Don't watch this video. I promise you that there is nothing important in this video. I don't know why I even made it. This is probably the least important video on the entire internet and if you keep watching you will waste your time, guaranteed.
[look distracted]
In fact if you watch this video to the end against my express wishes I will consider it a personal betrayal.
[waste some more time]
Still watching? Last chance to turn it off.
Ok the truth is that this video is dangerous. There's a real chance it could lead to psychological problems. I'm serious. This is a dangerous video. It might turn you into a Satanist. It might turn you into a nihilist. Remember what they say about staring into the abyss. The abyss stares back into you.
This video is like a labyrinth. [The Shining] You could get lost in it. Is that what you want? Are you sure that you can find your way out? There is a monster in this video, too. Just like the minotaur. If you watch the video all the way through, there's no guarantee that you won't be eaten. That's the real reason I don't want you to watch.
Remember what happened to King Minos. Posidon told King Minos how to acquire a perfect divine white bull. King Minos was supposed to sacrifice this bull to Posidon, but Positon was too greedy, too covetous, too struck by the bull's beauty to sacrifice it. Instead, he substituted an ordinary bull, hoping that would be good enough.
However, King Minos's wife Pasiphaë was also enamored of the bull. She asked the royal slave Daedalus to construct a mechanical cow that she could ride in so that the bull would ride her. How'd you like that? Cucked by your own farm animal. And that's what could happen to you if you don't understand this video all the way to the very end.
That wasn't the end of it because Pasiphaë gave birth. Minos's shame was named Asterius he was part man, part bull. A minotaur. As the minotaur grew up, Minos was unable to conquer him. He was a juvenile delinquent who could not be socialized. Instead, Minos ordered Daedulus to design and construct a labyrinth to imprison him. Young men and women were periodically put in the labyrinth to feed the minotaur, where they would wander in darkness as he stalked them.
Thus, divine gifts are not always good for you. As a result of his greed, his desire to avoid sacrifice and to keep what was his, King Minos was cursed with a wife who no longer desired and with a responsibility to feed your step child with perfectly healthy children. That's what's at stake if you don't understand this video completely.
But never fear because you are Thesius and I am the thread that connects the center of the labyrith to the exit. You will never get lost when you have me as your guide. I will show you the difference between the true nature of reality and shadows projected onto the wall.
It has taken me a long time to make this video because it turns out that the Handicap Principle is a more complex idea than I originally understood. There is a lot of scientific controversy surrounding it and each time I tried to explain it I would realize that there was some kind of question that I hadn't fully appreciated. Currently the idea is not not universally accepted by biologists, in fact it may be falling out of favor at the moment. If you do a search on the idea now, a paper that comes up is "". It has taken me a long time to understand every issue that has confused people about the Handicap Principle in the past. In this video I will go over everything, I will look at objections and explain why I don't agree with them, but that will be at the end of the video. I will take a very long time just to develop the idea first so that there is no confusion about what we're talking about.
So if you're already familiar with the Handicap Principle and know about the controversy, don't worry looks like I'm neglecting the latest research on this topic. Please be patient. This video is a full examination but a lot is required to develop the proper foundations. Also if you've seen "The Beakon, the Bunker, and the Faulty Node", you can think of this video as a continuation of that, although you don't need to understand that video in order to watch this one. There was supposed to be a part 2 but as I did my research for it I came to understand that this idea is way bigger than I was prepared for at the time so it took a while before I was ready to go into it. This is going to be my final statement on this issue so that I'll never need to explain handicaps again.
The Handicap Principle, says that the only honest signal of fitness is a handicap. I will provide a more precise definition of handicap later on, but basically it is something that reduces your ability to survive, it's something that's visibly anti-fitness. It's something that brings you closer to insolvency, failure, death. And it's something that other people can see easily.
