Well see....that's the thing: I have. Not long ago I examined exactly the claim that you just made (due to having become neighbors of a polyamorous household and become curious about the various claims made about the practice).
Which is why I know that your second sentence above is flatly false.
Well, in the US twosomes lead to divorce 50% of the time. Is there really data on threesomes? And do you get that if one member of a marriage cheats with a third party, that is not polyamory? That is called having an affair. They're different.
Fair. My one caveat would be that polyamory should be addressed (at least for the purpose of this discussion) as a possible candidate for a luxury belief: the kind of lifestyle that confers status, and maybe some sort of happiness, on wealthy people from the Bay Area, while inflicting costs on the lower classes who are going to watch a gazillion TV shows about polyamory over the next decade and are going to break up marriages and leave children unattended and fuck themselves up even further, because cool people do it. So, from that point of view, it’s perhaps healthy for society that a bunch of narcissists give us their takes on their terrible experiences, so we lowly journalists can write them up and poor people can link to them on their Facebook feeds. Sounds Effectively Altruistic to me.
Lower-class people are already struggling to maintain stable relationships with one person. If A and B have a 50% chance of getting along, what are the chances A and B, A and C, and B and C can all get along?
As someone with friends across a rather wide range of classes, I'm quite appalled at the stereotyping of working class people as being unable to manage their personal lives if given some liberty. Maybe there's a wider spread in outcomes, but I doubt their median ability is much below that of their middle class neighbors. Dudes (and dudettes) with demanding jobs and tight budgets are often more grounded than those who have more leeway - reality has a way of bumping you in the nose.
Honestly it sounds to me like a cheap excuse for authoritarian positions, which should be mercilessly mocked.
Yeah habits change, quite massively. Nobody is arguing they don't. You can decry it if you want for all kinds of systemic reasons, and I'm not getting into an argument about those here.
Individually though, I'll defend the ability of most individuals to make better informed choices for their life than someone from a different social milieu looking over their shoulder saying "if only these people would...".
"Individually though, I'll defend the ability of most individuals to make better informed choices for their life"
Ok, does that contradict the idea that a lifestyle could be more harmful for one group than another? Should we individuals making informed choices not inform ourselves of that possibility through discussion as we're now doing?
I'm quite appalled at the stereotyping of ACX people as being unable to discuss an "is" without necessarily implying an authoritarian "ought" when given some commenting liberty.
I suspect this might be getting causation backwards? For example, other things being equal (which they never are), divorce is really bad for people financially.
Also consider that your observations may be due to survivor bias.
If C is auspistizing for A and B and B is auspistizing for A and C and so on, possibly quite high.
If you are in the type of relationship that fights about money, a third income (and reducing housing costs by a third if you all share a home) can fix a lot of problems.
If you are in the type of relationship that fights about sex, a second partner you can have sex with if the first isn't interested that night can fix a lot of problems.
If you are in they type of relationship that fights because chores and childcare take up so much time that you're both habitually exhausted and irritable, someone to pick up a third of those duties can fix a lot of problems.
If you are in the type of relationship that fights because you are both bad at communicating and stop trying very hard when you get emotional, having a third party who knows you both really well and can facilitate communications between you can fix a lot of problems.
Perhaps my comment was a confusing mix of rhetorical question and open-ended thought experiment.
Suppose for example that polyamory increases the chance of any two people in a throuple getting along to 80%. Then in a three-person relationship the chance of of all three getting along should be 51%, slightly higher than my monogamous assumption of 50%.
Like everything else - ill health, losing your job, your marriage or long-term relationship blows up - if you have money, it cushions you more. You have more options. You can access help faster and better. If you want to spend six months curled up in bed crying and eating ice cream, you are not likely to have the electricity cut off because you can't pay the bill. You can write a book that gets reviewed in the 'quality' papers about your vicissitudes.
If you try poly and it doesn't work out, having money means you can afford therapy (like the blackmail Mrs. Winter indulged in, apparently: gave hubby an ultimatum that he goes to couples therapy with her or she closes the marriage) or separate households if you have to split up, etc.
For those who, like the other example the Atlantic writer gave, rely on poly relationships as a network of practical physical and financial, as well as romantic and sexual, support, if it goes wrong then they may be very badly stranded: now they have no place to live, or their finances are reduced, or the person who always brought them to their hospital appointments is no longer around. They don't have the same range of options or spare capacity.
The concept of a luxury belief strikes me as deeply suspect. I could provide an argument for its invalidity, but I think it'd be dishonest to lead with that even if it was true. Because the real reason for my suspicion is almost certainly just that it's too damn convenient.
For intellectuals not aligned with the mainstream intelligentsia, calling something a luxury belief is just perfect. It condemns a belief in a way that makes most possible counter-evidence irrelevant, it frames the speaker as an insightful critic of the WEIRD, and it carries with it a worldview that usually flatters their politics.
I realize that this is rather unfair of me. Sometimes convenient things are true; sometimes one's biases align beautifully with reality. But still, it feels off.
I like your objection to my objection, I think it's important that we don't let the concept of luxury belief slide into something meaning "stuff that sucks." We already have words for that. So, to address the point of whether polyamory is at least partly a luxury belief or behavior, we need to decide whether a) it confers status to upper-class promoters of that belief and b) it inflicts costs on the lower classes who will ape the behavior. If both conditions are not met, then it's not a luxury belief.
I don't see how mental math qualifies as "a belief". You could imagine people advocating that math _should_ be done in your head, and that writing it down as an aid to calculation was sinful, but I don't think avowing that belief would confer status.
I think (a) is true of many beliefs, but I have a hard time thinking of any real world examples of (b). While something like polyamory could in theory be harmful to the masses, very few people practice it and it's unlikely to take off any time soon. Many of the examples of luxury beliefs I've heard (like "defund the police" and open borders) are really just policy views where the individuals espousing them do not personally have the capacity to implement them and can therefore say whatever they want. I would like to see examples of luxury beliefs that actually hurt the lower classes when they go on to adopt them.
“Supporters all live in rich countries” seems to elide the rather large portion of the population whose human potential is not adequate to fend off the challenge posed by the arriving horde.
The luxury belief is that of the Bryan Caplans whose lives at no point touch any of this social decay, and who sincerely believe national unity may be maintained while telling the lower class they are shit people who deserve to be displaced by strivers from other countries.
Not sure what he’s going to tell the strivers’ kids and grandkids.
If rich people benefit from keeping immigrants out, but poor people are harmed, keeping immigrants out is a luxury belief. If rich people benefit from not being able to immigrate, but poor people benefit from immigrating, then not wanting to immigrate is a luxury belief.
Both of these are aspects of closed borders, but they are *not* the same thing. And you're trying to compare rich people who want to keep immigrants out--the first one--to poor people who benefit from immigrating--the second one. You can't paste together half of each one and still get a luxury belief.
The ones I've heard most often are casual sex and no fault divorce. Neither idea seems to cause much harm to the upper classes, but are destroying the working classes.
I don't think no-fault divorce has any real connection to status. I think people just realized how fucked it is that someone (mostly women) would have to stay with someone they hate for the rest of their life if they can't provide what sometimes amounted to very specific evidence of wrong doing depending on their location. No doubt it has done a lot of harm to some people who would have been better off staying married, but it also provides an enormous amount of benefits.
It seems to me that there are two very broad categories of no-fault divorce. One is which there is something terminally wrong with the relationship (often to the level of abuse) but that would be difficult to prove in a legal context. The alternative is really any other situation, where one or both partners just decides to leave even without a specific problem.
No-fault divorce was implemented for the first group in order to solve some real problems. The second ground was an unintended consequence of the rules changing.
Cultural elites gain benefit from the first and rarely choose the second (they tend to stay married). Lower classes much more often get divorced, and both the couple and their kids suffer significant burdens because of it. In some cases this seems worth the tradeoff (i.e. abusive relationships), but in many others it becomes objectively worse for all involved.
I would much prefer a society in which couples needed a recognized reason in order to get divorced (or at least a strong Schelling Fence against divorce).
There's an argument you frequently see in conservative circles that society has embraced the luxury belief of "it's okay to deviate from strict Christian sexual morality" or "it's okay to prioritize your self-actualization over your social role". Things have gone okay for the upper class, who have fun premarital sex and marry later but still generally get married before having kids and stay married after. Meanwhile rates of single parent households have risen dramatically among the lower class. And it's not that lower class people have found cool alternative arrangements to nuclear families; it's just lots of single moms and inadequately supportive dads.
I'm not saying I agree with this view. The upper class morality I was raised with "it's okay to have premarital sex but you are responsible for being a good and stable dad" seems perfectly fine and something I think everyone should follow. But I'm just sharing the most common version of "luxury belief" I've read.
There's a related argument that upper class people have the self-control to use addictive substances that are bad for lower class people, so lower class people benefit from tighter prohibition/stigma re: drugs.
The last "luxury belief" I can think of, which I mostly agree is a "luxury belief", is that college is for unfocussed intellectual aspiration rather than following some track to success. This works out fine if you can get a job at your dad's law firm after your wanderings, not so much if it leaves you with a ton of student debt and a job at Starbucks.
This seems like a different approach to the idea of "luxury beliefs". Rather than being beliefs that confer status, these are behaviors that people can get away with if they have the right resources or self control but that can be disastrous to people who lack these things.
I think this fits the words "luxury beliefs" better.
The idea of luxury being where you can spend more (time/money/etc.) on something than the bare minimum because it better fits your idea of what it should be.
The other version seems more like a status marker, because it conveys status to *publicly* hold the belief - you don't get anything for privately holding it after all.
I had a friend who was on welfare. He decided to lease a luxury car because he could (barely) afford the lease payments (on a 6 year lease). I think he also made a case that the car would better enable him to look for a job (it didn't). Of course when the lease ran out he was back on foot.
Why not get a cheaper car? Because he liked the heated seats.
That's a good point. I suppose the connection is that the luxury belief is a non-judgmentalism toward and perhaps willingness to indulge in the luxury behaviour.
Why is it different? When it's clear that belief X is inconsequential for high status persons and disastrous for low status persons, then the claim of "I have belief X" is either a claim to lunacy or a claim to high status.
Should the option of lunacy be disprovable by other means, what remains is a very powerful high status signal.
That is more about "defund the police" categories than "polyamory" categories, though. Not because I doubt the disastrousness of polyamory for low status persons, but because I doubt its inconsequentiality for high status persons.
(IIRC, Sailer has filed polyamory under the orthogonal "nerds lacking the jealousy gene" compartment. I find that to have better explanatory power: for such a group, it is indeed inconsequential, whereas membership in that group is as status-agnostic as is "being born on the 79th day of the year")
That's how I've always understood the term, which I believe I may have first heard used by Rob Henderson.
Luxury beliefs = beliefs that one group has the luxury of believing without much negative consequence, whereas another group suffers to the extent they adopt the belief. Some examples that spring to mind are 'sexual promiscuity is acceptable' and 'drug use is acceptable'.
Now, there must also be some benefit/upside to holding the belief that makes it a 'luxury' and in many cases it is that they confer status, but that's not always the sole or even main benefit (sex and drugs can be their own rewards lol!)
Some other ones besides no-fault divorce (and a norm of not marrying at all, which wasn't mentioned), and casual sex:
1. Choosing to be a single mom (tons of high quality studies show the best child outcomes are from stably paired parents).
The median choosing single mom in our (educated coastal elite) social circles is likely highly accomplished, high conscientiousness, and going to give that kid a great education and childhood. This is like <1% of single moms - the vast majority are poor and low conscientiousness and basically breeding a next generation of similar kids.
2. Drug legalization.
I'm actually still all for this on philosophical principles alone - the state shoudn't police what you do with your own body - but it's terrible for lower class and lower conscientiousness people. For educated coastal elites? It's fine, you do shrooms on the weekend once a month with similar friends and get deep into philosophical conversations. Or you smoke weed in a controlled way that doesn't influence your career or family life.
For regular people? It's a huge trap and waster of talent and potential. Yes, you can easily find drugs illegally if you want them, but we're talking the marginal "yes" here that wouldn't happen without legalization. And plenty of young people get trapped in a place of low ambitions and low performance because they have cheap, legal/easy weed and shrooms and video games or whatever. On the margin, it's practically certain that we're causing many people to underperform their potential significantly for many years with drug legalization.
> 1. Choosing to be a single mom (tons of high quality studies show the best child outcomes are from stably paired parents).
That is true, but those studies tend not to differentiate between parents who are unpaired by choice ("choosing to be a single mom") and parents who have been unpaired without being given a choice ("a drunk driver hit my husband").
My understanding is that the children of single parents whose missing parents did not choose to go missing do not have worse outcomes than the children of stably paired parents, which means that the status of single parenthood in itself does not have the negative impact to which you allude. It's more of an issue of quality of the parents.
A lot, maybe even the majority, of harm wrought by drugs on lower class people is due to their criminalisation.
There are thousands of people incarcerated just for cannabis. The drug trade, which would be massively disrupted by legalisation, is an obvious trade for many to go into given the circumstances they are born into. And criminalisation makes harm reduction and treatment for addiction much harder to deliver.
I completely agree, and my personal belief is that we should legalize ALL drugs, inclusive of heroin and cocaine. You want to stop the opiod death crisis? Legalization is *literally* the only way to do that.
The actual drugs cost pennies - if they were legally available at a fair cost+20% or whatever at a known strength and purity, there would essentially be zero overdose deaths, and very little negative physical downsides. With pharmaceutically pure stuff, addicts can live and work and function in society for decades. Just look at William Burroughs or Keith Richards!
But I believe my overall point still stands. Definitionally, at the margins will be people whose lives are worse off due to the drugs being legal and easily procurable. Just like at the margins, tens of thousands of people are going to die every year from human-piloted cars, about the same as the amount dying of opiod overdoses. Yet, people choose to drive cars because they perceive their life to be better and more pleasant when driving, even if it comes with some risks. I think that's totally legitimate, and similarly legitimate for the use of legalized drugs.
If "upper-class" in this context includes liberal elite, or those who aspire to be so, or to be seen as such, then a classic example of (a) + (b) is the luxury belief that mass immigration benefits the economy.
Yes, up to a point it may benefit certain aspects of the economy, for rich people. But for members of the "lower classes", who have to compete with the immigants for housing and jobs among other things, the result is much as that rich guy in the film Titanic scoffs to Jack about his lifeboat deal: "not that you'll benefit from it!"
"While something like polyamory could in theory be harmful to the masses, very few people practice it and it's unlikely to take off any time soon."
I think lower class/lower status people are engaging in practical polyamory, they just don't bother with any theory and call it either "sleeping around" or maybe "serial monogamy"; the person who doesn't have one main relationship but a lot of casual partners, or is with one person right now but that doesn't mean they're being monogamous if casual encounters are available.
The only thing is that such behaviour is still considered, to an extent, trashy and low-class. But if the NYT reading class, the chattering class, start adopting it and it gets covered in celebrity gossip rags as it trickles down the status ladder, then people may be persuaded into "let's open up our relationship/oh by the way I'm poly now" who would otherwise be dissuaded by the trashy image.
Dan Quayle got dinged for condemning the Murphy Brown storyline about Murphy becoming a single mom, and he probably deserved it, but nevertheless down the line...
"Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%). The study, which analyzed how people’s living arrangements differ by religion, also found that U.S. children from Christian and religiously unaffiliated families are about equally likely to live in this type of arrangement."
It's not that people will see "Golly, Molly Winter, the wife of successful TV soundtrack composer Stewart Winter, is in an open marriage, we should do that too!", it's that over time things become more acceptable. Famous person does it. Well, that's one of those Hollywood celebs, of course they're like that. Less famous person does it. Well, New York values (to quote someone who got into hot water for that). "A few crazy kids on campus" becomes "our organisation urges our staff to put their pronouns in their email sig". And suddenly what was "nobody decent does that" becomes "everybody decent does that".
Drug use- microdosing is cool and high status in some circles, and rich/highly-competent people can usually afford to fix themselves if they go too far (with some famous exceptions). I suspect there are quite many more failure modes for poor people succumbing to drug use, and they have less of a safety net. (Edit: whoops, this did come up. But in a slightly different format. Apologies).
Milder example, veganism. It comes up in ACX/SSC/EA forums fairly often about how it's "not that hard," then people describe their diet, vitamin, blood-testing regimens: if you don't have a strong enough cultural base or a competent neuroticism to make up for that lack, it's easy to wind up with nutrient deficiencies.
>really just policy views where the individuals espousing them do not personally have the capacity to implement them and can therefore say whatever they want.
I would give an alternative version of B: the people espousing the belief do not expect negative consequences from the belief for themselves. This can be the result of being insulated from consequences *or* from (the perception of) having nothing left to lose. Yes, this is a variant of de Jouvenel's high-low vs middle dynamic (https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/9oiywz/illiberal_thinkers_1_bertrand_de_jouvenel_what/).
"Defund the police" fits that perfectly, IMO. High-status people saying it are insulated from the consequences (think of Seth Rogen saying having your car robbed is the price of city life- that's easy to say for someone that can afford to replace it without any effort), and low-status and/or poor people saying it have no trust in police anyways.
> I would like to see examples of luxury beliefs that actually hurt the lower classes when they go on to adopt them.
Well, arguably "sexual promiscuity is fine" is an example of this kind of belief. But that's kind of what the thread is about, so it seems circular to use as an example. I think "drug use is fine" could easily fall into this category. Even aside from just "artificial" consequences like being arrested or drug tested, it's much easier to absorb unexpected costs/risks such as medical side effects or having to take time off work if you have a high-paying salaried job than a low-paying hourly one. You're more likely to be able to afford treatment if you get addicted. It might be easier for you to ensure your drugs are actually just drugs and not mixed with household cleaners or whatever.
A classic example is divorce. Various commentators have pointed out that the upper-class people most likely to endorse the idea that no-fault divorce is a good thing and the traditional nuclear family structure is oppressive - such people are overwhelmingly likely to get married, stay married, and not have children out of wedlock. Divorce is far more common among working-class families, who have to deal with the social and psychological consequences of broken families and children splitting their time between two households. I believe Ross Douthat even compared this phenomenon to class warfare.
Your comment seems to make sense, but then I read again... how on Earth is polyamory a belief, luxury or not? Wouldn't it be a luxury practice, if it's somehow luxury at all?
That also shows how ridiculous the "luxury XYZ" criticism is. If you can afford something that many people can't and is not a necessity, that's a luxury by definition. People with relatively little money will save and make efforts to allow themselves the occasional luxury, like a family trip or fancy clothes. Assigning negative value to mere luxury seems weird and wrong-headed.
Also, and when we talk about actual beliefs, before we start arguing about whether they confer status or inflict damage on such and such, shouldn't we first maybe have a try at the object-level question of whether they are true?
> Also, and when we talk about actual beliefs, before we start arguing about whether they confer status or inflict damage on such and such, shouldn't we first maybe have a try at the object-level question of whether they are true?
That would confer status to rationalists and inflict damage on those who prefer to weaponize the conversation in pursuit of their own private goals.
I think the luxury belief would be something like the following:
"Polyamory is superior to monogamy because it's more in tune with human nature and the desire for sexual variety. Everyone would be so much happier if they just were able to accept this, like I have." Or "I the polyamorist, having risen above petty jealousies and base desires of possessiveness, am enlightened and deserving of higher status than those irrational monogamists who don't possess the emotional maturity to handle a relationship where me and three other dudes are banging the same gal on the reg."
That sounds like a remarkably weird belief. I've seen plenty of groups out there more or less implicitly claiming superiority over the rest of society, but the poly don't really strike me that way. There's always this clear sense of "if you're into that, then...", with an implicit "otherwise, feel free to ignore us".
This is mostly a straw man I think. Pretty much every poly person I know would say it is not for everyone, and that many people are better suited to monogamy.
Do you think that conferring status is a essential part of a "luxury belief"? I would think that any sort of expensive benefit would be a natural candidate. Some luxury goods are things that people acquire in order to demonstrate status, but other luxury goods are actually really pleasant to have, though they are luxuries, because they are really expensive to maintain, and would be problematic for most people despite their real benefits.
Seems like a reasonable definition, but doesn't that make many luxury beliefs good things?
Believing that you should be treated with basic human dignity can be very costly to people at the bottom of society. Many of the poor are in a position to be punished quite harshly if they insist on decent treatment.
Are we comfortable classifying our own (often correct) beliefs as luxury beliefs?
Any luxury belief is negative by definition, in that b) it inflicts costs on the lower classes, while allowing the upper class to reinforce their superior status. It's not metaphorical costs, it's actual costs like those suffered by people who study in shit schools because upper-class people who spend millions to school their own children keep saying that education is overrated and that one should follow their heart and SATs are worthless because holistic admissions making it easier to bribe the Ivy league college to accept their own kids instead. There is no silver lining to luxury beliefs.
"it inflicts costs on the lower classes who will ape the behavior. If both conditions are not met, then it's not a luxury belief."
This is an interesting question to me, but hard to untangle. We already have a certain level of non-monogamy. How do we tell what fraction of lower class monogamy is due to the upper classes or whatever influenced the upper classes originally? Only the portions that are open and consensual? Does acceptance of polyamory make it harder to police cheating? Possibly. And the notion that monogamy is no longer a cultural standard in dating might be a problem for those who rely on a sort of culture boilerplate to do their heavy lifting. I could understand that. On the other hand, middle class polyamory tends to involve a huge amount of relationship analysis, discussion, etc. And how do we measure the benefit of that added cultural context?
The problem with the notion of 'luxury' is that it implies a certain excess of *material* wealth. I question whether material wealth is the luxury in play here (unless we're talking about distinctly middle class luxuries) as opposed to things like having the intelligence and cognitive empathy to navigate complex relationship dynamics.
Although material wealth is often involved, I don't get the impression that anyone intended to limit to just material wealth. Having cognitive freedom or emotional stability both seem to fit the bill in terms of the discussion.
As for your first question, I think the rise in unwed mothers over the last 50-75 years is a really good indication. There is always going to be a fraction of children raised without one or both parents - from parental death if nothing else. We can imagine that, say, 1960 (because those are the stats I found) could be considered a baseline for "natural" single parenthood/unwed motherhood and what we have now is more likely the result of the opening of sexual mores and divorce options. In 1960 5% of births were to single women. Today it's around 40%.
Clarity: status with one group may not equate to status with another. Can we distinguish a "luxury belief" from tribal formation around a set of interests or proclivities?
I've been living below the poverty line for over a decade, and am poly. I have several friends who range from my status to just making ends meet. Yes, I agree that many poly people are at least middle class or above, but certainly not all.
You were being pretty evenhanded until you slipped in “the upper classes “
Polyamory has nothing to do with luxury or the upper classes. It’s been practiced by “the peasant class” forever. Just listen to some blues songs; or folk songs.
Your para is true if you substitute 'non-monogamy' for polyamory, but not true as written, I think. Polyamory is a particular set of ideas that non-monogamy via serial infidelity doesn't correspond to.
That is a difference of degree, not of kind. Polyamory is non monogamy stripped of a lot of its subterfuge. And, like any other human experience, it is as rich or as barren as the people involved.
I don't agree with your definitions of "luxury belief" - in my understanding the criteria is simply the various things where it's a luxury to spend your time and effort caring about because the person has the privilege of not having to worry about the many more pressing "lesser issues" that the lower classes *have* to consider, and also often requiring exposure to things or events that aren't common for the lower classes. And while it is *correlated* with status, it doesn't necessarily need to confer status (it might sometimes do it, just as one more visible "class marker"); and the only "inflicted cost" on lower classes is that it may distract them from their priorities, the beliefs required to protect their livelihood and interests.
> For intellectuals not aligned with the mainstream intelligentsia, calling something a luxury belief is just perfect. It condemns a belief in a way that makes most possible counter-evidence irrelevant
Evidence that the belief leads to positive outcomes would still be relevant (it would disprove the idea that the belief was a luxury belief), so I'm not quite sure what you're objecting to.
The concept of luxury beliefs is just the concept of costly signals, applied to beliefs.
> You could say someone who lives by a moral code is just costly signaling that they are so good they can be successful even if they never screw others or cut corners.
You could say that, but in that case you wouldn't get very far; most extant moral codes, including the prohibitions on screwing other people over, have obvious direct benefits.
> You could say someone who gives a lot to charity is costly signaling that they can earn so much money they are willing to be generous.
You can say that, no problem. It's a very common viewpoint.
'Costly belief' is its own term already, it seemed like OP was saying a luxury belief could be have positive benefits for the well-off people who can afford to make it work, but harms poorer people who can't.
In which case, evidence of it helping anyone who can afford luxuries wouldn't count; it's only evidence against the accusation if you can show it consistently helping the poorest and least advantaged, a group who doesn't write a lot of blog posts about their experiences and is hard/inconvenient/annoying to study.
(for example, tests on college students, the subjects of most psychology research, wouldn't count because if they can afford college they're too affluent)
1. (mine) A "luxury belief" is one that someone holds despite the fact that it hurts them. In this model, the more strain a person is under, the more likely they are to renounce the luxury belief. I think this fits the concept of a luxury well.
2. (as you just stated) A "luxury belief" is one that is good for some people and bad for other people.
3. A "luxury belief" is one that is avowed by a person who doesn't believe it. (Then, that person remains unharmed by the belief because they don't conduct themselves as if it were true, but someone who falls for it will be harmed.)
It makes no sense to have a term for definition (2); that's most beliefs and certainly all beliefs with any controversy around them. And the only connection to the concept of "luxury" is that we're defining one group to be well off in some sense and the other group to be not well off in the same sense. That is weird. Luxuries aren't things that are good for rich people and bad for poor people, they're things that rich people can afford and poor people can't. They are bad for poor people only when weighed against opportunity costs, and often not then.
(1) and (3) are not the same definition, but I can see the argument for calling either type a "luxury belief".
I like the first definition you give, though I would replace "the fact that it hurts them" with "the fact that it is costly to hold". There are many different kinds of costs and benefits associated with physical luxury goods, and there could be similar kinds of costs and benefits associated with luxury beliefs.
Compare my mother's stated grounds for her belief that blacks are no dumber than whites: "I wouldn't want to live in a world where [the opposite] was true."
This belief has many negative consequences at the societal level. At the individual level of being a non-managerial white-collar worker in California, it has no particular direct consequences. Holding the opposite belief would have pretty severe consequences if you admitted to it, but of course it also wouldn't have direct consequences if you kept your mouth shut.
There is not a good match to any of the above three definitions. Which side is the "luxury belief"? Well, I think you could poll a lot of agreement with the idea that the luxury belief is the one where the arguments are "it's true because I wish it was true", as long as you didn't fill in what exactly the beliefs were. Can we do better than identifying luxury beliefs by the spurious arguments made in their favor?
I associate hypocrisy with luxury beliefs. I tried to think of an example that wouldn't enrage people and failed utterly, so: BMI correlates inversely with income and even more strongly inversely with education; thinking here of the luxury belief of fat acceptance.
This might be the best example I have heard yet in terms of fitting the framework of (a) conferring status on the person expressing the belief and (b) harming lower class people who adopt it. A fit person can show compassion and reason by expressing the belief that overweight people are largely victims of their genetics, but an overweight person may be better off being prodded in the direction of losing weight.
This does seem to have the right structure (group with privilege holding status-conferring belief without bearing costs of enacting it) but no longer has to do with class; any thin person can arguably seem compassionate and sophisticated by adopting fat acceptance, and (if it were the case that such attitudes played a causal role in obesity) escape the harms that then accrue to fat people of every social rank. That BMI and income are correlated seems pretty incidental to the question of who benefits and who is harmed. The class angle seems pretty central to how 'luxury belief' is lately conceptualized but isn't essential to it, to my mind. Sometimes roping in class comes with unneeded unjustified assumptions (as here), and sometimes roping in class is needed to substitute for evidence of harm (as in the popular "lower classes are being harmed by permissive attitudes toward relationships" take).
When it comes to physique, thin is higher status than fat regardless of any other characteristics a person possesses. Status occurs on many dimensions, not just income and education.
ETA: I re-read your post and I think I better understand the point being made, that the term “luxury beliefs” has strong connotations related to socioeconomic class. This example doesn’t fit the class connotations very well, so you are absolutely correct.
That's quite right--I think it's useful to understand status-conferring and harm-bearing dimensions as much more variable than the upper/lower class distinction allows.
I don't think that's unfair. I think the problem is that labels like "luxury belief" do two things simultaneously:
a) assert factual properties of the belief
b) assert an interpretation of why someone would subscribe to such a belief.
In this case, "Luxury Belief" asserts a very negative moral interpretation of why someone would subcribe to such a belief, namely that they don't really care about the actual benefit to anyone, only their own status. But even if the facts a) are true, this doessn't imply b) since people have many reasons for subscribing to beliefs, starting with simple error.
You've described its utitility perfectly -- it's a good term for speaking disdainfully of our social 'betters', but ultimately has no explanatory value.
On the contrary, I think polyamory is a nerdy gentrification - or perhaps a feminist attempt at harm reduction - of what a lot of people have always done. Historically, monogamy has always been associated with a tradition of quiet infidelity. French culture even pretty much institutionalised it.
The underlying problem is that humans are better at pair bonding than we are at maintaining the sexual spark long term. The natural trajectory is towards a dead bedroom - if this were a solved problem then there'd be something like the 12 Steps, rather than a plethora of different books and couples therapies.
I suspect that whenever a couple avoids the dead bedroom, there's always a hack involved, whether it's exaggerated courtship rituals - second honeymoons etc - BDSM (our bag), swinging, adventure holidays, or - the topic under discussion - poly.
It could be both. Taking what “a lot of people have always done” and providing it with increased visibility, status and social cachet can also be harmful to the lower class (eg, hick libs) who adopt the behavior.
I agree on your point about pair bonding vs sexual spark. I question how sustainable even the supposedly happy/stable polycules will turn out to be. (“I saw this cute elderly throuple walking in the park today” is a phrase I doubt I’ll ever hear.)
Interesting broader points in this piece about selection effects but I still hate polyamory.
How do you define a polycule? For example, my last one involved me and partner (6.5y), partner and their partner (TP) (over a decade), TP and their partner (TTP) (9y), TTP and their partner (TTTP) (3y), etc. I'm still part of their lives, 6y after breakup with partner. Went on vacation with them and others, which TTP paid for, because poor. Many polycules become families.
I don't think you and various other people here understand what polyamory is. It's not a fancy word for having lotsa hookups or, if you are partnered, for having affairs. It's not swinging. It's a romantic and sexual relationship among more than 2 people. So if there are 3 of them, then instead of being a couple they are a thruple. It is understood among all the members that some or all of them will be having sex with various others in the group. It's out in the open. And often the members of the poly group make some commitments of some sort to each other and to their more-than-one-person love relationship. At least, that is what all the people I know who use the world polyamory mean by it.
Yes, my understanding from observing my local poly friends is that - as you say - it's not about hookups. It does, however, build variety into the long term.
Not yet, not for the people making up the rules and little groups and discussing this amongst themselves and reading the Ethical Slut books and so forth.
Solo polyamory, to me, looks like old-fashioned sleeping around just with a theoretical construction put on it, but I'm not anywhere near that lifestyle so what do I know?
"Solo polyamory means that someone has multiple intimate relationships with people but has an independent or single lifestyle. They may not live with partners, share finances, or have a desire to reach traditional relationship milestones in which partners’ lives become more intertwined."
Now, the ethical theoreticians may practice this in a very different manner and not have the same kind of mindset or life as the guy with a string of 'relationships' where he has kids by three different women, none of whom he lives with, and is sleeping with two new sidepieces right now - but to an outsider, it looks the same. Middle-class Robert and lower-class Bobby are not in committed relationships, are having sex with different partners, and are not "sharing finances or intertwined lives".
And as poly disseminates out into the mainstream, if it does, it will be like dye in water as it reaches the level Bobby is at - it will be diluted immensely from the original practice Robert adheres to.
Who knows how which way cultural diffusion will go, but my guess is that polyamory, with its awkward greco-latin name, mostly remains a label for "group relationships with lots of agreed upon explicit rules".
The other thing is much more common, and already has the common friendly name of "open relationships". Or as you said yourself, "sidepieces".
Um, solo poly here for several decades. It can be about lots of casual sex, and I have no problem with that so long as everyone knows that and pregnancy and STI prevention is maintained at a high standard.
The guy with multiple kids by multiple partners you describe? Not poly. Never was, never will be.
dunno, when is "dead" an "early dead"? Heard once, lesbians have that the early issue, know an ex-hetero-couple, too - me now in 11th year and in my fifties and still wonder: why even bear another person if not for this? Statistics seem to indicate, married(partnered) people do it more and with each other. Anthropology suggests loose partnerships with a prefered partner. Scott once wrote 'Polyamory is boring', I guess he is right (monogamy obviously is, too). But neither: dead bedroom. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/06/polyamory-is-boring/
Googling around yields the stats for dead bedrooms or dry spells to be anything between 16% and 50%.
If it's as low as 16%, then I suppose you could argue that those are the folk who *need* specific other arrangements; that these aren't actually hacks but rather revealed preferences.
I'm sure partnered folk do have sex more often *on average* than unpartnered ones. However, most of that probably happens early in the relationship.
> Anthropology suggests loose partnerships with a prefered partner.
Which suggests that some variations on poly are "natural", in so far as poly goes with the grain of human nature.
Since you mention "natural", what I've heard from the world of ethology, putting humans in the wider context of sexually reproducing animals, is that as a species we're much closer to long-term pair-bonding than to free-for-all, but not all the way so. Hence all these unstable situations, like our tendency to form long-term bonds and then cheat or drop out.
That's what I'm talking about. We've become "too good" at pair bonding compared or our ability to maintain sexual interest.
I would speculate that this has something to do with developing consciousness and then culture, plus our extended longevity compared to what it was when these instincts evolved.
It's not just humans either. I remember reading about a male crow being tracked who they knew was infertile, but his mate kept successfully having children anyways. No points for guessing how that happened. More interestingly, I've personally witnessed a crow couple have a really violent fight (right in front of their child, too), and after that day, only one parent would come visit me with their child. I'm pretty sure they split up, and I'm not even sure if they ever got back together again.
It makes sense that as intelligence increases, behavioral patterns become less consistent. That's the whole point of intelligence, after all; to allow one to dynamically adapt to situations instead of being fixed to a doomed path.
Probably both, honestly. Nerds and feminists seem to be a big portion of the people doing it.
As for the kink--you would be surprised how often I got the 'my husband doesn't want to dominate me' thing on OKCupid back in my dissolute era. (Yes, I know it's the other way in your case. The point still holds and, really, I agree with you.)
Agree that this is gentrifying a universal feature of human mating behaviors, disagree about trying to explain why it happens with generic flaws in human nature/relationships.
Most behavioral strategies are not unitary in a population, there is usually variance between different types of behavioral strategies in different proportions that create a hard-to-exploit equilibrium across the population.
We should expect some number of monogamous people and some number of poly people and some number of whatever other categories we want to draw in every human population, just because a population with a pure strategy featuring only one of those for everybody would be vulnerable to exploitation and invasion by other strategies.
We don't need a universal explanation like 'dead bedrooms trend towards infidelity' or w/e, we can sufficiently explain this with normal human variance.
It's more like the way we diagnose some kids as ADHD when really all they are doing is failing to thrive in the unnatural constraints of the classroom.
These are sentences where 'often' would have been uncontroversial, but 'always' stretches credulity. Do you wish to be understood as literally denying the existence of happy monogamous fidelity?
However, I think in most cases - assuming they are sexually active together - the couple in question is applying some hack, maybe as vanilla as strategic second honeymoons or makeup sex, or messing with tantric stuff.
Yeah, I think this is close. I'd describe it as a straightforward continuation of a pattern I associate with 3rd-wave feminism, of noticing patterns of human behavior that were suppressed and stigmatized by the dominant culture, and finding a way to implement them in ways that align with "feminist" values such as consent. (Same as with various flavors of kink.)
I basically view gender, as in the "social construct" type of gender, as being a socially approved form of role-playing. I'm not a half-elf paladin or an orc mercenary, but I've played them at times and had fun, sometimes even dressing up for the live-action stuff. Putting on gendered clothes to go to the opera is similar. And yeah, I do have preferences - there's stuff that I can try to play as but it doesn't really click, and other stuff that just fits like a glove the first time I try.
That's a good example of the same process. Just because an urge is natural, doesn't mean it's good. However, just because an urge is bad doesn't mean you can't have fun with it and maybe scratch the itch. See also martial arts.
I meant "the urge" in the sense of "*an* urge", if you know what I mean. The urges I scratch when playing video games, for example, are probably not good ones.
I'm in the center of local polyamorous (mostly, but not only, in a broad sense, i.e. ENM) community. Our polycule of 3 lives on ~$2500/month and we are not far from being the richest people in our social bubble. ~$20-25/day is considered an ok-ish salary.
We're always quite surprised when we hear that polyamory is apparently the lifestyle for rich:)
I have heard it's seeing adoption among less-affluent young people as a way of coping with uncertain jobs and high housing costs, so that may be a third cluster along with nerds and feminists.
Isn't St Petersburg sort of the California of Russia? Long intellectual history, closer ties to Europe, etc.?
Eh, my experience with lower class relationships doesn't bear this out.
Maybe you could make that argument about casualizing divorce and/or normalizing co-habition or something, but given how common divorce and co-habitation are, the horse is already out of the barn. Marriages already get broken up, children are already out of wedlock, there's not a lot of sacred cows left protecting us against those things.
Whereas for the people who can manage it, normalized polyamory can provide a mechanism for more distributed types of networks of support and mutual aid and tight-knit community.
Because the Public Discourse world is surprisingly small in some ways, the guy that coined "luxury beliefs" has complained about the nearly-unknown author of the feted poly book getting book events while he can't despite having a much larger audience: https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/book-stores-dont-want-to-host-an
The "luxury belief" thing was already mostly addressed in the subscriber-only post.
From Scott:
>[quotes from the author]…so you might think the author believes that polyamory is, in some sense, associated with the rich. Any such belief would be false - both of the studies I know of addressing the demographics of polyamory (1, 2) find that it’s about equally common across social classes.
From the comments (presented without attribution in case anyone was relying on the anonymity of subscriber-only):
>Wasn’t this article just one of the alt-right criticisms of polyamory as a “luxury belief”, repackaged for the left instead?
--
>The problem with the "luxury belief" conception for polyamory is that polyamory doesn't really buy you any status... at least not outside certain small groups which are themselves low-status. If I, as an upper middle class person, started telling people I was polyamorous then I wouldn't get status, I'd get a whole bunch of "ew, TMI" and "I didn't need to know that".
>I agree that being opposed to polyamory is low status (unless you couch it in a bunch of left-wing blather like this guy did) but actively being polyamorous isn't high status (unless maybe you're really good looking).
---
Even the author of the article disgrees (with himself):
>Meanwhile, others have turned to ethical non-monogamy precisely because our society is not set up to their advantage. They practice it not as part of an individual journey of self-discovery, but as a way to have more support, materially and emotionally. In 2022 the writer and disability-rights activist Jillian Weise wrote a thoughtful essay, also for New York magazine, exploring the freedom polyamory provides to her as a disabled person. That piece did not generate the breathless coverage of either More or New York’s canoodling cats.
The lower class (at least if defined by education and income) has already been on this trajectory for a long time, while the upper classes have mostly continued on the track of getting married and not having kids outside of it. Arguably the upper class as a responsibility, which they've failed to meet, to use its cultural influence to encourage this behavior. Also arguably, popularizing polyamory in culture could make the problem worse. But the damage is largely already done, and I think it could easily be the case that it stems more from ignoring the upper classes than from paying attention to them too closely.
I think I object to the idea that people who live a certain lifestyle are morally culpable for the harm done by third parties who choose to imitate or make TV shows about that lifestyle. No one is forcing the third parties to do those things; shouldn't the people choosing to do bad imitations or make bad TV shows have the primary moral responsibility for the effects of those choices?
Maybe if the original person is going out of their way to draw attention or promote the lifestyle, but then you're essentially back to hating people who write books, not all people who live the lifestyle.
I also object to labeling lifestyles as "beliefs". That's just poor terminology.
Fair points. I would say common sense would apply: there are certain things that I do, that I don't think everyone should do because they would be awful for them (I went to J-school, for example: awful waste of good time and money); so it's fine that you do certain things without the need to turn your own tastes into moral crusades.
I mean, I don't think people are going to copy polyamory just because they saw it on TV.
It's way more likely that material reality drives people to poly, and one material reality is that it's easier to afford living on 3 - 4 incomes than on one, and if you have 3 - 5 adults cohabiting you may be able to skimp on childcare costs.
There's that saying about how California rent keeps relationships that are long dead going. I predict that urban rent and cost of childcare is going to create so, so, so many toxic polycules, just as the aspiration for a house with a white picket fence in the suburbs and 2.5 kids thing created so many terrible hetero monogamous marriages (because what are you going to do otherwise? Spinsters and bachelors were seen as suspect, you probably couldn't have gone very far without the wife and kids).
Sounds like those are precisely the sorts of people who would fuck up their lives regardless. Do you honestly think they'd be great parents and spouses if they'd never heard of polyamory? They just would have found some other excuse to torpedo their relationships and ignore their responsibilities.
I read section II and thought, "Hmmm. I should conduct a close analysis of the things I do gracefully and effortlessly and try to write about what I discover..."
Then I read section III and thought, "No... I really shouldn't."
I know this isn't the point of your post, but "Treat every day as a gift from God" is much better relationship advice than non-violent communication, etc.
Seriously! Just being grateful for the simple things in life is such an amazing way to improve it. Having a warm bed! People who recognize you and smile when they see you! The smell of toast! Hot running water! And that's just in my first-world city life.
But only people who already believe and feel this way would understand what you're talking about. You're not convincing or persuading anyone with this. You're right, but it's not useful.
From what I've heard, the actionable version of this advice is "start keeping a gratitude journal of the things you were thankful for". I've heard some people who admitted to being instinctively averse to the idea refer to it as being "infuriatingly effective", which is about as high praise as you can give something like that. Rewiring your trapped priors to see the good in life, or whatever.
Put me in the 'infuriatingly effective' camp. Also in the 'incredibly cringe but effective' camp is the practice of grace at mealtimes; I'm no longer religious, but think a daily dinner practice of being thankful for your daily bread is deeply healthy.
For what it's worth, my relationship advice mostly boils down to 'don't be an asshole and don't hang out with assholes'; it's been very effective for me, but of course, is highly dependent on being able to identify assholery (in yourself and others) and is therefore useless for those who don't already practice it.
I think there is actually a large difference between "Treat every day as a gift from God" and the "infuriatingly effective" actionable version. The former is vapid, the latter is an actual thing you can do.
It is like the difference between the advice Scott says is given by the healthy and functional, vs the legible but wrong advice from the dysfunctional. Except: this advice is legible without being wrong! Maybe something like a translation service for vapid correct advice is the way to bridge the gap and make advice useful.
For me at least, the need for gratitude is not something I need to be convinced of, but something I need to be reminded of.
I do have a lot to be grateful for, but it's far too easy to get caught up in the day-to-day business of life and forget about that. It's too easy to be focused on the things we don't have and forget to be grateful for the things we do.
So, I am grateful to Moon Moth for today's reminder.
I'd say it's a description of what the destination looks like from inside, but not a map of how to get there? But if you've been there, it may remind you that you can go back?
To your point, "don't be depressed" has got to be one of the worst pieces of advice ever.
Good advice for spoiled people who are self-centered and have unrealistic expectations and are too upset by minor setbacks.
But also the type of advice that keeps a lot of people in abusive relationships for much too long, or gets them to ignore problems instead of trying to solve them.
The problem here is probably expecting any piece of advice to be 'good' in and of itself, rather than 'good for a specific person in a specific situation'.
> The problem here is probably expecting any piece of advice to be 'good' in and of itself, rather than 'good for a specific person in a specific situation'.
I agree with this. I'd say, I wouldn't expect telling a random person these specific words would help, but I do think that most if not all people could benefit from getting to a place where they have first-hand experience with what the words refer to.
Recognizing and getting out of abusive situations is a completely different matter. Or maybe it's the flip-side of not taking stuff for granted, where just like we should pay attention to the nice things in life and notice and appreciate them, we should also pay attention to the painful things in life and notice them and reject them. (IMO, one of the key parts of abuse is getting people to the point where they think that it's wrong for them to feel hurt, that their pain is "invalid" and deserved.)
I separated from my husband of 30 years and the father of my kids for precisely this reason. I wanted to be grateful for the every day joys and not only was he incapable of doing so, he couldn't bear to let me do it either. I'm grateful that the option was available. We did not need to be screaming at each other or hitting each other to be making each other unhappy every day.
