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.
He was rude to me and you think my comments are annoying because you're both unintelligent and irrational. I didn't leave my comment to "push my blog". I left my comment because Arctotherium's essay has several errors and inaccuracies. If you don't have any rational arguments against anything that I said, then fuck off.
Wow, tell me you don’t understand game theory without telling me you don’t understand it.
The entire point of prisoner’s dilemmas is that the ONLY way to create cooperate/cooperate outcomes is via outside pressure.
Removal from a suboptimal Nash Equilibrium requires some force external to the two players in order to push them from defect/defect to cooperate/cooperate, as mere rational self interest will not get them there.
In the case of the literal prisoner’s dilemma, one creates a culture of silence in the face of the police with either something like a crime boss who punishes and threatens defectors (essentially altering the payoff matrix) or inculcating a culture in which “snitching” is felt as being worse than imprisoned.
With marriage, the enforcement mechanism for cooperate/cooperate is two fold— the legal system (analogous to the crime boss); and the cultural system (the equivalent to “snitches get stitches” might be slut shaming).
I understand game theory very well, thank you very much. And if you had a better understanding of epistemology, then you would understand how you can’t conflate the outcomes of the prisoner’s dilemma with different types of societies.
In my comment I already gave multiple thorough reasons why it’s epistemological error to do this. There is absolutely nothing in your comment where you refute arguments that I actually made.
If it’s not clear to you how your explanation of the prisoner’s dilemma doesn’t refute anything that I already said, then you need to re-read the original comment. If you’re not going to make a substantive criticism (http://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2025/03/critics-and-criticism.html), then fuck off, arrogant imbecile.
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.
The problem of declining marriage seems intrinsically hard to stop in the modern technological landscape. Previously, most high productivity labor was physical (e.g., farming, construction, etc.). Men had an inherent advantage in labor. Women *had* to marry young for financial support.
Now, with modern technology, most high productivity labor is intellectual (e.g., lawyers, data scientists, etc.). Because women can now earn similar wages to men, they have little need for marriage. They can achieve financial stability on their own. And so, they prioritize career over family, sleep around in their youth, and don't fear divorce. Many men are frustrated that earning a strong paycheck no longer guarantees marriage as it once did, and so "defect" from working as you describe.
I reckon that our cultural norms re marriage are all downstream from these material trends.
This is a lot of words for "let's make women economically dependent on men again." The simple fact that you ignore the reality that women's domestic labor is uncompensated (and not accounted for in GDP) and is a/the primary mechanism for the gains in married men's income (productivity? LOL if ever there was an intellectual leap there you have it), tells me you are really enamoured of your own idea.
The obvious thing that is happening is the female-defect/male-cooperate is going to be very short lived, quickly becoming a defect/defect arrangement. We have transitory things like the digital harems and perpetual situationships, woke sinecures in government rapidly grew to an unsustainable level. And many other weird effects. Which has lead to a substantially fraction of women ending up childless, which has no demographic future, a dead end. Female vices are being aggressively exploited. And men are dropping out. I would speculate two groups will come out of this as the norm. The defect/defect, the path of least resistance. And cooperate/cooperate, walled off some how and of coarse more wealthy.
In time AI will have a massive not commonly predicted effects. Human-like AI, likely decades away. And physical, fully-functional, human-like androids, decades away. You will know we are getting close to this when standardized parts for human-like androids become common.
Consider this: When electricity came on the scene, sometimes called animal electricity. Making a Frankenstein monster was speculated. But what we actually got was mass communications, the telegraph. A few years before power flight became a reality, the predictions on what it would be used for and would look like was quite different from what actually happened. When human-like androids actually become a reality they will have many effects no one is predicting. True it will have major effects on male/female relations but quite different from what is commonly speculated in movies.
(1) Meiji Japan was a strongly militarized society. When men are fighting afar, society is forced to ensure their marital rights and privileges. Otherwise, they would refuse to fight (or work).
(2) Traditional Jewish marriage is based on the marriage contract signed by two witnesses, called "Ketubah". In contemporary secular sectors, the ketubah has been substituted by a legal marriage contract, formulated by a lawyer and legally enforceable. Moreover, even if there is no rabbinical or secular contract, the state (the family courts) act as any relationship creates rights and obligations.
P.S.: If a couple has a shared bank account, they are legally a couple and the male is automatically considered the father of her children. Genetic analysis is forbidden in Israel.
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.
The individual doesn't exist, and marriages are often secured by clans/tribes.
Your socio-economic status determines your marital value even in a free western society.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180202082106/https://reactionaryfuture.wordpress.com/2016/10/19/the-common-root-of-all-modern-political-discourse/
In short, you're a retard who wants to call others virgins and brag about all the sex you're having.
You're weak and your virginity will be raped from you.
Lol, looks like someone is very triggered by rationality. You have not presented any rational arguments.
i’m not a virgin, but regardless, your remark is irrelevant.
