People love puppies, but we wouldn't have kept dogs in our lives if they hadn't grown up to become adult dogs that were useful in many other ways. If they'd remained puppies, we might keep them for food just as we keep cows and goats for food. They wouldn't be our close companions. The initial value of dogs to human society was that they became socialized as part of a human pack. As members of the pack, they barked to warn us of intruders in our territory and would attack those intruders if those intruders were seen as a threat. We developed breeds to do certain tasks that are not dependent on their being lovable. The dogs that protected our herds of sheep didn't need to be loving companions. They just needed to keep the sheep from wandering too far from the flock and they needed to keep predators from attacking the flock. They didn't do either of these things by being lovable. Instead, they scared the sheep into staying into one flock and scared or attacked predators that threatened the sheep.
Plenty of species have survived millions of years without being lovable. Sharks are a vastly old species, but they are not lovable or friendly. They are not particularly sociable within their own species. They found a niche that fits their personality, and they have filled that niche for a long time. People haven't established that we can fill any niche for a similarly long time.
The Siberian fox experiment wasn't just an experiment to try to tame the foxes. The scientist was studying them in general and decided to try breeding the more human-friendly foxes to other human-friendly foxes. This strategy produced more and more friendly generations of foxes. This approach also led to changes in the foxes' physical characteristics. The resultant foxes were not really better suited for survival in wild Siberia. They were just better adapted to captivity.
We sometimes see similar behavior with other animals. Certain reptile species will have individuals who don't seem to have much natural defensiveness towards people. They aren't tame according to the definitions that many people use, but they are fairly easy to handle. As breeders produce more generations that have been around people their entire lives and have come to see people as sources of food, they are more tame in their behavior. Their brains don't allow them to adapt as much and become as obviously domesticated as dogs are, but they are different. If one wants a reptile as a nice pet, getting one that has been in captivity for five or six generations from a breeder is much easier than picking up one under a rock and trying to tame it. That doesn't mean that the fifth-generation pet is better adapted to anything except captivity.
I've had nothing but bad luck in my relationships with women. People tell me that I'm a very nice guy. Plenty of women have liked me as a friend, but few women who have other choices have ever wanted me for romantic or sexual relationships. The idea that "nice guys" will do just fine is not true for every nice guy.
My conclusion after decades of watching relationships from the outside is that men are attracted to physical beauty and women are attracted to self-confidence. Some people make a good argument that physical beauty is just a proxy for fertility. The "ologists" (psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, etc.) will say that woman are attracted to power because they want a man who can ensure that their children grow up with advantages. I believe that power might be the underlying quality, but the proxy trait is self-confidence.
In both men and women, the proxy trait has more emotional power than the underlying trait. Men at a party with a hot forty-year-old and a frumpy, dumpy twenty-year-old will be influenced by the hot forty-year-old. Even if they engage in the contrarian behavior of going out of their way to talk to the unattractive twenty-year-old, they are being driven and influenced by the beauty of the forty-year-old. They behave this way even though they know at some level that if producing a bunch of offspring is the goal, the ugly young woman is a better choice than the beautiful forty-year-old at the end of her reproductive years.
I've seen guys who are complete losers but still have relationships with beautiful women because they have self-confidence. They are sometimes nice guys and sometimes the opposite of nice guys. They don't have any real power. They don't have jobs that give them power. They haven't risen to political positions that would give them power. They aren't physically strong. They aren't gifted in some area of production or entertainment. They are losers, but they draw women because they have self-confidence. Their relationships may fail, but they find other relationships because they have that self-confidence that grabs a woman's emotions in a way that nothing else does.
We mistake the success of these self-confident losers for a general success of "bad boys." Among all of the losers, we notice them because their self-confidence gives them success with attractive women. The other losers are largely invisible to us because they have nothing we want. The success of these guys causes nice guys who don't have self-confidence to think that women are attracted to the "bad boys." To the extent that some level of self-confidence is necessary to reject certain norms of regular life, the "bad boys" might have an advantage because their being "bad boys" suggests that self-confidence.
For both men and women, there are also counterfeits to the proxy traits. Sometimes, ugly women can give an illusion of being more attractive by dressing in the right kind of provocative way. If their legs are attractive enough, they can just wear short skirts to create the illusion of being attractive overall. Other times, they can wear a longer skirt with a very high slit on the side. The slit will stay closed enough of the time that men don't easily see that the woman's legs aren't attractive, but the slit creates a line that gives the illusion of long, well-shaped legs. For guys, volume and bravado can provide the illusion of self-confidence. Most men would rather avoid fights because anything can happen and even a victory can lead to consequences in civil or criminal court. Even if a man wins the case, the case takes resources from other parts of a good man's life. Because of this, losers can make themselves look more self-confident by being loud even if they have no ability to back up their words in a fight. They know that good men don't want the fight at all, so they can posture and pose to make themselves look more self-confident. Many wise women can see through this act, but most foolish women and even some wise women don't see through the act. The result is that losers without self-confidence can put on an act and create enough illusion to get an attractive woman for at least a little while. If they get hurt from putting on an act, they can still sometimes parlay their injuries into a civil suit that brings them money when the other guy settles just to get back to his life.