Is it? I think it is exactly as vapid as Scott implies. Or even if it does have meaning, it is probably something close to "Just be a kind and happy person." Which is completely non-actionable to a person who is not kind and happy. (If nonviolent communication fares much better is another question.)
"Whenever you feel that your life sucks and your relationship sucks and everything sucks, remind yourself of all the things you have that so many other people don't have, like enough food, a roof over your head, and not having your kids be killed by a missile strike. Then remember that although you could have it better, you could also have it much, much worse."
This is in the same spirit as "gift from God", but more concrete and actionable. And it helps me sometimes, when I feel that my life sucks and my relationship sucks and everything sucks.
That’s because “gift from God” is a form of toxic positivity for a person that is suffering whereas you are having a heartfelt good faith conversation with yourself about what is really true about your life.
Good point. The only way I can make sense of "gift from God", no matter how literally or metaphorically you take the word "God", is if this sense of "gift" applies equally when life is treating you badly as when it's treating you well. Which strains the metaphor quite close to the breaking point. It's wonderful when it works though, I've literally seen people be thankful for cancer.
Good advice if you are a typical reader of this blog, probably.
Bad advice if you are in an abusive relationship you should be escaping, or have real relationship problems that could actually be fixed with the right effort
There's not a single piece of advice that's applicable to every person in every situation. "Eat less!" - "Eat more!" - "Quit your job!" - "Hang in there!" - "Put more work into your relationship!" - "Get a divorce!" - Each of these can be just the right thing for some and directly harmful for others.
You're confusing "this won't make them change," with, "they can't ever change." No, they definitely can change, but your cute quote ain't gonna be what causes it.
Happy, no, but kindness is a practiced skill. Yes, some people are naturally better at it than others, but anyone *can* get at least a bit better at it with effort.
Came here largely to say this. Not that it's *useful* advice, but that most good advice is obvious and if you don't get it or struggle to do it, probably breaking it down into smaller pieces and trying to examine each bit of it won't help at all. If it did, the productivity industry would have made us all productive by now.
I don't know that I agree, is there a significant part of the population that would benefit from *more* violent communication in their relationship?
I wouldn't recommend that to people who get exploited because they don't angrily stand up for themselves while throwing things, for example; I'd recommend they find someone who doesn't exploit them.
You must know that it is logically possible for something to be helpful for one person and unhelpful, even harmful, for another.
Personally I have never met anyone who got anything out of NVC long-term, although I have met many who were initially enthusiastic.(and have occasionally been subjected to it myself). Perhaps it works better on "low income folks," I don't know. There may also be cultural issues, I don't know where you're from.
Honestly, for the most part I've found it to be a harmless waste of time, but it can cause two big problems; firstly, although in theory it's supposed to be just for you, in practice it gives people a weapon to accuse others of communicating inappropriately; and secondly, that it discourages judgement and blame - which could be good for some! - but in practice most people seem to have the opposite issue and could stand to be a lot more judgemental.
I'm slightly disappointed you didn't format "(have I just accidentally re-invented televangelists? Fine, I’ve just re-invented televangelists; I recommend against marrying one.)" as a Song of Myself joke.
It's a bit hard to get into due to the face-value narcissism, but once inside it is what Scott here spoke of as making the ordinary human transcendent. Whitman invites us to use his words to describe our own experience "(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you, / Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.)".
Sorry if this is somewhat off-topic, but I don't have a subscription to The Atlantic: did Tyler Austin Harper (a professor of English at Colby College who, I believe, specializes in stuff like late Victorian sci-fi novelists like H.G. Wells) mention how Silicon Valley polyamory is linked to American Golden Age sci-fi authors like Robert Heinlein?
For example, Heinlein worked hard to normalize polyamory in his last book before his cerebral problems, the 1966 libertarian cult classic "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress." Like most people in the Luna colony, the regular guy narrator Manny, a computer repairman, is in a group marriage. This, he explains, is a remnant of the early days of the moon colony when there were far more men than women. Nowadays, the sexes are more equal in number, but Loonies found that they still prefer group marriages for reasons. Manny discounts all the hubba-hubba snickering: polyamory is purely a sensible way to organize that side of life and it's good for the kids!
My impression is that Heinlein had a normal heterosexual man's urge for sexual variety, and he was born without the Jealousy Gene, so, being a reasonable guy, he thought a share-and-share-alike system made sense.
Many of the older tech tycoons like Musk and Bezos are big Heinlein fans. And Heinlein studied his readers carefully and respectfully. Although not a nerd himself -- an Annapolis grad, he struck his fans as a glamorous officer-and-gentleman type who'd be played by Franchot Tone in a movie, which helps explain why they always deferred to him as "the dean of science fiction" even as he got older and crankier -- and he seems to have noted their tendencies such as polyamory and even transgenderism.
I hate to support mainstream media, but anything with Aleister Crowley, the Babalon Working, and Parsons' attempt to build a homunculus has got to be entertaining. Do what thou wilt.
I think Heinlein was a gentleman among nerds but would have seemed a nerd among gentlemen.
He's an example of the older libertarian tendency in sci-fi before it got taken over by wokies; I still remember Niven and Pournelle picking on the environmentalist movement in Fallen Angels. That was in the 80s and 90s. Before that you can even count John Norman, author of the notorious male-dominant BDSM Gor hexatrigintology, who apparently got the boot when Donald Wollheim's daughter took over at DAW from him. (OK, it was a hexavigintology at the time.) He's a libertarian. (He's still alive and just dropped the 36th book...)
Apparently his wife, Virginia Heinlein, got him into both polyamory and libertarianism; before that he was just a lefty. The lady was basically your libertarian nerd's dream woman: bright, athletic but feminine, mechanically competent, and libertarian. (Apparently the secret to getting the lady scientist is to be a famous science fiction author.) Heinlein's very unpopular among feminists despite having an obvious taste for strong, competent women.
OK, but wokies are still into polyamory (modern right-wing sci-fi authors like Vox Day most definitely are not). I'd go further and say polyamory makes sense for nerds because there aren't enough female nerds to go around, so there's an obvious solution: share! The male nerds get to sleep with someone, the female nerd(s) get a choice of partners...everyone wins! As for non-nerdy wokies, which is a lot of them, it lets the women indulge their taste for sexual variety, but they put up a lot of feminist stuff to drive off the inevitable supply of men looking to sleep around rather than form multiple relationships.
You may want to read the polyamory subreddit. It is woke as f*** but often unintentionally hilarious, and the single best argument for monogamy I have ever read (likely for reasons Scott says).
Stuff like "Starship Troopers" leads me to think Heinlein was conservative. I think he mostly could think good, commonsense thoughts, and that most people aren't as far apart on topics as people think they are.
You know how most people's views on disparate issues correlate (pro-gun people are often also pro-life)? Heinlein's an exception to that rule. That 99% correlation? He's the 1%.
(OK, I know a correlation coefficient is the *square root* of the proportion of variation explained by the model, but consider it poetic license.)
This kind of correlation has long puzzled me. I don't doubt it is true, but have no good explanation for it. My best explanation is people listen to someone pushing an agenda, so they listen to a person, rather than think through issues.
Factor 1: Any belief with any natural correlation will tend to cluster. People who believe in small government will tend to believe in lower taxes, and vice versa, since you can't make an infinitely big government on no money. The correlation doesn't have to be perfect, because it's then exaggerated by...
Factor 2: People on the other side are annoying and stupid, people on my side are smart and wise, so I listen to the people on my side and disdain the people on the other side. When Ben Shapiro explains how great monogamy is, I nod my head and accept his wisdom as I accepted all his other wisdom.
For Factor 1, the correlations seem to sometimes be contradictory. Such as gun control and pro-life. Or capital punishment and pro-life. If the sanctity of life is the important thing, aren't these inconsistent?
Most people don't have a lot of time to spend thinking out the implications of tax policy or the minimum wage, and are more interested in work and family. They pick the side that has an issue they care about (abortion, immigration, transgender rights), or else pick the side they fit in better with socially (red tribe, blue tribe). Since any practical political change involves voting for one of our two parties in the USA, it doesn't really make any difference what you actually think, and holding heretical views in our polarized era means you can be suspect for belonging to the other side. So thinking for yourself is actually a bad idea.
It may be different in Europe with multiple parties, though I suspect you have a weaker version of the same effect.
> The psychologist I’m thinking about here is Steven Pinker, who, in writes the following on the question, “Why Are States So Red and Blue?”:
>> But why do ideology and geography cluster so predictably? Why, if you know a person’s position on gay marriage, can you predict that he or she will want to increase the military budget and decrease the tax rate . . . there may also be coherent mindsets beneath the diverse opinions that hang together in right-wing and left-wing belief systems. Political philosophers have long known that the ideologies are rooted in different conceptions of human nature — a conflict of visions so fundamental as to align opinions on dozens of issues that would seem to have nothing in common.
> This is all fine—except that attitudes on such diverse issues are not so highly correlated. For a quick check, I went to the General Social Survey website and looked up correlations among attitudes on gay marriage (marhomo), military spending (natarms) and upper-income tax rates (tax rich). The correlations are 0.17, 0.09, and 0.05.
> Before developing a theory of why people’s attitudes on such issues are so highly correlated, we should first measure what correlation is actually there.
Which, if I'm reading the abstract correctly, found that increasing polarization caused people to more often be found avowing membership in a political party that harmonized with their views, but did not noticeably change the views themselves:
> the authors model trends in issue partisanship—the correlation of issue attitudes with party identification—and issue alignment—the correlation between pairs of issues—and find a substantive increase in issue partisanship, but little evidence of issue alignment. The findings suggest that opinion changes correspond more to a resorting of party labels among voters than to greater constraint on issue attitudes: since parties are more polarized, they are now better at sorting individuals along ideological lines.
The links seem a bit too dry and uninteresting for me to analyze in-depth right now, but at least I'll take away from this that I should indeed doubt the correlation, as I doubt almost everything anyway.
I do suspect that people don't really think about issues, but fall on the same side as the people they respect and/or associate with. Thinking can be hard work and isn't for everyone, nor, apparently, for most people.
Heinlein was much influenced politically by his various wives. Not much is known about his first wife, but his second wife in the 1930s had him in touch with Hollywood leftist circles, occultists, and so forth. His third wife was libertarian.
Another thing about Heinlein is he got bored fairly easily and then moved on to other topics, which makes him an interesting writer. He didn't have any interest in becoming a cult leader like his friend and fellow sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard or Ayn Rand did, so he didn't bother being politically consistent. Thus, his three main cult novels are aimed at three quite different cults: Starship Troopers is for militarists, Stranger in a Strange Land was adopted by hippies/druggies, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by libertarians.
Note: I'm not familiar with his books written after The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. He had cerebral health problems from 1966-69 and couldn't write. Then he awoke to find himself rich and famous because hippies had taken up "Stranger" and all the old censorship rules were gone. His post-medical crisis 1970s books sound in summary pretty dire, but they sold well and many people today only know him from those.
Heinlein's 1950s juvenile novels for 13 year old boys strike me as his best stuff.
The above shows from 1994, I recall the trend continuing to the 50s (where people's views were much less correlated), but I'm struggling to find the research; will reply here if I get around to it.
It's so amusing to see this debate - Heinlein made a deliberate effort to "get inside the heads of" differing ideas and steelman them on paper. He was not espousing (all of) moon is a harsh mistress, or starship troopers, or stranger in a strange land, off the top of my head.
He was just good enough at writing that it was hard to imagine he was just writing about it.
Right, there's also "Beyond this Horizon" which has an armed society, and what could be described as eugenics... advising people who to have kids with. I think if you want to get inside Heinlein's head the best lens would be his juveniles.
I'm trying to figure out the construction of this word. hexa- is a Greek root for 6. trigint- is Latin for 30. -log- is Greek again, leading to a conflict where the vowel connecting from trigint- should be -i- but the vowel connecting to -log- should be -o-.
> hexavigintology
This seems to confirm that we're using mixed Greco-Latin numerals for whatever reason. The Greek word for thirty ("triakonta") is clearly cognate to the Latin word, leaving the possibility of confusion open; the words for twenty are not similar.
But then it gets even weirder. Neither language actually allows the formation of numbers this way. It isn't possible to just prefix "six" to "thirty", even if you restrict yourself to Greek. Compare the oktokaitriakontedron,† the figure of thirty-𝗮𝗻𝗱-eight faces, in Archimedes' work: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=o%29ktwkaitriako%2Fntedron&la=greek . Or the much better known triskaidekaphobia, the fear of three-𝗮𝗻𝗱-ten.
An immediate implication is that the word "hexadecimal" is malformed on top of its parallel Greco-Latin construction. (In Latin prefixing without inserting an "and" does occur, and seems to be obligatory, for numbers in the teens, but the "and" appears again in the twenties and presumably higher numbers. The Latin form would be "sedecimal", with no "and". Greek requires the "and"; 16 is hekkaideka (with -ksk- getting simplified to -kk-) but I'm not sure what an adjectival form should look like.
† If someone else knows, I'd like to know why the aspiration at the beginning of "hedron" isn't preserved in the compound form. Does this word postdate the disappearance of initial aspiration in Greek? Does it postdate the transformation of [tʰ] into [θ]?
It was a joke. I was poking fun at Norman and needed the word for the equivalent of a trilogy with 36 books. I think I saw 'duotrigintillion' somewhere.
If I were to guess, "duo𝗱𝗲trigintillion", where duodetriginti is Latin for 28, literally "two from thirty".
Just for fun, I'll also note that while the Latin and Greek words for 20, viginti and eikosi, are not especially similar to each other, they are still cognate.
That's interesting. I had thought that one of the appeals of poly is you can structure it however you want, which would seem to apply to things like the line marriages of Stranger in a Strange Land.
Do poly people generally consider poly relationships to require some qualities that Heinlein didn't include?
I rather like IMDB's mini-bio of Gaio Giulio Cesare:
> Gaio Giulio Cesare was born on July 13, 100 in Rome, Roman Republic. He was a writer, known for La conquête des Gaules (1923) and Caesar the Conqueror (1962). He died on March 15, 44 in Rome, Roman Republic.
Indeed ! They mention some other curious facts about the writer in the "Trivia" block (below the mini-bio), but they completely omitted this one crucial detail.
> I think this goes beyond polyamory. The people I know from various oft-discussed groups - transgender, super-religious, autistic, rich, etc - are all nicer and more normal than their public representatives would lead you to believe.
I think this may have something to do with how said public representatives are algorithmically selected to be maximally rage-inducing to the "other side".
Perhaps, but I think it's baked in to the process? It's a gradual frog-boiling, of positive reinforcement, where each additional increment of rage-inducement gives more likes from Good People and more flames from Bad People. So the end will be more likely to be annoyingly overconfident than the start, but there's also other ways to be rage-inducing.
Nah I think it's the death of "respectability politics" - activists and advocates used to go out of their way to appeal to/assuage the concerns of normies, now you get bonus points for triggering them. The Church of Satan is a good example of this.
I think the death of respectability politics is part of the effect of the algorithm dynamic Moon Moth's is pointing to.
If respectability and compromise gets you more of what you want, while vitriol and trolling set you back, people will aspire to and enforce more respectability and compromise in their social movements.
But if respectability and compromise means you get ignored in favor of vitriol and trolling, people will aspire to and enforce more vitriol and trolling in their social movements.
True, although it's sort of interesting, apparently the term was invented in 1993 (as a way to criticize the concept) in the race studies world. It's like 90s academia has become our whole mainstream culture.
My impression is that "respectability politics" is always an undercurrent, and gains and loses prominence in waves? Like, it's always a useful skill to be able to speak the local prestige dialect (in my case, a "neutral" variety of American Standard English), but sometimes schools go overboard in forcing its use all the time and calling any other dialects "bad grammar" and other epithets, but other times schools go overboard in dismissing ASE and promoting the use of local dialects and calling them "more authentic" and "natural". And yet the reality is that it's good to be able to speak both, and switch back and forth as appropriate, which can sometimes mean making a point by using the opposite one from what other people around you are using.
I agree that the dynamic has always existed, but I think the ad-driven Internet, ubiquitous smart phones, and social media algorithms have dramatically increased its speed and reach. The guy ranting in a medieval village pub about Wat Tyler can now reach half the population of the planet in a matter of hours.
It's like the apocryphal Stalin quote, "quantity has a quality all its own".
Also, I suspect that the process of engaging with the public tends to bring out the worst in people. Add two hours of getting yelled at by idiots to your daily routine - is it going to make you nicer?
I think that's part of the algorithm. The idiots get shown your thing because it gets them interacting on the site, and you see their responses because it gets you interacting on the site, and the people who'd quietly nod or shake their head get shown something else that hooks into their particular triggers.
In some cases, but I don't think it's the whole explanation. Narcissists are ready to tell you a dramatic story of their own life, saving the journalists the effort of doing an in -depth interview. There are still many shows and articles which are not intended to be rage bait, and they still seem to showcase many narcissists.
Nicer and friendlier to whom? I worry that as we tribalize, we wind up with people who are perfectly nice and civilized (by their standards) to their in-group, and reflexively hostile to their out-group. That is, I think if we average out "niceness" as a single scalar property of a person, we lose a lot of important information about how they treat different individuals and groups.
Toxoplasma of rage, right. This is an interesting counter-piece to that point, I think the selection pressure for public representatives talked about here, are a mechanism by which the cherries that Toxoplasma then picks become available.
I'd forgotten about that post, but yes, it's the same dynamic. Scott seemed to be describing the overall disease, while the current bug in my bonnet is how our tech stack deliberately exacerbates and spreads the disease in order to make money.
Also, wow, that quip at the end about "Is Bird-Watching Racist?" was prescient.
I saw a meme a couple years back which was a graph showing an inverse relationship between (loose paraphrase) "number of years since realizing you are trans" vs "desire to write blog posts about being trans".
People who have a lot of experience doing something and who feel reasonably comfortable in their identity seem to be a lot less likely to produce content about it in the first place. So you get a lot of stuff about transness from people in the first 3 years of their transition, lots of stuff about autism from people who were diagnosed at 26, lots of stuff about religion from recent converts, etc.
Your comments about who writes advice books reminded me of a little conundrum that I faced when I studied martial arts: who do you turn to for advice on self-defense? The best self-defense is to not get into trouble in the first place, but the people who don't get into trouble don't usually think about it and don't have much concrete advice beyond "well, keep your eyes open and don't hang out with assholes and criminals". The people who do have a lot of experience have a skewed perception: either they are professional bouncers/ bodyguards/ SWAT team members etc, and the conflicts they see may be much different from what you or I could expect to face; and/ or they are violent asshats, and you shouldn't associate with them or imitate them.
Eventually I decided that "keeping my eyes open and not hanging out with assholes" was good enough for me, and stopped worrying about the whole issue.
Oh absolutely. If you spend a lot of time worrying about crime in your neighborhood, spend at least as much time working on a plan to move to a better place.
Nowadays I live in Singapore. Crime is against the law here. It's ridiculously safe.
The police even tracked down my beater bike when I reported it missing. (This being Singapore, or course, it wasn't stolen. It was locked only to itself outside some building, and a hapless moving company accidentally brought it across the island by accident because I parked it next to their designated loading zone.)
Die jure you are right. De facto some things are actually forbidden for real and society and law enforcement come down on you for them. Like murder. And for some areas the laws are merely suggestions but not actually enforced. I hear shop lifting in large parts of the US is treated like that? Or stealing bikes or smoking pot in states that haven't outright legalised it.
As an historic aside, drunk driving used to be socially acceptable,, but is now completely taboo. The laws themselves didn't change all that much.
(There's also a third category of things that society will crack down on, but that are not actually against any law.)
In Singapore acts like shop lifting or stealing of bikes are also de facto crimes.
> I hear shop lifting in large parts of the US is treated like that?
Not large parts geographically. Mostly just some major cities where the prosecutors are making a political stand by refusing to prosecute certain types of crimes. (Which means they let anyone who was arrested go free, which means the police don't bother to arrest the criminals, which means stores don't bother to report the crime, which means the stats look like the crime isn't happening as much as it actually is.)
As someone who also practices the martial arts, I'm basically "book-learned" in that I haven't ever actually been in a self-defense situation. Yet I provide self-defense instruction all the time. And I practice it, which is likely a lot of the reason I haven't used it in an encounter.
Maybe not everyone who is good at walking is good at communicating how to walk, but some surely would be, since there are so many of them. No one would read a book about how to walk, though, except scientists, orthopedists, physical and occupational therapists, etc., those that have an interest in the mechanics and underlying principles. And those are the people to ask about advice on how to walk.
Yes. My experience with martial arts training is that there’s an element of truth to the David Carradine stereotype — it does instill a physical confidence that allows you to be calm and in control around potential aggressors, which can help in de-escalating — but that it also instills a certain desire to use your skills to dominate other people. The guys I knew who trained a lot also mysteriously found themselves getting into more conflicts than a normal person would. Kind of a double edged sword.
Speaking of swords, didn't the finest swordsman in France in the 18th century declare he would be terrified of getting into a fencing match with someone who had never used a sword, because that person would make unpredictable moves?
Amusing, but from personal experience that sounds highly implausible. As a teenager aged around 16 I engaged in a play fencing match with a similar aged female friend who was a young olympic fencer, or competing to be such and of a comparable standard. A few seconds into the match to my astonishment my sword simply vanished from my hand, whisked out of it by some crafty stroke! I wasn't unduly wimpy for my age either, so she must have had wrist muscles like a blacksmith's!
Speculating, but the 18th century comment might make sense in light of the risk of a "double kill", which apparently was a very real danger in fencing. An untrained fighter might be likely to make very high risk moves that open him wide open to attack but are also very hard to counter, at least in part because they're so suicidal that no trained fighter ever uses them.
The best self-defense by far is being a good enough shape to run away from the average troublemaker, something that any decent martial arts guru would endorse.
> Someone who tours the country, telling young people that monogamy is right for them, and answering their questions on the right way to be monogamous.
That's, actually, one of the things I really loved about "More Then Two" and most other polyamory-related people I follow - they specifically don't do that (even though each community has it's share of cringe corner cases). The point isn't in "polyamory is right and monogamy is wrong", it's "polyamory is an option, there are people for whom it works". It's representation.
Most populations don't have pure behavioral strategies about stuff like this, they'd be open to invasion (a purely monogamous society is prey to the first polyamorous person who scoops up lots of unsuspecting partners, a purely poly community is prey to the first monogamous person who can offer a better deal to the best available mate).
So most populations will naturally have people predisposed towards a wide variety of strategies, and be most stable when those strategies are in equilibrium with each other.
Um, no. Real poly people don't scoop up unsuspecting partners. They look for partners who are also poly, or who want to try it and seem like they have healthy motivations and expectations of it.
Real poly people don't want a mono relationship, no matter how good the "deal" on offer.
If you insist on strict terminology, substitute non-monogamy for polyamory in darwin's original comment.
What I guess his point is in his later comment is something like this: Whatever evolved, innate psychology exists around these issues, it's certainly not for or against specific, recently invented, detailed rule sets like what you refer to as "real poly" (which includes rules like not scooping up unsuspecting partners, and refusing a mono relationship no matter how good the deal is), but for or against broad categories like preferring a single partner who is staying with you and only you, or preferring to have many partners.
Actually, the way I do poly, we have only 1 rule: condoms always and safer sex.
Not scooping up unsuspecting partners isn't a rule, it's just the right, moral way to act.
Refusing a mono relationship, no matter how good the deal is isn't a rule either. It's just... How to get this through to you?
1) Many poly people, me included, simply don't want to be in a mono relationship, ever, no matter who's offering it, or how "good" the terms are. We are poly, and thus we want to be in poly relationships, not mono ones.
2) Some poly people are happy doing poly and mono relationships (obviously not at the same time!) For those people, there are a variety of possibilities:
a) They're in (a) relationship(s) when the magical mono person shows up: Why on earth would they leave partners they love, as well as their metamours (if they're close), for some stranger? If a perfect, sexy, smart, rich, funny, etc. person waltzed into your life, would you leave your partner for them? No? Exactly.
b) They're single but happy that way (not seeing anyone/dating, or seeing people/dating, but not interested in a long-term relationship atm):
A magical mono person is unlikely to catch their interest if they're not currently looking for a long-term serious relationship.
c) They're single/dating, but not in a serious relationship:
Well then! Magical mono person might have a chance!
Make sense?
We're not poly because we can't get anyone to be mono with us, and we're not secretly waiting for a magical mono person to sweep us off our feet. We're not like you, and that's OK.
Finally, being "for or against broad categories..." isn't a rule either. It's just who we are, or what we want.
Speaking for myself (and many other poly people) It's not that we *prefer* having multiple partners over having one partner, it's that mono doesn't work for us. It isn't a choice,* it's just how we are.
BTW, I've had 1 partner for the past 3.75 years (pandemic, my health, metamour's health, bereavement, etc.) and everyone is perfectly happy with that. I don't need multiple partners all the time, and I haven't met anyone in the past few years who I've bern interested in. But when I do, there won't be any issue if I start something new.
* As mentioned in my last post, some poly people are happy doing poly or mono. I'm not speaking for them.
I agree, most healthy societies involve a mixture of strategies in any number of... Fields? Partnership, gender, sexuality, even things like early birds and night owls. I read a paper the other day that hypothesised that the modern prevalence of ADHD people and autistic people was due to them being valued members of bands of humans and protohumans. Their particular neurotypes were useful (can't remember how atm, sorry - awake way too long with pain flare. Will try to track down the paper tomorrow).
I haven't read Tyler Austin Harper's essay in The Atlantic, but I like the guy. He's a professor of something or other at Colby College (environmental studies? but he's basically an English professor) who specializes in apocalyptic sci-fi like "The War of the Worlds." He's part-black and has pretty reasonable, moderate views on issues of race and class. He likes rural Maine and is a dedicated fisherman.
My guess would that his perspective on polyamory theory would be pretty similar to Charles Murray's general point in "Coming Apart:" there are a lot of theories about how to organize society that are okay for the right half of the bell curve, not that they are much inclined in that direction, but are bad for the left half. If you are, say, Bertrand Russell, well, you can afford four wives, but for the typical person below 100 IQ, the monogamous will have a much better life and their kids will have much less emotional trauma.
> As a moonbat leftist, I am not typically in the business of reading The Wall Street Journal. Nor am I an aficionado of contemporary courtroom dramas. But when a family member forwarded Patterson’s article about the resistance he encountered trying to write about a race other than his own, it hit close to home: I am a Black professor who is an expert on 19th- and 20th-century British literature — the infamous “dead white men” of European art and letters. Like Patterson, I have often been criticized for not staying in my racial lane. In fact, throughout my academic life I’ve had to justify my intellectual interests and fight the assertion that I should spend my time researching authors who share my skin color. For as long as I can remember, it has been made clear to me that I am the wrong kind of Black academic.
Hey, they won't let white guys write about *anything* now unless they're gay or used to be a woman (or they seek a right-wing audience). But I do sympathize with the guy. The whole ancestry-based requirement for writing about a culture is kind of dumb. It does add some credibility, I admit.
Is there a person alive today for which 19th century English Literature is a natural fit? I would argue no - it's far too much in the past for anyone to naturally participate in the relevant culture the books are about. The closest approximation is having parents and other adults that value such things and inculcate 19th century literature. Nothing about a person's race is determinative regarding that, and it's a very poor proxy. Better to ignore it at this point.
If you're talking something more recent, like the US Civil Rights movement, then there are people still alive and a lot of second generation participants who would make much better experts. I would definitely want to talk to an American about 9/11's effect on US culture rather than someone from a foreign country, even if they've studied it a lot. They might know more about it, but they're approaching it from a significant disadvantage compared to someone who was already here and alive at the time.
Actually, that's precisely what prompted him to write the essay. You should read it! He's doing exactly the thing the left claims to like: using his position of relative privilege to stand up against oppression in support of those who have less privilege. Except in this case he's standing up against woke orthodoxy in support of a white man. Also, in support of art itself:
> This is an assault on the very idea of literature and art. After all, isn’t the entire business of a poem, a painting, a photograph, whatever, that it is possible to imagine something other than this body I inhabit, in this place where I live, at this time that I find myself?
I saw a trailer for it a few days ago, and I was very interested. Maybe not first-run movie-theater interested, but I'm definitely going to watch it sooner or later.
The opposition to polyamory seems to stem from the same ingrained opposition that exists against polyginy.
Our culture's perception is that the opposition to polyginy is female-driven, but it is not. That opposition is male-driven, as polyginy leaves the male "left half of the curve" largely partner-less. (also, the Atlantic's author is male)
I don't have the stats, but a broad impression is that polyamorous polycules mostly tend to comprise more women than men - i.e. that they are, to a first approximation, polyginy. Which would make polyginy the "null hypothesis" for natural human choices; and which is exactly what the enforcement of monogamy historically tried to suppress.
When Prophet Muhammad prescribed four wives for successful men, it wasn't about "allowing more than one", it was about *setting the upper limit*. For social cohesion benefits.
(a limit that did not apply to himself. He had twelve wives, plus Rayhanah, a Jewish sex slave, whom some scholars think he later married and others think he did not)
It might be that, in the author's circles, complaining against Muhammad's prescriptions is frowned upon, but complaining against polyamory is not, *especially* if you represent it as something engaged in by those elites who aren't the currently dominant elites.
The impression I got was that it was full of 'queer' people who hated straight men, especially if they were white. But that's from reading the polaymory subreddit. Maybe life is different elsewhere. I bet the Silicon Valley and Park Slope variants are probably pretty different.
You do wonder if polyandry would balance out those kinds of problems. I think the real problem is while you can get nerds to share a woman, the other sort of men who lose out in the usual competition tend to be poor, with the accompanying tendency to violence and high 'time preference' as they say--and they won't share nicely. You may remember the famous case of the lady with four dorky-looking men who supposedly didn't care who the dad was--the kid was later found with injuries, from the least nerdy-looking of the tetrad.
Also, from what I can tell a lot of the opposition is from Christians and seems gender-balanced. Lots of guys think it's a great idea because they'll win the competition and get to have multiple girlfriends--men tend to be overconfident (after all, since women find confidence attractive, it is rational to be so to a limited extent!)
My impression is that polyandric arrangements are less frequent than polyginyc arrangements, meaning that polyamory's impacts ultimately correspond to polyginy's impacts. I also think that cases of "child of single mom hurt by one of her serial boyfriends" do far, far outnumber the *absolute count* of polyandric arrangements, let alone the subset of polyandric arrangements where one of the guys hurts the child.
You can discuss all that you wish whether monogamy is "natural", but the observable fact remains that cultures that enforced monogamy outperformed the cultures that did not.
I'd argue monogamy is not natural and is a successful social technology, with the evidence you've stated. (Though apparently successful Chinese guys could have a few concubines, and Islam wasn't exactly devoid of achievements for a while.)
And the currently most successful cultures are among the most liberal about sexuality, and aren't enforcing monogamy. Too many confounders to derive confident conclusions from empirical evidence IMO.
Your second paragraph is dead on, I think - I tried a few poly relationships, and I am more on the "plays contact sports and powerlifts" side of things even though I style myself as a bit of an intellectual *pushes up glasses*. I enjoyed it as long as I didn't really emotionally care about the people I was dating, but as soon as I really had feelings for one of the people I was dating it became unbearable. I know I know I probably just needed to say some Hail Aellas and contemplate my jealousy, but I think there's a temperament/personality factor in whether or not polyamory is a workable thing for people.
That's a polite way of putting it -- I salute you. I find amusing that ctrl-f "cuckhold" shows no hits.
Though a sometimes-polygyny-enjoyer myself, I do not pretend that female jealousy is a vestigial analog of male jealousy, akin to the clitoris or the male nipple. I point to Joyce Benenson's "Warriors and Worriers" as a good look into how worried and insecure (ways that I would never want a woman I love to feel) a woman might feel in a polygynous relationship. Nonetheless, I contend that those who think male jealousy a social figment with no basis in biology must have the wrong hormones to understand it.
FWIW, I know four people involved in polyamory IRL who I met through LessWrong. The two I know well are neither woke nor queer. When I brought my wife to a meeting, she having only gone to a few at that point, she saw two of them cuddling on the couch. After the meeting she was like "was that woman cheating on her husband in front of like twelve guys?" I said, no, they're polyamorous. She asked why I didn't tell her that before and I said I didn't want her to judge the entire group on the basis of this one thing.
It's not like we can just undo our instincts. In this respect, polyamory is objectively a worse solution to the problem of our excess sexual id than adultery, if only because in addition to the built-in problems of your personal time and resources being inherently limited, you also demand the participants to undo their natural emotions, which can't be done without putting a damper on all emotions, as well as emotional investment in the relationships themselves.
I'd say that different people have different amounts of those "natural emotions", such that for some people with low amounts the effort is trivial. And that the corresponding problem with adultery is the betrayal, which can have enormously bad effects on people. So maybe your jealousy is stronger than your sense of betrayal, but other people might be the other way around.
I mean, if men in the lower classes were supporting their wives and children alone, but I think the reality is that no family can survive on a single minimum-wage income, and most households a two-income.
In which case, having a three-income family is probably an even more salient advantage for the lower classes than for the upper, here.
We survived by living in caves, without electricity, or even running water, for most of our history.
Also, the whole point of familial bonding is putting the needs of others over the needs of oneself. Allowing a partner to pursue others axiomatically acts against this principle, especially when the woman, and all the moreso both parties, are allowed to engage in such. You're not gonna put as much effort into helping out someone when you have someone else, and less so when they themselves do to.
Poly people who live together (which is a subset of polys) benefit from multiple incomes, more people to share chores/organisation/childcare/etc., and are generally in a better financial situation than other families at their level of income.
I find it interesting that you posit a man supporting multiple women. In all the poly scenes I've been a part of (in 3 Anglo countries, but 1 was in Quebec, so very French), equality between women and men has been a basic tenet, and in general, women tend to have more partners than men. Very few of the poly women I've met would want to be supported by a male partner (unless they were caring for kids, disabled fam, or elders).
Ironically, the more meritocratic the society, the more dysfunction is there at the bottom, because the best ones can improve their social position, so they often leave their group.
Do you think your comment about who write advice books also applies to parenting advice? And please do let me know in 2-3 years time if your answer changes
Lottery, yes, but the choice of spouse may also play a certain role.
I've yet to see a kid (myself included) possessed of a trait that's, if not present in one of the parents, then present in one of the grandparents. Funny how that works.
Doesn’t that suggest it’s just a question of finding parenting advice from parents whose kids have similar traits to yours? (whether that’s from a book or in person)
Bah. One of my two daughters is five times as energetic and violent as the other. Parenting her has been down to the boring matters of putting in the work and being gutsy enough to balance traditional harsh methods (spank, patiently, when necessary, so that lesser punishments have teeth) with modern loving parenting (hug, frequently, after punishments as well as in normal times). It has worked; she is six years old and has good self control.
It is boring and not worth writing about, but it is very much not down to chance.
Some people have novel insights or specific suggestions, or can present them in useful ways. I would absolutely value a book on parenting written by Fred Rogers.
Oh whoops, I really did mean this as a reply to a different comment. (And then I thought this was someone replying to a different comment of mine, because substack app doesn't show context)... My bad.
>"And I’m not mocking the legible-principle-seekers"
Excellent term right there. Are "legible-principle-seekers" fully equivalent with "Rationalists", or are "Rationalists" only the subset of legible-principle-seekers with an affinity for Bayes?
(i.e. insisting on a world model where principles use mathematical rules to process single-dimensional numbers, ostensibly representing probability, and conveniently empowering utilitarian calculus based on numbers pulled out of a hat)
"Legible-principle-seekers" surely includes the sort of person that reads webpages with names like "10 Tips on How to Do X", where "X" is some impossibly complex social skill that can't (presently) be taught using explicit instruction.
Somehow these end up being the top results of many, many Google searches, so some significant fraction of the Internet must read them. Certainly there's more of those people than there are "Rationalists".
Agreed, that set is far, far larger than the set of Rationalists.
I was just wondering, in the sense that a human is defined as a "featherless biped", is a Rationalist defined as a "Bayesian legible-principle-seeker", or is there a less stringent winnowing that doesn't quite insist on boiling down assumptions to single-dimensional numbers fed into the Bayesian formula?
I dunno, that depends on how you think the meaning of words should be construed in general. Eliezer, CEO and caliph of rationalism, wrote a sequence on this exact topic, actually, but I suppose it doesn't have much to do with "boiling down assumptions to single-dimensional numbers fed into the Bayesian formula", so it might not qualify as properly Rationalist writing, ahaha.
I've read only about three quarters of the series, but I believe you.
Russell wrote the Principia Mathematica, to demonstrate how mathematics was a self-contained complete and provable edifice. Then came Gödel to say, um, no, it isn't.
Eliezer, however, not only wrote the Principia Bayesiorationalica, but he also came to be his own Gödel.
I feel like a simpler rebuttal to such an article would be statistics comparing relationship happiness/satisfaction in polyamorous people and monogamous people. Does no such comparison exist which is why one must resort to reviewing n-of-1 studies or raising concerns about people deriving generalizations from a handful of n-of-1 studies?
Judging by the discourse around "does having children make you happier?" studies, I'm not confident such statistics would accomplish much. And that's before aggressive societal selection effects.
You do run into the issue that people going for polyamory are more likely to be willing to adopt fringe ideas (and actually act on them) *and* they don't have as much cultural background on how to resolve these problems because it hasn't been around as long.
(Ex: I expect that early lesbian relationships tended to have more problems, but that the percentage got closer to average as a greater portion of the population participated, because the early adopters were more likely to have 'interesting' problems.)
Though poly has more inherent challenges, so I'd still expect you get higher problems on average. Dunno whether possibility of higher happiness/satisfaction outweighs that. (I'd also slightly worry that there'd be an effect of people who practice polyamory are more likely to be more willing to be selective than the average typical relationship but unsure)
The monogamy-evangelist sounds pretty much like purity culture in evangelical circles in the 90's and early 2000's, at least as I remember it. Honestly, you're underselling how creepy and off-putting it was/is.
One of those tantalizing "I enjoyed this post but it feels like there's a missing Section V to tie it all together". Something about how book-writing selects heavily for x, y, z, in the same way as things that bubble to your attention are heavily selected for against natural apex predator memes. And this is one of the big lessons about life in the modern epistemic environment. Everything around me survivorships by selection effects. [link to On Bounded Distrust here]
Also passed up the obvious connection of "activists are not necessarily representative of things they activate for" in exactly the same way as book-writers being outlier exemplars.
Either way, I'll happily read your memoir and/or polyamory advice book if you choose to publish one.
> "I enjoyed this post but it feels like there's a missing Section V to tie it all together"
And I think there might be some actionable advice that could stem from that hypothetical. Like, eliminate as many filters and algorithms as you can. Or, figure out which of your sources share the same filters and higher-level-sources, so that you can distinguish "literally everyone is talking about it" from "this appears to be a hot topic in the Xsphere right now" from "the X-wing media is pushing this narrative strongly". Or, view things in at least a 2-dimensional grid, where in addition to a political axis, there's also a "wants my attention" axis, and pay meta-attention to what sort of things cluster at different points along that axis.
This seems unusually against the prevailing local ethos of throwing science or at least principle-seeking at things people normally take for granted.
Why are relationships more like walking and less like, say, judo or dancing? As in, we can all sort of naturally grapple or shimmy if we must, and perhaps subdue/impress an opponent/partner if we're lucky or naturally strong/graceful, but there are clearly techniques and body conditioning that make it unambiguously better, and these are generally taught by people successful at it?
(I do accept that it matters how mastery is reached, and the people who had to fight harder for it might be better at teaching the process, in a kind of Berkson's Paradox way - but still.)
His article about him getting married also suffered from the same problem.
In general, there’s an annoying taboo on how to get better at attracting romantic partners, and for some reason Scott implicitly honors it. This article’s point is “don’t judge a minority by its most vocal members, that’s bound to be nonrepresentative”, but there are strong undertones of “it all must happen naturally, don’t try to improve your skills”.
I think every time someone tried to explicitly explain it (for men anyhow, never really looked at the advice for women) it devolved into a fairly problematic mess quickly. Not mentioning any names but even the most brilliant writer among them eventually went off the rails, badly...
Whether that was driven by the explainers or their frustrated audience is hard to really say.
To be fair, I actually agree with (and have lived by) the idea of the unexamined romantic epiphany as the only genuine article - but the man who wrote 'In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences' shouldn't. I've been reading SSC/ACX mostly because it's often alien to my worldview and therefore interesting. This sop to my irrational meatbag ways feels like a betrayal.
Anyway, there's a difference between attracting romantic partners and sustaining stable relationships with them, the latter being the focus here. Reasonable to assume there are useful non-obvious heuristics for the bits that aren't all Keats and roses.
And yeah, the article's main point is good, though I'm not thrilled with the idea of a minority voice being dismissed as non-representative merely by virtue of being audible. Perhaps 'ethnographies' of subcultures/minorities (where a conscientious, neutral non-member investigator seeks out those who don't self-select) can be usefully complementary to memoirs/advocacy.
Tangential, but I'll bite. There is plenty of good advice about how to get better at attracting romantic partners, and some of it gets buried, but also, people who are bad at it just won't listen. I think the good advice is unwelcome.
But here, here is the good advice in three simple bullet points:
1. Spend a long time, *years* of time, developing general social skills and social intelligence, really until you're some kind of advanced level.
1a. This *mostly* means learning to pay more attention to non-verbal, implicit, deniable social cues. Listen more, speak less, watch more, judge less, and stop trying to force everyone to say what they mean. Learn to hear what they mean when they're not saying it.
2. Spend more time in larger groups with better gender balance. Don't sit around in gender-skewed specialist cliques waiting for the opposite gender or whatever type of person you want, go out and spend your time in places where there are a lot of different types of people.
It’s not like you’re entirely wrong, but I don’t think you’re fully on the right track either, because this isn’t actionable advice. For example, while something similar could be said about learning to play the piano, spending years around musicians won’t get you far. You need something or someone to tell you what keys to press and how, and to get feedback when you press them wrong. Such materials and people are readily available for the piano, but it’s taboo to teach somebody relationships in a similar way.
The key point of the advice is that relationships and attraction are not like piano; there no formally explainable set of buttons; as soon as they exist, normal humans move the goal posts again because they by and large do not *want* clear rules, because they are (mostly unknowingly) using “plays well by the secret rule book” as a sorting function, and classing the most rule bound in last place.
So the very actionable advice is to abandon your rules based goal and spend years in quiet, *unbiased* observation, not making formal rules, but instead letting your brain form an intuitive model.
That’s the core advice, and that’s why lawful nerds reject it. They do not want to hear that the relationship system is purposely chaotic and selects for smart observant chaos people, and against lawful types.
Everything else is like a piano and can be studied using the scientific method. But psychology, and not even all of psychology, but only the psychology of attraction, is resistant to science? This in itself is a scientific claim that needs to be substantiated scientifically!
Your argument that as soon as science figures out attraction rules, people will start consciously acting contrary to those rules, sounds extremely strange to me. How do people even learn that attraction has been solved scientifically so they know to immediately engage in violating the rules that have been discovered? “Annu. Rev. Psychol. has published a study that women are attracted to men that brush their teeth (p=0.003). Effective tomorrow, I shall reject men that do so”?
To the extent that people are aware they're being studied and described by rules, psychology is indeed resistant to science. (No, don't look away, stay with me. I'm at least as much of a scientist as you, and I'm going somewhere with this.) Why do you think psychology is experiencing the worst of the replication crisis? Do you think psychology academics are uniquely unethical? No! It's uniquely hard to design an airtight psychology experiment. Read Feynman's Cargo Cult Science, man.
It's *well* substantiated per the above, but also, it doesn't need to be, any more than "jumping out of an airplane without a parachute will kill you" needs an RCT.
"""Your argument that as soon as science figures out attraction rules, people will start consciously acting contrary to those rules, sounds extremely strange to me. How do people even learn that attraction has been solved scientifically so they know to immediately engage in violating the rules that have been discovered?"""
It doesn't happen at the field level, it happens at the individual level. I'm sorry for being rude, but you sound like someone who went up to a crush with a "Do you like me? Please check Yes / No" paper. How did that go? People have a demonstrated history of being extremely weirded out by rigid, rules based human interaction.
It's not that people hear about being studied and work against it. It's that most of them have intuitive systems to detect stilted rule-dorks, and react *very* differently when those systems alert. If you rule-dork someone, you're not getting real data about how people react to your behavior. You're getting stilted data about how people react to rule-dorking.
