r/changemyview

There is a common belief that in today's dating world, 80% of women are chasing the top 20% of men (or varying percentages to indicate the vast majority of women are chasing a small, top percentage of men). It comes from red pill ideology but has spread disturbingly far into mainstream discourse.

The frequent claim is that this is backed up by "dating app data," but this is untrue. Pressing for this data inevitably results in one of three replies:

OKCupid survey This survey done back in 2009 by OKCupid found that the mean rating of men's profiles by women put 80% of them as "below average" or worse. But, in the very same graph, it also shows that 80% of messages sent from women were to the bottom 92% of men.

The real kicker is that the same survey found that 2/3 of messages sent from men were to the top 1/3 of women. It basically says the exact opposite of what red pill claims.

Tinder "Experiment" blog posts There's a bunch of these but this particular blog post is the most common one. These "experiments" claim to scientifically prove the 80/20 rule, but they're literally just blog posts that very frequently provide no data to back up their claim, to say nothing of the incredibly flawed methodology.

Statistics that don't actually say anything about the 80/20 rule There are a few varieties of these, the most common one right now is "women only swipe right on 5% of men!"

Yes, but it does not say that women only swipe right on the same 5% of men.

Where is this data?

Background - The DSM-5 is the gold standard for mental health professionals to use for diagnosing disorders.

Allen Frances is a former chair of the American Psychiatric Association. He helped co-author the DSM-5.

This is a direct quote - “It seems clear to me that pragmatic concerns for patient welfare always trump ‘science,’ especially since the ‘science underpinning psychiatric diagnosis is so thin and subject to alternative interpretations”

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/why-dsm-iii-iv-and-5-are-unscientific

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201012/dsm-5-and-practical-consequences

People go around thinking they have “X” disorder as if it is some biological fact. When in reality nothing can be further from the truth.

A common argument about AI is that it lacks the “human” element in regards to creativity. I think that is true in some cases, but I find that people often overextend that point into saying AI can not be creative to begin with.

For example, AI writing is often a dead giveaway. An example of this are patterns people can discern pretty easily. While I do think that criticism is fair, that says more about LLM’s as opposed to AI as a whole.

From my understanding, models like ChatGPT are heavily trained on text and books. Naturally, it seems to me that if you train a system mostly on text, then of course a lot of its output will reflect the weaknesses of text prediction. But us humans do not learn from text alone. So at this point, we are comparing apples to oranges. We of course learn from images, sound, emotion, etc. So if AI eventually learns from enough multimodal input in a way that starts to resemble human learning, I do not see why we should assume its upper bound on creativity would automatically be less real or less unique than ours. After all, isn't our creativity just a byproduct of the combination of our multimodal experiences?

As a thought experiment, imagine an AI that could observe and learn from every second of a person’s life. At what point does the claim of creativity vanish if the AI takes in every piece of data I do. I am not arguing that current AI is already fully there, but I think that we are in the early stages of AI where our models are simply not connected to enough real world data.

I understand that life is often difficult & we all need to boost our ego. Self love is important & healthy, as long as you do it in private & zip up after.

But, when it comes to things like morality, a lot of people have issues with lgbt folks “because my preacher told me the Bible said it’s a sin to not reproduce & I never question my preacher.” Or “because my mom said it’s a sin to not be straight & I never question my mom.”

I often get to the point where people should realize there is no moral good/bad to being lgbt, it’s equally as moral as being a fan of chocolate ice-cream over vanilla ice-cream. But after that point, it seems like they’re not even trying to convince me of anything about morality, they’re just trying to defend their self-esteem & protect their perceived identity as the moral superior to lgbt people. It’s often like they’re thinking “lgbt stuff must be sinful, otherwise I’m not as holy as I thought it was by avoiding all that love-making with people of the same gender.” Or “lgbt stuff must be sinful, because otherwise I just missed out on a lot of positive experiences.”

People condemning lgbt folks are humble-bragging about being straight/holy. They’re just getting off, and don’t even recognize what they’re doing.

I’m not open to changing my view that lgbt stuff (between consenting adults) is morally neutral. That’s just obvious to me at this point. I am trying to see if there’s any good counter-arguments against my idea that homophobia is usually just cope for self-esteem & fomo.

Edit: I’ve been convinced that the fomo is less common than I thought.

Also, I noticed that a lot of people are saying that they find kissing gross wether it’s gay or straight. That’s not homophobia, that’s something else, maybe we can call it kissphobia.

And also I wanted to correct the title and say “cope for a self-esteem boost” rather than “low self-esteem” because a homophobe might just be feeding an already bloated ego, they don’t necessarily have to start with a low self-esteem.

Just to be clear, I'm not making some sweeping statement that all news media is inherently bad. The statement id like critiqued is that... on net, most modern news media, which comprises of:

- 24 hour rolling news.

