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Episode 199: Attraction tiers, Bluffing conscientiousness, Jimmy the guitar player
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dear dimers thank you people typically rate as ten out of ten but one is deemed more attractive on average would that mean that they are objectively better-looking while being in the same tier I think I'll take this just because yeah I've been I've actually had for quite this is back of the last couple three years on the show about like how critical I am about the about females looks and I'm always reading this class me it's like women it's women Doug not female about that sorry I try this looked at it I'll never actually get that right yeah yeah but would which of course I find rather amusing because the truth is this is a universal phenomenon it's not a it's not a Doug wild thing for goodness sakes the and the it's also true all I've also heard it often said that owed that rating thing that men use it's like holy smokes this is way this is a universal phenomenon not just among humans this is any animal kink so all right so what are we talking about here the when we assign numbers if you're more literary so I don't know that Jen ever uses numbers but Jen has this massive ya know a little bit oh don't be offended no I might not yet know we clear describe people to we're very descriptive obviously right right yeah that's all about yeah it or not as if women are word sure yeah it's not as if women are not assessing you know the relative attractiveness of different males they're just maybe not doing it in such a strict zero to ten system on such regular basis at least not the web and i i have traditionally hung out with yeah the so in any event the notion here is that the that if you use a one to ten scale this is just a convenient way to Demark deciles on on this so if you're a five then you're at the fiftieth percentile if you're a seven-year at the 70th percentile and so if you're a nine you're at the 90th percentile and for those of you that it's been a while since you took stats 98th percentile means that 90% of the distribution is below you and 10% is above you effectively so if you're a ten in principle then out of a straw poll of a hundred people of your gender and age you would be the most attractive out of one hundred and ninety-nine would be less attractive than you objectively rated by some numbers of Raiders so the so if two people are rated as tens obviously we can see that when we use descriptors like eighty nine to tens bits miss miss Cecily on this necessarily sloppy because what would you call someone that you would thinks is seven and a half or seven point seven you're not going to say seven point seven now I might but most people wouldn't okay and most people when they're even using these numbers they're not even using them as consciously as defiled so just sort of generally descriptive of what it is but when I'm using them I'm using them I'm plotting them directly on a bell curve and and demarking deciles according to my subjective estimation of some individual so therefore a couple of people that I might a pair of people that I might rate as tens I still might I'm going to rape somebody who I think is a nine point seven as a ten okay well you're not going to rate them a nine so unless you're going to go to the trouble and say well I think that's a nine seven and it gets ridiculous so you just say hey it's a ten you're effectively in a straw pull of ten people they are probably the most attractive of the ten the now so however what's interesting is if you have two people that are extremely attractive and that you would say hey any strawpoll they're the most attractive person of the group then the two of them together of course wouldn't surprise anybody you'd say okay well it's a pair attendants and however one of them you could you could notice that one of them appears to be a 99th percentile and the other one might appear to be a 96th percentile so you might pick up some characteristics that you believe objectively are objectively delineating you know indicating a difference between those two to the level of three percentile and so that's why when we say same tier there is no such thing as a tear the it's here is whatever you want to make it you want to make a tier five percentile tiers you want to make them 20 percentile tiers there isn't any cheers okay that's that's just sort of a sloppy way but possibly useful descriptively to talk about a general group that you might think might be you know some imaginary line where there'd be a group of people that would be objectively close enough in their attractiveness that they would be possibly somewhat interchangeable within the group in terms of their in terms of the attracted how attractive anybody finds them within the group so that would be indicate that the that the correlation coefficients within a tier start to fall towards zero so let me explain further what this is going to mean if you had a group of ten people it was truly randomly distributed out of the population they would let if it was truly random it's very likely that the distribution would look something like this there would be somebody that would be at about the 10th percentile for activeness somebody else at about the 20th somebody else at about the 30th somebody else about the 40th then 5060 all the way up to 10 okay and so you would notice that that the people that are 4 to 6 were pretty similar and it was be a little bit hard to get agreements about who was the 5 and it was before however the agreement would be extremely high a question of who's the a to do is to five other words all judges would agree about which one is the ADA and one is the five and all judges would agree about who is before and who is the one okay so the the correlation coefficient between any two Raiders if we're rating people along des îles is almost perfect in other words there's basically no agreement or almost