As I said at the top level when I took the bait, the trouble here isn't that there isn't a method, or that the method is held secret from you. The trouble is the method is outside your acceptable set of methods, so you reject it out of hand. And stay single.
I was a published mathematician and am now a machine learning model builder. If *I* can step outside formalisms and learn a purely intuitive system and find myself a spouse, so can you.
And what does it mean to be successful at it? We are talking about increasing the quality of long-term relationships here, not just courting people. If you find someone you're really compatible with and end up spending the rest of your life of them, you still don't really know what you did right because you don't have many examples of failure to compare against. The people who claim to be good at courting people don't really have useful advice for long-term relationships because, unless they're polyamorous, they can't keep courting people while in a long-term relationship.
What I'm trying to say is that the only person that might be able to give you useful information about long-term relationship is either someone who failed at way too many of them for a single lifetime or some kind of polyamorous sex god, and you are going to have a very hard time finding either of them.
"And what does it mean to be successful at it? We are talking about increasing the quality of long-term relationships here, not just courting people."
Correct, that was what I meant, as well. I now realise that going with grappling and dance as examples of quasi-natural skills more improvable than walking managed to imply that I'm talking about the 'conquest' part rather than the sustainment part. That's on me. Man with a hammer, and all.
"If you find someone you're really compatible with and end up spending the rest of your life of them, you still don't really know what you did right because you don't have many examples of failure to compare against."
I think you might well know something of what you did right. You're not blind or unreflective, you can be aware of the bullets you've dodged or choices you've made at pressure points that have worked out well. You can compare yourself to general trends you observe, or other people you know in the same milieu. Whether you would be incentivised to analyse it and write about it is another question - but these days enough people seem eager to exploit even the tiniest scrap of supposed social alpha that someone somewhere surely would.
The problem is that people do not have a good understanding of other people's relationships compared to their own. If you asked the average conservative religious couple about why their relationship works, they'd probably give you some shit about how it's because they were faithful to each other and God or whatever, as if plenty of people didn't do the same thing and their relationships didn't fail anyways. The root of the issue is that nobody has enough good data.
An obvious solution would be to run an experiment involving forcing clones of an already successful couple to marry and seeing which ones end up living happily and which ones end up trying to killing each other, but you'd probably get lynched for even suggesting such a thing. Though... we could try it with monogamous birds instead. Grey parrots are intelligent enough to match 4-6 year old humans, and that might be enough to get some insights that are applicable to humans as well.
...Honestly, it probably isn't worth spending this much effort figuring out how to build a happy marriage. Most people don't seem to have a problem with it in the first place.
> If you find someone you're really compatible with and end up spending the rest of your life of them, you still don't really know what you did right because you don't have many examples of failure to compare against
I don't know, I failed plenty of times before finding someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
If I were to write a dating book it would come down mostly to "be patient and meet a whole lot of people until you find someone you're compatible with" and "don't have any massive personal flaws".
Well yeah, that's the advice I would give too, and I haven't even been in a relationship before. But surely there's more to it than that? Even if it's just some minor micro-optimizations to reduce the chances of something going wrong... There are always going to be better or worse options to choose from, and you need accurate data and understanding to figure out what's what.
>Why are relationships more like walking and less like, say, judo or dancing?
In a sense, all those things are alike. Most of the difference is in that, over the course of ordinary life, you're supposed to get appropriate amounts of practice to reach acceptable skill levels in certain crucial activities by default. If you're neurotypical/whatever the physio- counterpart of that is, of course.
I think the comparison to shopping at Whole Foods is really on the money (no pun intended).
Most people (in fact, an overwhelming majority) shop for groceries at some kind of a grocery store. But if you write a memoir about shopping at Whole Foods, the implication (be it intentional or not) is that your shopping habits are somehow superior to those of the hoi polloi, and perhaps your groceries are elegant and refined -- thus worthy of inclusion in your memoirs. This kind of attitude invites derision, because really all you're doing is buying plain old potatoes at double the price.
Similarly, most people have either slept around at some point, or are at least aware of the concept. So when you write a book about sleeping around in this elegant and refined way with a fancy name like "polyamory", you invite derision, because really all you're doing -- from the average person's point of view -- is hooking up with floozies just like everyone else.
Granted, there's more to polyamory than random hookups (AFAICT), just as there's more to Whole Foods than overpriced potatoes; but the barrier to making that difference clear is quite high, and is probably beyound the reach of the kind of people who feel compelled to write excruciatingly detailed step-by-step guides to polyamory.
The Whole Foods one strikes me as probably unintentional, considering it's followed by The Lonely Island; I get the vibe this person would be fine specifying they went to shop at Food Lion if that's where they'd gone shopping.
Yes, but she is also signaling that she's the type of person who would shop at Whole Foods instead of Food Lion. This is likely unintentional and is a type of signaling that she naturally slips into (saying things she, even subconsciously, believes will boost her social status).
I think Whole Foods and The Lonely Island are just things that she likes. The problem with the paragraph is that it implies that we should be interested in her preferences at that detail.
"I clicked Spotify and it played Tom Waits, who I normally love, but that day I wasn't in the mood, so I clicked next track and it played Jason Isbell. That sounded better, so I let that one play."
I think whole foods comes off as hoi polloi to people in some cultures and just normal to others; in much of NYC whole foods is actually the relatively cheap option (since they're a chain and local shops have nyc-local prices, which are high).
This is like people talking about driving to the store. It feels like a weird brag if you live somewhere where having a car is a conspicuous sign of wealth and just normal if you live somewhere people regularly drive, and if you say "no no everyone in my neighborhood drives" it just comes across as even more braggy.
I probably shouldn't comment because I haven't read the Atlantic article or the subscriber only post (both are behind paywalls), but the argument in this post seems to be 'Tyler Austin Harper can't argue against polyamory based on a memoir because memoirs are written by narcissists or activists and advice is written by "defective people"'.
I disagree. Most memoirs I have read give a positive impression of what the author does (e.g. if I read a memoir by a professional gambler, it makes advantage gambling sound exciting). And plenty of memoirs don't give the impression of being written by narcissists. The problem with the passage from the memoir quoted here is not that there is anything wrong with what is described, it is how it is described (and the fact the author presumes anyone would be interested in anything so banal.)
And advice is generally written by professionals, or teachers, or coaches or therapists (obviously these are all "defective people" in the trivial sense of "everyone is defective", but they generally do have some skill in whatever they are writing about, if they aren't frauds).
As far as polyamory is concerned, it is a very controversial issue; a lot of people dislike it or find it immoral and have reasons for doing so before they read any specific memoir.
If you dislike it a priori, but are interested in the topic, maybe you should study some evidence, such as a memoir, and update your beliefs based on that? Of course, being fully aware that memoirs as a whole are biased towards the kind of person who writes a memoir.
This may be a matter of personal taste; I immediately develop a dislike of the author of a memoir while reading it more or less independently of the person (with the exception of Marcus Aurelius; I also find Caesar's memoirs insufferably self promoting, so disagree with Scott Alexander here).
I was thinking about this. Most of the autobiographies I have read (which isn't all that many) have been written between about 1800-1970. Usually these either give me a positive or a neutral impression of the author.
But on the internet nowadays there are comparatively unimportant people who write blogs about how they found themselves and what they want to do in life, and what is special about them, or how their effortless extraversion has been so helpful to them, and what advice they would give the rest of us. Some of these people write books too. These people are irritating. So maybe there is something to the idea that contemporary culture promotes narcissism.
I never really read Caesar. I thought St Augustine's Confessions was annoyingly sanctimonious, but I guess that is because I, as modern, secular reader, expected it to be something different from what it is.
While having valid points, this argument taken as a whole seems a bit too reductio ad absurdum. An expert, whether their expertise be gained via siccessful experience with the object of their desire or painful failure with it, need not becCesear to have something valuable to share with others interested in the topic. The easiest example is John and Julie Gorman’s studies of both successful and unsuccessful marriages. Or, using the physical therapist example, physical therapy is NOT based on studying how people who have problems move; rather, it’s largely based on stimuli’s of normal physiology-at least the parts about moving normally. The parts about movement problems are oriented towards diagnosis, not healing. Another example is the field of positive psychology, which primarily focuses on what works. I think there may be a confusion in the essay between what’s popular and what’s effective.
I think Activist and Influencer are new roles, products of the internet age. Of course there have been activists since forever, and once the world was connected enough for someone to become world famous, there have been plenty of world famous people, many of whom influenced the views or fashion choices of other people. In our era, though, the internet grabs hold of certain people, or some people grab hold of the internet, and then they are inflated like the Macy's floats. They are Activists or Influencers. You can't be an activist or influencer without fucking *tweeting* a chunk of your supposed subjectivity, or maybe strutting it before the world via some other social media format.
But there were rabble-rousers and showmen and hucksters and cult leaders way before DARPA. As new communication methods are invented, some humans use them to their advantage. The rest of us comment on more successful people's Substacks. ;)
Yeah, I said that. Second sentence: "Of course there have been activists since forever." I wouldn't be touchy enough to point it out if you weren't the second person to call my attention to the fact that there have been activists since forever. My point was that when certain public roles get Internetized they change. If you internetize your activism you become an Activist, a bloated and subtly different kind of entity.
Edit: Just realized what else made me speak up: your "Um," at the beginning. That's really irritating. It means, "I don't mean to embarrass you, and I feel awkward bringing it up, but you just said something really really obviously dumb." And people who say "um" before pouncing on someone's gaffe never seem to be a feel a bit awkward bringing it up, and generally appear to relish the original writer's embarrassment.
Edit: Huh. Didn't realise it came across that way. TY. Honestly, I was tired and braindead, and I wanted to write more, but settled for "Um" (until I found a Red Bull in the fridge).
Invectives about polyamory are inevitable now, in the current phase of polyamory Overton window shift. This is the only acceptable way polyamory can be currently portrayed and discussed.
As Overton windows move for new social norms like LGBT and polyamory, the mainstream media narratives evolve along the axis of omission/taboo -> negative/critique -> ambiguity -> struggle/oppression ->positive -> new normal. We have seen LBGT cover almost all these steps during recent 40 years, currently I think we are between positive and new normal. With polyamory, we have just recently moved from omission/taboo to negative/critique. Portraying polyamory as positive or struggling/oppressed in mainstream media is still out of the Overton window, showing ambiguity is now at the edge, only negative critique is in the window. This is also why almost all movies and shows about polyamory are telling a story of a failure of a polyamorous relationship.
Positive polyamory testimonials exist on social media, but usually the comments below are a shitstorm. This also proves how positive portrayal is unacceptable. At the same time, positive polyamory testimonial + shitstorm comments = negative meta-content bundle that itself fits well within the Overton window.
Note that these negative portrayals still promote polyamory somehow, as they at least put it on the map. 10 years ago there were no polyamory movies, shows or social media content - it would have been unthinkable, as we were in the omission/taboo phase back then.
You're assuming it catches on--they tried this with the Bloomsbury group in the early 20th century and 'free love' back in the 70s. But maybe it'll work this time. Seems to have gotten further than the last couple of times.
I kind of wonder about the kids given the increased instability. But as Giles says, it may be a form of harm reduction for the lower classes where families already disintegrated. And the Silicon Valley guys seem OK. The Park Slope bunch are on antidepressants and their marriages break up, but then they always were and did.
"The people I know from various oft-discussed groups [...] are all nicer and more normal than their public representatives would lead you to believe"
This has been, very strongly indeed, the absolute opposite to my personal experience!
I think part of why Scott has experienced this is his own personal Niceness Field skewing his experience ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds ) and partly because his social circle has been hand-cultivated to encourage nice people and discourage not-so-nice ones to a greater extent (and with more conscious thought) than the average person's social circle (my own included).
Contra Scott, my personal experience has been that the average person in an oft-discussed, heavily-memed-about group does seem to be more cantankerous, boorish, self-centred, belligerent, and one-dimensional (especially one-dimensional!) than the average person-in-the-street.
(One exception being the rich, who in my experience tend also to be considerably more horrible than the average person, but along different axes)
I think that this might be because the people in such groups are just as vulnerable to the memeplexes ("memeplices"?) Scott describes - perhaps more vulnerable, even, since they're actually in the talked-about group themselves:
> Very few are indifferent to the memes ('cos, as Scott points out, in a Darwinian sense the memes are really bloody effective)
> Some thrive on the memes - these are the self-obsessed public-memoir-writers, public-social-media-ers, etc. who are awful to be around for all the reasons Scott describes.
> Others really don't like the memes at all, and so their mental/inner life is in a permanent state of siege against a memeplex they don't like but can't escape - is it any wonder if such a person ends up becoming overly-self-focused and belligerent?
[Please don't take this as a personal criticism if you're reading this and are in an oft-discussed group - obviously I'm making a comparison between the *average* person from such a group that *I happen to know* and the *average* person not from a group that I happen to know, so A) there'll inevitably be a whole bunch of selection effects going on for me, just as there are for Scott, and B) obviously there will be many non-average lovely people in the group and many non-average awful people outside it. Also I do have to admit that there are definitely some oft-discussed and heavily-memed-about groups - vegans come to mind, but I'm sure there are others - where the average person I m̶e̶a̶t̶ meet does genuinely seem to be perfectly nice, interesting, friendly, multidimensional, etc. and such groups do kinda mess up my nice neat theory a bit..]
Hm, Scott's experience is very close to mine. For context, the groups in question I've been with have been transgender, autistic, and rich - I'm none of those things, but was either close enough (eg gender non conforming) or had personal connections (the rich people in question were my stepmother's workplace). I'm also very conflict-avoidant. I know where the tripwires are and can step over them.
I wonder if some of Scott's, PJohn's and eclare's experience is driven by what they bring to the relationship. Scott is such a sweetheart that when he knows someone personally, he likes them, and eclare may be too. PJohn may be a little more attuned to their faults.
(Or not, but maybe. What did Hamlet say? There are no most interesting men in the world, nor boors, but that thinking makes it so?)
Possibly! I would say that I'm a polite person and (as I said) conflict-avoidant. I think people are interesting and like to talk to them. However, I do also internally judge people I don't know very well all the time, so I can't say I'm totally nice.
I know this is one of your trigger-topics we disagreed on years ago, and I think that’s clouding your interpretation here.
> But The Atlantic’s complaint was that the book seemed kind of navel-gazey.
That’s a polite way to put it. Did it come up in the subscriber-only post that The Atlantic’s critique only came *after* a wave of glowing reviews that ignored everyone in the book being miserable and borderline-abusive?
Much of the media has an obsession with making poly sound fantastic, and giving this no-name narcissist platforms, book stores will host her but not Actual Person Rob Henderson. The Atlantic published one article to the contrary, and that’s the one you pick on? Hmm.
> I think this goes beyond polyamory. The people I know from various oft-discussed groups - transgender, super-religious, autistic, rich, etc - are all nicer and more normal than their public representatives would lead you to believe.
While I would mostly agree with this, poly has a complete lack of sympathetic public representatives. The other groups have skewed representation- other comments discussed why- but not such a thorough lack. Clearly, it’s no longer an extreme taboo, it’s a luxury belief most media has been portraying positively for a decade now- and yet. Hmm.
A *lot* of people hate Aella, and Scott's had the NYT go after him.
The media is really pushing it, I agree. It's been all over New York magazine and the NYT. It was in the WSJ a few days ago, and I contemplating cancelling my subscription. I have no objection to polyamory (heck, I...uh...had a girlfriend and a sub for a few years a while back), but my gut feeling is, if the liberal (and apparently not-so-liberal) media's pushing it, it must be some plot to screw cishet white men over.
> That’s a polite way to put it. Did it come up in the subscriber-only post that The Atlantic’s critique only came *after* a wave of glowing reviews that ignored everyone in the book being miserable and borderline-abusive?
I only know you through your blog but you seem to be struggling lately with clarity of thought---many of your posts seem to be blinded by some agenda or axe to grind.
You describe this article as, "they conclude they hate polyamorous people" and that the article implies there is something wrong with polyamory. It's almost as if you didn't read the article!
The article ends with a clear statement that polyamory works well for some people. The last paragraph begins, "Open relationships really do provide some people . . . the freedom that they want and need." This follows the previous few paragraphs discussing that it's ethically fine, and that it's nobody's business how consenting adults want to live their lives.
What they seem to hate is uncritical fads and "therapeutic libertarianism," not polyamory. What you seem to hate is...?
Critique of EA by non-EAs and critique of poly have long been “triggers” for the good doctor. Certainly my own attitudes on the topics play a role in interpretation, but I tend to find his quality of communication to take a dip in these zones of thought.
Yes. And I hold higher expectations for ACX (and myself, and the rationalish-sphere in general) than I hold for most people. I have been adjusting my expectations for ACX lately but I'd rather not stop reading this blog, which is the only blog I read.
One could easily write an article complaining about therapeutic libertarianism, but this article is titled "Polyamory: The Ruling Class's Latest Fad", its subtitle is "Americans who most reap the benefits of marriage are the same class who get to declare monogamy passé and boring", and it uses the word "polyamory" about 150% as much as the words "therapeutic libertarianism".
I agree that in some sense the author *meant* to criticize therapeutic libertarianism and that all of his arguments are against that. But *in fact*, he wrote an article criticizing polyamory, and part of my objection to the article is that he ended up criticizing a thing other than the thing he meant to criticize.
In general I would like for people here to discuss things politely and not start a discussion by speculating about someone's character flaws.
The phrase "doctor heal thyself" was intended to refer to your writing, and not your character.
Your writing has shown a lot of bias, almost to the point of misrepresentation.
I stand by my comment: you have not accurately represented the Atlantic article.
Perhaps some more attention to nuance. Something like: "Although this article overtly states an acceptance of polyamory as a practice, if you ignore what the author says in the last few paragraphs, it actually means something else."
Your own article is titled "You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books", and moves in and out of addressing The Atlantic and addressing your readership. Who is "you"? Is "you" me, the long time reader? I felt personally speculated-against, or reduced, or something, and I think so did other people. I have polyamorous bay area friends and have never read a book about the subject, and so my feelings do not at all come from where you're saying.
From any other author, I would call that title "extreme clickbait". Since you are fundamentally well meaning and truth seeking, I bend and call it "muddled thinking". Yes, the Atlantic is doing it too, and probably with more of an axe to grind, but you are very much in pot calling kettle black territory.
No, I really do hate polyamory. It is, simply put, evil. I think the negative societal effects will become more apparent over time, both for the people involved and, in particular, for the children involved. (For one thing, that is one hell of a Chesterton's fence you're tearing down.) And even if the negative effects don't become more apparent, polyamory will still be evil.
I'm sure this post will not be appreciated. But I wanted someone to point out that moral absolutes exist, and that someone needs to stand athwart history yelling, "Stop!"
Because 99% of the human race has an inborn extreme disgust reaction to this behavior, honed by billions of years of natural selection. That instinct should be trusted over midwit “rationalism” that isn’t as clever as it thinks it is.
I'm not going to pretend that I can convince anyone that they should convert to and follow Christianity by posting on this board. But they still should do so, and I'm going to say so, even if I know it's futile.
I don't feel like this is the dominant effective model for successful proselytizing and in fact I'm pretty sure it's the opposite. I would say that I am now 0.01% less likely to become Christian on the grounds that you have reminded me what a bunch of annoying, judgmental twats actual Christians act like with far too much frequency.
I'm mostly not posting to proselytize. The assertion in Scott's title is no one hates polyamory. I'm posting to convince Scott (and others) that I exist. There are, in fact, people who hate polyamory, not just those who write books. And the reason I hate polyamory is because it is evil.
Okay. I hate Christianity. The reason I hate Christianity is because it is evil. Your posting has convinced me of this fact: Christians are evil people who love sitting in judgment over others while pretending to follow Jesus.
Man, it would be too much simple if Christianity was just evil. Instead, it has just the right mixture of authentic love with judgmental holier-than-thou authoritarianism, sprinkled with some real weird-ass myth, to hit some weird memetic corner that makes it super sticky and strangely repulsive at the same time.
I agree, everybody should convert to Christianity, it’s so progressive and poly-friendly it has instructions what to do in case you knock up both your primary partner and a friend with benefits (Deuteronomy 21:15)
I suspect polyamory isn't for everyone, and monogamy isn't for everyone. Even marriage isn't for everyone.
Polyamory must work best when each of the people involved isn't satisfied having only a single partner AND doesn't get jealous of the partner's partners. Monogamy must work best when both devote their whole being to the other person. But monogamy is simpler, since it has fewer conflicts. If something is better for your kids than for your partner, which do you choose? For polyamory, who gets which bedroom, and who has to sacrifice the most to make the arrangement work?
This response really starkly demonstrates the Overton Window aspect that is so terrifying. I swear just a few years ago "are you seriously comparing same-sex relationships with polyamory?" was the standard thing to hear in a debate about changing sexual norms. I'm too young to be sure, but I expect it was only a few decades before that "are you seriously comparing pre-marital sex (or no-fault divorce) to homosexuality? How offensive!" was the standard liberal thing to say.
You know what would make many, many people infinitely more sympathetic to a social change like this? Some sort of credible promise or committment that "this time, we will change this one last thing and then we will STOP". And not move as soon possible to finding another pillar of society to dismantle, to tear down the last remaining parts of civilisation that interfere with somebody's personal desires.
There is a much clearer Schelling point between activities that only involve consenting adults, and ones that don't, than between various activities between consenting adults.
I don't think liberals/progressives tended to say that any sexual activity between consenting adults is immoral, or should be illegal, any time in the last several decades. In fact, polyamory was legal in many places earlier than homosexuality, as it's been generally legal anywhere pre-marital sex is. I didn't follow all the debates very closely, but I doubt people would've said "are you seriously comparing same-sex relationships with polyamory?"; aren't you confusing it with "are you seriously comparing same-sex marriage with polygamy?"? (And I'm not sure they said that in this tone either.)
It's a terrible argument when some of the people involved in the thing aren't asked if they want it, or are too young to make an informed decision. Not when all the people doing it are consenting adults.
"Monogamy must work best when both devote their whole being to the other person."
See, I think the modern insistence that your romantic relationship is your most important relationship and should over-ride everything else is part of the problem. We're being encouraged to put all our eggs in one basket, a basket that wasn't designed for it. Why *should* your spouse be your best friend? There's nothing wrong with having a best friend! Or a bunch of friends you hang out with, or your hobby group, or you go talk to your parents/sibling/great-grandpa about your emotional problems.
Making the spouse the person who has to carry all the loads, and making it that you devote your whole being to them, puts pressure on. And that's why people find themselves 'falling out of love' or looking outside the marriage for someone else, and because we've made romantic relationships the loadbearers, people look for a new romantic relationship and blow up their existing one in the illusion that what they need is a new "all in one basket".
Except that isn't what it means, in practice. Instead of "always" think more like "often". If you always thought of your partner first, you couldn't say, eat. It's a balance that tends to favor your partner. You can still hang out with other people, and should, since your partner wants what's best for YOU.
This all sounds nice until you become the victim of cruel circumstance (which is inevitable) such as dementia or cancer or whatever and find that since you no longer make an attractive partner to anyone, you are abandoned when you’re most vulnerable. Suboptimal relationships are the only kind of relationships. And the notion that you should always be on the lookout for a better deal is disturbing to us old farts. If you were terribly injured in an accident tomorrow and would never recover, would you not value (and want to reciprocate) the irrational commitment of your partner to care for you despite having nothing to gain? Who better to be the load bearer than the person you’ve solemnly committed yourself to? Unless of course you’re rich enough to just pay someone to do the dirty work involved in caring for you when the time comes.
Ehh, no, the traditional idea is that your spouse *is* the one you can count on for that. That is the special mutual responsibility you take in a long-term committed relationship. And to preserve that, you try to have a life outside, so that your partner doesn't have to double as your secretary, maid, best friend, shrink, etc, to the point where they get sick of you.
Modern life has weakened social bonds quite a bit, but when you're in a monogamous relationship, and for as long as it lasts, it's as intense as ever because you're sharing a roof and an everyday life. Which ends up demanding too much of the relationship, and putting a strain on it. Hence the advice to have a life outside.
This incidentally shows us how the traditional model was not nearly as monogamous as it looks. Just add "sexual partner" to the list of roles above, keep it under wraps, and you have the way it's been done for the longest time.
I’m confused. Are you saying the spouse is the one you can count on for care and practical compassion but not romance, or that the spouse is the one you can count on for romance but not care and practical compassion, or are you saying a spouse can be counted on for both but should not be “your secretary, maid, best friend, shrink, etc?” Because I don’t think I argued that a spouse should be any of those things. I just think a spouse is defined by the commitment itself. And commitments will at times be more burdensome than anticipated.
Maybe I just misunderstood deiseach’s meaning. If so, my bad.
> are you saying a spouse can be counted on for both but should not be “your secretary, maid, best friend, shrink, etc?” Because I don’t think I argued that a spouse should be any of those things.
That one. Maybe we're running in circles a bit. I was just reiterating my understanding of Deiseach's post, which is that modern culture errs in shoving too many of these extra roles on the spouse or romantic partner. Because being there for romance, care, practical compassion, and a shared day-to-day life is already quite a lot.
Everywhere else you are supposed to diversify. Multiple investments, multiple friends, multiple job applications, multiple grocery stores and gas stations etc. Somehow “simpler and fewer conflicts” is almost never a plus. Why should romantic relationships be different?
A claim as strong as “there is no way” requires strong evidence, and the term “to hedge a bet” is somewhat misleading unless you elaborate what kind of bet is being made.
The obvious improvement on the concept of monogamy is to start with multiple FWBs and gradually let them grow closer and closer to you. Or more distant, that also happens all the time. Eventually you’ll see which ones, if any, are good matches for you, you might even fall in love with one or more of them. I don’t know whether this would be close to your definition of hedging a bet, but betting on one person that you hardly know anything about and when you can easily mistake infatuation for love is not exactly ideal.
Sorry, I thought it would be obvious, concerning love. If you diversify in love, you cannot, by definition, put all of your focus on one person, even temporarily. If you do it temporarily and then do it temporarily on another person, both people will find you aren't there when you are with the other person. If you were talking about sex, then yes, depending on the emotional make-up of all the individuals involved, you could have sex with more than one person and have a back-up if it doesn't work out.
But then you're talking about having multiple partners which whittle down over time. That is the opposite of diversification. Consider having some number of FWBs, and changing the number up and down as circumstances allow. How can you consider any of that to be love? It is certainly diversified, though.
If you’re the kind of person that can only love one other person, then perhaps “diversification” is not the most precise term, it’s more like “shopping around” (though that one sounds a little rude, maybe you can suggest something better).
You start with FWBs, and as you correctly point out, you don’t love any of them. You have lots of fun though. And if your goal is to find a single person to love, eventually you get closer and develop feelings for one of them.
It’s not like there’s anything revolutionary about this, just common sense. If you want to find a suitable romantic partner, of course you should surround yourself with candidates, and of course you should take it slow to better know each of them.
>you cannot, by definition, put all of your focus on one person, even temporarily
Yes, but should you? I think you shouldn’t, even if you’ve found one person you love and your goal is emotional monogamy. (And for the record, that’s not the same as sexual monogamy, which I don’t recommend for anyone.)
>both people will find you aren't there when you are with the other person
The tautology club consists of the members of the tautology club? You aren’t there either when you’re with your platonic friends either.
Evil is just a very strong word, even from the disapproving eye of a Christian. I don't think most Christians would go so far as to use that word, which in my understanding would imply the work of Satan.
I'm not a theologian, but this seems like a pretty good definition/explanation of evil:
"Evil, according to St. Thomas, is a privation, or the absence of some good which belongs properly to the nature of the creature." (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05649a.htm)
That's a surprisingly broad category that could encompass a LOT of things, depending on your views of what "belongs properly" to human beings. Difficult to talk around, that one.
There's a verse in James that helps explain the Christian perspective on evil: "Therefore, to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin."
The scope of 'sin' is quite large in Christianity, which fits with their belief in the universality of sin (see, the commonly cited verse in Romans, "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.") Anything short of the glory of God is a sin, and a seed of evil.
A lot of Christians really struggle with the scrupulosity problem that Scott wrestles with in Nobody is Perfect, Everything is Commensurable (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/.) To some people (Scott included, I think), imperfection in themselves feels evil. Falling short of the mark feels unacceptable.
Having some way of making your inner self-judge shut the hell up is important for scrupulous people; for Christians, it's that Christ replaced that standard of perfection with his own perfection, and now only asks that you follow him and let him live in you. Your errors aren't your own to bear. For Scott, he's found a Schelling fence where he can tell his self-judge that he's already paid his RENT on that infinite debt, so shut up already.
I can understand, and agree with the basic idea that we have a certain weight of dirt or imperfection in our system. Psychologically, it's the residue of imperfect coping mechanisms, the weight of our selfish choices, etc.
But how on Earth does that amount to an *infinite debt* in anyone's mind? The mind/heart/organism/whatever itself is finite, so if I'm carrying a pile of dirt in it, how can it be anything else than finite too?
How much do you owe your mother for all her care for you? How much do you owe society for inventing and creating roads, laws, and modern health care? etc.
Out of curiosity do you have a special axe to grind with polyamory specifically? I was raised devout catholic and had 13 years of Catholic education and while it would certainly be sinful its really not near the top of the list and has a fair amount of biblical precedent.
And the chestertons fence argument doesn't track - monogamy is the more recent invention, and there are actively other norms practiced around love and child raising in other societies.
The point of chestertons fence isn't that you shouldn't tear down fences without a good reason, it's that you shouldn't tear down fences before you _know why they're there_ and I think that's pretty well understood already.
No, not really. Scott approached this topic as only viewing practical considerations as the ones anyone would reasonably value and didn't even reference the moral aspect, as if morality is so passe it shouldn't even cross your mind. That irked me.
And I disagree that it's not near the top of the list. I think it's probably at the top of physical non-violent sins.
Scott has written at length about being an EA and a consequentialist, if there's one thing you can't fault him for not doing, is thinking hard and writing about morals. Maybe they're just so different from the kind of morals you believe in, that they don't even register as such for you?
You probably know that this is a rationalist (-adjacent) blog. We can't really expect people here to be swayed by arguments of authority, like your "even if [no bad consequences], it's still evil".
Again, this isn't about swaying people by my arguments. It's pointing out that people that think like me exist--which was denied by the title of Scott's post.
That's not at all the point of the post. It's that people who read memoirs that involve polyamory think they hate polyamory after reading them, whereas they actually hate what they have read.
You are welcome to hate polyamory on its own merits as you see fit.
The title is pretty awful and incendiary, and the content freely jumps from addressing the Atlantic to addressing the readers, or at least is very ambiguous in this regard.
Kevin was not the only person who felt personally addressed in a bad way by the article.
I am not Christian, but I am against polyamory. I have never read a book about it. I am against it because I did not like watching the experiences of bay area polyamorous friends. Not one bit.
The article is far from Scott's ordinary careful thinking and careful modes of address. This is an author who has gone as far as to put extensive parenthetical disclaimers on statements, effectively saying "I know some people are going to read this as X, and make angry comments, and I can't stop you, but I just want you and everyone else to know I really meant the less incendiary Y".
You’re strengthening my belief that everybody should switch to Christianity. It’s so progressive you can even cherry pick the parts of the law that you want to follow, you’re free to believe the rest has been replaced!
>there are actively other norms practiced around love and child raising in other societies.
Can you name them? An off the top of my head survey of cultures across space and time is that institutionalized pairing of a man and a woman is predominant.
Casual sex is clearly not what I or Sovereigness was referring to. A society that has institutionalized a man/woman pair as the family unit, including ones where shelter is shared among extended family, can have normalized casual sex - this is still the case in Western countries, despite the efforts of the purple haired.
Define “institutionalized” then? If monogamy is considered moral, if there are rituals officially pairing men with women, but husbands routinely have sex with other women, that doesn’t look like a monogamous society to me.
I meant institutionalized in the sociological sense where individuals step into social roles that exist before and after them. These roles are shaped and maintained by both intergenerational habits and formal laws, eg the entire field of family law.
>husbands routinely have sex with other women
An observant person might have noticed that this is usually met with opprobrium, and that this fact undermines the point they (you) were trying to make.
People often contravene the expectations that are associated with the institutionalized roles that they've stepped into. That doesn't mean the institution doesn't exist. Eg, teacher-student relationships and the associated expectations are also institutionalized, teacher-student intimacy being one expectation that is codified and socially taboo, yet this does happen with some frequency.
It’s quite grotesque when children are involved. If you don’t have kids or plan to have kids then you do you. But kids should make this utterly off limits.
Yes, I strongly agree! I can't even comprehend how disgusting it would be to put your desires for sexual exploration ahead of a stable environment for your children.
And this is also where your. "lifestyle" is absolutely 100% society's business.
The kind of polyamory where people have children with their primary partner and protected sex with their secondary partners seems like a more stable environment for children than monogamy where a strong desire for a new partner often leads to a divorce.
But still much less good than the ideal case -- a monogamy where both partners manage to squelch/ignore whatever desire they might have for other partners.
It is easy to lose in a comparison against some idealized situation. Let's imagine a polyamorous situation optimized for children...
OK, imagine three men and three women, living as three "primary" pairs on the same street. They already had this relation for a few years. Approximately at the same time they all decide to have children. They keep visiting each other, help each other babysit the kids, and organize some activities for the kids together. It's almost like living next to your extended family, except the adults are also having sex with each other, when the kids are sleeping or away from home (which can happen quite often, if they agree on e.g. "on Monday afternoon all kids are in our house, on Tuesday they are in your house, etc.").
I would imagine that this is even better situation.
You would imagine that because you have no children, and have perhaps forgotten what it was like to be one.
Children watch adults. Children are very sensitive to competing priorities, shifting arrangements, and wavering allegiances. Children do not treat *complicated structure* as structure, they treat it as chaos. Children strongly prefer and respond positively to simple structure. "We brush our teeth at 8," not "it is Tuesday, so you brush your teeth at 7, except for Steve, who brushes his teeth at 840 for reasons I don't want to explain again in detail".
Furthermore, give me a percentage value on relationship dissolution. Let's be very kind and say only 10% of functional, healthy relationships dissolve over ten years. In the monogamous case, that's a 90% chance at ten years of consistent relational structure for the child to rely on.
In the six person case you've described, that's (0.9)^6 = 0.53, a 53% chance at ten years of consistent relational structure for the child to rely on.
This is one of the core reasons to make this ladder:
Well executed monogamy >> well executed polyamory > poorly executed monogamy >> poorly executed polyamory.
You're idealizing polyamory and comparing it to a realistic low quality monogamy.
Childcare in a stable household without complicated conflicting priorities is better than childcare in a stable household with managed conflicting priorities. That's well executed monogamy > well executed polyamory.
You're free to decide whether poorly executed polyamory is better than poorly executed monogamy; I won't defend one way or the other.
This actually used to be a topic of serious discussion, and the general consensus was that yes, you need to make sacrifices and compartmentalize things to avoid impacting your children. Polyamory was very big on upholding commitments and honoring agreements, and providing a healthy and stable environment for children was seen as a "pre-existing" commitment. Your use of "disgusting" indicates that you may have different object-level about what "healthy" means, but please do believe that anyone with a working brain was taking the meta-level question seriously. (With the caveat that a known failure mode in poly is "not thinking with your brain", if you know what I mean.)
Yes, okay. There's two different attitudes here that are a whole *universe* apart.
1. Genuinely believing that your lifestyle is the best thing for your children, and the morally correct path.
2. Not particularly caring if it's best or moral, but really wanting to do it anyway.
I only meant "disgusting" in the context of the second. People who honestly believe they're doing the best thing for their children, even if I disagree that they are, are just an instance of reasonable, factual disagreement. People who say "it doesn't actually matter what the moral thing is, because I have a right to do *whatever the fuck I want*" are...well, all I know is "disgusting" is much too kind a word for them.
And any look at progressive and feminist spaces shows how common the latter attitude is. On abortion it's most clear: there are women who firmly believe unborn children have no consciousness and abortion is the morally best option for everyone. And there are women, more than I can comprehend, who literally say "it doesn't actually matter if it's a person, all that matters are my rights to do whatever I want for any *reason at all*".
It. Doesn't. Actually. Matter. That's literally what they say. I think I can say, with virtually no exageration, that there is no one more evil on the face of the earth than these people. Even Vladmir Putin thinks he has to have a fake "reason" for killing people, he doesn't proudly, with no shame whatsoever, say that the mere fact that he wants to is enough.
Now if we lived in a remotely just world, any community (polyamory, pro-choice, and so on) would, as soon as any of their members started talking like that, immediately denounce and ostracise them, the same way they would to someone saying that black people's lives don't actually matter. Of course, the very idea is laughable, that these movements would treat someone saying children don't matter to someone saying black people don't matter: much of the time, they actually *valorise* the first!
So, in summary, I'm sure lots of people in these movements have consciences, and have thought carefully about the moral implications and are trying to do the right thing. Just remember that they're rubbing shoulders with people more evil than words can describe. And there's a good chance they're enabling those sociopaths by not condemning them, or even distancing themselves from them, when they proudly advertise their evil. They're (often) either evil-adjacent or evil-complicit.
1. Believing that something is the best for your children and the most moral choice, strictly better and more moral than any other option
2. Not caring if it's best or moral, but doing it even if it were terrible for your children and grossly immoral,
like
3. Believing that it's indifferent for your children, and indifferent morally (that is, neither better nor worse than other options), and doing it because you prefer it yourself (but you wouldn't do it if you though it were much worse for the children or morally)
4. Believing that it's slightly worse for your children but much better for you; putting a large weight on your children's interests, but not infinitely more weight than on your own
5. Believing that, within some range, neither option is inherently significantly better or worse for your children, but if you take an option you have a strong preference against, it'll probably lead to dysfunction that's bad for your children too; so whichever you prefer is also best for your children.
----
If someone on your political side says extreme things, which would be evil at least if taken literally, how quick are you to ostracize and condemn them? How quick are most people on the same side?
I think your two categories are actually missing the core group here, which I'd describe as roughly:
1.5. People who think that the mono/poly distinction, by itself, has no moral valence and is irrelevant to the health of children, but who do think that certain ways of implementing mono/poly relationships can be better or worse for children, and feel a moral imperative to choose the ones that are better.
Like, there's a lot of advice out there on how a single parent with children should go about mono dating. It's not my situation and not something I'm very familiar with, but as I recall, one bit of advice is to have the early dates away from the home, and only bring people home to meet your kids once you've been seeing them for a while and the relationship is stable. The theory behind it is that it's bad for kids to have a succession of potentially-unreliable adults coming in and out of their lives and making them feel uncomfortable or unsafe in their own home, and so the dating is arranged to keep the kids feeling safe. And exactly the same thing applies in poly relationships. From what I understand, most of the advice is like that, where it applies equally to mono and poly.
So in that respect, I think the argument you want to be making is that there's something inherently wrong about poly relationships, and exposure to them will damage children?
I'm separating that aspect from this:
> "it doesn't actually matter what the moral thing is, because I have a right to do whatever the fuck I want"
Which I agree is a problem. I've complained here before about protestors using rhetoric that's easily twisted and interpreted to mean something horrible, and this seems like another example. And I have no doubt that there are people out there who get high on self-righteousness and do things that harm their kids. My main argument here is that these people would still be hurting their kids even if they'd never heard of poly and were just doing a serious of mono relationships. But I have to admit that poly provides more opportunities for things to go horribly wrong.
And yes, I worry about what happens when poly becomes "mainstream" among people who are used to black-and-white thinking and who find it easy to justify stuff to themselves by using the latest slogans. And I worry that various interpersonal habits among poly people and among nerdy geeks make them a prime stalking-ground for sociopaths. A weaker argument I'll make is that a lot of people are inconsistent and kind of stupid some of the time, and while they'll respond to criticism with a brain-dead slogan, they don't actually believe it 100%, and won't follow it when their common sense tells them to do otherwise. That said, I sadly have experience with people like that who will cave in and follow the slogan when they're put under any sort of pressure, and who are afraid to disagree even in private to themselves. :-(
> Just remember that they're rubbing shoulders with people more evil than words can describe. And there's a good chance they're enabling those sociopaths by not condemning them, or even distancing themselves from them, when they proudly advertise their evil. They're (often) either evil-adjacent or evil-complicit.
I feel rather strongly that this is the sort of claim that needs to be backed up with examples, not just of wrongdoing, but of the coverups and excuse-making. It resembles how some people raised in an abusive religious family go on to become strident atheists who blame all religion everywhere for the harm they suffered. There are many wonderful, decent religious people, and I don't think it would be fair to describe them as "rubbing shoulders with people more evil than words can describe".
Polyamory has been around for a very long time in the form of small tribal societies, and the harems of kings and emperors. The main difference in what we see today is that the focus is on sexual opportunity rather than child rearing or power expansion (in the case of kings). Multiple parents that one could count on actually being there is not a bad thing. However, polyamory as it stands in modern times is not geared for that. There's a lot of churn in pods that make for bad conditions in child rearing. As a disclosure, I'm fully monogamous, but have been close to a number of poly groups- mostly poor and working class.
Um, actually, while sexual opportunity is often part of it, and sometimes all of it, many, if not most, poly people seek connection, trust, understanding, respect... ie. relationships with other people.
I'm sure they exist. It's not prioritized at all in my decently sized polyamorous friend set. It's hardly the top concern in these comments. Would you claim it's actually prioritized to the level typical in normal society, and I've just missed it?
I'm about to jump on a 12 hour shift running conduit, so I apologize if this is a little disorganized. Id intended to write this for next Monday, but it's topical.
I've been thinking about the structures I've observed in polyamorous groups and the challenges that they face. Very little is codified as generally acceptable in the space, though certain pods may have structural rules that work for them. As a whole though, it's a kind of laissez faire dedicated to maximizing sexual access rather than building cohesive groups of reliable people with healthy relational habits. I suspect this focus on sexual access alone is an accident of how political sexual liberation has affected polyamorous culture rather than an inherent evil that is baked into the practice.
In many, (though not all) polyamorous groups I've seen, kids are often an afterthought who are brought up by single mom's who often find themselves as satellites to several disparate polyamorous groups. The nature of easily picking up a new flame and dropping old ones makes it easy to pick up attractive but difficult people, and get rid of them (and their kids) when they become too inconvenient or unreasonable. Given the inherent complexity of maintaining multiple relationships, I see it a lot. 2 people have 1 relationship to manage, 3 have 3, 4 have 6, 5 have 10... And so on. So many simplify to a wheel and spoke type of relationship structure to simplify. There may be a primary power couple who are tied together financially and they sleep with other people who are easily discarded and have no financial obligations to them. Children produced in this manner are similarly easy to discard, and grow up in difficult circumstances. Some pods have around 4 or 5 people who are part of the primary group and financial obligations are slightly more rigid, though I have often seen an ease of discarding in this structure as well. In these groups I've seen that the kids sometimes stay with the main pod while the satellite parent is ejected. This is marginally better, but still not ideal.
Raising healthy children who have stable family backgrounds could be a primary focus within polyamorous culture in the US if expectations were a little more codified and there were fewer individuals flying the polyamorous flag for hedonic sexual pursuits alone. Kids need a fair amount of support, stability, and need to have connections to people of all ages to grow up as responsible, strong minded people. The small village mentality that could exist in polyamorous groups could reduce the burdens most parents experience in child rearing, because there can be a number of kids growing up together with a number of parents to provide support. But again the lack of codified expectations in that space means that relational churn is prevalent.
I'd be interested to see what effective polyamorous marriage would look like as a legal institution, as it could provide satellites who have kids more recourse. However, it still wouldn't solve the cultural issue of commitment to relationships, which is increasingly rare in monogamous couples as well. How to address that and make people just behave as good people in relationships can't really be written into law. I suspect there may be something about the templates of life we learn from the dominant stories we consume, but that's a whole other tangent.
I think the major point here is that it isn't polyamory so much as the dominant strain of polyamory that is so distasteful. Since it looks like it's around to stay, I'd like to see it hashed out to be healthier and geared towards making good people.
I've seen a lot of adoption of polyamory among disabled and those on food stamps where I live. It looks to be a strategy to find resources as a group, as well as to maximize sexual access for those who are not traditionally desirable. As an outsider, I have observed a lot of toxic behaviors in these groups, but it seems to be far more common than one would expect. I'd love to see the numbers, but my intuition says that this amount of buy in doesn't go away quickly. It's possible that there aren't many people who are actually interested in healthy polyamory outside of a few well off, responsible individuals such as Scott. Possibly most people just want casual sex on the side of their committed relationships. If that is the case, I'd prefer a culture of swingers in already committed relationships to a culture of satellite relations who have no recourse. At least swinger couples and quads each have two parents who are financially responsible for any kids that come around because of one of their dalliances.