- hyper partisan papers and outlets.

- 'fast journalism'.

- click bait articles.

- news site social media channels.

Is a hindrance to decent politics.

Whilst in pockets great journalists are doing great work. The majority of content produced is a form of warped entertainment, more interested in outrage induced engagement, than in the truth seeking.

Much of it is either rushed and poorly researched, or outright lies and lies by omission.

The stories followed are not chosen by how important they are, but instead by how many clicks they can garner. Meaning much of the news cycle massively over index's on divisive stories that aren't that important, Vs real issues that may seem nuanced or slow burning.

An example would be the various soap operas in party politics, which can often become headline news, whilst serious global and economic issues are pushed to the back pages or not featured at all.

This system then incentivises politicians to focus time and energy on these non-issues, instead of the ones that are actually going to affect us or fix our countries.

The natural biproduct is a class of politicians being elected who are exclusively concerned with optics, and completely ill informed about the actual problems facing the economy, the environment, health systems, geopolitics etc. Instead they only speak in overly simplistic slogans and divisive rhetoric that the media landscape rewards.

Just to preface, I’m a writer and a visual artist, so believe me when I tell you I take no pleasure in this position. Well, maybe a little bit of spite, but the kind of spite where you’re stabbing your self and the other guy at the same time.

The way I see it, the task companies are trying to achieve with generative ai is the creation of a general purpose problem solving machine. As we’ve seen in the past few years, general models have gone from barely being able to consistently solve 2+2 to winning gold medals in the International Math Olympiad and solving or helping solve Erdos problems autonomously (regardless of potential contamination, this is not a feat that I would be able to pull off). It has progressed leaps and bounds with regards to coding, even if you don’t take Anthropic’s claims about mythos at face value, and moreover I don’t see any real reason why it won’t continue to get better at both of these tasks (an argument that I’m sure many of you will make).

For whatever reason, the art they produce has lagged behind. Part of this, I’m sure, is because companies have not been focusing on this as much as they have on replacing jobs that actually make people money. But I would like to believe that part of this is due to the genuine complexity of art and the human experience.

However, at the end of the day, ai is a general purpose problem solving machine, and art is a problem. The only conceivable difference I have been able to imagine in my brain, if you don’t assume magical things about human consciousness or art or whatever, between art and a very hard math problem is complexity. With the right amount of parameters and the right amount of compute, what exactly is stopping gpt 7 or Claude 8.3 (or whatever) from finally cracking the problem?

I think that we live in a period of story where it is easy to show no empathy to people you consider your "enemies", it is almost dystopian how one of the biggest memes of the younger generation was a murdered political figure who had controversial opinions.

I think that anyone has the right of hating anyone based on their political opinions, I see no problem in it, in fact, I hated Charlie Kirk even before his death.

But even then, I feel that one of the pillars to make a society work is having respect for our neighbor no matter how much we don't vibe with them, and recently with terms like "vote shaming" or the Charlie Kirk memes I see that we're losing our basic human decency by dehumanizing people over their political opinions.

I feel that this can have catastrophic consequences on our society because even the things we consider "indisputable" are socially constructed, and a society where debate is not allowed is a society doomed to fail.

We all have skeletons in our closet when it comes to political opinions, there's no one who has a 100% socially acceptable opinion on every aspect of politics.

For example: when it comes to assisted suicide, there's no universal point of view on that where everyone agrees, there's no way you say something about that makes everyone happy, and that's fine.

That's how society evolves, by questioning even the things we see as indisputable and by debating about it.

But when we reduce people as labels and dehumanize them because they didn't agree with us on certain topics, my question is: where do we draw the line? What's something that we can discuss and something that we can't? What's an opinion worthy of dehumanizing a whole human being? And who decides that?

Again, I don't care about Charlie Kirk, I don't like the guy, the thing that worries me is how tomorrow it can be any of us who is dehumanized and desecrated after our death for sharing a controversial opinion.

And in order to stop that from happening, we should start with respect, yes, even for the people we hate.

To describe more: 'mainly due to their misogyny' - I don't mean consciously hating women. I mean due to their general views of women, bestowed on the by society that have gone unchecked and unchallenged.

Reasons being:

1. Most of those jokes made by women, would/do get a massive laughs when repeated by men. Men will claim 'it's the delivery', but I argue that it's the fact that due to the views of women, they are missing the context clues that are making it funny. (similar to how many men can't tell when a woman is or is not interested in them).

2. When a woman delivers a more dry joke, the number of men who proceed to explain to her why what she said is ridiculous- when the joke was the fact that it was ridiculous. (These men are inherently assuming the woman wasn't smart enough to grasp the very concept that she understood well enough to then make ridiculous on purpose.)

