Suppose materialism were true: then, as we’ve seen, my belief will be a neural structure that has both NP [neuro-physiological--Hallquist] properties and also a propositional content. It is by virtue of the NP properties, however, not the content, that the belief causes what it does cause. It is by virtue of those properties that the belief causes neural impulses to travel down the relevant efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, causing them to contract, and thus causing behavior. It isn’t by virtue of the content of this belief; the content of the belief is irrelevant to the causal power of the belief with respect to behavior (p. 336).

Plantinga argues that therefore, if materialism is true, then there’s no reason for evolution to produce reliable belief-forming mechanisms, and therefore it’s unlikely that evolution would produce reliable belief-forming mechanisms. This strikes me as utterly bizarre. As far as I can tell, it makes no more sense than saying that if materialism were true, it is by virtue of the arrangement of subatomic particles that our digestive system digests food, and therefore whether or not those particles are arranged into a stomach, intestines, etc. is irrelevant with respect to digestion, and therefore evolution is unlikely to produce those organs.

My guess is that that is what most non-eliminative materialists would say in response to Plantinga. In fact, hardcore non-reductive materialists like Hilary Putnam would say that the higher level explanation is crucial, and the lower level explanations aren’t even really explanations. Plantinga shows no curiosity about any of this; there’s not the slightest mention of how materialist philosophers might respond to his central claim. And that looks like a bigger problem than ignoring evolutionary biologists.

But… I recently (more recently than I read Plantinga’s book) re-read Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works, which talks about the cognitive revolution in psychology, which happened decades ago, and which in the mind of many psychologists has demystified things like beliefs and their relationship to the brain.

Because of this, I don’t think there’s any reason to see the relationship between the brain and beliefs as any less a scientific issue than the relationship between atoms and macroscopic objects. And it means that by ignoring what materialists might say about his argument, Plantinga isn’t just ignoring other philosophers, he’s also ignoring scientists. As I explained in my previous post, that really shouldn’t be acceptable anymore.

Anything on the psychology of religion. Lately I’m more interested in knowing more about why people believe irrational things than in dissecting plainly bad arguments.

Which was followed by Andy Scicluna saying:

Gotta go with Ellis. A lot of Theists nowadays seem to be argueing that, since Religion and Religious experiences have no complete natural explaination, they seem to imply the existence of God. Also, I’d like to see what you’ve got on dualism (chalmerian vs theistic).

Psychology of religion is something I don’t have a lot to say about. I recently re-read a bit of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and remembered how great it was. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it, and I may blog about some of the cooler parts at some point.

In this post, though, I want to focus on Andy Scicluna’s comment, because it makes me realize that while I tend to think it’s obvious what the main issues with religious experience are, what’s obvious to me isn’t always obvious to everyone. So first: it’s a mistake to think that the best response to the appeal to religious experience is to try to “explain away” religious experience. Really, there isn’t anything about the brain we understand 100%, so we’re not going to have a 100% explanation of anything brain-related.

Some atheists, I think, have the idea that the reliability of religious experience is somehow undermined by discoveries in neuroscience. It’s hard to see how this could be so, though. Neuroscience now gives us strong reason to think that whenever something happens in the mind, there’s corresponding stuff happening in the brain. So when we make the specific discovery that there are specific kinds of events in the brain associated with religious experience, that’s just what we’d expect on general principles. It neither confirms nor disconfirms religious experiences.

This is an important general point. Waaay too much popular neuroscience boils down to, “OMG! When X happens, something happens IN YOUR BRAIN!” We’re past the point where that should be surprising. Like when someone says “pornography is bad because pornography CHANGES YOUR BRAIN!” Yeah, memory involves changes in your brain, so if you can remember watching porn, porn has changed your brain. This is just a scientifically confused way of saying “You watched it, you can’t unwatch it!”

Similarly, the fact that messing with people’s brains can induce religious experiences doesn’t prove people don’t ever genuinely experience God. Messing with people’s brains can also make them hallucinate spiders, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t ever see real spiders. If someone knows of a neuroscience-based argument against religious experience that I’m not aware of, please fill me in, but from what I know now I doubt there are any good arguments of that sort.