Zahavi came up with this idea by asking questions about the functions of elaborate displays that some animals have, such as the peacock's tail. Clearly the tail has to do with attracting females but it also appears to be the exact opposite of something that would make life easy for the male. Clearly it is a handicap that the male bares because it is programmed into his own DNA. Now if you were some kind of Darwinist, then you might think all animals would be trying to be fit, not trying to be unfit. So why is it apparently a good idea for these males to hurt themselves this way?
Zahavi proposed that the tail's ability to interfere with the male's survival was, in fact, inexorably connected to the reason that the female took it seriously. That's what makes it honest, and honesty is what she likes about it. There are diminishing returns with the costly tail. It may be attractive to females but at some point it starts killing the male so much that and he doesn't have enough time to meet females, no matter how beautiful they think he is. And these diminishing returns get worse more quickly for the less fit males, so they optimize at a lower level than the more fit males do.
If he's not as good at running from the tiger, then he's getting caught and eaten if he tries to grow the same tail as another male who is better at running. He can't afford it. If he's not as strong then he going to weigh himself down and be an easy catch for the tiger while the fit male is still spy enough to get away. He's going to be exhausted around females while the fit male can still be vigorous. So it's honest because only fit males can afford to handicap themselves the most.
So the tail is an honest signal of fitness because it is a handicap. If the tail was not costly on the male then he could use the tail to lie to the female, if the peacock could convince females to mate with him without bering that cost presumably he would, therefore handicaps are the only honest signal of fitness, which means they are the only good reason to get horny. So a pretty important idea.
And when we say that handicaps are honest, that does not mean that they are honest absolutely. They are honest on average. That means that the most handicapped candidate is not necessarily the best. But it does mean that a sample of the most handicapped candidates is likely to contain the top candidate.
The problem that handaps solve is that searching for a good candidiate is costly. It takes a lot of effort to figure out who is really good. Especially since they will all be trying to tell you they are good. They all will be trying to conceal their weaknesses. Handicaps reduce the amount of time you spend searching through all these candidates because no other method of rejecting the vast majority of candidates without thinking about them will more reliably fail to reject the true best candidate. In other words, you never have time to actually look at all the candidates carefully. You have no choice but to reject some without giving them a proper look. If you tried to give a serious evaluation to everybody, you would waste too much time looking at candidates. If you use handicaps, you get a good sample of candidates that is small enough for you to look at carefully but still probably has the one you want in it. If you use something other than handicaps, then your sample isn't as good because liars will be more likely to game their way into it.
So if the peacock did not have his tail, the peahen would be like someone who is trapped in a labyrinth. Not finding her way through the labyrinth is like her children being eaten. It's like her eggs are being wasted because they are being fertilized by less fit males. The peacock's tail makes it so that the labyrinth is much smaller, small enough for her to find the exit with her tiny brain.
So handicaps are not good for getting an accepted offer, but they are they are good for getting your foot in the door. Without them you don't get to make a sales pitch at all but with a handicap you don't necessarily make a sale. They are good for getting an interview or a date but once you are actually at that interview or on that date, then you have to actually be good, ok? At that point the handicap has served its purpose and it has gotten you a real genuine opportunity to be evaluated that the other party will actually think carefully about. You saw that in the video. First you got the handicap and now you're getting the sales pitch. So at the end of the video, if you accept my offer, then the idea goes into your head and becomes part of your life.
The logic of the handicap principle is that if you can afford to throw something away, then there must be something left over. It's the leftover that you're really interested in, but you don't get to see that. So the handicap is not in and of itself valuable and it does not magically make the male valuable to grow one. It just makes him a better salesman. Remember what we learned from The Little Prince: "The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen. The desert is beautiful because somewhere it hides a well." So truth and beauty are not the same thing but beauty points you towards a hidden truth. Saint Exupery did not know about handicaps but he understood that there is a connection between visible beauty and concealed truth. Handicaps explain why that is.
