Too Many Whats? Part II. Attending To The Wrong Stressors

I'm interested in sources and varieties of executive dysfunction. I'm starting out by examining maladaptive biases of attention through simple concept analysis. Here's the starting point: What words or phrases make sense in place of X in these sentences?

• I'm facing too many X at once.
• I've been dealing with X for too long without a break.
• I perceive the presence of important X too readily.
• I find myself systematically dealing with the wrong X.

I introduced this problem in my last post and didn't make much conceptual progress besides listing a bunch of Xs. Well now I've got a bigger list of Xs broken into clusters and the clusters have descriptive labels.

There are lots of words that fit, and I think they can all be called difficult situations or stressors. The situations and the stressors can both be perplexing, embarrassing, threatening, worrying, or otherwise producing pain or unpleasant emotions. Synonyms for "situations" like events, developments, and incidents also fit in for X. "Issues" and "matters" both fit in for X, and maybe those are kind of like synonyms for stressors?

If a situation is only a little bad, then we focus on the small things that are wrong and we talk of complications, tricky details, and intricacies. When situations are moderately bad, we call them predicaments, problems, troubles, and quandaries. When situations are pretty bad, we call them crises, disasters, and emergencies. There are situations worse than those, like catastrophes, but they don't stand in for X in all of the above sentences, because they're not ever going to be the wrong situations to focus on.

Now we've touched on difficult situations. How about stressors? These can also be situations, but they're categorized by the emotions that we have in response to them.

Stressors producing annoyance are called annoyances, disturbances, nuisances, messes, and inconveniences. Annoyance is sometimes a reaction to low-level pain and sometimes it's a reaction to being interrupted (and if psychologist/behavioral economist George Ainslie is right, being interrupted from appreciating one's baseline utility level is the very mechanism of pain, though I doubt it). If we internally use a decision process, like a POMDP, as a model of the cause of our annoyance, then the stressor is called a pest, among other names.

Stressors producing anger or fear are called dangers, hazards, threats, attacks, personal offenses, harassments, and torments. If we model the stressor with a decision process, it's called an enemy. If we throw disgust into the mix of anger and fear, we've got terrors, horrors, and good old fashioned offenses against god and nature. If we model these with a decision process, they might be called monsters. These things with a disgust component, the horrors and monsters, they make me think of varieties of moral outrage, like conservative puritanism and liberal social justice.

Actually, fear comes in a few forms, doesn't it? There's angry fear, like the response to threats and offenses and horrors that we just mentioned, and there's surprised fear, like when someone says boo (the causes of which probably won't fit in for X above, since they're surprises and not things we could focus too readily on in anticipation), and there's sad fear, like dread from a painful situation you can't escape, and there's anxious fear. Anxious stressors might be called perils or risks. I'm not sure about the names of stressors that produce dread. Maybe dread is just fear without anger when you can't fight back, and the causes of dread are the same dangers, hazards, threats, et cetera.

Stressors producing perplexity are questions, doubts, and confusions. Perplexity is one of those epistemic emotions like surprise and credence that's much less visceral and hedonic than other social emotions, but it's still the sort of thing you can focus on too much, to the detriment of your executive function.

Stressors producing shame are self-doubts and embarrassments. It's interesting that this cluster has the word doubt in it also, no? I don't think perplexity is like shame at all. There's a puzzle for you. What are the doubts that produce perplexity about, if doubts about self-adequacy produce shame? Maybe perplexity doubts are about how to perform, rather than whether to risk performing.

Alongside things that produce emotions, names for emotion-like things fit pretty well in place of X also: pains, negative feelings, and intrusive thoughts.

I don't have names for the emotions produced by the next three stressor groups. What emotions do you feel when you're impeded, conflicted, or burdened?

1. When we're prevented from doing one thing that we want, the stressors are obstacles, difficulties, defeaters, drawbacks, hindrances, impediments. Maybe that's sadness? Or anxiety? Or a second class of annoyance.

2. When we're prevented from doing either of two contrary things, the stressors are called binds, constraints, and dilemmas. When these stressors are non-physical, we call them conflicting desiderata, conflicting deontological prescriptions, conflicting social expectations, and informal contradictions. Maybe that's anxiety? It also sounds like sadness.

3. Sometimes our stressors are specifications of necessary work that come to us from conscience or external social authority. These are burdens, obligations, demands, onuses, and hard jobs. If annoyance is a response to low-level pain or interruptions, what do you call the response to being chronically interrupted or chronically in moderate pain? I don't know. Maybe burnout. I know that's not a standard emotion. It could just be sadness or anxiety again.

