• Badhart’s Law: if a large organization doesn’t measure anything, it’s unlikely to achieve anything

• The Zareto Principle: roughly 20% of effects come from just 0.001% of causes

• The Dunning–Kruger-Kruger-Dunning Effect: people with little knowledge about the Dunning-Kruger effect will confidently claim that it’s about how people with little skill believe they are more skilled than experts

• White Swan Theory: most real-world impact comes from the most commonly occurring instances, since they’re so numerous (e.g., most people’s perspective on whether swans are dickheads comes from their interactions with white swans, not black ones)

• Zuckerberg’s Number: technology enables us to break free from evolutionary constraints by barely having a social relationship with 5000 people

• Barkinson’s Law: regardless of how much time is allocated for a project, many people will start working on it at the last possible moment

• Schloccam’s Razor: Among competing explanations that all fit the facts, use the one that is most useful

• The Savile Effect: Attempts by powerful people to suppress information often succeed – it’s just that you only hear about the ones that fail

• The Autism Effect: when a trait’s apparent prevalence skyrockets due to broadening definitions and improved screening, somebody will inevitably blame its rise on really stupid shit like Tylenol or vaccines

• Stalin’s Razor: don’t attribute to stupidity what could be adequately explained by the person in charge being a dangerous, power-obsessed psycho

• Musk’s Law: those with tremendous success early in life become convinced that they are geniuses in other domains where they very much aren’t

• Daze’s Rule: people will be more impressed if you use fancy math to make a point than if you just say the same thing

• Dunderham’s Law: the fastest way to summon wrong answers online is to post the right one.

• Godberg’s Law: As people get increasingly angry at something happening in society, the probability that someone eventually tries to blame the Jews for it approaches one

• Dumbar’s Principle: famous number about humans inevitably have very stupid origin stories (e.g., ~150 stable social ties, 10000 steps for health, 8 glasses of water per day, a >2.9013 positive-to-negative ratio needed to flourish)

• The COVID Principle: people will often risk their lives before they risk standing apart from their tribe

• Diner Equilibrium: when nobody is actually happy with the outcome of a negotiation, but everyone is satisfied enough not to complain

• Multipolar party: when, despite nobody being in charge, humans miraculously self-assemble and cooperate to solve challenges, as often occurs at Burning Man

Just in case you didn’t catch on: these are parodies of “real” mental models 

This piece was first written on April 13, 2026, and first appeared on my website on April 30, 2026.

It’s definitely true that some women are attracted to traits like narcissism, callousness, and manipulativeness (and some unusual women even go so far as to write letters to serial killers to get to know them). In my experience, though, attraction to traits like these is actually quite rare (I can only think of two friends who are substantially attracted to those traits in particular).

Much more commonly, I believe, women tend to be attracted to traits that have a tendency to be found among bad guys (but which are not exclusive to bad guys), like:

• confidence (or, at least, the appearance of it)
• lack of neediness (e.g., they aren’t sitting around waiting for the woman to call, they aren’t clingy)
• independence and not being overly concerned with what other people think of you (or, at least, the appearance of not caring)
• self-determination, knowing what you want and going after it intensely
• strength (emotional and physical)
• making the woman feel extremely desired and special
• charisma (intensity, presence, high energy)
• assertiveness
• self-respect (e.g., not letting others take advantage of you)
• power (e.g., you can get things done effectively in the world, others respect you, high status)

I know a lot of women who are attracted to the traits on the list above.
So, yes, many women are attracted to bad boys, but I believe that’s mainly because bad boys have a tendency to have (or, at least, appear to have) a number of these other desirable qualities.
Women are often attracted to traits found among bad guys, but thankfully, these traits are also found among what you might call “powerful good guys.”

The regular (non-powerful) “nice guy” stereotype invokes a sense of:

• low confidence
• weakness, patheticness, neediness
• a sense of entitlement or a lack of responsibility
• low assertiveness
• not knowing what you want or not pursuing what you want
• clingy, in need of constant reassurance
• lack of charisma (e.g., low energy, lack of presence)
• lack of power (e.g., lack of respect, living in their parent’s basement)
• low self-respect (e.g., letting others walk all over you)
• an intensity of interest in a woman (bordering on obsessiveness) that can come across as creepy

On the other hand, there are “powerful good guys” who reflect the traits that women tend to like while not being “bad” at all.