no disagreement between any two Raiders the this has been demonstrated around the globe doesn't matter where you pull the pictures from from what culture if you have me and Nathan judging women from you know band to Africa or whatever it we would we would judge them exactly the same way as people within the culture would judge them in other words our agreement would be essentially identical with any judge on earth the however if you get within a decile let's suppose that we've got we instead very carefully grab a bunch of people that are between seven and eight so we have a thousand raters right a thousand people and we take the seven hundred you know most attractive to the 800th most attractive so we take the seventh to the eights now within there the the correlation coefficients are going to get muddy so if we were to take people of the person who is for example 70th percentile did 71st and 72nd 73 74 75 out of a thousand people so we're talking about number seven hundred seven ten seven twenty seven thirty etc up to eight hundred and we made those are ten people so then we took those Africa or to Kansas or to Canada or to Europe and we had any set of judges look at these it's going to turn out that the correlation coefficients would be not nearly as high they wouldn't be 0.94 but it's going to get sloppy and the reason is is that the human eye isn't going to be in that grade of agreement as to who is a 72nd percentile versus who's a seventy six percent top it's getting kind of dicey okay now the truth is is that you're going to see obviously the the correlations are going to get stronger if we took like two people took a group of four and we said okay well we got one of them that's the 71st and one of them it's a 72nd and then we've got one of them that's the 79th and one of them is the 80th percentile we're going to put those four pictures in the middle of the pot and we're going to have thousands of pairs of raters rate those what would we expect the correlation coefficients to be and the answer is pretty high but not nearly as high as 0.9 four it's probably point six okay so there starts to be some disagreement among the raiders so this is however the correlation coefficient is positive other words it's not zero so it doesn't suddenly get subjective as to who's the seven and who's the eight it's still a great deal of objectivity even at that level it's just that the degree of objectivity is now slipping and we're seeing more subjectivity in the data okay if we were to continue to do this and try to find a distinction we took ten thousand people and we take the 71st percentile and the 72nd percentile and then we have seventy one point one seventy one point two all the way through seventy one point nine and then seventy two point O those differences the correlation would approaches zero other words there would be the two Raiders would have almost we'd have huge disagreements as to is the 71 point one more attractive than seventy one point two or is seventy one point two reliably more attractive than the 71 point one and the answer would be gets really sloppy okay so at some point the human eye cannot delineate and cannot pick up objective differences but when with this question what people are saying is what if it's a pair of heads what does that mean that what does it mean that one of them is fancier than the other and it's fairly objective in other words it's pretty common that that's what the reaction is the answer is is that the human eye is actually able to reliably pick up differences between individuals even at the level of a few percentile points now it's going to turn out that that that's going to be most reliable at the very top of the curve it's not going to be reliable at the bottom of the curve and it's not going to be reliable in the middle of the curve so the the objectivity of the difference between a 50th percentile and a 55th percentile is going to be incredibly difficult to demonstrate there's going to be some objectivity but it's going to be pretty weak but the difference between a 95th percentile in the 99 9 is very clear okay so that's because the human eye is it as a person's attractiveness converges on perfection the the beauty detection mechanisms are beautifully designed to actually pick up even the slightest imperfections and to essentially run a score on what it thinks of those genetic mutations so that's why this person is has has absorbed what they've observed so we could look at two people there were pair of tens but most people say hey she's actually more attracted to me as even though they're both super attractive and the majority of people would agree if she's a 97 and he's a 94 ok so that's that's what we're picking up a fascinating observation that there's there's two factors here one of them is objectivity and the other is subjectivity so the question is at what point does the subjectivity start to intrude and make a major factor in analytics the answer is almost none at the level of deciles so it's the decile levels are almost perfect correlation coefficients however as we start to move our way in to within a decile it starts to grow the subjectivity starts to get greater but it is very clearly still demonstratable okay as we start getting down to the level of he's a nine point seven and she's a nine point six then nobody there's no agreement in the room half the people think she's prettier than he is half the people think he's handsome or that she is and there is no correlation coefficient because they're too close okay but in the observation where you have seen in your life if you seen people that that where there seems to be a reliable opinion of difference you're picking up on objective differences in attractiveness at the level of a few percentile points which are almost always only able to be detected at the very highest level of the distribution that's fascinating now dr. hawk can we get your take on this a lot a lot of fancy math for some toxic masculinity is