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curious about this; you could easily imagine war killing off the highest risk taking men and leaving more conservative, fearful men alive tho

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Robin Hanson

@robinhanson

Jun 3, 2019

So when women say "It is so hard to find good men these days", maybe they really mean "we've had no big war lately to reveal the good men by killing off the others".

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9:29 PM · Mar 15, 2022

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That's not what you would expect in the ancestral environment.

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Its not about men and women, the same can be applied to both for the same reasons, society inevitably protects the weak. Many people with various deficiencies would die off if the current population were thrust into the same environment our ancestors inhabited.

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There are lots of risk taking kids with no Dads, and lots of risk averse kids with both parents.

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We would have to verify the assumption that war kills unfit men, and the men left are fit (fitness in a natural selection context). Because of the complexity and randomness of war I highly doubt this is true.

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Happened with the Assyrians according to this book I'm reading. Fought a *lot* of wars of aggression, ran out of fighting guys.

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Death in modern warfare seems so random I'm not sure it would select for the types of fitness usually considered attractive. Artillery fire doesn't discriminate between those who are tall / fit / muscular / courageous / intelligent and those who are not.