I was thinking that, if you actually had a stable quad or couple-of-couples you might actually come out ahead as you'd now have four parents responsible. But I think it's too 'alternative' to attract stable people in large numbers. We shall see!
I suspect it would be a lot more stable because it's two primary relationships. It's a lot easier for our monkey brains to say this is my main relationship, and these are my two secondary relationships than it is to say these are the three relationships I have to manage my place in the hierarchy within. Also I am responsible for kids that this partner has (or I have if female).
Quite the contrary. Necessity makes for ugly choices because opportunities are scarce. Much of the adoption of poly I've seen from poor friends and family has been out of the need to consolidate resources among a number of people. The relationships are often explosive, due to the nature of their complexity and the wider culture around polyamory.
Just imagine me drawing 5 dots and counting the lines that can be drawn between them. I appreciate the compliment, but I'm afraid I have to scribble on paper for that kind of thing like everyone else ;)
You do bring up a good point about child-rearing. Human children are probably the most demanding children to care for on Earth. Traditionally, mothers had a lot of help from their extended family and friends in raising their children, but that's not really possible under the current status quo of monogamous nuclear families. If we could just normalize setups that made this kind of collaborative childcare practical, maybe that could encourage people to have more children. ...Of course, there's still the issue of affordability, and we still have a problem of people failing to form relationships in the first place. *sigh* I really doubt things are ever going to improve at this point...
Thank you, this actually shifted my views somewhat.
This is one of the topics that helps make it clear that politics and law are a thin meniscus on top of culture and practice. It would be nice to codify stable versions of polyamory into law, but I agree it would be hard to do so without stable versions in practice. It would be an improvement to shift stable versions of polyamory into practice.
""""""I think the major point here is that it isn't polyamory so much as the dominant strain of polyamory that is so distasteful. Since it looks like it's around to stay, I'd like to see it hashed out to be healthier and geared towards making good people."""
I am opposed to polyamory, having never read a book about it, because of what I saw in practice among my polyamorous friends, and how I felt about it. This statement helps heal that feeling somewhat and helps me imagine a world where the practice is not awful.
A couple of years ago I visited a Maasai village in Tanzania. They are very traditional, as in "we got to the Stone Age and decided to stay here." The son of the headman asked me how many wives I had. I told him just one. He was clearly disappointed in me as a man--I was a guy who lacked the status and prosperity for multiple wives. He, on the other hand, had three wives and his father the chief had six. Those were men who made it big, despite living in dung-and-stick huts without running water or electricity. So is polyamory for the elites? I guess your cultural mileage may vary.
The argument is these cultures aren't as wealthy and successful long-term, and given the Maasai versus the Brits...I kind of have to admit the monogamy advocates have a point.
Modern polyamory takes many forms, but old-school polyamory generally meant "elite men get lots of wives; poor men get no wives." May sound good if you're elite, but historic polygamy was a negative for the majority of men.
Also goes for weight loss advice, where fat people have endless supplies of suggestions and seem especially to try to force those thoughts on non-fat people who are successfully dieting already despite having a lot less weight to lose. In the past when I had bad obsessive compulsive disorder I had lots of advice for how to deal with it, but now that it's been years since I had any symptoms I've mostly forgotten them. I was also a bit insufferably into self-analysis back when it was bad, but since that eventually led to improvement it wasn't a waste.
Speaking as a fat person in the process of becoming less fat (through boring calorie counting that I really don't need to explain), I am probably a bit guilty of this, but I think it's a good example of Scott's other point: people who have never had a problem with their weight can't offer any useful advice on weight control at all, because they don't really know what they are doing differently. I have tried asking these people and they pretty much just say, "I don't know, I just eat whatever I want." You can learn a lot by _observing_ them and seeing what "whatever they want" actually is for them, but you don't learn anything useful by just asking them.
Ideally if you are looking for advice you ask people who have successfully conquered a weight problem, but they are not so likely to be proactively offering advice as people currently dealing with one because it is no longer at the forefront of their mind.
For what it's worth, as a person with a pattern of once every few years deciding I weigh too much and then successfully dieting to lose it, my advice is to weigh yourself daily and use an app to track the results over time as a way of gamifying the process. Since that's all that's necessary for me, that's all the advice I have to give. With that approach I generally lose 1 or 2 pounds a month, which is completely sustainable but slow, and the biggest problem is just how boring the whole thing is and keeping interest from fading over time. Good luck withy our weight loss journey. Oh, and don't drink sugar water including fruit juice, skim milk, and alcoholic beverages. That advice is so baseline that it's easy to forget to mention it.
"The people I know from various oft-discussed groups - transgender, super-religious, autistic, rich, etc - are all nicer and more normal than their public representatives would lead you to believe."
Yes! I've interacted with all of these groups (aside from super- religious) and despite my worries, I found that even the most ideological of them are willing to engage with you as people first if you grant them the same grace.
From Tolstoy's dictum, "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", it follows that every happy family's memoir or advice would be repetitive and vapid.
I'm sure the subscriber's only post does a good job on the specific disagreements, but without that context this feels like FUD more than insight: "Maybe advice is written by defective people. Ok, it's not really advice, but memoirs might be written by narcissists. Or maybe by activists. Maybe all of the above!"
These are probably useful stereotypes to keep in mind, but it's left to the reader to assume they apply in this case. And even so "a defective narcissist activist writes a memoir about their experience" is obviously the thesis of an article titled "Polyamory: the Ruling Class's Latest Fad." You can claim she doesn't represent all of polygamy, but I failed to find that claim in the article anyhow.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant this way with more context, but this post comes across like a substance-free attack on the article by casting aspersions at the book the article is attacking.
Wait, I don’t understand why “the ruling class’s latest fad,” which seems to be a statement about poly people generally (or at least a certain class that is drawn to poly), is equivalent to a statement about a *particular* person who wrote a book.
Okay, I have two basic objections to polyamory. The first is a broader but weaker point, and the second is narrower and stronger.
1. If you actually love someone, that person should be enough for you. Especially, if most people who claim to love someone do, in fact, find that that person is enough for them. I struggle to see how it doesn't *almost* follow by definition that if Aaron wants to be in a momogamous relationship with Brenda, and Carl wants to be in a polyamorous relationship with Diana, then Carl loves Diana less than Aaron loves Brenda. Now maybe this assumption can be refuted somehow, by reference to irreducible personality types or something, but it certainly seems like the prima facie assumption, and requires an affirmative defence.
2. There seem to be two types of polyamory: the "hippie" kind where a group of people are all in a single demarcated "relationship" with each other, all know each other as either friends or lovers, and having sex with anyone outside that group would be condemned as cheating. And the "open relationship" kind where two people are dating or married but are "free" to sleep with other people (but still have each other as a "primary partner" or some such). The first, while I'm not endorsing it, seems to have decent case for being a form of actual love. The second, unless I'm missing something, looks like despicable pure hedonism. First, because the "primary" aspect shows it really is all about sex, not about sharing your love with someone else. Second, because it's basically legitimised cheating, and for all the talk of mutality what's to stop someone pressuring their spouse to "consent" to "opening" their relationship? (I've seen a number of online stories of this happening, though with beautiful poetic justice where the pressured partner ends up finding someone who actually values him or her and wants a true relationship, and the other partner ending up entirely alone and certainly not finding the harem they were expecting). And third, because it creates *competition* between the two spouses over who can get more partners, and for fuck's sake a marriage is the ONE place such toxic sexual competition should not exist!
And also, I can't find it but when I was reading through the old slatestarcodex archives, I at one point followed a link to a post where Scott's former girlfriend, Ozy someone, was outright arguing that cheating is sometimes okay! As in, actual non-consensual cheating. I think when you've got your activists doing that, it's fair to say your movement has a massive problem. How many monogamous people will you find publicly, proudly saying "cheating is okay, actually"?
Love is not conserved, as many people that have multiple kids can attest to. Time and attention are extremely limited, and people are very aware of when they are getting the short end of the stick on either.
But (to restate the point I just made to drsophilist's similar reply) even people in monogamous relationships spend some of their time and attention outside of the relationship: they spend it on work, on friendships, on hobbies. That doesn't mean these fail to be issues; they definitely are issues for many couples. "You care more about this hobby than you care about me," "you're spending too much time at the office," "I never get time to see my friends"—these are all complaints that relationship counselors are familiar with, and they're all legitimate areas of conflict. But of course no relationship counselor would say "just do without your friends/hobbies/job; your partner should be enough for you." They're things that have to be negotiated, and the most acceptable answers will vary from couple to couple.
Sure, but romantic love/attachment tends to have a much higher status in most people's mind. Jealousy is a thing, and spouses are well known to be much more jealous of a rival love interest than a job, even if that job is 60-80+ hours a week.
If you doubt that, I would be interested in your opinion on a wife whose husband is at the office 60 hours a week. Would she feel the same, better, or worse if she found out that her husband was having an affair with his secretary so he was only actually working 40 hours a week? Would she feel better about it if he told her he was going to do it first? Some people might say yes, but the vast majority would say that the affair is strictly worse than the work hours, despite being the same amount of time away from the home.
I definitely don't doubt it, and I agree when you say the vast majority would find work hours more acceptable than poly-hours. The vast majority are going to continue to not be poly! For most people—probably particularly most women—the "negotiation" over poly will be "No, that's a dealbreaker," and woe betide the poly person who doesn't accept that going in. That said, the answer to your question "Would she feel better about [the husband sleeping with another woman] if he told her he was going to do it first" is clearly yes for some people, since that's the arrangement poly people arrive at. Though of course that arrangement, if done properly, wouldn't be "he told her" but "they worked it out openly."
So no, I definitely would not say "A spouse should accept a poly relationship just as they would accept a job or a bowling league." Hours are not created equal. The point I was making is that someone getting the short end of the stick is a subjective perception that some people will hold regardless of any negotiation, whereas other people will find worth negotiating around.
That's true, but the amounts of time, energy, and attention each partner requires are going to vary quite widely among different couples. As an example, some people would not be compatible with a partner who has a high-powered, high-stress job that takes up a huge amount of their time and attention. Others would, even though a lot of maintenance might still be required. That's the kind of thing that has to be worked out partner to partner; it's hard to lay down a general rule about how many hours each partner should work and no more.
The poly question is structurally quite similar to the gay/lesbian issue, which went from censored to mainstream acceptance quite recently. The claim is not that people "should" be poly, it's that it works better than the alternative for a certain % of people.
These kinds of subtle shifts always have a way of eliciting fearful responses from people who think someone is trying to turn the whole of society gay/poly/whatever. And of course the world being what it is, there will always be some overexcited confused teenager misunderstanding the issue and arguing for just that.
But it's really about just letting people with minority options in life do their thing. I'm not in any of these groups, but I'm happy to see society shift in the direction of letting them live their lives in whatever way suits them best.
>The poly question is structurally quite similar to the gay/lesbian issue, which went from censored to mainstream acceptance quite recently.
Is anyone arguing that poly people are "born that way"? I've heard this once or twice (and I don't buy it), but the bulk of the discourse does seem to promote it as a *choice*, and in media it does tend to get a "try it" note, and not as an inherent quality. As such, it is not a good parallel to the gay/lesbian issue. And as such...
>The claim is not that people "should" be poly, it's that it works better than the alternative for a certain % of people.
I disagree here. It is a hard sell to claim that something is better for X% without specifying that % and what makes them unique. As with any lifestyle- veganism, paleo, prepper, Crossfit, whatever- there is an implicit or explicit "this is better" component.
I'm not arguing either way about "born that way". People form stable preferences over things, some can be more genetic and others less so. In a world where gay/straight was mostly a developing preference freely taken by a certain % of people, I'd still be happy for society to normalize that.
> there is an implicit or explicit "this is better" component.
I think the difference is that the lifestyle examples you give didn't originally have a contingent of people ready to call them "evil" and "bad for society". Before it became a movement, "I eat caveman food" would at worst make you a weirdo, not a menace to cultural norms. You don't have to go very far in this very thread to find people who honestly believe that normalizing poly is just that.
So I'm not worried at all about the poly group trying making me feel like I'm inferior for not being one of them. Group cultures change though, if they ever make it to the mainstream and then degenerate that far, I'll be ready to grumble.
I don't know if I was born poly, but it's certainly hard-wired. I've been poly since I was 19 (now 48), aside from 2 painful and disastrous mono relationships in my mid-to-late 20s. I don't fit into mono relationships, so I became increasingly miserable, and so did my partners. (One relationship was abusive, so big grain of salt there.) Swore off monogamy after that.
Have all my poly relationships been blissful? No, of course not, but then, most mono people can't say that either. All have been better than my mono ones, though, and many have been lovely.
I'm sure you can see the problem in going from "I remember one person was arguing this extreme position" to "your activists are arguing this extreme position, therefore your movement has a massive problem." It's not suspicious that you can't find Ozy someone's post saying cheating is okay, but if this is a massive problem within the movement you should be able to find a bunch more posts saying the same thing, right?
It was just a single example I thought a number of people here might be familiar with. This Ozy was someone Scott was constantly linking to in the early SSC posts and I could probably find her post on cheating if I trawled through those archives. I use it as an example of someone in Scott's own (past) polyamorous circle, and again I thought some of the regulars here might recognise what I was talking about.
But more generally, what I find about these related sexually liberal movements (gay, feminist, polyamorous) is that while their members will rarely outright defend cheating, they also won't condemn it very clearly or very often. Maybe I'm wrong, it's just an impression I get, that it's rare to see a full throated "cheating is one of the worst things to you can do to someone and you're a disgusting person if you do!". If I could see a lot of that, I'd feel a lot better. It just feels like their attitude is an (unspoken) "yeah, cheating's bad, but it's not really *that* bad, and I wouldn't really *judge* someone for it".
Well there's morals, and then there's psychological realism, and sometimes they paint quite different pictures. Cheating sucks, if you want to hear it from a permissive liberal, here it is. Don't do it. Especially now that you can leave a bad relationship quite freely. But cheating is also a fact of life, probably has been for as long as there have been modern humans. There have been places and times in history where it's been disallowed as hard as possible, and it looks like it still happened quite a lot, just underground. At some point you have to make peace with the whole human package, and accept to work within that.
Which means that within these constraints, as much as cheating sucks, the optimal level of cheating in any society is not zero.
Do you think the feminist movement has on the whole been gentler to cheating than pre-feminism was? I would find that very surprising, given that men seem much more likely to cheat and women much more likely to be expected to put up with it. Laws in olden times were harsher with female adulterers than male adulterers, "mistresses" much more common than whatever the male counterpart would be called, etc. I suppose it could depend on which "wave" we're talking about, but I would need some pretty definite reasons to think that feminism as a whole has been lenient on cheating.
In fact I don't even know if I'd agree that feminism is "sexually liberal" as a whole; a lot of feminism's relationship to sex has been to insist on *strictures*: feminists historically have been more opposed to prostitution and child marriage, have gotten marital rape laws passed and enforced, etc. Again, it depends on what generation of feminists you mean: there are feminists who are pro-sex worker and feminists who are anti. But that just seems to illustrate the problem with sweeping statements like you're making here.
I also think you're greatly overstating the degree to which pre-feminism was anti-cheating. Mad Men is a great show, I highly recommend it!
Pretty much. That's why they claim to be 'sex-positive' but get upset when shows, movies, video games, etc. have female nudity--it's the 'male gaze'.
It's one of the big reasons no man should ever trust a feminist when they say 'it's for men too'--no, it's not. They want to benefit themselves at your expense, and you should know that.
well this is because when you make a virtue out of a vice its hard to stop. its a vice to not be able to commit to one person; polyamory tries to make it into a virtue. you cannot have flaws with the upperclass, they always must be recast. so even cheating becomes one i guess
Um, poly here, and almost all the poly people I know are very against cheating. Also, cheating is possible in poly relationships: some relationships have rules, and breaking them = cheating. More broadly, doing something that you know your partner would feel uncomfortable/betrayed by is icky. Not telling them? Cheating.
> First, because the "primary" aspect shows it really is all about sex, not about sharing your love with someone else.
Sex is a human need. But do you think it is impossible to also love someone you have sex with?
> Second, because it's basically legitimised cheating
That's like saying that trade is basically legitimized theft, or that sex is basically legitimized rape. In some sense, yes it is, but the word "legitimized" makes a great difference.
From my perspective, the bad thing about cheating is not the sex per se, but lying to one's partner. If my wife had other sexual partners before she met me, then having another one now would kinda be a difference in timing only. But if she lied to me about that, then... how could I trust anything else she says, and how could I organize my life with a person whose words I can't trust? (Probably a very aspie perspective, but hey, that's who I am.)
> what's to stop someone pressuring their spouse to "consent" to "opening" their relationship?
Presumably the same thing that stops them from pressuring their spouse to other things.
And, you know, sometimes monogamous people divorce, and they can do that completely unilaterally, without any "consent" from the other party. Seems to me that even unilaterally declaring a relationship to be "open" is still not worse than applying for a divorce.
> And third, because it creates *competition* between the two spouses over who can get more partners
That would be quite immature, IMHO. Okay, let's assume that I get 3 extra sexual partners, and my wife gets 4. What exactly should be my problem with such outcome, compared to e.g. a situation where each of us gets 3 extra partners?
I would expect that people who react this way are probably already feeling competitive about the number of their previous partners, or the quality of their previous partners, or the length or intensity of the previous relationships, or something.
"Sex is a human need. But do you think it is impossible to also love someone you have sex with?"
I don't understand the question: I'm saying that particular setup makes it look like the desire is only for more sex not more love. And scratch that, I don't actually mean desire for sex (or more sex, which you could have with your own partner) but for sexual variety. The latter is surely not a biological need.
But now I worry that everyone's talking past each other. I'm even less of sure of what "polyamory" actually means than I was before.
"That's like saying that trade is basically legitimized theft, or that sex is basically legitimized rape. In some sense, yes it is, but the word "legitimized" makes a great difference."
Fair point, to my lack of context. The context that I think makes it different is: imagine if we lived in a society where people were regularly swindled out of some item, say family antiques. A group of fraudsters go around, tricking people into selling them their antiques for much less than their actual value. Society condemns this, these people are ostracised when exposed, and there are countless widely shared tips on how to avoid being so swindled, and campaigns to inform people that this behaviour is not okay and how to be on the lookout for it. It's widely accepted that if you sell a family antique for less than its value, you have been wronged, end of story.
And then suddenly a movement of people arises advocating for people's "right" to sell their antiques for less than their value, if they so choose. It's a free trade after all! Who are we to judge if some people freely choose to make what the majority consider unfair deals?
I think there would be strong suspician that a lot of this is being driven by the fraudsters, and it would be reasonable to call it an attempt to legitimise fraud. Even though you could say, technically, it's not fraud if the sellers are aware of what they're doing, that they're part of this "right to make unequal trades" subculture.
This is a badly hacked together analogy and it would take me time to come up with a better one that more closely resembles polyamory. But without focusing on the details, can you see the rough point I'm getting at?
"But if she lied to me about that, then... how could I trust anything else she says, and how could I organize my life with a person whose words I can't trust? (Probably a very aspie perspective, but hey, that's who I am.)"
I'm possibly aspie as well (at least somewhat) and I agree with your account of why lying is so bad (I'm almost a Kantian about lying). But I don't share your intuition that lying is the only immoral part of cheating. Saying to your spouse "I will now be having sex with someone else, like it or not" is only slightly better than lying about it. Lying makes it worse, but that would still be absolutely horrible, still a fundamental betrayal of the highest order. Do you disagree?
"Presumably the same thing that stops them from pressuring their spouse to other things.
And, you know, sometimes monogamous people divorce, and they can do that completely unilaterally, without any "consent" from the other party. Seems to me that even unilaterally declaring a relationship to be "open" is still not worse than applying for a divorce."
I disagree. An honest, clean, unilateral divorce (while I think it's often wrong absent good reasons) seems much, much less bad than a unilateral physical withdrawal while still being married, or a unilateral emotional withdrawal, or something similar. The latter is just so horrifying, that someone could keep up the pretense of being in a relationship with you while actually, secretly (to most outsiders) abandoning you partially. And when you've broken up, everyone understands something bad has happened, that you've been abandoned. In the other cases, people might well not understand at all, not even realise there's any problem. I find it terrifying. And emotional abuse to the extreme.
More generally, the huge sticking point for me is the whole Chesterton's Fence. We have, as a society, decades or centuries of codified standards and norms, some harshly debated and some widely accepted, about what spouses owe each other, and what demands and actions are normal and abusive, regarding sex, division of labour, communication, raising of children and so on. We have all but nome of this in relation to demands and desires for opening a relationship, and the difference between "consensual" affairs and non-consensual ones, because it's been taken completely for granted that involving a third person in a relationship is something you categorically do not do.
And now there's a movement to tear down this fence. Well, if this happened over the course of centuries, I daresay society might adapt to it fairly well. There'd be established norms and official advice and so on about all the intricacies, and metaphorical "case law" regarding every possible situation. When this is happening in the space of a few years...can't you see how much harm this could cause?
Fair point about the immaturity of competition, but people in general can be pretty terrible, and several times more so for the subset who are inclined to throw away conventional morals for high status trends.
> I'm saying that particular setup makes it look like the desire is only for more sex not more love.
Ah, so the problem is basically with "I want to have sex with you, and even a long term relationship, but you are not my primary" -- especially the last part, doesn't seem too loving?
But it's not like monogamy gives a better answer. If you love two people, you should... marry one, and leave the other alone, right? That's why people are so broken-hearted about narrowly losing to someone. In polyamory, the person gets three options: (a) find someone else, (b) accept being a "secondary", (c) be alone. Or, possibly, find someone else *and* remain a "secondary".
Also, there is an obvious incentive to pretend love, just to get more sex. But the same is true in monogamy.
> more sex, which you could have with your own partner
Sometimes different people have different needs, and sometimes it causes problems in a relationship that could otherwise be happy. Suppose than one partner would prefer to have sex every day, and for the other once in a month is best; but otherwise they are a perfect couple.
> I'm even less of sure of what "polyamory" actually means than I was before.
It probably means different things to different people. I suppose the important part is whether you plan to have kids. If yes, you need to make it clear who will have kids with whom. If not, then it simply means people having sex with multiple partners, and letting their partners have sex with multiple partners.
> A group of fraudsters go around...
Ok, so what exactly is the threat we are trying to avoid here? I can imagine a few bad situations that often happen in relationships:
* A guy gets a girl pregnant, then says "not my problem" and walks away.
* A guy keeps two or three girls in parallel; they do not know about each other. The girls believe that they have some kind of relationship (an exclusive relationship, with the potential to become an exclusive marriage with children), but they actually never had.
* A 20-something guy dates a 20-something girl, with the assumption that they will have fun now and start a family later. Ten years later, the 30-something guy breaks up with her, finds another 20-something girl and starts a family with the new girl. The 30-something girl is shocked when she finds out how her value on the dating market has changed in the meanwhile.
* The same as the second and the third situations, but the girl also gets pregnant.
Probably some other options, too. I have mentioned the ones that I observe happening around me. Now the funny thing is, none of these guys was (officially) polyamorous. It all happened under the pretext of monogamy.
An analogous situation in polyamory would be the guy telling the girl that she is his "primary", and later changing his mind to "actually, I only want you as a secondary" or "actually, I decided to be monogamous, with someone else". That still doesn't seem worse.
An argument could be made that in the (pretend-)monogamous situation, when the girl finds out that the guy has other girls in parallel, the smart move is to leave him, immediately. While in the polyamorous situation, she is encouraged to stay -- and she may miss a different opportunity for a relationship that would come if she paid better attention and advertised being single.
To take it further, if you are okay with *both* mono and poly, it may seem like poly is strictly giving you more options... but actually it takes some of the options away, as your potential monogamous partners see you as "in a relationship" and therefore not available to them. You may not even notice that this is happening!
But it seems to me that most of the centuries-old norms were already abandoned by the prevalence of premarital sex and "serial monogamy" and cheating. Compared to cheating, and the kind of serial monogamy where you are already planning to replace your partner later but you haven't communicated it to them clearly, polyamory seems like a more honest option.
> Saying to your spouse "I will now be having sex with someone else, like it or not" is only slightly better than lying about it. Lying makes it worse, but that would still be absolutely horrible, still a fundamental betrayal of the highest order.
I agree. As I see it, the problem is with starting the relationship under some assumptions, and then changing the deal unilaterally later. That is almost like applying for the divorce, in the sense that you announce that the original form of relationship no longer exists.
It would be different if (a) you made it clear from the beginning that you are only interested in a polyamorous relationship, or if (b) both partners made the decision that being poly was better for them.
> And when you've broken up, everyone understands something bad has happened, that you've been abandoned.
I think, if your previously monogamous partner suddenly announces "I will now be having sex with other people", and you consequently break up / apply for a divorce, this will be quite legible for the outsiders, if you summarize it as "he/she started cheating on me".
> We have, as a society, decades or centuries of codified standards and norms
We also currently have 50% of marriages ending up with a divorce.
> First, because the "primary" aspect shows it really is all about sex, not about sharing your love with someone else.
Actually, I think it's mostly an explicit hierarchy for prioritization. Sometimes stuff goes wrong, sometimes you're needed in two places at once, and this provides a simple framework. As the good book says, "No man can serve two masters". And for the people on the other end, it provides clarity about what they can expect.
The alternative in 99% of cases is to make a lot of nice sounding noise about egalitarianism, but with the hierarchy still in place beneath, except now you're not allowed to talk about it.
There's something slightly amusing here, in that I regard you as one of the better legible-principle-finders I've encountered, in fully general. You're quite excellent at taking knowledge which is implicit, and forming it into a legible (implicit) structure.
I find it a lot in people who, for one reason or another, "had to grow up too fast" - sometimes because their parents were crap and they had to step up far too early, sometimes because their effective peer group as a child was more closely aligned to "adults" than "actual peers". (Being very smart can cause adults to be far more interesting as a child than your fellow children.) Not really having the time to make a nice slow gradient descent, they get really good at finding shortcuts - and sometimes this coincides with the ability to actually specify what these shortcuts are.
This is the more detailed, thoughtful, and charitable version of what I was arguing last night, kudos!
I really want to double-down on the "you should hate people who write books" angle: it is - theoretically - possible to write a book of advice excellent enough that it more than redeems the author from all the errors in judgement led to them gathering such legible expertise. But in practice the writer of a sexuality memoir has not just made a chain of mistakes throughout their life, they are actively and determinedly making a continuous, crowning mistake through the process of publishing their book. It is one thing to screw up a conversation with a lover and hurt feelings; it is another to fuck up so dramatically and so often for this to be a relevant pattern; and it is a third far worse thing to fight to sell the second as entertainment.
It’s always seemed incredibly fraught to me, and always and only (before we became self-consciously deliberate about these things, anyway) seems to arise in situations where something is happening to drop the numbers of the male population, or else is put in place after such an event to exclude some number of men from the mating population by a religious institution like the FLDS.
I know in my bones an internet comment isn’t going to change many people’s minds on this, but two points because I can’t help myself.
1. Granted, I had one of those childhoods that was so terrible that people find it fascinating but this seems just awful for kids. Again, I’m probably bias because my parents have racked up close to ten marriages between them and I grew up knowing that their first and most heartfelt loyalty was never to me. There would be my brothers and sisters, whichever of my parents we were with, and just some random person they’d decided they loved more than us. And that person definitely made their resentment of us known and usually made whichever of my parents was there perform some sort of loyalty test. Most other people I know in this situation have some kind of similar experience even if the examples are less dramatic and more open to being interpreted as over-sensitivity. Say what you will about monogamy but it makes lines of loyalty very clear within a family unit. That might not matter as much when there are resources to go around for everyone, but when you’re poor it matters a lot because there isn’t that much to go around and one year your step-mom might want to ritually humiliate you and your siblings by giving you socks at Christmas while her children open elaborate gifts.
Again, personal experience, blah blah blah. But you have to acknowledge that the pathways for this kind of thing open up just because you’ve expanded the numbers of players in the game and unaligned their motivations.
2. This seems incredibly susceptible to motivated reasoning as a lifestyle. When we sit down and think about ethics, morality, or whatever, the expectation we should have is that we will walk away from those thoughts having some list of things we are not allowed to do. The whole purpose of ethics/morality/whatever is to figure out how your wants and desires step on the wants and desires of other people. So when people sit down and think through those things in a romantic context and in the back of their head there’s a command that says “and remember, try to rules-lawyer this in some way that you can still get what you wanted at the beginning” it kind of short-circuits the whole thing. When people talk about what they get out of this kind of a thing my biggest feeling is “Doesn’t it make you suspicious that when your partner is expressing their boundaries to you it always turns out that you should just be able to have everything you want?”
If there’s some beautiful version of polyamory where you’re putting bits of yourself into another person and bits of them into you, and your concern and caring for those bits of them in you grows greater than your concern and care for yourself, I would genuinely, sincerely, love to hear it. Otherwise, what I generally take away is a lot of “…. Yes, maybe someone does want that ideally but what about ME?”
3. A third point because I can’t help myself. Once you have kids, I think there’s a biological command in you, or at least there was in me, that shouts “Go fuck myself!” Your kid is the most important thing in the world. I felt that in my bones, anyway. If you’re shy, or don’t want to do some particular thing because it will be too stressful there’s that command “Go fuck myself!” And you just do it anyway.
You don’t want to brush their little teeth because they get wiggly, just do it anyway. You’re too tired to change the dirty diaper, just do it anyway. He’s crying and won’t stop and you’re just about out of fuel to keep going, just keep holding him anyway and kiss the top of his head and tell him it’s going to be okay. That voice, or chemical tug, or evolutionary imperative, or whatever you want to call it, guides you along the path of things that are best for your child.
Whatever anyone does before having kids, I think if you listen to that voice honestly, it tells you to dedicate yourself to a nuclear family unit.
Again, I’m also not typical because even if my wife and I got divorced for any reason I would never get remarried. I would never want my children to feel that my loyalty is divided. I remember what that was like where I was just a little kid and I suddenly knew that I couldn’t count on my mom and dad anymore (or even less than before in my case) and I would never ever do that to my kids.
> Once you have kids, I think there’s a biological command in you, or at least there was in me, that shouts “Go fuck myself!” Your kid is the most important thing in the world.
Thank you.
Having children *changes* you, because suddenly, you're not the most important person in your own life anymore. There's a distinct step in someone's maturity and their priorities between before and after they have kids, and I have my doubts whether this is compatible with the quadratically growing social complexity of non-monogamous relationships.
(of course there are exceptions, not every parent is selfless and devoted, some people are born with the maturity of an old crone, and some gain that maturity through hardship and suffering – I'm talking "in general")
We should all aspire to Mufasa level fathering. I am practicing how to manifest as a cloud right now so that I will be prepared when my son needs me after I die.
As per your point 1, I am very sympathetic to your experience, that sounds very difficult, I just don't really see how that's an argument against polyamory. As I'm understanding your comment, your parents weren't polyamorous, they were monogamous? As in, all of their relationships were monogamous relationships? It seems like an argument against instability, and against not prioritizing children, but how exactly is it related to polyamory when it's the result of broken/unhealthy monogamous relationships?
Take a man from Mars view of this situation where you can’t really understand why anyone involved in any of this is doing anything. They can’t explain it to you and you couldn’t understand it. You just watch how atoms move around.
First scenario, two humans live in the same domicile, never procreate with anyone except each other and the Martian can observe this. They create offspring and provide them with resources during development.
Second scenario, two humans live in the same domicile for some period but continue there’s turn-over into the specific humans. You chart an increase in physical force used against the developing humans on average and a drop in support given to the offspring. The statistics around child abuse when an adult lives in the house who is not related to the child aren’t very good. You even see this kind of behavior in primates where they start to do weird stuff to the babies of other gorillas, presumably to create more resources for their own child.
Third scenario, more than two humans live in the same domicile for some period, with the specific configuration of humans changing across time. I think it’s fair to assume the dynamics of this situation will follow scenario two as this scenario *is* basically scenario two where you have just changed the temporality of where people are at a given time.
I was quite close to a girl in high school whose parents started to do the polyamory thing and she definitely felt like her and her siblings were not their priority. The problem isn’t “were the other relationships separated by time” the problem is “were there conflicting relationships at all?”
I think of polyamory like I think of cousin marriage. I will still be polite and kind to people who do it. I will look at particular examples of it and think “Well, everyone involved here seems to love each other quite a lot.” And I will still think “this may be locally okay, but it is still globally bad, and not sustainable at the level of the population for very long periods of time. This probably represents some developmental process breaking down somewhere and people should be encouraged to date outside their families.”
I am not saying make it illegal or break into people’s homes and start going through their stuff to figure out who is screwing who.
But I am saying when my son is a 60 year old man and I am a close to 100 year old man I will look at his gray eyebrows and tufts of ear hair and say “You’re still my baby.” And I am saying when I didn’t talk to my dad for five years he just sort of didn’t notice because he had other things going on with some lady he just met so that when I saw him again he just asked me to go refill a tank of propane for him.
You can argue you don’t owe some kind of magical Mufasa-level mentorship relationship to your child and maybe in a certain sense that is true. But that certain sense is also self-evidently pretty shitty and we should try to be better. I don’t care what people do before they have kids, except when I know them personally, or if they’re just trying to get a vibe on what they should be doing, but once they have kids your kid should know your eyes are always on them first and never on some person you just happened to meet who had big tits.
You could imagine further scenarios where the two original parents stay together in a loving relationship prioritizing the children, the only difference being that the parents don't restrict eachother from having additional romantic/sexual involvement with other people. This could have positive or negative effects on the children, but those effects would be a result of the way the parents behave and prioritize, regardless of whether they place default restrictions on eachothers romantic/sexual interests.
A parent prioritizing a (additional) romantic relationship over their children is no more harmful than a parent prioritizing their friends over their children. The issue is the way they're prioritizing. When I defend polyamory I'm not defending loosening You familial bonds.
Whether or not parents prioritize their children's needs seems to be the main important distinction. You offer an example where the children weren't prioritized. I think your example exemplifies monogamous attitudes, you disagree, but I think we agree that not prioritizing children is the issue.
I can also imagine an infinite and perfectly frictionless plane where objects once put into motion continue in straight line trajectories until acted upon by other forces.
We’re not circle heads on stick bodies. We have an evolutionary and biological history that gives us all kinds of built-in natural urges/chemical tugs/biological imperatives. You have a natural urge to defend *your* specific children and anything that threatens that gives you a natural urge to behave in a hostile manner.
Wrote this above, yes I can imagine finding examples fairly easily where I would say “this seems okay.” And also at the same time, in no way contradictory to that, think it’s a worse system that doesn’t scale and people for whom it worked out had it work out by accident.
I think parents that don’t prioritize their kids won’t prioritize their kids weather or not they have various romantic relationships. It might have been golf instead of a girl with big tits. The only exception is if a parent that doesn’t prioritize their kids stays with the other biological parent who does care more about the kids and thus influence them into being a somewhat better parent than they’re inclined to be. But I really don’t think this has anything to do with sex except that adults like sex - they like other things too. Some parents are bad parents.
There will always be terrible homes in any system. My best guess, given what I said above, is that you probably have bad homes less often with monogamy. And I’m sure there are probably polygamous groups where I’d be fine with everyone there.
We’re not circle heads on stick bodies executing logic perfectly on an infinite plane with no friction. Whether we want them or not, we inherited certain drives/chemical tugs/biological imperatives whether or not we would prefer them to be there. You have to engineer your society around what’s there. And you have a very limited budget to get people to go against those instincts.
Not saying anyone isn’t free to go do what they want. I’m not going to lobby to have this made illegal or break up someone’s home where nobody is being hurt. Just that it’s probably not a very good idea over the long term. Especially with kids.
I am also probably in a minority here where I just don’t really care what makes someone who is a parent feel better or worse about the “fun” in their own personal life. We all get a bit of time to go out and have our fun. Then some of us go and take on a duty that’s more important than that fun. It’s still loads of fun! The most fun I’ve ever had in my life. But it’s a different kind of fun and it doesn’t involve a lot of immediate gratification.
Right, but the set of "parents who won't prioritize their kids" disproportionately includes *step*parents. And probably even more so step-hey-I'm-not-even-married-to-this-kid's-mother or whatever.
Polyamory necessarily introduces into the "family", adults who are disproportionately inclined to not prioritize at least some of the kids. And who, being part of the family, will necessarily suck bandwidth from the actual parents of those kids. It's certainly possible for a polyamorous relationship to be structured to mitigate this risk, but it's not guaranteed. So it's a serious concern that shouldn't be handwaved away with "sometimes parents just suck, that's not our problem".
This had less of gamesmanship and more of honesty than 90% of the comments.
I think of something I observed with my niece. Who was beloved, and really desired - a 40s surprise, my brother and his wife seemingly confirmed in infertility (pro-tip: get your gall bladder removed, but that’s another story).
Anyway, mental illness and whatever other mutual discontents led to the breakup of their marriage after a few years of delight in their child, and spoiling her rotten.
I then saw how, as if on cue, they both began complaining about their time, about being late for picking up, about personal plans getting messed up, about whose turn it was (they had no agreed upon custody schedule, and as mentioned, there was some mysterious illness or other alteration in one party).
I remember feeling a little pang when even my mother, the child’s grandmother, took up this chorus on behalf of her son, “he has to do too much, he has to have her too much”, etc.
I can’t emphasize enough that everyone loved this child but somehow they lapsed into a more selfish single version of themselves after the divorce. When she had been the sole apple of their eye only shortly before …
We are not a kid friendly culture and it drives me up the fucking wall.
It is one of a very few topics where I will shout at strangers in real life because I can remember when I was a kid the worst part was always that self-evidently messed up stuff was happening and everybody kind of just walked around it.
My prayers to your niece and I hope she knows you love her. In a healthier culture her parents would have been encouraged to take life paths that prioritized her.
"Say what you will about monogamy but it makes lines of loyalty very clear within a family unit."
I think I disagree with this, for exactly the reasons you talk about here. It sounds like (sorry - your comment wasn't super clear on this, but I'm trying to read between the lines) your parents were monogamous, at least in terms of ideology if not in practice (compare eg someone who votes Republican with someone who deeply embodies conservative principles in everything they do). It sounds like this failed them. I'm not saying that being ideologically polyamorous would have served them any better. But it doesn't seem like it could have served them worse.
The way I'm thinking about this is that both monogamy and polyamory have failure modes and success modes (for long-term relationships with kids, I don't care as much about low-commitment flings):
MONOGAMY SUCCESS MODE: You stay faithful to your partner and stay with your family.
MONOGAMY FAILURE MODE: You cheat on your partner, betray their trust, they get really angry, you get divorced, your family is torn apart, maybe you monogamously marry someone new, repeat multiple times.
POLYAMORY SUCCESS MODE: You have a primary partner who you live with and have children with, on the understanding that you might have other relationships too. You stay with your primary partner, have a great relationship with them, and continue to raise children together happily, while also having one or more good relationships on the side. Your other partners either don't interact with your family, or act as aunt/uncle figures to the children.
POLYAMORY FAILURE MODE: You try to have children with a primary partner, but one of you switches to prioritize another relationship instead and you divorce, or there's some other kind of instability that affects the children.
I've seen many people talk about the monogamy failure mode and claim this is a strike against polyamory. To score points against polyamory, I think you would have to prove that switching the marginal person from monogamy to polyamory increases the risk of the polyamorous failure mode more than it decreases the risk of the monogamous failure mode.
I would say that my parents’ marriage appeared to be a failure to us, their kids, although the misery was mainly down to one party, my strange and very difficult father (as my own husband put it, after knowing him awhile, “I don’t think he’s in the DSM”).
Well - failure looks like success now. He has succeeded in making them financially very comfortable (my brother: “Even Dad couldn’t screw up this bull run”) and she provides the round the clock care he needs, that no one else in the world would.
Marriage looks different as time passes.
Thank God they stayed together, or rather, she was not the type to seek to leave, both for lack of gumption and for social reasons.
Note that this isn’t precisely the same thing as weakness …
Firstly, I probably ought to have toned down some of my response here. You’re a real guy with real people around you and it’s always important to remember that down from the narrative level the personal is the most important. So, anyway, sorry to you and your loved ones.
You are basically correct on the situation with my parents.
It’s always hard for any of us to sort out what are the failures of the system versus the failures of our particular piece of the system. No system is perfect and culturally enforced monogamy on the scale we had a few generations ago didn’t produce 0 difficult family circumstances. Likewise, I’m sure there are probably polygamous relationships where I’d have a real hard time identifying a victim because everyone involved seems to be doing well. That said, it’s also equivocating for me to put it that way because I think one of these both in theory and in practice is clearly superior to the other and far less prone to be abused. And I also think that to not have an abusive polyamorous relationship you basically have to Mr. Magoo your way through a field of incredible hazards to arrive unharmed at the other side. Great for you if it all worked out but also it’s not like there’s a very good road through the sewer holes and moving I-beams that everyone can just follow.
“I've seen many people talk about the monogamy failure mode and claim this is a strike against polyamory. To score points against polyamory, I think you would have to prove that switching the marginal person from monogamy to polyamory increases the risk of the polyamorous failure mode more than it decreases the risk of the monogamous failure mode.”
To this I would just refer back to the statistics on the likelihood of abuse when an adult other than a parent is in the home. Why would those be different in a polyamorous situation? That’s my general system level proof of which one of these is likely better for children at the social level of analysis. Also the statistics about the general well-being of children with two parents in the home. That is very clearly more stable, you probably know those statistics better than I do, and while of course not perfect it does seem very hard to argue that if that wasn’t the case for more people (which we know is possible because it was the case for virtually everyone not that long ago) general welfare would be much better.
To argue for polyamory being generally better you’d have to make the case why the statistics about adults other than the parent being in the home don’t apply in the general case and also point to a historical precedent. Note, I know that something being “generally better” doesn’t mean anything in terms of legality/enforcement or what someone should do in their day to day reality. If someone’s gay while I think it’s better for a kid to have a mom and a dad I’m still going to encourage them to figure out a way to have a child because that is the greatest good available to them (note, I don’t think being polyamorous is like being gay). And I’m not in favor of anyone kicking down anyone’s door or publicly shaming them for their private lives.
I don’t think from purely an ethical perspective that this is as simple as a grid of success and failure modes. I mentioned this in another comment but say you’re a man from Mars. You can see what people are doing but can’t really tell why and they can’t explain it to you (your translator tech is broken and your biology is too different to make inferences). Would you easily be able to tell that the failure mode of monogamy isn’t just polyamory? Say you see one person go into another person’s house, mate, and leave and they get back home the other human there makes loud noises. That’s the same if it’s a husband cheating on his wife or if it’s polyamorous and someone gets jealous. The labels are different but the behavior is the same.
Pulling apart the success mode of polyamory… I’d challenge you to reconsider your entire mental model of consent in this scenario. If someone says “yes” to you is that enough for you to consider that you have full moral authorization to do something? I have not always lived by this, but I don’t think that a single “yes” is consent without additional questions. I am not saying you don’t follow any of these already I’m just explicating them to apply to the happy polyamory scenario. We have at minimum three additional obligations to a person to really know we have their consent. One is to reasonably imagine that out of all the possible lives they are likely to live would the the happiest bulk of those possible lives think that what they are consenting to is a good idea? And if I were them, but still knew what I knew, would I be okay with whatever the situation is that they are consenting to? And a third since becoming a parent: would I be okay with someone doing this to/with my kid? You’re famous and you’re quite good at making arguments. You have additional obligations. Is this person consenting to you because you are famous and is what they are consenting to likely to cause them harm? If there is some conflict you are sorting out with them, if they had your ability to quickly array facts and speak them out loud would their side of whatever dispute become stronger? That last test is the best one I have against motivated reasoning.
When you have a “primary” relationship would you ever be okay with someone making you one of their “secondary” relationships and treating you like a lower priority when this is consuming your time/resources to go make another bond with someone else? I haven’t read all of your old stuff but someone pointed me to a piece a few weeks ago where it seems like some people were pretty shitty to you. Can you easily imagine a future where if this satellite person wasn’t spending their time with you that they go off and find a more fulfilling relationship? If the answer to that question is yes and you imagine that person thirty years in the future what do they ask you to do right now in order to help them on their way? Are you doing that? Maybe the answer to that exercise really is “I love you so much that I always just wanted to sort of be in your orbit, but never really mattering enough to be in the home with you.” I won’t lay out the last one because I just typed it out and it felt mean but yeah, if the person you loved most in the world was involved in this kind of a situation would you think that is what is best for them and everyone is doing their best for them?