what that see here's the thing I never and I still don't understand why I mean mostly I get I get when I talk about this with with with females or women or your girls ladies ladies seem to have most of the problems with this type of system and of course its objective and so therefore they feel like they are being objectified but for me I got look at these numbers it's more it's it's actually relaxing to think that there's actually mathematical certainty well not certainty but you know what I mean there's mathematics behind this and that you know we're not saying that persons a better individual or more useful coalition member it's just about gene mutations right I think a lot of the reason that women struggle with us so much is that it this is not in this this is not something that comes naturally to most women they're not they're not you know they're not drawn to it in this particular very strict Dussel oriented way that Doug is talking about and they also or not they don't they don't grow up practicing this in this kind of way so this is not a common experience to be at least to the American women not in my experience that you're going around reading men on a scale of one to ten it's just it doesn't happen that way and I think also that women are so familiar directly and immediately with the repeat exposure effect that they have watched their attraction to different men change over time as they've gotten to know different men that it's all much more fluid from their perspective and and men can sort of can-can you know rise and fall in their eyes and influence to their personality characteristics and their the quality of their company so it's a much strong intuition and tendency in women and so I think when they see men do it they feel that it's really particularly strict and objectifying too yet it is and and not not a natural process so that's why it's often interpreted as being socially constructed or you got this from the culture you know toxic media or the patriarchy etc etcetera that is an absolutely fascinating that is really great Jen that that that is I never even considered that and that's also yeah I've always been a little irritated of the fact that I would get any pushback or irritation from women about this yeah and of course I'm like more sorry life's competitive and it's just as competitive for us as it is for you and don't tell me that that that females aren't doing incredibly defined you know essentially assessment of male attractiveness because they obviously clearly are not just in our species but in all species so the what do we think sexually selected characteristics are okay I've always been quietly quietly simmering over over the fact that I was supposed to swallow this as a politically incorrect you know faux pas and knowing full well that there was no reason to hide from hey bell curves and numbers but this is really interesting so yeah so because you're right the subjective experience of women is different than the subjective experience of men on this dimension and it's causing them to be you may be frustrated confused feel like hey wait a minute isn't it supposed to be fluid and I win some points on your beauty yes you can tear your inner beauty count so much so why doesn't mine so it's very made right without egocentric bias Yeah right fantastic got it sir yes if we add in the number system but then we add in a third dimension of time time start getting person then it becomes more more applicable maybe but repeated exposure is not linear so you can you can get in trouble with repeat exposure just as easily if you can improve your online so so this you qualify today you don't qualify tomorrow like you know you miss put out you say library instead of library and you're out so you never you never know but season how do you trust your own information you never know you always be the only thing you can trust I I had a I had a friend once as we were having this conversation like well how do you know when you just intuitively know that your it's not going to work and she's like well you know that feeling that you have when it feels like you're your insides want to get up and run away out of your body like when he said something that disqualifies him or he says something that's just it's just shuts down like the it's just immediate that disqualification can happen and it's not because of outer beauty it's because of personality it's because of characters and and all of these character qualities and all of these things that we would link to his provisional capacity basically yes outstanding great Wow all right well that makes a little more sense I've been on the other end of that all right so we actually call or call in during that question so I figure we'll just take them right now and then and then we can take questions all right so sir this caller told me his name is Jimmy the guitar player from Canada so Jimmy the guitar player welcome Oh perfect Jimmy oh I think Jen wants to talk drum I definitely want to talk to Jimmy all right Jimmy what's going on roll hi everybody long time hold on that just sounds like Jimmy just he's swaggering into the gun he's already swaggering in so I have a question about marriage and doctor well you've spoken about how marriage doesn't we fit the way that pair-bonding would have worked in the Stone Age environment so I was wondering in this day and age if two people do decide to Wed are there any safeguards that you would that either of you would recommend to put in place for ensuring the best outcome so for instance you've mentioned in order to stop eating junk food you don't keep any in the house is there an equivalent of that for marriage because my girlfriend's not really particularly fond of the wife wife wife chippy strategy I should be marrying Jimmy the guitar player yeah all right Jen why don't you take a pass of that and while I think go ahead yeah yeah I mean I would say that there's no Universal answer to that question at all that it has