> The study you linked is about online dating. While that is clearly important, it's also an arena in which you are basically forced to quantify and pick thresholds for various attributes (and in which it is much easier to just "disqualify" people based on attributes).

Of course in reality women aren't going to reject males on arbitrary and exact thresholds, but on what they consider "too short", which is also related to their own height.

I would agree that online dating is a very tough dating pool and that many other pools exist and that those thresholds are always relative to who is in the pool.

> I don't know, on reading this I was inclined to agree. But on further reflection, speaking as a man, I know there are plenty of other men who have differences of opinion with me about what they care about in a woman - height, body type, etc. There are the endless discussions of "are you a chest man or a butt man".

That's another point I keep making: Men's preferences generally don't matter to the outcome. Average men have far lower standards and are willing so settle for less, because the pool is far smaller. Beggars can't be choosers.

Women have higher standards not only because it's their biological imperative, but because they generally can afford to, at least in a free sexual marketplace.

> That said, you're also making another mistake in your reasoning IMO - you're assuming attractiveness is the only thing that matters in finding a mate. That is simply not true - both in what people say they care about, and by simple observation of actual people.

I'm not exactly saying that. The evidence shows that - absent any societal or economical pressures - attractiveness is the overwhelmingly important factor in mate choice. What people say is irrelevant, studies show that people are not honest about this. People don't want to be seen as "shallow" or "superficial", they also want to believe in a just world.

> Put another way, let's do this experiment: someone takes a hundred couples (let's assume straight couples), takes a picture of the man and the woman separately, then mixes up the pictures. Do you think you'll be able to match the couples based on attractiveness alone? I'm sure there's some correlations here, and you'll be able to do it to some extent, but certainly nowhere near 100%.

Looking at couples is "survivorship bias". You would have to be taking into account the population that fails to find a mate.

Again, just because you can find a short guy with a mate doesn't mean there's mate for every short guy.

> I'm not sure what our point of disagreement is at this point.

I guess you're being "too optimistic".

> 1. It's very rare to be unable to find a sexual partner.

Finding sex - if we were to include prostitution - is very easy. Finding a sexual partner with which to produce offspring is another matter. I would suggest that the number of males that fail at this, particularly in a free sexual marketplace, would be relatively high, perhaps in the double-digits percentages.

> 2. Physical attractiveness and other physical (immutable) attributes, while certainly mattering a lot, will almost certainly not preclude anyone from being able to find a sexual partner.

I disagree with this, at least if we exclude prostitution.

> 3. If you're an around-20-year-old incel, the chance that you will never be able to find a sexual partner, assuming you make some steps to change things you can change for the better, is incredibly tiny. Most people posting in incel forums are not in that situation, and if they think they are, they are mistaken.

I'm not interested in the question of "how many self-described incels on the forums are real incels?", because it's just not measurable. Like I said, people are dishonest in what they say, people like to harbor victim identities, and so on.

At the very least, I doubt only a "incredibly tiny" amount these people couldn't be turned into a reproductive success, because I already ballparked the amount of reproductive failures at over 10% and it makes sense that these would be overrepresented in an incel community.