If you are a powerful, good guy, you demonstrate the following:

• a quiet confidence (rather than a bragging narcissistic confidence)
• strength that is used to protect others (not to take advantage of or manipulate others)
• self-determination, knowing what you want (but with pro-social rather than selfish goals), and going after what you want with intensity (but without violating other people’s boundaries)
• strength and charisma
• independence (e.g., strongly desiring to spend time with the woman, but not being clingy or needy, and not being pouty or angry when the woman needs time alone, and having a flourishing and meaningful life outside of your time with the woman)
• making the woman feel extremely desired and special (because you genuinely feel this way, and you are not afraid to show it, rather than this being a tactic to get what you want, but also the self-confidence, self-respect, and kindness to fully accept rejection and not get angry over rejection)
• assertiveness and self-respect reflecting a healthy expression of desires and enforcement of your own boundaries (not a coercive assertiveness that violates the boundaries of others)
• power that comes about through your respect for others and competence (not created through fear or manipulation)
• protectiveness that helps you give your loved ones safety (without any coercive control – a nurturing protectiveness can be very attractive to women, I believe, whether directed at the woman themself or to others like babies, children, and animals)

There is also a major advantage that powerful good guys have over bad guys – they are kind and supportive, two traits that women often report caring the most about in their partners.

These good guys also tend to have much happier, healthier relationships (rather than the damaging, often miserable relationships that highly manipulative, narcissistic people tend to have).

So, if you are a guy who wants to become the sort of person who is more attractive to more women, my advice is:

• don’t aim to become the “nice guy” (who can be viewed as pathetic)
• don’t aim to become the “bad guy” (who is a dick, or worse)
• aim to become the “powerful good guy” (who builds happy, healthy, long-term relationships)

However, if you’re not close to any of these types, that’s also okay, of course! And it’s totally fine not to aspire to be like any of these archetypes.

Women are very far from a monolith. There are women who are attracted to all sorts of different things (just as there are men who want the opposite of what most men want). But, I claim, the “powerful good guy” is a better archetype for thinking about how to be generally attractive than both the “bad guy” and the “nice guy” archetypes. Plus, as a bonus, modeling the “powerful good guy” archetype helps you be a better person in the process.

Women who are attracted to men: I’d be especially interested in hearing what you think of what I’m saying here. Do you agree or disagree with my points? I’d also be really interested to know whether you (or your close friends) are attracted specifically to traits like narcissism, callousness, and manipulativeness, or (insofar as you’re attracted to “bad guys”), do you think you’re mainly attracted to traits that tend to be associated with being a “bad guy” (rather than those potentially harmful traits themselves)?

I’ll add (thanks to commenters who pointed this out!) there are at least a couple of traits more unique to bad guys that some women do find desirable, in particular, ones that inspire thoughts like “He’s an asshole to everyone but me, so that makes me special!”, and “Normally no one woman can satisfy him, that’s why he’s a philanderer, but his desire for me is so strong that he’ll commit just to me!” and “I know he’s bad, but I can fix him!” While some women are, indeed, attracted to these ideas, I think it’s fair to say that most people would acknowledge these are unhealthy desires that typically end in frustration and failure, and they aren’t key components of most women’s attraction to men.

Finally, it’s worth noting that many (but not all) women find sexual dominance attractive (which they may associate with bad boys). But sexual dominance is neither bad nor good and has nothing to do with being good or bad per se (though sometimes people enjoy having it mimic bad behavior, such as with r*pe fantasies). In other words, sexual dominance is a neutral behavior that is equally compatible with being a powerful good guy as with being a bad guy. It can be done ethically (if done with consent and with attention to your partner’s experience) or unethically (if done without consent or with indifference to your partner’s experience).

This piece was first written on October 25, 2023, and first appeared on this site on January 18, 2024.

To help clear them up, I’d like to share with you some statistics, followed by what I’ve witnessed regarding sexual assault and rape (in my personal networks).

Here are some helpful statistics about the rates of victimization in general:

• According to RAINN, about 1 in 6 American women and 1 in 33 American men have been the victim of an attempted or completed rape (source). 

