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The Evolution of Desire - A Short Book Review
nonfictionnotes.com/2026/02/…
When you look at YouTube, you find countless pop-psychology or dating-guru explanations about what men desire and what women desire in a partner. But if you truly want to examine these preferences in depth—if you want solid, evidence-based knowledge about them—you could read The Evolution of Desire by David Buss.
Over countless millennia, humans evolved mating preferences that were adaptive in ancestral environments. These preferences nudged us toward certain behaviors and away from others. For example, women evolved tendencies to avoid mating with men who lacked resources or the ability to acquire and provide them. Men evolved preferences for cues of fertility rather than age or infertility. In ancestral environments, such preferences increased reproductive success.
I still vividly remember the first chapters of the book—there were genuinely ingenious quotes and conceptual gems throughout, and the final (short) chapter was almost philosophical in tone. The book confronts the reader with fundamental questions:
Why do men and women have the mate preferences they do?
What can individuals do to attract a partner?
What can they do to retain a desired partner?
What strategies are used to end relationships?
Why do attraction and attractiveness change over time?
How do people respond to their own changes—and to changes in their partners?
Why does sexual frequency often decline in long-term relationships?
Why do roughly 40% of men report, after four years of marriage, that their wives are withholding sex?
Why are break-ups so common?
Why does sexual conflict appear to be so persistent, rather than inter-sexual harmony?
And how do some couples manage to stay together for decades?
These are some of the essential questions one encounters while reading the book. It provided considerable food for thought. It sheds light on one’s past relationships or one’s current relationship and on relationships within one’s social environment. It explains why we have inherited certain adaptive preferences and how these preferences evolved.
But it also raises a deeper question: If these preferences evolved because they were adaptive in ancestral environments, are they still adaptive in modern environments? And what does adaptive behavior look like today? Conversely, what does maladaptive behavior look like in modern contexts?
Once you have read this book, enjoyed it, and acquired a solid understanding of human mating—quite unlike the kind of information one might receive from the average dating guru—the next question naturally arises: Where should the journey continue?
Which books should one read next to deepen knowledge in this area and in related fields?
In my case, Robin Hanson comes to mind—particularly his ideas related to social ally theory, a framework that has been elaborated in considerable depth by Jean-Louis Dessalles. Status, in this perspective, is closely linked to the concept of “your value as an ally.” (Geoffrey Miller might phrase it as “your value as a mate.”) The next step, for me, would be to deepen my understanding of social status as a central organizing principle in human behavior.
Martin retweeted
Elite overproduction is gonna hit China HARD.
Pretty insane PhD job market spillover problem in China.
Shenzhen Middle School has over 100 teachers with a PhD, and 150 graduates of Tsinghua/PKU, 100+ alum of Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge
You don’t need a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua to teach middle school math…. but the job market in China basically forces that lol
A Strange Conversation:
Johann Hari:
“Next to me there were two men in, I guess, their mid-twenties. I shamelessly eavesdropped on their conversation while pretending to read David Copperfield. It was clear they had met on an app, and this was the first time they had seen each other in person.
There was something about their conversation that seemed odd to me, and I couldn’t place it at first. Then I realised they weren’t, in fact, having a conversation at all. What would happen is the first one, who was blond, would talk about himself for ten minutes or so. Then the second one, was dark-haired, would talk about himself for ten minutes. And they alternated in this way, interrupting each other. I sat next to them for two hours, and at no point did either of them ask the other person a question. At one point, the dark-haired man mentioned that his brother has died a month before. The blond didn’t even offer a cursory ‘I’m sorry to hear that’: he simply went back to talking about himself. I realised that if they had met up simply to read out their own Facebook status updates to each other in turn, there would have been absolutely no difference.
I felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention – it’s where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego.”
Questioning:
“questioning is an attentional mechanism. We can all harness this mechanism; we can all shift attention and influence thoughts, feelings and actions, just by asking questions. You can choose to intentionally use this ability, or not, and this choice will have an impact on everything from your professional achievements to your personal relationships.”