everything to do with your personalities and and sort of what your tolerance thresholds are for for you know I would immediately sort of think of the chippy question and open marriages and polyamory and all of these things which are kind of some type of safeguard I put that in big quotes for certain kinds of marriages for the right kinds of personalities so you know one of the other really well-known evolutionary psychologists in the field is Jeffrey Miller at the University of New Mexico and he he just married his long-term girlfriend and they are very openly polyamorous and it's a big part of what makes their relationship successful and they have a lot to say on that so that they're an interesting resource for that particular question but obviously that's not a that's not a solution that works for everybody it doesn't work for every personality so I think that the best thing that I I would give to this if there's not anything structural that you can do in that sort of sense is to just make the best use of all of the different little clinical practices that we have just to make sure that you're you know I again put this in really big quotes because this is a terrible phrase but you know good communication ie you're practicing something up what we call crystal clear when you run into conflict so you're not letting things turn into bad feedback loops essentially so that's the main thing that you want to be watching for especially around issues of jealousy or perceived cheating or perceived chippies or anything like that so just keeping keeping that sort of a quasi institutionalized practice in the relationship to just raise those issues as they come up and crystal clear the hell out of them and just make sure that you're really on the same page about that all the time that would be the main kind of general piece of advice that I would have not knowing anything about what kind of personalities we're dealing with and what sort of Tolerance level you would have for different different structural changes to the relationship and what those might look like yeah well there could I lose everyone yeah yeah yeah I would I would add one more thing that I can think of and this is a so let me this is a little a little brutal but it's it's worth thinking through and that is that I suggest to women that that even though this is a this may cross go straight across your life plan and what feel it feels like that you would like to do and what you think would optimize your existence but I would suggest that you make sure that you become skilled and educated enough that you can support yourself yeah really you're never at a position of weakness yeah you don't want to live your life in a position of weakness and you you also want to be a situation not only that you don't want to be in a position of weakness you don't want to be a burden on the other side of this where someone wants to leave you but they can't afford you because they can't afford to support you and themselves in a new relationship and so what I'm really getting at is a is a grisly truth that we're going to look at we're going to look down the barrel of the Spang and we're going to be courageous about this which is the one of the best things that you can do for your life in general and for any relationship is to essentially get out if it's lousy okay so the notion is here isn't that the idea here is listen you know you don't want to waste your opportunity to have an outstanding life experience and you don't want to waste your partners either and so the notion is is that you don't want to be in a situation where you're doing somebody a favor and you're choking on your own desires for freedom because we either can't afford it financially or we feel like they can't afford it emotionally the so the notion I would recommend that anybody contemplating getting married reads how I found freedom in an unfree world from Harry by Harry Brown and that that is a manifesto of human freedom including within relationships and the general principles by which to approach all relationships in life in general and behind that ironically Harry comes down very negatively on merge okay and then of course what's quite ironic is he gets married twice after he writes down okay breath of love is a hell of a drug so the so my attitude is of course there's there's nothing in the world wrong in principle with getting married and I'm not anti marriage at all what I am and what I want to warn people is is this a 50-year decision you're making it with a five-year chip and so you can be making a wise intelligent and mature choice and in the modern world it can involve basically total integration of both finances as well as child-raising etc and in doing so it's putting barriers to exit in an interdependence on these two people that it never had in a stone-age so the barriers to exit are astronomically high they are nothing like they were in the nature of the animal and so as a result because those barriers are so high you have a lot of people choking down year after year of their lives frustrated and miserable okay now we see how how how true this is I mean I'm always just amazed at the at the sort of right-wing conservative lamenting of the breakdown of the family it's like are you people out of your minds this should be celebrated this is absolute evidence of the greater economic power of women the let less dependency of children in their and their welfare on a man and his provisioning capacities and basically bring people from each other so that they can say hey were and it isn't quote a mistake because you're getting a divorce that doesn't mean your marriage was yeah stake it means it ran its course yet it had its five-year run that it was designed to have or it was a mistake that we found out later that we weren't well-suited to each other so what okay why add that when this happens when you're 22 it's a breakup of a boyfriend and girlfriend but those so two same people at 24 years old when they get