I agree but would go way harder for people to be brutally realistic about their own ranking and how that will change over time.
Beyond mid to late twenties the best people pair up, marry, and stay married. Waiting past 25 (maybe up to 29 if you're in a social zone that pairs up late) isn't a neutral information gathering exercise where the only price is the number of years you could have gotten married.
You don't get to pick from everyone after you've waited gathering information, you get to pick from *who is left*, which gets continuously worse.
This advice is pretty solid, but I would give very different advice to younger people (say under 25). People often change a lot in their early-20s, and the person you met at 21 may be very different at 24. Of course people are always changing, but I think the transition from school to full adult life plus hormones and brain development mean people at this age are much more likely to change quickly and dramatically. I would generally tell someone under 25 to wait longer before getting engaged, no matter how they answered the cost-benefit questions.
I agree that younger people should have more uncertainty, but I feel like the way they should handle that in most cases is having a higher bar for staying together longer than a couple years (basically do the secretary problem thing). If you get with your partner at 20, and then you stick around in a monogamous relationship for six or seven years because you're too young to get engaged, then at 26 or 27 you'll be facing the marriage decision without having dated anyone but your partner in ages, and you'll probably be very confused and stressed for that reason. That's pretty costly, especially for women.
I wish it were more the norm to amicably break up with your college boyfriend / girlfriend and then get back together with them a few years later if you haven't found someone better. (Poly can cushion this because you could still find your next primary partner while dating your current one.)
That’s pretty much what my male best friend and I did in college. At that point we liked each other platonically. We could talk all night. Shared values. Similar social class. Could see it going romantic, it would be a stereotypical rich jew/rich asian match. And thought a marriage between us would work. Still think it could have worked. It would be a self-arranged marriage more than a love match because we’re both pragmatic people. We said if we were single at 28 we’d just get married. At some point he asked me where he could find a woman like me except be romantic to begin with (I think we were both deep in the friendzone with each other). We both found more suitable people but it wasn’t the worst idea.
I got married at 23 and won't either say I regret it or everyone who doesn't is a coward, but... Yes? But if you're living like a married couple, you frequently change in the same direction.
If there's a Singularity soon, then there's a very good chance that you're either dead or there's extremely advanced technology that gives you very radical new options for life (e.g. the ability to upload your brain into a computer, very powerful drugs that permanently change your brain to make you far more intelligent or alter your personality, the ability to date extremely life-like artificial partners, etc). I think that you should probably not make strong commitments now about what you'd do then — your vows should probably be until the Singularity.
yeah i was very confused on the ai bits from the otherwise solid cost-benefit analysis. it’s just new technology, and it doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of capability to substitute human social institution in any meaningful way :/
“A good chance” of all that shit she said is straight up crazy lmao. I’m not saying there’s no chance, but no one wants to consider the possibility that it will never actually be able to magically shit out interstellar spaceships or freeze time or vaporize all disease or any of that. I understand you can’t DISprove the idea that intelligence scaling forever would just be straight up magic, but some people aren’t open enough to the idea that it’s not actually magic.
Yeah I was a bit confused by this one. Is the expectation that humans will be extinct at some extremely high certainty some number of years after AGI? Isn't there also some probability that we'll be rendered biologically immortal some number of years after AGI? I would think it's at best a wash
choosing immortality or not is a decision even more consequential than marriage but probably not one that you thought about when you got married or have ever discussed with your partner. Like whether or not you want children, it seems like the sort of thing that might lead to growing apart if you have different preferences
In contrast I much prefer the mainstream "til death do us part", making commitments now about extremely different and extremely long lives feels very dicey. "Til death or the Singularity" is a natural generalization of the mainstream view on commitment for a very different eschatology
I hate every reference to AI and the singularity here, please touch grass, but the very plain-spoken/de-mystified/grounded considerations for marriage are refreshing imo
The whole “should you marry her” frame gets interesting fast once you realize women are usually being evaluated for warmth, loyalty, beauty, and ease while still being expected to carry adult life like a second spine.
This is wonderful but, with all due respect, I can't see the Singularity having much impact on the length of any marriage one way or another. At most it'll be 'Oh, did you hear the machines overtook humanity?' and then the pair of you will get on with the boring business of being human one way or another and in whatever circumstances arise.
This was great. One issue for young men to consider: when thinking about which women are “out of your league “ that can change with time! When you’re 21 and haven’t accomplished anything the dating market looks different from when you are 31 and have become highly respected in your field.