Let's go a little more into why handicaps are honest. They are not honest because of magic but because they create an incentive to be honest. Males who are dishonest die out quicker than males who are honest. If they handicap too much, the environment kills them before they can meet very many females. If they handicap too little, then females do not give them enough attention, just like King Minos.
But just because you have an incentive to be honest doesn't mean that it's easy. It's a pretty difficult problem, in fact. This is a game with a very complex strategy because the only way you'd know how to be honest is to compare yourself to the other males. If males with a similar handicap to yours are more fit than you then you are handicaping too much, whereas if they are less fit then you can probably afford a bigger one. So the way to win the handicap game is to understand the rest of the population. So handicaps are something that make people want to look around and understand each other. That's something I love about them. Of course peacocks are not doing that because they don't choose how big of a tail to grow, but their DNA effectively has to guess at what everybody else is doing. But if you were to actually apply intelligence to this game it would end up a very intellectually challenging game. If the males were very good at playing it then you would expect a very strong correlation between handicap and true fitness, whereas if they were bad at it, then the correlation would be weaker.
Never forget what Swedenborg taught us of what he learned about heaven and hell during his visionary travels to spiritual dimensions as well as to the other planets of the solar system, Hell is a place of constant war, heaven is a place where everyone naturally naturally finds their own place.
Very much like Dante's heaven. In heaven, there are 8 levels and everyone naturally goes to their own level and maximizes their own happiness. Someone who belongs in level 2 is not happier closer to god at level 8. Handicaps are just like that. So handicaps take us from hell into heaven because they make everyone want to select his proper rank rather than everybody trying to kill each other to get into the top position. That's what's great about them. Sound too good to be true? Well it is because there's a catch. Remember I said that there's a monster in this video. I will reveal the identity of the monster later on.
So, Zahavi used the word handicap to describe these kinds of apparently anti-fitness features like the peacock's tail. In retrospect, this metaphor has confused people because it's not specific enough. A better word that Zahavi also used was waste and I think that is actually clearer because when you think about it something could be a handicap and still have its own benefits as long as the costs outweighed the benefits. However, that would actually make it worse as a signal because then the reader of the signal has to start thinking about how do the costs and benefits relate to one another? What is the net cost? If you say waste then you know we mean something that is not beneficial. Of course, the handicap is beneficial because it's good for attracting females really you have to say that the handicap is waste if there are no females around.
Another good word, I think, is sacrifice. So the Handicap Principle says that a visible sacrifice is the only reliable way to elicit desire because it's the only honest signal of fitness. If you want to take someone to bed, you must show your sacrifice and when you do, and if it is the right kind of sacrifice of the right proportion that is the moment that you will arouse interest. Not the moment that you get a yes to sex. The moment you get a yes to your sales pitch. Conversely, if someone is trying to get you in bed with them, you have to make sure they show you the sacrifice or else you have to say no.
Now traditionally, we have this idea of a sacrifice as being like a payment to some divine force and you get back whatever you asked for. However, the divine force is more like a stand-in for some process that we don't understand how it works. A handicap is not a payment that automatically gets you laid. If the sacrifice isn't accepted, you don't get your money back.
I've learned that people find the handicap principle really unappealing for this reason. They don't want to pay and get nothing for it. However, if the handicap principle is true, then you'd better not resist it and try to find some way out of it because all you're doing is failing on the first step towards the most important moment of your life.
Have you heard that love is given without expectation of return? Handicaps are like that, except you're not giving, you're sacrificing, with no expectation of return. And that doesn't mean you should expect no return. If you get no return, you should probably find someone else. But you have to make the sacrifice no matter what! It is the only way, just accept it or you'll end up like King Minos.
Now to me this handicap idea is really important, but when I talk about it with people, I see their eyes glaze over like they think I'm talking about something really esoteric and academic. No, this idea is not angels dancing on the head of a pin, it's about eliciting desire. It's about the nature of beauty. So pretty much the most important thing that you could possibly understand.