You have always struck me as a good and fundamentally decent person and I want to state I still think that is who you are? You gave someone an organ for crying out loud. But have you, genuinely, ever asked yourself these questions in reference to polyamory? These are very hard standards to meet and I think the simple “yes” version of consent where you back it up with “I’m trying to not be patronizing and I’m honoring their agency!” becomes almost Faustian in this context. Which of these views of consent and obligation would you rather have applied to you and the ones you love the most?
I don’t think polyamory does well in this reference frame.
Try to put on the same hat you would wear if we were talking about cousin marriage. Locally you’d probably find all kinds of cases where everything is fine and you could say “seems to be working for them, no genetic defects in these children, but it’s just not for me.” But if you pull back the lens you can see if everyone does it that this is genetically damaging the entire society and the health of the nation and that probably some social institutions broke in such a way that people stopped dating outside of their family. I think polyamory is similar. Local cases are fine, and if anyone is already in a historical situation where everyone is fine I’m not saying throw them into a garbage can, but at scale it doesn’t work.
Taking the man from Mars perspective again if someone brought you a system diagram of human reproduction and there were all these lines all over the place of how mating clusters worked and someone asked you to find the simplest, least entropic state, how long would it take you after understanding how humans mate to come back with monogamy? Even one minute?
As you are likely to you continue to see no problem with polyamory as a theoretical system, can you admit the ethical model outlined here around consent is a better model than the “yes, and asking more questions would be wrong because I’m honoring your agency!” If in your own mind you can see a better future for someone than whatever it is they are doing that you happen to like, I’m sure you will feel compelled to help them along in that direction because you’re the same guy that was so distressed over the suffering of a stranger you gave them a kidney.*
*Because I remember your kidney article well enough to remember you objecting to something like a sibling to these ethical tests being applied to you and someone denying you the ability to donate and I can already sense the version of you that lives in my head standing up to make the objection, I don’t think a fair reading of that is they were asking how all the imagined future versions of you would feel about having saved someone’s life at low risk.
"To this I would just refer back to the statistics on the likelihood of abuse when an adult other than a parent is in the home. Why would those be different in a polyamorous situation? That’s my general system level proof of which one of these is likely better for children at the social level of analysis. Also the statistics about the general well-being of children with two parents in the home. That is very clearly more stable, you probably know those statistics better than I do, and while of course not perfect it does seem very hard to argue that if that wasn’t the case for more people (which we know is possible because it was the case for virtually everyone not that long ago) general welfare would be much better."
Hm, this didn't occur to me because I rarely see poly people bring a third person into the home itself. I more often see partners interact with the children the same way as any other close friend.
But also, thinking about this in near mode - does this mean people shouldn't live with their extended families? Shouldn't have nannies? That single moms shouldn't remarry? I think usually people agree that an extra parent-figure is worth this risk, especially if very carefully screened. I haven't thought about this much because I haven't seen this situation, it's not something I have a strong opinion about, but it doesn't seem that different from things which we already acknowledge are good.
I'm not sure I agree with the man from Mars argument for two reasons. If the third partner was living with the couple, it would look completely different from cheating. If they weren't, I think the Martian would process it as an unusual sort of friend or relative - someone sometimes comes to the house, everyone is glad to see them, they all hang out together, and maybe the third person helps take care of the kids sometimes. I don't think it would look very much like cheating unless the Martian already privileged the have sex/don't have sex distinction above everything else. But also, I'm not sure I agree with the Martian argument at all. Movers bringing your stuff to a new home would look to a Martian a lot like thieves robbing you. So what? Are we supposed to draw some deep conclusion from that?
"When you have a “primary” relationship would you ever be okay with someone making you one of their “secondary” relationships and treating you like a lower priority when this is consuming your time/resources to go make another bond with someone else? I haven’t read all of your old stuff but someone pointed me to a piece a few weeks ago where it seems like some people were pretty shitty to you. Can you easily imagine a future where if this satellite person wasn’t spending their time with you that they go off and find a more fulfilling relationship? If the answer to that question is yes and you imagine that person thirty years in the future what do they ask you to do right now in order to help them on their way? Are you doing that? Maybe the answer to that exercise really is “I love you so much that I always just wanted to sort of be in your orbit, but never really mattering enough to be in the home with you.” I won’t lay out the last one because I just typed it out and it felt mean but yeah, if the person you loved most in the world was involved in this kind of a situation would you think that is what is best for them and everyone is doing their best for them?"
I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what you mean here. If you mean "X is Y's primary, but Y is X's secondary", I agree that's not a good kind of relationship. I don't really see it happen and I think people would be against it with their usual "be against specific unhealthy dynamics" module. If you mean "do you think someone will help their other partners find primaries and build happy families", then yes, this seems to be what happens. I wrote my partner's dating site profile, and my wife actually tried to match up one of her partners with a mutual friend last week.
I do hope that I'm adding (rather than subtracting) to most of my partners' lives, and they're adding (rather than subtracting) to mine. I don't want to do too much personal infodumping to you, but one of my partners helped me through a really hard time, let me live with them when I had nowhere else to live, and was partly responsible for me starting this blog. Another comes over once or twice a week to help take care of our children. I've helped one of my partners get their business to work, and am helping another partner and her husband figure out IVF and genetic screening issues.
I continue to be interested in knowing the exact way it doesn't work at scale. We have Aella's survey data which says poly relationships seem to last as long as mono and have the same level of self-rated security and satisfaction. If you tell me a specific theory about the problem with poly relationships, I can probably get Aella to test it.
I’ll email you for the sake of observing the forms of truth-seeking but I would advise you to ignore it because you have twins who matter way more. I feel like I’m scolding someone who is gay about being gay and that isn’t my intent. You’re a person, whatever a perfect relationship might be with zero entropy at zero degrees kelvin doesn’t matter as much as your humanity. If you have history with people that certainly matters and it’s very important.
I have my own bullshit which I fully admit might color my views here. I doubt I’ll be able to think up some test that could be obtained by filtering some columns in a spreadsheet that someone hasn’t already filtered. But I’ll see if I can’t think of something worth typing up an email over.
Everything you're saying makes sense and I'm not upset. I hope I'm not crossing the line by discussing your childhood trauma too dispassionately. I'll probably ask people in general for a test in a Highlights From The Comments post, so don't feel obligated to figure one out if you're not excited about doing so.
Trivers' theory of genetic conflict raises its head here. It's bad for her existing children, but can permit her to have additional children who have entirely different interests.
The real reason to prefer monogamy is that most cultures/societies have been polygynous, but the smaller number of monogamous ones were the winners in the contest of cultural group selection*.
Does that mean I should prefer to have the flu rather than not, because the most successful societies have had endemic flus?
I'm a committed monogamist by the way, happily married with kids, I just think we should query the issue/ought distinction here; the evolutionary winner is not necessarily the one that best promotes human flourishing
No, but it means you shouldn't live in a society without endemic flus, if societies with endemic flus exist, because your society is gonna get wiped out the moment the borders open.
I'll accept the nuance and critique of the analogy.
To clarify your views here, are you saying:
1) The societies that are the most 'successful' (in a taking over the world sense) are *necessarily* the societies that best promote human flourishing; or
2) We should not value individual human flourishing, but should instead value societal success/greatness/replication?
Really I'm just questioning your flu analogy rather than agreeing with the great-grandparent post.
I would say that (1), but with the causation reversed; human flourishing is more likely to occur in a society which are successful in a taking-over-the-world sense. And monogamy certainly seems to be pretty good for making a society that's successful in the taking-over-the-world sense.
- Circumstances have changed a lot. There is no reason to assume that norms that evolved when reliable contraception and paternity tests didn't exist, infant mortality was high, most work was physical (so women had a significant disadvantage), and the economy often barely produced enough for subsistence, are optimal today. (Cf. we didn't biologically evolve to wear clothes, but we had to start wearing them when we moved to colder climates than we were adapted to.)
- The sample is small, and heavily confounded. In particular, if we're talking about the West's success in the last few centuries, it's a sample size of 1, and it may have been caused by any of the various differences between it and other civilizations.
- If by success we mean surviving and multiplying (which is fitting if we're talking about a sort of evolution), Islam is doing pretty well for itself. In fact, the early Islamic conquests were some of the fastest, widest conquests having long-lasting cultural effects. If by success we mean prospering and thriving, right now many of the most prosperous societies are among the ones that are the most liberal about sexual morality. I'm not saying that sexual libertinism causes prosperity (if anything, the causation goes in the opposite direction)—but that just drives home the point that cause and effect are hard to disentangle, causation in a particular direction doesn't follow from correlation.
Men have a physical advantage in plough agriculture, not so much in hoe agriculture. In the latter, men tried to collect many more wives for economic reasons.
Neandertals lived in much colder areas than humans originally evolved in, and they didn't seem to have sewing needles, instead wearing animal hides. The late Judith Harris theorized that they were still hairy, and that modern humans mostly ate them as a result: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11509
Monogamy is not just a feature of the west. Per Jack Goody, "monogamy is part of a cultural complex found in the broad swath of Eurasian societies from Japan to Ireland that practice social monogamy, sexual monogamy and dowry", linked to intensive plough agriculture.
Even Islam constrains the number of wives to four, which is less polygynous than the pre-Islamic norms of the area in which it arose (monogamy was more of a Roman thing).
Polygamous marriage is still not legal in the liberal societies you're referring to. And within them the cultures which appear capable of maintaining above-replacement fertility are those like the Amish & ultra-orthodox Jews.
Isn't the structure of this critique kind of a variant of Bulverism?
From C. S. Lewis, *Bulverism*[1]:
"Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is "wishful thinking." You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not."
And change it to:
Suppose I think, after reading polyamorous memoirs, that polyamorous people are dysfunctional. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is wrong (due to me having made a mistake due to the people I read being memoir-writers and thus selected for dysfunctionality). You can never come to any conclusion by examining my ability to infer whether one's dysfunctionality is related to polyamory or desire-to-write-memoirs. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the polyamory vs. monogamy dysfunctionality statistics yourself. When you have checked these stats, then, and then only, will you know whether polyamory is actually connected to dysfunction or not.
I think many of this post's ideas—that memoir-writers are selected for potentially-repulsive traits which may poison one's feelings on polyamory or whatever else, and more broadly the idea that people might be misled about the inherent properties of X class of individuals due to the consumption of information regarding said class X being confounded by the methods (mediums, groups, personality types, etc.) involved in obtaining information about class X—are quite good and valuable, but one can't help but notice that the proving of what is seemingly the central point ("polyamory isn't (non-trivially) worse") has been left hanging. Much akin to C.S. Lewis' psychologist perhaps being able to find all sorts of interesting psyche-related facts about the guy with the bank account, but not having advanced one whit in confirming whether he has a large balance or not.
So the question remains: does polyamory work similarly well to monogamy? I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but a quick Google search and some skimming tells me[2]:
"Polyamorous relationships aren’t historically the most successful, says relationships expert Neil Wilkie.
He told Red magazine that 20% of couples have experimented with consensual non-monogamy, but open marriage has a 92% failure rate. What’s more, he suggested 80% of people in open marriages “experience jealousy of the other”."
This would seem to suggest polyamory does involve much more dysfunctionality. Perhaps there's some other confounding factor—I can only assume openness to polyamory strongly selects for verbal intelligence, and AFAIK verbally-oriented people tend to have higher divorce-rates; also it seems quite intuitive that people whose relationships were already going south would try open marriage as a Hail Mary—but it certainly goes against the idea that attempts at polyamory are currently as successful as attempts at monogamy, and that such equivalent success is obfuscated by people who write books.
Yeah, this kind of argument isn't automatically invalid based on its form. I don't think communism can be implemented in a way that works well. But I think so because I have theoretical arguments why communism can't work, some of them inspired by the problems real-world attempts not implement communism had. It has to be argued. It's not something we can conclude with certainty just from that people tried to implement it a few times (whether it was "true communism" is a matter of definitions) and it didn't work.
This ("You say «true X has never been tried», but that's ridiculous, just like those silly commies who say «true communism has never been tried»") is basically a fully general argument that if people have tried doing something a few times in particular ways, and it didn't work, then it can't be done, even in different ways. But that surely isn't always true.
Replying to the methodological point, because it's unique and interesting on its own.
Of course if we're talking about evaluating claims about the real world, I'll be the first to say that the only real way to get to the bottom of things is to search for ground truth.
But in actual discourse, it's not the only thing we're doing. In a public dialogue we engage with what the other person said, rather than ignoring it and going for our counter-evidence. If each side just keeps pushing their line of argument without critiquing the other's, not much is going to be learned.
So I think there's a place for things like showing reasons why someone's arguments can be bad at the source, like the dynamics of "people with mediocre but hard-hearned wisdom being the loudest at shouting their advice".
There's also proof by contradiction. If you can show that your opponent's conclusion says entails a contradiction with known facts, you can short circuit the rest of their argumentation. Even if they happen to be right in terms of ground truth, they would be right by chance, and not by virtue of the arguments they are giving.
It is absolutely good to engage with the other person's points in a dialogue—no disagreement there! But there are different ways to engage. For instance if Bob says he's pro-choice because he thinks banning abortion will cause women to suffer more, Alice might argue against him by:
a) Telling him he only feels like banning abortion will cause women to suffer because his liberalism biases him towards such intuitions. (Analogous to "You only feel like polyamory leads to dysfunction because the memoirs you've read confound you towards such intuitions")
b) Sending him arguments about the sanctity of life and fetal rights
c) Engaging his point, e.g. by showing him studies indicating banning abortion reduces woman suffering, or saying: "Since you care about women suffering, I assume you care about the suffering of other beings too, right? According to this study, many more fetuses suffer when abortion is legal, more than enough to offset decreased woman suffering"
Option A alone is Bulverism. Even if Alice can conclusively prove that Bob's intuitions here are pure bias and have no bearing on reality, she still has not at all proven that women will not suffer more if abortion is banned. But in reality even conclusively proving that Bob's intuitions are pure bias would be essentially impossible.
I think the following quote from an SSC comment really gets at the heart of it[1]: "*Bulverism* is arguing why someone is wrong, rather than that they are wrong."
Now, options B and C are both pretty important for a public dialogue. You can't *just* engage the opponent's points enough to disprove them (option C) because then you're just showing that Bob's wrong to think an abortion-ban would cause women to suffer more, without providing any reason to be pro-life. But you can't only provide reasons to be pro-life (option B) because then you haven't engaged with Bob's reasons to be pro-choice.
But option A can still be valuable *if paired with the others*, because it can explain why your opponent is (apparently) wrong.
For instance, if Scott had found and shared (hypothetical) statistics showing that polyamory leads to very similar outcomes as monogamy does[2], he could then speculate about how memoir-writers and their drama could've confused the Atlantic writer and others. Perhaps some (hypothetical) statistics on those how dysfunctional memoir-writers are could even have been shown.
To return to C.S. Lewis' example: if Bob claims to have a large sum in his bank account, AND Alice says Bob is showing clear traits of wishful thinking, we have a good explanation for why Bob was probably wrong, and it seems quite convincing that Bob was in fact wrong. Perhaps if Bob hadn't seemed like he'd have lied about that, we'd have instead found it more plausible that he had a secret second bank account or something. But what Bob said seemed to be untrue, and we had a good reason for why this might be. Quite convincing!
"You only feel like polyamory leads to dysfunction because the memoirs you've read confound you towards such intuitions" (or rather, the more detailed argument Scott made about memoirs being an unrepresentative sample) is a much more valid argument than "you only feel like banning abortion will cause women to suffer because your liberalism biases him towards such intuitions" because the former offers a concrete way the target of the argument may have come to an incorrect conclusion.
Cf. "I looked at your calculations of your fortune, and you think you have a total balance of $X because you mistakenly counted one of your dollar accounts as a euro account, which biased you towards a bigger number than you should have, even if the rest of your math was correct". This isn't bulverism; of course we wouldn't typically use the word "bias" here either, it's not the sort of vague thing like "liberal bias".
"Liberal bias" might make it more likely that someone is wrong in a particular direction, but it isn't a valid argument against a concrete, object-level argument. But "the sample you used is unrepresentative" is very different thing, it *can* be valid against a concrete argument, as can be "you mistook a dollar account for a euro account". You are overgeneralizing the point that "you think so because you have liberal bias" is bulverism and an invalid argument in a very weird way, to a point where you seem to say that *any* claim that a concrete argument someone else is making is wrong is bulverism and invalid. You're proving too much.
----
Later, you seem to say essentially that it's only valid for Alice to point out a mistake in an argument Bob makes if Alice makes a positive case for her own, different conclusion. That surely isn't the case. Now, if Alice doesn't make her own, positive case for a different conclusion, she can't claim that Bob's conclusion is *definitely* wrong. But she *can* claim that the particular argument Bob made should be ignored or discounted, and she *can* say that Bob shouldn't claim he's *definitely* right, unless he also has a different, better argument for his conclusion.
I don't see the analogy between your two "Suppose I think" paragraphs at all. Bulverism involves imputing some thought process to the target of the bulverism that's irrelevant to the correctness of the claim the target of the bulverism is making. This: "hey, the model of calculator you've used to calculate your fortune is known to be faulty" wouldn't be bulverism, because that's something that can actually influence the correctness of the conclusion. The argument that the source the author used is unrepresentative is more like the latter—an argument that's relevant to the correctness of the author's conclusions—than like the "wishful thinking" argument. It's no more of a bulverism than basically any argument to the effect that someone else is making a mistake in his claims, or that there is a fault or bias in someone's sources.
Moreover, the reason it's clearly silly to argue about wishful thinking when discussing someone's bank balance is that it's a very objective thing that can be calculated exactly, so biases are unlikely to affect it. Inferring whether someone's dysfunctionality is caused by polyamory isn't so objective. And, in particular, if there isn't actually any inferring of causality going on beyond looking at the statistics and observing that most polyamorous relationships are dysfunctional, it's very relevant whether the sample is representative, even if the math is correct.
Phoo. Well, I've seen polyamory go well and I've seen it go badly. It's not my jam (too much input, and I don't take pleasure in dealing with all the social stuff all the time) - my concern has always been that people get "stuck" on ideas and then pursue them past the point where they're good or enjoyable. I've seen this done with polyamory, but I've also seen it done with monogamy for that matter, way more. It's just that the polyamory stuckness I saw was more of an idealistic thing, and less of a default thing.
A motto I try to live by is "pain means move away." If someone or something is causing you pain, please, retreat from it. Don't double down. If it's not a fun relationship, you can't make it fun because "polyamory is valid." I have seen that happen a bunch. Yes, it's valid, but if any partner you're with is causing you chronic pain, that's not a good relationship, period.
Ya, treat every day like a gift from God. And God wants you to be happy, OK? That's all it boils down to. If you're happy with multiple partners, happy with one, or happy alone, whatever. You do you, boo. Just be happy.
I just don’t think it’s true that people who are good at things don’t have useful lessons they’ve learned and continue to apply. The lessons might be simpler and less contrived but that’s because they work
The issue is more in their ability to explain, especially to novices and the unskilled. But they can still provide useful lessons, even if rather than providing it themselves, it's provided by those who study, observe, and successfully copy them instead.
However, there's a difference between being unskilled and committing to a doomed idea. Those whom aren't natural talents can still learn how to do many things to at least an adequate level, barring certain highly physically- or mentally-intense fields. Most of life doesn't require genius intelligence. But there is no successful formula for polyamory. It's too against human nature. Way more than polygyny, monogamy, or even adultery.
The thing that creates engagement is the worst example of a thing. If you're poly you're common. Everyone knows what you think and either already agrees or doesn't. Either way, you're probably not interesting enough to talk about.
But if you're a poly person who thinks everyone else should be poly, and that "poly" means "allowed to have and abuse a harem," you have a perspective that can create strong feelings, debate, love, hate, jealousy. So if one hundred million poly folks write a book, and an insane publisher publishes them all (imagine if every person in the world could publish their inane stuff every day), the only ones that will get publicized will be exceptionally well-written or reasoned, or ones that make polyamory seem controversial. And it's much easier to do the latter.
Whenever I point this out, I get accused of impugning motive. "You can't just claim every person on the internet is a liar." But that's not my claim. It's a pure numbers game. It's not that everyone who attempts to talk to the public is a liar, it's that of a billion pieces of content, only liars or insane people will get popular enough to get through.
I strongly recommend ignoring or at least casting an extreme critical eye at anything written since 2000.
The overall form was: “I read a memoir about polyamory, everyone involved seemed awful and unhappy, and now I hate polyamorous people.”
That is not how I felt the Atlantic writer came to a conclusion; it wasn't polyamorous people per se, but rather the self-indulgent, 'I must be my True Self' rooting around for novel experiences by bored, well-off people who think that they have to constantly be gazing in the mirror of their psyche, and that turning everything upside-down is good because never mind the collateral damage, they're being *authentic*. The kind of people who will glom on to polyamory as the newest fad.
The memoir author seems to have remained in a long-term marriage, so maybe they worked out their problems, but the reviews don't paint the entire process as one of happiness. You're probably right about memoirs and the people who write them, and that is why this is a terrible book by (well, calling her a terrible person would be unfair).
But for the second memoir, I have to agree with Freddie. What that person needs is a bucket of cold water in the face, not a book deal to ramble on about how simply super special they are.
"One night, I watched comedy band The Lonely Island, laughing in a crowd alone as they brought out Michael Bolton and T-Pain."
How do you laugh in a crowd alone? You're in a crowd, by definition you're not alone! Were you the only person laughing? If so then that band must have been awful at comedy. If everyone else was laughing, then you were not laughing alone.
Oh, you're trying to indicate your superior delicate sensibility because you mean you didn't know anyone else in the crowd, you weren't connected to them, you were there on your own. Wrong! You are in the set of "people who go to watch comedy bands", so there's your connection.
Somebody hand me a bucket, I need to go to the well and fill it up, there's a pseud needs a face-washing.
> That is not how I felt the Atlantic writer came to a conclusion; it wasn't polyamorous people per se, but rather the self-indulgent, 'I must be my True Self' rooting around for novel experiences by bored, well-off people who think that they have to constantly be gazing in the mirror of their psyche, and that turning everything upside-down is good because never mind the collateral damage, they're being authentic. The kind of people who will glom on to polyamory as the newest fad.
Yes, that's what I thought too. Comparing this post with the first one, I think Scott may be moving in this direction, too?
Reducing one's romantic relationships to political statements is a real thing. I spent time for a few years in a polyamory group which turned into a Relationship Anarchy group. They redefined "Polyamory" to mean every bad thing that anyone labeling themselves polyamorous had ever done to them. Some of them eventually did that to the term "Relationship Anarchist" too, and switched to "Political Relater". I wrote more about this here:
I don't hate polyamory. I do think it's poor social technology that will not work for the vast majority of people. For those that claim it does work, I don't see anyone trying to stop them from (legally) continuing to do it. Social approbation is a good thing if it stops the spread to people who would not do well with it.
This seems like a non-problem at current equilibrium.
Or, in other words, today's public discourse is dominated by a loud and unrepresentative minority for any particular topic, for any particular group, and the majority of people are far more normal.
As for polyamory: I think there are lots of people with great social skills in long term relationships that will tell you it took a lot of work. And considering that, a great many of us monogamous people simply cannot imagine having to do that load of work with more than one person.
That's why humans have evolved the tendency to copy the behaviors of successful people, not the things they say. I'm surprised you didn't make this connection to your prior reviews of Joseph Henrich.
If you're postulating an evolutionary response to human communication, then you need to be treating memoirs and the written word more generally as a brand-new threat vector - hence this piece. As for mass media, well...
> But I still notice a totally unfounded feeling of contempt (just to emphasize, I’m not endorsing this contempt, and for all I know the writer might be great). If you write this kind of thing in a memoir, and it claims (even as subtext) that you’re a deep and interesting person, then readers are going to make fun of you.
I dislike this, though I can't quite explain why. I feel like scorn is one of the things whose danger is underappreciated. As a general rule, I'd like to live in a world were people were less hesitant to say and do (normal, ethical) things that feel unpopular. Perhaps they'd be more straightforward in their communication, and less afraid of sounding trivial, or immodest, or stupid. And perhaps they'd more readily share their experiences - including simple experiences told in a simple language, like the excerpt in question.
(I'm not stating Scott endorsed that contempt he described - I know he didn't. I just wanted to share my feelings on this matter)
While I agree with your general sentiment, I also think that Scott in particular tends to hide himself away, and I for one am glad to see him occasionally feel comfortable showing us where he falls short of being an abstract embodiment of "niceness, community, and civilization". It feels like a more human sort of interaction.
I'm sorry, but this and the prior essay sound a little "the lady doth protest too much, methinks," as in overly defensive. And such defensiveness often comes with a healthy dose of negative judgment against the person who disagrees or just isn't that thing even if they have no issue with its existence. It's a subtle form of predjudice that is just as bad and pernicious as the more well-known forms of predjudice imho.
In general, I find that defensiveness and happiness don't mix well together. YMMV, but nothing in these last two essays has changed my mind. It has been uncomfortable reading because I wonder at the latent angst driving the desire to explain and explain and explain.
I think "you're making an argument, which means you must be obsessed with this, which means you must be overly emotional about it, which means you're wrong" is a kafkatrap (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122). I love writing, have written about three articles a week on a wide variety of topics for the past twenty years, and I think someone is wrong on the Internet, which is mutually agreed to be the best and noblest reason to write something. Why did you post this comment?
I didn't say you were wrong. I didn't say you were obssessed. I didn't say you weren't a very good or a very prolific writer who hasn't gotten better and better at his craft and analysis over the years. I didn't say that you couldn't/shouldn't write about whatever strikes your fancy (which would be a very dumb take given that this is your site and community). I did not say these things because I don't think them (and I'm not being Cicero-like, I'm clarifying given your comment to me).
I merely remarked that I percieve a lot of explaining for something that doesn't need it as defensiveness and that it doesn't seem to align with happiness/really enjoying that thing. That to me is a curiousity and so I expressed said curiousness and why.
I apologize that my words sounded like criticism, it wasn't my intention. You put a lot of yourself out there with your writing and I can imagine it gets tiresome hearing from the peanut gallery.
"Sound overly defensive" is not the same as ascribing motives.
"I wonder at the latent angst" is ascribing them, but with low confidence. A simple "I can see how you'd think that, but no, I'm not angsty or defensive" would suffice.
I have spent a lot of time around the poly community and they're almost all suffering stupidly, and the lower on the social ladder they are the worse it is.
I've seen the same thing. It's particularly harsh because the culture pathologizes ordinary human responses (anxiety, jealousy, loneliness) as if they're deviant. This seems to drive underground the kind of useful conflict - in which issues get addressed and incremental improvements made - that are standard operating procedure for high functioning monogamous relationships. I'm sure some people can do polyamory well, but it's not for many, and certainly not for most.
In my experience being poly, anxiety and jealousy aren't treated as deviant, they're treated as natural feelings to be communicated about and validated.
I'm glad to hear it. My exposure is pretty limited, so the handful of people I know who are tackling polyamory may not be all that representative. Come to think of it, that's at least part of the point Scott is making above.
It makes sense to me that less attractive individuals would opt out of the mainstream relationship system given that they're less likely to be successful in it, but I don't think that's what makes people get that gut 'ick' feeling about polyamory, polyamorists being too few in number for most people to know any at all.
First, what a terrible article. Does no one edit the Atlantic anymore?
Scott's assessment takes me back to something that's on my mind a lot lately. I'm definitely not the first person to have this thought, but it seems to me there's always been a powerful selection bias against happy people in public discourse. Or maybe in any kind of discourse. I noticed this first in feminism; if you took a random sample of feminist writing one could easily conclude that there had never been any authentically happy women anywhere before around 1965, and maybe not ever. But this is probably not true, and quite likely far from true. Like Scott said, happy people who feel like things are going well don't spend a ton of time analyzing much less writing about the ways in which they're going well. See Tolstoy's quote "All happy families are alike..."
I wonder more and more how this the radio silence of actually happy people might have affected us throughout history, and is affecting us now. I feel like a lot of critical writing seems to assume the presence of theoretical happy people somewhere. Often they're cast as an oppressive force, or as sheeple leading unexamined lives, not at all like the author and you, dear reader.
Scott correctly points out that people who have managed to avoid certain problems don't write books about them, and if they did their advice wouldn't be particularly useful. I think it goes somewhat deeper in that we have an uncomfortable relationship with happiness itself. We desire it, and consider its absence a sign that something is wrong, but when we achieve happiness it immediately becomes suspect, because the intellectual position has long been that happy people are inherently doing something stupid or unethical.
At the same time, we almost can't help trying to maximize at least our own happiness. It's literally its own reward system. But because of our uncomfortable relationship with the idea of happiness itself we're necessarily on a poorly-lit path, following either the dim lanterns of happy people (for whom intellect dictates we must harbor some subtle contempt), or the blazing lights of inauthentically happy or downright unhappy people. I think a lot of the conservative-liberal divide could be described as mostly unhappy people attempting to tell each other how to live, and anyone who isn't already strongly aligned with the values of the source noticing their unhappiness and wondering why they should listen to them.
"First, what a terrible article. Does no one edit the Atlantic anymore?"
Every time an Atlantic article pokes through online, and I therefore have a reason to go read it, I am freshly appalled at what has happened to what was once a bastion of strong and interesting writing. I'm being literal: every single time. For several years now. And regardless of whether the article gained online currency positively or negatively (whether Very Online people are holding it up to praise it or to blast it).
I've no idea what's happened over there, it seems to be well beyond the general crumbling of legacy media. And to answer your specific question: no. There is no way that any meaningful editing takes place at the Atlantic anymore.
You're a good man, and it clearly hurts your feelings when people criticize polyamory, so I don't want to feel like I'm piling on. Yet, as one of the few women of the ACX commentariat, I'm going to emphasize something that other commenters haven't really focused on:
On average, straight men and straight women differ in their sexual/romantic preferences. For obvious evolutionary reasons, men's sexuality is optimized for variety/novelty/as many partners as possible, while women's sexuality is optimized for emotional attachment/find the best man you can and get him to stick around and help care for your babies. (Obvious disclaimer: I'm talking about trends and averages, not every man/not every woman, blah blah blah.)
For this reason, I'm worried that a widespread embrace of polyamory/open relationships would be a disaster for women. Sure, you'll say that polyamory is all consensual and based on negotiated agreements, so what's the problem? But it's not so simple, and people who are emotionally entangled find it hard to make logical choices, and people are good at lying to themselves. "I can totally accept polyamory as the price of holding onto the man I love! [six months later] I'm so jealous and miserable and I keep hiding in the bathroom so he won't see me crying, but all open-minded people do polyamory nowadays, I can't let this get to me, I'm with the man I love, this is totally the right choice... excuse me while I get another box of tissues..."
If polyamory catches on in society at large, we'll see, at minimum a lot of tearful letters to advice columns from women saying things like, "Dear Abby, my husband wants to open our marriage, I really hate the idea of him being with another woman but I don't want to be an old-fashioned prude, plus I'm afraid he'll leave me unless I agree, but the thought makes me so unhappy, what should I do?"
Other commenters already mentioned the potentially negative effects on children.
To paraphrase something you, Scott, have written in one of your old SSC posts: Going from monogamy to polyamory is not "solving a problem," it's "replacing one set of problems with another exciting set of problems."
This theory doesn't match what's found in reality of social dynamics. Polyamory is mostly driven by women. In my 18 years of experience, the majority of polyamorists I have known either were (or were dating) a woman who was in a monogamous relationship to a man, she wanted to open a relationship, her husband agreed to it, she got lots of dates, and he did not.
90% same in my personal observation, but I think this is just the old taboo against polygamy pushing down the male-driven numbers. That'll go away eventually if polyamory is normalized, and then it will be at least a 50/50 male/female driven thing.
As Arnold says, polyamory is mostly driven by women, and your odds are much better of finding dates from an open marriage if you are female.
However, it is entirely possible that polyamory benefits women more than men within it, and that it makes women overall less happy...if you have two different groups of women! If polyamory destroys the expectation of pair bond, a small fraction of women, say group A, will benefit from being able to force their boyfriends/husbands to let them sleep around, while a (likely much larger) group B will be unhappy because they can't get the stable monogamous relationship they want.
The game theory does point in that direction, yes, though I find it very puzzling that it's mostly women pushing for this and the man can't get any dates (it's strongly suggests that the woman just partnered with a sub-standard male and wants an excuse to ditch them without ditching them.)
It's well-known that at least some men will go for sex under almost any circumstances. This is much rarer for women. So you can find a lot of men willing to be a woman's sidepiece; a woman will (usually) only accept sidepiece status if she thinks she can be the main squeeze later on, or the man is very attractive or wealthy.
I may partially withdraw my statement about mostly women pushing for it; there are plenty of men who think they're going to get lots of tail on the side and get disappointed. It's mostly *advantageous* to women (who want to have outside partners) as currently constituted.
All of this discussion is infused with the American ideas that (1) adultery is a tremendous evil, and (2) discord in marriage is evidence of a serious pathology which must be cured. My quotes file contains:
"Europeans think Americans are a bit naive for thinking that a president of a country, especially, wouldn't cheat on his wife." -- Pamela Druckerman, author of "Lust in Translation"
"Discord and dissolution in mating relationships are typically seen as signs of failure. They are regarded as distortions or perversions of the natural state of married life. They are thought to signal personal inadequacy, immaturity, neurosis, failure of will, or simply poor judgment in the choice of a mate. This view is radically wrong. Conflict in mating is the norm and not the exception. It ranges from a man's anger at a woman who declines his advances to a wife's
frustration with a husband who fails to help in the home. Such a pervasive pattern defies easy explanation. Something deeper, more telling about human nature is involved--something we do not fully understand." -- David M. Buss, "The Evolution of Desire"
Though of course anyone who understands the evolutionary perspective on human behavior understands why discord is ubiquitous.
Adultery is a tremendous evil if you're breaking a promise. One should keep one's promises, and not make them lightly. If both people in the relationship with full knowledge agree to see other people while married, then it may be adultery, but is no longer cheating.
But do be aware this is a very American point of view, looking at marriage as some sort of contract whose terms one negotiates. Compare with religion: in most places there are one or a few religious choices offered by society, and people are assessed by which one they choose and the degree to which they adhere to the socially-defined rules of that religion. In the U.S., it's considered fairly normal to *make one's own religion*, and then expect to be judged by how one adheres to that individualistic standard. Similarly, in most cultures, the terms of marriage are defined by the culture, and people adhere to them or not. You don't get to redefine marriage, and then boast that you have followed the standard that you've created yourself. (Why would anyone else care?)
As one researcher noted, "The key to understanding marriage versus pure pair-bonding is recognizing the role of a community in defining, sanctioning and enforcing marriage norms. This element of human social life is routinely missed in non-cultural approaches to monogamy."
I think the promise-keeping part holds true regardless of one's religion, or lack thereof. A specific religion will have its own marriage vows, which are promises. If those vows say nothing of sexual relations then no promise can be broken by sexual practices, but I know of no marriage vows that don't.
As an American, I do need to keep in mind that things in the rest of the world may be different and equally valid, and in this case I think I have done so.
Fellow American, don't worry, this person Worley is making things up whole cloth. Most places through most of recorded history have frowned mightily on adultery, even the non-monogamous ones.
Some of us have lived extensively in Europe and know better than to take you at your word. Violent hatred of adultery greatly predates America, and there has not in the last six thousand years been a society anywhere that consistently start-to-finish tolerated adultery. Pick me a cool French novelist who normalizes adultery. I will pick you an older French adultery case that ended in *capital punishment*.
Is it somehow *American* that adulterers were publicly flogged in medieval Germany? Call it medieval if you want, implicitly call North America, South America, China, Japan, Korea, etc, medieval. But don't say it's American. That's profoundly unsupported and very easy to dispute with historical evidence.
Yeah. There are a vanishing small number of relatively modern and scattered historical societies where adultery-is-immoral has even dropped below majority support. Almost everywhere else at almost every time almost everyone thinks it's pretty bad.
Find someone crying in a bathroom, shattered, and tell them they had consensual sex with their adulterer and see if they agree with you. See if they think it was consent, given the false pretenses.
(No, it has never to my knowledge happened to me. It didn't have to. To have seen it secondhand, ever, is to have witnessed *a tremendous evil*.)
That is not an American idea, that is a historical idea and a near universal. "Adultery is not a tremendous evil" is a recent, aberrant, unjustified idea. I do not care what author or 20th century continental philosopher you pass off as old to try to justify that it is an old or universal idea. It is not. Those were bad people reviving a discredited idea.
I want to defend people who defend a belief or a system of beliefs. While I agree that sometimes they're the kind of people who win a Darwinian battle, the more local practitioners are just ordinary people living their lives and offering advice to the rising population. Here I'm thinking of the Scoutmaster teaching the scouts, parents teaching their children, or the local minister delivering his weekly sermon.
And actually, it's that sermon that seems to me to be the least well understood. Most of the time, it's not there to TEACH the congregation something they don't know already. "Wait, you haven't heard the Christmas story yet? Let me tell you all about it. Everyone else in the congregation can nod off for a few minutes while I waste their time on an inefficient teaching method." If teaching were the point of church, it would be pretty bad at its job and people would stop coming. But a sermon is about preaching, not teaching. Preaching - especially to a congregation of like-minded believers - is about reminding people of principles they already know about and agree to. It's encouragement to Stay the Course, or to get back on track.
I think there's a legitimate benefit to preaching - including outside the strictly religious context. It's an effective method of motivation to achieve a long-term goal, or to maintaining/restarting behaviors you wish to persist in. A lot of these self-help books are a kind of low-grade preaching, and as such aren't always meant for consumption by people outside the 'faith'. As such, they're not entirely worthless, even if the people doing the preaching are sometimes poor role models for the cause they espouse.
If you want to know WHETHER to follow a behavior model, probably look at the statistics for success at your long-term goals to see whether it's a model with a proven track record of achieving those goals. If you want to know HOW, maybe the self-help books could work a little, but there's no substitute for in-person instruction.
If you want to renew your motivation, I can see a place for books like these. There's an old story about a motivational speaker. After his talk, a woman comes up to him and says, "I like what you're saying, but the trouble is I have a hard time staying motivated long after these things are over." The speaker replied that, "I like to shower to stay clean, but the next day I have to do it again. That doesn't mean yesterday's shower wasn't worth doing."
The stronger the social taboo against something, the more it selects for people who really want to practice the taboo. Polyamory is still seen as taboo to most people in the West, so we should expect that the people practicing it are the best suited to maintaining it (otherwise, they drop out to default monogamy).
As polyamory becomes more acceptable, the selection effect weakens.
A direct comparison of the happiness levels of poly vs. mono relationships probably does not generalize to the whole population.
The word “polyamory” is silly. Who came up with it? (Who benefits?) That “amor”!
Whatever would we do if instead of words we relied on pictograms?
Transgression has a deal of appeal to some, I know, but it’s hard to view something as norm-breaking when it’s merely a reversion to the norm over much of the globe.
First of all, agree to all of this, especially the idea of monogamy influencers. If you had never heard of monogamy and read Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus or The Rules (or, god help you, The Game), you would run screaming from this obviously dysfunctional and dehumanizing institution.
Second, the end of this post makes an interesting accompaniment to The Toxoplasma of Rage. Not sure if it makes more sense to pose this as an alternative media stream that functions on less politically-charged issues, or just as one function of that pipeline which creates more toxoplasmic popular examples to select from.
Those books are more "hetero culture" than monogamous, in fact The Game deliberately encourages sleeping around, which is not exactly what a zoologist would call monogamy if they were observing, say, a bird.
Did you actually read The Game? It's a morality tale about the futility and emptiness of sleeping around. The last page of the book states explicitly: "To win the game was to leave it." and the last sentence of the book is: "It was time to leave the house, and the community, behind. Real life beckoned."
I kept waiting for the part where Scott was going to tell us how we should form opinions on polyamory. Obviously, favorable anecdotes are also subject to selection effects.
I think it's okay not to form opinions on things. I like the idea of asking the question when is it important for us to form an opinion about something?
I don’t happen to have strong interest in this topic (and I have moral views about it that are independent of the kinds of things he’s talking about) but if I did I would like to be able to look into it and figure it out. Seems reasonable since it’s a frequent topic of discussion here.
Feels like this is crying out for a Last Psychiatrist-type analysis of *why* this particular sort of memoir writing makes people so angry. If you're reading it, it's for you; what is it about polyamorous memoir-writing narcissists, specifically, that made them rise to the top of the Darwinian hyper-specialized outrage meme pool? Maybe the feeling of contempt is founded, maybe it's not, but either way I'm more interested in where it comes from and what it implies about Atlantic readers/ACX readers/internet-addicts/people in general.
All of the happy polycules I have encountered have a lot of trans or autistic people. Just going by personal observation I don't think it works so well with neurotypicals, if you can call solomonesque narcissism neurotypical.
There was actually a discussion about this on the polyamory subreddit a while back. Cishet guy said he wasn't queer, neurodivergent, or kinky and didn't fit in, and they all agreed with him.
I think when you get two cishet people of the opposite sex the tendency to go back to the default programming of pair-bonding is too strong. With autism the programming is sometimes nonfunctioning to some degree.
> But I still notice a totally unfounded feeling of contempt (just to emphasize, I’m not endorsing this contempt, and for all I know the writer might be great)
Yeah I feel it too. I think it's because it sounds like they're doing and feeling everything they're supposed to, *because* they're supposed to. Like we are reading the thoughts of a completely fake person and implicitly being asked to believe that that fake-ness is real-ness. It takes only a slight amount of perceptiveness to realize how false it is. If there's one thing we humans find contemptuous it's fakeness.
The fence around sleeping around between several people was taken down completely decades ago. To be frank this amounts to erecting a new fence by trying to get them all married.
"But if you’re not in this situation, taking their advice will probably go much the same as taking an ataxic’s advice on walking. You’ll overthink it and trip over your own feet."
I guess I'm surprised to see the "probably" here (it's so strong!), especially from someone whom I think of as a (former?) self-help author himself. So many of your (and esp. Eliezer's) writings on rationality are legible principles for seeing truth and achieving success in life ("rationality is winning"). Do you think the probable outcome of trying to follow that advice is the equivalent of "trip[ping] over your own feet"? If not, I'm curious what distinguishes the rationality movement from other forms of self-help in your mind.
Also, if your point here applies to "books on how to walk", then doesn't it also predict that most writing on "how to overcome depression" would be unhelpful (and written by depressed people, as opposed to by therapists)? That seems unlikely to me, or at least like it would be a too-easy way for someone to invalidate the (very helpful!) writing you've done on Lorien. And it predicts that Zero to One (a book you've reviewed positively) would be harmful to most. Anyway, I think your argument here proves too much.
Do not seek to bring things to pass in accordance with your wishes, but wish for them as they are, and you will find them.
Epictetus
Same advice as "treat every day as a gift from God" really. I feel like this will be that one quote I never forget
An interesting wrinkle is that this state of mind seems to make me more willing to make changes, as I have more confidence in my ability to appreciate the results
I was poly for two years or so then stopped. Jealousy, in the sense of feeling bad because someone was sleeping with my partner, wasn't a problem for me. I will say what the problems were, and I'll be interested to see responses/links to responses.
I hung out in two polyamorous friendship groups: one was good but very small and not much happened. The other was large, and it was *awful* to be in for a man - to be blunt, because competition for females ended up happening two-faced way - "oh it's so great to see you man!" - while not actually having any interest in one another. I don't think the women were always aware of it (my primary partner certainly wasn't). The problem polyamorous communities have that modal-person-is-monogamous communities does not is that men get an extra incentive to interact with other men: that incentive is a chance of sleeping with your partner. This makes for more shallow interactions.
To say a possibly-related and by-no-means-original thing: polyamory probably makes it so that more attractive men have extra sex, while less attractive men have relatively less extra sex. It seems plausible that this makes men, on average, more miserable (I appreciate this is related to jealousy of course, but not quite the same, because it's not focussed on one person, i.e. one's partner).
I could be wrong about that part - but if you think I am wrong, and that's why you favour polyamory, please let this be a hill you would die on, that is, if I can show you that polyamory leads to misery of this kind, you have to give me that polyamory is therefore bad. I can understand people disliking the principle that some (attractive) people should have their personal lives limited in order to make life a little happier for less attractive ones, but sometimes that's what it looks like to decrease misery.
With respect I also think Scott is not the perfect person to listen to about this, simply because is at the top of a status hierarchy and the people whose welfare I am concerned for are not there.
I'm not a person who thinks poly will be ruinous by the way - even without it there seem to be lots of reasons people are moving away from committed relationships with an eye toward having children. But I don't think it's good.