Maybe better to wait until you’ve found your place in the world to judge.
other than the silliness about The Singularity (kinda reads like when Christians write about the Second Coming but for people who love space grey IKEA furniture) and also ignoring the general ick of using Silicon Valley VC language to describe human relationships, I'd rate this advice as a 4/10.
the "cofounder" perspective is just plain bad. weighing whether or not to marry your partner based on what you'd think of them within the confines of a corporate environment is frankly insane imho. i think i personally would want to be in a relationship with someone who is the exact opposite of the types of sycophantic husks who excel as middle managers in Big Tech or uppity YC douchebags. Obviously YMMV, but in general viewing the relationship in a mutually exploitative capitalist kinda way is sad. I feel love is the one escape we're given in life from the awful shackles of corporate brown-nosing and the atomized experience of existing in the postmodern workplace, so we should take advantage of that and just love who we love for them in their entirety (weaknesses and all). It's not about optimizing or doing a cost-benefit analysis. It's just the asburd choice to be a human and choose another human for their own sake, and to love them just for being them.
the talk about being lovers and the general pervasive belief in people being "in your league" or "out of your league" is red-pill adjacent and lame. obviously you want intimacy, both emotional and physical, and you wouldn't have initiated the relationship if there wasn't something there at some point, so this reads more as a "your partner better maintain fuckability in your own consumptive gaze" that's just very entitled and low in empathy and low vulnerability.
also, small note, marriage isn't a contract enforcement in front of your community as communities barely exist IRL nowadays lol (can you even name half the neighbors on your street?? and even if you can who cares!) it's literally just a party to celebrate love and mostly a historic holdover from the times when people believed in religion.
all of the generic platitudes about being friends is fine.
overall, meh. tech bros should try reading poetry or something and see what being a human consists of instead of trying to kill everyone with AI or whatever
> Given AI timelines, I think the expected length of your marriage if you get married today is probably something like ten years.
> For example, maybe you want to make a commitment that you’ll stay with your partner for one natural lifespan even if the Singularity does happen in between.
These two statements do not seem consistent? If marriage might make sense post-TAI, then it seems like the expected length of marriage might be very long indeed.
I think there are just a range of marriage contracts you could have in the face of the Singularity. One of them is that all bets are off afterward, which gives an expected marriage length of 10 years or so. A more intense contract you could have is that you partner has the right to demand “one natural lifetime” from you (including stopping you from eg uploading yourself or otherwise radically changing yourself) for one _subjective_ lifespan, say of fifty subjective years. In that case your marriage length is what it would have been without the Singularity. I’d strongly discourage making commitments much longer than that. I edited the footnote to clarify this.
I agree but would go way harder for people to be brutally realistic about their own ranking and how that will change over time.
Beyond mid to late twenties the best people pair up, marry, and stay married. Waiting past 25 (maybe up to 29 if you're in a social zone that pairs up late) isn't a neutral information gathering exercise where the only price is the number of years you could have gotten married.
You don't get to pick from everyone after you've waited gathering information, you get to pick from *who is left*, which gets continuously worse.
Also, marriage is great and kids are great.
Yes, in general I feel like I didn't emphasize enough the part where you try to figure out what kind of person would actually date you.
This part is important:
>ask yourself how often that kind of woman tends to come onto the market,11 and ask an honest friend if she’s out of your league.
And the footnote:
>In general, the kinds of women who have been married longer tend to be in higher demand and come onto the dating market more rarely.
Don't skip this part!
That said, I don't think the specific dynamic where all the best people are paired up is a very strong effect until ~29-32 in my social circles.
This advice is pretty solid, but I would give very different advice to younger people (say under 25). People often change a lot in their early-20s, and the person you met at 21 may be very different at 24. Of course people are always changing, but I think the transition from school to full adult life plus hormones and brain development mean people at this age are much more likely to change quickly and dramatically. I would generally tell someone under 25 to wait longer before getting engaged, no matter how they answered the cost-benefit questions.
I agree that younger people should have more uncertainty, but I feel like the way they should handle that in most cases is having a higher bar for staying together longer than a couple years (basically do the secretary problem thing). If you get with your partner at 20, and then you stick around in a monogamous relationship for six or seven years because you're too young to get engaged, then at 26 or 27 you'll be facing the marriage decision without having dated anyone but your partner in ages, and you'll probably be very confused and stressed for that reason. That's pretty costly, especially for women.
I wish it were more the norm to amicably break up with your college boyfriend / girlfriend and then get back together with them a few years later if you haven't found someone better. (Poly can cushion this because you could still find your next primary partner while dating your current one.)
That’s pretty much what my male best friend and I did in college. At that point we liked each other platonically. We could talk all night. Shared values. Similar social class. Could see it going romantic, it would be a stereotypical rich jew/rich asian match. And thought a marriage between us would work. Still think it could have worked. It would be a self-arranged marriage more than a love match because we’re both pragmatic people. We said if we were single at 28 we’d just get married. At some point he asked me where he could find a woman like me except be romantic to begin with (I think we were both deep in the friendzone with each other). We both found more suitable people but it wasn’t the worst idea.
I got married at 23 and won't either say I regret it or everyone who doesn't is a coward, but... Yes? But if you're living like a married couple, you frequently change in the same direction.
Perhaps I'm not enough of a futurist, but I'm not following why AI timelines change marriage expectations. How do these two relate?
If there's a Singularity soon, then there's a very good chance that you're either dead or there's extremely advanced technology that gives you very radical new options for life (e.g. the ability to upload your brain into a computer, very powerful drugs that permanently change your brain to make you far more intelligent or alter your personality, the ability to date extremely life-like artificial partners, etc). I think that you should probably not make strong commitments now about what you'd do then — your vows should probably be until the Singularity.