3. Jokes are dependant on having similar context of something. Many of these men, have made it their life's mission to never have empathy or understanding for the female experience... so even if the woman is joking about a universal experience that man is still unable to consider than he may have the same experience, no matter how it's worded (this also lends itself to men laughing if another man repeats the joke, and blames 'the delivery', when it was really the mouth in which did the delivering.

4. It's threatening. The focus on women being a resource to be obtained and 'won over' gets harder if that woman is more funny than them... they have less to offer.

5. Ultimately it's about objectification, and objects can't have real personalities.

I'm a man, and I'm in quite a few friend groups that are mostly women. I've always been well liked, but in the last 6 months or so I've watched a lot of my friends start to 'man-hate', and whenever I address this they seem to treat me as an exception to all other men who are apparently awful and terrible.

And don't get me wrong, there are a lot of bad men out there but they are in NO way the majority in such a way that I should be seen as an exception and it's immensely frustrating to the point where I feel like I'm developing a complex about it.

I specifically avoid the 'manosphere' groups, but I feel like this messaging becoming more prevalent is only boosting their ideas if women see all these men as irredeemable. I don't know whats caused the surge in the last ~5 months or so, but these ideas have become much more common amongst these women I know.

I'm a Millennial. Over the last couple decades, most journalist integrity in our mainstream media has almost disappeared. Particularly on the right with Fox News, News Nation, right wing radio, OAN, and others propagating hate speech and other anti-science propaganda as "news." The liberal (or left, though we barely have it) media outlet response is often to sane-wash or downplay severity of just how bad the right wing has gotten and the vitriol they say.

There is a reason the Nazis went after the media so hard and filled it with hateful and anti-leftist propaganda. It's the same reason Musk took over Twitter (and pressured other social media owners to loosen hate speech restriction), the Trump admin defunded PBS, is bullying ABC, and countless others of legacy media and newer, informal media alike. They need the hate hose to survive to do their atrocities and to make people blame the wrong people.

Yet, most liberal leaders rarely bring up that we need to stop oligarch, right wing media funding because they are: 1) often owned by the same wealthy corporations and/or oligarchs; and 2) are afraid to look like they are against free speech. On #1 they need to fight or be replaced with someone who will. On #2, they need to know many countries have free speech that exists somewhere in the many options between "Nazis and oligarchs get to buy all the airwaves" and "Stalinist State Media Fever Dream." They should research and fight for such options.

If we don't get this fixed, we will always have a hate hose (and otherwise anti-equity hose) filling people's brains with the propaganda that got us here.

Like the prompt says, I think outside of scalping, these people are highly unemployable, horribly adjusted, and generally physically unable to hold an actual job for longer than a month. There is a reason why there seems to be a specific “type” that goes scalping (generally physically unfit, disheveled, always single, kinda gross), and this type also understands that not only their physical capability, but also their personality itself, prevents them from being legitimate, valuable, contributive members of society.

I’m really not an economist I just study politics so this is genuinely a cmv. I would generally say that I fully support equality of opportunity and that we need greater equality of outcome to achieve this. But I think taxation should be benefiting everyone. Knowing your money is going to some random person is kinda unfair. Tax being used for national services makes sense since you’re gonna use that and it’ll probably be cheaper than using a private company. The issue is that people need benefits in the first place and it’s kinda hard to argue with that since a lot of them are just genuinely dealt a bad hand. But I think the solution is to ensure no one is paid way more than someone else (in terms of £/h), so you’ll be rewarded for work at any level. I understand the need for incentive with difficult jobs like doctors, but I think you have this incentive without the needing to earn over £500k a year with the same amount of hours put in as someone earning £20k. I don’t think I explained it properly in so tired so sorry and I can explain further if needed. Also I’m quite curious about negative taxation if someone could explain that? Mostly I just think the benefit system doesn’t work rn because you have no control over what you buy with your state given money. ALSO I’m not against benefits I just think there might be a better solution

Whether it be a man lying about have a vasectomy, or a woman lying about being on birth control, both can lead to extreme, life long consequences for the victim. Lying has legal consequences in many situations way less coercive and damaging, so why not here?

Sex without a condom will always present a risk, but that does not excuse willingly putting someone in an extraordinarily higher risk situation just because of sexual desire or the desire to reproduce. Having sex with someone under the belief that you are safe with while that isn’t the case is an unforgivable betrayal of trust, no matter how long they’ve known each other. It’s one step below lying about using a condom (often illegal), only for the added STD risk.

- Full English breakfast

- Cornish pasty

- Beans on toast

- Toad in the hole

- Steak and ale pie

- Fish and chips

- Bubble and squeak

- Sunday roast

- A good British curry (I'm half Indian and Currys in Britain are sufficiently different that I think the British Indian contingent can claim them).

If you don't know what any of these are, you're missing out.

Yes it's a culinary celebration of beige foods, but beige doesn't mean flavourless. These are great, hearty, homily dishes that people in the US would love if they adopted them.

