Supreme Court Going HAM

3 days ago, Supreme Court upholds a key tool fighting discrimination in the housing market
In the 5-4 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court ruled that the 1968 Fair Housing Act prevents more than just intentional discrimination in the housing market. The court said the law can also prohibit seemingly race-neutral policies that have the effect of disproportionately harming minorities and other protected groups, even if there is no overt evidence of bias behind them.
similar to the abercrombie case.

fucking supreme court. so many fails in a row, all at once. it’s like a blitzkrieg, man. (also the obamacare and marriage "equality" rulings)
In his dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. warned that the court “makes a serious mistake” in giving meaning to the Fair Housing Act that Congress never intended when it passed the law.
sighhhh
In his rebuttal, Thomas wrote that racial imbalances don't always disfavor minorities, pointing to instances in which minorities have dominated certain industries.

"And in our own country, for roughly a quarter-century now, over 70 percent of National Basketball Association players have been black," Thomas wrote. "To presume that these and all other measurable disparities are products of racial discrimination is to ignore the complexities of human existence."
true, though not the best thing to say. what about FREEDOM? since when am i obligated to help everyone equally? i should build housing, or whatever, to help MYSELF – and whoever else i feel like. if i’m paying, if i own it, then it’s up to me...

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

First Date Opener

Edit: (sept 2015) due to complaints and confusion, I want clarify some things:

I think dating is bad.

I have low opinions of alcohol, dancing, clubs, partying, lots of sexual promiscuity for "fun".

I think the way society treats women (and men too) is bad. I think both gender roles have lots of huge flaws.

I think PUA is the messenger – it's not to blame for how this stuff works, but gets blamed a lot for telling the truth about social dynamics, contrary to society's pretty lies. I appreciate PUA's knowledge of how society works and truth-telling on the matter. I appreciate standing up to pretty lies.

I do have PUA-type views on some issues. For example, I think the campus rape epidemic is bullshit and the affirmative consent standard is bullshit. I have many large disagreements with feminists and social justice warriors. And I do not think men in particular are to blame for gender roles, dating conventions, etc, I think so much of this stuff is mutual.

Statements like, below, "her value is more in her face, her body" are talking about how society works, what the social rules are. They are not an endorsement of those rules. I am not recommending that you value women in that way.

I consider it hard to find women who are of much value in good ways. But I also think the same thing about men. I think the female gender role is a bit worse overall, but both are terrible. Some key problems with the female gender role are it's more passive and less compatible with being intellectual. I do not think you should take the attitude, "women suck, so I'll just put up with some dumb bitch to get sex". I don't think you should give up on a better life. I also don't think you should find some slightly less dumb bitch and lie to yourself that she's smart.

These problems are caused by underlying factors such as static memes and coercive parenting. These things are cultural defaults that are very hard to get away from. These topics get into deep, complex ideas. People could be much better than they are. These are soluble problems.

I advise people to become serious philosophers and reject many of society's customs.

The purpose of this post is to explore ideas, and think about PUA, dating and social dynamics. If you think it's not pretty, consider becoming unconventional – but only in a serious way involving deep study of philosophy.

Note: flakey, unthoughtful deviations from convention generally don't work very well. And whatever you currently think is seriously intellectual, is, I'd guess, not nearly good enough.

Sorry there's no simple way to even know where the line is for what's good enough to be rational reform instead of reckless destruction. You have to learn tons of philosophy to even have a quality view on that issue.

The original post is below, unedited:

what to say at the start of a first date:

(speak slowly)

hi. look i know people get really nervous on first dates. i don't like for people to suffer and it's really unnecessary. so i hope you can relax and we can talk honestly. but i know that's a cliche, and just saying that doesn't work. so i'm going to do most of the talking until you get more comfortable. i'll go first and share who i am, so it's easier for you. i won't ask too many questions, i don't want to put you on the spot. speak up more when you want to. and don't worry about saying "yeah" or "me too" every 5 seconds to keep my confidence up, i'll be fine. and please don't worry about silences either – sometimes i need to stop to think, it's no big deal.

another problem is people form all these expectations about the other person, and about what you do on dates. people have this fantasy of what they want from the other person before they even know them. for now, we're just talking. no big deal. no pressure or obligations.

now what i want you to do to get started is listen. thanks. and if you don't like something, i want you to tell me. point it out. because if you tell me, i can deal with it. but if i don't know there's a problem, then i might not be able to. can you do that for me? is that fair?

