1. In one study, young children learn how to deceive in ten days.
2. “A new kind of elevator uses linear motors, similar to those in maglev trains and HyperLoop, to whiz its cabins through shafts, and will be able to move people up, down, left, or right.” Link here.
3. New Chinese movie stars Stephon Marbury as Stephon Marbury (NYT). And this: “There is indeed a statue of Marbury in Beijing. “People say it doesn’t look like me,” Marbury said. “But I know it does, because I know the face I made when they made the statue.””
4. Boris Becker is now bankrupt (no Beijing statue).
5. Employees committed to family are more motivated and productive (WSJ).
Children do not need to be taught how to deceive, starting from infancy, as any experienced parent knows. Learning how to deceive effectively, however, takes practice. (And even here, the deception is not actually effective, it is simply not being acknowledged to the deceiver, it seems.) One wonders whether the authors were attentive parents before writing this study.
(5.) Reverse causality strikes again! (Maybe.) Both directions of causality are plausible. If I didn’t have a family to support I would probably be one of those guys just playing video games all day long every day (Erik Hurst study at Chicago Booth).
Or perhaps booth are a result of high consciousness.
Came here to say this. Unmotivated and unproductive people are more likely to be virgins.
Then again, I can think of several anecdotes in my personal life where having a family DEFINITELY motivates my coworkers to work harder.
“Unmotivated” and “unproductive” are pretty vague terms, but if your thinking of the things that are associated with unmotivated and unproductive people, they correlate with being LESS likely to be a virgin:
“I will have to use virginity statistics as a proxy for the harder-to-measure romancelessness statistics, but these are bad enough. In high school each extra IQ point above average increases chances of male virginity by about 3%. 35% of MIT grad students have never had sex, compared to only 20% of average nineteen year old men. Compared with virgins, men with more sexual experience are likely to drink more alcohol, attend church less, and have a criminal history. A Dr. Beaver (nominative determinism again!) was able to predict number of sexual partners pretty well using a scale with such delightful items as “have you been in a gang”, “have you used a weapon in a fight”, et cetera. An analysis of the psychometric Big Five consistently find that high levels of disagreeableness predict high sexual success in both men and women.”
https://archive.fo/qeh6z
I think it’s a combination of the general pattern of chicks digging jerks(which the author complains about), and the smarter men being more likely to see through the bullshit nerd-shaming spread by people like msgqueens, deciding to Go Their Own Way.
I ain’t nerd shaming, I’m misogynist jerk shaming. Guess we know which one you are.
Your comment was basically the dictionary definition of nerd shaming. Probably a self-hating nerd as well.
No. But to be honest, I didn’t know nerd-shaming was a thing. Everything triggers somebody these days I guess. Safe spaces, snowflakes, it’s a lot to keep up with.
“smarter men being more likely to see through the bullshit nerd-shaming spread by people like msgqueens, deciding to Go Their Own Way.”
+100. The common internet meme is that no man could ever really reject women, that if he claims to be, it must really be sour grapes, a rationalization. Are we really to believe that all those elite college guys are simply unable to get sex? These are the smartest people in the country, and not in a one dimensional books-only sense either: they were able to navigate the opaque and corrupt admissions process to those colleges. It strains credibility to believe that they are simply incapable of getting into some woman’s pants. And it’s not that they would reject women who throw themselves at them, they just don’t see the point in spending hours of effort dealing with women’s nonsense for a few minutes of pleasure and a not inconsiderable risk of ending up in jail or in indentured servitude.
@Lothrop Stoddard
Your link (https://archive.fo/qeh6z) brought back many, many memories of various internet drama.
However, I have to point out that smarter, upperclass men, the types that you would call “motivated” and “productive”, are actually *less likely* to have children.
So we have the following facts:
1. Workplace motivation is positively correlated with having a family, according to Prof. Cowen’s link.
2. Higher intellect is positively correlated with motivation, and is negatively correlated with being a virgin, according to you.