The real problem with religious experiences is that religious experiences are wildly inconsistent with each other. Not just sometimes inconsistent, the way visual experiences are, but pretty much all the time: Mormons routinely have religious experiences that seem to them to validate Mormonism, Catholics routinely have… well, you get the idea. Adherents of some Eastern religions even have what could be considered “atheist religious experiences”; here’s Richard Carrier on an experience he had back when he was a Taoist:

The most fantastic experience I had was like that times ten. It happened at sea, well past midnight on the flight deck of a cutter, in international waters two hundred miles from the nearest land. I had not slept for over 36 hours, thanks to a common misfortune of overlapping duty schedules and emergency rescue operations. For hours we had been practicing helicopter landing and refuelling drills and at long last the chopper was away and everything was calm. The ship was rocking slowly in a gentle, dark sea, and I was alone beneath the starriest of skies that most people have never seen. I fell so deeply into the clear, total immersion in the real that I left my body and my soul expanded to the size of the universe, so that I could at one thought perceive, almost ‘feel’, everything that existed in perfect and total clarity. It was like undergoing a Vulcan Mind Meld with God. Naturally, words cannot do justice to something like this. It cannot really be described, only experienced, or hinted at. What did I see? A beautiful, vast, harmonious and wonderful universe all at peace with the Tao. There was plenty of life scattered like tiny seeds everywhere, but no supernatural beings, no gods or demons or souls floating about, no heaven or hell. Just a perfect, complete universe, with no need for anything more. The experience was absolutely real to me. There was nothing about it that would suggest it was a dream or a mere flight of imagination. And it was magnificent.

I’ll do another post on dualism at some point, but the issue of why some kinds of dualism are ruled out is a neurosciency one, so I’ll toss in a link to Sam Harris here, who said it better than I could. I should mention that Chalmersian dualism isn’t the only kind of dualism that tries to avoid these issues. Richard Swinburne wants the soul to be responsible for personal identity through time, but I think he accepts that memory, personality, intelligence, etc. is dependent on the brain. I reject Swinburne’s view, but more because I don’t see the point than for a definite scientific reason.

Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires. We act of our own free will to the extent that we have the opportunity to exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure. We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities and we have opportunities to exercise them.

[snip]

This conception of free will represents a longstanding and dominant view in philosophy, though it is typically ignored by scientists who conclude that free will is an illusion. It also turns out that most non-philosophers have intuitions about free and responsible action that track this conception of free will. Researchers in the new field of experimental philosophy study what “the folk” think about philosophical issues and why. For instance, my collaborators and I have found that most people think that free will and responsibility are compatible with determinism, the thesis that all events are part of a law-like chain of events such that earlier events necessitate later events. That is, most people judge that you can have free will and be responsible for your actions even if all of your decisions and actions are entirely caused by earlier events in accord with natural laws. [This view is known as compatibilism - Hallq]

Our studies suggest that people sometimes misunderstand determinism to mean that we are somehow cut out of this causal chain leading to our actions. People are threatened by a possibility I call “bypassing” — the idea that our actions are caused in ways that bypass our conscious deliberations and decisions. So, if people mistakenly take causal determinism to mean that everything that happens is inevitable no matter what you think or try to do, then they conclude that we have no free will. Or if determinism is presented in a way that suggests all our decisions are just chemical reactions, they take that to mean that our conscious thinking is bypassed in such a way that we lack free will.

And here’s Coyne’s reply:

How do people conceive of free will, though? My own definition, which I think corresponds to most people’s take, is that if you could rerun the tape of life back to the moment a decision is made, with all the concatenations of molecules at that moment, and the circumstances leading up to it, remaining the same, you could have chosen differently. If you couldn’t, then determinism reigns and we’re not free agents, at least as most people think of them.

Philosophers don’t like that notion—the idea that we’re all puppets on the strings of physics. So they do what theologians do when a Biblical claim is disproven: they simply redefine free will in a way that allows us to retain it. Like the story of Adam and Eve, it becomes a metaphor, with a meaning very different from how it was once used.