(if she's receptive, this is a good point to touch her for emphasis. you can tell her to look at and touch her to turn her towards you more, in order to get stronger attention when you ask the questions. and it communicate seriousness, it adds gravity.)

[she says ok]

Great. Now to start with, I'm a philosopher. That's the most important thing to me. You don't know what I mean. There's different ideas about philosophy floating around, and I strongly disagree with most of them. I'm a specific type of philosopher. To me, philosophy is about...

If you're not a philosopher, you'll have to replace that part with whatever you really care about, that really matters to you, that you will be able to talk about a bunch, confidently, without needing constant reassurance from her.

If you don't have anything like that, get something. You need to have your own life, have a "you" that really solidly exists and means something. That's so much more important than girls.

BTW, you should consider becoming a philosopher. Ideas are the most important thing in the world. A philosopher is a person who deals with ideas. It was philosophy knowledge that let me write this post. It's through philosophy that I learned people don't have to suffer, and that all the cliche talk about open, honest communication doesn't actually solve the problem.

there's a bunch of reasons for opening this way. it's partly like explained: to try to help her past her nervousness and make it easier for her. it's partly because the man leads. it's partly because it's better to talk about your own passion than hers. it's what you're about, your major values, that should be the focal point. if she's not compatible with you, it doesn't matter what her interests were anyway. and it's your value, the good stuff about you that you care about, which will draw her to you. she wants to know what you're about, and you want to know if she likes what you're about, so start there. her value is more in her face, her body, her compliance with your stuff, not her interests. girls are more malleable – it's your job to draw her into your world and, if it's nice, she can be a kind of person that's helpful to you.

if she's one of the few girls who doesn't follow traditional gender roles – and i mean really, thoroughly doesn't follow them (which is under 1% of the girls who claim they want equality) – then no harm will be done. she'll understand why you approached it this way and she'll take some initiative to say, e.g., that she isn't nervous, that she has a lot to say too, that she wants to share her passion with you, etc. if she doesn't have the confidence and initiative to say that and change the style of discussion, then she is a normal, passive girl after all, so the original style is best.

this isn't the only way you can approach a new girl. lots of ways are ok. but this is good. there are a lot of common problems with dates. ignoring them won't make them go away. you'll have to be very skillful and charming to deal with all the problems really well in a subtle way. if you're more of the nerdy, intellectual type who would actually read my blog, then addressing the bad things about dating directly and honestly is a good way to do it.

but keep in mind you can't just copy my words. if you start with my words, then switch to your own words afterwards, she'll notice. you'll sound like one person, and then a different person. it'll be confusing. you have to say things you're comfortable with, which are natural to you. PUAs call this congruence.

i think it's good to be the kind of person who naturally would say things like my example. if you're not, maybe you can see some of the appeal and learn something. and maybe you can even be inspired to want to learn more about philosophy.

PS if your date is not officially a "date", or you aren't sure if it is, you can say pretty much the same thing with a few adjustments not to mention dating. if it kinda might be a date, people still get nervous and get expectations, so the issues still come up.

don't try to push the "date" label on her if it's unclear – you're only doing that to create social approval to pursue her, because you lack confidence (if it's a "date" that allows you to touch her, try to sleep with her, etc – that's a bad mindset).

PPS if you're interested in PUA, try to point out some of the techniques used in the comments! you'll learn more.

Edit: (sept 2015) Disclaimer: this is a post about PUA. If you want to do or understand PUA, you can learn something. This is not advice. My recommendation for your lifestyle is: learn philosophy instead of getting involved in stereotyped relationships.

Also, this is a thought experiment, not a recommendation to say these lines (which would not be congruent for you, and also in real life you need to make lots of adjustments on the fly depending what she says).

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (3)

Getting Caught Using PUA

Many guys worry about getting caught using PUA (Pick Up Artist, aka Game, aka RSD) tricks. They worry the girl will notice a canned line, or any other technique, and call them on it.

A standard answer is that if the girl is having a good time, even if she knows you're gaming her, she'll go along with it. So it doesn't matter and would generally come up with girls you weren't going to get anyway. I agree. (It's a bit like magicians doing magic tricks with audience assistants – usually the assistant will try to be helpful, not disrupt the act, even if he or she catches something the magician did.)

You can also just treat it as any other shit test and pass it. No big deal. This isn't the sort of thing that guys worry about if they're great PUAs.