In general, I think that being a nice person is the right thing to do. That alone should be enough to be nice most of the time. I'm just not certain that niceness is a real evolutionary advantage.
I'd agree that "self confidence" is generally found extremely attractive by women. On average, I'd guess that confident people are in general more successful people, this is it hard to separate confidence from success.
The attractive forty year old woman and the frumpy twenty year old woman at a party is an interesting scenario. Sure the good looks will draw the eye and lead to initial contact, but my experience is that attractive forty years olds are happy in relationships and you never see them. The few attractive forty years olds that are single generally are bitter and have a terrible personality so that initial attraction wears off extremely quickly.
Being "nice" isn't the same as being a social doormat. I think if we go back to primitive times then being "nice" is contributing to the group. The group will keep those that contribute and shun those who don't contribute, thus selecting for "niceness".
I've run into plenty of people who are self-confident but have accomplished nothing in life to justify their self-confidence. To some extent, their self-confidence allows them to play office politics effectively enough to get ahead of some people, but they are often not the real leaders in any group. Often, the real leaders do have a good level of self-confidence, but I've learned not to look at self-confidence as a measure of whether I can trust someone's honesty or competence.
I use the attractive forty-year-old and ugly twenty-year-old just to illustrate the difference between our attraction to the proxy versus our attraction to the underlying quality that some people claim is the basis for how the proxy moves us. I'm not saying that either of them is a better choice for a long-term relationship. I'm saying that the more attractive woman makes a man's heart go pitter-pat. In the same way, the "bad boy" will make a woman's heart go pitter-pat. She will probably never build a healthy relationship with him, but she will go out with him and do what he wants.
I don't know that being "nice" will necessarily mean contributing to the group. I imagine two equal groups. If one of them has a blacksmith who is extremely nice but he can't make good tools that last, that group will have much less of everything because their plowing, hunting, and everything else will constantly be delayed by the need for that blacksmith to try to repair tools that he didn't know how to make correctly the first time. The second group might have a blacksmith who is a jerk, but if his tools work well and don't break, that group will plow more ground, grow more crops, transport more goods, and kill more game. No one will like the guy, but if he does good work, he'll always manage to make a living, and his village will prosper more.
I'm not advocating that anyone be a jerk. If the second village finds another blacksmith nearby and he makes equally good tools without being a jerk, the villagers will start getting all of their tools from the guy who isn't a jerk. Eventually, that will cause the jerk to lose business and be unable to support as large a family. Even so, if he makes and sells his tools at a lower price, he'll continue to get some business. He'll probably get enough business to survive.
I once worked for a guy who was a jerk. In truth, he wasn't that competent. His company was not efficient. He survived because he could put on a nice guy persona on a witness stand and win any case that required expert metallurgical testimony. He took business risks and always seemed to avoid huge losses. I'm guessing he'd built his business to a worth in the neighborhood of five to ten million dollars. In truth, I still hated him because he was a jerk. I remember thinking, "No matter how much financial success I could ever have, no matter how much I was in demand from the lawyers looking for technical experts, if I treated people the way he does, my mom would be ashamed of me." I'm sure that he's dead by now, and I'm sure that maybe only one of his employees even went to his funeral. Most of us knew that he was just garbage. He was still very successful garbage.
Thank you again for bringing a different perspective.
I'm glad you added in the third blacksmith example (not a jerk and competent). The more variables we have, the more complex the analysis and conclusions of anything are.
So if we go back to the village with two blacksmiths. We assume they have equal competence but one is a jerk and the other is not. I'd assume the nice one will be the one that thrives.
Often it's hard to judge someone else accurately without the perspective of time and more experience. In my twenties, I was hired into upper management by a guy that I thought was a terrible guy. We always got along well, but I tend to get along with almost everyone. But he had a hot temper and was very demanding of his employees. The impression I had was that most people only stayed working for him because they were unwilling to take a pay cut to work somewhere else.
He had a lot of his own family working for him (at times nearly a dozen of them out of a company of 250 employees). Most of his family were incompetent! So it really rubbed me wrong (I ran payroll so I knew what everyone made) that his incompetent family members were paid more than other people and put into management positions.
Well, with the wisdom of time, to look back, I have more of an appreciation that he was a hard worker himself and very competent. He built his business with his own blood and sweat. Really he wasn't demanding anything of his employees that he wouldn't expect from himself.
