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...
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.