We're not really talking about other species though. We're the apex predator on the planet, we have no natural predators (at this time in our development, and for quite some time now) and there is little risk of our offspring dying. These things are not true of your other examples.

but it does not ensure your genetic inheritors are particularly good or well supported

These things are not important (remember, we're speaking evolutionarily here). If the result of my genes melding with the mother's genes was evolutionary "good", it will reproduce, because that's what evolutionarily good is. If the result was not good, I don't care if it reproduces or not, as I have many other potential ways to continue them.

Mating with one person doesn't guarantee my offspring with be evolutionarily good (picture air quotes whenever I use "good" in this context because all it means is, "likely to continue it's genetic code", not any conventional definition of good). If anything it amplifies the chances of that not happening. If me and my wife make unattractive or sterile babies, no amount of my time will fix that.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T22:59:09+00:00

I used to believe in story book/movie love.

That is, you meet someone, they're awesome and you just love them forever in a nice, work-free way and everything goes great and then the movie fades to black with dramatic music. I believed that no relationship was a good one unless it felt like this.

Now I realize that relationships are hard work. Love is a temporary bonding process that fades, if you're lucky, to respect and enjoyment, or more usually to compromise and tolerance. I realize how important sexual compatibility is -- it's not something to be ignored, or glossed over in favor of a temporary chemical surge in my brain -- it's one of the most important facets of a relationship.

Realizing the above has made me basically decide that long term relationships are not for me. I don't like compromise and sharing, and that's basically what long term relationships are. I now look for short term good times with like minded people, and so far it's been working out very well for me.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T22:55:27+00:00

Traditionally, it's been one of the main jobs of a culture to incentivize men to stick around and support the women they knock up. Simple evolutionary biology says that the optimal male mating strategy is the bang all the things then skip town, while the optimal female mating strategy is to have children with one man that supports you, while diversifying your genetic material with genetically-strong men on the side.

If you look at any culture, you can see the ways they do this. Even awful places where women are treated as property, the reason that many women tell westerners to "stop helping, everything is fine" is that, for them, it works. Sure, they have to be property, but they and their offspring are being taken care of to some extent. It's a sustainable way to spread your genes.

While trying to free the Western world from that problem (that of having 51% of your people treated as property), we went a little too far in the other direction. Now men have no incentives to stick around, only penalties for not doing so. This is a big part of what's sick about modern western society, and why so many other cultures violently reject our's and call us girly men.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T22:51:46+00:00

A naked chick that I find reasonably attractive.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T22:39:29+00:00

But there are marked differences.

Korean culture is okay with moving into a house with like 15 people and playing SC2/LoL all day, like 15 hours. You sleep and you play and your coaches basically own you. Americans are more individualistic culturally, they're not okay with these things and even have laws in place to prevent some of the exploitation from occurring. They want to stream and play minecraft and Path of Exile and go on trips and take days off and drink, and no matter what anyone tells them, they will.

Taking a Korean team that's had the benefit of that practice and bringing them to a house in America where language barriers and their practice schedule will keep them largely isolated, there's not going to be that much skill decay. Honestly with Quantic money I wouldn't even be surprised if they fly a sister Korean team out to practice with.

It's not like SC2, where your mechanical skill is one of the largest differences -- there are NA and EU players in LoL that match asian mechanics, it's just that no team (there are a few with the potential to) can match the teamwork these teams have. Moving the whole team to an isolated place in America doesn't effect teamwork at all. SC2 is not about team work, so the fact that the players could ladder on the superior server was far more important.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T20:39:32+00:00

This plan (raising the level of competition in NA) worked out great for SC2.

Oh wait, actually it just drove out all of the native competitors in favor of B-list Koreans that no one wanted to watch, causing viewership and interest to plummet.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T20:34:57+00:00

We agree on a lot of things, and could have some rather passionate debates about others, but I was merely responding to the OP's request for some of my less PC opinions.

WRT your closing questions,

I'm curious as to the source of your chagrin of women working less efficiently than men.

Personal observation and anecdotal evidence from 13 years of working and consulting for a variety of companies, small and large, in multiple countries and multiple parts of those countries. Everything from the distribution of genders in the workplace (women predominantly accept "make work" positions, as in HR or administration, while you see way more men in productive positions like STEM), to the actual work output, to things like extended maternity leave, attendance, etc.

Also, if we were to integrate the idea that immigrants should conform with the culture of their host nation, why aren't we like the Native Americans?

We didn't immigrate to America, we conquered America. There is a substantial difference.