Smart people don’t speak the way you do. Successful people don’t talk that way either. it’s reasonable to infer that you are a failure in real life.
The person was rude to you, because you're annoying. You're only here to push your blog, whom nobody reads.
He was rude to me and you think my comments are annoying because you're both unintelligent and irrational. I didn't leave my comment to "push my blog". I left my comment because Arctotherium's essay has several errors and inaccuracies. If you don't have any rational arguments against anything that I said, then fuck off.
Webpage link: https://zerocontradictions.net/misc/response-arctotherium-sexual-PD
Wow, tell me you don’t understand game theory without telling me you don’t understand it.
The entire point of prisoner’s dilemmas is that the ONLY way to create cooperate/cooperate outcomes is via outside pressure.
Removal from a suboptimal Nash Equilibrium requires some force external to the two players in order to push them from defect/defect to cooperate/cooperate, as mere rational self interest will not get them there.
In the case of the literal prisoner’s dilemma, one creates a culture of silence in the face of the police with either something like a crime boss who punishes and threatens defectors (essentially altering the payoff matrix) or inculcating a culture in which “snitching” is felt as being worse than imprisoned.
With marriage, the enforcement mechanism for cooperate/cooperate is two fold— the legal system (analogous to the crime boss); and the cultural system (the equivalent to “snitches get stitches” might be slut shaming).
I understand game theory very well, thank you very much. And if you had a better understanding of epistemology, then you would understand how you can’t conflate the outcomes of the prisoner’s dilemma with different types of societies.
In my comment I already gave multiple thorough reasons why it’s epistemological error to do this. There is absolutely nothing in your comment where you refute arguments that I actually made.
If it’s not clear to you how your explanation of the prisoner’s dilemma doesn’t refute anything that I already said, then you need to re-read the original comment. If you’re not going to make a substantive criticism (http://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2025/03/critics-and-criticism.html), then fuck off, arrogant imbecile.
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!
He doesn't really explain why Meiji Japan is worse than his ideal Germanic model.
The problem of declining marriage seems intrinsically hard to stop in the modern technological landscape. Previously, most high productivity labor was physical (e.g., farming, construction, etc.). Men had an inherent advantage in labor. Women *had* to marry young for financial support.
Now, with modern technology, most high productivity labor is intellectual (e.g., lawyers, data scientists, etc.). Because women can now earn similar wages to men, they have little need for marriage. They can achieve financial stability on their own. And so, they prioritize career over family, sleep around in their youth, and don't fear divorce. Many men are frustrated that earning a strong paycheck no longer guarantees marriage as it once did, and so "defect" from working as you describe.
I reckon that our cultural norms re marriage are all downstream from these material trends.
I decided to publish my criticisms as a more polished webpage instead. https://zerocontradictions.net/misc/response-arctotherium-sexual-PD
This is a lot of words for "let's make women economically dependent on men again." The simple fact that you ignore the reality that women's domestic labor is uncompensated (and not accounted for in GDP) and is a/the primary mechanism for the gains in married men's income (productivity? LOL if ever there was an intellectual leap there you have it), tells me you are really enamoured of your own idea.
The obvious thing that is happening is the female-defect/male-cooperate is going to be very short lived, quickly becoming a defect/defect arrangement. We have transitory things like the digital harems and perpetual situationships, woke sinecures in government rapidly grew to an unsustainable level. And many other weird effects. Which has lead to a substantially fraction of women ending up childless, which has no demographic future, a dead end. Female vices are being aggressively exploited. And men are dropping out. I would speculate two groups will come out of this as the norm. The defect/defect, the path of least resistance. And cooperate/cooperate, walled off some how and of coarse more wealthy.
In time AI will have a massive not commonly predicted effects. Human-like AI, likely decades away. And physical, fully-functional, human-like androids, decades away. You will know we are getting close to this when standardized parts for human-like androids become common.
Consider this: When electricity came on the scene, sometimes called animal electricity. Making a Frankenstein monster was speculated. But what we actually got was mass communications, the telegraph. A few years before power flight became a reality, the predictions on what it would be used for and would look like was quite different from what actually happened. When human-like androids actually become a reality they will have many effects no one is predicting. True it will have major effects on male/female relations but quite different from what is commonly speculated in movies.
(1) Meiji Japan was a strongly militarized society. When men are fighting afar, society is forced to ensure their marital rights and privileges. Otherwise, they would refuse to fight (or work).
(2) Traditional Jewish marriage is based on the marriage contract signed by two witnesses, called "Ketubah". In contemporary secular sectors, the ketubah has been substituted by a legal marriage contract, formulated by a lawyer and legally enforceable. Moreover, even if there is no rabbinical or secular contract, the state (the family courts) act as any relationship creates rights and obligations.
P.S.: If a couple has a shared bank account, they are legally a couple and the male is automatically considered the father of her children. Genetic analysis is forbidden in Israel.
Read the unwin review
Female status and lack of chastity is linked to male unemployment.
Basically every woman job could be done by a male who'd then use it to get married.