But it's not only about sex because there are other reasons to signal fitness besides sex. It's about communicating value to people who don't know you. I use handicaps all the time. I use them to convince people to watch long videos full of nonsense. When I learned about this idea, it felt like learning magic. Really, it was like magic. And the reason it was like that is that this is a poorly understood idea so if you understand it you can pretty much put yourself ahead of anyone else who doesn't and that's a lot of people. So it's an overlooked idea which means it's potentially profitable.
So although the handicap principle is definitely a challenging idea to understand, I think the benefit is very worth the cost and I see the handicap principle very much as an idea for normal people, not for nerds.
A nerd may be good at talking about the idea so you think he might like it because it's good for showing that he's smarter than everybody else but I find that nerds actually don't like the Handicap Principle because they are not as good at actually doing it.
And this is why it's not such a good idea for academics because although it's not an easy idea to understand and therefore something that might appeal to an intellectual who wants to be smarter than everybody else, it is also something that forces you to engage with reality, which is what a lot of intellectuals don't want. They want to stay in their world of perfect Platonic forms. If you Handicap you have to think about how much cost you can bear, and that means you have to think about the real world.
Really I find that intellectuals often don't like the Handicap Principle because it tells them about how they are not fit. The Handicap Principle may not be an easy idea to understand and it may be good for showing off how smart you are, but it's NOT good for hiding in a land of Platonic ideals. Some nerd who understands the Handicap Principle cannot go on telling that he's better than a jerk that women actually like. Once he understands the Handicap Principle he has to either get better or admit that he doesn't really deserve girls.
Not just nerds. Many people don't like this idea. From a certain perspective, the idea is pretty grim. it says that you have to hurt yourself in order to be attractive without a guarantee of a positive outcome. The whole theory about why it works is that you are actually bringing yourself closer to death. People don't like that. People don't want to do it.
I think that the handicap principle has a lot to do with why men and women resent each other. They each blame the opposite sex for demanding the sacrifice they have to make in order to get a good relationship started with no expectation that actually will. They attribute ill-will on the part of the opposite sex. But the truth is that no other method is efficient enough to be acceptable.
Last chance to turn off the video. If this truth is going to blackpill you, better just forget about what you've heard so far. I think it's well worth it because if you understand the game then you can optimize the strategy but if you can't handle it, then this is the last chance to turn down the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Good luck eating the fruit of the tree of life without it!
. Of course, Bitcoin already uses handicaps but I think we can use them for other things.
This is an idea that is directly relevant for getting laid. If you're familiar with Rollo Tomassi, remember he says "You can't negotiate desire", which is a mistake that men often make. Well the Handicap Principle is about eliciting desire. So if you've got a problem with not enough desire, here's how to get it. But it's good for other things, too. It's good for getting a relationship started with people who don't know you. It's good for walking in a room and being seen as someone valuable. And it's good for searching for good information because DNA is just one kind of information but we can apply the idea to other kinds of information, and right now we have a very big problem with finding good information.
Does it sound too good to be true? Well it is because there's a catch, and the catch is that in order to use a handicap optimally, you have to stop lying to yourself. It's an honest signal of fitness so in order to use it, you have to actually be fit. You must completely stop pretending that you are better than you really are. You can't afford to buy more than you deserve or you will hurt yourself too much, and I've seen that there are many people out there who want to lie so much about how great they are that they will truly kill themselves over it. That's the monster I mentioned earlier that is stalking you in this video. Conversely, if you are greedy and don't to handicap you will end up like King Midas: without love and with responsibilities that you don't want and can't get rid of.
