Comment by roguecoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roguecoder | Hacker News Reader

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I think your generalizations are ridiculously broad here. Some women are golddiggers, but those relationships are, IMHO, not worth having anyway. Why do you think such a relationship is going to contribute more to your life than spending time on things that actually make you happy?

Even if all women wanted was power, we are playing a zero-sum, I-got-mine, race-to-the-bottom, everyone-loses game if we demand total devotion to status, and I don't think most women want that either. Already 25% of stay-at-home parents are men. The majority of women are now in the work force. Egalitarian marriages last longer. Things are changing, and we can help them change faster by opting out of that self-destructive game.

That doesn't mean giving up on being able to find a romantic relationship, however. There is a difference between being a bum and not seeking to dominate the people around us to get ahead at all cost. I'd recommend reading http://postmasculine.com/ for the dating advice that worked best for me. Much like weight loss, there are no short cuts to becoming capable of having satisfying relationships. It is hard work to move from desperation to a place where relationships are one possible way your life could be a bit nicer, but certainly not the only one. On the other hand, I found it worth the energy.

I think you are misinterpreting what I'm saying.

I'm not insinuating that women are generally gold-diggers. I'm saying that ultimately status and income are considerations that come into play when it comes to the mating game. Physical attractiveness aside, a male doctor or male CEO is going to attract more interest than a male barista by virtue of his occupation and income. Income and wealth for men is a sometimes a consideration not different from height.

Let's put it another way: A minority male in the U.S. like an Asian male who earns a certain amount above the average is going to have significantly a lot more choices in interracial pairings than if he were at a low paying job. Statistics show that Caucasians females rarely marry Asians in the United States, but when they do, that pairing has the highest median income level compared to every other pairing in the U.S., including Caucasian/Caucasian and Asian/Asian. Anecdotally, all the Asian men I know who married Caucasian female are well-paid relative to the average Asian American male.

> Physical attractiveness aside, a male doctor or male CEO is going to attract more interest than a male barista by virtue of his occupation and income.

You clearly do not live in San Francisco.

My argument is this: so what? You say these things like marriage, and in your case interracial marriage, is the be-all and end-all of happiness. I argue that it isn't, and all research directly correlating income and happiness finds that it tops out around $67k.

If you sacrifice happiness for marriage, and get a crappier marriage than you would otherwise have in the bargin, what is the point?

> $67k.

Not in Silicon Valley. In Ohio, maybe.

Some women are golddiggers, but more importantly, all women, as a rule, have golddigging tendency. (There are exceptions, but I am talking of a rule.) This is very well established by now.

I recommend reading David Buss's textbook, Evolutionary Psychology, 4th edition. In particular, Women's Long Term Mating Strategies, where the first heading is Preference for Economic Resources. Women consistently rate importance of economic resources in partner twice(!) higher than men. This is consistent from 1930 to today, and does not change whether most women are in the work force or not. As a textbook, it has lots of references you can check yourself.

"Some women are golddiggers, but more importantly, all women, as a rule, have golddigging tendency."

Exactly. Women want a man that can provide (this is usually achieved through money and power). Just like men want a woman that's attractive.

I don't know why people want to go against human nature or try to pretend that it's a bad thing or it doesn't exist.

Not everyone thinks it's human nature. In fact, there's no real reason why we should think that it's human nature rather than (say) a purely social phenomenon that's entirely learnt, and can therefore be changed.

there's no real reason why we should think that it's human nature rather than (say) a purely social phenomenon

No reasons except that we already know from separated twin studies that genetics plays a strong role in behavioral traits. Then also as you look at other places in the animal kingdom where learned behavior takes a greatly reduced role to wired/instinctive behavior we see many analogues. Birds provide many examples whereby the male must demonstrate his ability to provide an environment, sustenance, and protection for potential mates. Some male birds build their nests that the females examine before choosing a mate. Other birds demonstrate athletic abilities through dance.

Saying that it's just as likely that male/female behaviors are learnt as they are inborn is akin to saying that it's just as likely that having a womb to give birth with is just as likely learnt as inborn.

Male birds also wear and display decorative plumage in order to attract mates, whereas female birds tend to be more drap. Obviously it's natural for men to look and dress prettily in order to demonstrate their attractiveness to women, who as the ones being wooed don't need to put in the same kind of effort.

It's funny how selective our analogies to nature are sometimes.

You completely missed the point. The point is that there are many examples of similar behaviors that aren't learned in lower animals that don't have the ability to learn much of anything the way humans do.

Thinking up an example of a different trait attributed to the opposite sex in humans is completely irrelevant.

If you want to address this subject in a meaningful way -- rather than find a nit-pick over an analogy while obtusely missing the point, maybe you should look into refuting the mountain of twin study evidence that shows that nurture lost in the nature vs nurture debate.

A social behavior that's been around in nearly all societies in the world? Human nature came first and shaped our society, not the other way around. Anything that goes against human nature usually ends up in failure and/or many deaths (Communism, extreme socialism, etc). We need to learn to embrace it and use it to our advantage.

There was a study done sometime back at a Swedish university (I can't find the link at the moment) where they had the same mindset as you. A family raised a son and totally removed all male-oriented things from his life. They even gave him dolls to play with. He ended up gravitating towards male-centric things and they stopped the study.

Actually, there are reasons, and lots. Go read the literature. Really.

One of the best study is International Preferences in Selecting Mates. This is a large study (N=9474) with samples from six continents, from cultures with monogamy and polygyny, etc.

Can you describe this in the form of a testable hypothesis?

There's a difference between gold digging and being attracted to more successful men, in that gold digging is motivated by a conscious incentive to expend the man's economic resources. Unemployed men living in their mother's basements are unattractive compared to, say, machinists, who are in turn less attractive than doctors, but it's less a matter of golddigging and more a matter of social status and respectability. There's probably diminishing returns in the range between machinist and doctor, with a step function down for unemployed slackers and a step function up for multimillionaires.

>Egalitarian marriages last longer.

Second the call for a rationale for this. In fact, I would wager that the opposite is true.

Citations provided below. While I've seen no causal evidence, the best hypothesis is that it is the result of perceived fairness, social connection to the partner or a side effect of people with egalitarian beliefs only get married when they really want to, rather than out of a sense of necessity.

> Egalitarian marriages last longer.

Do you have any data for that, or even a rigorous definition of an "egalitarian marriage?"

The definition of egalitarian marriage is either division of household labor (reduces probability of divorce for women: http://jfi.sagepub.com/content/24/1/51.short), predominantly equal contributions of income (no effect on divorce relative to men earning more, decreases probability relative to women earning more: http://www.addegem-asso.fr/docs/PapersDMM2009/7.pdf) and egalitarian gender roles (lowers probability of divorce when held by men: http://books.google.com/books?id=Yv8KZnvVbTsC&lpg=PA225&... )

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