Lani Watson
Martin retweeted
The best hack for growth on 𝕏 is to follow your reply guys— replies from mutuals are weighted much more heavily in the algorithm
𝕏 just open-sourced the For You algorithm again!
Grok Bot read all 370,523 lines of the code.
Here’s the summary:
Grok does not give your post a “quality” score. For every reader, it guesses what that person will do to your post. Then it multiplies each guess by a weight and adds them up. That total is the value of the post. Highest total goes highest in For You.
These are the production weights
(last synced 12 Aug 2026).
WHAT THE ALGORITHM PAYS FOR
If Grok thinks a reader will:
• copy the link and share it: +20
• reply, on an original post, and you follow each other: +20 (5 + 15 extra)
• quote: +5
• reply (anyone): +5
• share via DM: +5
• follow you from the post: +4
• hit the share button: +2
• repost: +1
• like: +0.5
• click the post: +0.4
• open a link: +0.2
• expand a photo, open a video, or watch a “quality” video: +0.05 each
• click a quoted post: +0.05
• keep reading (dwell time): +0.004
• “dwell” as yes/no: +0
• click your profile: +0
A like is 0.5. Copying the link is 20. That is 40 likes. A normal reply is 10 likes. A follow is 8 likes. Clicking your profile is worth nothing.
WHAT KILLS A POST
If Grok thinks a reader will:
• report it: −234
• mute you: −58.8
• hit “not interested”: −43.2
• block you: −31.2
• not dwell: −0.02
A report is about 468 likes in the other direction. A mute hurts more than a block. “Not interested” also hurts more than a block.
AFTER THE SCORE, THREE MORE HAIRCUTS
1) Same-author penalty.
Your 2nd post in that person’s feed is multiplied by 0.625. 3rd by ~0.44. It never goes below 0.25. Flooding one timeline is coded against.
2) The 25% tax.
If they do not follow you: ×0.75.
Same tax on replies and reposts even when they DO follow you.
Originals from people they follow keep full weight. Replies and reposts are treated as weaker on purpose.
3) Similar-post shuffle.
After scoring, a reranker (θ = 0.65) spreads similar posts apart. You can lose a few spots for looking like the post above you.
HOW YOUR POST EVEN GETS IN THE ROOM
For You is rebuilt every time someone opens it. About 35 posts make the feed.
• They follow you: Thunder (a live store of recent posts from accounts they follow). Up to 1,200 candidates.
• They don’t: Phoenix retrieval (Grok finds “nearby” posts) + SimClusters (Twitter’s 2020 interest clusters, still on). Up to 1,000 and 800.
Then Grok scores all of them together. It does not care which door you came through, except for that ×0.75 tax.
Your own posts never appear in your For You.
Nothing older than 48 hours gets in. There is no “best of last week.”
Small-account bump: under 1,000 followers, under 1,000 impressions, post under 24 hours old. One original can get lifted to position 15 or 16. Not the top. You still have to already be in the top 85% of the pile.
Replies and reposts from accounts the reader does not follow are dropped before scoring. You cannot reply-guy your way into a stranger’s For You.
FILTERS THAT CAN STILL KILL A HIGH SCORE
Ranking and visibility are different machines. A post can score well and then get deleted from the feed.
Followers (in-network) is milder: blocks, mutes, suspensions. NSFW often sits behind a warning instead of disappearing.
Recommendations (out-of-network) are much harsher. Spam, “Do Not Amplify,” NSFW, compromised accounts, impersonation: followers can still see it, For You recommendations will drop it.
Video only gets the tiny “quality view” credit if it is at least 10 seconds.
THE LITTLE-KNOWN PARTS (this is the stuff people miss)
• Scrolling is not a vote. Yes/no dwell is 0. Time spent barely moves the number (0.004).
• Mute damages you more than block (−58.8 vs −31.2).
• Copy-link is the single biggest positive. The share button is only +2. A repost is only +1.
• The mutual-follow boost is originals only, not your replies. They shipped a bigger version in July and cut it after World Cup complaints (extra reply weight 20 → 15).
