I think it would be appropriate to include a link to that site in the prior comment. I would go check it out!

Maybe some people need this advice. But most people read dramatically too few books, and in particular too few books from before the 21st century.

What books from before the 20th century should most people read?

I'm claiming that if the problem is about filtering being hard, in particular, one should be able to munchkin effective filtering methods.

I'm skeptical that that's a good description of the problem though.

This seems surprising. Did servants not know that they had better-for-them options before WWI? What caused that ignorance and how was it stable?

I love this kind of economic analysis of cultural trends and I'd eagerly consume more of this kind.

I didn't realize that the reason why house servants largely disappeared in the first half of the 20th century was because household appliances were partial substitutes for them! But that makes perfect sense!

Why are dance halls niche these days? There are many factors, but the single biggest one is recorded music. It used to be that all music was live. Live music was a coordination point where everyone could form new social connections. And once you're there you might as well dance.

This explanation doesn't ring true to me?

The claim as I understand it:

Music, when it couldn't be recorded, was expensive to produce, and so usually produced and consumed as a club good? The cost of the music creation was amortized^[1] over everyone coming to a social event about it, which had the happy side effect of causing there to be social events of this type at all (which had positive externalities on dating).

But when the price of music falls, it becomes much easier for people to purchase music on their own instead of purchasing it collectively as a club good. As a consequence, there's a much weaker incentive to go to dance halls (since apparently a big chunk of the value was getting to listen to music). So people do that less, and the dance hall scene becomes niche.
 

Is that right?

This story seems possible, at least. But it seems a little fishy to me that, if dance halls were as awesome for dating as you suggest that a big chunk of the value was getting to listen to music. I'm not clear on why you can't keep doing the "teenagers go dancing" thing, just with recorded music instead of live music.

1. ^{^}

   Is that the right word? Can you amortize over many people enjoying a good at once instead of over time?

Singles meetups. Singles meetups are tailored to women-style filters. Men have a bad experience because they can't filter properly. Women have a bad experience because there aren't enough quality men.

I don't know what you mean by "can't filter properly". That isn't usually how the problems with dating, on the men's side, are described?

If this were true, it seems like it should be exploitable by smart men. If there are an abundance of women, can the men figure out a method for sorting effectively even if the context isn't conducive to it? 

(I think this is symmetrical, and the women should be able to hack the dating app, if there's an abundance of quality men. But in-person meetups are much higher bandwidth and so have better affordances for bespoke filtering approaches.)

Posts that are trying to change what is socially acceptable to think/say on LessWrong are NOT fine. 

Huh. Presumably there's some space for proposing and arguing for norms that you think should become part of the culture. (Noting that this is a very importantly different thing from shaping the culture by making normative statement in a way that ambiguously implies that they are already the socially normative, which shifts people's expectations about what behavior is rewarded, praised, punished, or shamed.)

I do think the norm and vibe should be “this is a cost of doing business. If you want money/support from the high integrity political engine, you should expect people to be evaluating you, this is nothing personal, the standards are very exacting and you may not meet them.”

I think it helps if

1. The standards are legible, and clearly written down.

2. The standards are regarded as a separate category from "are you a good guy".

Like, it should feel like "yep, trying to meet these standards is an actual cost, and it might not be worth it for you, and that doesn't mean that we can't be friendly, or be allies, but it does mean that you don't get to have the resources that are allocated specifically for the people who decide to buy into these costs (in exchange for the support)."

I think there's some bad knock-on effects for normalizing the use of "insane" to talk about very common features of the world: I think it makes social-rationalists to willing to disparage people and institutions, as part of a status-signaling game, often without much careful thought.

But I think there's also something valuable about eg. calling belief in God "insane". There's a kind of willingness to call a spade a spade, and not back away from how the literal stated beliefs, if they were not pervasive, would in fact be regarded as signs of insanity.