gender inequalities

There are many inequalities between the genders. Males for instance experience greater variation in many traits. Whatever you measure, top and bottom percentiles always end up being male dominated. (e.g. Smartest as well as dumbest people - as measured by IQ - tend to be male.) Nature is taking greater risk with males who - as a population - pay for this greater variance in the form a lower average lifespan. (Generally speaking, in complex systems, there is a correlation between experience of stress and generation of variance.)

Here is another interesting inequality pattern that has got to do with desirability rankings:

Desirability of women is mostly biological and keeps declining. Desirability of men on the other hand is socio-biological and peaks around 45. Whereas reproductivity declines after a certain age, status accumulation has no theoretical limit.

Here are some further observations:

  • Societies compensate the drop in biological desirability by providing a status boost for entering motherhood which is considered as a holy institution in many cultures.

  • No wonder why grooming for women is such a huge industry. Anything that helps to prolong the perception of a biological downfall is appreciated. But what is the corresponding industry for men? It is get-rich-quick schemes, promising to provide quick sociological boosts. Men are much more susceptible to spam emails, gambling of all sorts etc. (Tragically, this susceptibility increases with age. Generally speaking, everyone should be de-risking their financial portfolios as they get older.) Status consciousness for men is like beauty obsession for women.

  • Average marriage age happens to be around the time when the desirability of men is equal to the desirability of women. This is another indirect proof of the generally accepted fact that it is actually women who make the marriage choices. They wait until the last second, making unconscious estimations of the future status trends for their potential husbands. Males often feel duped afterwards, but do not really understand why. At some point some of them quit and return back to the marriage pool with much higher status points. (Of course, making such a return is harder for women. That is probably why they cheat less although they feel an equal amount of temptation.)

  • Majority of germ line mutations come from sperms. (Men go through way too many sperm production cycles in their lifetimes.) In other words, the “quality” of a gene pool gets affected a lot by the older men deciding to have kids late in life. I put the word quality in quotation marks since evolution actually desires to create more variation and try out new things. It is just happens to be easier to do so through the male side. (As pointed out at the beginning of this post, most risk taking is conducted through the males.) Hence, if evolution is any guide, sexiness of older men will keep increasing over time. (Variation wants to increase and will exploit all mechanisms to do so.) Good news for the George Clooney’s of the world.

charisma and meaning as rapid expansions

Charisma is geometric phenomenon, generated via a rapid spatiotemporal expansion of the self within the physical space.

Next time you enter that Japanese restaurant enter the place as if you own it and eat that edamame like you have been eating it for the last one hundred years.

Meaning is a topological phenomenon, generated via a rapid spatiotemporal expansion of the self within the social graph.

The crusader's life gains purpose by suborning his heart and soul to a cause greater than himself; the traditionalist finds the transcendent by linking her life to traditions whose reach extend far past herself.

Tanner Greer - Questing for Transcendence

intergenerational cycles in parenting

  • Children who choose to do their own thing and nevertheless have good relationships with their parents often have open-minded parents whose own parents were oppressive. In other words, the freedom these children enjoy derive from the freedom their parents could not enjoy. Now that these children are growing up in a free environment, they will probably not give the same luxury to their own children since they are not even cognisant of its value.

  • The fact that girls get more attached to their fathers and sons to their mothers creates a strange sort of justice between genders. If a father fucks up, then his girl grows up to fuck up as a mother, then her boy grows up to fuck up as a father and so on.

bursting vs building

There are two ways to think about sales, and this applies to everything from business to politics to teaching: You can sell something in a way that captures people’s attention, which is very effective in the short run but wears off, as attention spans and dopamine bursts expire. Or you can sell in a way that captures people’s trust, which is harder and slower than capturing attention but tends to last longer.

- Repeating Themes (Morgan Housel)

Come on... Who needs trust when you have blockchain? We live in an age where relationships start with a swipe to the right and companies either fail fast or scale quickly. Don't be so old fashioned!

Information wants to be not only free, but also bursty! Why deliver slow while you can deliver fast? Slow processes suck, especially since we have so short lifespans!

Well... I am sorry but I am slow. I like enjoying the time I have here rather than rushing through some potentially longer lifespan.

  • People who spend all their efforts on creating a great first impression tend to disappoint horribly afterwards.

  • Companies that scale very fast scare the shit out of me as their falls tend to be also very fast.

  • Skills that take longer to learn (like negotiation skills as opposed to a technical skill that can be learned by reading a single book) tend to also stay relevant longer.

