Ask A Genius 146 – Women’s Rights, Selection, & Society
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/12
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Rick Rosner: I have a buddy, Ted, who was rabid for fake IDs. He went on to have different adventures in life. He didn’t stay a bouncer for life. He caught many, many IDs, but well below me because he didn’t treat it as this pursuit that occupied a 1/3rd of his life.
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RR: You and I talk about the future and the way it will change things in the next century or two, but we don’t talk about when it will get her. There’s a big futurist named Amy Webb who said that you should not worry about the future and then should focus on the near future. You were, off-tape, talking about her – ba-ba-ba—say what you said.
SDJ: She would identify as a women’s rights campaigner, defender, and so a feminist—
RR: No! I thought we were taping and you said did a TED talk.Say what you said.
SDJ: Yea! So I don’t think she would be going through a rabbi for dating. So she made her own formula with some math. She found her best match. Her end message was that ‘when women that their standards are too high that her standards were not high enough.’
RR: You said that she said that women should be selective as possible.
SDJ: Selective in this sense, women should be as selective as possible because women are often told that they are too selective. Her message was women were not selective enough.
RR: She developed a candidate population somehow according to her criteria and then went with the guy who best fit those criteria.
SDJ: Then you transitioned into the pill, which was Margaret Sanger in 1960.
RR: That makes sense in terms of now in that we’re a mobile and information-rich society. We can find out a lot of information about a lot of potential partners. If you look at historical statistics, the average distance—most people in Brooklyn in the 1920s or in London married within a few blocks of each other. They married in a very close radius and made do with whomever was available within their radii of accessibility and information.
A lot of people on hooking up in Brooklyn found people married people from the same block or building – 80, 90, 100 years ago – because people didn’t have much wherewithal to reach further. Also, they died earlier. They had to marry faster because they lived shorter lives, then they had to divorce if the partnerships weren’t ideal. People had to put up with more limited expectations.
But now it makes more sense to access a lot of people, but that model of coming up with a list of boxes to be checked harkens back to an older model of marriage that has it being an economic unit or a business partnership. A union that addresses all of the various tasks of adulthood including having kids.
SDJ: People needed more kids! Their lives were shorter. They married earlier. The chances their kids would survive were lower.
RR: Yea! Mortality was higher. So family sizes were bigger. People needed to start earlier. What that leaves out, the Amy Webb model, assuming that she or we—
SDJ: You were saying biology is in charge, not us.
RR: Well, you talked about a study that about a third of men and women say marriage is one of their life goals. I assume this is people who aren’t married.
SDJ: Yea, I think with ‘marriage as one of the most important goals in my life.’ Very important.
RR: So this has to be among people who aren’t yet married.
SDJ: [Laughing].
RR: That sounds like a lot of younger people, saying, “Yea, I may or may not get married.” If you look at them 10 or 15 years later, most are married or in long-term relationships. Where those young people think they’re in charge, but evolution is in charge, it wants you to hook up and reproduce. One that happens during your life is you’ll probably end up hooking up.
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