I wish my younger self could have benefited from some of the experience of my older self. In retrospect, one of the worst decisions of my life was to resign from that job.
Safety practices at the place were horrible. The owner once asked me to do something extremely unsafe, but on that point, I refused.
The whole workflow management was bad, but he wasn't interested in looking at the problem and finding a solution. His solution was to get mad about it occasionally and start screaming at people until we all scrambled around and told him that we'd solve it. We couldn't solve it because a solution needed a competent owner to make decisions. The problems continued, and eventually he'd scream again.
The owner just wasn't mature enough to deal with life, and he berated his employees as his form of therapy. I got my engineering degree to solve engineering problems, not to be the emotional toilet for a sixty-six-year-old toddler. Most of his employees were overpaid for their level of competence. He paid them more than they were worth so that they would put up with his immaturity and lack of professionalism. I think most of them were unaware of the safety issues, but I guess they were also being paid to work in a place with substandard safety practices.
He knew how to play certain games with certain clients. He could maintain just enough to keep them from going elsewhere. He couldn't keep really good employees, but he could keep people who were just good enough that he could cover for them just enough to keep any serious problem from developing.
I think he eventually brought in someone else to run the place. Maybe that person established a bit of competency. I don't remember how long that lasted. Eventually, a company with a string of metallurgical labs bought the building, equipment, and maybe the name. I don't know whether they kept any of the employees. I guess that they probably ran the place with a fair amount of competence.
Getting back to the original idea, I see your point, but I also see major complications.
I don't know Darwinian evolution enough to know whether Darwin really distinguished between traits that improved survival of the individual and traits that improved survival of a species. To me, the difference seems important.
Zebras form large herds. The herds protect the species. Maybe zebras could survive as solitary animals, but they would be much less prevalent. Individuals would learn to hide from predators, be more observant of the approach of predators, and flee sooner. This approach might be good enough for zebra to survive as a species, but the total number of zebra would be much smaller.
Forming herds ensures survival of much larger populations of zebra overall, but the herd approach is not helpful to the slowest zebra in the herd. For that zebra, operating within a herd means that he or she is in the back of the pack as they run and a lion will get that one. That one zebra might be better off as a solitary animal with different behaviors.
In this sense. Darwinian evolution still passes on the genes of the faster zebras, but evolution is also passing on the genes of the herd behavior.
For some animals, cooperation is a good strategy. Other animals seem to have done very well with the opposite strategy.
Anyway, I've written too much and am getting tired.
As far as I know, Darwin only went so far as "reproductive success". It requires other theories to explain the benefit of having wise elders and forming cooperative societies.
This really points out one of the key things I wish people understood. 99.9% of what we think we "know" are actually just theories. We constantly develop new "better" theories and discard the old ideas.
I'm glad that you can look back at that boss and find some redeeming qualities. I look back and my boss and still see nothing but garbage.
I've forgotten all of the stories, but I see no redeeming qualities to the guy. He was dishonest in some things. Some of them were big things regarding taxes. Others were small things regarding policy. He was incapable of taking responsibility for his mistakes. There were some things that he just didn't know but refused to admit that he didn't know.
I do remember one story.
I got a call from an engineer at a plant in Iowa. Her plant's entire output went through one reactor vessel made of a 300 series stainless steel. She said that she'd been talking to someone and got the impression that the vessel might be in danger of something called stress corrosion cracking. She wanted to know whether it was a problem and whether we could help. I asked her to describe conditions in the vessel, and the conditions she described made me think that this mechanism was very likely. I asked her how long the vessel had been in service. It had been in service long enough that I was surprised that stuff wasn't leaking out the side of the vessel as we spoke. I didn't put my thoughts that way, but I said that conditions sounded right for this problem. She asked whether we could help.
That put me in a bad place. We didn't have the proper inspection tools to inspect for this problem. There was no way that we could ethically inspect the vessel and give them advice. There was another company nearby that had the right tools, but that company had split from our company because the bastard who owned our company had gotten into a spat with the guy that owned that company and had previous been at our company. I know that I'd be fired if the boss every learned that I sent this lady to the hated competitor or any other competitor. I told her that we could do an inspection and that our people were more experienced than even the average engineer would be at looking for the problem. I said that we couldn't just wave a magic wand and say whether her vessel had a cracking problem.
I had been in the habit of documenting calls in my previous job. I wrote a call report and put it in the owner's inbox. No one else did that, but I wasn't interested in lowering my standards to what everyone else did.
An hour or so later, the owner called me into his office and fussed at me about the call. He was mad that I said that we didn't have instrumentation that could do a proper inspection for the problem. He said that we did have instrumentation. I asked him what, and he told me what he had in mind. I was so shocked that I couldn't have spoken even if I hadn't realized that speaking would get me fired. What he was proposing was not a legitimate inspection method for this problem in any reputable company. I could never tell whether he realized this fact and just deluded himself because he wanted the fee or whether he was really that clueless. He made clear that he wasn't interested in hearing that he was completely wrong by any technical measure.