I’m sympathetic to much of what Coyne says about philosophy and theology, but here he’s completely missing the point. The problem with a lot of liberal theology is that there’s no motivation for it, aside from a desire to somehow save tradition from scientific and moral advances. And in the worst cases, left-wing theologians end up saying things about “God” that make “God” unrecognizable to the vast majority of religious believers. We know this because surveys show that in the US, at least, a larger percentage of the population still adheres to a relatively conservative brand of Christianity.

However, while Coyne asserts that his view of free will is the one most people have, he presents no evidence for this, whereas Nahmias has done actual research on what ordinary people (or at least undergraduates untutored in philosophy) think about free will. Nahmias doesn’t say as much as he could about his research, but anyone who’s curious about it can find free PDFs of some of his papers online (Google Scholar will do better than ordinary Google here).

Nahmias’ research is part of a movement known as “experimental philosophy,” and takes a totally different approach to understanding concepts like “free will” than the one taken by most philosophers and theologians. This means that he shouldn’t be lumped in with them–and I should mention that when I’ve talked negatively about philosophy on this blog, I’m not mainly talking about Nahmias and his fellow experimental philosophers. (Unfortunately, they haven’t solved the problem of philosophers being unable to agree on anything, though.)

I could go over some of the examples Nahmias gives subjects in his research, but instead let me repurpose one of Alvin Plantinga’s examples to make my point. Suppose Curley Smith, mayor of Boston, is offered a $35,000 bribe, and given his venality (and various other conditions, including his financial situation and estimate of the odds of getting caught), it’s a forgone conclusion that he’ll accept the bribe. Maybe if he were less venial, or he felt certain he’d be caught, he’d reject the bribe, but given how things actually are, there’s no way he’s going to reject it.

Now, given this, once Curley accepts the bribe, can we say he chose to accept it? Can we say he could have rejected it? I think the answer to both questions is “yes.” And I think the answer to these questions is still “yes,” even if what guaranteed Curley would accept the bribe was a matter of the laws of psychology. But being people’s actions being determined by initial conditions and laws is just what determinism is. So it seems determinism is compatible with choice, even compatible with being able to do otherwise in a sense.

I say “in a sense” because there’s a sense in which determinism means being unable to do otherwise. It means being unable to do otherwise holding relevant all initial conditions and laws exactly fixed. But in these contexts, I think it’s natural to say “he could have done otherwise” if what we mean is, “he might have rejected the bribe if he were less venal, etc.” And the majority of Nahmias’ subjects seem to agree.

Of course, I’ve described this example at the level of psychology, in terms of personality traits and so on. So you might think bringing in neuroscientific explanations of behavior changes things. But what Nahmias is reporting is that people are mainly bothered by the idea of their actions being the product of chemistry because they think that means the psychological stuff doesn’t matter. And what neuroscience actually does is explain the psychology in terms of chemistry and cell biology. It doesn’t make the psychology irrelevant.

A criticism of evolutionary psychology that literally centers on insulting the opposition’s mating fitness and social status?

Now that’s irony.

–A comment on BoingBoing

Also: the people in the comments who say feminism isn’t monolithic are absolutely right. Some definitions make you as “they have a word for that?” while in other contexts feminism seems to be the view that that girl Jenny is, like, such. a. total. slut.

I like the “byproduct” hypothesis, if for no other reason than it’s almost self-evidently true. Surely every human behavior is in some sense a byproduct of genes that evolved for other reasons. And if religion, like music-making, jokes, and pornography, is an outgrowth of genes that have evolved for other reasons, then we need not make up adaptive stories favoring a “religion module” in the brain. That imposes some restraint against the injudicious production of untestable stories.

Every human behavior is a byproduct? What? When porn gets a prominent place in your list of human behaviors, I can sorta see how someone could say, but only by supposing that Coyne has forgotten about eating and heterosexual intercourse. After making this rather silly claim, Coyne abruptly switches course in the very next paragraph:

That said, I don’t see decisive evidence one way or the other. Pascal Boyer does make an excellent case for the “byproduct” hypothesis, but it is, after all, just an argument that sounds pretty good, without conclusive data. I’m not sure exactly what data would support one hypothesis over the other, and in the end, if you can’t settle the issue the question becomes scientifically uninteresting.