I use the Handicap Principle all the time and to me it feels like magic. It is like having the favor of the gods instead of their opprobrium. And I'm not saying I'm an expert at getting laid. I use it to get people to watch hour long videos of nonsense. If you want to win, then you need this magic that I am offering you. But if you accept this magic but you still want to tell yourself that you're greater than you really are, then you'll end up just like King Minos. Your wife will like farm animals better than you and you'll be stuck kidnapping children to feed to your step son.
females and fit males
Think about this from the female's perspective. She's like "All these males want to get their semen into me by any means necessary, how do I know which jizz I really want? Every single male is just going to tell me that he's God's gift to peahens! How can I believe anything he says about himself? Aha! The tail means if he lies, he dies! Now I feel hot! Now I know who I love!
And when I say female, I mean peahen. In humans, both males and females have handicaps, so both get the female perspective. Men benefit because women have breasts. Women benefit because men have confidence and because they get negged. So this is an appealing idea. You love handicaps and you use them all the time. They are the reason you get horny. If you don't like them you're going to end up like King Minos so just accept it and play the game. Figure out your correct rank and show us what it is.
Now I've given you the basic idea. The rest of the video is about going way way into detail about everything I just said. I'll do some examples from Zahavi, then I'll talk about Graffen's mathematical model, and then I'll talk about modern objections to the handicap principle.
Zahavi began to see similar patters everywhere in nature. Of course there are many types of birds that have beautiful plumage. Peacock's certainly don't have a monopoly on that. We often see a pattern in which the male bird is beautiful and the female is boring. That suggests that the female is doing all the work raising the chicks and the male is only contributing his sperm. She is making a very big mistake with a very big cost if she mates with the wrong male, so he has to prove to her that he's good. Whereas it's not a big deal if he mates with the wrong female, so she doesn't have to prove anything to him. He's just trying to maximize on total number of females.
However, there is also a pattern in which both the male and the female are beautiful and they look similar to one another. When we see this pattern that means that both sexes have to prove to one another that they are fit, which means that they are probably contributing equally to the raising of the chicks.
Some birds are beautiful just because they have bright shiney plumage, and not because they are carrying a heavy weight. Zahavi would say that this kind of plumage is also a handicap because it emphasizes health and grooming. If you're a drab, boring bird you can be covered in shit and no one will notice but if you are a shiney irridescent bird then any failure of grooming is much more obvious.
Of course this is not only a pattern that we see in birds. Foxes are also like this and they have little families with two parents as well.
We have looked at structures that appear to exist to look beautiful for the opposite sex. Darwin called these ornaments. There are other kinds of structures that seem to be good for communicating strength, that Darwin called weapons. These include horns and antlers. Weapons seem to be more addapted to communication between males. The males try to establish and defend a territory from other males and then they get the females that live within that territory.
Of course, these weapons communicate strength just by looking at them without having to fight, so you wouldn't think that females would just ignore them. However, the reason a signal of fitness is so important for males who defend territory is that fighting is dangerous and if you can know the strength of your adversary, you can be a lot safer
Klingon batleth
And I have an email from Zahavi
email from Zahavi.
So remember that. Bucks without antlers are more lethal. If it wasn't for horns, the bucks would be trapped in a labyrinth, not knowing who they can fight. The minotaur is like dying in a fight instead of retreating and gaining territory elsewhere.
Some birds have wattles and these appear to function as targets that another bird could peck. Therefore the bird must be good at fighting.
Some animals have beards and that appears to be a similar idea because his opponent can grab the beard. Therefore he must be good at fighting if he can display a beard.
There are also signals that are interspecies. The event that Zahavi remembers as having originally sparked this idea had to do with an antelope.
long hair
There are also ways that predators may communicate with prey.
spots and stripes
Key to its meaning "medium is the message"
I've given you a rough description of Zahavi's idea. Now I'm going to try to make the idea more precise. I have some fine distinctions that I want to make clear. This section of the video is about making a very clear, precise theoretical idea of the Handicap Principle.
