I want to begin a conversation with the intention of establishing a richer definition of the black pill.

The reason I bring this up is that the black pill was born in a memetic cauldron, not a laboratory. The evidence provided here stands on its own, but does it all really come together as a coherent set of claims?

Our host, /u/SubsaharanAmerican, offers two working definitions of BP. These are not sufficient, in my opinion.

The first:

It is popularly claimed that some of the more immutable traits, such as facial physical attractiveness, height and visually discernible race/ethnicity, play a comparatively minor role in animating social and sexual exclusion. The purpose of this subreddit is to bring this claim's veracity under methodical scrutiny.

I read into this that if we were to prove the listed claims false, the black pill would be true. But that is a very weak definition of the black pill, authorizing us only to say that immutable traits play more than a comparatively minor role in animating exclusion. The black pill subculture really wants to say, "immutable physical traits command social and sexual exclusion." Without that stronger claim, the politics of the black pill evaporates.

The second definition is richer:

Blackpill Theory of Sexual Attraction: the idea that mate preferences in WEIRD societies are primarily guided by lookism, tribalism and, for heterosexual women, heightism. This is generally paired with the recognition that, for some individuals, the relationship between the amount of goal-directed effort expended in order to attract and court preferred mates (either by oft-touted self-help methods or by "one weird trick" courtship techniques) and one's success rate may be so poorly correlated that, for these individuals, such narrowly targeted effort is naive at best.

This definition has two parts, first the claim that attraction is primarily determined by (immutable) physical attributes (looks, race, height), and second the claim that this has something to do with the feeling that effort to win a mate might be "naive at best."

The two claims are linked weakly, as being "generally paired," but this is insufficient. Black pill culture wants to assert things like, "Because lookism is true, it's over." It's "because" not "and" that defines the black pill.

But there's a more serious problem. The word "naive" involves valuation, not facts, and this is where the politics of the black pill spill out. At what point, under what conditions, is someone authorized to say, "I can do no more"? This is about interpretation and perspective, not facts. I think the black pill cannot be proven by science alone, but requires additional argumentation to establish the plausibility of the "it's over," without which, again, the politics of the black pill dissipates.

Now that we've seen there is science confirming at least some of the assumptions of the black pill, it makes sense for us to clarify the object of scrutiny.

Our objective should be to arrive at a definition of the black pill that

  1. Is accessible, with technical supports,

  2. Decomposes the black pill into discrete claims that can be testable and supported by scientific studies,

  3. Identifies elements of the black pill that are not testable, but can be supported by argumentation.

I've sketched out some ideas, but I want some feedback first.

Does anyone else think we need this?