Okay: one minute, the “byproduct” hypothesis is a near-certainty, and the next minute it’s hard to say how we can even know what hypothesis is right? Did the same Jerry Coyne who wrote the excellent Why Evolution is True really just contradict himself so blatantly?

It amazes me how readily people who have a first-rate understanding of evolutionary biology can immediately begin saying such foolish things whenever the topic is the evolution of the human mind. Yes, many of the things said about the subject are speculative, and Daniel Dennett may be right that excessive speculation is a much bigger problem in the study of human behavior than in the study of animal behavior. And yes, some features of human behavior are byproucts, and religion may well be among them. But there’s a huge difference between these moderate observations and the absurd pronouncements that Coyne gives us examples of.

The only real explanation for such behavior is that some people just really dislike the idea that the human mind might contain adaptations, but why dislike that idea? I suspect most of it is just that if the human mind is adapted, then it’s adapted to pursue a rather selfish program of survival and reproductive success, and most people don’t want to accept that view of what human beings are like. In some cases, the problem may also be the conflict between evolutionary psychology and Marxist or feminist ideology, but most people don’t have such strong ideological commitments, so the selfishness issue looks like the best explanation in most cases. On the other hand, simple aversion to accepting that humans are generally selfish doesn’t seem like it should inspire anti-EP animosity quite as intense as is seen whenever the topic comes up. So I’m really not sure what the deal is.

What I thought was really interesting about the movie, though, was that it was a nice illustration of some odd human impulses that you run into quite a bit in studying religion. Here’s the set up: human corporation with a big mercenary army goes to an alien planet to mine Unobtanium, (yes, they actually call it that) but sentient natives called the Navi are in the way. The Navi are technologically primitive, but they have the advantage of being ten feet tall and we are told at the beginning of the movie that their unusual biology makes them extra hard to kill. Their size and strength makes them able to use bows powerful enough to shatter the glass on smaller military vehicles, and they also have access to suitably large mounts, both land and flying, which they can neurologically bond with though their hair braids. The flying mounts are big enough to be able to take out small aircraft through dive bombing.

The strategy gaming nerd in me really liked the setup: the humans had a strong overall advantage, but the Navi had some advantages the humans didn’t. Should have made an interesting fight, but when the inevitable fight happens, though, the Navi’s performance is a bit disappointing. They get the dive bombing with the big birds thing right, but for people who spend lots of time riding around with carrying bows, they do a really lousy job of riding and shooting at the same time, which made the whole thing rather pointless. Also, given that the Navi seem vaguely based off of native Americans, it’s disappointing to see that they have no concept of stealth. The good guys win in the end, though, because it turns out the planet is quasi-sentient and decides to send a few packs of large animals after the human army.

The weird thing is that we are presented with a vague implication that there is something more noble and even spiritual about a quasi-sentient planet saving the day, as opposed to winning by properly making use of your advantages. Because quasi-sentient plants, like wise aliens, are a religious concept, even though they bare little resemblance to traditional religious concepts. But the fact that the thought is weird doesn’t mean sentiments like this are rare: Susan Blackmore has talked about how she used to find it profoundly emotionally satisfying to think that telepathy exists. I’ve been aware of this for years, but I still am not sure what to make of it when I encounter it.

In Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, a defense of Aristotelian virtue ethics, attacks this idea. He’s really interested in judgments of “goodness” rather than “oughts”–fair enough, since the is-ought problem is supposed to apply to ethics in general. Then he cites the cases of “good farmer” and “good watch,” where it seems like we can make judgments about who the good farmers are and what the good watches are based on descriptive facts alone, precisely because the terms “farmer” and “watch” contain within them a certain notion of what farmers and watches are for.

MacIntyre then goes on to make this generalization:

Within the Aristotelian tradition to call x good (where x may be among other things a person or an animal or a policy or a state of affairs) is to say that it is the kind of x which someone would choose who wanted an x for the purpose for which x’s are characteristically wanted.

