Nerd Incels & Dating. Part I

Introduction

Sex sells, always has, so let’s talk about it. Specifically, incels, and more specifically incels who…have non-obvious problems. See, from figures like Andrew Tate to Jordan Peterson to Richard Reeves, there’s an established group speaking to a growing population of young, isolated men who have limited professional, social, and romantic prospects. Lots of “Clean your room” and “Make more money” and…speaking to a broad class of men who don’t really have their life together.

Which is cool but isn’t really what I want to investigate. Instead, running off the ACX Survey results again, there’s a pretty broad class of male incels who make good money, have degrees, don’t have social issues, and are single and unhappy about it. And not rare individuals and not just young men, literally hundreds of men in their 30s and 40s, just in the ACX community. I get why the young man working at McDonalds, addicted to weed and video games, has trouble finding a partner and why someone like Jordan Peterson is useful. What’s going on with a 40 year old incel with a PhD making $140k?

How many people are we talking about

So incel is…not a neutral term and I’ll freely admit to a bit of clickbaiting but there’s also a good reason to focus on this specific subpopulation, which is that it removes ambiguity. For example, the general survey has ~2,800 male respondents between the ages of 30 and 45, of which:

1513 are married (54%)

617 are in relationships (22%)

677 are single (24%)

, which is roughly comparable to the general population.

Changes in these categories are not necessarily bad. For example, if more people are staying in committed relationships rather than marrying into their 30s and 40s or if more people are staying happily single, that might be a good thing or a bad thing or have good and ill effects but these are all open to debate and inherently somewhat ambiguous. Focusing on incels, defined very specifically as people who are single and rate their own romantic satisfaction on a scale of 1-10 at a 3 or less removes a great deal of ambiguity. This is, pretty unambiguously, a bad situation.

It's also a little tough because, technically, incel refers to involuntarily celibate men and we’re not technically investigating people who are celibate, we’re investigating people who are single. This is the internet, however, I’ve seen how people use the term, but also…I dunno, nothing else culturally fits and all the new terms I can think of are, like inbach or insin or…just stuff that sounds dumb.

And, for the record, the actual population is 430 men, or roughly 16% of respondents in this age range, are incels. Of the remaining ~250, most are just content. Maybe two dozen respondents reported high romantic satisfaction but, in general, single respondents weren’t happy about their romantic situation; they were either unhappy or content.

Who are these people?

For the red pill audience, the prototypical respondent is in their mid-30s with a Bachelors or Masters, an income varying between an average of $100k and a median of $76k, and a BMI between 24-26. Most of them work some kind of tech job and roughly 40% of them have lost significant weight (10% of bodyweight) in the past.

For my more liberal or leftist audience, who tend to point towards right-wing radicalism among this population, this group is centrist with a slight left-wing tilt and pretty ambivalent about feminism overall.

Which is why the term nerd also seems appropriate and matches most people’s impressions of the ACX audience: nerds. Specifically, slightly chubby, high-income tech workers with a degree.

What’s not the issue

Which I think leads to a few common explanations that people might have that don’t work for this group.

First, most obviously, social awkwardness. I’ll be honest, I wish there were more questions on the survey but I was able to check their social satisfaction score, whether they had more male or female friends, and whether they attended physical meetups, and none of those showed interesting results. I don’t want to completely discount this, I’m not satisfied with the data we have, but there’s no indications of nerd incels being especially social awkward, at least compared to nerds in relationships.

Second, the idea they’ll kind of age out of it. Like, there’s this low key expectation that a lot of nerds are “late bloomers”, that a lot of them will have it extremely rough when they’re young but most of them will find stable relationships as everyone matures. And this absolutely does happen. Roughly half of nerds in their early 20s from this data are incels and a lot of them do find relationships in their late 20s. The point of interest is more that a large and substantial number of them aren’t. After 30, only roughly 25% of incels will leave that category by 45. This is a consistent chunk of the population.

Finally, a couple other things I checked out. First, religious views…I don’t think this data is well suited for it. Honestly, the population is mostly atheist/agnostic and remainder is a hodgepodge. I didn’t see anything relevant there, although to be honest I didn’t look as closely as I could just because I thought the data was messy. Also looked at various political measures, none of which looked terribly relevant.

Next parts

I did, however, find one unexplored factor which showed a strong effect and makes a lot of logical sense but, as I keep experimenting with formats, I’m going to break this up into four parts:

This first one, which lays out the investigation and intrigue.

The next one, should be ready in two weeks, will explore some of the red pill and feminist factors in more detail. I don’t think they explain the “nerd question” but they did show real effects and I think it’s worth exploring.

Third, I’ll show the new factor which has solid explanatory power. Hopefully this will be the most useful ones for the audience because I want to focus on some more practical steps.

Finally, I’ll release all the code in one final post.

Oh, and let me wrap this up with a teaser for the next one.