3. Higher intellect is negatively correlated with having a family, according to me (You could easily find a source).
Premises 2 and 3 seemingly contradict premise 1. What I think is going on is that we’re looking at Simpson’s paradox. If we split the population into two groups: 1) Lower-class bad boys who are generally unmotivated, 2) Upper-class smart people who are generally motivated; we would see a positive correlation between having a family and being motivated at work within each group. But if we *didn’t* split the population into those two groups, we would see a *negative* correlation between having a family and being motivated, since people with families are more likely to belong to the unmotivated lower class.
As for causation? I think for unmotivated bad boys, family causes motivation, and vice-versa for the motivated upper-class.
If Ray Lopez’s Filipina fiancee gets pregnant, do you think he will get a job and stop posting so much at this website? Maybe this has already happened, assuming that Ray was telling the truth about himself.
Why did Boris have to pay so much in child support (2M pounds, + 6M over 18 years), something seems broken there.
Something seems hilarious here HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Hey buddy, JUST FYI here pal, I mean ya deserve bad things to happen to you in your life. That’s you. BAD things man, for you. They can write about it on the Internet.
#5 – They’re cucks, that’s why!
5. has been part of the platform of the alt-right (Moldbug?) for a long time. Men need a family to focus their energy on providing for, so single men are likely to become either unproductive or downright destructive. Hence the destruction of the marriage institution is a bad thing.
Especially that part of the marriage institution that guaranteed a husband sex whenever desired, which is no longer the case (assuming it ever was, at least for those one would described as decent men).
Joking aside, it’s not the wife it’s the kids.
Now, agreed. My suggestion, stay single if you can’t find a rich, nymphomaniac woman who owns a nice bass boat or whose father owns a liquor store.
Otherwise, if you’re, say, 50 years old and exhausted from free-range coitus, go for it.
Don’t let me stop you.
Why should you be happy?
If I wasn’t married, I’d have no one to check me over for deer ticks after a fishing or hunting trip.
Sometimes, I feel bad for the other airline passengers when I sit there hoping the plane crashes.
Why be against gay marriage, then. Or are they?
The alt-right is a lot of disparate groups, if any are against gay marriage I think it would be just the countercultural “lets offend people for the lulz” types.
I’ve encountered the argument that gay marriage is bad for public perception, because it erodes the tradition (super important for keeping an institution alive) and strengthens that view of marriage as just a casual thing you do for the tax break. But it is a weak argument, marriage is doomed if not already dead, with or without gay marriage. More on what I mean by “public perception” below:
The marriage institution (all institutions really) is not about the law. It is about how people perceive the thing, what is seen by society as acceptable and what isn’t. The law comes after, if at all. Traditional marriage was the belief that two people who have sex must stick together and care for each other for life, modern marriage is a contract.
The marriage institution was at its strongest before no fault divorce. A man gets married and is guaranteed to keep his family, and he’s responsible for the household, so he works hard. With no fault divorce, the institution falls apart – men marry and then lose their kids, the young see that marriage isn’t stable and marry less, and try to keep finances separate and family investment low because divorce is seen more and more not as a nuclear option but as an inevitable fact of life. The optics are important – marriage could be super easy to dissolve legally or even not part of the law at all, but as long as people *think* of it as a super important unbreakable thing, the institution is strong. Public perception makes or breaks the institution, or rather that’s all an institution is, a meme held by all of society that has big positive effects for the structure of that society.
Traditional marriage was a widespread meme about a way to make stable families. The upper class may still believe in that meme, but it has been lost by everyone else. The institution is dead or near dead, modern marriage is just an artifact we haven’t yet purged from the legal system (although I hear the UK now assigns the same consequences to longer-term cohabitation, so they’re a step closer to ditching it I guess).
Legal marriage is the institutionalisation of an arrangement where people have dependants. Someone dies, who gets what, who looks after who. The more resources involved, the more important the institution is; who gets to keep running the farm. That was the primary impetus for gay marriage; who gets the disability or death benefits in a same sex long term relationship, who gets to sit with the dying. How it was sold is another story.