There is an apparent paradox with the idea that a Handicap should reduce fitness somehow because clearly if a handicap really reduced fitness, then it wouldn't really work. Animals with handicaps would die out. Instead what we mean is that the handicap should reduce fitness when we eliminate the benefit of of the handicap as a signal. In other words, when there are no females around, the handicap is bringing you closer to death so that's bad for fitness. But when there are females around then the handicap is also bringing you closer to more offspring and that's good for fitness. So the benefit of the handicap is worth the cost but without its benefit as a signal it would be a net loss.
Getty makes a distinction between fecundity and viability. Viability means your ability to stay alive. Fecundity means how much females like you. Fitness is a combination of both of these. If Zahavi had used this terminology, he would have said that handicaps reduce viability in order to improve fecundity.
To illustrate this, I want to discuss a bad example of a handicap that I have heard other people use, and that is big muscles. Big muscles certainly demonstrate cost because it must have taken work to build up a good physique. However, big muscles do not reduce a man's viability. They increase it. Thus, there are big benefits to big muscles regardless of how much women like them.
Big muscles are not a sacrifice. You may have to sacrifice something in order to get big muscles, like time spent at the gym that could have been spent or something else, but they are not a sacrifice and they are not a handicap. If you want to think of examples of handicaps, think of something that's more like a literal sacrifice where you are actually burning up perfectly good food.
Muscles are more like what biologists call a cue. A cue is something visible that indicates fitness in some way because of the functionality of the body itself, not because it is a signal that evolved specifically to signal fitness. A cue can be sexy but if you tried to use it as a signal then it could be used deceptively. In other words, a less fit male could develop big muscles in order to compensate for his defficiencies and to appear greater than he really is, and he could probably do this his whole life without getting into trouble over it.
I think you would say that a good man would have a good physique but a good physique is not a good way of eliminating bad candidates because you still get plenty of bad candidates. A good signal of fitness will enable you to narrow down your search to a reasonable number of candidates but physique won't do that.
If we are talking about handicaps in humans, then breasts are the best example. Of course, breasts are functional but they are also handicaps because they contain fat that inhibits the woman physically. This fat could be used for producing babies, but it is not, and therefore, she must be fertile.
If we are talking about handicaps in human men, then I think the best examples are things that are not part of the body. They are behaviors and adornments. What about confidence? Confidence is a handicap. Confidence means that you project your actions so that you can't retreat or backtrack easily. Mistakes become more obvious when you are confident.
What about being a jerk? That goes along with confidence but it takes things one step further because it's anti-social. Man is a social animal, so acting anti-social directly interferes with your own fitness. No wonder women like jerks so much.
What about clothing? Human fitness is about production. It's about economics. With human males, it's less about your body than it is about what can be on your body. What about signs of wealth?
What about tombs? What about temples and cathedrals? What about art?
The Peacock is beautiful because of his DNA.
Without beauty, we end up lost in a labyrinth. But truth is not beauty. Beauty is a sacrifice.
Let's say that the human population was small enough that you knew the life history of every member of the opposite sex. If you had that kind of intimite knowledge about them, the would probably have a hard time deceiving you. Handicaps become important when you start getting too many candidates who you don't know very well, which is the whole problem of the modern world. Handicaps put all candidates in a ranked ordering. You look for the best candidate among the top 10 or top 100, whatever you have time for. Those top candidates you give a thorough evaluation. The rest are eliminated without giving them a close evaluation. The handicap, the sacrifice, is for rejecting candidates who are probably unqualified so that you don't have to bother with them.
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You could say maybe a cue will be good for a first round of selecting people but if it was you'd think it would become more efficient by evolving into a handicap. So the handicaps come first, generally speaking, and then after that come other things that would be more like reading a resume or hosting an interview or going on a date.
You can have a handicap on a resume because an eye catching resume is a short resume.
"You can't negotiate desire."
