Nice Guys Finish Last? Let's Talk About Hoe_Math

Today I wanted to talk about Hoe_math. Ironically, about the time I got around to talking about him, he came out with a video that addressed most of my complaints. So, if he ever sees this, nice work Hoe_math. As a quick recap for those of you who have no idea who I’m talking about, Hoe_math, or HM going forward, is a recent YouTube channel that has been gaining a decent amount of popularity. The channel is dedicated to explaining dating and psychology using fancy hand-drawn graphics.

A quick recap on HM the man himself. From what I’ve pieced together from watching his content, he seems to be a man in his early 30s. On a few occasions, he made it sound like he has never really held down a serious job or career. This came up in the context of not having much money. He seems hopeful that his sudden rise to internet fame will solve his money problems. Based on what he says in his content, he seems to view himself as someone unattractive early on in life. Then he gained muscle and suddenly became attractive. After this point, he seems to have gone through a hoe phase of sorts. This period spanned from 2008 to 2017 according to him. It sounds like the results from the whole experience were a lot of disappointment and a lot of life lessons.

That’s what I’ve pieced together about HM. Some of it or all of it could be wrong but it’s immaterial to what I want to talk about. Moving along, my issues with HM were his generalizations, his content sample size bias, and some of his logic. With the release of his Zones V3 video, he addresses right away that his model doesn’t apply to non-desire-based relationships. So, with that, he acknowledges a good amount of the counterarguments I would levy against his models. I don’t think many human relationships are desire-based. I think desire-based relationships only make up a small fraction of the relationships a healthy person will have.

Moreover, in another video of his, he specifically says that he is generalizing and that he recognizes that there will be exceptions. So, we’ll say that the issue of generalization is addressed. That leads to the next two points which I don’t think have been addressed yet. Let’s talk about the sample size bias. That’s probably not the right term for it. I think it would probably be closer to selection bias. At any rate, the content I see HM making is all social media-based. A common form of his content is to take a video that someone posted on social media, usually a woman, and then explain it using his graphics.

The problem with this is that his whole target demographic consists of people who are social media users. Moreover, he specifically addresses people who post on social media. Based on the two links I tossed in here, not everyone is using social media and most of those who are don’t post. They just lurk instead. So, in light of that, I think that a lot of what HM says is only applicable to a small subsection of the population.

For the rest of the world, the people who aren’t in the top 10% of social media users, HM’s models get messy. The rest of the world would include religious people, intelligent people, and productive people. Girls who are these things don’t exhibit behavior that’s consistent with the models that HM is presenting in his content. Taking it one step further, I would say that a decent amount of what he says isn’t accurate when applied to a religious rural context in general. (Now I’m the one generalizing hehe).

I’m thinking of friends that I have who are happily married and I’m trying to apply the dimensions of HM’s zones model to them and it’s not working. This is what you would expect when trying to apply a generalization to a specific case. That all is to say that HM’s stuff is probably good to know about but that it would probably be risky to apply it to your own personal affairs.

Now on to his logic. In the title, I mentioned the age-old “nice guys finish” last thing. HM released a video about this. I watched it on December 16th, 2023, and added it to my notes at 4:38 p.m. ET as something to address. Now ironically, the video is set to private at the time of writing this (12/17/2023 11:43 a.m. ET). So obviously he must have realized that he messed something up in it which is amusing. I know all too well how that feels. See the eating crow post I wrote a while back. But at any rate, in that video, HM used his V2 zones chart to explain why nice guys finish last.

He essentially broke the situation down into a four-quadrant type of scenario. You have Hot-nice, Hot-jerk, Ugly-nice, and Ugly-jerk. Those weren’t his actual words but since he made the video private, I can’t directly quote him like I was planning to. The order of finishing for these groups is incidentally the order in which I listed them. One comment HM made was that the Ugly-nice guys are mad because they finish last. This is where we get the whole “nice guy” meme. This is true to a certain extent, but I wanted to point something out that is important. I don’t think Ugly-nice guys are mad because they finish last. I think they’re mad because women don’t pick them and then women complain about getting treated like crap by the Hot-jerks they favor over the Ugly-nice guys. The problem here lies with women not accepting accountability for their actions. If women picked the Hot-jerks, got crapped on, and then just accepted it as a consequence for their choices, Ugly-nice guys probably wouldn’t be complaining much at all.

That was one point of logic I wanted to talk about. This next one is a bit more serious. HM seems to be playing both sides of the field at once. On the one hand, he acts like humans are evolutionary deterministic creatures. He explains a lot of his stuff in terms of evolutionary psychology. His zones are an example of this. Men like X, Y, Z and women like X, Y, Z and U, V, W. Yet on the other hand, he’s been working on this self-maximizing content that he’s planning on releasing at some point, which implies some sort of agency. So, the question is when it comes to humans, who is in charge? Are we just an evolutionary product bound by our genetically programmed preferences or are we capable of transcending our basic programming? I think the answer to that question is rather obvious. However, I am highly skeptical of evolution as well which is a bias that I’m admitting here. And before you all jump on me, I’m not saying it isn’t the way it is. I’m just saying that it falls flat on its face down a flight of stairs when it comes to explaining certain things.

I think that humans are capable of transcending our inherent programming. If you want examples then I present to you diet, sleep deprivation, and the fact that some people are not hoes. Diet is a great example. I like junk food. I like it a lot. You could even say that I’m evolutionarily programmed to like the fat and sugar in junk food. However, you don’t see me and millions of other people constantly eating junk food. So, it would seem that we can override the evolutionary pressure toward consuming calorie-dense food to achieve a higher-order goal. How about sleep deprivation? I just finished an excellent book called Why We Sleep. Sleep is something necessitated by evolution because everything under the sun seems to sleep. Yet if you look around you, everywhere you look, you see people perpetually getting less sleep than they need. Once again, you see people resisting an evolutionary desire to achieve a higher-order aim.

Then there is the matter of a lot of people not being hoes. From a male evolutionary perspective, the whole purpose of life is propagating your genes as much as possible. Yet that isn’t really what you see happening. Instead, you see a lot of males missing opportunities on purpose.

According to this link, only 20% of men cheat which means that 80% of men are faithful to their partners. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Especially when given the fact that mate choice copying is a thing. If you ask me, this is another example of people overriding genetic programming. And that’s the point I’m getting at with this whole article.

People can act in accordance with higher ideals. We don’t have to submit to our baser nature. People have died to save other people who are not part of their people group. This is behavior that evolution wouldn’t predict because it defeats gene propagation. A lot of HM’s stuff is based on this not being a thing. He talks about this in his psychology level of thought chart or whatever you want to call it. In conclusion, Hoe_math is kind of all over the place. It will be interesting to see if he gets it all figured out.