That being said, maybe you think we deserve our status as having 'infamously bad food' or you think Americans wouldnt like these. Curious to know your thoughts.. cmv.

Edit: also wanted to add haggis neeps and tattys, I'm also half Scottish so can't overlook that!

First off, let me say that I am very progressive and pretty far left of center. I understand representation matters, but I’m not sure it advances the causes of LGBTQIA+ people to shoehorn this into every single show on tv. I’m talking things like a longtime character suddenly realizes they’re gay in the season premiere of season 5, or a character is suddenly trans in the reboot of a show or sequel of a movie that aired 15 years ago. It just feels so performative and fake. Am I completely off base here or do LGBTQIA+ people generally feel the same way?

A big part of the industrial revolution was every country with the capacity to do so setting up their own car companies, their own industries, and building things for themselves. It was hard, difficult, expensive, but it allowed them to build their own economies up and not just be dependent forever on the big first movers.

China has followed exactly that approach with big tech, partnering with American companies just enough to learn how they operate, but building their own competitors and equivalents.

There is no good reason that smaller countries could not do this. Each country could have their own version of facebook, or a national version of google, or their own software companies, and they could be entirely viable without needing an American or global market, and honestly the competition from that would be extremely good for consumers, competition, and actual innovation.

We don't all need to be plugged into either Microsoft or Apple for everything, and this idea that every tech product must be some global fire-sale diverts investment away from what should be a major engine of economic growth within all developed economies.

Update: Economies of Scale exist for physical products. In many previous eras it would have been objectively more 'efficient' to buy from the first movers and early monopolies. The entire gilded age of monopolies (that required major political reform efforts and laws to be enacted to stop) was was built on physical products. Big Tech is not categorically special here. Nor is its global use as frictionless as many of these responses imply. There are language barriers, legal barriers, and even physical infrastructure barriers to its deployment in many places. Yes, it is even easier to monopolise, and even easier to make the case 'just pay the rents to the CEO over there' with these products than with physical items, but this is not a magical new reality, it's a political and economic choice.

Here are some reasons why I think it may actually hurt the cause:

- It can (and it does) turn the issue into a left vs right debate. Addressing homelessness should be something both sides can work on, but the term “unhoused” is often associated with progressive language, which makes some people dismiss the issue as political rather than focus on solutions.

- Even setting politics aside, it creates unnecessary distractions. Data, reports, and policies all need to be updated, which takes time and effort without directly improving outcomes.

- It may unintentionally soften how serious the situation sounds. Saying someone is “unhoused” can come across as less urgent than saying they are homeless.

- It can also narrow how people think about solutions. It might imply that building more housing is the main fix, when in reality the issue also involves addiction, mental health, reform reentry from the justice system (ex-con and renting), and more.

On the other hand, I understand why people prefer the term. It can frame the issue as a structural and social problem rather than a personal failure. But is it worth?

When lust for retention of political power, even at the personal level, overwhelms doing what is right, then the weakness of humanity is reflected in collapse of checks and balances in the system. This requires intervention in the form of limiting that retention of power. If officials are less worried about the next election because their time is about up anyway, then they may be stronger in doing the right thing. This is in the line of “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and the way to stem corruption is to stem time in power. I am less than convinced by arguments that politicians need more than one term to get things done. If this were true, then this would be saying that the Constitutional specifications for length of term were ill-conceived, and I don’t believe that to be true. I am also less than convinced by other work-around about term limits like cronyism and grooming of a successor. This says that voters can’t identify a crony and choose not to elect the crony.

Edit: I am from the UK, and this post references UK and US politics, as I engage in both

In the original political compass uses left and right as a scale strictly for views on economic policy. Most people online (and in person it seems) seem to also associate social policy and personal values with the left right scale.

I think this strips many political debates of its nuance, and can make it very hard to have a civil debate with someone whose opinions don't have the same label as yours, as in most situations, it's always an "Us Vs Them" situation, where people who hold one opinion on, say, abortion for example, will be pressured to group up with which "side" of the political slider agrees with you, despite what other opinions you may hold.

It would be nice if people would see past arbitrary labels, and debate issues on a case by case basis, rather than adopting the opinions of an entire side, and dying on every little hill to defend your ego.

At the end of the day, there is a very low chance that a select two people will share identical political views, so instead of broad labels, we should introduce some nuance into how people associate themselves with others politically.

It is nothing but counterproductive to find out someone holds X right wing associated opinion, and to immediately group them up with "extremists and fascists", the same way with associating X left wing opinion with "radical wokeness and communism" it just doesn't make sense.

I see lots of people who think the further left you are, the more libertarian you are, and the further right you are, the more authoritarian you are. By that logic, North Korea should be a paradise of freedom!

I know I've yapped a lot here but I just want to know what other people think of my take on this, and if there's something I'm missing - I'm happy to hear it :)