My next important distinction is between cost and waste. Cost means that something good was lost in order to have something else. It means opportunity cost. If you're talking to an austrian economist and you hear the word cost, think opportunity cost. Waste is more specific than cost. Waste costly but it is also not beneficial. It is pure cost and no benefit. Zahavi said specifically that handicaps are waste. Of course, handicaps have a very big benefit and that is that they get you laid, so that's why you need the distinction between viability and fecundity. As far as your viability goes, a handicap is not just a net cost but pure waste.
According to Zahavi, a handicap is not just something that visibly reduces viability. It reduces viability because it is waste. Something could reduce viability in the net and still have costs and benefits. Zahavi says no, that is not a handicap.
Since the only honest signal of fitness is a handicap, this implies that something with costs and benefits to viability is not an honest signal of fitness.
It seems that this idea of pure waste is kind of an ideal that nothing can really satisfy perfectly. I don't know of anything that has literally no benefit. If you think about it enough you can find some way of using it. In Bitcoin we have proof-of-work, and that's as close to a pure handicap as you can get but it produces heat.
But it's important to keep the distinction between waste and cost in mind because there are fallacies in later authors that are based on not keeping it in mind.
However, Graffen did not model a handicap as something that is pure waste. He modeled it as something that reduces viability. And the conclusion of his paper was that an honest signal of fitness must reduce viability.
This was a very important conclusion but it is not the same as the handicap principle, and the big problem was that neither Graffen nor Zahavi seem to have noticed. Later biologists have taken Graffen's model as the statement of the Handicap Principle. When they do that they forget about waste versus cost and that makes a big difference.
Let's think about the female perspective again. And remember when I say female, remember that I really mean the interpreter of the signal. From the female perspective, some signals of fitness are much easier to interpret than others.
Graffen's model does not include the idea that females incur a cost to interpreting a signal, but this is where waste versus cost really matters. Something that is pure waste just doesn't have much ambiguity about it, so it's easy to interpret and therefore preferable to females over something that demonstrates cost in some other way.
Graffen's Principle of Costly Signals: An honest signal of fitness must demonstrate cost and reduce viability.
This idea is so important that it could save your life because it's about how to find good information. When Zahavi originally talked about it, he was talking about information in the context of DNA and biological reproduction, but today we have a problem with not just that but with the spread of other types of information. We have a big problem with understanding the true global state of the world. We have a big problem with misinformation and disinformation that is designed to manipulate you. The Handicap Principle is the only way out of this problem. It's the only way to deal with information overload that actually works.
Remember, bad ideas can kill, so understanding this idea is a matter of life and death. There's a book by Gad Saad about parasitic ideas called "The Parasitic Mind". He explains the problem but he doesn't know how to solve it. The solution is handicaps. So the handicap principle can be used to rescue you from bad ideas. I think if we give memes handicaps then we can promote fit memes a lot more than we do now. Fit memes are not parasitic, they are symbiotic. We can use the handicap principle to ensure that our collective consciousness promotes our collective growth rather than what it does now, which is to propagandize people into being easy to parasitize.
I have another bad example of a handicap that I hear sometimes when I talk to people and that's buying a woman dinner. This one isn't as bad as big muscles because it seems that the idea of a gift as a handicap sometimes works but does not work very well with humans.
When you think about it, Zahavi's first apprehension of the Handicap Principle happened with something that is like a gift because the antelope simultanously reduces the viability of the antelope while improving the viability of the leopard, since it makes the antelope easier for him to catch.
However, the problem with gifts is that they open you up to exploitation because someone could accept a gift not because they are actually interested in evaluating your fitness but just because they want the benefit of a gift. Now in a relationship that is inherently exploitative, such as that between predator and prey, this is not a big problem. But it is a problem when it comes to mating because you don't want to attract people who want to exploit you.
Now I don't think you can really get away with not giving a woman free stuff unless you like women with no breasts but gifts should not serve the function of being a handicap. She should already be convinced that you're fit before you buy her something. You need to use a better signal first, before you get to dinner, that's good for attracting people who won't exploit you. A handicap that communicates strength.