If there's not a super obvious associated emotion, maybe they should just be called difficult situations and not stressors.

I've got just a few more clusters of things that can fit in for X. Each of these clusters seems to refer regularly to two classes of stressor: the situations are differently stressful if they're directly affecting you or if it's just your job to fix broken situations that otherwise wouldn't directly affect you.

You can deal with defects, errors, failures, faults, mistakes, and malfunctions. 

You can deal with wrongdoings, infractions, and sins. 

You can deal with scheduling conflicts, time constraints, resource shortages, and resource demands. 

You can deal with interpersonal conflicts, disputes, controversies, misunderstandings, bad arguments, altercations, and disagreements.

When these directly affect you, maybe the associated emotions are sadness, shame, burnout, and anger, respectively.

But you've already named the stressors associated with those, Preinfarction! What's the difference between these stressors and the previous ones? Where's your rigor, Pre? Where's your ontological commitment to categorizing concepts per genus et differentiam?

Now I am all done and completely satisfied with the product of my efforts.

Too Many Whats? Part I. An Investigation Of Problem-Like Concepts

There's a method of Concept Analysis I sometimes use when I have a big list of words (like an English spelling dictionary) and I want to sort it into narrower clusters: I come up with a sentence that has a blank spot which can be filled by some of the words on the list (maybe two or three select words to start the process) but not some of the others, and I use the sentence as a binary classifier. "Does this sentence scan naturally when I let its variable equal this value"? Often it works better to start with a few blanked-sentences which all fit well with the seed words: a cluster of tests to point your attention toward a cluster of concepts.

Here's an example: What words can stand in for X in all of these phrases?:

• I'm facing too many X at once.
• I've been dealing with X for too long without a break.
• I perceive the presence of important X too readily.
• I find myself systematically dealing with the wrong X.

The word "problems" fits in each sentence well, while "loaves of bread" makes for some really weird sentences. If you'd like to try your hand at finding other words or phrases that fit, before I share mine down below, now's the time.

It could be fun. .... All right.

I don't know a name for this technique. I've seen it operationalized in the lexicosemantics literature where, for example, a word is judged to have passed the test if the filled-in sentence returns a threshold number of search results when used as a Google search query. Maybe the lexicosemanticians have a name for it and I've just forgotten. It's a little bit like type checking, isn't it? "Error, line 1: "loaves of bread". Problem-Like entity expected. Received Unvalenced Material Object."

I once used this technique to sort a big list of random abstract concepts into categories for use in a natural language Context-Free Grammar of wise sentences. The categories of Virtue, Vice, Reward, and Punishment towards the bottom of my MoralityBot's CFG source JSON here, while not particularly narrow, are each fairly semantically regular, and this is hard to accomplish just by thinking about concepts without any blank-sentence tests.

Let's get back to the example. I was thinking about those Things that can overwhelm a person's attention. Terms that are fit include: problems, tricky details, threats, obstacles, messes, informal contradictions, hard jobs, defeaters, disasters, conflicts, shortages, emotional triggers, self-doubts, social expectations, deontological prescriptions, obligations, emergencies, and hazards.

Some terms that are less abstractly cognitive and more specific to a physical domain also pass, but I don't like them as much: epidemics, acts of god, droughts, and famines.

The terms "people" and "gods" (thank you for the entry, Grace), pass all of the tests, but they seem very different from the other terms and very similar to each other. I think other terms like "demons" could also go here, while "inner demons" fits better with the previous words.

Here are some words that pass some of the tests, but I'd say not all: duties (which is interesting, because the very similar word "obligations" does pass), distractions, addictions, changes, omens, and reminders of my dead loves. The same way that the semantically-fit "inner demons" is similar to less-fit "demons", and "obligations" is similar to the less-fit "duties", I think the other almost-fit examples are evidence of yet-undiscovered concepts that are similar and fully fit.

Anyway, now we've got a cluster: problems, tricky details, threats, obstacles, messes, informal contradictions, hard jobs, defeaters, disasters, conflicts, shortages, emotional triggers, self-doubts, social expectations, deontological prescriptions, obligations, emergencies, hazards, and inner demons. What are they? What do they have in common? What is their semantic type? Some of them seem necessarily internal to the mind, while threats, obstacles, messes, disasters, conflicts, and shortages don't. They're bad things, but I think you'll agree that "diseases" are bad and yet the word only passes some of the tests.