• According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) survey, 1 in 5 American women experienced completed or attempted rape during her lifetime, and 1 in 14 American men had been made to penetrate someone (completed or attempted) during his lifetime (source). Among women, 13.5% experienced completed forced penetration during their lifetime, 6.3% experienced attempted forced penetration, and 11.0% experienced completed alcohol/drug-facilitated penetration at some point in their lifetime. Among men, approximately 1.6% were made to penetrate through completed forced penetration, 1.4% experienced situations where attempts were made to make them penetrate someone else through the use of force, and 5.5% were made to penetrate someone else through completed alcohol/drug facilitation at some point in their lifetime.

Note that these estimates can vary quite a bit due to (a) different definitions being used/different question wording and (b) precisely who is being surveyed. I wouldn’t be surprised if anywhere from 1 in 2 to 1 in 6 women in the US have been raped and/or sexually assaulted (depending on who is asked and with which wording).

• According to RAINN, about 20% of sexual violence is committed by a stranger, 40% by acquaintances, 33% by a current or former romantic partner, and 3% by a non-spouse relative (source).

• According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, only about 1 in 3 rapes/sexual assaults are reported to the police (source).

In my networks:

• Twelve people that I know have told me about being raped or sexually assaulted (11 women and one man) – note that I’m only talking here about one-on-one conversations I’ve had where the person told me some details about what happened. If you’re wondering, none of these were cases where consensual sexual activity was occurring, and then, in the heat of the moment, the perpetrator did something that they didn’t know the victim didn’t want. These cases are all very clear violations.

• In only three cases (i.e., 25%), the perpetrator was a stranger.

• Of the 12 people, only one of them (i.e., 8%) reported what happened to authorities or publicly named the perpetrator.

To see how common sexual assault experiences are among my Twitter followers, I posted two (anonymous) polls, both shown below. Of the respondents, more than 1 in 2 women and more than 1 in 7 men reported that they had experienced sexual assault, defined here as a situation they found very distressing where (1) they were forced to engage in a sexual act OR (2) a sexual act was performed on them against their will. These proportions were similar regardless of if it was (or wasn’t) specified that a reasonable person would have predicted they didn’t want the act to be done (this specification was added in the second poll).

This raises the question – why did victims so rarely report such cases to authorities?

The reasons I’m aware of for why people don’t report are that they…

• don’t think they’ll be believed

• feel shame or embarrassment

• don’t want their attacker (e.g., an ex-boyfriend) to go to jail or be harshly punished

• don’t want more people to know about the event

• are too young to know what to do

• are trying to avoid reliving the trauma or being retraumatized (since reporting it will require talking about the event extensively)

• are scared of retaliation by the perpetrator

• don’t believe that reporting it will lead to justice

Claire Z, who commented on an earlier version of this post, also pointed out the following additional reasons that people sometimes don’t report (which I don’t believe were major factors in the 12 cases I’m referring to above, but which I think can be important in other situations).

Some people don’t report because they…

• are too busy and don’t want to take the time to report, follow up, and possibly be a witness in a trial

• have fear related to admitting to the use of illegal substances during the assault

• don’t want specific people to find out about the assault (e.g., parents they think would react counterproductively)

• don’t think what happened to them was very bad or important

• don’t think what was done would be considered very bad or important (or even think people would consider it good – especially in the case of men assaulted by women)

• are genuinely uncertain what happened, e.g., because of substance use

In a nutshell, I think victims of rape and sexual assault usually believe that (all consequences considered) they will be worse off reporting the event to authorities. So, after an extremely upsetting and often traumatic event, they are in a situation where reporting it may make things even worse for them. Under such circumstances, is it any wonder that these events would often go unreported?

Another thing I’ve seen baffle people is that victims sometimes stay in touch with a perpetrator or even continue being nice or friendly to them. Such behavior sometimes leads people to think that the alleged event was consensual or fabricated. Yet, there are good explanations for why this sometimes happens.

Here are the reasons I’ve seen for victims staying in touch with (or even acting friendly with) the perpetrator afterward:

• they don’t want the perpetrator to slander them to people they both know

• they don’t want to come across as a threat to the perpetrator, which could raise their future level of danger (especially if the perpetrator has power over them or comes across as someone who may hurt them even worse if angered)

• there are additional negative consequences associated with not speaking to the perpetrator, or it is difficult to avoid talking to them (e.g., the perpetrator is a work colleague, a family member, tightly woven in their social circles, or has some kind of power over them)

• they want to hide from the perpetrator how negatively impacted they were by the event

• they have a strong emotional attachment to the perpetrator (or are even in love with them), and the terrible event doesn’t remove that attachment (e.g., it’s a situation of an abusive boyfriend/close family member)

• the perpetrator (or other people in the victim’s life) make the victim feel like they are to blame for the event, or at least that they are as much to blame as the perpetrator

• they feel some uncertainty about what happened because they were willingly (or unknowingly) consuming drugs before the event transpired

Thankfully, the norms around reporting rape and sexual assault appear to be shifting. It’s getting easier to report these events. That being said, I think the incentive structures still are such that victims often feel it is not in their interest to report.

