As for an engagement ring... don't get me started about the whole ritualistic marriage thing. The diamond ring may be not the biggest waste. I'd rather buy my spouse jewellery that can be worn and enjoyed at any time instead :)
A big fat white stone on a finger will draw eyes for so long as a woman wears it. Every woman your wife meets will make a judgement call based on that ring for the next 20 years.
Why not just be a real man, speak and live the truth. Eschew the lies.
Why can't we all just do that as a society? It doesn't matter how much you love each other or your mutual respect? Why do rings even matter?
It's the kind of irrational behavior that has destroyed an entire planet!
I definitely agree with your last point, but wasting resources to display fitness is found all across the animal kingdom and sadly it doesn't seem like we've moved past that yet as a species.
>buy fake diamonds
>lie to everyone, including spouse
>fudge the books so spouse can't see suspiciously low-ball jeweler transaction
>launder savings through local cash-money businesses
>use hypnotic sedatives to repress memories of the lie
> Real men don't buy fake diamonds. They buy real diamond rings. Fake diamonds just aren't worth anything, let alone being used for a marriage contract. So I'll be keeping the diamond wedding.
It also produced this beauty:
Real men don't buy fake diamonds. Fake men don't pay fake taxes. Fake men don't lie about their motives.
Fake men can't read. Fake men can't keep their promises.
Fake men know how to hide from the truth. Fake men can't make promises they can't keep.
Fake men can't even tell the truth when they think nobody cares, if everybody's watching.
Fake men lie just because they can.
Fake men are the same as us.
They just don't know we're watching.
Of interest in relation to GPT-2
Do you think the comment you're replying to is against fake diamonds because they want you to buy real diamonds?
The guys who get women fake diamonds may result in an uncomfortable partner when someone wows over the diamond.
In my case my wife was a scientist - so a man made diamond was perfect. Same thing physically, less likely to have a conflict origin. My advice, if you know your partner well - get something that works for them. For some that's a diamond.
That said, when it comes to cubic zirconia the stone will definitely scratch with regular wear over several years. If you see a clear stone with scratches, its obviously not a diamond/moissanite and probably cz. To a careful observer, its also not incredibly difficult to tell the difference between diamond/moissanite/cz with the right lighting. Cubic Zirconia lacks the refractive index to really match the brilliance of a similar diamond/moissanite.
Ultimately though I fully agree with the idea of wear whatever you think looks good.
One of the victims was interviewed, and when she confronted the guy with doubts of his sincerity and asked whether the ring he gave her was even real, he took it and made a big scratch in a mirror with the stone to prove it was a real diamond.
Later she said, "After he disappeared, I discovered that cubic zirconia can also scratch glass"
Maybe this type of signalling isn't universal but it definitely serves a (not-always-evil) purpose.
This is because, if someone is not comitted, it's easier to demonstrate commitment falsely to many people by purchasing large quantities of cheap jewelry. Buying over-priced items forces the person signalling committment to put their money where their mouth is.
Think of it as the cost of fake commitment; our culture of wedding-rings, etc, is an attempt to increase the cost of fake commitment.
There are an almost infinite number of healthier ways that we could signal commitment. There's no need for a middleperson, and there's no real value that the diamond industry is providing in exchange for their 'cut' of the money. Diamonds have always been relatively easily faked, and no one other than the recipient will likely be able to tell a fake diamond from a real one -- so they're not even particularly good public signifiers. A private gesture would work just as well.
Honestly, if the engagement process involved dropping a bundle of cash on a public sidewalk and lighting it on fire, even that would be a better system than diamonds.
If the whole benefit of this is that we're making it costly to get married, and thus costly to blithely propose to someone, then I dunno. Getting rid of money is not hard; it's very, very easy. We don't need a complicated, ethically challenged system for that.
On a technical level, you're probably right about diamonds. It's probably a legitimate signalling hack in the romantic sense to buy a zirconia and pass it off as a real diamond. This will probably be a short-term play if women start catching on.
I also disagree that a private gesture ever works as well as a public one, if that's the comparison. Public gestures signal commitment to a wider group, therefore increasing the cost of defection. Public commitments are one of the prime examples of costly signalling (as compared to private commitments) out of game theory. Not saying I'm a game theory authority, or that game theory is always right, but this is textbook.
I agree that burning a pile of cash is even better than giving diamonds in terms of signal-quality.
Seems to me that the global human cost is lower if you have middle-men involved. You have a similar signalling cost but humanity overall retains some value by paying the middle-men, whereas the burn-cash strategy leans 100% towards signalling at the cost of value retention.
Edit - potentially lower if you have middle-men involved.