>polyamory probably makes it so that more attractive men have extra sex, while less attractive men have relatively less extra sex.
Probably! Just like tinder, no-fault divorce, birth control, female higher education, a labor market that doesn't discriminate against women, and not confiscating the babies of unwed mothers or kicking said women out of society. And you can argue against all of those, too, or you can argue that some of them actually have offsetting benefits, but if you're doing the latter, you're just haggling over the trade-offs we should accept for higher male sexual inequality.
Also, nearly everyone benefits from some type of status/inequality that is making someone else either objectively worse off or worse off in relative terms. And while I'm not against the idea that some people should limit their life to decrease overall misery, when I have seen this expressed, the person putting it forth is rarely volunteering to go first or articulating some kind of general principle on the topic.
Yes, haggling could be worthwhile. Of those, Tinder is something I'd say doesn't have to be viewed as an inevitability - it's not ridiculous to consider at least regulation of dating apps to fight this problem. In the same vein subsidies for couples with children and tax breaks for married couples.
I focussed on men so I see why you went for the other examples. But I'll say one argument is that male sexual equality could benefit women, because they benefit from men competing to better husband/dad material(focus on job and stable friendships) instead of better fling material (focus on gym+politics).
> nearly everyone benefits from some type of status/inequality
Yes, everyone is a bit evil. But re: articulating general principles, Categorical imperative, veil of ignorance, and negative utilitarianism all seem to say that one should "volunteer" in this way. And one can at least choose to ostracise people who exploit inequality for their own gain too much. Again assuming that the inequality situation is true, it might be that for a community to be stable, it should adopt a principle like that one.
I wouldn't actually be a one to do that though; I love my poly friends.
Not all women would be happier with a husband and kids. Some percentage, who are currently not getting it, would be happier; I don't know how many. Another factor is how *much* happier those women would be with that outcome; plausibly this is a lot; but I still don't know how much.
If we did some research and gave ourselves an idea of how much happier people are with families, and how much people are not getting that, at what threshold would it make us want to change something? Eg, at what threshold does it become more important than the happiness levels of other people we're considering? I heard a sad statistic about this, but I later found out the stat was dubious, so I'm not sure what to think.
However, I see no reason why we can't let people choose their own way, whether that's marriage or not, kids or not, or hell, running off to sail around the world alone, or devoting their lives to poor people. We should all be able to choose the way we want to live our lives. We may be wrong, but that's on us.
The stats I've seen are that older women who didn't want kids and didn't have them are largely happy with their lives. Same with older women who did want kids and had kids, although the numbers are, interestingly, slightly lower for this group.
WRT marriage, there are so many studies out there, but I read a review article a while ago that assessed the methodology, data collection, stats, bias, etc. of a large number of papers on the subject of marriage, wellbeing, happiness, etc. Wish I'd saved it! Their conclusion was that men overall were happier and healthief in marriages, while a large majority of women were happier and healthier outside of marriages (including singles, people in long-term relationships who weren't married, and divorced women).
There is at least a wealth of literature on the question of why more-educated women are less likely to have kids. This study found that even though less-educated women *have* more kids, they are no less likely than more-educated women to *want* them https://aifs.gov.au/research/research-reports/its-not-lack-wanting-kids-report-fertility-decision-making-project another reason this matters demographically is that women are now a bit more likely to go to college
The discussion this sometimes leads to is lots of men saying "career-driven posh birds [which there weren't many of in the 50s] don't want to settle". That's part of it, and that's why it's important to think about the production line of marriageable men. Relatedly, being unmarried is now relatively more fun than it was before. Polyamory is part of making that so.
Aside from the children thing, regarding marriage alone, it would be nice if we had that study you mentioned. You don't want to just say this thing without being able to answer the *many* questions it raises about how this can be known when it's somewhat counterfactual ("you didn't have kids, but how would you have felt if you did?").
Exactly! Steve Sailer has the Law of Female Journalism: they tend to argue for situations which make the writer more attractive. At one point, a commenter argued that the equivalent Law of Male Journalism would be the writer arguing for situations which make them higher status...which we *do* see an awful lot of, probably about as much if not more!
As you allude to, we're all out for ourselves, some of us just lie about it better, including *to* ourselves, since the loss in understanding of the universe can sometimes be balanced by making the lie more believable. When you understand reason was made to convince people of things rather than understand the universe (that's a later hack that started in ancient Greece), it makes a lot of things make more sense.
I think there's a lot to be said for socially conservative cultures which ask more of people and have tools for enforcing status compression! But there's also a reason why people get out of them, and if you're endorsing a small part of that without thinking about what you personally -- a globally high-income and probably high-status person -- would give up, then that is a useful exercise to engage in.
To pose this argument in a different way: some people speculate that within two centuries or so, cultures worldwide will necessarily have become more conservative and insular, because the only ones (cultures) that are able to reproduce themselves will be the ones that avoid letting their young people collectively fall into a lifestyle that makes them less likely to reproduce. The claim is that poly is part of that lifestyle (maybe an extreme of it).
I am on the fence about whether this is correct. You can't get an ought from an is, so even if this is correct, that doesn't necessarily mean we have to throw out the principle that we should let people choose the lifestyle they want. But I am interested to know whether that principle has a determinable expiry date.
> Freddie de Boer recently wrote a harsh review of a memoir, which included quotes like this:
I'm reading the linked post and damn, I never thought I would feel so in agreement with Freddie DeBoer. Not just, like, agreeing on some fact or abstract principle, but a visceral feeling of seeing the same situation the same way. Same for his linked post about disabilities.
This is a very good writeup which made me LOL (ruefully) several times.
This general point -- "If you want good advice about how to walk, ask someone with cerebral palsy. They experience walking as a constant battle" -- expresses itself to some degree in the world of organized sports. It is a longstanding sports-fan cliche, which seems to generally hold up well to real-world review, that the superelite athletes rarely turn out to be effective coaches and usually fail in the attempt. Or put the other way around many of the most-successful sports coaches turn out to have been active players who weren't gifted enough to reach, or to succeed in, that sport's highest level/league.
The books I've seen on polyamory are self-help books not memoirs and in that they seem to be sincere attempts at helping people think through what kinds of resources and capacities a person might need to have on board to pull it off successfully. Those books make it seem like a second full-time job to pull it off responsibly, and not a lot of people have that kind of time or capacity. For the people that do, or who pull it off well regardless, there's nothing to hate it seems to me.
I do wonder if there are two kinds of people doing polyamory (just to oversimplify for a minute) -- those who are doing it to try and solve problems in their monogamous relationships and those who are proactively setting out to create polyamory from the start because that's what they want.
As a therapist (and from talking to colleagues) many of our client bases tend to select I think for the first kind, and that does give us a biased view because in that context, polyamory looks like people putting a lot of energy into new and exciting romantic and sexual liaisons while they're having trouble communicating and being emotionally present for their primary relationship. And for a while that may bring a kind of breath of fresh air back into the primary relationship, but it also brings a ton more emotional and psychological complexity which the primary relationship is not equipped to manage. I've seen multiple situations, with and without kids, where polyamory was a transitional step to divorce (and of course that's not an indictment of polyamory itself).
Therapists also see situations where even if the parents manage polyamory well between them, it's very time and energy intensive at a time developmentally when their small kids need a lot of care. Young kids can have a hard time getting enough care anyway with two working parents in late-stage American capitalism with all its demands outside of the family. So seeing the parents' spare going to nurturing second and third romantic interests when the emotional needs of the kids (or the grownups for each other or themselves individually) are not adequately met seems like not a helpful thing.
Now of course polyamory in that frame can join all the other things that people choose or have to put energy into -- substance use, very involved hobbies, workaholism, economic precarity, media consumption, emotional avoidance, etc.
On the other side, the nuclear family in our current culture is pretty widely insufficient for parents and children. As well that narcissistic self-gratification is not an adequate motivation to sustain a marriage. So to the extent that polyamory might offer more social connectivity for people and to the extent people in it create a larger sense of purpose for it than just self-gratification, then maybe it's a good alternative social structure, including maybe for raising kids.
My bias is that many of my data points make it look like people engaging in emotional avoidance by finding another arena in which they can pursue self-gratification. I'd be interested to hear from people happily in polyamorous situations and who have more data points any reflections about whether they see these two kinds of people doing polyamory and any guesses about what the ratios are (and really anything else they might want to say).
Agreed. Almost all articles in the press are about mono couples "opening up". I've never been in one of those, nor have some of my poly friends. Also, some people open a mono relationship, it falls apart, but then they're poly thereafter. We're out here, we're just less exciting, I suspect.
Sure. This is where affection, cultivated or deserved, really pays dividends.
But yeah, the culture is not terribly excited by that.
Our cultural products tend to assume certain things about women’s sexuality that are totally false, though, so perhaps best not to put too much trust in them.
There seem to be a couple distinct strands of polyamory I've noticed, one has a massive PR problem and the other doesn't want PR at all.
On one hand you have these arrangements that sound like some nightmarish bubbling ooze emerging through several sedimentary layers of Tumblr and Asperger's. "Queer catgirl polycule" kind of stuff that you'll see late-transitioning transwomen post about when they've basically abandoned any idea that they can find a home in normieville. Living arrangements that get broadcast as shock journalism in the Daily Mail, seemingly tailor made for normies to look down on the whole thing. A continuation of the Jerry Springer spectacle, often completely fabricated by the participants, but a spectacle that nevertheless convinced me at a very young age that involving any 3rd person in a relationship would probably just get a chair thrown at your head.
On the other hand, there are various flavors of "swingers", with a surprising amount coming from the ex-military and current law enforcement community, who have semi-stable ongoing activities with another couple. They don't want normies knowing about any of it, and treat it like a secret club. So the publicly successful and well-adjusted members of the community who have secret sexual/romantic lives aren't talking about them, and as a result that leaves only the eccentric outsiders as the "face" of the lifestyle, such as it is.
I have never had an inclination towards any of this, the amount of potential drama just seems miserably high, and I've been conditioned to see it as either low-status or psychologically damaging to a person's self-conception of their social identity ("if you go too far, you'll never get back to where the rest of them are".) I think that a society which encourages people to view polyamory negatively is probably doing most people a favor, as most people will find these arrangements dangerous and unrewarding and are better off being steered towards traditional monogamy. If you decide you really want to do it later in life, you'll find the pineapple people or an adjacent alt-lifestyle group eventually, and you know where California is if you want to go further than that. I don't hate polyamorous people, but I do find them weird, and it's probably for the best if most people feel the same.
I think it was Justin Lehmiller who, in 'Tell Me What You Want', actually pointed out that the poly and swinging communities are separate, and one leans left and the other right. This was privately confirmed to me by a gentleman who had contacts in both communities. Apparently heterosexuality is expected among swingers, though sometimes the wives can play with each other.
Swingers have the added benefit of having responsible adults to take care of any children who are made from their activities. Additionally, there's not an odd man/woman out. Most of my complaints with polyamory do not work in the face of swingers. I have no inclinations towards the practice, but swingers have my grudging respect.
I'm just about 5% of the way through this article right now, so this may be terribly unfair, but I'd like to leave the comment while it's on my mind. If the rest of the article causes me to amend my opinion, I'll edit this comment.
I just want to say that I think it's almost always a mischaracterization to assume people conclude that they 'hate polyamorous people' as opposed to concluding that 'polyamory seems like a shit lifestyle' - and while this might not seem like a significant difference to people on the receiving end of the latter attitude, it makes a world of difference in my experience as to whether people are movable on the issue or not.
[EDIT: I'm rescinding my initial contention because - it turns out - this article is more about criticizing the evaluative process than the conclusion framework.]
That doesn't seem too different from what the article is saying. You're saying, "polyamory (as practiced by narcissists and activists) seems like a shit lifestyle". There's a whole genre of parenting influencers that try to go viral on tiktok or youtube by recording contrived scenarios. Do they give an accurate representation of parenting? Probably not, because it's filtered through the experience of someone that is using their children to get likes.
In other words, true polyamory has never been described. Unfortunately, this means I'm not sure how we can evaluate any lifestyle from memoirs. Hillbilly Elegy made growing up in a rust belt wasteland sound miserable. But maybe that's just because Vance is the type of person that thinks his experience is important and there's really no issue with growing up in Appalachian backwaters is great and normal. There's nothing wrong with the culture, it's just the people who write books.
Sorry, I can't parse what you're saying and who you're accusing of living in the bubble.
I don't have any strong opinions on polyamory. I disliked the central argument of this article -that you can not form opinions on polyamory from the writings of polyamorous people -since it "proves too much". Surely Scott would concede that it's reasonable to (for example) make conclusions about the "hillbilly" lifestyle from reading J.D. Vance's memoir. Or that reading Frederick Douglas could tell you something about slavery. With the logic presented in this article, why wouldn't I dismiss them as narcissists or activists, and therefore unreliable?
To repeat, I don't have an argument about polyamory. This is a meta-argument that it's reasonable to make conclusions about a lifestyle from memoirs.
(I realize that my examples are different than polyamory because the authors are not proponents of what they're describing , but wanted to choose topics (rural destitution and slavery) that are obviously unpleasant)
Yeah, I got through the full article and feel somewhat less strongly about what's being asserted here. I'm still vaguely disinclined towards the framing. Most people that I know do a pretty good job compartmentalizing their generalized conclusions away from their individual judgements. For instance, most people who read a garbage polyamory memoir written by a narcissist will come away with -0.5 for some general heuristic involving the polyamorous lifestyle (one that never manifests as bigotry towards an individual in daily life) but -1,000 for that specific author, amounting to serious dislike.
Wait! Is that your secret? In real life are you terrible at everything you write about? Also you don't seem like a narcissist but I guess you must be. TIL
no, i hate polyamory because its a bad idea, not because its loudest proponents are annoying. The erotic force in people is too volatile to be safely indulged in with multiple people at the same time; its binds people too tightly together. Like good lord, the negative aspects of eros with one woman or man are painful; with two you can add whole dimensions of pain. its a rough sea far better people have shipwrecked in.
as for the "normal," you need to ask how well you know them. People are very good at hiding the bad stuff till it explodes; some may take it to their graves. Once they explode, people can't believe it. They were such a nice couple.
its not a simple as just annoying people. We rarely get the full story from anyone, and people are too good at hiding.
A friend of mine once put it to me this way: "a good rule of thumb is you stay attached to anyone you had sex with, for three years. you won't act normally when you see their name, or their picture, or see them in a room. three years."
thats probably a good breakup too; you can pine for them a lot longer.
my parents divorced. love can turn into pain and screaming matches quickly, and they never, ever remarried. when it goes bad it goes BAD, and polyamorous people are not immune to that.
One thing you can try is to ask them if they're vegan or polyamorous. If they're either one, they can't decide which one to tell you first and they can't talk.
"There are probably some acceptable times to write a memoir, like when you’ve just conquered Gaul. But usually memoir-writing means you think your True Self is absolutely fascinating and your experiences are worth recording and analyzing at book length" is a fully general objection to writing almost anything. Reword it as "writing means you think your thoughts are absolutely fascinating and your ideas are worth recording and analyzing at book length," and there's very little anyone should ever write.
This is not criticism; this is in fact why I haven't written anything of note.
To throw it out there, I think this argument also works against you? "I am friends with stable, generally nice people, some of those people are polyamorous, and they enjoy stable, generally nice relationships. Therefore, polyamorous relationships are stable, and generally nice." Isn't this line of logic making the same mistake as believing that polyamory is bad based on the dysfunctional people who write about it? Selection is occurring in both scenarios, after all. Hope I'm not mischaracterizing things here.
On a different note, even if the memoirs only show the effect of a polyamorous lifestyle on jerkwads, that's still useful info, right? If you're going to have a great relationship no matter what lifestyle you choose, then lifestyle choice doesn't really matter. But, if you are an unrepentant egoist, and a polyamorous lifestyle makes that trait more damaging in really obvious ways, then you shouldn't live that lifestyle, even if it works for others. Norms around long-term sexual arrangements should probably be tailored towards the worst that society has to offer, not the best. After all, the best are likely going to be happy regardless, while the worst will take any excuse to increase their own misery.
Well, I wouldn't say he's rubbing my face in it, I decided to read the article after all. But yeah, he definitely has a few bubble-beliefs, polyamory included. Weird to see his typically even-handed style sort of fade away, whenever he writes an article about one of them. Makes me wonder which topics would lead me down the same path.
Gotta say, those posts are usually the most enjoyable to comment on, though. It's kind of fun to ride the line between second-guessing the author's even-handedness, and second-guessing my own interpretations of how even-handed they're being.
Lotta people commenting on how they can't read the Atlantic article due to the paywall, you can use https://archive.ph/ to get around that and most other paywalls. Doesn't work for Substack, though.
Harper never said he hates polyamorous people, or anything like that. Scott is misrepresenting the article.
A similar thing happens with the gender debate. Someone describes her concerns about the ideology, and the response is “Well, you just hate trans people.”
Am I so literal: I read your bit as critiquing the impulse for a poorly informed person paid to read a book by a narcissistic self indulgent polyamorist memoirist to equate the memoirist with all people choosing this lifestyle and to make rather moralistic conclusions about said lifestyle. Your critique is either with the person who wrote the critique or with the person who wrote the memoir. (Both I think)
I’m not sure why everyone here then is yammering on about poly vs mono.
But here goes:
What if poly and mono were seen as both having challenges and issues. Like trying to decide if it’s better to wear hiking shoes or sneakers.
Perhaps in the lifespan it’s better to wear sneakers and at other times it’s better to wear hiking shoes, but no need to dismiss all people who are at a life phase of wearing hiking shoes because one particularly loud one gets a book deal.
Or perhaps the substack post, the Atlantic article and the memoir all exist because we as a group are curious about them and want to read about them (click on them) wonder how others can do it/can’t do it etc etc.
What if: we as a people evolving in bands of 150 people were inherently poly and it’s no big woop. What if the current majority of folks who read sub stacks experienced being raised in nuclear families so have “moral imprinting” that nuclear is better? And now here we are in the middle of something old and wild coming forward again?
Jeez, I love memoirs. But the ones I like are not by people who are making the case that they are a certain kind of interesting, special entity. They're I yam what I yam books. James Agee wrote one that begins, "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child."
I tried "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" about 5 years ago, but I bounced hard off of the writing style. I think it was too highbrow for the way my mind was working then. I'm a bit more functional now; do you recommend it, or his other stuff?
> Advice is disproportionately written by defective people.
Maybe in a purely statistical sense of disproportionate. But not really. Advice is written by people who are motivated to give advice. That motivation can be due to a personal defect. It can also not be. For example, the millions of words of financial advice issuing from Wall Street are not a sign of people who are defective about money. Nor do they know less about investing than your average person.
Being defective itself is not a motivation but lends itself to many motivations. For example, your defect might make you intimately familiar with a system and highly motivated to overcome its flaws. Your defect might also create anxiety which you then soothe by trying to normalize the defect by showing it off publicly. Or the defect may give you significant advantages in having interesting things to say and you want to make a career out of some form of attention economy (whether blogs or TV shows or whatever).
The disagreement between you and the other side (I do not have a ready name to hand) is what your motivations are. Your side posits the first version: you want to overcome the flaws of the modern relationship system which you believe you have special insight into because of, effectively, a quirk of psychology/biology/whatever. The other side posits the second or third: that you are defective and less happy but are narcissistically seeking either attention or to normalize your defects to make yourself feel better about them.
At any rate, this is a battle between soldiers and so (to be honest) not incredibly interesting. I am on neither side and no one is truly trying to convince me. I wish you enough space for your oddities but not so much space you deny the other side theirs.
IMO, monogamy people don't care that much whether Poly people are really happy/narcissistic . The real issue is many monogamy couples can stay Mono just because there is no other option. Poly is hideous, unacceptable, fullstop.
This is mostly a trust issue, i.e: I am not sure whether my spouse would leave if Poly is widely accepted.
I think this is a pretty strong version of the typical mind fallacy. (Guessing that you are poly.) "Everyone would be poly if they could be and no one actually cares about whether they think I'm lying to them or harming the social fabric" is not really a great model of the other side's minds here.
Why do you attribute the views you are criticizing to "The Atlantic", rather than the author of this particular book review (which was published by The Atlantic)?
I would understand this, if your critique concluded that the review was so bad that The Atlantic should not have published it, but that does not seem to be the case.
Tyler Austin Harper. This post is a critique of the writing of Tyler Austin Harper; but his name does not appear, which reads strange to me.
The smuggled premise is presumably: "The Atlantic does not publish book reviews which take an attitude contrary to that of its editorial staff".
A smuggled premise which I find obviously true, but you're right, there is a distinction here which could at least be mentioned.
For a reducto ad absurdem: I struggle, for example, to believe that the Atlantic would publish a review of some book by Dugin making the case that Ukraine Is Legitimately Russian Land wherein the reviewer concludes "His arguments convince me entirely, Ukraine Is Legitimately Russian Land".
It is legitimate to infer the attitude of the Atlantic from the not-technically-made-by-the-Atlantic-but-certainly-signalboosted-by-them set of views which they choose to publish.
Because I want to avoid pile-ons against individual people, and although this is probably not going to cause a huge pile-on, I think it's important enough that I want to build a fence around the law.
I see. Thanks for the response. However, I would think that the author would be happy to have his work engaged with in a fair way (which I think you've done), by name.
Polyamory is like... I dunno, snake charming? Juggling knives? It's a risky activity that some people can apparently do just fine (though I've never met any) and which will hurt most people who try it.
This is fine, most people don't even think to juggle knives most of the time. But when I start to hear people promoting knife juggling to the masses as a great and fun hobby, I feel compelled to weigh in on the side of "Yeah, nah, that's still kinda stupid and dangerous, and not even that much fun, have you considered juggling fruit maybe?"
If you hear me saying like this, it's not aimed at erasing the lived experience of all the expert knife-jugglers out there who have been juggling for decades and somehow still have eight, nine, or maybe even ten fingers. It's just aimed at all the inexperienced youngsters out there who might need to be reminded that knives are sharp and hands are meat.
Not really, I think that the ACX readership (and even more so, the ACX survey-replyship) is heavily selected for being anomalous in a whole bunch of dimensions, and can't be relied on to be representative of anything. Aella's sex survey even more so.
As someone who has never read a book on polyamory but knows several people who have been or are in those relationships, they are near universally unhappy or one partner is dissatisfied with the relationship. In all these cases, the major friction in these relationships is coming from the structure of the relationship.
I know it is not for me, but I see a lot of my friends who are trying to "have it all" so to speak and very reluctant to confront the problems coming from their arrangements.
Transgressing Boundaries: A Non-Binary, Non-Toxic, Non-Violent Journey
Neutralizing Poison: The Fourth Level of Self-Healing (the first three being, of course, Curing Light Wounds, Slowing the Venom, and Banishing Blindness, and the sequel being Returning from the Underworld)
The Love of an Influencer: Very Different from Conventional Love
Ah, Piero, I did not know about him. There was a German artist in the 30's who did paintings of evil-looking members of the public in cafes, & mixed shit into his paints. But I can't think of his name.
I think this one takes the cake. Amazon blurb is really funny, but somehow I can't imagine author sustaining the amusement for 100 pp or so -- seems like kind of a one trick pony. Tho I'm sure somebody highly inventive could keep finding variations that kept the reader howling.
I actually read it! (I gave it as a present to a friend who was also a fan of the show.) Half of the funny stuff is the disconnect between the book and what we see on the show - sometimes the book omits important things, or glosses over bad stuff, or otherwise outright lies in ways that wouldn't be obvious if you didn't know the kind of person it was about.
My friend was the one who kept me in touch with this stuff. :-)
It sounds like you don't much like TV, but this might work to make you feel better about the politics of the last decade.
Heck, they even predicted a race between a 1-term narcissist and the sitting president who replaced them. Or maybe it's some sort of sympathetic magic curse, it's hard to tell. At least we haven't had an electoral college tie yet. **knocks on wood** And how about a sitting president cutting short his re-election campaign, and putting forward his vacuous VP? That sounds like it might be in the cards, too.
On the subject of “legible relationship principles”: I grew by great and rapid strides when I started reading books in that category, precisely about things like NVC and gaslighting. The impact on my life has been significant. Granted, my use case was mostly “I’m serially attracted to abusive partners and need help realizing this fact, holding a higher bar for others, and believing I can and should stick to it”. It worked for me.
"Relationships work the same way. Go to an elderly couple who have been happily married for fifty years, and they’ll give you vapid old-person advice like “Treat every day as a gift from God.” But go to someone who’s struggled with every one of their last thirty-seven relationships, and they’ll be full of suggestions"
Can you say confirmation bias? I can easily think up at least five different people who are the exact converde of what you are saying. A better takeaway is most people have a hard time articulating advice.
Honestly, this can be barely considered a rationalist blog anymore. Tons of assertations without any evidence simply backed ip by ridiculously anecdotal data to reject possibly correct criticism on a practice that you like. Cmon Scott!
I am deliberately trying to not defend polyamory with statistics, because people freak out whenever anyone defends polyamory or makes an affirmative case for it, and accuses them of trying to push their lifestyle on them. Instead I'm just using it to make a slightly related point about sources of information.
Judging by the comment section this plan has definitely worked out in your favor (/s) and I look forward to the inevitable follow-up (mostly not /s) and/or Highlights from the Comments (fully not /s).
People already seem to be interpreting your point about 'sources of information' as being driven by ulterior motives, so I think you might as well bring out the statistics at this point. If there's a case, I'll hear it, though I'm more interested in TFR than I am in in self-reported life-satisfaction for younger age groups, or the like.
"You don't hate the Taylor Swift media obsession, you just hate beautiful successful women getting their due".
When you used the unwitting re-creation of the televangelist attitude, you didn't disprove the critics though - happily married committed monogamists who raise their children to value such and who roll our eyes at the polyamorist media focus with the same disdain as for veganism, absolutely can be put off with the Jesus freaks.
And deBoer's point was that if you put your deep thoughts on paper, and it get's published, and you and your publisher promote your deep thoughts as deep thoughts, you can't cry foul when someone lampoons the vacuity and banality of the alleged deepness of the alleged thoughts. There's no contradiction or lapse in logic in any of this.
This defence is just pathetic. You know, I also hate Rationalists, as they are my enemies. Perhaps one reason is that I can point to blog posts like this one and say, "Wow, isn't this not only stupid, but in defence of something inherently oppressive and evil, and obviously so?" But then Scott jumps out and says, "No no, you actually hate me, and other Rationalist bloggers, not Rationalists!"
How does anybody even respond to that? "I hate X due to multiple self-written examples of X showing X as having negative consequences even by those who promote X publicly." And then the defence, "Oh no, you don't hate X, you only hate the public examples of X! I have secret personal examples that show it's okay. You're just falling for confounders!"
Yeah well, I have multiple personal examples of underage girls marrying men in their mid to late 20's, and it not ending in personal horror. That doesn't mean it's a choice equal to others, and that I don't actually hate giant age gaps in underage relationships.
This is probably the first time I've read Scott's blog post and just thought, dude, just stop.
In my (limited) experience, there are two kinds of polyamorous people:
1) Polyamorous 20-somethings. These guys are insufferable. They jump back and forth between "You shouldn't be so judgmental" and "Polyamory is the only ethical way to hold relationships". "You shouldn't snark at people who are different than you" and "The human heart is large enough to hold more than one person!" "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE JOYS OF NRE!!!" Toxic people yell "I'm polyamorous!" and, suddenly, the topic shifts away from the toxicity to defenses of Polyamory Theory. Ryan cheats on Chris and the community joins together to tell Chris to be more open-minded and less selfish.
2) Polyamorous 40-somethings. These guys are pretty okay. There's a lot less jumping back and forth. It's not really a "polycule" as much as a "stable triad/quadrad". NRE? Ha! I'd have to leave the hosue. Oh, man. I haven't thought about Ryan for years. I heard they moved to Wisconsin. I think Jamie is still Facebook acquaintances... I'll ask next time we get coffee. You know what? I won't. I don't care. I'm glad they're no longer here.
The problem is that the only way to get a 40-something polyamorist is to take a 20-something polyamorist and wait a couple of decades.
I'm putting together a response for someone else, but one thing I thought about including but probably won't, is that the distribution of personality types in "poly" has changed over the years. Like with tech, in the beginning there were a bunch of early adopters, figuring out how to implement feminist theory in a way that let them have lots of sex, and they tended to be fairly good about self-awareness and boundaries and the like. I expect that Scott's circle is a younger generation of people like this. But there were also people who discovered the poly community and thought "if I say the right words, I get to have fun, and if I say these other words, I can hurt people and get them to think it's their own fault". And eventually there were people who thought "if I say the words other people say, and do the things other people do, I can fit in with the cool kids". (Similar to what happened with wokism.)
Back in the 90's, I watched someone hurt a lot of people and who was very good at changing the subject to Polyamory Theory and the need for others to ethically manage their jealousy in a healthy way.
This person eventually moved out of the circle when there was no one left to lie to.
I take grim satisfaction in having a relationship that has outlasted every single relationship among those who gave speeches about how I just didn't understand, man.
Though, of course, I'm sure that they'd explain that if I thought that relationships were supposed to last forever, that I still don't understand the point of polyamory.
This reminds me of all the hate that Christopher McCandless got after Into the Wild came out. In that case it was particularly unfair because he wasn't writing a book. If someone publishes your diary without your permission it's going to make you sound like an asshole
Since I don't see myself represented in the comments, I will add this:
I lived in the Bay Area for many many years working as a software engineer, and I had and still have a number of polyamorous friends, and I've never read a single book about polyamory.
I hate polyamory, not people who write books. Many of my friends have the same experience as me. I know the post is ostensibly addressed to the Atlantic, but it has reduced me out of existence.
I suspect "advice is disproportionately written by defective people" generalizes to many classes of book, including ones supported by this blog and this community, which makes this a biased take. But I can't easily back it up, so I just offer it as an opinion.
For what it's worth, I agree with many of the other commenters who say the value of systems like monogamy and polyamory varies a great deal based on the competence of the executors, or their place on the socioeconomic bell curve.
I think well executed monogamy is best by far. It has stealth benefits that take decades to become apparent, mostly enjoyed by the kind of people who don't bother to explain themselves. This class is rare.
I think well executed polyamory is second best. It very obviously solves some problems with poorly executed monogamy. This class is also rare.
I think poorly executed monogamy is third best. Yeah, it's a shit show, but points for trying. Real utility points for real tries. This class is obviously most common.
And poorly executed polyamory is by far the worst. By far. The downsides are insidious and subtle, and sometimes take years to make themselves known. I do not want to see it become any more common than it is.
Yes, please go read Some Guy's top level comment about his parents, who were ostensibly monogamous, but actually not obviously different from polyamorous, and how that affect his childhood, and how he behaves as a parent, and the parent comments from monogamous parents in general in this thread. Those are half the stealth benefits, though I'm afraid you're not gonna get a more accessible explanation if you haven't had kids yourself.
The other half is barely explainable. You'll hear "cancer" and scoff at it, but *please go live through it*, please go live through a monogamous experience of cancer, and you will understand something important about dependability that can barely be explained.
tldr: if you haven't had a bad disease or a child under monogamous conditions, the answers will be glib.
Most people are stupid. Ideas that make stupid people's life worse are an infohazard.
(This set probably includes polyamory, atheism, who knows what else.)
I wonder what would be a good general solution to this problem. Perhaps smart people should live on a separate island with their own rules and internet. Except, this couldn't work in the actual world, someone would tell the plebs.
I'm fascinated by the selective looseness of the good/bad person absolutism in rationalist writings. Here you describe yourself as a 'particular type of bad person' (twice) as a qualifier to not-super-unreasonable thoughts. Presumably(?), someone simplistically inferring "Scott thinks of himself as a bad person" from this would be silly. I found an explication of a non-loose variant in https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/16/the-economic-perspective-on-moral-standards/.
He's saying that his thoughts/behavior are not ideal and he would not intentionally choose them if he were able to do so. It's admitting to non-rationality in that particular area of his thoughts, which is a sort of meta-sin in rationality. I think you're reading it as intended though, in that it's not a big deal and he might as well be saying "I'm human."
"I was a Reagan conservative; what was that about? I was a drug addict hospitalized in a mental institution; what was that about? I was accused of assault with a deadly weapon by a woman with whom I was having an extra-marital affair and it became front-page news throughout the country, because I was nominated for the Undersecretary in the Department of Education position - the number 2 position - in the second Reagan administration, and it was while that nomination was pending that this fiasco, this disaster in my life, et cetera et cetera... I could go on, obviously, in this frame for a long time. You asked me a pointed question, 'why did I write the book'; I'm saying that I had something to explain and I had something to say."
"And I've kind of gestured at why I want to explain it to others because I think I need somehow to contextualize my biographic profile from my point of view, to humanize it and to invite a more sympathetic view of those who will be taking my measure."
Sorry if this has been brought up before, because I am not prepared to read 700 comments, but I did a search for "Klein" in the thread and it didn't show up. So.... Ezra Klein recently had Rhaina Cohen, the author of a new book called "The Other Significant Others" on his podcast. It's so new it's not out yet so I haven't read it, but I did listen to the podcast talking about the book.
If the interview is anything to go by, I think it's going to be a great book about polyamory because it's not a book about polyamory. It's a book about people who choose to live together with partners in a relationship that not conducted as a traditional marriage and who do not regard themselves as romantically involved. Sometimes there are more than two of these partners. They are "platonic life partners" as we call it. Childcare and how people can come together to raise children in a partnership that is not "two people who have sex with each other" is apparently a major theme of the book. This is not a memoir and it is not written by unhappy people.
It is not a book about polyamory, but I strongly suspect we will be able to learn more about polyamory from it than we will from many books about polyamory because it is a book about how people can perform many of the functions of marriage without being a two-person romantic couple.
I think the reason most people are uncomfortable with polyamory is that it subverts the dearly-held mythology of all-conquering “true love” between soulmates that pervaded western culture for a few centuries until the last decade or-so. Years ago, Jason Pargin (of Cracked.com, back when it was still relevant) said that outsiders looking back at our culture would see romantic love as our religion, and I think he was right.
For the first decades of my life, we were so immersed in it that it didn’t occur to us that it was strange compared to other times and cultures to believe in and focus on finding your “true love,” mutually “falling in love” with a soulmate for an eternally-passionate, all-satisfying, exclusive marriage that transcends and conquers all problems. Most of our popular stories reinforced these myths, from Disney’s “Happily Ever After” twists on ancient fairy tales that originally had dark endings, to hero’s journey stories that required the crucial step of “getting the girl,” to more-disturbing stories like Punch Drunk Love. It was so pervasive that it was shoehorned into the ending of Fight Club, where we barely even noticed that it didn't make much sense.
As these myths have been breaking down in recent years, movies and TV shows have started moving away from them, but to the many people who still hold these romantic myths as dearly as a religion, hearing about people who don't share them can be as frustrating as hearing about the "new atheists" was to fundamentalist Christians in the early aughts.
Yeah, true love might not really be the norm in relationships, but the vast majority of pre-modern societies weren't consent-based sexual free-for-alls either. Marriage was enforced by stigma and social convention and was seen more as a mutually-beneficial business arrangement than anything else, assuming the bride was consulted at all. Even non-monagamous societies still had very strict rules regarding these transactions. Love would be nice and all, but it could (A) develop over time, and (B) wasn't really the point per se. Reproduction was.
Very true, and of course, most people who have religious feelings for monogamous "true love" mythology would be irritated by heretics in their culture abandoning it for any other system, whether consent-based free-for-all or any of the other historical, often-coercive systems. There just aren’t many westerners practicing/advocating a return to those historical systems, so it doesn’t come up as much. Similarly, modern Christians rarely get upset about ancient Greek mythology but would if people around them started believing in it.
There's a version of True Love that's dumb and toxic, where it's implied that Your Special Someone is a girl/boy you'll just coincidentally lock eyes with across a room and settling for anyone else is a betrayal of your needs (and yeah, the older Disney films kinda reinforce this), but there's a more defensible version of the myth where you're expected to work on developing a stable relationship with your spouse that develops into a deeper affection over time. Ideals being lofty isn't a problem in and of itself- your aspirations have to be a bit higher than the norm or the norm degenerates over time.
things I enjoy about memoir (not having read this one): realistic dialogue from people's heated moments, better social dynamics, less tropey characters, more focus on interiority and a slower pace as a result.
That's fine, but use the words that have the actual meaning you intend if so. It's simply not correct to say that lower classes have practiced polyamory commonly in the past. It's true for non monogamy. Soyou're arguing they are closely related concepts, but even if so, the latter is more accurate to use than the former, so you should use it instead.
I’ve been to a talk by a monogamy influencer, and it was actually pretty good. He didn’t have a book deal, but I think he’d given dozens of similar talks. He gave a limited number of examples of things from his life, and talked about some of his reasoning in those decisions. He described the situations in enough detail that it was easy to empathise with the way he made those decisions, and he drew a small enough number of examples from his life that he could stick to meaningful examples. Maybe life advice is different from a memoir, but it’s possible to dispense the former and be in a happy and successful relationship (he and his wife were giving simultaneous talks to men and to women, respectively).
I'm less concerned about the direct effects of polyamory on quality-of-life for the immediate participants (though those could well be terrible) and more on whether they're (A) reproducing at all, (B) reproducing eugenically, and (C) setting a poor example to peers, especially in the lower class.
There are some fundamental and obvious game-theoretic reasons to suspect that polyamory is highly destabilising to the long-term relationships conducive to raising children, especially when you roll it out at scale (temptations to infidelity/defection multiply as unattached or loosely-attached singles increase), and that smart women are more likely to be sensitive to this, which impacts fertility. You can make a pretty good argument that it just degenerates into a harem system for the top 20% of men, minus the reproduction.
Did you mean to reply somewhere else? But also, l think you’re skipping some steps in this. If nothing else, you’d have to explain why harems are unstable or bad for raising children. I think there are lots of benefits from having a small family unit with clearly defined parent-child relationships, where a child can trust their parents to see them as important, but even I don’t have a clear sense of whether the world would be more stable if families clustered together so a good parent can look after more children. (Also, maybe put in more groundwork before you refer to infidelity as “defection”, if you want a good conversation with anyone who supports polyamory).
I've seen enough twin/adoption studies that I don't think home environment, barring rare cases of serious negligence/abuse, makes much of a difference to kids' long-term outcomes at all, but the stability of a relationship has a large effect on whether women will commit to bearing children in the first place (at least if they have a brain in their heads.)
And... yeah, defining infidelity as a non-bad-thing is the point in contention here, and IMO the onus is on polyamorists to prove their case before I revise my language.
People in polyamorous relationships would use contraception unless they intended to have a long-term child-raising relationship. Argue that they wouldn’t, or that contraception would be ineffective. And… you won’t convince many people if you say, “The onus is on you to accept my conclusion, and you won’t accept the language I argue with until you do”.
Infidelity has been considered a sin, sometimes punishable by death, in just about every human society for thousands of years, and as I already went over, there are good theoretical reasons for why this might be so. If polyamorists want to make the case that all of these societies were wrong, the onus is on them to prove it.
I'm not directly concerned with use of contraception here, because I don't measure the utility of child-rearing exclusively as a function of the parents' life-satisfaction, and I don't see evidence that contraception is solving the OECD's problems with sub-replacement/dysgenic fertility. It may well be making them worse.
Are you defining infidelity differently than most people? I understand that poly people have sex with people outside of a 1-1 relationship, but I've generally heard that this is discussed and accepted by both/all participants. I don't consider that infidelity, if it's pre-arranged and accepted.
Not sure how MA views it, but I read his "infidelity = defection" to describe something that was not arranged previously. He seems to be making the point that non-monogamous relationships seem more prone to defecting against loose agreements than (presumably more rigid) monogamous relationships.
Something unfamiliar in the style. Topics that catch the imagination? Intelligent focused stream of consciousness? I am starting to search these pieces out.
The Bay Area Poly thing & discussion reminds me of the old observation: Each generation believes it is the first to discover sex. To enjoy sleeping around is not exactly something new in human evolution.
If it emotionally confuses and hurts children & hampers developing deeper feelings for another person is a different matter. But if children without psychological scars & parents with deep feelings for each other were necessities for human survival, our species would have gone extinct long ago.
I'm a tall, good looking guy. I was cool and in popular groups. I'm the chad. The cool and good looking guys slept around. The less good looking guys tried but did poorly. The top dogs were shamed by many of the top girls for being 'players', but they would still get involved with us.
Poly came around and you could tell people about it and most would think it was cool, but few would challenge the idea because... well we were cool and they weren't. You can convince uncool people of many things by being cool and good looking.
Cool people never said they were poly back in the day. But we definitely acted poly. Then some more nerdy guys started to say they were poly. This let more moderately attractive people have greater sex choices, something only good looking guys previously had.
I've had multiple girls. Many times. It's not hard to do but it's a headache. I got older and decided on one girl. If you want kids, one long-term partner focused on your children is better (time is resource constrained).
For all the poly people out there, Chads are so much better socially. We get more practice --- the amount of gentle touch to maneuver numerous relationships is large. We're better than you at it. Are we better because of skill or because people are nicer to us? It's probably a bit of both. Most poly people seem pretty bad juggling things and ruin their lives. You get more slack when you're high status or hot. If you aren't high status or hot you'll struggle.
Even with all those skills and numerous opportunities most of the Chad guys I know (85-90%) pick one girl eventually, because it's tedious! You will become more bored of sex (not entirely but a lot) and you'll want other things than sex optionality as you age.
Hot guys have sex optionality in monogamous relationships. We can cheat faster than you stumble getting her number. But we overwhelming don't. It's a tremendous waste of time. This 'support relationship' or whatever nonsexual relationship you might also think about having is a waste of time.
I don't know how else to write this. I feel like my writing skills are sorely lacking compared to the more bookish people on this website. As a man who's lived the poly life poly people romance. It's not worth it. It's rationalized horniness.
IF you plan to never have children, poly is fantastic. The Chads I know that didn't pick one girl are either dead or taking drugs and will likely remain bachelors
I think you nailed it. No need to worry about the writing style; it’s a bit overly analytical and blunt (autistic?) but effective at conveying your points. I think this kind of ‘status envy –> nerds replicate and amplify “Chad behavior” –> Chad behaviors become translated into warped, rigid conceptual frameworks’ pathway is helpful for thinking about this.
I generally agree with this, though not sure the framing of the Atlantic piece is fair. If I remember rightly, the Atlantic author has no issue with polyamory as a general practice, and certainly doesn't "hate polyamorous people". Rather, they take issue with the uncritical (professional middle class) championing of it – especially when that championing presents polyamory as a radical challenge to capitalism, when in fact the two are wonderfully compatible. I may well be conflating their tweets and what they actually wrote in the piece. Either way, I think the 'radical challenge' point is fair and useful.
I find it so fascinating that the older I get the more insight I can have on people just from a few words.
I can tell that Scott comes from a divorced family and was raised by his mother and doesn’t have a lot of married male friends he hangs out with solo.
I know this because men talk a lot about what it takes to have a successful marriage while women attribute it to their mere existence.
I talk with my male friends and father about being a good husband and father a lot. And it isn’t because I have the equivalent of MS for relationships. It’s because I know that relationships are so,etching you actually do have to work at to get right.
That’s not a bad thing because it leads to a happy life.
Um....some links please.
Well see....that's the thing: I have. Not long ago I examined exactly the claim that you just made (due to having become neighbors of a polyamorous household and become curious about the various claims made about the practice).
Which is why I know that your second sentence above is flatly false.
Well, in the US twosomes lead to divorce 50% of the time. Is there really data on threesomes? And do you get that if one member of a marriage cheats with a third party, that is not polyamory? That is called having an affair. They're different.
Fair. My one caveat would be that polyamory should be addressed (at least for the purpose of this discussion) as a possible candidate for a luxury belief: the kind of lifestyle that confers status, and maybe some sort of happiness, on wealthy people from the Bay Area, while inflicting costs on the lower classes who are going to watch a gazillion TV shows about polyamory over the next decade and are going to break up marriages and leave children unattended and fuck themselves up even further, because cool people do it. So, from that point of view, it’s perhaps healthy for society that a bunch of narcissists give us their takes on their terrible experiences, so we lowly journalists can write them up and poor people can link to them on their Facebook feeds. Sounds Effectively Altruistic to me.
Lower-class people are already struggling to maintain stable relationships with one person. If A and B have a 50% chance of getting along, what are the chances A and B, A and C, and B and C can all get along?
As someone with friends across a rather wide range of classes, I'm quite appalled at the stereotyping of working class people as being unable to manage their personal lives if given some liberty. Maybe there's a wider spread in outcomes, but I doubt their median ability is much below that of their middle class neighbors. Dudes (and dudettes) with demanding jobs and tight budgets are often more grounded than those who have more leeway - reality has a way of bumping you in the nose.