Apply this to the question “what is a good man?” and some humorous thoughts immediately pop up: stereotypical images of a military commander barking “I need a few good men” and yuppie women wondering where all the good men are in their city. Having read Geoffrey Miller, part of me wants to believe there’s more to the second image than meets the eye–Miller’s thesis is that humanhttp://www.amazon.com/Mating-Mind-Sexual-Choice-Evolution/dp/038549517X evolution was driven by the need to attract sexual partners, and that doing so is the ultimate reason for a wide range of human activities with apparently diverse purposes. That thought is especially tempting given that Aristotle’s account of virtue was as something only a few could achieve, and that, in spite of attempts by the Catholic church to make Aristotle underwrite good Christian morality, he is probably better understood as part of the “pagan virtues” tradition where virtue (or, what may be a better translation of the Greek, excellence) is largely about being better than other people (and, on Miller’s account, a more attractive item on the sexual market place).

When looked at from the point of view of the is-ought problem, however, this answer isn’t very satisfying. Even if it just were part of the definition of the word “man” that “good man” meant “good soldier” or “attractive mate for a heterosexual woman,” this wouldn’t mean that those qualities are what are ultimately worth trying to attain in life. That question remains, as G. E. Moore said, an open question. The is-ought gap remains unbridged.

Take, for example, the concept of possible worlds. I’ve talked before about how this concept is sometimes used where it isn’t helpful, and sometimes even muddles the issue. Worse, I was recently in a class discussion where people were seriously proposing trying to use the concept of possible world while throwing out its original definition, since hey, we use it so much that of course we have a sense of what it means independent of any definition. How we could have access to the definition-independent meaning of any such piece of philosophical jargon is beyond me.

Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias recently proposed an explanation of why things like this happen–not just in philosophy but everywhere. He proposes that academia is really about credentialling impressive minds, so ideas are treated as important if and only if they’d take an impressive mind to produce. For philosophy, what this means is that since it takes an impressive mind to successfully juggle lots of technical concepts like “possible worlds,” philosophical papers that successfully juggle such concepts are the ones that get a reputation as important, and are then the ones that other philosophers try to imitate. This happens whether or not the technical concepts really aid the official philosophical goals of clear thinking and truth.

To be fair, it’s very easy to sympathize with academics who fall into this way of thinking. Robin’s former co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky one wrote a post about how elite academics and businesspeople are so much smarter than the merely competent. When I first read Eliezer’s post, it sounded right to me. But this may be an illusion created by the human tendency to want to see small gaps in human ability as large ones,

Recently, I finally got around to picking up a copy of Bertrand Russell’s Marriage and Morals, the notorious book that played a major part of the campaign to get him barred from teaching in New York. I also had brought to my attention a Richard Dawkins piece on sexual jealousy from a couple of years ago, “Banishing the Green-Eyed Monster.” What follows would be a double-header review if only the Dawkins piece were a full book, as it stands, count this as a general reflection on what prominent atheists have said about sexual morality.

Marriage and Morals starts out a bit disappointing, if only because it is so out of date. Russell’s writing is enjoyable and level-headed, without any hint that he’s adopting an implausible view of human psychology for ideological reasons, but much of what he says looks just wrong in the light of current evolutionary psychology. But the book picks up quickly, when he moves from trying to make generalizations about human psychology for all times and places to observing trends in his own day. There, he was excellent. He provides a nice reminder that the sexual revolution and even the drunken hookup culture didn’t appear out of nowhere in the 60′s. Those trends were already underway in the 20′s.

Moreover, he provides an analysis of those trends that many would find surprising–Russell comes out as a calmer, less spiteful Roissy: Political gender equality brings with it the death of the old double standard (men get to screw around, women don’t). The double standard could be corrected either by tightening restrictions on men, or loosening restrictions on women, and it looks like women on the whole will opt for looser restrictions on themselvs. This will lead to the breakdown of the traditional family, and lead to the state taking the role once held by the provider father. Aisde from attitude, the main difference between Russell and Roissy is that Roissy thinks this will lead to social collapse, while Russell was worried that an ever-more powerful state would lead to totalitarianism, where children’s upbringing is 100% controlled by the state and the birthrate is set based on how much cannon fodder is needed. (Third option: nothing dramatic happens.)