I have no good second method here to take care of the products of the first method. Clustering by similarity, making up more test sentences, examining guesses that are true of some list members to see if they're true of all, thinking about where the concepts fall among ontological categories like Top Types, Formal Roles, and Phased Sortals. I have no good second method, but I still have work before me, because this is the kind of thing my mind does in its off hours. Also, this is partly trying to get at an insight which I think will help me to compress a bunch of thoughts that I want to include in a future post on varieties and sources of executive dysfunction. Or a bunch of posts. There's nothing wrong with incremental installments. One post on serotonin, one on anhedonia, one on ambiguity aversion, one on effort discounting or whatever. It'll be grand. And they will feature a unified understanding of the features of problem-like concepts. Do let me know if you see that they have something in common.

Some Light Mineralogy and Petrology

Feldspars and quartz are the most abundant rock-forming minerals on earth. Granite, basalt, & sandstone are mostly feldspar & quartz. Feldspars (alongside mafic minerals & micas) get weathered into clay minerals, while quartz (alongside limestone) gets weathered into sand & silt.

That makes me think of soil components. What's left in soil after those is lots of water and air, and a little bit of organic material, and tiny bits of other minerals. Or, that's what's in the lower layers anyway: the regolith, the saprolite, and the bedrock. The top layer is humus - organic materials in soil that have been decomposed enough to lose their cellular structure are called humus. And humus is a mess, chemically. There are big random molecules like damaged chain-link fences full of rings with random bits hanging off, which is fitting because that's what plenty of non-decomposed organic molecules like lignin also look like. There are also organic acids like fatty acids and phenolic acids and hydroxy acids, and other organic things like terpenoids and alcohols, and ugh. Let's get back to rocks and minerals.

Other rocks: Marble is metamorphosed limestone, which is made of calcite, which is an arrangement of calcium carbonate arranged in the trigonal system, which is a little laborious to describe, but basically the unit cell has a nice little three-dimensional diamond shape with equal side length and some special symmetries. Let's talk about it some other time. Chalk is also a limestone, formed under the ocean from calcium carbonate shells, also having bits of flint, which is quartz. Although sidewalk chalk is usually a different mineral these days, gypsum. We'll talk about that later. The calcium carbonate in shells is mostly tiny crystal of the mineral aragonite: it's the same chemical as calcite, but it's in a different crystal arrangement from calcite; aragonite has in the orthorhombic arrangement, which has a rectangular prism as its unit cell. There's another famous limestone, travertine, which is formed in hot springs. It's a limestone rock made of calcium carbonate minerals, like how marble and chalk are limestone rocks made of calcium carbonate minerals.

Slate, schist, and phyllite are all metamorphosed shale, I think? Probably in different stages of increasing metamorphism. In some other order. Anyway, the base rock, shale is a sedimentary rock made of mud and clay. A mudstone. We don't ask what mud is. Okay, you win, it's humus soil. And clay. But that doesn't make it any less taboo. Humus soil is scary stuff to an inorganic chemist. When the organics in mud become fossilized, they're called kerogen, and kerogen in shale is where a lot of the carbon on earth is located. Petroleum, coal, natural gas, it's all kerogen. And that's why people drill into shale to get fossil fuels. What about less organic rocks? Soapstone is a metamorphic schist (a metamorphized shale) but the shale it comes from is almost all talc, a nice inorganic clay mineral. There's a continuum of sedimentary rocks from mudstones (with mud and clay) to sandstones (with feldspar and quartz and mica and some other stuff). A sandstone that's rich in quartz can be metamorphosed into quartzite, where tiny bits of sand get merged together into larger grains, I think. 

Let's talk about gems. They're mostly pure minerals and those are easier to think about. Just a chemical formula and sometimes a crystal arrangement. Amethyst and citrine are colorful impurities in quartz. Alabaster is made of gypsum, which is a new mineral! It's calcium sulfate. It's also called plaster of Paris and drywall. Outside of geology, especially in the ancient middle east and north Africa, alabaster can also refer to calcite. They look very similar. Aquamarine and emeralds are colorful impurities in beryls, another new mineral. It's a beryllium aluminum silicate. And it's a cyclosilicate, which is cool. It's got six silica tetrahedra arranged in a ring, kind of looking like a star of David. There aren't a lot of famous cyclosilicates. Tourmaline is another one.

Jasper and chalcedony are both quartz aggregates. So they're rocks with lots of tiny crystals, rather than one big crystal. Bloodstone and carnelian are both quartz stones with hematite for color, which is iron rust. Cinnabar rocks are their own mineral! Mercury sulfide! Blood red, beautiful, toxic. Where we get our elemental mercury from.