I have another answer which I haven't seen. It won't work for everyone, but it will work for many people who ask this question. It works best for intellectuals and the kind of people who don't like game tricks and feel a little bad about using them (who are the same guys worrying about being caught).

So think about it this way. You used a game trick, e.g. a canned line. You didn't feel quite right about it. You weren't thrilled with it. You sorta wish the world was different and it was easier to get girls without learning PUA. If you feel that way, you may also worry: what if she recognizes it's a canned line? What if she calls me on it?

Well, if she calls you out on using the thing you had mixed feelings about, she is exactly the kind of girl you were looking for. She's smart, or she's honest, or reads PUA, or she's bold, or some other good traits. You should be fucking thrilled. Smile. Grin. Confess, happily. Tell her you're so glad she noticed, and now you really like her. Praise her for being logical, noticing details, being knowledgeable, or whatever fits the specific situation. Tell her how hard it is to find a girl like her. Say you were always hoping someone would call you on it instead of falling for the line. Tell her you now believe the two of you will get along great.

If you don't like something, and she doesn't like it, that's great. You have something in common. You see through a lot of social games, and so does she – perfect! You're the more honest type, and so is she – compatibility! (To be clear, a lot of PUA isn't any kind of trick and there's nothing wrong with it. And especially skillful PUAs don't need training wheels like canned openers. It's possible to do PUA honestly.)

This is a very powerful reframing of the situation. It turns a negative into a positive. And it's true, isn't it? OK not for all guys, but something like this is true for a lot of the guys who had this worry.

If you frame the situation as two people who prefer honesty finding each other, as this wonderful, rare meeting, then the part where you got caught is this tiny little detail to be forgotten. It just doesn't matter anymore and doesn't get in the way of the exciting new possibilities you have together.

PUA teaches – correctly – to find something you like about a girl other than her sex appeal and clearly communicate that you appreciate that about her. It's a major concept called 'qualifying'. You get her to express some trait or value she has, and then you are able to give her actual reasons that you like her which she'll be happy with. (Some PUAs lie and say you like whatever her qualities are, but it's better for everyone if you find someone you're more compatible with. And if you have an abundance mentality where you know you can get someone else who fits you better, you'll do better with girls anyway.)

And yes you still have to calibrate. If she doesn't start smiling back, you can't gush quite that much. But something like that can be your natural, congruent reaction to being caught. If you mean it, you can draw her in to that frame, that narrative, that perspective. It's the default starting place, and then you calibrate a bit from there, as always.

(Calibration is not a dirty trick, it just consists of noticing if you and she aren't on the same page. If you're not on the same page, you adjust and try to fix it, or decide you're incompatible and part ways, but you don't just keep talking past her. That's logical. The main hard part of calibration is that some of her signals are nonverbal, so you might misread them and calibrate wrong. There's nothing dishonest about improving at understanding nonverbal communication.)

PS If you're perfectly happy to lie for sex, and get caught using PUA tricks, just lie that you were looking for a smart girl who sees through those tricks. Just do the above as an act if you want. Shrug.

Update: Disclaimer: this is a post about PUA. If you want to do or understand PUA, you can learn something. This is not advice. My recommendation for your lifestyle is: learn philosophy instead of getting involved in stereotyped relationships.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (4)

ask.fm bans "rude words"

ask.fm does not allow "rude words", "trolling", being "mean", being "upset[ing]", or "to provoke or antagonize people". also nothing "shocking", and no advocacy of anything illegal (drugs, torrents, etc)

fucking wow man.

they don’t enforce this consistently or objectively at all. people constantly use rude words and troll on ask.fm

so everyone is guilty and the site admins actually follow some other, hidden policy which they refuse to state in public.

i looked this up cuz i got asked a question about incest, answered it, then saw it was deleted. and the question wasn’t even anonymous, so i asked the submitter, and he said he didn’t delete it.

i received no notification of any kind about it being deleted, and i don’t have a record of what i wrote. (contrast with youtube where, in my experience, if your video is taken down, it becomes private so you still have it, just no one else. and of course youtube notifies you and gives a reason, and has a system for you to challenge the takedown)

http://about.ask.fm/terms/
When using the Services, you must not post or send anything which:

• Is mean, is bullying someone or is intended to harass, scare or upset anyone;
• Is deliberately designed to provoke or antagonize people, especially trolling;
• Uses rude words or is intended to upset or embarrass anyone;
• Encourages dangerous or illegal activities or self-harm;
• Depicts horrible, shocking or distressing things;
• Is obscene or pornographic, contains any pictures of naked people, is sexually explicit or depicts graphic violence;
• Contains any threat of any kind, including threats of physical violence to yourself or others;
• Is racist or discriminates based on someone’s race, religion, age, gender, disability or sexuality;
• Infringes other individual’s privacy rights;
• Is illegal, could expose Ask.fm to legal liability, or encourages people to get involved in anything which is illegal (for example, drugs, violence, or crime);
• Is defamatory or violates any third party’s rights, including breach of confidence, copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, moral right, privacy right, right of publicity, or any other intellectual property right;
• Constitutes spam, attempts to sell anything to other users, or competes with the business of Ask.fm;
• Contains any computer virus or other malicious code designed to attack, damage, divert, take over, disable, overburden, or otherwise impair the Services;
• Collects user content or information, or otherwise accesses the Services using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our prior permission;
• Violates any robot exclusion headers of the site, if any, or bypasses or circumvents other measures employed to prevent or limit access to the Services;
• Shares, recompiles, decompiles, disassembles, reverse engineers, or makes or distributes any other form of, or any derivative work from, the Services;
• Attempts to scrape or collect any personal or private information from other users or from the Services;
• Pretends to come from someone other than you, or where you are impersonating someone else;
• Intercepts or monitors, damages, or modifies any communication not intended for you;
• May cause any harm or damage to you or anyone else;
• Otherwise breaches the TOU; or
• Attempts to do any of the foregoing.

We reserve the right, at any time and without prior notice, to remove or disable access to any content that we, for any reason or no reason, consider to be objectionable, in violation of the TOU or otherwise harmful to the Services or our users.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (5)

[Videos] How To Write Philosophy Emails

I've made 4 (and counting) screencasts. These are videos in which I write Fallible Ideas emails and explain some of my thoughts. Now you can see what writing philosophy emails looks like.

Click to watch the videos!

Compare my process to what you've been doing (if anything), ask questions, etc. Learn something or, if you think that won't work, make a suggestion.

EDIT:

"These videos are great. I highly recommend watching them." – Kristen Ely

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Message (1)

Correlation Example

Suppose, hypothetically, that most (say, 66%) therapists on TV shows are female. That's a correlation: being a TV show therapist is postively correlated with being female.

I don't know if this is true, but I think it's realistic enough to make a plausible example.

Many people would conclude sexism, gender roles, something like that. That's the fallacy of mixing up correlation and causation.

People ought to think harder about possible alternative explanations. Is there any other reason most TV show therapists might be female?

Here's one: it could be that most main character are male, and most therapists are the opposite gender of the main character.

In that case, the choice of the main character might be sexist (I won't get into debating that here), but the choice of the therapist would not be sexist in the normal way. The therapists would be chosen because, in some ways and some settings, people find male-female conversations more interesting than male-male or female-female. There may or may not be something wrong with people's preferences about that, but it's not an example of the standard, typical sexism and gender role stuff which someone might have initially assumed.

If most therapists really are female (maybe, I don't know), is this alternative explanation true? Again, I don't know. What I do know is most therapists being female would not rule out this non-sexism explanation!

This is a practical example of how correlation doesn't imply the first causation you think of, and you need to look for alternatives.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

No One Else Discusses Ayn Rand

This is expanded from a letter I wrote to Per-Olof Samuelsson.

I already knew that quality discussion of Objectivism is virtually impossible to come by. It occurred to me that I've never heard a single word about one of Rand's very best quotes, anywhere, ever, besides by me and my friends who I've quoted it to. I did some Google searches and found a sad situation.

In short, no one really cares about discussing Ayn Rand's ideas in English, online, in public, besides me. (If you're interested, join my discussion group.)

The Return of the Primitive, The “Inexplicable Personal Alchemy”:
Who can take any values seriously if he is offered, for moral inspiration, a choice between two images of youth: an unshaved, barefooted Harvard graduate, throwing bottles and bombs at policemen—or a prim, sun-helmeted, frustrated little autocrat of the Peace Corps, spoon-feeding babies in a jungle clinic?

No, these are not representative of America’s youth—they are, in fact, a very small minority with a very loud group of unpaid p.r. [agents] on university faculties and among the press—but where are its representatives? Where are America’s young fighters for ideas, the rebels against conformity to the gutter—the young men of “inexplicable personal alchemy,” the independent minds dedicated to the supremacy of truth?