He continued to fuss by screaming, "If you tell her this, the company won't pay us $5000 to go out there for one day and do this test." I thought to myself that this test was not worth a dime for finding this problem, but he wouldn't have accepted that.
He called the lady on the phone with me in the office and basically told her that I was stupid and that we absolutely could give them a meaningful inspection. He said that another member of the staff would call to arrange the trip. He hung up and told me that that was the right way to handle that call.
I was left with an ethical dilemma. I knew that what he proposed was worthless. I knew that we might finish the inspection, find nothing, and the vessel would crack open a week later. I had to decide what to do. I could call her off hours and warn her, but if the boss ever learned, I'd be fired. I hadn't been able to sell my house where I lived previously, so I was making house payments there and rent payments where I lived for this job. Telling her the truth was risky for me. At the same time, knew that I couldn't live with myself if he foisted this sham inspection on her, they had a big problem, and someone were hurt.
I reviewed all of the operating information that she had given me. Eventually, I decided that a failure was very unlikely to cause a health and safety problem or even a serious environmental problem. If something went wrong, it would be expensive to the company, but no one would be hurt. Maybe the company would end up suing our owner, but he'd already cut me out of the whole decision tree.
He ended up sending another engineer who put on the charade that he wanted. The other engineer came back and wrote a report saying that they didn't find anything. However, the owner had him write the report with a heavy emphasis on all of the reasons why a problem could exist. The report was written with the intention of keeping the company scared so that they would hire us to repeat the charade once or twice a year.
The company read the report and was as scared as the owner wanted. All of their production started with this vessel. If the vessel developed serious leaks that couldn't be repaired quickly, the company was in deep trouble. Instead of just coming up with more work orders to make the owner more money, they were screaming that our report was worthless and they expected us to help them figure out what to do next.
At this point, I was enjoying the situation a little bit. I felt bad for this company because they had no way of knowing that our owner was a jerk, an idiot, and a manipulator. On the other hand, I thought that if companies didn't hire work to idiots like my boss, then maybe this company wouldn't exist. If this company didn't exist, maybe I would have been hired by someplace that wasn't so worthless.
Our vice-president was given the job of trying to write a follow-up report to make the other company feel better. The owner had created the mess, but he didn't have the character to try to make things right. The vice-president called me into his office because he was clueless. He wasn't even an engineer. His degrees were in geology. He'd learned a great deal about failure analysis, but he didn't know metallurgy or engineering. At first, I just nodded my head and agreed that he had a problem.
Eventually, I agreed to try writing something that might help everyone feel better about the situation. Part of the problem is that I still didn't know why they weren't having terrible cracking. To this day, I sometimes wonder what was really happening. I know that part of the process used to deposit a latex layer over all of the vessel surfaces. I wonder whether the layer deposited quickly enough in each batch process to protect the stainless steel from the cracking issue. Another possibility is that the temperature information that they gave me wasn't complete. Maybe they were reporting a temperature at the center of the reactor but the temperature along the walls was much, much lower. If so, the temperature that the metal saw might have been below the threshold for this cracking problem. If I'd worked for a reputable company, maybe we could have studied the issue in depth. As it was, I knew that I couldn't write anything that would end up telling them that they had wasted five thousand dollars and shouldn't waste that money again. I ended up writing my best evaluation of the situation while admitting that I didn't have a satisfactory explanation. I couldn't say that they wouldn't have problems, but I could say that the previous several years of operation without a problem was a promising sign that they wouldn't have a problem.
My original goal had been to ghost write sections of the second report but let the vice-president and the owner claim everything. I didn't want to be involved in the mess any more.
I halfway remember signing some report in partnership with the vice-president. In spite of his technical shortcomings, the vice-president wasn't a bad guy. Maybe he insisted that I be on the report as a matter of being honest. Maybe the owner wanted me on the report to try to drag me back into liability if something went wrong. Maybe the people at the plant in Iowa talked over everything with their engineer and came to the conclusion that I was the only trustworthy person at our company. In which case, they may have asked our owner why I'd been cut out of everything and insisted that I be part of the follow-up report. Maybe I'm remembering wrongly and I was able to write major parts of the report without having to sign my name to anything.
My impression is that the "bad boy" myth is hyped by Hollywood and reinforced by "bar behavior". Women might sleep with bad boys, but I think any relationships are more just because women haven't met anyone else. I've observed a lot of inertia to women staying in bad relationships, probably mostly because they feel they don't have an alternative.
I'm a little skeptical of this one.