married and two years later they want to break up oh it's a divorce oh my god we got to talk to the deacon and we're going to have to have the in-laws involved and this is big freakin crisis why okay that's because people are gutless and they they aren't thinking through any of these things that we're talking about so although these are you've just a really quickly quickly interrupted I think a lot of that is also that well won't someone please think of the children and this idea that the children once you've had kids this is a lot of what they were the religious right and the breakdown in the family is about that but basically the be taken at face value of the notion that children are going to be completely destroyed for life by a divorce and by single-parent them and I heard some like really smart people on the right about this I was just hearing listening the Heather McDonald talk about it the other day where she's she's putting it forth as if this is as you know solid evidence that children are going to grow up to be super compromised if they are if they grow up in a single-parent home and there's just no evidence for that so that's that's what a lot of that is so yeah go go back to the general point that I think that's a big thing to also keep in mind when you're deciding behind your life up with somebody somebody else but don't let your personality keep you in it don't let financial dependence keep you in it and don't let the kids keep you in it right God thank goodness Jen's here with us to remind me of these things because I had so I so don't think of that I don't even consider it but of course that's a huge consideration that that I talk to people about often because they're they're contemplating this and they're worried about the impact on the children and of course my immediate reaction is don't even think about that it's yeah we're going to be fine with it all okay of course just like any short-term adjustment that's scary children can be wailing and very upset but this is absolutely short-term and there's no impact at all ever has been demonstrated in any scientific literature it's exceedingly clear that there is no problem okay so therefore the incidentally the research that any of the the right sites is all correlational research which is a huge mistake you cannot you cannot do the research that way okay so now Alice so no it's all it's all it's all wrong so no the evidence is very clear from anybody that's that's looking at the research right-side up but there's no that there's no long-term impact on any known dimension from that process so there you go so my my thing is maybe like it's talking about a psychotherapist with 30 years experience okay what am I thinking I'm thinking careful about the exit okay careful about that be thinking about you know that we're not going to go in blind here and assuming that if we have a good attitude and say positive thoughts and affirmations every day that we're going to just manage to avoid the you know the lurking serious possibility that this relationship has a very different character ten years from now than it does not okay so if we feel like no I want to do this I feel like it's right I feel like I can you know I think there's a good chance that that myself and my partner could be among a modest-sized minority that is really happy very long-term is it possible it absolutely is possible is it is it even plausible yes okay if you have wise intelligent mature choice and it turns out that you know you're not God help you if you're 22 in doing this but if you're 34 in doing this you've seen the world a little bit you know yourself quite a bit better and you know life better and you may be ready to make that choice however don't look look don't stick our heads in the sand about the possibility that we may want to go our separate ways at some point and if we do if we want to we want to be able to do so and so keep that in mind and keep in mind that that really there should we would hope that there would be nothing that would stop you from leaving if you wanted to leave that's about the most important thing that I can say about getting married mm-hmm wow I'm a big guitar player from Canada thank you very very much for that great question huh I did I must follow up Nate if that's it oh yeah sure um so in my own experience from an anecdotal standpoint the five-year chip seems to have a lot of truth to it um I'm just wondering where did that number come from is it derived from studying hunter-gatherer tribes I've masturbation five year old five oh five year old is pretty confident so once you've once you've had a kid and it's about five years old that's pretty it's going to keep itself mostly alive in a Stone Age village kind of context so you don't need you don't need the the support as much as you did so it's evolutionarily more sound to diversify the gene pool at that point then to continue in your same pair bond yeah bought it so I yeah nobody these incidentally are these are all sort of estimations looking at observation says yeah people mating behavior so Helen Fisher is called you know she'll she'll argue that it's seven years yeah whatever Alan so I think everybody likes that because there was a famous phrase seventy enrich and I came up with five years because I like how it it's got a litter a ssin with it's a you're trying to make a 50-year decision with a five-year chip okay that's right so but the truth of the matter is is that it's it's actually based on precisely what Jen is saying which is the the critical period is pregnancy and a couple two or three years afterwards when the child is very young super important that it has heavy paternal investment at that point and as as the child gets three four or five years old it's if the risk is now much less and and as a result the critical need for the guy being in love with her and she being in love with him winds up being evolutionarily less important mm-hmm an office seven-year energy typically when