4 ms·

Nice clothes and a nice car indicate financial wellbeing, which is a desirable characteristic in a mate. Why demonstrate success on a date? What do you think t

• jazzyk 10y ago
  >you try to demonstrate your reproductive value to a potential mate Gosh, you are quite the romantic, aren't you... ;-)
• coldtea 10y ago
  >What do you think the purpose of a date is? I thought it was to get to know the person, build a relationship and maybe bed them (if you're too horny). But now I've learned its purpose is to show your bling and evolutionary advantages to send the right primitive signals to the other hardly developed monkey-human. >I think you have this mixed up; a prostitute is precisely the person you don't need to indicate your value to. You just pay them. The distance between a whore and a golddigger is not that wide.
  • wyager 10y ago
    The things in your first paragraph are, for the most part, euphemisms for "evaluate the person's reproductive fitness". What do you think "getting to know someone" entails? You literally mention sex in the same sentence; this is the fundamental evolutionary (not teleological) purpose of courtship, regardless of how you dress it up.
    • coldtea 10y ago
      >What do you think "getting to know someone" entails? Talking to them, learning their past, their character, their preferences, their favourite Tom Waits album, etc? >You literally mention sex in the same sentence; Which we've managed to separate from pure evolutionary urges to reproduce at least some millennia ago. >this is the fundamental evolutionary (not teleological) purpose of courtship, regardless of how you dress it up. You'd be surprised, billions manage to have sex with billions without having children -- in casual relationships and such. And an increasing number of people (like 20-30% in the US I've read?) even for life.
      • wyager 10y ago
        >Talking to them, learning their past, their character, their preferences, their favourite Tom Waits album, etc? All of these things except maybe Tom Waits are indicators of reproductive fitness. Why do you think your brain is structured to prefer these characteristics in a potential mate? > Which we've managed to separate from pure evolutionary urges to reproduce at least some millennia ago. Hardly. We've only had effective birth control for a few decades. Society hasn't fully caught up to this yet, let alone our evolutionary programming. > You'd be surprised, billions manage to have sex with billions without having children What planet do you live on? In fact, billions of people have had children!
        • coldtea 10y ago
          >All of these things except maybe Tom Waits are indicators of reproductive fitness. Why do you think your brain is structured to prefer these characteristics in a potential mate? Why do you think different men/women have completely different preferences on those things? Except if "reproductive fitness" is subjective, which defeats the whole argument... >Hardly. We've only had effective birth control for a few decades. We've had romantic (and even platonic) love, annal sex, gay people, and tons of other things besides arranged marriages or fucking for reproduction since at least ancient Greece... >What planet do you live on? In fact, billions of people have had children! One or two or five. They've had sex 100s of times.
          • wyager 10y ago
            > Why do you think different men/women have completely different preferences on those things? Because evolutionarily optimal characteristics are different for men and women. An example: women have to endure long periods of partially debilitating gravidity, which means that, among other things, human males are optimized to perform physically exerting tasks. This is presumably why men have more muscle mass than women in general, and why women generally put more emphasis on a mate's musculature than men put on women's. > since at least ancient Greece... Most societies and religions select against those activities, presumably because it's sub-optimal from a memetic reproduction standpoint. If all your citizens or followers are galavanting about subverting the sexual reward system and reproducing less than they would if they were forced only to have sex for reproduction, then you will be out-bred by those societies who only allow sex for reproduction. This is why anti-sodomy, anti-homosexuality, anti-masturbation, and even anti-birth-control are extremely popular memes both in established religions and in many societies. Until quite recently the US was one such society, and we are still dealing with attitudes and policies borne of these memes. That is what I meant by "Society hasn't fully caught up to this yet". Not that I am not passing any value judgements on the morality or immorality of such policies; I am just stating historical fact.
    • jazzyk 10y ago
      I hope that one day you will find someone who will take your breath away and make you simply enjoy interacting with another human being.
      • wyager 10y ago
        I call those people "friends", and people typically have somewhat different criteria for friends and lovers. Not that they are mutually exclusive.
        • hx87 10y ago
          In my experience at least, living without "lovers" is vastly easier than living without "friends".
• cheetos 10y ago
  I find this to be a very sad comment. Life, and love, is far more than an exercise in evolutionary psychology.
  • wyager 10y ago
    However you find it emotionally, it's the truth. > Life, and love, is far more than an exercise in evolutionary psychology. I agree, there is additional value in the emergent behavior of evolutionarily driven organism (us). However, this isn't contradictory to what I said.
    • cheetos 10y ago
      It's actually not the truth at all, it's your opinion. Your comment contains theory and pop psychology popular in the West. But it is neither scientific, nor evidence-based, and many Eastern cultures do not view mating or courtship in the same way you do.