People love puppies, but we wouldn't have kept dogs in our lives if they hadn't grown up to become adult dogs that were useful in many other ways. If they'd remained puppies, we might keep them for food just as we keep cows and goats for food. They wouldn't be our close companions. The initial value of dogs to human society was that they became socialized as part of a human pack. As members of the pack, they barked to warn us of intruders in our territory and would attack those intruders if those intruders were seen as a threat. We developed breeds to do certain tasks that are not dependent on their being lovable. The dogs that protected our herds of sheep didn't need to be loving companions. They just needed to keep the sheep from wandering too far from the flock and they needed to keep predators from attacking the flock. They didn't do either of these things by being lovable. Instead, they scared the sheep into staying into one flock and scared or attacked predators that threatened the sheep.
Plenty of species have survived millions of years without being lovable. Sharks are a vastly old species, but they are not lovable or friendly. They are not particularly sociable within their own species. They found a niche that fits their personality, and they have filled that niche for a long time. People haven't established that we can fill any niche for a similarly long time.
The Siberian fox experiment wasn't just an experiment to try to tame the foxes. The scientist was studying them in general and decided to try breeding the more human-friendly foxes to other human-friendly foxes. This strategy produced more and more friendly generations of foxes. This approach also led to changes in the foxes' physical characteristics. The resultant foxes were not really better suited for survival in wild Siberia. They were just better adapted to captivity.
We sometimes see similar behavior with other animals. Certain reptile species will have individuals who don't seem to have much natural defensiveness towards people. They aren't tame according to the definitions that many people use, but they are fairly easy to handle. As breeders produce more generations that have been around people their entire lives and have come to see people as sources of food, they are more tame in their behavior. Their brains don't allow them to adapt as much and become as obviously domesticated as dogs are, but they are different. If one wants a reptile as a nice pet, getting one that has been in captivity for five or six generations from a breeder is much easier than picking up one under a rock and trying to tame it. That doesn't mean that the fifth-generation pet is better adapted to anything except captivity.
I've had nothing but bad luck in my relationships with women. People tell me that I'm a very nice guy. Plenty of women have liked me as a friend, but few women who have other choices have ever wanted me for romantic or sexual relationships. The idea that "nice guys" will do just fine is not true for every nice guy.
My conclusion after decades of watching relationships from the outside is that men are attracted to physical beauty and women are attracted to self-confidence. Some people make a good argument that physical beauty is just a proxy for fertility. The "ologists" (psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, etc.) will say that woman are attracted to power because they want a man who can ensure that their children grow up with advantages. I believe that power might be the underlying quality, but the proxy trait is self-confidence.
In both men and women, the proxy trait has more emotional power than the underlying trait. Men at a party with a hot forty-year-old and a frumpy, dumpy twenty-year-old will be influenced by the hot forty-year-old. Even if they engage in the contrarian behavior of going out of their way to talk to the unattractive twenty-year-old, they are being driven and influenced by the beauty of the forty-year-old. They behave this way even though they know at some level that if producing a bunch of offspring is the goal, the ugly young woman is a better choice than the beautiful forty-year-old at the end of her reproductive years.
I've seen guys who are complete losers but still have relationships with beautiful women because they have self-confidence. They are sometimes nice guys and sometimes the opposite of nice guys. They don't have any real power. They don't have jobs that give them power. They haven't risen to political positions that would give them power. They aren't physically strong. They aren't gifted in some area of production or entertainment. They are losers, but they draw women because they have self-confidence. Their relationships may fail, but they find other relationships because they have that self-confidence that grabs a woman's emotions in a way that nothing else does.
We mistake the success of these self-confident losers for a general success of "bad boys." Among all of the losers, we notice them because their self-confidence gives them success with attractive women. The other losers are largely invisible to us because they have nothing we want. The success of these guys causes nice guys who don't have self-confidence to think that women are attracted to the "bad boys." To the extent that some level of self-confidence is necessary to reject certain norms of regular life, the "bad boys" might have an advantage because their being "bad boys" suggests that self-confidence.
For both men and women, there are also counterfeits to the proxy traits. Sometimes, ugly women can give an illusion of being more attractive by dressing in the right kind of provocative way. If their legs are attractive enough, they can just wear short skirts to create the illusion of being attractive overall. Other times, they can wear a longer skirt with a very high slit on the side. The slit will stay closed enough of the time that men don't easily see that the woman's legs aren't attractive, but the slit creates a line that gives the illusion of long, well-shaped legs. For guys, volume and bravado can provide the illusion of self-confidence. Most men would rather avoid fights because anything can happen and even a victory can lead to consequences in civil or criminal court. Even if a man wins the case, the case takes resources from other parts of a good man's life. Because of this, losers can make themselves look more self-confident by being loud even if they have no ability to back up their words in a fight. They know that good men don't want the fight at all, so they can posture and pose to make themselves look more self-confident. Many wise women can see through this act, but most foolish women and even some wise women don't see through the act. The result is that losers without self-confidence can put on an act and create enough illusion to get an attractive woman for at least a little while. If they get hurt from putting on an act, they can still sometimes parlay their injuries into a civil suit that brings them money when the other guy settles just to get back to his life.