> "If there's a Singularity soon"
Maybe it is because I have a more "mechanical" view of transformers, but I think it will take us longer to beat evolution.
yeah i was very confused on the ai bits from the otherwise solid cost-benefit analysis. it’s just new technology, and it doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of capability to substitute human social institution in any meaningful way :/
“A good chance” of all that shit she said is straight up crazy lmao. I’m not saying there’s no chance, but no one wants to consider the possibility that it will never actually be able to magically shit out interstellar spaceships or freeze time or vaporize all disease or any of that. I understand you can’t DISprove the idea that intelligence scaling forever would just be straight up magic, but some people aren’t open enough to the idea that it’s not actually magic.
Yeah I was a bit confused by this one. Is the expectation that humans will be extinct at some extremely high certainty some number of years after AGI? Isn't there also some probability that we'll be rendered biologically immortal some number of years after AGI? I would think it's at best a wash
choosing immortality or not is a decision even more consequential than marriage but probably not one that you thought about when you got married or have ever discussed with your partner. Like whether or not you want children, it seems like the sort of thing that might lead to growing apart if you have different preferences
Another win for the Mormons (a group that does explicitly and literally consider marriage an eternal, immortal commitment)
In contrast I much prefer the mainstream "til death do us part", making commitments now about extremely different and extremely long lives feels very dicey. "Til death or the Singularity" is a natural generalization of the mainstream view on commitment for a very different eschatology
I hate every reference to AI and the singularity here, please touch grass, but the very plain-spoken/de-mystified/grounded considerations for marriage are refreshing imo
I really disliked this but I think it’s valuable for the intended audience.
🤣🤣🤣 well said
The whole “should you marry her” frame gets interesting fast once you realize women are usually being evaluated for warmth, loyalty, beauty, and ease while still being expected to carry adult life like a second spine.
This is wonderful but, with all due respect, I can't see the Singularity having much impact on the length of any marriage one way or another. At most it'll be 'Oh, did you hear the machines overtook humanity?' and then the pair of you will get on with the boring business of being human one way or another and in whatever circumstances arise.
This was great. One issue for young men to consider: when thinking about which women are “out of your league “ that can change with time! When you’re 21 and haven’t accomplished anything the dating market looks different from when you are 31 and have become highly respected in your field.
Maybe better to wait until you’ve found your place in the world to judge.
other than the silliness about The Singularity (kinda reads like when Christians write about the Second Coming but for people who love space grey IKEA furniture) and also ignoring the general ick of using Silicon Valley VC language to describe human relationships, I'd rate this advice as a 4/10.
the "cofounder" perspective is just plain bad. weighing whether or not to marry your partner based on what you'd think of them within the confines of a corporate environment is frankly insane imho. i think i personally would want to be in a relationship with someone who is the exact opposite of the types of sycophantic husks who excel as middle managers in Big Tech or uppity YC douchebags. Obviously YMMV, but in general viewing the relationship in a mutually exploitative capitalist kinda way is sad. I feel love is the one escape we're given in life from the awful shackles of corporate brown-nosing and the atomized experience of existing in the postmodern workplace, so we should take advantage of that and just love who we love for them in their entirety (weaknesses and all). It's not about optimizing or doing a cost-benefit analysis. It's just the asburd choice to be a human and choose another human for their own sake, and to love them just for being them.
the talk about being lovers and the general pervasive belief in people being "in your league" or "out of your league" is red-pill adjacent and lame. obviously you want intimacy, both emotional and physical, and you wouldn't have initiated the relationship if there wasn't something there at some point, so this reads more as a "your partner better maintain fuckability in your own consumptive gaze" that's just very entitled and low in empathy and low vulnerability.
also, small note, marriage isn't a contract enforcement in front of your community as communities barely exist IRL nowadays lol (can you even name half the neighbors on your street?? and even if you can who cares!) it's literally just a party to celebrate love and mostly a historic holdover from the times when people believed in religion.
all of the generic platitudes about being friends is fine.
overall, meh. tech bros should try reading poetry or something and see what being a human consists of instead of trying to kill everyone with AI or whatever
> Given AI timelines, I think the expected length of your marriage if you get married today is probably something like ten years.
> For example, maybe you want to make a commitment that you’ll stay with your partner for one natural lifespan even if the Singularity does happen in between.
These two statements do not seem consistent? If marriage might make sense post-TAI, then it seems like the expected length of marriage might be very long indeed.
I think there are just a range of marriage contracts you could have in the face of the Singularity. One of them is that all bets are off afterward, which gives an expected marriage length of 10 years or so. A more intense contract you could have is that you partner has the right to demand “one natural lifetime” from you (including stopping you from eg uploading yourself or otherwise radically changing yourself) for one _subjective_ lifespan, say of fifty subjective years. In that case your marriage length is what it would have been without the Singularity. I’d strongly discourage making commitments much longer than that. I edited the footnote to clarify this.