      • wyager 10y ago
        > Your comment contains theory and pop psychology popular in the West. It does contain theory, but it doesn't contain psychology or anything "pop". It's anthropology and evolutionary biology. My views also aren't popular among Western people, except those who like to scientifically pick apart the origins of beloved social traditions. This makes most people uncomfortable. > many Eastern cultures do not view mating or courtship in the same way That's nice. Do you actually know anything about "Eastern" views on courtship rituals, or are you just saying that my views aren't mystical enough and you assume that "Eastern" people have some sort of mystical interpretation? The fact that you're appealing to cultural folklore about dating at all should cause you to re-consider your argument.
        • coldtea 10y ago
          >It does contain theory, but it doesn't contain psychology or anything "pop". It's anthropology and evolutionary biology At the very pop level. No anthropologist or biologist would make as crude presentations of the relevant arguments -- or even think their interaction with culture is some solved problem and it's 100% "evolution" at play. >My views also aren't popular among Western people, except those who like to scientifically pick apart the origins of beloved social traditions. This makes most people uncomfortable. No, it's mostly the crude early 20th century scientism and basic oversight of empirical data. >The fact that you're appealing to cultural folklore about dating at all should cause you to re-consider your argument. Well, your whole premise was that evolution trumps "cultural folklore" and customs, to which the parent's reference is completely justified as a counter-example.
• imgabe 10y ago
  > Nice clothes and a nice car indicate financial wellbeing That, or a completely irresponsible attitude towards consumer debt. In most cases, the latter. So, this isn't really a very sound strategy for finding a mate who is financially sound. Read The Millionaire Next Door. Most people who are actually wealthy drive moderate cars that are completely paid for. Since many of them own a small business that often works in a fairly blue collar industry, they're more likely to be wearing jeans and a work shirt rather than a suit.
  • beachstartup 10y ago
    > Most people who are actually wealthy drive moderate cars that are completely paid for whoever wrote that book is selling you on a worldview. your quote is often repeated, but i don't find it to be true. i think it's wishful thinking for a lot of thrifty people, so they can feel superior by judging people they don't know by what they drive around in. in my experience being a millionaire or not has absolutely no bearing on the kind of car you drive. some people like nice cars or sports cars, other people simply don't give a shit about cars, rich or not. and from what i've seen, even the wealthy people who don't drive nice cars have other really nice shit, like $100k in road bicycles, or gigantic house(s) or a fully equipped fishing boat sitting in the marina. but they drive a prius, so they're thrifty and virtuous.
    • imgabe 10y ago
      That's fine if you met some people who don't meet the profile outlined in the book. It's a statistical trend, not an ironclad law. Obviously once you get beyond a certain point of wealth the difference in price between a Toyota and a BMW becomes insignificant. Rather than just anecdotes, the authors of the book did actual research and found that most people who have actual net worth above a million dollars did in fact get there by carefully managing their money, and conversely, most people who had the appearance of wealth in the form of expensive cars and boats, didn't have the actual net worth that it implied. So, if you're judging someone's net worth by the things they happen to own, the whole point is that this is not a reliable indicator of how much wealth someone actually has.
• justinlardinois 10y ago
  > What do you think the purpose of a date is? It's a courtship ritual where you try to demonstrate your reproductive value to a potential mate. I think you have a very narrow definition of "date."
• Retra 10y ago
  I think you're underestimating human diversity. In some very base sense what you are saying is true, but you're not going to have a successful date just because you vaguely "demonstrated reproductive value." That's because what is appropriate value depends entirely on the person you're dating -- their mood, their experiences, their self-perceptions... The only way you're speaking the truth is if just about every human behavior qualifies as demonstrating success. In which case, you're saying nothing. It is nearly useless for making actual decisions, and thus not something you are justified in believing strongly.
  • wyager 10y ago
    > That's because what is appropriate value depends entirely on the person you're dating But you're still demonstrating value, yes? I admit that there is no universal value function. It is subjective to a large degree. However, we can pick out large-scale trends fairly easily. > The only way you're speaking the truth is if just about every human behavior qualifies as demonstrating success Not sure what you mean.
    • Retra 10y ago
      Everything you do "demonstrates value." So what? You need to know what your date values, and that can vary wildly enough that you cannot reasonably predict it. Thus the purpose of a date is not to "demonstrate value", but to let someone else analyze your value for themselves. Sure, you can find trends, but you're never dating trends. Real people are not averages of a population. >Not sure what you mean. When you say "but you're still demonstrating value", you are reducing dating analysis to a tautology. It will either be untrue or useless. Something has to fail to demonstrate value in order for you to determine not to do it. And you can't do that without knowing the person you're dating. Which is at the heart of everyone else's point: Dating is about finding out what your date values, not 'demonstrating' what you imagine it is that they value.
      • wyager 10y ago
        So what you're telling me is that healthy, fit, intelligent, and wealthy person isn't going to have more dating success than a sickly, scrawny, impoverished idiot? Interesting theory. > you cannot reasonably predict it. I think I just did.