Honestly it sounds to me like a cheap excuse for authoritarian positions, which should be mercilessly mocked.
https://quotulatiousness.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Screenshot-2023-01-31-at-13-41-12-Thorstein-Veblens-Theory-of-the-Leisure-Class%E2%80%94A-Status-Update.png
Yeah habits change, quite massively. Nobody is arguing they don't. You can decry it if you want for all kinds of systemic reasons, and I'm not getting into an argument about those here.
Individually though, I'll defend the ability of most individuals to make better informed choices for their life than someone from a different social milieu looking over their shoulder saying "if only these people would...".
"Individually though, I'll defend the ability of most individuals to make better informed choices for their life"
Ok, does that contradict the idea that a lifestyle could be more harmful for one group than another? Should we individuals making informed choices not inform ourselves of that possibility through discussion as we're now doing?
I'm quite appalled at the stereotyping of ACX people as being unable to discuss an "is" without necessarily implying an authoritarian "ought" when given some commenting liberty.
I suspect this might be getting causation backwards? For example, other things being equal (which they never are), divorce is really bad for people financially.
Also consider that your observations may be due to survivor bias.
THIS
If C is auspistizing for A and B and B is auspistizing for A and C and so on, possibly quite high.
If you are in the type of relationship that fights about money, a third income (and reducing housing costs by a third if you all share a home) can fix a lot of problems.
If you are in the type of relationship that fights about sex, a second partner you can have sex with if the first isn't interested that night can fix a lot of problems.
If you are in they type of relationship that fights because chores and childcare take up so much time that you're both habitually exhausted and irritable, someone to pick up a third of those duties can fix a lot of problems.
If you are in the type of relationship that fights because you are both bad at communicating and stop trying very hard when you get emotional, having a third party who knows you both really well and can facilitate communications between you can fix a lot of problems.
Etc.
Indeed.
Perhaps my comment was a confusing mix of rhetorical question and open-ended thought experiment.
Suppose for example that polyamory increases the chance of any two people in a throuple getting along to 80%. Then in a three-person relationship the chance of of all three getting along should be 51%, slightly higher than my monogamous assumption of 50%.
Um, no
Like everything else - ill health, losing your job, your marriage or long-term relationship blows up - if you have money, it cushions you more. You have more options. You can access help faster and better. If you want to spend six months curled up in bed crying and eating ice cream, you are not likely to have the electricity cut off because you can't pay the bill. You can write a book that gets reviewed in the 'quality' papers about your vicissitudes.
If you try poly and it doesn't work out, having money means you can afford therapy (like the blackmail Mrs. Winter indulged in, apparently: gave hubby an ultimatum that he goes to couples therapy with her or she closes the marriage) or separate households if you have to split up, etc.
For those who, like the other example the Atlantic writer gave, rely on poly relationships as a network of practical physical and financial, as well as romantic and sexual, support, if it goes wrong then they may be very badly stranded: now they have no place to live, or their finances are reduced, or the person who always brought them to their hospital appointments is no longer around. They don't have the same range of options or spare capacity.
Why do you think it's an upper-class thing that lower-class people copy unsuccessfully?
The concept of a luxury belief strikes me as deeply suspect. I could provide an argument for its invalidity, but I think it'd be dishonest to lead with that even if it was true. Because the real reason for my suspicion is almost certainly just that it's too damn convenient.
For intellectuals not aligned with the mainstream intelligentsia, calling something a luxury belief is just perfect. It condemns a belief in a way that makes most possible counter-evidence irrelevant, it frames the speaker as an insightful critic of the WEIRD, and it carries with it a worldview that usually flatters their politics.
I realize that this is rather unfair of me. Sometimes convenient things are true; sometimes one's biases align beautifully with reality. But still, it feels off.
I like your objection to my objection, I think it's important that we don't let the concept of luxury belief slide into something meaning "stuff that sucks." We already have words for that. So, to address the point of whether polyamory is at least partly a luxury belief or behavior, we need to decide whether a) it confers status to upper-class promoters of that belief and b) it inflicts costs on the lower classes who will ape the behavior. If both conditions are not met, then it's not a luxury belief.
This sounds like it describes mental math. Are you against mental math?
I don't see how mental math qualifies as "a belief". You could imagine people advocating that math _should_ be done in your head, and that writing it down as an aid to calculation was sinful, but I don't think avowing that belief would confer status.
I think (a) is true of many beliefs, but I have a hard time thinking of any real world examples of (b). While something like polyamory could in theory be harmful to the masses, very few people practice it and it's unlikely to take off any time soon. Many of the examples of luxury beliefs I've heard (like "defund the police" and open borders) are really just policy views where the individuals espousing them do not personally have the capacity to implement them and can therefore say whatever they want. I would like to see examples of luxury beliefs that actually hurt the lower classes when they go on to adopt them.
This is a good point, I had not thought of this side of things.
“Supporters all live in rich countries” seems to elide the rather large portion of the population whose human potential is not adequate to fend off the challenge posed by the arriving horde.
The luxury belief is that of the Bryan Caplans whose lives at no point touch any of this social decay, and who sincerely believe national unity may be maintained while telling the lower class they are shit people who deserve to be displaced by strivers from other countries.
Not sure what he’s going to tell the strivers’ kids and grandkids.
If rich people benefit from keeping immigrants out, but poor people are harmed, keeping immigrants out is a luxury belief. If rich people benefit from not being able to immigrate, but poor people benefit from immigrating, then not wanting to immigrate is a luxury belief.
Both of these are aspects of closed borders, but they are *not* the same thing. And you're trying to compare rich people who want to keep immigrants out--the first one--to poor people who benefit from immigrating--the second one. You can't paste together half of each one and still get a luxury belief.
The ones I've heard most often are casual sex and no fault divorce. Neither idea seems to cause much harm to the upper classes, but are destroying the working classes.
I don't think no-fault divorce has any real connection to status. I think people just realized how fucked it is that someone (mostly women) would have to stay with someone they hate for the rest of their life if they can't provide what sometimes amounted to very specific evidence of wrong doing depending on their location. No doubt it has done a lot of harm to some people who would have been better off staying married, but it also provides an enormous amount of benefits.
It seems to me that there are two very broad categories of no-fault divorce. One is which there is something terminally wrong with the relationship (often to the level of abuse) but that would be difficult to prove in a legal context. The alternative is really any other situation, where one or both partners just decides to leave even without a specific problem.
No-fault divorce was implemented for the first group in order to solve some real problems. The second ground was an unintended consequence of the rules changing.
Cultural elites gain benefit from the first and rarely choose the second (they tend to stay married). Lower classes much more often get divorced, and both the couple and their kids suffer significant burdens because of it. In some cases this seems worth the tradeoff (i.e. abusive relationships), but in many others it becomes objectively worse for all involved.
I would much prefer a society in which couples needed a recognized reason in order to get divorced (or at least a strong Schelling Fence against divorce).
I am fascinated and a bit horrified at how much of this discussion is pivoting around class.
If I close my eyes, it’s not there!
— baby
There's an argument you frequently see in conservative circles that society has embraced the luxury belief of "it's okay to deviate from strict Christian sexual morality" or "it's okay to prioritize your self-actualization over your social role". Things have gone okay for the upper class, who have fun premarital sex and marry later but still generally get married before having kids and stay married after. Meanwhile rates of single parent households have risen dramatically among the lower class. And it's not that lower class people have found cool alternative arrangements to nuclear families; it's just lots of single moms and inadequately supportive dads.
I'm not saying I agree with this view. The upper class morality I was raised with "it's okay to have premarital sex but you are responsible for being a good and stable dad" seems perfectly fine and something I think everyone should follow. But I'm just sharing the most common version of "luxury belief" I've read.
There's a related argument that upper class people have the self-control to use addictive substances that are bad for lower class people, so lower class people benefit from tighter prohibition/stigma re: drugs.
The last "luxury belief" I can think of, which I mostly agree is a "luxury belief", is that college is for unfocussed intellectual aspiration rather than following some track to success. This works out fine if you can get a job at your dad's law firm after your wanderings, not so much if it leaves you with a ton of student debt and a job at Starbucks.
This seems like a different approach to the idea of "luxury beliefs". Rather than being beliefs that confer status, these are behaviors that people can get away with if they have the right resources or self control but that can be disastrous to people who lack these things.
I think this fits the words "luxury beliefs" better.
The idea of luxury being where you can spend more (time/money/etc.) on something than the bare minimum because it better fits your idea of what it should be.
The other version seems more like a status marker, because it conveys status to *publicly* hold the belief - you don't get anything for privately holding it after all.
I had a friend who was on welfare. He decided to lease a luxury car because he could (barely) afford the lease payments (on a 6 year lease). I think he also made a case that the car would better enable him to look for a job (it didn't). Of course when the lease ran out he was back on foot.
Why not get a cheaper car? Because he liked the heated seats.
Luxury belief.
That's a good point. I suppose the connection is that the luxury belief is a non-judgmentalism toward and perhaps willingness to indulge in the luxury behaviour.
Why is it different? When it's clear that belief X is inconsequential for high status persons and disastrous for low status persons, then the claim of "I have belief X" is either a claim to lunacy or a claim to high status.
Should the option of lunacy be disprovable by other means, what remains is a very powerful high status signal.
That is more about "defund the police" categories than "polyamory" categories, though. Not because I doubt the disastrousness of polyamory for low status persons, but because I doubt its inconsequentiality for high status persons.
(IIRC, Sailer has filed polyamory under the orthogonal "nerds lacking the jealousy gene" compartment. I find that to have better explanatory power: for such a group, it is indeed inconsequential, whereas membership in that group is as status-agnostic as is "being born on the 79th day of the year")
I'd thought that that was the original definition of "luxury belief", but I don't actually know where the term came from.
What is "I have vast material resources and self-discipline" if not an expression of high status?
That's how I've always understood the term, which I believe I may have first heard used by Rob Henderson.
Luxury beliefs = beliefs that one group has the luxury of believing without much negative consequence, whereas another group suffers to the extent they adopt the belief. Some examples that spring to mind are 'sexual promiscuity is acceptable' and 'drug use is acceptable'.
Now, there must also be some benefit/upside to holding the belief that makes it a 'luxury' and in many cases it is that they confer status, but that's not always the sole or even main benefit (sex and drugs can be their own rewards lol!)
Some other ones besides no-fault divorce (and a norm of not marrying at all, which wasn't mentioned), and casual sex:
1. Choosing to be a single mom (tons of high quality studies show the best child outcomes are from stably paired parents).
The median choosing single mom in our (educated coastal elite) social circles is likely highly accomplished, high conscientiousness, and going to give that kid a great education and childhood. This is like <1% of single moms - the vast majority are poor and low conscientiousness and basically breeding a next generation of similar kids.
2. Drug legalization.
I'm actually still all for this on philosophical principles alone - the state shoudn't police what you do with your own body - but it's terrible for lower class and lower conscientiousness people. For educated coastal elites? It's fine, you do shrooms on the weekend once a month with similar friends and get deep into philosophical conversations. Or you smoke weed in a controlled way that doesn't influence your career or family life.
For regular people? It's a huge trap and waster of talent and potential. Yes, you can easily find drugs illegally if you want them, but we're talking the marginal "yes" here that wouldn't happen without legalization. And plenty of young people get trapped in a place of low ambitions and low performance because they have cheap, legal/easy weed and shrooms and video games or whatever. On the margin, it's practically certain that we're causing many people to underperform their potential significantly for many years with drug legalization.
> 1. Choosing to be a single mom (tons of high quality studies show the best child outcomes are from stably paired parents).
That is true, but those studies tend not to differentiate between parents who are unpaired by choice ("choosing to be a single mom") and parents who have been unpaired without being given a choice ("a drunk driver hit my husband").
My understanding is that the children of single parents whose missing parents did not choose to go missing do not have worse outcomes than the children of stably paired parents, which means that the status of single parenthood in itself does not have the negative impact to which you allude. It's more of an issue of quality of the parents.
Interesting, I haven't heard this argument. Can you point to some studies showing that?
A lot, maybe even the majority, of harm wrought by drugs on lower class people is due to their criminalisation.
There are thousands of people incarcerated just for cannabis. The drug trade, which would be massively disrupted by legalisation, is an obvious trade for many to go into given the circumstances they are born into. And criminalisation makes harm reduction and treatment for addiction much harder to deliver.
I completely agree, and my personal belief is that we should legalize ALL drugs, inclusive of heroin and cocaine. You want to stop the opiod death crisis? Legalization is *literally* the only way to do that.
The actual drugs cost pennies - if they were legally available at a fair cost+20% or whatever at a known strength and purity, there would essentially be zero overdose deaths, and very little negative physical downsides. With pharmaceutically pure stuff, addicts can live and work and function in society for decades. Just look at William Burroughs or Keith Richards!
But I believe my overall point still stands. Definitionally, at the margins will be people whose lives are worse off due to the drugs being legal and easily procurable. Just like at the margins, tens of thousands of people are going to die every year from human-piloted cars, about the same as the amount dying of opiod overdoses. Yet, people choose to drive cars because they perceive their life to be better and more pleasant when driving, even if it comes with some risks. I think that's totally legitimate, and similarly legitimate for the use of legalized drugs.
If "upper-class" in this context includes liberal elite, or those who aspire to be so, or to be seen as such, then a classic example of (a) + (b) is the luxury belief that mass immigration benefits the economy.
Yes, up to a point it may benefit certain aspects of the economy, for rich people. But for members of the "lower classes", who have to compete with the immigants for housing and jobs among other things, the result is much as that rich guy in the film Titanic scoffs to Jack about his lifeboat deal: "not that you'll benefit from it!"
"While something like polyamory could in theory be harmful to the masses, very few people practice it and it's unlikely to take off any time soon."
I think lower class/lower status people are engaging in practical polyamory, they just don't bother with any theory and call it either "sleeping around" or maybe "serial monogamy"; the person who doesn't have one main relationship but a lot of casual partners, or is with one person right now but that doesn't mean they're being monogamous if casual encounters are available.
The only thing is that such behaviour is still considered, to an extent, trashy and low-class. But if the NYT reading class, the chattering class, start adopting it and it gets covered in celebrity gossip rags as it trickles down the status ladder, then people may be persuaded into "let's open up our relationship/oh by the way I'm poly now" who would otherwise be dissuaded by the trashy image.
Dan Quayle got dinged for condemning the Murphy Brown storyline about Murphy becoming a single mom, and he probably deserved it, but nevertheless down the line...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/12/12/u-s-children-more-likely-than-children-in-other-countries-to-live-with-just-one-parent/
"Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%). The study, which analyzed how people’s living arrangements differ by religion, also found that U.S. children from Christian and religiously unaffiliated families are about equally likely to live in this type of arrangement."
It's not that people will see "Golly, Molly Winter, the wife of successful TV soundtrack composer Stewart Winter, is in an open marriage, we should do that too!", it's that over time things become more acceptable. Famous person does it. Well, that's one of those Hollywood celebs, of course they're like that. Less famous person does it. Well, New York values (to quote someone who got into hot water for that). "A few crazy kids on campus" becomes "our organisation urges our staff to put their pronouns in their email sig". And suddenly what was "nobody decent does that" becomes "everybody decent does that".
A couple examples that haven't come up yet:
Drug use- microdosing is cool and high status in some circles, and rich/highly-competent people can usually afford to fix themselves if they go too far (with some famous exceptions). I suspect there are quite many more failure modes for poor people succumbing to drug use, and they have less of a safety net. (Edit: whoops, this did come up. But in a slightly different format. Apologies).
Milder example, veganism. It comes up in ACX/SSC/EA forums fairly often about how it's "not that hard," then people describe their diet, vitamin, blood-testing regimens: if you don't have a strong enough cultural base or a competent neuroticism to make up for that lack, it's easy to wind up with nutrient deficiencies.
>really just policy views where the individuals espousing them do not personally have the capacity to implement them and can therefore say whatever they want.
I would give an alternative version of B: the people espousing the belief do not expect negative consequences from the belief for themselves. This can be the result of being insulated from consequences *or* from (the perception of) having nothing left to lose. Yes, this is a variant of de Jouvenel's high-low vs middle dynamic (https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/9oiywz/illiberal_thinkers_1_bertrand_de_jouvenel_what/).
"Defund the police" fits that perfectly, IMO. High-status people saying it are insulated from the consequences (think of Seth Rogen saying having your car robbed is the price of city life- that's easy to say for someone that can afford to replace it without any effort), and low-status and/or poor people saying it have no trust in police anyways.
> I would like to see examples of luxury beliefs that actually hurt the lower classes when they go on to adopt them.
Well, arguably "sexual promiscuity is fine" is an example of this kind of belief. But that's kind of what the thread is about, so it seems circular to use as an example. I think "drug use is fine" could easily fall into this category. Even aside from just "artificial" consequences like being arrested or drug tested, it's much easier to absorb unexpected costs/risks such as medical side effects or having to take time off work if you have a high-paying salaried job than a low-paying hourly one. You're more likely to be able to afford treatment if you get addicted. It might be easier for you to ensure your drugs are actually just drugs and not mixed with household cleaners or whatever.
A classic example is divorce. Various commentators have pointed out that the upper-class people most likely to endorse the idea that no-fault divorce is a good thing and the traditional nuclear family structure is oppressive - such people are overwhelmingly likely to get married, stay married, and not have children out of wedlock. Divorce is far more common among working-class families, who have to deal with the social and psychological consequences of broken families and children splitting their time between two households. I believe Ross Douthat even compared this phenomenon to class warfare.
Your comment seems to make sense, but then I read again... how on Earth is polyamory a belief, luxury or not? Wouldn't it be a luxury practice, if it's somehow luxury at all?
That also shows how ridiculous the "luxury XYZ" criticism is. If you can afford something that many people can't and is not a necessity, that's a luxury by definition. People with relatively little money will save and make efforts to allow themselves the occasional luxury, like a family trip or fancy clothes. Assigning negative value to mere luxury seems weird and wrong-headed.
Also, and when we talk about actual beliefs, before we start arguing about whether they confer status or inflict damage on such and such, shouldn't we first maybe have a try at the object-level question of whether they are true?
> Also, and when we talk about actual beliefs, before we start arguing about whether they confer status or inflict damage on such and such, shouldn't we first maybe have a try at the object-level question of whether they are true?
That would confer status to rationalists and inflict damage on those who prefer to weaponize the conversation in pursuit of their own private goals.
Lol, good one!!
I think the luxury belief would be something like the following:
"Polyamory is superior to monogamy because it's more in tune with human nature and the desire for sexual variety. Everyone would be so much happier if they just were able to accept this, like I have." Or "I the polyamorist, having risen above petty jealousies and base desires of possessiveness, am enlightened and deserving of higher status than those irrational monogamists who don't possess the emotional maturity to handle a relationship where me and three other dudes are banging the same gal on the reg."
That sounds like a remarkably weird belief. I've seen plenty of groups out there more or less implicitly claiming superiority over the rest of society, but the poly don't really strike me that way. There's always this clear sense of "if you're into that, then...", with an implicit "otherwise, feel free to ignore us".
I've heard watered down versions of both. I can't say how commonly they're actually held, though.
This is mostly a straw man I think. Pretty much every poly person I know would say it is not for everyone, and that many people are better suited to monogamy.
I think the belief is 'non-monogamy is moral'
Do you think that conferring status is a essential part of a "luxury belief"? I would think that any sort of expensive benefit would be a natural candidate. Some luxury goods are things that people acquire in order to demonstrate status, but other luxury goods are actually really pleasant to have, though they are luxuries, because they are really expensive to maintain, and would be problematic for most people despite their real benefits.
Seems like a reasonable definition, but doesn't that make many luxury beliefs good things?
Believing that you should be treated with basic human dignity can be very costly to people at the bottom of society. Many of the poor are in a position to be punished quite harshly if they insist on decent treatment.
Are we comfortable classifying our own (often correct) beliefs as luxury beliefs?
Any luxury belief is negative by definition, in that b) it inflicts costs on the lower classes, while allowing the upper class to reinforce their superior status. It's not metaphorical costs, it's actual costs like those suffered by people who study in shit schools because upper-class people who spend millions to school their own children keep saying that education is overrated and that one should follow their heart and SATs are worthless because holistic admissions making it easier to bribe the Ivy league college to accept their own kids instead. There is no silver lining to luxury beliefs.
"it inflicts costs on the lower classes who will ape the behavior. If both conditions are not met, then it's not a luxury belief."
This is an interesting question to me, but hard to untangle. We already have a certain level of non-monogamy. How do we tell what fraction of lower class monogamy is due to the upper classes or whatever influenced the upper classes originally? Only the portions that are open and consensual? Does acceptance of polyamory make it harder to police cheating? Possibly. And the notion that monogamy is no longer a cultural standard in dating might be a problem for those who rely on a sort of culture boilerplate to do their heavy lifting. I could understand that. On the other hand, middle class polyamory tends to involve a huge amount of relationship analysis, discussion, etc. And how do we measure the benefit of that added cultural context?
The problem with the notion of 'luxury' is that it implies a certain excess of *material* wealth. I question whether material wealth is the luxury in play here (unless we're talking about distinctly middle class luxuries) as opposed to things like having the intelligence and cognitive empathy to navigate complex relationship dynamics.
Although material wealth is often involved, I don't get the impression that anyone intended to limit to just material wealth. Having cognitive freedom or emotional stability both seem to fit the bill in terms of the discussion.
As for your first question, I think the rise in unwed mothers over the last 50-75 years is a really good indication. There is always going to be a fraction of children raised without one or both parents - from parental death if nothing else. We can imagine that, say, 1960 (because those are the stats I found) could be considered a baseline for "natural" single parenthood/unwed motherhood and what we have now is more likely the result of the opening of sexual mores and divorce options. In 1960 5% of births were to single women. Today it's around 40%.
Clarity: status with one group may not equate to status with another. Can we distinguish a "luxury belief" from tribal formation around a set of interests or proclivities?
I've been living below the poverty line for over a decade, and am poly. I have several friends who range from my status to just making ends meet. Yes, I agree that many poly people are at least middle class or above, but certainly not all.
I'm not aping anything from my "betters". I've bern poly for longer than most poly people I know.
You were being pretty evenhanded until you slipped in “the upper classes “
Polyamory has nothing to do with luxury or the upper classes. It’s been practiced by “the peasant class” forever. Just listen to some blues songs; or folk songs.
This one captures the spirit….
https://www.google.com/search?q=woe+is+me+shame+and+scandal+in+the+family&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
If the discussion is about the explicitness of it, if you will, then there is something there.
Your para is true if you substitute 'non-monogamy' for polyamory, but not true as written, I think. Polyamory is a particular set of ideas that non-monogamy via serial infidelity doesn't correspond to.
That is a difference of degree, not of kind. Polyamory is non monogamy stripped of a lot of its subterfuge. And, like any other human experience, it is as rich or as barren as the people involved.
I don't agree with your definitions of "luxury belief" - in my understanding the criteria is simply the various things where it's a luxury to spend your time and effort caring about because the person has the privilege of not having to worry about the many more pressing "lesser issues" that the lower classes *have* to consider, and also often requiring exposure to things or events that aren't common for the lower classes. And while it is *correlated* with status, it doesn't necessarily need to confer status (it might sometimes do it, just as one more visible "class marker"); and the only "inflicted cost" on lower classes is that it may distract them from their priorities, the beliefs required to protect their livelihood and interests.
> For intellectuals not aligned with the mainstream intelligentsia, calling something a luxury belief is just perfect. It condemns a belief in a way that makes most possible counter-evidence irrelevant
Evidence that the belief leads to positive outcomes would still be relevant (it would disprove the idea that the belief was a luxury belief), so I'm not quite sure what you're objecting to.
The concept of luxury beliefs is just the concept of costly signals, applied to beliefs.
> You could say someone who lives by a moral code is just costly signaling that they are so good they can be successful even if they never screw others or cut corners.
You could say that, but in that case you wouldn't get very far; most extant moral codes, including the prohibitions on screwing other people over, have obvious direct benefits.
> You could say someone who gives a lot to charity is costly signaling that they can earn so much money they are willing to be generous.
You can say that, no problem. It's a very common viewpoint.
'Costly belief' is its own term already, it seemed like OP was saying a luxury belief could be have positive benefits for the well-off people who can afford to make it work, but harms poorer people who can't.
In which case, evidence of it helping anyone who can afford luxuries wouldn't count; it's only evidence against the accusation if you can show it consistently helping the poorest and least advantaged, a group who doesn't write a lot of blog posts about their experiences and is hard/inconvenient/annoying to study.
(for example, tests on college students, the subjects of most psychology research, wouldn't count because if they can afford college they're too affluent)
I see three definitions in the thread:
1. (mine) A "luxury belief" is one that someone holds despite the fact that it hurts them. In this model, the more strain a person is under, the more likely they are to renounce the luxury belief. I think this fits the concept of a luxury well.
2. (as you just stated) A "luxury belief" is one that is good for some people and bad for other people.
3. A "luxury belief" is one that is avowed by a person who doesn't believe it. (Then, that person remains unharmed by the belief because they don't conduct themselves as if it were true, but someone who falls for it will be harmed.)
It makes no sense to have a term for definition (2); that's most beliefs and certainly all beliefs with any controversy around them. And the only connection to the concept of "luxury" is that we're defining one group to be well off in some sense and the other group to be not well off in the same sense. That is weird. Luxuries aren't things that are good for rich people and bad for poor people, they're things that rich people can afford and poor people can't. They are bad for poor people only when weighed against opportunity costs, and often not then.
(1) and (3) are not the same definition, but I can see the argument for calling either type a "luxury belief".
I like the first definition you give, though I would replace "the fact that it hurts them" with "the fact that it is costly to hold". There are many different kinds of costs and benefits associated with physical luxury goods, and there could be similar kinds of costs and benefits associated with luxury beliefs.
Compare my mother's stated grounds for her belief that blacks are no dumber than whites: "I wouldn't want to live in a world where [the opposite] was true."
This belief has many negative consequences at the societal level. At the individual level of being a non-managerial white-collar worker in California, it has no particular direct consequences. Holding the opposite belief would have pretty severe consequences if you admitted to it, but of course it also wouldn't have direct consequences if you kept your mouth shut.
There is not a good match to any of the above three definitions. Which side is the "luxury belief"? Well, I think you could poll a lot of agreement with the idea that the luxury belief is the one where the arguments are "it's true because I wish it was true", as long as you didn't fill in what exactly the beliefs were. Can we do better than identifying luxury beliefs by the spurious arguments made in their favor?
I associate hypocrisy with luxury beliefs. I tried to think of an example that wouldn't enrage people and failed utterly, so: BMI correlates inversely with income and even more strongly inversely with education; thinking here of the luxury belief of fat acceptance.
This might be the best example I have heard yet in terms of fitting the framework of (a) conferring status on the person expressing the belief and (b) harming lower class people who adopt it. A fit person can show compassion and reason by expressing the belief that overweight people are largely victims of their genetics, but an overweight person may be better off being prodded in the direction of losing weight.
This does seem to have the right structure (group with privilege holding status-conferring belief without bearing costs of enacting it) but no longer has to do with class; any thin person can arguably seem compassionate and sophisticated by adopting fat acceptance, and (if it were the case that such attitudes played a causal role in obesity) escape the harms that then accrue to fat people of every social rank. That BMI and income are correlated seems pretty incidental to the question of who benefits and who is harmed. The class angle seems pretty central to how 'luxury belief' is lately conceptualized but isn't essential to it, to my mind. Sometimes roping in class comes with unneeded unjustified assumptions (as here), and sometimes roping in class is needed to substitute for evidence of harm (as in the popular "lower classes are being harmed by permissive attitudes toward relationships" take).
When it comes to physique, thin is higher status than fat regardless of any other characteristics a person possesses. Status occurs on many dimensions, not just income and education.
ETA: I re-read your post and I think I better understand the point being made, that the term “luxury beliefs” has strong connotations related to socioeconomic class. This example doesn’t fit the class connotations very well, so you are absolutely correct.
That's quite right--I think it's useful to understand status-conferring and harm-bearing dimensions as much more variable than the upper/lower class distinction allows.
> an overweight person may be better off being prodded in the direction of losing weight.
Free semaglutide for all!
I unironically support this.
I think the fact that all the examples are political hand grenades is something of an indictment of the term in itself, actually.
And for what it's worth, while some people take "fat acceptance" to a comical extreme, a mild version is good for everyone.
I don't think that's unfair. I think the problem is that labels like "luxury belief" do two things simultaneously:
a) assert factual properties of the belief
b) assert an interpretation of why someone would subscribe to such a belief.
In this case, "Luxury Belief" asserts a very negative moral interpretation of why someone would subcribe to such a belief, namely that they don't really care about the actual benefit to anyone, only their own status. But even if the facts a) are true, this doessn't imply b) since people have many reasons for subscribing to beliefs, starting with simple error.
You've described its utitility perfectly -- it's a good term for speaking disdainfully of our social 'betters', but ultimately has no explanatory value.
On the contrary, I think polyamory is a nerdy gentrification - or perhaps a feminist attempt at harm reduction - of what a lot of people have always done. Historically, monogamy has always been associated with a tradition of quiet infidelity. French culture even pretty much institutionalised it.
The underlying problem is that humans are better at pair bonding than we are at maintaining the sexual spark long term. The natural trajectory is towards a dead bedroom - if this were a solved problem then there'd be something like the 12 Steps, rather than a plethora of different books and couples therapies.
I suspect that whenever a couple avoids the dead bedroom, there's always a hack involved, whether it's exaggerated courtship rituals - second honeymoons etc - BDSM (our bag), swinging, adventure holidays, or - the topic under discussion - poly.
It could be both. Taking what “a lot of people have always done” and providing it with increased visibility, status and social cachet can also be harmful to the lower class (eg, hick libs) who adopt the behavior.
I agree on your point about pair bonding vs sexual spark. I question how sustainable even the supposedly happy/stable polycules will turn out to be. (“I saw this cute elderly throuple walking in the park today” is a phrase I doubt I’ll ever hear.)
Interesting broader points in this piece about selection effects but I still hate polyamory.
Or maybe some cultures within the "lower classes" have always had chaotic sex lives and poly would be a good way to help them manage them?
I just wonder if they can pull it off or if it'll just lead to more social breakdown. But maybe we've reached peak chaos and it'll improve things.
Seriously, lower class people can't think for ourselves? Hellooo. Class issues ahoy
How do you define a polycule? For example, my last one involved me and partner (6.5y), partner and their partner (TP) (over a decade), TP and their partner (TTP) (9y), TTP and their partner (TTTP) (3y), etc. I'm still part of their lives, 6y after breakup with partner. Went on vacation with them and others, which TTP paid for, because poor. Many polycules become families.
I don't think you and various other people here understand what polyamory is. It's not a fancy word for having lotsa hookups or, if you are partnered, for having affairs. It's not swinging. It's a romantic and sexual relationship among more than 2 people. So if there are 3 of them, then instead of being a couple they are a thruple. It is understood among all the members that some or all of them will be having sex with various others in the group. It's out in the open. And often the members of the poly group make some commitments of some sort to each other and to their more-than-one-person love relationship. At least, that is what all the people I know who use the world polyamory mean by it.
Yes, my understanding from observing my local poly friends is that - as you say - it's not about hookups. It does, however, build variety into the long term.
"It's not a fancy word for having lotsa hookups"
Not yet, not for the people making up the rules and little groups and discussing this amongst themselves and reading the Ethical Slut books and so forth.
Solo polyamory, to me, looks like old-fashioned sleeping around just with a theoretical construction put on it, but I'm not anywhere near that lifestyle so what do I know?
https://www.webmd.com/sex/what-is-solo-polyamory
"Solo polyamory means that someone has multiple intimate relationships with people but has an independent or single lifestyle. They may not live with partners, share finances, or have a desire to reach traditional relationship milestones in which partners’ lives become more intertwined."
Now, the ethical theoreticians may practice this in a very different manner and not have the same kind of mindset or life as the guy with a string of 'relationships' where he has kids by three different women, none of whom he lives with, and is sleeping with two new sidepieces right now - but to an outsider, it looks the same. Middle-class Robert and lower-class Bobby are not in committed relationships, are having sex with different partners, and are not "sharing finances or intertwined lives".
And as poly disseminates out into the mainstream, if it does, it will be like dye in water as it reaches the level Bobby is at - it will be diluted immensely from the original practice Robert adheres to.
I remember hooking up with someone in college who asked "how long have you been poly?" I didn't think I was poly, just single.
Who knows how which way cultural diffusion will go, but my guess is that polyamory, with its awkward greco-latin name, mostly remains a label for "group relationships with lots of agreed upon explicit rules".
The other thing is much more common, and already has the common friendly name of "open relationships". Or as you said yourself, "sidepieces".
Um, solo poly here for several decades. It can be about lots of casual sex, and I have no problem with that so long as everyone knows that and pregnancy and STI prevention is maintained at a high standard.
The guy with multiple kids by multiple partners you describe? Not poly. Never was, never will be.
Also, poly isn't just happening in little groups. It isn't common, but it is a full-fledged thing, with international orgs.
dunno, when is "dead" an "early dead"? Heard once, lesbians have that the early issue, know an ex-hetero-couple, too - me now in 11th year and in my fifties and still wonder: why even bear another person if not for this? Statistics seem to indicate, married(partnered) people do it more and with each other. Anthropology suggests loose partnerships with a prefered partner. Scott once wrote 'Polyamory is boring', I guess he is right (monogamy obviously is, too). But neither: dead bedroom. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/06/polyamory-is-boring/
Googling around yields the stats for dead bedrooms or dry spells to be anything between 16% and 50%.
If it's as low as 16%, then I suppose you could argue that those are the folk who *need* specific other arrangements; that these aren't actually hacks but rather revealed preferences.
I'm sure partnered folk do have sex more often *on average* than unpartnered ones. However, most of that probably happens early in the relationship.
> Anthropology suggests loose partnerships with a prefered partner.
Which suggests that some variations on poly are "natural", in so far as poly goes with the grain of human nature.
Since you mention "natural", what I've heard from the world of ethology, putting humans in the wider context of sexually reproducing animals, is that as a species we're much closer to long-term pair-bonding than to free-for-all, but not all the way so. Hence all these unstable situations, like our tendency to form long-term bonds and then cheat or drop out.
That's what I'm talking about. We've become "too good" at pair bonding compared or our ability to maintain sexual interest.
I would speculate that this has something to do with developing consciousness and then culture, plus our extended longevity compared to what it was when these instincts evolved.
If so, why the need to sell so much Cialis?
It's not just humans either. I remember reading about a male crow being tracked who they knew was infertile, but his mate kept successfully having children anyways. No points for guessing how that happened. More interestingly, I've personally witnessed a crow couple have a really violent fight (right in front of their child, too), and after that day, only one parent would come visit me with their child. I'm pretty sure they split up, and I'm not even sure if they ever got back together again.
It makes sense that as intelligence increases, behavioral patterns become less consistent. That's the whole point of intelligence, after all; to allow one to dynamically adapt to situations instead of being fixed to a doomed path.
Poly is usually boring.
Probably both, honestly. Nerds and feminists seem to be a big portion of the people doing it.
As for the kink--you would be surprised how often I got the 'my husband doesn't want to dominate me' thing on OKCupid back in my dissolute era. (Yes, I know it's the other way in your case. The point still holds and, really, I agree with you.)
Agree that this is gentrifying a universal feature of human mating behaviors, disagree about trying to explain why it happens with generic flaws in human nature/relationships.
Most behavioral strategies are not unitary in a population, there is usually variance between different types of behavioral strategies in different proportions that create a hard-to-exploit equilibrium across the population.
We should expect some number of monogamous people and some number of poly people and some number of whatever other categories we want to draw in every human population, just because a population with a pure strategy featuring only one of those for everybody would be vulnerable to exploitation and invasion by other strategies.
We don't need a universal explanation like 'dead bedrooms trend towards infidelity' or w/e, we can sufficiently explain this with normal human variance.
I'm not sure these are flaws as such.
It's more like the way we diagnose some kids as ADHD when really all they are doing is failing to thrive in the unnatural constraints of the classroom.
These are sentences where 'often' would have been uncontroversial, but 'always' stretches credulity. Do you wish to be understood as literally denying the existence of happy monogamous fidelity?
Absolutely not.
However, I think in most cases - assuming they are sexually active together - the couple in question is applying some hack, maybe as vanilla as strategic second honeymoons or makeup sex, or messing with tantric stuff.
> or perhaps a feminist attempt at harm reduction
Yeah, I think this is close. I'd describe it as a straightforward continuation of a pattern I associate with 3rd-wave feminism, of noticing patterns of human behavior that were suppressed and stigmatized by the dominant culture, and finding a way to implement them in ways that align with "feminist" values such as consent. (Same as with various flavors of kink.)
M/f kink is basically a way of laundering traditional gender roles through 'kink'.
You would be surprised how many feminists were into it. Or maybe you wouldn't.
I basically view gender, as in the "social construct" type of gender, as being a socially approved form of role-playing. I'm not a half-elf paladin or an orc mercenary, but I've played them at times and had fun, sometimes even dressing up for the live-action stuff. Putting on gendered clothes to go to the opera is similar. And yeah, I do have preferences - there's stuff that I can try to play as but it doesn't really click, and other stuff that just fits like a glove the first time I try.
That's a good example of the same process. Just because an urge is natural, doesn't mean it's good. However, just because an urge is bad doesn't mean you can't have fun with it and maybe scratch the itch. See also martial arts.
Agreed.
As for the urge being good or bad...I suppose it only makes sense we'd disagree on *this* one, huh? ;)
I meant "the urge" in the sense of "*an* urge", if you know what I mean. The urges I scratch when playing video games, for example, are probably not good ones.
Hello from Saint-Petersburg, Russia.
I'm in the center of local polyamorous (mostly, but not only, in a broad sense, i.e. ENM) community. Our polycule of 3 lives on ~$2500/month and we are not far from being the richest people in our social bubble. ~$20-25/day is considered an ok-ish salary.
We're always quite surprised when we hear that polyamory is apparently the lifestyle for rich:)
I have heard it's seeing adoption among less-affluent young people as a way of coping with uncertain jobs and high housing costs, so that may be a third cluster along with nerds and feminists.
Isn't St Petersburg sort of the California of Russia? Long intellectual history, closer ties to Europe, etc.?
Eh, my experience with lower class relationships doesn't bear this out.
Maybe you could make that argument about casualizing divorce and/or normalizing co-habition or something, but given how common divorce and co-habitation are, the horse is already out of the barn. Marriages already get broken up, children are already out of wedlock, there's not a lot of sacred cows left protecting us against those things.
Whereas for the people who can manage it, normalized polyamory can provide a mechanism for more distributed types of networks of support and mutual aid and tight-knit community.
Because the Public Discourse world is surprisingly small in some ways, the guy that coined "luxury beliefs" has complained about the nearly-unknown author of the feted poly book getting book events while he can't despite having a much larger audience: https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/book-stores-dont-want-to-host-an
"Right background, check; right boxes, check."
>Sounds Effectively Altruistic to me.
Hahaha, I like this model, yes.
The "luxury belief" thing was already mostly addressed in the subscriber-only post.
From Scott:
>[quotes from the author]…so you might think the author believes that polyamory is, in some sense, associated with the rich. Any such belief would be false - both of the studies I know of addressing the demographics of polyamory (1, 2) find that it’s about equally common across social classes.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8023325/
[2] https://sci-hub.st/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224499.2018.1474333
---
From the comments (presented without attribution in case anyone was relying on the anonymity of subscriber-only):
>Wasn’t this article just one of the alt-right criticisms of polyamory as a “luxury belief”, repackaged for the left instead?
--
>The problem with the "luxury belief" conception for polyamory is that polyamory doesn't really buy you any status... at least not outside certain small groups which are themselves low-status. If I, as an upper middle class person, started telling people I was polyamorous then I wouldn't get status, I'd get a whole bunch of "ew, TMI" and "I didn't need to know that".
>I agree that being opposed to polyamory is low status (unless you couch it in a bunch of left-wing blather like this guy did) but actively being polyamorous isn't high status (unless maybe you're really good looking).
---
Even the author of the article disgrees (with himself):
>Meanwhile, others have turned to ethical non-monogamy precisely because our society is not set up to their advantage. They practice it not as part of an individual journey of self-discovery, but as a way to have more support, materially and emotionally. In 2022 the writer and disability-rights activist Jillian Weise wrote a thoughtful essay, also for New York magazine, exploring the freedom polyamory provides to her as a disabled person. That piece did not generate the breathless coverage of either More or New York’s canoodling cats.
Exactly. Thank you. Disabled, poor and poly here.
The lower class (at least if defined by education and income) has already been on this trajectory for a long time, while the upper classes have mostly continued on the track of getting married and not having kids outside of it. Arguably the upper class as a responsibility, which they've failed to meet, to use its cultural influence to encourage this behavior. Also arguably, popularizing polyamory in culture could make the problem worse. But the damage is largely already done, and I think it could easily be the case that it stems more from ignoring the upper classes than from paying attention to them too closely.
I think I object to the idea that people who live a certain lifestyle are morally culpable for the harm done by third parties who choose to imitate or make TV shows about that lifestyle. No one is forcing the third parties to do those things; shouldn't the people choosing to do bad imitations or make bad TV shows have the primary moral responsibility for the effects of those choices?
Maybe if the original person is going out of their way to draw attention or promote the lifestyle, but then you're essentially back to hating people who write books, not all people who live the lifestyle.
I also object to labeling lifestyles as "beliefs". That's just poor terminology.
Fair points. I would say common sense would apply: there are certain things that I do, that I don't think everyone should do because they would be awful for them (I went to J-school, for example: awful waste of good time and money); so it's fine that you do certain things without the need to turn your own tastes into moral crusades.
I live in ohio. Most poly people I know are queer and either poor or working class. Seems to work fine for them.
I mean, I don't think people are going to copy polyamory just because they saw it on TV.
It's way more likely that material reality drives people to poly, and one material reality is that it's easier to afford living on 3 - 4 incomes than on one, and if you have 3 - 5 adults cohabiting you may be able to skimp on childcare costs.
There's that saying about how California rent keeps relationships that are long dead going. I predict that urban rent and cost of childcare is going to create so, so, so many toxic polycules, just as the aspiration for a house with a white picket fence in the suburbs and 2.5 kids thing created so many terrible hetero monogamous marriages (because what are you going to do otherwise? Spinsters and bachelors were seen as suspect, you probably couldn't have gone very far without the wife and kids).
Sounds like those are precisely the sorts of people who would fuck up their lives regardless. Do you honestly think they'd be great parents and spouses if they'd never heard of polyamory? They just would have found some other excuse to torpedo their relationships and ignore their responsibilities.
I read section II and thought, "Hmmm. I should conduct a close analysis of the things I do gracefully and effortlessly and try to write about what I discover..."
Then I read section III and thought, "No... I really shouldn't."
You're allowed to write a blog post. If it gets to a book then yeah, don't :)
Be careful. Trying to overanalyze something you only unconsciously understand can give you The Yips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yips
I know this isn't the point of your post, but "Treat every day as a gift from God" is much better relationship advice than non-violent communication, etc.
Seriously! Just being grateful for the simple things in life is such an amazing way to improve it. Having a warm bed! People who recognize you and smile when they see you! The smell of toast! Hot running water! And that's just in my first-world city life.
But only people who already believe and feel this way would understand what you're talking about. You're not convincing or persuading anyone with this. You're right, but it's not useful.
From what I've heard, the actionable version of this advice is "start keeping a gratitude journal of the things you were thankful for". I've heard some people who admitted to being instinctively averse to the idea refer to it as being "infuriatingly effective", which is about as high praise as you can give something like that. Rewiring your trapped priors to see the good in life, or whatever.
Put me in the 'infuriatingly effective' camp. Also in the 'incredibly cringe but effective' camp is the practice of grace at mealtimes; I'm no longer religious, but think a daily dinner practice of being thankful for your daily bread is deeply healthy.
For what it's worth, my relationship advice mostly boils down to 'don't be an asshole and don't hang out with assholes'; it's been very effective for me, but of course, is highly dependent on being able to identify assholery (in yourself and others) and is therefore useless for those who don't already practice it.
I think there is actually a large difference between "Treat every day as a gift from God" and the "infuriatingly effective" actionable version. The former is vapid, the latter is an actual thing you can do.
It is like the difference between the advice Scott says is given by the healthy and functional, vs the legible but wrong advice from the dysfunctional. Except: this advice is legible without being wrong! Maybe something like a translation service for vapid correct advice is the way to bridge the gap and make advice useful.