the five-year chip the the five-year chip is is when it expires and it takes another two years with personality and and all of this or there's all this financial garbage and everything else that we're talking about to actually take action on it good it starts itching at five years but does get Scrat happen where yours exactly maybe maybe not know not to look you're eight all right OJ you thank you very much for the phone call really appreciate a great question no are you taking my Jimmy you bet yeah have a good night all right so you know one thing that until that while dr. hawk what's that Jen's all happy gentle happy we had a we had Jimmy's a guitar player Colin although he's getting married so a lot of good that does me you know any other jimmies that want to call in tonight you know the phone lines are open so you know that that I'm just thinking about right now is I'm unwinding your your answers is you know previous shows dr. Lyle you've said that that with your you know trying to date for example you know dating profiles that you since your competition is going to be bluffing or is going to be representing themselves as a little more fancier and a little bit more willing to provide you know a little bit better than what they actually are and so therefore if you don't do that you're going to be left behind with with in terms of context is all that just refers males from my perspective if all the males are essentially signalling and even though they don't know that they have a five-year chip but they're signalling that they're willing to marry and provision for the rest of the woman's life and then you know listeners of this podcast they're like well sorry I'm willing to provisioning for five to seven years but not forever where is that what is that believe it or not I can I can actually envision the future you know a hundred years from now where where the where the spot will be that this is a ten-year decision may so alright I can see we're actually there could be it can become so obvious and the people could become so you know so essentially wealthy relative to basic needs that essentially that it isn't even expected that these two people are going to be having a lifelong thing it's just that they've decided that they're that they're essentially married and probably exclusive then and want to be exclusive they're sort of signaling that they want to be exclusive and that they have this great love for each other and that they that that's it they're an official couple and that you know that they hope and expect that it might go forever but they certainly but the ex cultural expectation might be quite a bit different 100 years from now than it is now right now are still we have some of our roots back in the 1800s still and so we still have some of our roots in in a very poor country where you cannot possibly you know it is a tragedy for children to have their father die or become disabled or divorce their mother and and so there's a so there's a specter over this that hangs very very heavy and for for many reasons and now that that is now it there still is major potential financial issues but not for everybody so we see that that you know a lot of people if you are if you're have high openness to experience and you have a lot of means those people are much more likely to get divorced incidentally statistically those people are happier okay yeah it's the fact that they can get out of relationships that they don't want to be in because everybody has the means to to survive it without any big crisis and they have the openness to to say oh no I'm - I'm not going to waste my existence and something that I'm not happy I'm leaving we we might infer that oh god she's been divorced three times you know what a miserable train wreck of a human when the truth is matter is oh no not at all the truth is when you actually look at those individuals if we're not looking at the unstable low SES that's scrambling around just you know in trouble for finances if instead we look at people that are higher SES and we're not being financially irresponsible and it wasn't being chaotic but these were simply lifestyle decisions and they decide no you know I'm the guy was more Horace and Jimmy and it turns out I'm not that interested now see you later okay that individual when we actually study their their life satisfaction those are happier individuals than individuals that don't behave that way so but I can imagine we can see on a continuum what had changed there has been in the United States and in Europe over the last you know 70 years 9950 this was a disaster in 1970 it was scary but it's starting to become more and kind of only the flakes you know did this and etc by the year 2020 it's like hey I guess your relationship didn't work out that's sad we'd all like swore to keep it together you know we're going to go to the pasture but the truth of the matter is people are going to do what they're going to do so that's because it's dawning on people that that you know this it doesn't seem that the children are winding up delinquents everywhere because their friends got a divorce and those kids are fine okay it's starting to dawn on people but this needn't be a disaster so I don't have to suck it up and choke down fifty years when my chip tells me it's time to move on so I think that in the future increasing financial independence is going to lead to greater greater higher percentages of people having been divorced at least once or twice in their life and I think that that's why I would I'm emphasizing as I did in this question that one of the most important things that women can do is don't forget to get yourself financially independent capable whether or not you you you exercise that financial capability in your marriage is independent of the fact of whether or not you've got the degrees and skills to be able to go to the marketplace and support yourself and your children quite comfortably if you need to part ways and that that's