BBC Planet Earth - Birds of Paradise mating dance

What Hacker News said

Cites okayIguessSo · 2018-01 · on “How Birds of Paradise Produce Super-Black Feathers”

Up until now, I had assumed that BBS Planet Earth scene was just some enhanced photography at work. [this video] Even now, it still seems pretty unreal. I’m glad to learn it’s not manipulated footage, adjusted by what seemed like possibly the choice to film during overcast weather, with possibly some less-than-natural lighting and carefully selected camera angles.

Cites wu-ikkyu · 2018-03 · on “Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?”

I read your post, and am still trying to wrap my head around the content. The best metaphor I could come up with, given my potentially erroneous understanding of your thesis is thus: The purpose of life is a dance competition, the more novel the performance the better. The beautiful mating dances of exotic jungle birds comes to mind: [this video]

Cites fossuser · 2020-11 · on “A 4-month online dating experiment using 10 fictional singletons (2012)”

There's a pretty good book by one of the OKC founders that goes into a lot of this data. [LINK] There's a bunch of good graphs and analysis in there (which matched my anecdotal experience of online dating). The takeaway for me - if you're a man looking for a woman and you're not in the top 5% of attractiveness for men (really top 2%) then online dating is a waste of your time and you're better off doing pretty much anything else. This is doubly true in skewed dating markets like the bay area (less so in favorable markets like NYC, DC). There's a lot of 'what you can't say' [0] in that book, sexual selection is skewed in lots of ways people pretend it isn't. I think it'd be better to acknowle

Cites lsd_throwaway · 2021-06 · on “Disintermediating friends: Online dating displaces other ways of meeting (2019) [pdf]”

I think they're fighting an uphill battle because these incentives are sexual selection incentives. There's not much you can do to 'fix' them. I think what happens is that both sexes go through it and come out the other side. If they were lucky enough not to pair off with a bad mate early they can then choose more wisely. For a lot of men this means being unhappy and lonely in their 20s, for women it means being unhappy while sleeping around a lot in their 20s. Eventually people figure out what they want. I'm not sure an app can do much to fix that. Sexual selection's affect on behavior is a powerful thing: [this video]