What I meant with that is that diamonds are a bad public gesture, because no one other than your immediate partner will ever be able to evaluate the authenticity of the diamond. If you're going down the diamond route, you might as well do a private gesture because diamonds already can't be easily publicly verified. If you're concerned about being public, then skip the ring entirely and pay for your partner to go on an expensive trip, or donate money to get something named after them. These are gestures that a fraudster would be unable to easily replicate.
> Seems to me that the global human cost is lower if you have middle-men involved.
If your concern is that you don't want the money wasted, then at least donate it to a charity, or give it to a local business. Some of them would even be willing to officially recognize or publicly name something after your partner, which again would be good public signaling because it would be hard to fake.
The investment signaling theory of diamonds is that we've all decided that in order to efficiently signal, we're going to give money to someone we have no relationship with, who isn't providing a useful or unique service, who has a long history of unethical practices (even if they've cleaned up a bit recently), and who employs the majority of their workforce and conducts the majority of their investments outside of our communities.
If society was actually thinking about engagement from a purely rational signaling point-of-view, it wouldn't pick diamonds as the way to signal. But somehow the diamond industry convinced society as a whole that they were an essential part of the process. What I would contend is that I don't think there was anything rational about that advertising campaign; it preyed on people's emotions, their vanity, and their misconceptions about how the market worked. It's a prime example of an industry making a social system less efficient and more harmful than it otherwise would be in its natural state.
My point is that regardless of whether you think of a diamond as an investment, or as an inherently meaningful item, or as game-theory signaling device -- it's really bad at being all of those things. No matter what direction you come at it from, diamonds are a kind of crappy scam.
For example, maybe they have a great sense of humour, or give good advice, or they invite you to things you like the sound of, or you share a great many interests with them.
If they think failure to purchase a diamond makes you a lesser person in any way, I sincerely doubt either of those might still be true...
I did not expect that much difference!
(The whole concept of the guy spending a fortune on a piece of jewelry before confirming that the girl actually wants to marry him is sexist bullshit, why does he have to make the effort and take the risk to prove his "commitment", but not her?)
Not having a fancy engagement ring is a status symbol for certain circles too, or having an engagement ring that is fair trade, not diamond, self made, or some other set of adjectives. A lot of people are really preoccupied with signaling objects, what those things are changes but the drive doesn't really.
It's complicated precisely because it's signalling, so in context insecurity over the size of the diamond might not be an actual red flag. You might decide to take a principled stand on the matter, and I agree that insistence on a large diamond is a deal breaker, but not everyone has the same upbringing, cultural belief system, or social environment.
There's a whole variety of reasons why that might happen. Societal expectations, economic reasons, insecurity, etc.
People are generally obsessed with status symbols, jewelry isn't really any worse than anything else.
You know plenty of people don't do any of this stuff, right? I get the feeling you meant that to be a broad list that would have virtually everybody covered in one respect or another, but if that was your intention you failed.
I do think people who are not particularly interested in status signaling are somewhat rare.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-psychology-of...
>...apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior.” The more noticeable status disparities are, the more concerned with status people become, and the differences between the haves and have-nots have been extremely pronounced during the economic recession of recent years.
Talk about a book you read? Talk about how a certain restaurant is terrible? Talk about where you went on vacation? Talk about your job? Talk about music you like?
All those things signal status.
Everyone cares about status symbols. And engagement rings is one of the most prolific. It goes right next to fancy vacations, fancy cars, and fancy coffee.
Our choice was mostly founded in finance, but because we thought it was a waste of money not because we couldn't afford it. She also had no interest in walking around with a $5k+ insurance liability on her finger, but she enjoyed the aesthetic of a clear centre stone. The small stones in both her engagement and wedding bands are diamonds because they are cheaper due to being more readily available.
We don't use it as a status symbol or for virtue signalling. Neither of us are active on social media, and I don't even think there is a photo of it online. She normally doesn't even wear the engagement ring, just the wedding band (which is very thin and basic). Our friends are aware it isn't a diamond, but because they asked not because we forced it on them. People who don't ask can think it's whatever they want, neither of us derive our self worth from whether her ring is perceived to be a particular type of stone.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-psychology-of....
>...apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior.” The more noticeable status disparities are, the more concerned with status people become, and the differences between the haves and have-nots have been extremely pronounced during the economic recession of recent years.
It's important to recognize we're talking about generalities here. But status symbols are one of the most important motivating factors in social behavior. Sure, maybe for your wife that's not a status symbol she particularly cares about, but do you really believe that's the majority case?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-psychology-of...
>...apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior.” The more noticeable status disparities are, the more concerned with status people become, and the differences between the haves and have-nots have been extremely pronounced during the economic recession of recent years.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
If we can agree that one hermit, living alone in the woods, exists somewhere in the world, then we can agree that my claim is true: Some percentage (percentages do not imply whole numbers) of people opt out of status games.