that's you you want the that kind of independence at sitting inside your CV of that relationship for the whole ride also in terms of updates recently I've started to see people celebrate you know divorce part having divorce parties so they get married realize it doesn't work out sort of having a big drag through family court they just have a party if they H didn't work out yeah I I think this is as you as you normalize as you normalize divorces Doug's talking about and then you also just have less draconian institutions and it's all you know people are less tied to really traditional religious beliefs and families have gotten more liberal over the course of a few generations and all of these things that you also have you know you have ceremonial marriages but not legal marriages so those are more fluid and people yeah they just kind of have a separation party and that's I have lots of friends who sort of maintain some kind of relationship with their exes including integrated family arrangement so I have a friend she goes to the holidays every year with her ex and and and her family and calls them her outlaws instead of her in-laws so she hangs out with the outlaws to the for the holidays and it's just one big sort of happy clan and a lot of people are doing this moving in this direction and it's a reflection of the inherent diversity and the bell curve of personality and the kinds of tolerance thresholds people have for different sorts of arrangements both within the primary relationship and extended to the family and the less oppressive the institutions the more more of that diversity you're going to actually see play out so although financial independence is as important as it is it doesn't um doesn't compensate for the other big problem which we may not have even time to get into but that's the the agreeableness problem which we talked about we actually pre-recorded out that I think that's coming out in a few weeks where I talk about this a lot that the you know that's that's the second biggest reason that I when I talk to clients that they're staying in bad relationships is that they they are talking themselves into it behind their agreeableness and they just they don't want to you know they don't want to cause a fuss and they there see they're still seeing the good in their partner and they don't want to throw it all out and they are willing to take a bad deal just inherently because of that agreeableness so they're they're systematically undervaluing their freedom and their happiness so that's a that's a bigger problem than just being financially independent although financial independence you know necessary if not sufficient part of that mm-hmm now dr. Lyon dr. Holcomb just to appease some of our listeners that may be thinking about this particular point which is you know I've heard and I've seen people throw around a different discussion groups about well single mothers the kids of single mothers are far more likely to be criminals and have this problem that problem this problem to that you say what yes correlation lis yes not cause soda right so the the the reason is is that it is statistically likely that that single mothers are likely to be lower SES they're likely to be less educated they're likely to be have have less conscientiousness in other words did now please keep this in mind this is statistical okay so when these are averages these are statistical averages they say those aren't causal forces what the reason why they more the reason why single mothers are are having children for example they're having more problems in school is because the guy that they married and that the guy that they slept with and had that kid with the two of them are inherently less stable humans genetic stable low conscientious and prone and lower IQ most likely right yeah so therefore that's why the child is having problems in school is because of the child's genes not because of that fact that the mom is a single mom so you show me a single mom who graduated from Swarthmore okay and the dad is you know I don't know works for Goldman Sachs and now we're going to see that she's a single mom and we see her three kids let me take a wild guess what those kids look like super high achieving and really smart no problems okay so we can have it so you have to control there's once you control for mom's genes and the father's genes the there is no effect at all negative of being a single mother none okay so this is this is the inability of commentators to understand this because the whole world doesn't understand that behavior genetics is worth that passionately thank you very much I was very much uncomfortable uncomfortable conversation for those commentators you have they don't want to talk about why not X and especially when it's averages across population so yeah right very and the other Israel of American politics oh yeah and they don't know it it's right they don't notice and they're they're confident that you know education upbringing and you know all these kinds of things have this really important impact on human character development and it has absolutely brain because everyone has an anecdote everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who you know their kids started acting out after the divorce and they were perfectly well behaved before that and so it's clearly it's the divorce and it's the fact dad's mouth I mean like this is it's the same with the diet world everyone's got an antidote about grandma Mabel who ate four strips of bacon and seven eggs every day and most five cigarettes with the breakfast and live to ninety seven like it this is you know anecdotes are not data no there you go all right fantastic well we've got we've got to thank Jimmy the guitar player for starting this whole thing so yeah yeah this whole discussion so we really appreciate you calling in I think we're going to wrap it up we'll take the rest of the questions next week
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