What I don’t like about gay marriage is the fact of parenthood becomes a matter of bureaucratic diktat. Looking forward to when the very strange and dangerous ideas of academia end up being reflected by the bureaucracy (who else would hire these otherwise useless twits), the detachment of biology from reality is going to lead to ugly dystopian outcomes.
Much of the moral and societal structures stem from hard consequences; if a woman left her husband she was destitute; if someone engaged in promiscuous sex of any kind, death was a real possibility; Church communities were a fallback when things went bad; faith was just about the only positive thing lots of people had in their short and brutish lives.
Marriage will make a comeback when the consequences of a few more generations of ill socialized youth start threatening our ability to eat, to take one thing we don’t worry about much now. And the generous pensions that are promised don’t materialize. And the Obama’s Julias realize that women on welfare have lots of common characteristics that don’t look quite like advertised. If you think men are uncaring, distant, untrustworthy, dishonest and craven, just wait until you depend on a bureaucrat for your care.
These are just hyperbolic juvenile revenge fantasies. And weirdly fixated on women as some mythical monolithic bloc.
Honestly it reads like a frustrated 17 year old fat nerd who can’t wait till “women get their comeuppance.”
Most of us are regular people, in regular relationships. If I get divorced we both lose, since we make similar incomes. Also the kids lose by default.
Here’s a hint: don’t marry a woman who makes considerably less than you do. Or a woman without a masters degree. Or an atheist. Or a woman with a fat mom. Or a woman with divorced parents or unhappily married parents. Or a woman who doesn’t…know herself.
Avoiding dysfunction isn’t splitting the atom. Blood will out.
Is Potato’s comment a parody?
Parts read like a real liberal comment. (“If I get divorced we both lose,” keep telling yourself that! )
On the other hand, his list of characteristics to avoid weeds out all but .2% of the female population.
Good luck with that.
Potato’s comment reflects a widespread mentality among modern men, the just world fallacy. If a mans wife divorces him or cuckolds him, it’s either his fault for misbehaving, or it’s his fault for not recognizing his wife’s lack of virtue before he married her. We can all imagine that a man might hide a violent nature under a public face of respectability, but the notion that a woman might have the same ability, that’s just too painful for most to imagine.
I wish men would go on a marriage strike, refusing to engage in the modern charade. But most are engaging in this wishful thinking. Deep down, most people are conformists. They don’t think for themselves, and will have to learn the hard way.
So, I don’t think the collapse of the current marriage system is sustainable.
I love when the Comic Book Guys start posting about eeeevil women. Meanwhile, the happiest (self reported) people are married men, followed by single women, then single men, then married women.
I do think many married women are unhappy bc they have such lofty expectations for it, and society kind of brainwashes them into thinking they just have to marry.
Here’s a tip:. Figure out who you are marrying before you do it.
Msgkings,
To truly be relevant to this discussion, that happiness research would have to include the divorced in the group with married people, rather than including them in the same group as the never married. And they also must account for income, they say money can’t buy happiness, self reported hapiness surveys tell a different story.
+1 Tanturn
Msgqueen’s argument would be like a survey which proved that smoking isn’t bad for one’s health by including everyone who died of lung cancer in the “non-smoking” category.
>Here’s a tip:. Figure out who you are marrying before you do it.
Everyone thinks they have their partner figured out, and yet divorces are still common. The whole point of these systems is to provide a Schelling point for the vast majority that works most of the time. You don’t need marriage laws and memes if you’re a good judge of character (who sees character changes 20 years in advance). You don’t need welfare if you’re a healthy hard-worker who can gather savings for his own emergencies. You don’t even need police or laws if you’re a good people person with a lot of allies. Here’s a tip, git gut and you can even live in Africa, no problem. Until everyone can do that, we build institutions so not everyone has to be great at everything.
>Here’s a hint: don’t marry a woman who makes considerably less than you do. Or a woman without a masters degree. Or an atheist. Or a woman with a fat mom. Or a woman with divorced parents or unhappily married parents. Or a woman who doesn’t…know herself.