In general, I think that being a nice person is the right thing to do. That alone should be enough to be nice most of the time. I'm just not certain that niceness is a real evolutionary advantage.
Fascinating analysis.
I'd agree that "self confidence" is generally found extremely attractive by women. On average, I'd guess that confident people are in general more successful people, this is it hard to separate confidence from success.
The attractive forty year old woman and the frumpy twenty year old woman at a party is an interesting scenario. Sure the good looks will draw the eye and lead to initial contact, but my experience is that attractive forty years olds are happy in relationships and you never see them. The few attractive forty years olds that are single generally are bitter and have a terrible personality so that initial attraction wears off extremely quickly.
Being "nice" isn't the same as being a social doormat. I think if we go back to primitive times then being "nice" is contributing to the group. The group will keep those that contribute and shun those who don't contribute, thus selecting for "niceness".
I don't see things quite this way.
I've run into plenty of people who are self-confident but have accomplished nothing in life to justify their self-confidence. To some extent, their self-confidence allows them to play office politics effectively enough to get ahead of some people, but they are often not the real leaders in any group. Often, the real leaders do have a good level of self-confidence, but I've learned not to look at self-confidence as a measure of whether I can trust someone's honesty or competence.
I use the attractive forty-year-old and ugly twenty-year-old just to illustrate the difference between our attraction to the proxy versus our attraction to the underlying quality that some people claim is the basis for how the proxy moves us. I'm not saying that either of them is a better choice for a long-term relationship. I'm saying that the more attractive woman makes a man's heart go pitter-pat. In the same way, the "bad boy" will make a woman's heart go pitter-pat. She will probably never build a healthy relationship with him, but she will go out with him and do what he wants.
I don't know that being "nice" will necessarily mean contributing to the group. I imagine two equal groups. If one of them has a blacksmith who is extremely nice but he can't make good tools that last, that group will have much less of everything because their plowing, hunting, and everything else will constantly be delayed by the need for that blacksmith to try to repair tools that he didn't know how to make correctly the first time. The second group might have a blacksmith who is a jerk, but if his tools work well and don't break, that group will plow more ground, grow more crops, transport more goods, and kill more game. No one will like the guy, but if he does good work, he'll always manage to make a living, and his village will prosper more.
I'm not advocating that anyone be a jerk. If the second village finds another blacksmith nearby and he makes equally good tools without being a jerk, the villagers will start getting all of their tools from the guy who isn't a jerk. Eventually, that will cause the jerk to lose business and be unable to support as large a family. Even so, if he makes and sells his tools at a lower price, he'll continue to get some business. He'll probably get enough business to survive.
I once worked for a guy who was a jerk. In truth, he wasn't that competent. His company was not efficient. He survived because he could put on a nice guy persona on a witness stand and win any case that required expert metallurgical testimony. He took business risks and always seemed to avoid huge losses. I'm guessing he'd built his business to a worth in the neighborhood of five to ten million dollars. In truth, I still hated him because he was a jerk. I remember thinking, "No matter how much financial success I could ever have, no matter how much I was in demand from the lawyers looking for technical experts, if I treated people the way he does, my mom would be ashamed of me." I'm sure that he's dead by now, and I'm sure that maybe only one of his employees even went to his funeral. Most of us knew that he was just garbage. He was still very successful garbage.
Thank you again for bringing a different perspective.
I'm glad you added in the third blacksmith example (not a jerk and competent). The more variables we have, the more complex the analysis and conclusions of anything are.
So if we go back to the village with two blacksmiths. We assume they have equal competence but one is a jerk and the other is not. I'd assume the nice one will be the one that thrives.
Often it's hard to judge someone else accurately without the perspective of time and more experience. In my twenties, I was hired into upper management by a guy that I thought was a terrible guy. We always got along well, but I tend to get along with almost everyone. But he had a hot temper and was very demanding of his employees. The impression I had was that most people only stayed working for him because they were unwilling to take a pay cut to work somewhere else.
He had a lot of his own family working for him (at times nearly a dozen of them out of a company of 250 employees). Most of his family were incompetent! So it really rubbed me wrong (I ran payroll so I knew what everyone made) that his incompetent family members were paid more than other people and put into management positions.
Well, with the wisdom of time, to look back, I have more of an appreciation that he was a hard worker himself and very competent. He built his business with his own blood and sweat. Really he wasn't demanding anything of his employees that he wouldn't expect from himself.
