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Comment by twobitshifter | Hacker News Reader

The average man will go through a period of involuntary celibacy and I don’t believe this is a new thing but we’re now good at labeling. History shows that 80% of women reproduced compared to only 40% of men! https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/2012... (Note not sure the primary source on this stat, but the general idea is that polygamy was once common leading to fewer men reproducing)

We’re doing much better than that today, but how were things through history when 60% of men were “incels”? (Generally lots of violence)

In the interim, the most restrictive religious social systems apportioned one man for one woman, held sex as a reward for marriage, and punished those that strayed outside of these lines. This achieved the objective of efficient coupling but I don’t think we would ever want to go back to those repressive systems that controlled women.

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I know we joke about it a lot, but I think there's a serious case to be made that the Internet's ability to connect groups of previously unconnected people might end up literally ending humanity, or at least severely setting humanity back from a human rights standpoint.

"Incels" are one example of this that you're pointing out here, where a group of people who've always existed without name are now able to group together and create a feedback loop amongst themselves that results in literally mass murder.

> create a feedback loop amongst themselves that results in literally mass murder.

I dispute that causation. Mass murderers are extreme outliers that usually have identifiable mental problems, and I would say the primary cause of their behavior is those mental problems, not whatever particular thing they say triggered them. Also, even if you did show that a certain ideological group was significantly overrepresented among mass murderers, you would have to rule out the other methods of causation (e.g. this guy is a loner because of various problems, and he joined this group of loners because they welcomed him—doesn't mean the group caused him to go commit the murders, and in fact it's conceivable that being in the group reduces the likelihood of the potential murderers actually going and doing it).

Reminds me of a case here in Sweden where a father was found guilty of attempted murder of his half year old child. Just hours before the attempt he had been at the hospital begging to be committed since he was hearing voices and he was scared that he might hurt someone, but the beds was full so he was sent home.

Healthcare for mental health is still very much underdeveloped, especially when the patient is male. It is just easier to blame the individual.

I think that's an extremely interesting take -- that with the advent of the Internet, we've created a vehicle for mental illness to metastasize, and the only real solution is to treat mental illness like we treat malaria or even COVID, and upgrade our global healthcare systems to handle the influx of this "new" disease variant.

The analogy breaks down when you start to try and think of what our "vaccine" might be, though perhaps education can be a rough proxy. It's also possible there's nothing we can do, and we've reached a spread that is incurable...

Except that it doesn’t spread that way? And that it had always been around. We have just started paying attention to it.

Maybe we notice it more because we're paying more attention to it... Or maybe because there actually is more of it, since it now can be transmitted more efficiently -- has become "contagious" in a way it wasn't before. Hard to tell which it is.

I think the internet can act like an insulating force and for certain people a viscous feedback loop. Like it’s far more easy for certain types of personalities to call themselves “incel” and whine about it on the internet than get out of their bubble and talk to people. The insularly force is clearly amplifying other communities so this is probably “just another” instantiation of the same effect.

Edit-I don’t know the best way to exit this problem. But I’d probably start with telling the disparate groups that their positions are not so abnormal and maybe they would be happier focusing on other things-like hobbies that require time offline. Have your “incel” days and have days you force yourself to do something, anything else than think that.

As for a “solution”: I think social media should focus on instead of creating echo bubbles to connect distinct groups. Even in in-person, it is unhealthy to surround ourselves with same-minded people, and one should strive diverse circles in terms of opinion/background.

New forms of mass communication can certainly create political instability. The connection between the rise of Nazi Germany and the increasing widespread radios in everyone's homes is an interesting link (1)

(1) https://daily.jstor.org/an-affordable-radio-brought-nazi-pro...

Ironically, I think the internet's connection is causing the problem on both ends of the phenomenon.

Dating apps allow women to expand their dating pool to people they would never encounter in everyday life. I have quite a few female friends and I've been around them while they're swiping around and they are absolutely brutal in a way that's not at all malicious.

Then the regular (male) losers in that system can then all commiserate on 4Chan.

I think a smaller dating pool forced women to give men who _seemed_ less ideal matches a chance and resulted in more successful relationships.

I suspect that both men and women don't have any idea what would actually make a good relationship but they have a "type" that they like. With a limited pool, you could work through everyone of your type in a reasonable time frame. With a larger pool, it can take forever.

> I have quite a few female friends and I've been around them while they're swiping around and they are absolutely brutal in a way that's not at all malicious.

Depends on how you define "malicious", doesn't it?

I just mean that they're saying "no" to the slightest thing. And, really, they have to do that for time purposes. It's just kind of shocking how selective they can be and still be successful.

"History shows that 80% of women reproduced compared to only 40% of men!"

That doesn't necessarily imply polygamy, and it doesn't necessarily imply "incels". Imagine a society in which women get married at age 16 and typically die during childbirth before they reach the age of 32, and men get married at age 32, if they live that long, which most of them don't, and then get married again when the first wife dies during childbirth. I'm not saying that's how it was, but some societies were a bit like that and I think you could probably get the 80% and 40% numbers with a set-up something like that.

I think that you have a good point, there’s other factors that could contribute to the stats. We have seen that war can throw demographics out of balance even in modern times, such as Russia after WWII.

Women have lived longer than men throughout most of history and in basically every society, so your theory doesn't hold. Childbirth was dangerous but men's work was even more dangerous.

Citation needed. A quick Google search on life expectancy during the middle ages tells me that men lived longer than women.

Where do you see that? Every result from my quick searching is listing women as longer than men. Example: https://www.purplemotes.net/2015/08/23/medieval-life-expecta...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2847291?seq=1

The ratio of older women to men: historical perspectives and cross-national comparisons

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10902048/

This paper seems to disagree heavily with you.

Just going by the abstract that you linked, that study seems to only relate to the past 100 years.

And extrapolating this to the middle ages and earlier:

In general, countries with a lower overall life expectancy had a lower number of women per 100 men aged 75+, while countries with higher overall life expectancy had a higher female to male ratio in this age group. A hundred years ago there were nearly equal numbers of women and men aged 75+ in many countries.

It doesn't seem to disagree with me at all.

"making it to adulthood" is different than "living longer"

There are A LOT of claims itt, and not nearly enough sources for any of it.

It feels like you're right, but what "feels right" turns out to be wrong pretty often.

Sure, but the most powerful men today practise polygamy, so it's pretty likely that has been going on throughout history as well.

War is probably a big factor too. I don't know what the average or minimum age of all those soldiers standing in the lines of medieval battlefields all the way to say, the Civil War era, but I imagine quite a few were virgins and casualties were brutal.

Off topic, but such archaic means of warfare still confound me. Imagine being some 16 year old kid standing in the front line facing charging armored knights in the Middle Ages. Or staring across from another line of musket/riflemen and being expected to eat a volley of musket balls while standing straight and unmoving.

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