What society takes for common sense is part of the institution. Most of these criteria used to be common sense, then smart people wrote against them and expelled them from the culture. Well, they’re still part of upper class culture, because the upper class isn’t that easily fooled by smart people. The first step to the marriage institution getting rebuilt will be when these beliefs become common sense again, probably even more strict than they used to be (“don’t marry a divorcee” becomes “don’t marry someone whose parents divorced or are unhappy with their marriage”). Then they’ll go into law, and the cycle will repeat.
“I hear the UK now assigns the same consequences to longer-term cohabitation, so they’re a step closer to ditching it I guess”: not yet.
I think opening marriage up to gay people weakens the appeal to straight men somewhat. But the bigger piece that weakened it is giving marriage (and divorce) over to women. Most people who oppose gay marriage, churchianity types, can’t see or choose not to see that part though.
And ultimately linking men into community and society through marriage and family is what makes it peaceful and prosperous. Men are the ones with a real capacity for violence, and also the ones who work hardest if they have the incentive.
+1
Yep. Tyler wonders why so many men aren’t working, I wonder why so many are.
Character?
This is a fascinating look at the democrat party. Why work? You have Medicaid. And section 8. You can work under the table for 10 an hour.
And at zero income the government will give you benefits. Hence the reluctance at accepting a $15 an hour job. We don’t take into account actual income. People can make 40 a year with section 8, food stamps , and Medicaid. and earn cash under the table.
Who isn’t balling out on Medicaid benefits?
The reality is that lots of poor people face waiting lists for Section 8 that can last for years and food stamps for single people are worth about $200 per month. People who just get food stamps and Medicaid will have a pretty big incentive to get a job ASAP. If food stamps were better designed so they did not phase out at the rate of 30 cents for every dollar earned, the incentive to earn more would be even stronger.
That seems like part of the platform of the right, while the alt-right take would be to opt out of both the modern family and the modern workforce as unfair to men, but I’m sure many of the commenters here are more familiar with alt-right scholarship than I.
Of course the real can of worms arising from #5 is whether women committed to family are more motivated and productive employees.
You opt out of the modern family and long for the restoration of the old family model, yes. The destruction of that old family model is what is bad.
“and long for the restoration of the old family model, yes.”
I guess it is as food a thing to while playing videogames as anything else.
“The old family model…”
How old? Companionate marriage is a relatively recent phenomenon. Prior to that marriage looked more like fundamentalist Muslim marriages today.
Even Leave it to Beaver pre-no-fault marriages were a minority of marriages.
Islamiphobia like this is deplorable.
It has long been part of the platform of the right. Neoconservatives like Irving Kristol linked it to the failure of Great Society welfare policies, which naively assumed that government can change people’s motivations (or that their motivations were good in the first place). Getting married is one of the few things that has a significant effect on the motivations of people with bad character.
“Getting married is one of the few things that has a significant effect on the motivations of people with bad character.”
If you mean they beat their wives and children instead of random people, you may be right. I confess I am not eager about making bad marrying and forming families. YMMV.
Without the traditional institution of marriage the bad still have families. They just don’t take care of them unless the government forced then to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/63e63y/image_so_many_life_lessons_the_simpsons_do_it_for/
No kidding.
Reptiles lay eggs too. Does their work translate to reptiles? May be useful in species determination of dinosaur eggs.
Lacking endogenous flight, my experimental apparatus launches lizards through the air at velocities between 20m/s and 100m/s. Two angles of elevation at 20′ and 50′ were trialled. In both cases lizards were recovered from flying state by intercept with 12″ concrete block wall.
The resulting ballistic performance is plotted against egg shape coefficients (figure a). Scatter of results shows no discernible relationship under normal or logarithmic transforms for 19 out of 20 species. The exception is the rare spotted Patagonian lizard (p=0.045*) for the 20′ angle of elevation. More funding is required to purchase more of this endangered specie to continue testing.
It’s curious how horizontal travel (subway) costs while vertical travel (elevators( is free. The real important design goal for elevators should be pressurized shafts so these cars can be used as emergency exit in a fire.