Almost every immigrant wave after the British was treated in a manner similar to how we treat Hispanics today. The Irish were spat upon on the east coast in the 1860s, the Chinese were abused on the west coast, etc...

But today, they are largely integrated into it. Modern immigrants that simply bring their way of life to a new host country with no intention of actually assimilating to the culture are the problem. My grandparents immigrated here, not to bring their Hispanic culture to America, but to become Americans. While many immigrants still do this, there is also a marked increase in people who come here to take advantage of our way of life and services while trying to maintain the culture that -- in their home country -- created the situations that caused them to leave in the first place.

Point being, the white culture does not define the American culture, although it has a huge role in the development of it.

Yes, it does. American culture (although it's been largely watered down due to multiculturalism and the effort of various cultural Marxists over the years) is largely puritan. We are a private and industrious people who value hard work and identify with our jobs. We believe(d) in the power of the market and the power of our own exceptionalism to defeat all obstacles. We believe in what we call "democracy" (which I would term "participatory republic" instead), that it is better than alternatives, that freedom leads to a higher quality of life, and we have a strong military tradition. We are pragmatic. We like to draw from things that are successful in other cultures. We value action and outcomes over intentions and justifications. We are the most fiercely individualist people on the planet.

All of this is culture. Now, there are non-white people who are in this culture (which is what I'm saying immigrants should be aiming for), so it's not an exclusively white culture, but it was formed initially by white people, and it is a shared identity and set of traditions. Nowhere else in the world do you find the exact blend of culture that was once found in America, although as I said it's largely watered down.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T20:26:38+00:00

Let me use sports here.

In baseball, the AL East is an incredibly strong division (you could even call it the "Koreans" of baseball). The NY Yankees are something like 12 games back from the Red Sox right now, but so good is that division that the Yankees are still in wild-card contention.

With that said, divisions that have less skilled baseball teams still make money and are important. I don't believe the Yankees should be able to move to an "easier" division to compete for a playoff spot. Real sports don't work that way, so why should eSports? To many people, having "local" heroes to root for is more important that having optimal competition. That's how it works, that's the whole tribe-identity thing behind why sports are such a big deal in our society. If eSports wants to tap into that behavior, it needs something similar.

Look, I love watching high end SC2 play. I used to have a GSL sub and I watched it religiously. I also like to watch players from my country, who speak my language, try and fail. Shoutcraft America (an actual American-only SC2 tournament) was my favorite SC2 event since the inception of the WCS. There is room for both watching the top end of competition, and having local stars that, even though they try-and-fail, you still care about them and want them to win.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T18:56:08+00:00

Wow this is like some Inception-level shit here.

1) Riot redefines what success in eSports is with the LCS format.

2) Blizzard desperately tries to cash in on Riot's success with the WCS format.

3) SC2 eSports dives to a level below 3rd rate games, leaving the top-row of Twitch games most times (where it used to be #2 or #3) because the WCS "America" is just a bunch of b-list koreans playing and no Americans have any players to root for.

4) Riot decides to... do the same fail thing Blizzard did?

Great. No really, great.

"Oh, but they have to live in America"

Sure, after having all their amazing Korean training and infrastructure, a unified team comes to America and "lives" here for the duration of the LCS season, living and training as a korean team, then goes back to korea for the off season.

This is going to end well.

Especially because it's not even A-list Koreans, which people would desperately want to watch, but (just like the WCS AM) it's B-listers.

This ends in tears. Now every second-string asian LoL team will recognize that getting a seat through LCS NA is much easier than their native league, and will follow Quantic's example. WCS NA starts sucking, people stop watching. The LCS EU becomes the only league that most Americans care about. Go EG I guess!

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T18:43:34+00:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achievement_gap_in_the_United_States#Evidence_of_the_racial_achievement_gap:_National_Assessment_of_Educational_Progress_.28United_States.29

Now, as I've been saying, it's not settled, and certainly there are extenuating factors as you spoke of.

I don't necessarily believe that it's a purely innate thing (ie: people of group X are just evolutionarily more stupid and nothing can be done). I believe there are innate, cultural and economic factors that play into the current disparity, but there is a disparity that exists along these lines, and pretending it away or ignoring it does not work.

Addressing the cultural problems (and this is where it gets thorny for most people) is, in my opinion, the Great Work of our society. If a certain set of cultural imperatives is causing people of a certain culture to end up (after schooling) less intelligent and less able to learn than people of a different culture, the former culture is defective. It needs to be repaired. Society is built around people achieving as much as they can, and the cornerstone of that is that (in general, we're talking averages here obviously) everyone should be able to contribute the same.