I wish my younger self could have benefited from some of the experience of my older self. In retrospect, one of the worst decisions of my life was to resign from that job.
Part 2
Safety practices at the place were horrible. The owner once asked me to do something extremely unsafe, but on that point, I refused.
The whole workflow management was bad, but he wasn't interested in looking at the problem and finding a solution. His solution was to get mad about it occasionally and start screaming at people until we all scrambled around and told him that we'd solve it. We couldn't solve it because a solution needed a competent owner to make decisions. The problems continued, and eventually he'd scream again.
The owner just wasn't mature enough to deal with life, and he berated his employees as his form of therapy. I got my engineering degree to solve engineering problems, not to be the emotional toilet for a sixty-six-year-old toddler. Most of his employees were overpaid for their level of competence. He paid them more than they were worth so that they would put up with his immaturity and lack of professionalism. I think most of them were unaware of the safety issues, but I guess they were also being paid to work in a place with substandard safety practices.
He knew how to play certain games with certain clients. He could maintain just enough to keep them from going elsewhere. He couldn't keep really good employees, but he could keep people who were just good enough that he could cover for them just enough to keep any serious problem from developing.
I think he eventually brought in someone else to run the place. Maybe that person established a bit of competency. I don't remember how long that lasted. Eventually, a company with a string of metallurgical labs bought the building, equipment, and maybe the name. I don't know whether they kept any of the employees. I guess that they probably ran the place with a fair amount of competence.
Getting back to the original idea, I see your point, but I also see major complications.
I don't know Darwinian evolution enough to know whether Darwin really distinguished between traits that improved survival of the individual and traits that improved survival of a species. To me, the difference seems important.
Zebras form large herds. The herds protect the species. Maybe zebras could survive as solitary animals, but they would be much less prevalent. Individuals would learn to hide from predators, be more observant of the approach of predators, and flee sooner. This approach might be good enough for zebra to survive as a species, but the total number of zebra would be much smaller.
Forming herds ensures survival of much larger populations of zebra overall, but the herd approach is not helpful to the slowest zebra in the herd. For that zebra, operating within a herd means that he or she is in the back of the pack as they run and a lion will get that one. That one zebra might be better off as a solitary animal with different behaviors.
In this sense. Darwinian evolution still passes on the genes of the faster zebras, but evolution is also passing on the genes of the herd behavior.
For some animals, cooperation is a good strategy. Other animals seem to have done very well with the opposite strategy.
Anyway, I've written too much and am getting tired.
As far as I know, Darwin only went so far as "reproductive success". It requires other theories to explain the benefit of having wise elders and forming cooperative societies.
This really points out one of the key things I wish people understood. 99.9% of what we think we "know" are actually just theories. We constantly develop new "better" theories and discard the old ideas.
Thanks for the kind reply.
I'm glad that you can look back at that boss and find some redeeming qualities. I look back and my boss and still see nothing but garbage.
I've forgotten all of the stories, but I see no redeeming qualities to the guy. He was dishonest in some things. Some of them were big things regarding taxes. Others were small things regarding policy. He was incapable of taking responsibility for his mistakes. There were some things that he just didn't know but refused to admit that he didn't know.
I do remember one story.
I got a call from an engineer at a plant in Iowa. Her plant's entire output went through one reactor vessel made of a 300 series stainless steel. She said that she'd been talking to someone and got the impression that the vessel might be in danger of something called stress corrosion cracking. She wanted to know whether it was a problem and whether we could help. I asked her to describe conditions in the vessel, and the conditions she described made me think that this mechanism was very likely. I asked her how long the vessel had been in service. It had been in service long enough that I was surprised that stuff wasn't leaking out the side of the vessel as we spoke. I didn't put my thoughts that way, but I said that conditions sounded right for this problem. She asked whether we could help.
That put me in a bad place. We didn't have the proper inspection tools to inspect for this problem. There was no way that we could ethically inspect the vessel and give them advice. There was another company nearby that had the right tools, but that company had split from our company because the bastard who owned our company had gotten into a spat with the guy that owned that company and had previous been at our company. I know that I'd be fired if the boss every learned that I sent this lady to the hated competitor or any other competitor. I told her that we could do an inspection and that our people were more experienced than even the average engineer would be at looking for the problem. I said that we couldn't just wave a magic wand and say whether her vessel had a cracking problem.
I had been in the habit of documenting calls in my previous job. I wrote a call report and put it in the owner's inbox. No one else did that, but I wasn't interested in lowering my standards to what everyone else did.
An hour or so later, the owner called me into his office and fussed at me about the call. He was mad that I said that we didn't have instrumentation that could do a proper inspection for the problem. He said that we did have instrumentation. I asked him what, and he told me what he had in mind. I was so shocked that I couldn't have spoken even if I hadn't realized that speaking would get me fired. What he was proposing was not a legitimate inspection method for this problem in any reputable company. I could never tell whether he realized this fact and just deluded himself because he wanted the fee or whether he was really that clueless. He made clear that he wasn't interested in hearing that he was completely wrong by any technical measure.