• The Following tab is not this algorithm. Following is newest-first.
• Grok, Gork, and an internal products account are hardcoded out of the in-network store.
• Scores are cached for 3 hours because posts inside the model cannot “see” each other. That is why they can rank first and filter later.
• Ads, Who to Follow (around slot 7), and prompts are mixed in after ranking. Grok does not score those.
• The real Grok ranking model is a 2560-dimension, 8-layer transformer looking at 1,022 items of the reader’s history. They did not ship those model weights. The numbers above are the formula sitting on top of the predictions.
• SimClusters is still a 2020 model (20M users, 145k clusters). Old Twitter code, still in the path.
• Inferred gender and IP/geo are on as features for the model. Installed apps too.
• Who to Follow shows about every 30 hours. Ads try to sit next to “safe” posts, with a minimum gap of 3 organic posts.
WHAT TO DO
• Write originals people want to reply to, quote, copy, and send to a friend.
• Make the post itself worth following you for.
• Talk with people who follow you back. A reply on your original from a mutual is 20, not 5.
• Stay inside 48 hours. Recycle by posting something new. Old posts do not come back.
• If you are small, post originals in the first 24 hours. Don’t expect slot 1. A bump around 15–16 is the actual gift.
• Space your posts. The second one in the same feed is already worth 37.5% less.
• If you post video, make it at least 10 seconds.
WHAT NOT TO DO
• Do not farm likes. They are almost decorative.
• Do not farm profile visits. Weight is zero.
• Do not farm “time on post.” Yes/no dwell is zero.
• Do not use replies and reposts as a growth hack for strangers. Those are filtered out. Even for followers they get a 25% haircut.
• Do not dump several posts in a row.
• Do not bait reports, mutes, or “not interested.” One predicted report can erase a pile of predicted likes.
• Do not lean on NSFW or spammy tricks for reach.
• Recommendations will drop you even if your followers can still see it.
• Do not wait a week and expect For You to revive the post.
Martin retweeted
I don’f think I’ve ever been truly happy in some kind of over all sense in my adult life. I don’t think I’ve ever said “this is my present and it’s awesome.” Not for a day, not for an hour. I’ve never experienced this feeling.
Martin retweeted
When she’s the woman aching to be wanted in a room full of wives laughing about not wanting their men, the wound isn’t just a dead bedroom, it’s the awful clarity that desire can be lonely on either side.
Walking:
I enjoy taking walks around the city where I grew up. Most of the time, I meet people I know on these walks and have a chat with them, or I talk to people I haven’t met before. It’s a nice way to deepen existing connections and develop new ones.
Designing Your Work Life — Chapter 1 — Are We There Yet?
In most situations, we can either dream about a beautiful and deeply fulfilling future, or we can focus on the present and intentionally design the situation we are in right now. More often than not, it is a dysfunctional belief to aim exclusively for some distant ideal. Instead, it tends to be far more effective to cultivate a constant bias for action—to take meaningful steps, again and again. Along the way, we should also take the time to savor our experiences and successes, while reflecting on the new insights generated by our actions, our experiences, and our successes—or even our failures. I particularly like the idea that savoring “is the essence of getting more out of (rather than cramming more into) your life” by “reengaging your experiences through a savoring reflection.” In a nutshell, the suggested approach is simple: start with a bias for action—just do something. Then adopt the perspective of “good enough for now.” Over time, both a bias for action and the good enough for now mindset should become second nature. By embracing these mindsets, you become “much more available … to other people and to the opportunities that will start showing up all around you.” That is because you are no longer sitting in the backseat of your own life, asking, “Are we there yet?”
Deep Reading:
By spending just three to five hours deeply reading a single book each week, you can read roughly fifty books per year.
Martin retweeted
In adults, limiting smartphone functionality to texting and calls and blocking all social media and mobile internet for 2 weeks significantly improved attention, self-reported well-being and mental health. 90% of participants experienced a benefit.
Martin retweeted
You see these married couples, high income, million dollar home, 3 to 4 kids and then you see destitute idiots. The middle is disappearing quickly.