For Russell, these social observations are vital, because in Marriage and Morals, morality amounts to a code that society pushes on the individual though means that fall short of strict legal obligation. The question, then, is “what will happen if we try to enforce this or that code?” Russell’s proposal is complete sexual freedom where no children are involved, especially the government is not to be involved where there are no children. So college students, for example, should be able to enter into temporary marriages that can be ended without any legal trouble so long as no children are produced (this is in fact what many college students do nowadays, except they call them “relationships” and they aren’t always as stable as Russell hoped they would be). In fact, Russell thought that in general, people should be able to get divorced without fear of alimony, again so long as there are no children.

Up to this point, Russell is just a good writer who was quick to spot trends, but he also proposes something really radical: nobody should care about sexual fidelity as long as no children are produced. He doesn’t expect this to be easy: though his understanding of psychology isn’t perfect, he was smart enough to get that sexual jealousy is hard to overcome. He also got that the desire to screw around is hard to overcome. For Russell, the question is which instinct to surpress, and he argues we’d be best off preserving the traditional mom-and-pop family while surppressing the urge to regulate non-child-producing sex. I think Russell would have loved paternity testing; perhaps he would have supported making it mandatory.

One thing that makes Marriage and Morals a good read 80 years later is that Russell got things that most people today still have trouble with. Dan Savage, for example, is fond of saying that human beings aren’t naturally monogamous, which is true, but he routinely ignores the fact that human beings don’t naturally accept our parterns’ non-monogamy. Russell got the need for compromise here, and he got that it wasn’t always easy: I understand that at the time he wrote Marriage and Morals, his wife was openly having an affair. Eventually Russell left her after she had two children with her lover and began saying he didn’t know what to say about sexual ethics.

Indeed compared to Russell, Dawkins himself is a great wad of clueless, even though The Selfish Gene contains plenty of insights on evolutionary psychology Russell never understood. Dawkins’ basic position on sexual jealousy is that it’s weird and involves feeling that you own another person (which is of course icky), so get over it already. He even says that in a particular high-profile case of divorce over infidelity, it was the cheated-on wife who was in the wrong and not, apparently because two wrongs don’t make a right but because she shouldn’t have cared about her husband’s affair.

This is terribly insensitive both to human feeling and social reality. The social reality, in particular, is that marriage is an implicit promise to stop screwing other people. This doesn’t mean that all marriages should be monogamous, but it does mean that if you don’t want yours to be you have to work that out an advance, at least if you care abou being an honest person. Dawkins disregard for that fact makes his “I am not advocating deception and lying in personal relationships” ring hollow.

There’s a final point here that isn’t discussed enough any more: how much business does society have getting involved in personal decisions? After years of reading Dan Savage, I’m used to the assumption that these issues are something that you just have to come to some agreement on with whoever you’re romantically involved with. But Russell took for granted the opposite–that it might make sense for society to use informal arm-twisting to get most people to arrive at the same solution.

In principle, Russell has a point: seemingly individual decisions do have indirect impacts (something I talk about in the economic case towards the end of this post). But on the issue of sex and family, I recoil at the prospect of any really strong coercion in these matters at the level of, say, jailing or ostracizing people who screw around in ways unfavorable to society. In that area, light incentives to behave in pro-social ways is the most I can support.

People have especially begun to talk about men having it pretty bad in the dating world. This is something that’s particularly come out in this Kay Hymowitz piece and various responses to it. And the consensus here seems to be some version of “changes in social conventions about dating have made things really hard for men.” At this point, I say the consensus is wrong, and I have the truth.

First, obvious question: why men? Why isn’t the confusion of cultural change just as hard on women? Cultural change, in and of itself, is indifferent to gender, and should affect all equally. Why is it hurting men more?

Second, I would especially question the American Scene writer linked above what a new, solve-all-our problems set of social norms is supposed to look like. The goal is a way for the nice guys of the world to have a way of approaching women they want to date without risking awkwardness, but there’s no thought about how such a set of social norms could possibly work in the real world. In the real world, as Dan Savage once said, “All unwelcome advances are made by assholes, while all welcome advances are made by non-assholes.” The cited xkcd strip subtly reinforces this point: guy doesn’t hit on girl because he thinks she’d think he’s creepy, actually she thinks he’s cute, but what would the middle ground be? In the real world, unfortunately, it tends to be one or the other. Any attempt to change this will run up against the fatal challenge that, if there ever were a guaranteed protocol for men to express interest in women without awkwardness, all men would start using it–including men many women would consider “creepy,” making advances made under that protocol awkward suddenly and then some.