Ruby and sapphire are colored impure versions of corundum, which is aluminum oxide. I don't know what garnets are, and I'm afraid to learn. Jacinth in colored zircon, which is its own mineral: zirconium silicate. Opals are hydrated silica, which is not quite quartz.

I think you've heard of diamonds. Topaz and turquoise are their own minerals. Topaz is a silicate with aluminum and fluorine while turquoise is a hydrated copper aluminum phosphate. Pretty cool. Peridot is gem-quality olivine, which is in the category of magnesium and iron-rich minerals (mafic!) that also includes pyroxenes and amphiboles. The mafic minerals form a sequence of increasing complexity: olivine/peridot have solitary silica tetrahedra, then pyroxenes have single changes of silica tetrahedra, and amphiboles have doubles chains. I remember the order by saying "Opa!" in the Greek fashion. Olivine, pyroxene, amphibole. Some other minerals besides the olivines also have just one or two silica tetrahedra, like garnets and epidote. But they're weird and confusing. There are also silicate minerals that form in sheets like clay and mica. And there are silicate minerals that form three-dimensional frameworks, like quartz and feldspar and weird zeolites. There's a pretty nice orderly system of arranging them.

But back to gems. How about jade? That's a gem, right? Jade can refer to rocks made of either of two silicate minerals: nephrite jade is a silicate with calcium and magnesium, closely related to asbestos, and jadeite jade is a silicate with sodium and aluminum, and it's a pyroxene (a one-chain silicate). Pyroxenes are common in the earth's mantle (between the core and the crust), so they show up in lots of igneous and metamorphic rocks. Most of them are kind of heavy, and contain more magnesium and iron than light minerals which contain more sodium, potassium, and calcium. Jadeite doesn't have iron or magnesium, but oh well.

That is the extent of my knowledge.

Romanceless Men And Mistreated Women

After re-reading SlateStarCodex's "Radicalizing The Romanceless", I looked at the comments, because I thought something particular was missing from the analysis.

Before I go any further, please note that this is a high-context post, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't read it if you haven't first read the linked post. If you're not going to click the link anyway, let me at least say for context that Scott makes a case - a case which is interesting but only partly compelling to me - that when feminist writers complain about "Nice Guys" as distinct from guys who are nice, the capitalization isn't doing any denotative work. Scott makes the case that the many feminist writers he cites are really just complaining about guys who are nice, and the Title Case Capitalization is serving as a very weak way to hide the fact. He also responds to feminist writers saying that yes, the capitalization is doing denotative work, and Nice Guys are a different category. It's a very thorough post with lots of reasoned arguments. When I say "Scott makes a case", it's more than just him stating an opinion and moving on. Anyway, the complaints in the many feminist blog posts that Scott cites mostly say that Nice Guys (or nice guys without capitalization, if Scott's analysis is to be taken seriously) are pathetic and deserving of mockery, and they complain too much about being lonely, and they feel entitled to sex from women, and they don't care about women as people, and they think that their lack of romance stems from women being mean or inconsiderate to them, and they might be rapists or terrorists.

It's quite a list of complaints, and it gets repeated from lots of different feminist writers. You might have noticed a split, where the first three symptoms were about Nice Guys being merely pathetic
(patheticness being that which elicits pity in the normal observer, like a starving puppy does) and the next four were about them being immoral and misogynistic. Scott doesn't mention the split explicitly, but he does talk about how feminists like to mock lonely men, and how this mockery is making men bitter. So that's sort of an explanation of the two clusters of complaints. Possibly not right, but it's something.

Let's get back to Scott's claim that the capitalization in "Nice Guys" isn't actually being used to point to a different group of people. It's partly compelling: I think it's plausible that heterosexual women, generally, aren't looking to date men who are nice. The statistics Scott presents in section VII of his post (Yes, section 7. It's a long post with lots of well-thought arguments.) make that point pretty clear. I don't know why criminality, drug consumption, violence, and disagreeableness of personality, among other factors, predict the number of sex partners for men, but those are the facts. Whether men with fewer sexual partners who aren't violent, disagreeable, criminal, et cetera, are viewed by women as pathetic or deserving of shame is not addressed by the statistics.