With very rare exceptions, they are perishing in silence, unknown and unnoticed. Consciously or subconsciously, philosophically and psychologically, it is against them that the cult of irrationality—i.e., our entire academic and cultural Establishment—is directed.

They perish gradually, giving up, extinguishing their minds before they have a chance to grasp the nature of the evil they are facing. In lonely agony, they go from confident eagerness to bewilderment to indignation to resignation—to obscurity. And while their elders putter about, conserving redwood forests and building sanctuaries for mallard ducks, nobody notices those youths as they drop out of sight one by one, like sparks vanishing in limitless black space; nobody builds sanctuaries for the best of the human species.

So will the young Russian rebels perish spiritually—if they survive their jail terms physically. How long can a man preserve his sacred fire if he knows that jail is the reward for loyalty to reason? No longer than he can preserve it if he is taught that that loyalty is irrelevant—as he is taught both in the East and in the West. There are exceptions who will hold out, no matter what the circumstances. But these are exceptions that mankind has no right to expect.
i did several searches with pieces of the paragraph about building sanctuaries. they turn up around 5 results, which are are google books and copyright violation, my own discussion group, and one quote site has part of it with no discussion.

The Virtue of Selfishness, Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?:
The excuse, given in all such cases, is that the “compromise” is only temporary and that one will reclaim one’s integrity at some indeterminate future date. But one cannot correct a husband’s or wife’s irrationality by giving in to it and encouraging it to grow. One cannot achieve the victory of one’s ideas by helping to propagate their opposite. One cannot offer a literary masterpiece, “when one has become rich and famous,” to a following one has acquired by writing trash. If one found it difficult to maintain one’s loyalty to one’s own convictions at the start, a succession of betrayals—which helped to augment the power of the evil one lacked the courage to fight—will not make it easier at a later date, but will make it virtually impossible.
this one initially appears to have around 100 google results, but there turn out to be only around 19 if you try to go through them all (google’s hit count estimates are often bad – in another case 272 turned out to be 16). most of those are just bad sites with the full text of the essay or book, and there’s also google books, dead links, and me. there is one single link with discussion, a forum post with essay full text and then one short paragraph of poor quality discussion. it received zero replies.

Philosophy: Who Needs It, An Untitled Letter:
Like any overt school of mysticism, a movement seeking to achieve a vicious goal has to invoke the higher mysteries of an incomprehensible authority. An unread and unreadable book serves this purpose. It does not count on men’s intelligence, but on their weaknesses, pretensions and fears. It is not a tool of enlightenment, but of intellectual intimidation. It is not aimed at the reader’s understanding, but at his inferiority complex.

An intelligent man will reject such a book [like Rawl's A Theory of Justice or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason] with contemptuous indignation, refusing to waste his time on untangling what he perceives to be gibberish—which is part of the book’s technique: the man able to refute its arguments will not (unless he has the endurance of an elephant and the patience of a martyr). A young man of average intelligence—particularly a student of philosophy or of political science—under a barrage of authoritative pronouncements acclaiming the book as “scholarly,” “significant,” “profound,” will take the blame for his failure to understand. More often than not, he will assume that the book’s theory has been scientifically proved and that he alone is unable to grasp it; anxious, above all, to hide his inability, he will profess agreement, and the less his understanding, the louder his agreement—while the rest of the class are going through the same mental process. Most of them will accept the book’s doctrine, reluctantly and uneasily, and lose their intellectual integrity, condemning themselves to a chronic fog of approximation, uncertainty, self doubt. Some will give up the intellect (particularly philosophy) and turn belligerently into “pragmatic,” anti-intellectual Babbitts. A few will see through the game and scramble eagerly for the driver’s seat on the bandwagon, grasping the possibilities of a road to the mentally unearned.
This one has one good mention, which has joke replies about sexual endurance and elephants being inferior to humans. (Plus, interestingly, this quote has two non-English pages which have the quote itself in English, one of which appears to have some discussion).

so there you have it. no one else discusses some of the very best of Ayn Rand’s ideas (in english, in public, online). i think this is extremely sad and messed up. i knew decent Objectivism discussion was hard to come by, but these search results are amazing. there’s approximately nothing out there.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Job Security Model of Relationships

I've got a great analogy to explain a common way people think about relationships that I think is really bad. This will make the most sense to the kind of people who are serious about capitalism, freedom and Objectivism. If you have a different perspective, try to understand even though you may disagree.

Some people really like the concept of at-will employment where anyone can be fired with no notice, for no reason given. You have to earn your job on a daily basis, and live up to it. There's no security or relaxation. You never keep a job when someone else wants it and has more merit.