Want to know what the truth is? First, understand that men are whores. I regard this as a scientific fact. There have been studies organized by scientists like David Buss where men and women are sent into bars to proposition people of the opposite sex for either a date or immediate sex, and the inevitable result is that it’s 50-50 on whether the date proposition is accepted, regardless of gender, but men accept 75% of the offers for sex, women 0%. And men are invariably politer about turning down sex: “Oh, I’m sorry, my fiancé is in town. Can I take a rain check?” Other great anecdotes in this area include the report of the famous anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who reported that the Trobriand islanders believed in virgin birth, reasoning that there were some women who were clearly too ugly to have sex with, but who kept getting pregnant anyway.

While results like these still have the power to surprise in the intellectual world, they are semi-commonplace in the entertainment world, where the goal is not “intellectual assent” but “oh yeah, I know what he’s talking about.” Consider this exchange from When Harry Met Sally:

Harry: No man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Harry: No. You pretty much want to nail ‘em too.

or this Chris Rock bit:

See, it’s easy for women to turn down sex. lt ain’t shit for y’all to turn down sex. lt ain’t no thing for y’all to turn down sex. Y’all like, ”Why can’t you turn it down? l do it all the time. ”Why can’t you say no? l say no.” See, it’s easy for y’all. You know why? ‘Cause every woman in here, every guy you met has been trying to fuck you. That’s right. Women are offered dick every day. Every woman in here gets offered dick at least three times a week. Three times a day, shit! That’s right, every time a man’s being nice to you, all he’s doing is offering dick. That’s all it is. ”Can l get that for you? How about some dick?” ”Could l help you with that? Could l help you to some dick?” ”Do you need some dick?”

That’s the basic story of what men are. And women? The basic story is that they aren’t. No matter how many times misogynists call women sluts and whores, they will never be able to document female behavior like the male behavior described above, and smart misogynists know they will never be able to.

Now for the promised male angst theorem: as long as men are naturally indiscriminate, women are naturally discriminating, people’s mate preferences are somewhat (though not, of course, absolutely) consistent, and everyone is left to follow their natural inclinations, there will be lots of sexually and romantically frustrated men out there. And see how much light it sheds on some of the dating dilemmas discussed in the above links.

Consider the man who says: “The modern dating world is so unfair! There are no clear expectations as to who will pick up the check, but with some women still make the guy pick it up if he wants a second date!” The male angst theorem explains why men say things like this, and not “Some women don’t get that the world has changed. They still expect men to pay for everything. But if they want to date me, they’re going to have to realize it’s the 21st century.” As long as women are choosier, they will be doing the choosing. Sure, some women may have a sense of entitlement, a feeling that they should be calling the shots in the modern dating world, but they only get to act on it because of the failure of men to be picky. If men were choosier, women who insisted on having dates paid for would have nothing to do but complain in the alternate-universe version of the Kay Hymowitz piece.

The wonderful thing about this theorem is that it applies no matter how women go about making their discriminations. It works if women mindlessly chase the tallest men available, it works if they mindless chase the most pumped body builders, it works if they mindlessly chase the best-groomed metrosexuals. It works if all they cared about was IQ, salary, or capacity for stand-up comedy. It works if it’s true that women go after alpha males (whatever that means). And it would even work if women mainly picked their mates based on ability to navigate confusing social norms.

Admittedly, if the male angst theorem were the only cause of male dating angst, things might be a little better. One contributing factor to male angst is that women have been known to make decisions based on that intangible quality of “having a good personality,” which can look pretty mysterious to most guys. Another is that, because cognitive shortcuts are as much a part of dating as any other area of life, and because success can be read as a sign of underlying quality, men who are seen as having a successful dating life tend to spiral upward, while those who aren’t seen as having a successful dating life tend to spiral downward. Still, I think the most basic features of the modern dating world can be deduced simply from knowing that women are choosy, and men are not.