Scott's analysis is also partly not compelling: I think women who talk about Nice Guys, generally, do indeed make a mental distinction between Nice Guys and nice guys. To the extent that the Title Case Capitalization is a thin veneer used to hide the (embarrassing?) fact that they want nice guys to keep their distance in the domain of romance and sex and pair-bonding and reproduction, then this fact must also be hidden to them. It's entirely possible to be mistaken about your true beliefs, especially when the beliefs are embarrassing: believing a strategic lie is an unconscious evolutionarily selected-for method of convincing other people of the strategic lie. But it's not enough to say, "Women hate nice guys, and they know it, and the fact that they sometimes use a frustratingly similar but slightly different term can be ignored as malicious trickery". It's not malice, it's a real psychological distinction that they defend earnestly. So we can recognize that Nice Guys are a different group from nice guys, and it's the former group that feminist blogs insult for being bad, or we can recognize that women generally aren't looking to date guys who are nice and they don't know it: they're honestly mistaken and don't realize that the Nice Guys they hate deep in the hearts are the same nice guys they can't publicly endorse hating. If Nice Guys and nice guys are different groups, then it's of course also possible that women wish that both groups would keep their distance.

That's one thing I was looking for in the comments section of Scott's post: an analysis that takes seriously the fact that women believe Nice Guys are different from nice guys, whether or not women are correct in this. I didn't get far enough to find that. Instead, I found ... Joe. Joe was talking about how he's a nice guy. Joe has recently - sometime after he wrote these old comments on an old blog post I was rereading - he's recently been accused of abusing his girlfriends and disrespecting their consent in ways that look a lot like rape. I don't know Joe, and I don't think I know anyone he's dated, and I'd never heard anyone talk about spending time with him before the rape accusations, so I feel a little out of my element talking about him, which is why I'm giving him a pseudonym. But he is in my Online community, and I had heard his name before, and some people on the internet whom I consider friends are friends with him on Facebook. Which means he's Here: he's nearby in social cyberspace, and I can't ignore him.

So what the fuck? Usually, I shrug off comments I hear online that nice guys are abusive rapists because, you know, I have many of those risk factors for lack of sexual success (like not being a violent, criminal drunk) and yet I have very good evidence that I'm not an abusive rapist. But then here's Joe, and I can't ignore him. Is he perhaps not a rapist, and that's why people I think of as decent are friends with him? I hope so, but I doubt it. Is he a rapist who happens to be nice in some sense, like scoring highly on trait Agreeableness in personality tests? Maybe. Again, I've never met the guy. Is he unconsciously self-deceiving about being nice, in the way that the great evolutionary socio-biologist Robert Trivers theorized about? Could be. Is he consciously deceiving others into thinking he's nice because he needs victims for his evil desires? Could be that too. Sadly, I think "he's actually nice along some dimensions" is the best explanation of why he thinks he's nice, and maybe unconscious self-deception and conscious other-deception happen to be along for the ride in his head.

When I saw Joe's comments, I couldn't read any more. It felt like the mere example of his existence was lending great credibility to the claim "Guys who seem nice are secretly all immoral and misogynistic, and a step away from being rapists and terrorists". You know, the claim that Barrys are worse then Henrys. I couldn't shrug it off, even though no one has ever said any of these things directly to me, even though no one has ever called me a Nice Guy in a derisive tone, even though I've never really been dissatisfied with the amount of romantic attention I get, as these bitter entitled Nice Guys supposedly do. I don't date, but it's more because I don't want to. The fact that I don't date is also why I will be generalizing from kind of sparse evidence in this post.

The last time I felt overwhelmed by this topic was about a month ago, when, just like last night, I was worn out after a long day at work and I read something about relationships Online. Maybe I shouldn't be doing that? Anyway, a month ago I read a post in which a bunch of women said that nice guys are all pieces of shit. Feeling pretty bad about that, I started looking to into medications for reversible chemical castration, operating in a similar desperate impulsive headspace as a depressed person who looks into suicide methods. And don't you know it, the Wikipedia article on chemical castration starts out by saying "chemical castration is mainly used by the courts for rapists". Great. That's what I needed to hear. Not only am I a rapist for caring about niceness, I'm a rapist for briefly wanting to get out of the entire romance and sexuality game.

(In fact, chemical castration is not mainly used for rapists: the anti-androgens used for chemical castration are the exact same pills used for Male-to-Female transsexual Hormone Replacement Therapy, and they're also used for treating prostate cancer, and some other stuff. Instead of getting those pills, I went to a clinic and got a prescription for an anti-depressant, which I knew could also lower libido, though I ended up not getting the prescription filled for further reasons. But I'm fine. No worries.)