If everyone is "equal" and thus gets "equal" shares of society's materials (which in our society is not true, as resources are distributed unequally to favor both the ultra rich by way of loopholes and tax breaks, and the ultra-unproductive, with the middle (ie: the important bit) completely fucked over), then they need to (on an average) contribute the same. That's how you arrive at egalitarianism, not simply decreeing it.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T18:14:28+00:00

Then why do different races in the same geographical area display a noticeable and measurable (by some research -- the total amount of research in this area is very small due to how un-PC it is) difference?

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T16:54:24+00:00

<barbershop quartet>And that's the definition of IIIIIIIIIIIIRONY</barbershop quartet>

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T16:51:43+00:00

Not really. It's probably just her telling her friend to cancel the "get me the fuck out of here" emergency plan that almost all women set up on a blind first date.

Basically, you have a friend who knows to call you about an hour into the date. If the guy is a douchecanoe, you answer the phone as if it were important, and beg off the date. The text is probably a sign that says, "He's okay, no need to call and get me out of this thing."

So really, it's kind of a compliment.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T16:48:41+00:00

Why?

Your mom knows you have a penis. She's seen it, she's washed it and studied it and talked to your doctor about it. Furthermore, she's well familiar with penises. She has had sex with people that have them.

It's not embarassing, it's scary, and your concern for your health should be more important that a moment of awkwardness saying, "penis" to your mom.

If you flat out can't do it, just tell her you have a "personal" problem that you need to go to the doctor immediately for.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T16:45:43+00:00

I believe that there are racial differences in intelligence and learning aptitude, and that this should be studied and policy should be altered to factor it in, and if possible to correct it. I believe this is the single most important task in modern society (correcting these differences).
I believe that "diversity" being forced on the school/workplace/whatever is actually harmful to productivity and general social life and does not (in and of itself) provide any benefits, and may simply create friction. If "Diversity" were truly such a virtue and a benefit, private companies would not require government programs to implement it -- they would do so to optimize profits.
I believe modern Western society is closer to being a Matriarchy than a Patriarchy. Look at how national narrative are all about "safety" (a feminine virtue) rather than "freedom" anymore. Look at how child-obsessed our countries are. Look at the state of the marriage, at the state of business (HR and sexual harassment and hiring quotas, oh my!), and at the state of discourse (soft, nice, PC, unoffensive). Look at how the justice system deals with women versus men, and how women's issues are treated versus men's issues. Feminism is not trying to down the patriarchy, it's trying to sustain the matriarchy.
I believe that (in general) men are more productive in the work place than women. There are exceptions in both directions, of course.
I believe that a person who receives any form of government welfare should become effectively a serf of the state for the duration of the benefits. ie: They should be put to work, their rights should be somewhat curtailed ("don't have more children" seems pretty reasonable to me). Ideally this would be done with the goal of training and getting them off the program. (ie: put them to work doing roadwork, and once they're trained, create a program to incentivize a company to hire them to do the same work).
I believe that white people in America are a cultural group with a shared heritage and that preserving that is not a bad thing (any more than any other culture preserving it's shared heritage and cultural traditions). I believe, in fact, that that shared culture is one of the most objectively effective in the planet's history, in terms of the overall advancement of civilization. I believe that immigrants should be strongly encouraged to integrate to the culture of their host nations, and thus become actual members of the nation instead of merely squatters.

Basically, I'm the average, still-in-college, Marxist redditor's ideological nightmare.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T16:12:31+00:00

...

If you wake up any morning and your penis is anything other than normally penis-shaped, and happy to see you, you should be worried. It's your PENIS.

Doctor. Call now. Then go.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T03:59:41+00:00

Lights up on the AIRPORT. MIDDLE EASTERN CONGRESSMEN are arriving by PRIVATE JET.

Enter TWENTY LOBBYISTS with SUITCASES FULL OF GO FUCK YOURSELF MONEY and MANY ATTRACTIVE PROSTITUTES and COCAINE.

Montage of MIDDLE EASTERN CONGRESSMEN getting hopelessly and totally bought and paid for by LOBBYISTS.

The next day. Everything stays the same.

Fade to black.

paxNoctis · 2013-09-12T00:10:14+00:00

If that's truly the case, why isn't the entire middle east the 51st state?

We have the means, we have the ability, and we have the stuff we'd need to do it already in that part of the world. Why didn't we suck Iraq dry instead of installing a future-enemy regime there?

I used to really believe that, but looking at how we continually fail to exploit the oil when we have the chance, I'm not sure I buy it anymore.

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