  • Men who can not enjoy the truly lasting qualities in a woman tend to be tasteless and impoverished.

parenting as signal processing

  • Good parenting is about signal filtering: Let the moderate, regular stressors pass through for the purpose of developing your kid's stress response muscles and absorb the high level, irregular stressors yourself.
  • Having a kid is a traumatic experience for every young couple. Amplitude, frequency and irregularity of the sinusoidal rhythms of life dramatically increase. You get subject to previously inaccessible levels of happiness and despair via emotional swings that are much faster than the speeds you are accustomed to.

These two points are intimately related. Absorbing the high level, irregular stressors will bring upon you previously unimaginable levels of misery. In return for this favor, your kid will shower you with gratefulness-inducing moments and take you to emotional heights that you will be completely at a loss for words to describe.

suboptimality of monogamy

Biological systems are replete with barbell strategies. Take the following mating approach, which we call the 90 percent accountant, 10 percent rock star. Females in the animal kingdom, in some monogamous species (which include humans), tend to marry the equivalent of the accountant, or, even more colorless, the economist, someone stable who can provide, and once in a while they cheat with the aggressive alpha, the rock star, as part of a dual strategy. They limit their downside while using extrapair copulation to get the genetic upside, or some great fun, or both. Even the timing of the cheating seems nonrandom, as it corresponds to periods of high likelihood of pregnancy. We see evidence of such a strategy with the so-called monogamous birds: they enjoy cheating, with more than a tenth of the broods coming from males other than the putative father. The phenomenon is real, but the theories around it vary. Evolutionary theorists claim that females want both economic-social stability and good genes for their children. Both cannot be always obtained from someone in the middle with all these virtues (though good gene providers, those alpha males aren't likely to be stable, and vice versa). Why not have the pie and eat it too? Stable life and good genes.
Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Pages 162-163)

True monogamy is evolutionarily suboptimal. This will be painfully apparent in near future when everyone's genome will be sequenced at birth.

Note that the most optimal strategy highlighted by Taleb is accessible only in an incomplete-information environment. If everyone could see the genetic landscape, the strategy would fail because

  • alpha fathers would not be open to the idea of their children being reared by others and
  • non-alpha fathers would not want to spend their resources to rear others' children.

success as abnormality

Normality does not breed success, extremity does. This is essentially due to the fact that every activity favors certain character traits and the people who have extreme doses of these traits end up being extraordinarily successful. Of course, not all mentally sick people gain crazy amounts of fame, power or wealth, but those who do are often mentally sick.

Here are some traits I have noticed over the years:
 

Autism

As brain science unravels the roots of investors’ underlying behaviors, it may well find new evidence that the conception of Homo economicus is fundamentally flawed. The rational investor should not care whether she has $10 million and then loses $8 million or, alternatively, whether she has nothing and ends up with $2 million. In either case, the end result is the same.

But behavioral economics experiments routinely show that despite similar outcomes, people (and other primates) hate a loss more than they desire a gain, an evolutionary hand-me-down that encourages organisms to preserve food supplies or to weigh a situation carefully before risking encounters with predators.

One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested, autistics often demonstrate strict logic when balancing gains and losses, but this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior. “Adhering to logical, rational principles of ideal economic choice may be biologically unnatural,” says Colin F. Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at Caltech. Better insight into human psychology gleaned by neuroscientists holds the promise of changing forever our fundamental assumptions about the way entire economies function—and our understanding of the motivations of the individual participants therein, who buy homes or stocks and who have trouble judging whether a dollar is worth as much today as it was yesterday.

Gary Stix - The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts

Assuming that rational investors always beat the irrational ones in the long run, we can conclude that fortune favors the autistic. On a related note, being successful in business also requires a lack of empathy to the degree of being autistic.
 

Obsessive Compulsiveness

This disorder can fake passion when it is absent and fuel grit when it is low, and thereby tremendously help a budding entrepreneur. Obsessing over details can sometimes cause dead-locks but can also act as a pillar for the kind of perfectionism that distinguishes the best entrepreneurs and designers.
 

