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I have a similar story. When I was very young, my mother was the primary breadwinner of the household, and put both herself and my father through law school. Growing up, it was always just kind of assumed that my sister would have to get a real job making actual money, same as my brother and I; a degree in underwater basket weaving would have required some serious justification. (She ended up going to dental school and also getting a PhD working with epigenomic data.)
I didn't realize on a gut level that this wasn't the norm until shortly after high school. I was hanging out with two female friends and one of them said "man, I really need more money". I replied "sounds like you need to get a job". The friend laughed and said "oh, I was thinking I need to get a boyfriend", and then the other friend also laughed and said she was also thinking the boyfriend thing.
... so that was quite a shock to my worldview.
This comment gave me the information I'm looking for, so I don't want to keep dragging people through it. Please don't feel obligated to reply further!
That said, I did quickly look up some data on this bit:
But remember that you already conditioned on 'married couples without kids'. My guess would be that in the subset of man-woman married couples without kids, the man being the exclusive breadwinner is a lot less common than in the set of all man-woman married couples.
... so I figured I'd drop it in the thread.
When interpreting these numbers, bear in mind that many couples with no kids probably intend to have kids in the not-too-distant future, so the discrepancy shown between "no children" and 1+ children is probably somewhat smaller than the underlying discrepancy of interest (which pushes marginally more in favor of Lucius' guess).
1That is useful, thanks.
Any suggestions for how I can better ask the question to get useful answers without apparently triggering so many people so much? In particular, if the answer is in fact "most men would be happier single but are ideologically attached to believing in love", then I want to be able to update accordingly. And if the answer is not that, then I want to update that most men would not be happier single. With the current discussion, most of what I've learned is that lots of people are triggered by the question, but that doesn't really tell me much about the underlying reality.
Update 3 days later: apparently most people disagree strongly with
Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I'm skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it's hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.
Most people in the comments so far emphasize some kind of mysterious "relationship stuff" as upside, but my actual main update here is that most commenters probably think the typical costs are far far lower than I imagined? Unsure, maybe the "relationship stuff" is really ridiculously high value.
So I guess it's time to get more concrete about the costs I had in mind:
- A quick google search says the male is primary or exclusive breadwinner in a majority of married couples. Ass-pull number: the monetary costs alone are probably ~50% higher living costs. (Not a factor of two higher, because the living costs of two people living together are much less than double the living costs of one person. Also I'm generally considering the no-kids case here; I don't feel as confused about couples with kids.)
- I was picturing an anxious attachment style as the typical female case (without kids). That's unpleasant on a day-to-day basis to begin with, and I expect a lack of sex tends to make it a lot worse.
- Eyeballing Aella's relationship survey data, a bit less than a third of respondents in 10-year relationships reported fighting multiple times a month or more. That was somewhat-but-not-dramatically less than I previously pictured. Frequent fighting is very prototypically the sort of thing I would expect to wipe out more-than-all of the value of a relationship, and I expect it to be disproportionately bad in relationships with little sex.
- Less legibly... conventional wisdom sure sounds like most married men find their wife net-stressful and unpleasant to be around a substantial portion of the time, especially in the unpleasant part of the hormonal cycle, and especially especially if they're not having much sex. For instance, there's a classic joke about a store salesman upselling a guy a truck, after upselling him a boat, after upselling him a tackle box, after [...] and the punchline is "No, he wasn't looking for a fishing rod. He came in looking for tampons, and I told him 'dude, your weekend is shot, you should go fishing!'".
(One thing to emphasize in these: sex isn't just a major value prop in its own right, I also expect that lots of the main costs of a relationship from the man's perspective are mitigated a lot by sex. Like, the sex makes the female partner behave less unpleasantly for a while.)
So, next question for people who had useful responses (especially @Lucius Bushnaq and @yams): do you think the mysterious relationship stuff outweighs those kinds of costs easily in the typical case, or do you imagine the costs in the typical case are not all that high?
I think you'll get the most satisfying answer to your actual question by having a long chat with one of your asexual friends (as something like a control group, since the value of sex to them is always 0 anyway, so whatever their cause is for having romantic relationships is probably the kind of thing that you're looking for here).
That's an excellent suggestion, thanks.
When this post first came out, it annoyed me. I got a very strong feeling of "fake thinking", fake ontology, etc. And that feeling annoyed me a lot more than usual, because Joe is the person who wrote the (excellent) post on "fake vs real thinking". But at the time, I did not immediately come up with a short explanation for where that feeling came from.
I think I can now explain it, after seeing this line from kave's comment on this post:
That's exactly it. The taxonomies are taxonomies of the space of worries and orientations. In other words, the post presents a good ontology of the discourse on "AI for AI safety". What it does not present is an ontology natural to the actual real-world challenges of AI for AI safety.
Unpacking that a bit: insofar as an ontology (or taxonomy) is "good", it reflects some underlying pattern in the world, and it's useful to ask what that underlying pattern is. For instance, it does intuitively seem like most objections to "AI for AI safety" I hear these days cluster reasonably well into "Evaluation failures, Differential sabotage, Dangerous rogue options". Insofar as the discourse really does cluster that way, that's a real pattern in the world-of-discourse, and those categories are useful for modelling the discourse. But the patterns in the discourse mostly reflect social dynamics; they are only loosely coupled to the patterns which will actually arise in future AIs, or in the space of strategies for dealing with future AIs. Thus the feeling of "fakeness": it feels like this post is modeling the current discourse, rather than modeling the actual physical future AIs.
... and to be clear, that's not strictly a bad thing. Modeling the discourse might actually be the right move, insofar as one's main goal is to e.g. facilitate communication. That communication just won't be very tightly coupled to future physical reality.