He continued to fuss by screaming, "If you tell her this, the company won't pay us $5000 to go out there for one day and do this test." I thought to myself that this test was not worth a dime for finding this problem, but he wouldn't have accepted that.
He called the lady on the phone with me in the office and basically told her that I was stupid and that we absolutely could give them a meaningful inspection. He said that another member of the staff would call to arrange the trip. He hung up and told me that that was the right way to handle that call.
I was left with an ethical dilemma. I knew that what he proposed was worthless. I knew that we might finish the inspection, find nothing, and the vessel would crack open a week later. I had to decide what to do. I could call her off hours and warn her, but if the boss ever learned, I'd be fired. I hadn't been able to sell my house where I lived previously, so I was making house payments there and rent payments where I lived for this job. Telling her the truth was risky for me. At the same time, knew that I couldn't live with myself if he foisted this sham inspection on her, they had a big problem, and someone were hurt.
I reviewed all of the operating information that she had given me. Eventually, I decided that a failure was very unlikely to cause a health and safety problem or even a serious environmental problem. If something went wrong, it would be expensive to the company, but no one would be hurt. Maybe the company would end up suing our owner, but he'd already cut me out of the whole decision tree.
He ended up sending another engineer who put on the charade that he wanted. The other engineer came back and wrote a report saying that they didn't find anything. However, the owner had him write the report with a heavy emphasis on all of the reasons why a problem could exist. The report was written with the intention of keeping the company scared so that they would hire us to repeat the charade once or twice a year.
The company read the report and was as scared as the owner wanted. All of their production started with this vessel. If the vessel developed serious leaks that couldn't be repaired quickly, the company was in deep trouble. Instead of just coming up with more work orders to make the owner more money, they were screaming that our report was worthless and they expected us to help them figure out what to do next.
At this point, I was enjoying the situation a little bit. I felt bad for this company because they had no way of knowing that our owner was a jerk, an idiot, and a manipulator. On the other hand, I thought that if companies didn't hire work to idiots like my boss, then maybe this company wouldn't exist. If this company didn't exist, maybe I would have been hired by someplace that wasn't so worthless.
Our vice-president was given the job of trying to write a follow-up report to make the other company feel better. The owner had created the mess, but he didn't have the character to try to make things right. The vice-president called me into his office because he was clueless. He wasn't even an engineer. His degrees were in geology. He'd learned a great deal about failure analysis, but he didn't know metallurgy or engineering. At first, I just nodded my head and agreed that he had a problem.
Eventually, I agreed to try writing something that might help everyone feel better about the situation. Part of the problem is that I still didn't know why they weren't having terrible cracking. To this day, I sometimes wonder what was really happening. I know that part of the process used to deposit a latex layer over all of the vessel surfaces. I wonder whether the layer deposited quickly enough in each batch process to protect the stainless steel from the cracking issue. Another possibility is that the temperature information that they gave me wasn't complete. Maybe they were reporting a temperature at the center of the reactor but the temperature along the walls was much, much lower. If so, the temperature that the metal saw might have been below the threshold for this cracking problem. If I'd worked for a reputable company, maybe we could have studied the issue in depth. As it was, I knew that I couldn't write anything that would end up telling them that they had wasted five thousand dollars and shouldn't waste that money again. I ended up writing my best evaluation of the situation while admitting that I didn't have a satisfactory explanation. I couldn't say that they wouldn't have problems, but I could say that the previous several years of operation without a problem was a promising sign that they wouldn't have a problem.
My original goal had been to ghost write sections of the second report but let the vice-president and the owner claim everything. I didn't want to be involved in the mess any more.
I halfway remember signing some report in partnership with the vice-president. In spite of his technical shortcomings, the vice-president wasn't a bad guy. Maybe he insisted that I be on the report as a matter of being honest. Maybe the owner wanted me on the report to try to drag me back into liability if something went wrong. Maybe the people at the plant in Iowa talked over everything with their engineer and came to the conclusion that I was the only trustworthy person at our company. In which case, they may have asked our owner why I'd been cut out of everything and insisted that I be part of the follow-up report. Maybe I'm remembering wrongly and I was able to write major parts of the report without having to sign my name to anything.
Interesting! I always wonder about the "bad boy" claim. I only like/date/marry really nice guys.
My impression is that the "bad boy" myth is hyped by Hollywood and reinforced by "bar behavior". Women might sleep with bad boys, but I think any relationships are more just because women haven't met anyone else. I've observed a lot of inertia to women staying in bad relationships, probably mostly because they feel they don't have an alternative.