In my opinion, shifting incentives so that victims benefit more from reporting rape and sexual assault (ideally without significantly increasing incentives for false reporting) is one promising approach to make outcomes more just and reduce how often these crimes are committed.

This essay was first written on January 9th, 2022, and first appeared on this site on January 21st, 2022.

The mathematical proofs are, of course, very rarely disputed. The use of mathematics is much more often disputed.

Why do these disputes arise? I’ve observed five different types.

Disputes in Applications of Statistics to Science

(1) Disputes over philosophy:

Example 1: is it valid to assign a probability to an event that is not part of any clear sequence of events or mathematical process (e.g., trying to estimate the probability that humanity will go extinct)?

We don’t agree on what we mean by “probability.”

Example 2: under what conditions should a strange data point be considered an “outlier” and hence removed from our data before calculating our statistics?

We don’t agree on what we mean by “outlier.”

Resolving these disputes might require more consensus on what we mean by different concepts in statistics and potentially more disambiguation of possible interpretations of these concepts.

(2) Disputes over what we’re trying to achieve:

Example 1: Is a p-value a measure something that we directly care about, and if not, is it still worth using?

We don’t agree on the extent to which one of the most commonly used statistics is something we care about.

Example 2: When we’re testing multiple hypotheses at once, how should we adjust our resulting statistics to account for this “multiple hypothesis testing”?

We don’t agree on how to handle the increased rate of false positives that occurs when we put multiple statistics in a single paper.

Resolving these disputes might require more agreement on exactly what we’re trying to achieve with statistics.

(3) Disputes over what is “good enough” or “accurate enough”:

Example 1: when you’re comparing the means of two groups, when is it okay to use the very popular t-test, which assumes equal variances in the two groups, rather than the welch test, which doesn’t assume equal variances (this article does a good job of exploring what a horror show this seemingly simple question is).

We don’t agree on how much we should worry about the basic assumptions of our commonly used statistical tests being violated.

Example 2: to control for effect (i.e., “factor out” the influence of one variable on the relationship between two other variables), is it sufficient to run a regression that includes that control variable in the model?

We don’t agree on what is sufficient to remove the causal effects of one variable (that we don’t care about) on another we do care about in order to avoid having those effects contaminating our main results.

Resolving these disputes might require more agreement on how robust methods are to violations of their assumptions and clearer best practices for what to do when we expect the assumptions might be violated.

(4) Disputes due to misconceptions:

Example 1: it is often assumed that the true value has a 95% chance of falling within the 95th percentile confidence interval for that value, but that’s actually a subtle misinterpretation of the definition of a 95th percentile confidence interval.

We can easily misunderstand the extremely subtle proper interpretations of statistics.

Example 2: the trim-and-fill method is often used in meta-analysis to try to correct for the fact results that find no effect are more likely to go unpublished than results that find an effect, but unfortunately, this method sometimes doesn’t do what it is supposed.

We sometimes continue to rely on techniques out of inertia even though they are known to occasionally produce wrong results.

Resolving these disputes might require better statistical education around common misconceptions and common confusions.

(5) Disputes over what to do when we lack information:

Example 1: when we don’t have any empirical data or previous experience to use to estimate a prior distribution for a variable, how should we set our prior?

We don’t have standardized steps that everyone can agree on for all procedures.

Example 2: if we don’t have reason to believe that our data is normally distributed, but the test we would usually run requires that the distribution of the data be normal, should we instead use a non-parametric version of the test (even though it has less statistical power), or should we base whether to use the non-parametric version of the test off of the result of the p-value of a test for normality, even though doing the latter will form a “compound test” and hence potentially change the interpretation of our resulting p-value?

When certain information is lacking, we don’t have a consensus on how to adapt.

Resolving these disputes might require a more standardized agreement on dos and don’ts for situations where we lack critical information.