‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

Which reads as an excuse to dismiss any inconvenient finding as a lie.

Also, to nitpick, the facts themselves still cannot be social actors, they aren’t people.

> We make countless choices about our romantic and sexual partners that have nothing to do with their fertility.

Fertility? Try perceived reproductive fitness instead. Now remove the conscious element, where someone is actively selecting for reproductive fitness, and replace it with a host of emotions and drives that have been selected by evolution for the perception of reproductive fitness without the benefit of reason.

This is where all of the magic of emotionality and meaning that you are talking about comes from. They’re a bunch of imperfect heuristics designed to ensure survival and reproduction. As they are simple they often go wrong and are easily hijacked, see the term super-stimulus for an example.

> It is a discussion of physical attractiveness, romantic/sexual value, and overall human value. I am arguing for decoupling all three.

You seem to want to pretend that attractiveness does not have the value it does so that people who are low in it don’t feel bad. On top of this, you seem to want to force other people to pretend along with you.

> Ultimately I'm arguing that a 35 year old, 40 year old, whatever-year-old woman's life is not over if she's "still" single. Her dating life isn't over either. Do I expect all men to be attracted to her? Of course not; but some definitely would be, and she still has a lot to offer in that context.

I agree. But is she justified in feeling bad about it, knowing that her opportunities have narrowed? Yes. Indeed you seem to acknowledge this. Her life is by no means ruined, but she’d be lying to herself to pretend that it were a bed of roses. This is also about giving advice to younger people, and telling them that following in her footsteps is fine and dandy would be doing them a disservice.

Yes, day to day there's a certain level of trust put in what scientists say based on their research, everyone can't know everything, but it's not blind faith. With priests, ultimately there's an expectation of belief without evidence.

No? I'm not even sure what fields we are talking about any more, but the findings of some fields and some works are so thoroughly polluted by their political motivations that they can indeed be dismissed entirely.

There are no doubt scientific works that are manipulated not merely for commercial reasons (e.g., the classic publication bias with pharmaceutical research) but for ideological ones as well. Some fields attract this sort of thing with such regularity that every work in the field is at least somewhat suspect, if the field itself has any credibility left (e.g. phrenology)

> Also, to nitpick, the facts themselves still cannot be social actors, they aren’t people.

Perhaps the term "actor" is the source of the nitpicking; my belief is that some science is done primarily to be a social force; to push a certain ideology.

> This is where all of the magic of emotionality and meaning that you are talking about comes from. They’re a bunch of imperfect heuristics designed to ensure survival and reproduction. As they are simple they often go wrong and are easily hijacked, see the term super-stimulus for an example.

Perhaps we agree here; I am arguing attraction and partnership and all of that is very complex, that there is a lot of emergent behavior. And that, to use your "super-stimulus" as an example, it is often beneficial to consciously override the simplest impulses in order to live a happier and more fulfilling life.

"I only date the most attractive person I possibly can; it's my genetics after all" is about as good a strategy as "I only eat sugar; it's my genetics after all".

> This is also about giving advice to younger people, and telling them that following in her footsteps is fine and dandy would be doing them a disservice.

I stand by my previous reply in that the destructive forms of an attraction-focused ideology are the far larger disservice. The message that a woman's worth is strongly related to her attractiveness which is strongly related to her age is the far more dangerous (and honestly, pervasive) message.

Far too many people are embracing a message that tells them to "lay down and rot" because they aren't attractive and have no chance at a normal, meaningful human relationship. Far too many people are convinced their attractiveness is extremely low, when it is low-average.

Far too many people believe that they are unattractive and unloveable and let that view trap them in bad relationships and decisions; I know I did it. I've seen this stuff rip through my friends and communities far too often. It doesn't even need to be age; there are countless ways people of both genders can be less than ideally attractive and feel worse for it.

My own lived experience tells me that as a 36 year old woman I'm more successful at dating than I was at any previous point in my life. Would I be even moreso if I was 10 years younger? Probably, but in my case success has come only with age, so I find it hard to accept a narrative that insists otherwise.