Narcissism

"Appear as you are. Be as you appear." said Rumi. Good advice for humans, but horrible for corporations. There is an entire department called brand management, dedicated to make sure that this does not happen. Same goes for modesty etc. In fact, ideal corporations are expected to display all the defining features of narcissism. (e.g. an inflated sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy for others, a fiercely independent attitude)

According to object relations theory, narcissistic people find the experience of need and dependency to be unbearable; as a result, they develop a set of psychological defences that embody an extreme form of anti-dependency. I don't need anyone. I can take care of myself because I already have what I need.
The Narcissist You Know - Joseph Burgo (Page 106)

That is why narcissist CEOs are the best. They envisage the whole company as an extension of themselves and do their best to minimize their dependency on employees so that no one can exert independent political power. To achieve this, such CEOs employ all sorts of operational software to suck any remnants of unique and valuable information the moment they are generated, meanwhile using all sorts of tricks to ease employees' existential anxieties and fool them into thinking that they are unique and valuable.
 

Bipolarity

It is no surprise that bipolar disorder is very common among successful entrepreneurs. It is the biological embodiment of the following two best-practices in business: 

  • Growth periods (manias) should be followed by pruning periods (depressions).
  • Every important decision should be evaluated from both a best-case (manic) and a worst-case (depressive) perspective.

Also bipolarity gives one an ability to freely trade energy across time. One can enjoy additional bouts of positive energy today by creating equal amounts of negative energy in the future. (Imagine an asynchronous version of the matter-antimatter creation process in physics.) Bipolar entrepreneurs can better navigate the highs and lows of the business landscape because they can gear up during the low periods and gear down during the high ones. (Entrepreneurs absorb external variations to create internal constancy for their team members who can then build the necessary functionalities.)
 

Psychotism

Apparently there exists some studies backing the common belief that insanity and creativity are closely associated. If so, why are so few of the successful scientists psychotic? After all science is a very creative discipline, isn't it? Here is a possible explanation:

Why are so many leading modern scientists so dull and lacking in scientific ambition? Answer: because the science selection process ruthlessly weeds-out interesting and imaginative people. At each level in education, training and career progression there is a tendency to exclude smart and creative people by preferring Conscientious and Agreeable people. The progressive lengthening of scientific training and the reduced independence of career scientists have tended to deter vocational ‘revolutionary’ scientists in favour of industrious and socially adept individuals better suited to incremental ‘normal’ science. High general intelligence (IQ) is required for revolutionary science. But educational attainment depends on a combination of intelligence and the personality trait of Conscientiousness; and these attributes do not correlate closely. Therefore elite scientific institutions seeking potential revolutionary scientists need to use IQ tests as well as examination results to pick out high IQ ‘under-achievers’. As well as high IQ, revolutionary science requires high creativity. Creativity is probably associated with moderately high levels of Eysenck’s personality trait of ‘Psychoticism’. Psychoticism combines qualities such as selfishness, independence from group norms, impulsivity and sensation-seeking; with a style of cognition that involves fluent, associative and rapid production of many ideas. But modern science selects for high Conscientiousness and high Agreeableness; therefore it enforces low Psychoticism and low creativity.

Bruce G. Charlton - Why are Modern Scientists so Dull?

asynchronous growth cycles

Modern marriages are based on the idea of mutual promotion of personal growth and what breaks them the most is the emergence of a major asynchrony among the growth cycles of the partners.

When one partner experiences an exponential growth in a certain area, he or she falsely believes that this will go on forever. But exponential growths never continue forever. Compared to linear growths, they are more thrilling, correct, but they are also more short-lived. 

This is the reason why traditional marriages are based on vows like "I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love and honour you all the days of my life."

Stasis may always be around the corner. You never know.

unsystematisability of chance encounters

Places that become renowned as (or designed from the beginning as) facilitators of chance encounters gradually lose their functionality. They get overcrowded by people who come there to meet new people. These networkers destroy the spontaneity element completely and replace chance encounters with plain encounters.

You want to experience beautiful and organic chance encounters? Just wonder around the city and keep your antennas open. Other wonderers with similar instincts and interests will inevitably cross your path.

dynamics of loneliness

Friends are divided into three circles: inner, middle and outer. Outer circle feeds the middle circle which in turn feeds the inner circle. All new inflow enters the outer circle first. Each circle suffers from a natural rate of entropy. The outer circle experiences the greatest flux while the inner circle is relatively stable.

What success and fame does is to destroy the middle circle by unleashing a tremendous hurricane blasting through all emotional blisters no matter how small. While the outer circle experiences a sudden cancerous growth, the inner circle (cut off from its supply of new blood from the middle circle) dwindles slowly at its natural entropy rate. Soon a deep sense of loneliness starts sinking in despite the presence of such a large number of people.