Except this is mitigated by transaction costs – if you underperform by $5, but switching employees costs $500, then you can keep your job. Transaction costs keep things a little bit more stable, but really don't offer much security in most cases. Transaction costs are logical because if everyone was changing jobs every day it'd be chaotic and waste a lot of effort on retraining. They don't mess up the principle.

The principle involves interacting on a case-by-case basis, for mutual benefit each time. If the mutual benefit ever stops, the interaction stops. If someone can get a better deal elsewhere, they should do that (make sure to factor in the price of making a change, which includes researching alternative options, the risk the new one doesn't work as well as you predict, turning off any old recurring stuff, setting things up with the new guy, etc).

Other people less into freedom, capitalism, voluntary win/win interactions, economic literacy, reason, Objectivism, etc, have a different approach to employment. They want regulations to create job security. They want it to be hard to fire a person without giving a good reason. They want predictability and security, so people can relax once they get a job (they can't just do a terrible job, but they can relax and do a pretty good job and not worry about it). They want unemployment insurance/welfare and to make sure everyone has a stable job they can build a life around.

Some people prefer to be able to start and stop jobs easily, others prefer to just get a job and keep it. Both of those preferences are OK. What's not OK is regulations to make it hard to fire people and to protect their jobs even if the employer no longer considers it mutually beneficial to keep them. What's not OK is a ton of paperwork when you want to hire someone to increase the transaction costs of getting a new employee, to artificially reduce (via government policy, something built into the logic of reality) the frequency that people get replaced at a job.

If you want a stable longterm job, why not get a contract? Why not write in the contract that you're guaranteed to keep the job for 20 years as long as you meet some minimum conditions (specified in the contract), and if they want to fire you, they either have to have a good reason (specified in the contract, e.g. they went out of business) or else they have to pay you money to make up for it.

Of course such a contract would be very expensive. Who wants to commit to keep an employee long term and make it hard to replace them?

Categorize all scenarios into two groups. There are the scenarios where a person staying at a job has mutual benefit, and where it doesn't. For the first category, they are going to keep the job without any contract or regulations protecting them. But for the second category, they will only keep the job if there is a contract or regulations or something to protect their job security. The entire purpose of this sort of regulation that limits at-will employment is to keep people in jobs where there isn't mutual benefit. If you want a contract where the employer agrees that in some potential future scenarios, they will keep paying you money in a way they don't benefit from, then that's going to be very expensive. They would have to pay you a lot less, so they benefit so much most of the time to make up for the risk.

And what if, knowing it's hard to fire you, you don't do your best work? Why would anyone want to sign a contract setting it up for an employee to do that and get away with it? Well the government regulations work similarly. Those regulations lower wages, they encourage companies to have fewer employees and to be less willing to take a risk on someone they aren't really confident about (which especially hurts younger people without a long track record).

OK, now you've got a refresher on free employment – firing someone at any time without giving a reason – and regulated employment to create job security so people don't have to constantly strive to have the most merit.

Application To Relationships

Most long term relationships follow the job security model. (Most casual hookups follow the at-will employment model.) In particular, marriage tries to set up job security so you don't have to compete with everyone else your spouse might like better all the time.

The idea is you can relax and be secure in your marriage instead of constantly worrying about dog-eat-dog competition. You can have a stable situation to build a life around, at the cost of sometimes you have to sacrifice – do stuff that lacks mutual benefit, give up things you'd prefer instead. (Your spouse makes the equivalent sacrifice. You both sacrifice alternatives you regard as superior to the spouse. But also you lie that the spouse is the best, and you change your mindset to not look for alternatives and not think about whether alternatives are superior, to try to hide the sacrifice from yourself.)

Job security marriages are bad like job security regulations. Relationships should be merit and mutual benefit based, at all times, just like employment should be. If you want stability, figure out a rational contract that makes sense. If you can't do that, maybe it's because you're trying to make the future predictable in ways the future isn't predictable – so you have to sacrifice big things like the growth of knowledge to artificially create more predictability.

Marriage and job security encourage taking things for granted and coasting through life. And even if you're not married, having "the talk" and being officially "boyfriend and girlfriend" can also put things into that same mode where all the inertia is in favor of continuing on, and there's a lot of pressure to prevent changes. When you make relationship commitments that make change hard and artificially add extra cost to making a change, then that's irrationally propping up something that wouldn't work on merit alone.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (4)