On incels, dead bedrooms and the hard problems of loneliness

I personally know people who used that method; it didn't work. Conversely my wife and I have used that method with the intention of getting pregnant, and it still took a while because accurately tracking it can be difficult for a variety of reasons.

>ideally, every student should have a roughly equal amount of attention and dollars allocated to them and if a school is underfunded, everyone suffers until the problem is remediated.

The problem is that this is sort of what happens right now, and it's not great. The current funding scheme relies disproportionately on local property taxes, which only serves to exacerbate the effects of inequality. The current system is a warehouse for student bodies, with oversize classes, underfunded supplies, underpaid teachers, and too many unfunded mandates.

Ideally, we figure out funding (that's way above my pay grade), and then we can move on to cross-ability grouping. Seriously, it's just a fact that high achievers learn much better when they are left to (roughly) their own devices, with guidance and outlines for progress as appropriate. Low achievers learn better when they are led through the process by someone who can put the language in terms they can understand; ideally with support outside of the teacher, such as from peers (look up supplemental instruction for a model in there). Middle achievers will consistently live up to the exact expectation you place on them; so they need a system and environment that places increasingly more strenuous expectations on them, both socially and educationally.

Combine all of that, and you have a wonderful cross-age, cross-ability classroom focused on social development as well as academics. The ability to specialize for various fields such as STEM, art, or technical education is just built in, as well!

If anyone is interested in funding my charter school idea - it's a neighborhood based one-room-schoolhouse model where education and learning are led by the abilities and desires of the students. Much free time, much outdoor time, and incorporating everything in the above paragraph. Completely unrealistic for public schooling in the united states due to the inordinate per pupil cost. But just a lovely idea.

The term "incel" is used to mean two wildly different things:

- One meaning is "an incel is someone who's single and complains about it". Statistically, a few percent of 30-year-old men are virgins. Some of those are for religious reasons, but a lot of them are involuntary. So in this sense of the term "incel", I'd guess there are somewhere around a million male incels in the US today.

- The other meaning is "an incel is a misogynistic asshole who uses terms like Chad/Stacy/femoid". This is a _much_ smaller group; I doubt there are more than a few thousand people active on incel forums.

A lot of people conflate these two groups, and that's very unfair to the former group. There's been a lot of discussion of the latter group, because they're dramatic and highly visible. But the former group is actually much larger; they just aren't as visible, often because the sufferers try to hide it. We need to talk about the former type of "incel" -- people who are lonely and suffering, but haven't done anything wrong!

My theory for how people get into this situation, is that they get stuck in a vicious cycle of impaired social skills:

1. For some reason, they don't have age-appropriate social skills.

2. Because they lack social skills, their peers don't want to interact with them.

3. Because they don't interact with their peers, they don't develop social skills.

When the problem gets bad enough, social interactions become traumatic. The sufferer learns that every time they try to interact with other people (whether romantically or not) they'll receive cold stares and harsh rejection. So they become scared to even try to interact with people, which makes it even harder to escape the cycle.

Many different things can potentially trigger this cycle. Sometimes it starts with something like autism that biologically impairs their social skills. Other times there's nothing biologically wrong with them, but their peers shun them for some reason, and then it becomes self-reinforcing.

There are no easy solutions to this problem. In particular, there certainly aren't easy solutions that are accessible to the people suffering from the problem; if there was an easy way out, they would have done it already! Therapy can help, but it's slow, expensive, inconvenient, and not guaranteed to work; so it's a poor substitute for "not being traumatized in the first place". I think the real solution will have to involve changes in society's attitude towards socially awkward people:

- For one thing, we absolutely need to stop conflating the "raging misogynist" meaning of the word "incel" with the "man who's lonely" meaning of the word "incel". Lonely men should be able to talk about their suffering without people acting like they're misogynists.

- For another thing, we should be kinder and more sensitive to socially awkward men when they try to make friends, or ask women on dates. Socially awkward people are often unintentionally rude, or accidentally make other people uncomfortable. Some people assume the awkward person is being rude on purpose, and react harshly; this makes it much harder for awkward people to escape the cycle. (Of course, nobody's obligated to be friends with a socially awkward person if they don't want to -- and in particular, women certainly aren't obligated to go on dates when they don't want to -- but I do think people should make an effort to reject socially awkward folks without traumatizing them!)