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Zero Contradictions's avatar

After thinking about this further, I've realized that there's multiple problems with the reasoning in this article, so I removed it from my homepage. Blithering Genius of Expanding Rationality (https://expandingrationality.substack.com/) helped me write this response.

First, any statistic on marriage isn't very informative, since it confuses the legal institution with pair-bonded relationships. The legal definition has changed over time, and become increasingly irrelevant. Even if it's difficult to find stats on the breakdown of the male-female pair bond, it should be noted in the essay that marriages technically aren't necessary to have or raise children, even if they can be beneficial.

Second, the sexual prisoner's dilemma is between *individuals*, not all males vs all females. Let's consider this quote by Arctotherium: "A defect/cooperate society, in which men act to secure the collective interests of their sex without regard for those of women, looks like Meiji Japan (which was monogamous) or early 20th century Arabia (which was polygamous)."

Society isn't based on the "collective interests" of one sex in opposition to the other. The sexes don't have separate interests as collectives. It would be more accurate to say that a person's sex determines the *individual* interests that they have. If anyone disagrees, then they should point out what these "collective interests" are and how they're "collective".

A society can make it easier or harder to arrange cooperation. A society can't create a defect/cooperate scenario. That doesn't make sense. A society could make it easier for one side to defect, but that would have effect of the deal being harder to arrange.

Third, a male defecting from a female means that he abandons her and her offspring, rather than providing protection and support. Given that this doesn't happen in "defect/cooperate societies", the wording for identifying such societies is misleading. It seems that "defect/cooperate society" was intended to simply mean a society where it's easier for men to divorce their wives on male-favorable terms, if they want to (i.e. the male can keep the children, all the wealth, etc). But even in the event of a divorce, it wouldn't be adaptive for males to raise the children by themselves if they could have the wife do that instead (for free). So it's not clear how that "defect/cooperate society" is a meaningful distinction, from a purely biological perspective.

Fourth, we should be skeptical that the so-called modern cooperate/defect society scenario is a valid categorization as well. It's true that the dynamics of mating, marriage, and divorce are biased towards women's preferences these days. However, this ignores how a historically significant chunk of society is just incels and virgins. A minority of men are getting a lot of sex and love, while many men remain sexless and loveless. It's not clear how or why an abnormally high population of incels and femcels should be labeled "cooperation" or "defection". It just doesn't make sense to extrapolate labels from individual scenarios onto societies.

Fifth, there are also many people who have successful relationships but choose to have no offspring at all. Even if people can manage to have cooperative romantic and sexual relationships, reproduction is not guaranteed. So, the sexual prisoner's dilemma is not sufficient for understanding fertility rates, as the article title implies.

There's simply no predictive or explanatory power to be gained by shoehorning the individual sexual prisoner's dilemma onto society. It also entails multiple false equivocation fallacies. In general, things tend to balance out in most societies, because you can't really have a power imbalance between men and women. Each needs the other. A society can make the pair bond easier or harder to achieve, but it can't create a defect/cooperate situation between the sexes. That's a possible individual outcome, not a collective outcome.

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Torless Caraz's avatar

Another banger by the based bear.

This is a sensible summary of your views, with convincing arguments. There's something I'm not sure about.

It is my understanding that, in late Roman empire, mariage had become a bad choice for both parties, especially for women, who then massively became christians as it expected stronger commitments from men. The Collins couple talk about this, commenting a Scott Alexander article as I recall. And nowadays I don't see how the current situation is beneficial to the average woman either, as there's no expected commitment from men. It seems like a downward spiral for both parties to be fair. It mostly benefits to very promiscuous women and very promiscuous men, not to the average male or the average female.

Much to ponder, great work as always!

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