I couldn't bear to read any more comments after seeing Joe, but I could remember all sorts of other things, like that reddit post, that equally made me wonder whether, you know, everyone is incredibly terrible and we shouldn't be allowed near each other. In addition to remembering about * Joe the Rapist who thinks he's a nice guy, and * all the women on reddit who have been mistreated by Nice Guys, and * Barry, who is undoubtedly an actual nice guy with impeccable feminist credentials who's still going to die alone, and * Henry who beats his wives and extra-marital girlfriends but will never once be alone in all his adult life, I also thought about * a friend on twitter who dearly loves her boyfriend, also on twitter, who is a disagreeable insulting edgelord that drugs her, and * another friend on twitter who once wrote about the great time she had screaming in the back of a car while being violently fucked by a handsome sadist, who was "good for her", and finally I remembered, * that study which found that ugly men are judged as creepy while handsome criminals are not. I remembered all of this, all these horrible confusing facts, and I tried to draw them into a tidy theory. Usually when I try to explain things on this blog, I come up with like twenty candidate explanations and maybe one or two of them are good. I don't have a list like that today. I've got one guess:

Women like handsome disagreeable dominant men, regardless of whether they're abusive, and they don't like ugly submissive agreeable men, regardless of whether they're abusive. Women are more likely to see men as being abusive if they're not attracted to the men and they're less likely to see men as being abusive if they find the men attractive. Women still know when they're being hit, of course, even if it's a handsome dominant disagreeable man, but they don't come to the conclusion that it's wrong.

Points in favor of this: It explains the case of those two women I know on twitter, who are/were very happy with being abused by handsome dominant men. It kind of explains why some abusive men, like Joe The Agreeable Rapist, get rightly ostracized for being abusive, while the wives and girlfriends of the Henry The Dominant keep coming back to him for another round in the boxing ring. It explains why women on reddit would more readily call out nice men, i.e. submissive or agreeable men, for being abusive than the dominant men they're attracted to, who might well be abusive at the same or higher or lower rates - the theory doesn't distinguish. And it kind of explains why I, average looking and concerned about niceness, but also sometimes aloof in a way that reminds you of your father, find myself under an average amount of romantic interest.

It's also fucking horrifying. Abuse should make a bigger difference to women than it seems to. It's horrifying that abuse happens, and it's horrifying that it's accepted. I hope that I come up with twenty candidate explanations that are more compelling than this, and they're all less horrifying, but for now, this is what I've got.

One small point against the theory is another woman I know on twitter who likes to beat, cut, and gag submissive men in the bedroom - with their consent, is my understanding - but still, that's one counterexample to the generalization of women liking dominant men.

Let's bookend the post with an explicit summary of the distinction between Nice Guys and nice guys: Guys who are nice are not abusive, necessarily, among having other nicer behaviors. It's not a bad thing to be nice, but it's not what anyone is looking for. Hard to believe, but consistent with all the evidence. Nice Guys™, in contrast, are those not particularly handsome men who are also submissive or agreeable, which traits women generally don't want. This second group probably starts out being malicious toward women at base rates for men, but they get called out for malice more than other men with equally evidenced guilt, either because * women feel disgusted by their looks and sometimes attribute the disgust to the man's character, or because * insulting people you're not attracted to is as common among humans as giving a little higher-than-merited praise to the people you find attractive, or because * Nice Guys become jerks in response to being bitter about being undesirable or insulted, or because * women are less likely to forgive Nice Guys for their malice when they make mistakes, or because * Nice Guys are less experienced at being decent because they have fewer relationships because they don't get into knife fights with other men in bars, the way that women love deep down, as much as they love men with strong jaws, men who command respect, and men who give playful insults that ambiguously demonstrate depth of affection through counter-signalling in a way that reminds us of addictive variable-ratio reinforcement schedules. Alternatively, Nice Guys™ are guys who are merely claiming to be nice out of some combination of conscious deception and unconscious self-deception, not because it's positively attractive, but because it's better than what they really are.

Edit: A friend points out that shamefulness is reliably unattractive, while shamelessness is reliably attractive. Further, they point out that the variance in shame seems to be more driven by personality than by having things to be ashamed about. From this, we can guess that the dispreference for shame is probably not an evidential dispreference (wherein the display of shame is seen as a sign of a personal flaw), but rather shame is the flaw itself: it's instrumentally or terminally dispreferred in mates, perhaps because showing weakness invites attack from others or because shame reduces value-capturing assertiveness.