For me at least, the need for gratitude is not something I need to be convinced of, but something I need to be reminded of.
I do have a lot to be grateful for, but it's far too easy to get caught up in the day-to-day business of life and forget about that. It's too easy to be focused on the things we don't have and forget to be grateful for the things we do.
So, I am grateful to Moon Moth for today's reminder.
Thank you! :-)
I'd say it's a description of what the destination looks like from inside, but not a map of how to get there? But if you've been there, it may remind you that you can go back?
To your point, "don't be depressed" has got to be one of the worst pieces of advice ever.
Ehnhn... bravery debates and all that, I think.
Good advice for spoiled people who are self-centered and have unrealistic expectations and are too upset by minor setbacks.
But also the type of advice that keeps a lot of people in abusive relationships for much too long, or gets them to ignore problems instead of trying to solve them.
The problem here is probably expecting any piece of advice to be 'good' in and of itself, rather than 'good for a specific person in a specific situation'.
> The problem here is probably expecting any piece of advice to be 'good' in and of itself, rather than 'good for a specific person in a specific situation'.
I agree with this. I'd say, I wouldn't expect telling a random person these specific words would help, but I do think that most if not all people could benefit from getting to a place where they have first-hand experience with what the words refer to.
Recognizing and getting out of abusive situations is a completely different matter. Or maybe it's the flip-side of not taking stuff for granted, where just like we should pay attention to the nice things in life and notice and appreciate them, we should also pay attention to the painful things in life and notice them and reject them. (IMO, one of the key parts of abuse is getting people to the point where they think that it's wrong for them to feel hurt, that their pain is "invalid" and deserved.)
I separated from my husband of 30 years and the father of my kids for precisely this reason. I wanted to be grateful for the every day joys and not only was he incapable of doing so, he couldn't bear to let me do it either. I'm grateful that the option was available. We did not need to be screaming at each other or hitting each other to be making each other unhappy every day.
Is it? I think it is exactly as vapid as Scott implies. Or even if it does have meaning, it is probably something close to "Just be a kind and happy person." Which is completely non-actionable to a person who is not kind and happy. (If nonviolent communication fares much better is another question.)
"Whenever you feel that your life sucks and your relationship sucks and everything sucks, remind yourself of all the things you have that so many other people don't have, like enough food, a roof over your head, and not having your kids be killed by a missile strike. Then remember that although you could have it better, you could also have it much, much worse."
This is in the same spirit as "gift from God", but more concrete and actionable. And it helps me sometimes, when I feel that my life sucks and my relationship sucks and everything sucks.
That’s because “gift from God” is a form of toxic positivity for a person that is suffering whereas you are having a heartfelt good faith conversation with yourself about what is really true about your life.
Good point. The only way I can make sense of "gift from God", no matter how literally or metaphorically you take the word "God", is if this sense of "gift" applies equally when life is treating you badly as when it's treating you well. Which strains the metaphor quite close to the breaking point. It's wonderful when it works though, I've literally seen people be thankful for cancer.
Goddam it, agree with you. Toxic positivity is exactly the right word for it.
Good advice if you are a typical reader of this blog, probably.
Bad advice if you are in an abusive relationship you should be escaping, or have real relationship problems that could actually be fixed with the right effort
There's not a single piece of advice that's applicable to every person in every situation. "Eat less!" - "Eat more!" - "Quit your job!" - "Hang in there!" - "Put more work into your relationship!" - "Get a divorce!" - Each of these can be just the right thing for some and directly harmful for others.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk
""Just be a kind and happy person." Which is completely non-actionable to a person who is not kind and happy."
Yeah, SBF forbid that a person ever, ever change in the least.
"But whyyyy I deserve to be happy" "Do you?"
You're confusing "this won't make them change," with, "they can't ever change." No, they definitely can change, but your cute quote ain't gonna be what causes it.
A surprising number of effective philosophies, like stoicism (and its children REBT and CBT) and Bogleheadism, aren't very complex.
Happy, no, but kindness is a practiced skill. Yes, some people are naturally better at it than others, but anyone *can* get at least a bit better at it with effort.
Gratitude is a practiced skill, as well, which is why I think the top-level advice here really applies.
Yes. The person whose relationships have all failed will have 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 advice, not 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 advice.
Came here largely to say this. Not that it's *useful* advice, but that most good advice is obvious and if you don't get it or struggle to do it, probably breaking it down into smaller pieces and trying to examine each bit of it won't help at all. If it did, the productivity industry would have made us all productive by now.
Not to someone who doesn't already know the infinite context and cached thoughts hidden behind that simple phrase, I would say.
For example: 'Today is a gift from God, and you are ruining that gift by getting annoyed about me not doing the dishes! What is wrong with you!'
You probably have an idea of how that phrase cashes out in relationship behaviors and perspectives and stuff, but on it's own it doesn't say much.
Yes, but that's true of any advice you could fit inside a comment section.
I don't know that I agree, is there a significant part of the population that would benefit from *more* violent communication in their relationship?
I wouldn't recommend that to people who get exploited because they don't angrily stand up for themselves while throwing things, for example; I'd recommend they find someone who doesn't exploit them.
"Non-violent communication" is a term of art. It has nothing to do with not throwing things.
There is a significant portion of the population that would be hurt by going down the NVC rabbit-hole.
What? How in the world would this hurt them?
I am not maximally pro-NVC, but a modicum of NVC has sure seemed to help a lot of low income folks I’ve known.
You must know that it is logically possible for something to be helpful for one person and unhelpful, even harmful, for another.
Personally I have never met anyone who got anything out of NVC long-term, although I have met many who were initially enthusiastic.(and have occasionally been subjected to it myself). Perhaps it works better on "low income folks," I don't know. There may also be cultural issues, I don't know where you're from.
Honestly, for the most part I've found it to be a harmless waste of time, but it can cause two big problems; firstly, although in theory it's supposed to be just for you, in practice it gives people a weapon to accuse others of communicating inappropriately; and secondly, that it discourages judgement and blame - which could be good for some! - but in practice most people seem to have the opposite issue and could stand to be a lot more judgemental.
I'm slightly disappointed you didn't format "(have I just accidentally re-invented televangelists? Fine, I’ve just re-invented televangelists; I recommend against marrying one.)" as a Song of Myself joke.
I find that poem so annoying! If only I could pin down the reason why...
Oh, don't worry, the only part I know about is the one I'm referencing:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
>I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,
Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?<
Those are some dangerous towels. Some towels from the Sorceror's Apprentice.
It's a bit hard to get into due to the face-value narcissism, but once inside it is what Scott here spoke of as making the ordinary human transcendent. Whitman invites us to use his words to describe our own experience "(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you, / Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.)".
Sorry if this is somewhat off-topic, but I don't have a subscription to The Atlantic: did Tyler Austin Harper (a professor of English at Colby College who, I believe, specializes in stuff like late Victorian sci-fi novelists like H.G. Wells) mention how Silicon Valley polyamory is linked to American Golden Age sci-fi authors like Robert Heinlein?
For example, Heinlein worked hard to normalize polyamory in his last book before his cerebral problems, the 1966 libertarian cult classic "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress." Like most people in the Luna colony, the regular guy narrator Manny, a computer repairman, is in a group marriage. This, he explains, is a remnant of the early days of the moon colony when there were far more men than women. Nowadays, the sexes are more equal in number, but Loonies found that they still prefer group marriages for reasons. Manny discounts all the hubba-hubba snickering: polyamory is purely a sensible way to organize that side of life and it's good for the kids!
My impression is that Heinlein had a normal heterosexual man's urge for sexual variety, and he was born without the Jealousy Gene, so, being a reasonable guy, he thought a share-and-share-alike system made sense.
Many of the older tech tycoons like Musk and Bezos are big Heinlein fans. And Heinlein studied his readers carefully and respectfully. Although not a nerd himself -- an Annapolis grad, he struck his fans as a glamorous officer-and-gentleman type who'd be played by Franchot Tone in a movie, which helps explain why they always deferred to him as "the dean of science fiction" even as he got older and crankier -- and he seems to have noted their tendencies such as polyamory and even transgenderism.
Alas, the only hit for "sci" is "lifestyle fascism".
There was a TV series a few years ago about Heinlein's pals Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard and their wives: Strange Angel.
I hate to support mainstream media, but anything with Aleister Crowley, the Babalon Working, and Parsons' attempt to build a homunculus has got to be entertaining. Do what thou wilt.
You should check out the underrated film Mock-Up on Mu which uses the Parsons-Cameron-Crowley-Hubbard story as its starting point.
https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/mock-up-on-mu
I think Heinlein was a gentleman among nerds but would have seemed a nerd among gentlemen.
He's an example of the older libertarian tendency in sci-fi before it got taken over by wokies; I still remember Niven and Pournelle picking on the environmentalist movement in Fallen Angels. That was in the 80s and 90s. Before that you can even count John Norman, author of the notorious male-dominant BDSM Gor hexatrigintology, who apparently got the boot when Donald Wollheim's daughter took over at DAW from him. (OK, it was a hexavigintology at the time.) He's a libertarian. (He's still alive and just dropped the 36th book...)
Apparently his wife, Virginia Heinlein, got him into both polyamory and libertarianism; before that he was just a lefty. The lady was basically your libertarian nerd's dream woman: bright, athletic but feminine, mechanically competent, and libertarian. (Apparently the secret to getting the lady scientist is to be a famous science fiction author.) Heinlein's very unpopular among feminists despite having an obvious taste for strong, competent women.
OK, but wokies are still into polyamory (modern right-wing sci-fi authors like Vox Day most definitely are not). I'd go further and say polyamory makes sense for nerds because there aren't enough female nerds to go around, so there's an obvious solution: share! The male nerds get to sleep with someone, the female nerd(s) get a choice of partners...everyone wins! As for non-nerdy wokies, which is a lot of them, it lets the women indulge their taste for sexual variety, but they put up a lot of feminist stuff to drive off the inevitable supply of men looking to sleep around rather than form multiple relationships.
You may want to read the polyamory subreddit. It is woke as f*** but often unintentionally hilarious, and the single best argument for monogamy I have ever read (likely for reasons Scott says).
Stuff like "Starship Troopers" leads me to think Heinlein was conservative. I think he mostly could think good, commonsense thoughts, and that most people aren't as far apart on topics as people think they are.
Seriously, he was all over the political map.
You know how most people's views on disparate issues correlate (pro-gun people are often also pro-life)? Heinlein's an exception to that rule. That 99% correlation? He's the 1%.
(OK, I know a correlation coefficient is the *square root* of the proportion of variation explained by the model, but consider it poetic license.)
This kind of correlation has long puzzled me. I don't doubt it is true, but have no good explanation for it. My best explanation is people listen to someone pushing an agenda, so they listen to a person, rather than think through issues.
Factor 1: Any belief with any natural correlation will tend to cluster. People who believe in small government will tend to believe in lower taxes, and vice versa, since you can't make an infinitely big government on no money. The correlation doesn't have to be perfect, because it's then exaggerated by...
Factor 2: People on the other side are annoying and stupid, people on my side are smart and wise, so I listen to the people on my side and disdain the people on the other side. When Ben Shapiro explains how great monogamy is, I nod my head and accept his wisdom as I accepted all his other wisdom.
For Factor 1, the correlations seem to sometimes be contradictory. Such as gun control and pro-life. Or capital punishment and pro-life. If the sanctity of life is the important thing, aren't these inconsistent?
Most people don't have a lot of time to spend thinking out the implications of tax policy or the minimum wage, and are more interested in work and family. They pick the side that has an issue they care about (abortion, immigration, transgender rights), or else pick the side they fit in better with socially (red tribe, blue tribe). Since any practical political change involves voting for one of our two parties in the USA, it doesn't really make any difference what you actually think, and holding heretical views in our polarized era means you can be suspect for belonging to the other side. So thinking for yourself is actually a bad idea.
It may be different in Europe with multiple parties, though I suspect you have a weaker version of the same effect.
> This kind of correlation has long puzzled me. I don't doubt it is true
You should; it isn't true. (Or rather, the correlation exists, but at negligible levels.)
Andrew Gelman wrote about this - both the issue, and the popular assumption that people's individual attitudes agree with the views of their political party - about ten years ago: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2012/12/19/a-psychologist-writes-on-politics-his-theories-are-interesting-but-are-framed-too-universally-to-be-valid/ , https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2012/12/21/kahan-on-pinker-on-politics/
> The psychologist I’m thinking about here is Steven Pinker, who, in writes the following on the question, “Why Are States So Red and Blue?”:
>> But why do ideology and geography cluster so predictably? Why, if you know a person’s position on gay marriage, can you predict that he or she will want to increase the military budget and decrease the tax rate . . . there may also be coherent mindsets beneath the diverse opinions that hang together in right-wing and left-wing belief systems. Political philosophers have long known that the ideologies are rooted in different conceptions of human nature — a conflict of visions so fundamental as to align opinions on dozens of issues that would seem to have nothing in common.
> This is all fine—except that attitudes on such diverse issues are not so highly correlated. For a quick check, I went to the General Social Survey website and looked up correlations among attitudes on gay marriage (marhomo), military spending (natarms) and upper-income tax rates (tax rich). The correlations are 0.17, 0.09, and 0.05.
> Before developing a theory of why people’s attitudes on such issues are so highly correlated, we should first measure what correlation is actually there.
He also wrote this paper on the subject : http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/B&G_PartisansWithoutConstraint_final.pdf
Which, if I'm reading the abstract correctly, found that increasing polarization caused people to more often be found avowing membership in a political party that harmonized with their views, but did not noticeably change the views themselves:
> the authors model trends in issue partisanship—the correlation of issue attitudes with party identification—and issue alignment—the correlation between pairs of issues—and find a substantive increase in issue partisanship, but little evidence of issue alignment. The findings suggest that opinion changes correspond more to a resorting of party labels among voters than to greater constraint on issue attitudes: since parties are more polarized, they are now better at sorting individuals along ideological lines.
The links seem a bit too dry and uninteresting for me to analyze in-depth right now, but at least I'll take away from this that I should indeed doubt the correlation, as I doubt almost everything anyway.
I do suspect that people don't really think about issues, but fall on the same side as the people they respect and/or associate with. Thinking can be hard work and isn't for everyone, nor, apparently, for most people.
Yes
Heinlein was much influenced politically by his various wives. Not much is known about his first wife, but his second wife in the 1930s had him in touch with Hollywood leftist circles, occultists, and so forth. His third wife was libertarian.
Another thing about Heinlein is he got bored fairly easily and then moved on to other topics, which makes him an interesting writer. He didn't have any interest in becoming a cult leader like his friend and fellow sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard or Ayn Rand did, so he didn't bother being politically consistent. Thus, his three main cult novels are aimed at three quite different cults: Starship Troopers is for militarists, Stranger in a Strange Land was adopted by hippies/druggies, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by libertarians.
Note: I'm not familiar with his books written after The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. He had cerebral health problems from 1966-69 and couldn't write. Then he awoke to find himself rich and famous because hippies had taken up "Stranger" and all the old censorship rules were gone. His post-medical crisis 1970s books sound in summary pretty dire, but they sold well and many people today only know him from those.
Heinlein's 1950s juvenile novels for 13 year old boys strike me as his best stuff.
That correlation has increased over time and is particularly marked in the United States: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/section-1-growing-ideological-consistency/
The above shows from 1994, I recall the trend continuing to the 50s (where people's views were much less correlated), but I'm struggling to find the research; will reply here if I get around to it.
It's so amusing to see this debate - Heinlein made a deliberate effort to "get inside the heads of" differing ideas and steelman them on paper. He was not espousing (all of) moon is a harsh mistress, or starship troopers, or stranger in a strange land, off the top of my head.
He was just good enough at writing that it was hard to imagine he was just writing about it.
Right, there's also "Beyond this Horizon" which has an armed society, and what could be described as eugenics... advising people who to have kids with. I think if you want to get inside Heinlein's head the best lens would be his juveniles.
> hexatrigintology
I'm trying to figure out the construction of this word. hexa- is a Greek root for 6. trigint- is Latin for 30. -log- is Greek again, leading to a conflict where the vowel connecting from trigint- should be -i- but the vowel connecting to -log- should be -o-.
> hexavigintology
This seems to confirm that we're using mixed Greco-Latin numerals for whatever reason. The Greek word for thirty ("triakonta") is clearly cognate to the Latin word, leaving the possibility of confusion open; the words for twenty are not similar.
But then it gets even weirder. Neither language actually allows the formation of numbers this way. It isn't possible to just prefix "six" to "thirty", even if you restrict yourself to Greek. Compare the oktokaitriakontedron,† the figure of thirty-𝗮𝗻𝗱-eight faces, in Archimedes' work: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=o%29ktwkaitriako%2Fntedron&la=greek . Or the much better known triskaidekaphobia, the fear of three-𝗮𝗻𝗱-ten.
An immediate implication is that the word "hexadecimal" is malformed on top of its parallel Greco-Latin construction. (In Latin prefixing without inserting an "and" does occur, and seems to be obligatory, for numbers in the teens, but the "and" appears again in the twenties and presumably higher numbers. The Latin form would be "sedecimal", with no "and". Greek requires the "and"; 16 is hekkaideka (with -ksk- getting simplified to -kk-) but I'm not sure what an adjectival form should look like.
† If someone else knows, I'd like to know why the aspiration at the beginning of "hedron" isn't preserved in the compound form. Does this word postdate the disappearance of initial aspiration in Greek? Does it postdate the transformation of [tʰ] into [θ]?
It was a joke. I was poking fun at Norman and needed the word for the equivalent of a trilogy with 36 books. I think I saw 'duotrigintillion' somewhere.
If I were to guess, "duo𝗱𝗲trigintillion", where duodetriginti is Latin for 28, literally "two from thirty".
Just for fun, I'll also note that while the Latin and Greek words for 20, viginti and eikosi, are not especially similar to each other, they are still cognate.
Well, not to mention Stranger in a Strange Land, in which he self described the book as "about a sex cult in an upholstered attic."
Most poly people don't consider Heinlein's stuff to be poly.
That's interesting. I had thought that one of the appeals of poly is you can structure it however you want, which would seem to apply to things like the line marriages of Stranger in a Strange Land.
Do poly people generally consider poly relationships to require some qualities that Heinlein didn't include?
I rather like IMDB's mini-bio of Gaio Giulio Cesare:
> Gaio Giulio Cesare was born on July 13, 100 in Rome, Roman Republic. He was a writer, known for La conquête des Gaules (1923) and Caesar the Conqueror (1962). He died on March 15, 44 in Rome, Roman Republic.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2471712/bio/
They left out that Gaio Giulio Cesare was interested in calendar reform.
Indeed ! They mention some other curious facts about the writer in the "Trivia" block (below the mini-bio), but they completely omitted this one crucial detail.
:-)
I assume he at least wanted to keep July?
It was previously called Quintilis, but renamed after him when he died. Sextilis was renamed after his great-nephew.
> I think this goes beyond polyamory. The people I know from various oft-discussed groups - transgender, super-religious, autistic, rich, etc - are all nicer and more normal than their public representatives would lead you to believe.
I think this may have something to do with how said public representatives are algorithmically selected to be maximally rage-inducing to the "other side".
Also because it generally requires some annoying over-confidence to put oneself out there as a public representative, yes?
Perhaps, but I think it's baked in to the process? It's a gradual frog-boiling, of positive reinforcement, where each additional increment of rage-inducement gives more likes from Good People and more flames from Bad People. So the end will be more likely to be annoyingly overconfident than the start, but there's also other ways to be rage-inducing.
Nah I think it's the death of "respectability politics" - activists and advocates used to go out of their way to appeal to/assuage the concerns of normies, now you get bonus points for triggering them. The Church of Satan is a good example of this.
I think the death of respectability politics is part of the effect of the algorithm dynamic Moon Moth's is pointing to.
If respectability and compromise gets you more of what you want, while vitriol and trolling set you back, people will aspire to and enforce more respectability and compromise in their social movements.
But if respectability and compromise means you get ignored in favor of vitriol and trolling, people will aspire to and enforce more vitriol and trolling in their social movements.
True, although it's sort of interesting, apparently the term was invented in 1993 (as a way to criticize the concept) in the race studies world. It's like 90s academia has become our whole mainstream culture.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-rise-of-respectability-politics/
Possibly because people outside of academia didn't have a way of participating in culture wars before the internet and social media happened.
My impression is that "respectability politics" is always an undercurrent, and gains and loses prominence in waves? Like, it's always a useful skill to be able to speak the local prestige dialect (in my case, a "neutral" variety of American Standard English), but sometimes schools go overboard in forcing its use all the time and calling any other dialects "bad grammar" and other epithets, but other times schools go overboard in dismissing ASE and promoting the use of local dialects and calling them "more authentic" and "natural". And yet the reality is that it's good to be able to speak both, and switch back and forth as appropriate, which can sometimes mean making a point by using the opposite one from what other people around you are using.
The selection process you're pointing to looong predates the advent of social media or of widespread Internet access.
I agree that the dynamic has always existed, but I think the ad-driven Internet, ubiquitous smart phones, and social media algorithms have dramatically increased its speed and reach. The guy ranting in a medieval village pub about Wat Tyler can now reach half the population of the planet in a matter of hours.
It's like the apocryphal Stalin quote, "quantity has a quality all its own".
Also, I suspect that the process of engaging with the public tends to bring out the worst in people. Add two hours of getting yelled at by idiots to your daily routine - is it going to make you nicer?
I think that's part of the algorithm. The idiots get shown your thing because it gets them interacting on the site, and you see their responses because it gets you interacting on the site, and the people who'd quietly nod or shake their head get shown something else that hooks into their particular triggers.
Probably.
Out of curiosity, is your name a reference to the Jack Vance story?
Yep. :-)
Nice!
I was looking for a pseudonym, and was on a Jack Vance kick, and it jumped right out. Memorable, silly, and unpretentious. :-)
In some cases, but I don't think it's the whole explanation. Narcissists are ready to tell you a dramatic story of their own life, saving the journalists the effort of doing an in -depth interview. There are still many shows and articles which are not intended to be rage bait, and they still seem to showcase many narcissists.
I suspect that narcissists generate an unusually high amount of rage in me, so I'm probably not a good judge. :-)
Right or, "Don't let the Atlantic push your buttons." (in fact why read the Atlantic at all?)
Nice and friendly people have more friends that nasty and hostile people.
This means the people you're friends with from a group will be nicer and friendlier than the group as a s whole.
Nicer and friendlier to whom? I worry that as we tribalize, we wind up with people who are perfectly nice and civilized (by their standards) to their in-group, and reflexively hostile to their out-group. That is, I think if we average out "niceness" as a single scalar property of a person, we lose a lot of important information about how they treat different individuals and groups.
Toxoplasma of rage, right. This is an interesting counter-piece to that point, I think the selection pressure for public representatives talked about here, are a mechanism by which the cherries that Toxoplasma then picks become available.
I'd forgotten about that post, but yes, it's the same dynamic. Scott seemed to be describing the overall disease, while the current bug in my bonnet is how our tech stack deliberately exacerbates and spreads the disease in order to make money.
Also, wow, that quip at the end about "Is Bird-Watching Racist?" was prescient.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
I saw a meme a couple years back which was a graph showing an inverse relationship between (loose paraphrase) "number of years since realizing you are trans" vs "desire to write blog posts about being trans".
People who have a lot of experience doing something and who feel reasonably comfortable in their identity seem to be a lot less likely to produce content about it in the first place. So you get a lot of stuff about transness from people in the first 3 years of their transition, lots of stuff about autism from people who were diagnosed at 26, lots of stuff about religion from recent converts, etc.
That seems to fit, yeah.
Your comments about who writes advice books reminded me of a little conundrum that I faced when I studied martial arts: who do you turn to for advice on self-defense? The best self-defense is to not get into trouble in the first place, but the people who don't get into trouble don't usually think about it and don't have much concrete advice beyond "well, keep your eyes open and don't hang out with assholes and criminals". The people who do have a lot of experience have a skewed perception: either they are professional bouncers/ bodyguards/ SWAT team members etc, and the conflicts they see may be much different from what you or I could expect to face; and/ or they are violent asshats, and you shouldn't associate with them or imitate them.
Eventually I decided that "keeping my eyes open and not hanging out with assholes" was good enough for me, and stopped worrying about the whole issue.
One of the Buddha's little rules for avoiding suffering was to not go into dark alleys at night.
That might be a skewed advice considering how many people try to kill him whenever they find him on the road
You might also want to pick carefully where you live.
Oh absolutely. If you spend a lot of time worrying about crime in your neighborhood, spend at least as much time working on a plan to move to a better place.
Agreed.
I grew up in (former) East Germany. That was a rough patch in the 1990s. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoyerswerda_riots
Nowadays I live in Singapore. Crime is against the law here. It's ridiculously safe.
The police even tracked down my beater bike when I reported it missing. (This being Singapore, or course, it wasn't stolen. It was locked only to itself outside some building, and a hapless moving company accidentally brought it across the island by accident because I parked it next to their designated loading zone.)
Isn't crime against the law by definition?
You would think
I was being a bit tongue in cheek.
Die jure you are right. De facto some things are actually forbidden for real and society and law enforcement come down on you for them. Like murder. And for some areas the laws are merely suggestions but not actually enforced. I hear shop lifting in large parts of the US is treated like that? Or stealing bikes or smoking pot in states that haven't outright legalised it.
As an historic aside, drunk driving used to be socially acceptable,, but is now completely taboo. The laws themselves didn't change all that much.
(There's also a third category of things that society will crack down on, but that are not actually against any law.)
In Singapore acts like shop lifting or stealing of bikes are also de facto crimes.
> I hear shop lifting in large parts of the US is treated like that?
Not large parts geographically. Mostly just some major cities where the prosecutors are making a political stand by refusing to prosecute certain types of crimes. (Which means they let anyone who was arrested go free, which means the police don't bother to arrest the criminals, which means stores don't bother to report the crime, which means the stats look like the crime isn't happening as much as it actually is.)
As someone who also practices the martial arts, I'm basically "book-learned" in that I haven't ever actually been in a self-defense situation. Yet I provide self-defense instruction all the time. And I practice it, which is likely a lot of the reason I haven't used it in an encounter.
Maybe not everyone who is good at walking is good at communicating how to walk, but some surely would be, since there are so many of them. No one would read a book about how to walk, though, except scientists, orthopedists, physical and occupational therapists, etc., those that have an interest in the mechanics and underlying principles. And those are the people to ask about advice on how to walk.
Yes. My experience with martial arts training is that there’s an element of truth to the David Carradine stereotype — it does instill a physical confidence that allows you to be calm and in control around potential aggressors, which can help in de-escalating — but that it also instills a certain desire to use your skills to dominate other people. The guys I knew who trained a lot also mysteriously found themselves getting into more conflicts than a normal person would. Kind of a double edged sword.
Homeless people are rarely perpetrators of violence. They're victims of violence far, far more often.
I would assume that there is a lot of homeless-on-homeless violence that mostly does not get reported.
You assume. Not a good look.
Is it your opinion that the homeless-on-homeless violence usually gets reported? Or that it is rare?
(If you disagree with something, it would be nice to state what you believe instead.)
Speaking of swords, didn't the finest swordsman in France in the 18th century declare he would be terrified of getting into a fencing match with someone who had never used a sword, because that person would make unpredictable moves?
Amusing, but from personal experience that sounds highly implausible. As a teenager aged around 16 I engaged in a play fencing match with a similar aged female friend who was a young olympic fencer, or competing to be such and of a comparable standard. A few seconds into the match to my astonishment my sword simply vanished from my hand, whisked out of it by some crafty stroke! I wasn't unduly wimpy for my age either, so she must have had wrist muscles like a blacksmith's!
Speculating, but the 18th century comment might make sense in light of the risk of a "double kill", which apparently was a very real danger in fencing. An untrained fighter might be likely to make very high risk moves that open him wide open to attack but are also very hard to counter, at least in part because they're so suicidal that no trained fighter ever uses them.
Ah yes, that sounds more plausible
I heard that that was Mark Twain quote...
The best self-defense by far is being a good enough shape to run away from the average troublemaker, something that any decent martial arts guru would endorse.
Someone like a criminal defense attorney would have good insight into how violence tends to ensue
> Someone who tours the country, telling young people that monogamy is right for them, and answering their questions on the right way to be monogamous.
That's, actually, one of the things I really loved about "More Then Two" and most other polyamory-related people I follow - they specifically don't do that (even though each community has it's share of cringe corner cases). The point isn't in "polyamory is right and monogamy is wrong", it's "polyamory is an option, there are people for whom it works". It's representation.
It's also good evo psych.
Most populations don't have pure behavioral strategies about stuff like this, they'd be open to invasion (a purely monogamous society is prey to the first polyamorous person who scoops up lots of unsuspecting partners, a purely poly community is prey to the first monogamous person who can offer a better deal to the best available mate).
So most populations will naturally have people predisposed towards a wide variety of strategies, and be most stable when those strategies are in equilibrium with each other.
Um, no. Real poly people don't scoop up unsuspecting partners. They look for partners who are also poly, or who want to try it and seem like they have healthy motivations and expectations of it.
Real poly people don't want a mono relationship, no matter how good the "deal" on offer.
And I'm sure that modern day American social trend is 100% applicable to pre-historical hunter-gatherer tribes.
Not just American, fyi. And I don't understand your reference to historical tribes?
If you insist on strict terminology, substitute non-monogamy for polyamory in darwin's original comment.
What I guess his point is in his later comment is something like this: Whatever evolved, innate psychology exists around these issues, it's certainly not for or against specific, recently invented, detailed rule sets like what you refer to as "real poly" (which includes rules like not scooping up unsuspecting partners, and refusing a mono relationship no matter how good the deal is), but for or against broad categories like preferring a single partner who is staying with you and only you, or preferring to have many partners.
Actually, the way I do poly, we have only 1 rule: condoms always and safer sex.
Not scooping up unsuspecting partners isn't a rule, it's just the right, moral way to act.
Refusing a mono relationship, no matter how good the deal is isn't a rule either. It's just... How to get this through to you?
1) Many poly people, me included, simply don't want to be in a mono relationship, ever, no matter who's offering it, or how "good" the terms are. We are poly, and thus we want to be in poly relationships, not mono ones.
2) Some poly people are happy doing poly and mono relationships (obviously not at the same time!) For those people, there are a variety of possibilities:
a) They're in (a) relationship(s) when the magical mono person shows up: Why on earth would they leave partners they love, as well as their metamours (if they're close), for some stranger? If a perfect, sexy, smart, rich, funny, etc. person waltzed into your life, would you leave your partner for them? No? Exactly.
b) They're single but happy that way (not seeing anyone/dating, or seeing people/dating, but not interested in a long-term relationship atm):
A magical mono person is unlikely to catch their interest if they're not currently looking for a long-term serious relationship.
c) They're single/dating, but not in a serious relationship:
Well then! Magical mono person might have a chance!
Make sense?
We're not poly because we can't get anyone to be mono with us, and we're not secretly waiting for a magical mono person to sweep us off our feet. We're not like you, and that's OK.
Finally, being "for or against broad categories..." isn't a rule either. It's just who we are, or what we want.
Speaking for myself (and many other poly people) It's not that we *prefer* having multiple partners over having one partner, it's that mono doesn't work for us. It isn't a choice,* it's just how we are.
BTW, I've had 1 partner for the past 3.75 years (pandemic, my health, metamour's health, bereavement, etc.) and everyone is perfectly happy with that. I don't need multiple partners all the time, and I haven't met anyone in the past few years who I've bern interested in. But when I do, there won't be any issue if I start something new.
* As mentioned in my last post, some poly people are happy doing poly or mono. I'm not speaking for them.
I agree, most healthy societies involve a mixture of strategies in any number of... Fields? Partnership, gender, sexuality, even things like early birds and night owls. I read a paper the other day that hypothesised that the modern prevalence of ADHD people and autistic people was due to them being valued members of bands of humans and protohumans. Their particular neurotypes were useful (can't remember how atm, sorry - awake way too long with pain flare. Will try to track down the paper tomorrow).
I haven't read Tyler Austin Harper's essay in The Atlantic, but I like the guy. He's a professor of something or other at Colby College (environmental studies? but he's basically an English professor) who specializes in apocalyptic sci-fi like "The War of the Worlds." He's part-black and has pretty reasonable, moderate views on issues of race and class. He likes rural Maine and is a dedicated fisherman.
My guess would that his perspective on polyamory theory would be pretty similar to Charles Murray's general point in "Coming Apart:" there are a lot of theories about how to organize society that are okay for the right half of the bell curve, not that they are much inclined in that direction, but are bad for the left half. If you are, say, Bertrand Russell, well, you can afford four wives, but for the typical person below 100 IQ, the monogamous will have a much better life and their kids will have much less emotional trauma.
He sounds like an interesting and independent thinker:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/06/02/opinion/wrong-kind-of-black-professor/
> As a moonbat leftist, I am not typically in the business of reading The Wall Street Journal. Nor am I an aficionado of contemporary courtroom dramas. But when a family member forwarded Patterson’s article about the resistance he encountered trying to write about a race other than his own, it hit close to home: I am a Black professor who is an expert on 19th- and 20th-century British literature — the infamous “dead white men” of European art and letters. Like Patterson, I have often been criticized for not staying in my racial lane. In fact, throughout my academic life I’ve had to justify my intellectual interests and fight the assertion that I should spend my time researching authors who share my skin color. For as long as I can remember, it has been made clear to me that I am the wrong kind of Black academic.
Hey, they won't let white guys write about *anything* now unless they're gay or used to be a woman (or they seek a right-wing audience). But I do sympathize with the guy. The whole ancestry-based requirement for writing about a culture is kind of dumb. It does add some credibility, I admit.
Is there a person alive today for which 19th century English Literature is a natural fit? I would argue no - it's far too much in the past for anyone to naturally participate in the relevant culture the books are about. The closest approximation is having parents and other adults that value such things and inculcate 19th century literature. Nothing about a person's race is determinative regarding that, and it's a very poor proxy. Better to ignore it at this point.
If you're talking something more recent, like the US Civil Rights movement, then there are people still alive and a lot of second generation participants who would make much better experts. I would definitely want to talk to an American about 9/11's effect on US culture rather than someone from a foreign country, even if they've studied it a lot. They might know more about it, but they're approaching it from a significant disadvantage compared to someone who was already here and alive at the time.
Actually, that's precisely what prompted him to write the essay. You should read it! He's doing exactly the thing the left claims to like: using his position of relative privilege to stand up against oppression in support of those who have less privilege. Except in this case he's standing up against woke orthodoxy in support of a white man. Also, in support of art itself:
> This is an assault on the very idea of literature and art. After all, isn’t the entire business of a poem, a painting, a photograph, whatever, that it is possible to imagine something other than this body I inhabit, in this place where I live, at this time that I find myself?
_American Fiction_ (a recent movie) may be of interest.
I saw a trailer for it a few days ago, and I was very interested. Maybe not first-run movie-theater interested, but I'm definitely going to watch it sooner or later.
The opposition to polyamory seems to stem from the same ingrained opposition that exists against polyginy.
Our culture's perception is that the opposition to polyginy is female-driven, but it is not. That opposition is male-driven, as polyginy leaves the male "left half of the curve" largely partner-less. (also, the Atlantic's author is male)
I don't have the stats, but a broad impression is that polyamorous polycules mostly tend to comprise more women than men - i.e. that they are, to a first approximation, polyginy. Which would make polyginy the "null hypothesis" for natural human choices; and which is exactly what the enforcement of monogamy historically tried to suppress.
When Prophet Muhammad prescribed four wives for successful men, it wasn't about "allowing more than one", it was about *setting the upper limit*. For social cohesion benefits.
(a limit that did not apply to himself. He had twelve wives, plus Rayhanah, a Jewish sex slave, whom some scholars think he later married and others think he did not)
It might be that, in the author's circles, complaining against Muhammad's prescriptions is frowned upon, but complaining against polyamory is not, *especially* if you represent it as something engaged in by those elites who aren't the currently dominant elites.
The impression I got was that it was full of 'queer' people who hated straight men, especially if they were white. But that's from reading the polaymory subreddit. Maybe life is different elsewhere. I bet the Silicon Valley and Park Slope variants are probably pretty different.
You do wonder if polyandry would balance out those kinds of problems. I think the real problem is while you can get nerds to share a woman, the other sort of men who lose out in the usual competition tend to be poor, with the accompanying tendency to violence and high 'time preference' as they say--and they won't share nicely. You may remember the famous case of the lady with four dorky-looking men who supposedly didn't care who the dad was--the kid was later found with injuries, from the least nerdy-looking of the tetrad.
Also, from what I can tell a lot of the opposition is from Christians and seems gender-balanced. Lots of guys think it's a great idea because they'll win the competition and get to have multiple girlfriends--men tend to be overconfident (after all, since women find confidence attractive, it is rational to be so to a limited extent!)
My impression is that polyandric arrangements are less frequent than polyginyc arrangements, meaning that polyamory's impacts ultimately correspond to polyginy's impacts. I also think that cases of "child of single mom hurt by one of her serial boyfriends" do far, far outnumber the *absolute count* of polyandric arrangements, let alone the subset of polyandric arrangements where one of the guys hurts the child.
You can discuss all that you wish whether monogamy is "natural", but the observable fact remains that cultures that enforced monogamy outperformed the cultures that did not.
I'd argue monogamy is not natural and is a successful social technology, with the evidence you've stated. (Though apparently successful Chinese guys could have a few concubines, and Islam wasn't exactly devoid of achievements for a while.)
And the currently most successful cultures are among the most liberal about sexuality, and aren't enforcing monogamy. Too many confounders to derive confident conclusions from empirical evidence IMO.
Your second paragraph is dead on, I think - I tried a few poly relationships, and I am more on the "plays contact sports and powerlifts" side of things even though I style myself as a bit of an intellectual *pushes up glasses*. I enjoyed it as long as I didn't really emotionally care about the people I was dating, but as soon as I really had feelings for one of the people I was dating it became unbearable. I know I know I probably just needed to say some Hail Aellas and contemplate my jealousy, but I think there's a temperament/personality factor in whether or not polyamory is a workable thing for people.
This comment has flair.
That's a polite way of putting it -- I salute you. I find amusing that ctrl-f "cuckhold" shows no hits.
Though a sometimes-polygyny-enjoyer myself, I do not pretend that female jealousy is a vestigial analog of male jealousy, akin to the clitoris or the male nipple. I point to Joyce Benenson's "Warriors and Worriers" as a good look into how worried and insecure (ways that I would never want a woman I love to feel) a woman might feel in a polygynous relationship. Nonetheless, I contend that those who think male jealousy a social figment with no basis in biology must have the wrong hormones to understand it.
"just needed to say some Hail Aellas" :) :) :)
Thanks for reminding me why I love to peruse the comment sections here.
Aella loves us, this I know
'Cause her Twitter told me so
Huge fan of the way she laughs
And her data in her graphs
Yes, Aella loves us... (x3)
Her Twitter told me so
(In all seriousness I like her graphs and her writing. I don't take her word as gospel and I doubt she would want me to.)
FWIW, I know four people involved in polyamory IRL who I met through LessWrong. The two I know well are neither woke nor queer. When I brought my wife to a meeting, she having only gone to a few at that point, she saw two of them cuddling on the couch. After the meeting she was like "was that woman cheating on her husband in front of like twelve guys?" I said, no, they're polyamorous. She asked why I didn't tell her that before and I said I didn't want her to judge the entire group on the basis of this one thing.
So this is mostly a performance?
“You Don’t Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Cuddle in Public”.
It's not like we can just undo our instincts. In this respect, polyamory is objectively a worse solution to the problem of our excess sexual id than adultery, if only because in addition to the built-in problems of your personal time and resources being inherently limited, you also demand the participants to undo their natural emotions, which can't be done without putting a damper on all emotions, as well as emotional investment in the relationships themselves.
I'd say that different people have different amounts of those "natural emotions", such that for some people with low amounts the effort is trivial. And that the corresponding problem with adultery is the betrayal, which can have enormously bad effects on people. So maybe your jealousy is stronger than your sense of betrayal, but other people might be the other way around.
Um, queer people who hate straight white men? Hahaha!
He's at Bates not Colby.
I mean, if men in the lower classes were supporting their wives and children alone, but I think the reality is that no family can survive on a single minimum-wage income, and most households a two-income.
In which case, having a three-income family is probably an even more salient advantage for the lower classes than for the upper, here.
We survived by living in caves, without electricity, or even running water, for most of our history.
Also, the whole point of familial bonding is putting the needs of others over the needs of oneself. Allowing a partner to pursue others axiomatically acts against this principle, especially when the woman, and all the moreso both parties, are allowed to engage in such. You're not gonna put as much effort into helping out someone when you have someone else, and less so when they themselves do to.
Polyamorous people are almost all leftists.
Poly people who live together (which is a subset of polys) benefit from multiple incomes, more people to share chores/organisation/childcare/etc., and are generally in a better financial situation than other families at their level of income.
I find it interesting that you posit a man supporting multiple women. In all the poly scenes I've been a part of (in 3 Anglo countries, but 1 was in Quebec, so very French), equality between women and men has been a basic tenet, and in general, women tend to have more partners than men. Very few of the poly women I've met would want to be supported by a male partner (unless they were caring for kids, disabled fam, or elders).
Also, working class != lower IQ. Seriously?
There probably is a correlation.
Ironically, the more meritocratic the society, the more dysfunction is there at the bottom, because the best ones can improve their social position, so they often leave their group.
Do you think your comment about who write advice books also applies to parenting advice? And please do let me know in 2-3 years time if your answer changes
I'm not Scott, but I would answer very much Yes.
Successful parenting is fairly boring, and a lot comes down to whether the genetic lottery gives you an easy kid. Not very actionable.
Lottery, yes, but the choice of spouse may also play a certain role.
I've yet to see a kid (myself included) possessed of a trait that's, if not present in one of the parents, then present in one of the grandparents. Funny how that works.
Yes, I meant also the lottery of what genes you and your spouse got.
Doesn’t that suggest it’s just a question of finding parenting advice from parents whose kids have similar traits to yours? (whether that’s from a book or in person)
That seems reasonable.
On a more pessimistic note: some problems can't be solved with advice.
There's no shortage of books about raising kids with neurodevelopmental disorders. I'm sure they have some value.
Bah. One of my two daughters is five times as energetic and violent as the other. Parenting her has been down to the boring matters of putting in the work and being gutsy enough to balance traditional harsh methods (spank, patiently, when necessary, so that lesser punishments have teeth) with modern loving parenting (hug, frequently, after punishments as well as in normal times). It has worked; she is six years old and has good self control.
It is boring and not worth writing about, but it is very much not down to chance.
Some people have novel insights or specific suggestions, or can present them in useful ways. I would absolutely value a book on parenting written by Fred Rogers.
Are you in a polyamorous relationship?
I think he said he is, though it's really none of my business and I wouldn't bring it up if he hadn't put it out there.
He has been, and has written about it in a low key way at various points throughout the history of his three blogs.
I guess the principle applies not just to writers and media interviewees, but also to politicians. Maybe we should take sortition more seriously.
We can start by using sortition in clubs and associations.
He's posted about it in more detail - look up "polyamory is boring" on SSC
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
Or did Scott talk about polyamory and sortition in the same posts?
The analogy is left as an exercise to the reader
I have to admit, I have no idea what you meant.
Oh whoops, I really did mean this as a reply to a different comment. (And then I thought this was someone replying to a different comment of mine, because substack app doesn't show context)... My bad.
>"And I’m not mocking the legible-principle-seekers"
Excellent term right there. Are "legible-principle-seekers" fully equivalent with "Rationalists", or are "Rationalists" only the subset of legible-principle-seekers with an affinity for Bayes?
(i.e. insisting on a world model where principles use mathematical rules to process single-dimensional numbers, ostensibly representing probability, and conveniently empowering utilitarian calculus based on numbers pulled out of a hat)
"Legible-principle-seekers" surely includes the sort of person that reads webpages with names like "10 Tips on How to Do X", where "X" is some impossibly complex social skill that can't (presently) be taught using explicit instruction.
Somehow these end up being the top results of many, many Google searches, so some significant fraction of the Internet must read them. Certainly there's more of those people than there are "Rationalists".
Agreed, that set is far, far larger than the set of Rationalists.
I was just wondering, in the sense that a human is defined as a "featherless biped", is a Rationalist defined as a "Bayesian legible-principle-seeker", or is there a less stringent winnowing that doesn't quite insist on boiling down assumptions to single-dimensional numbers fed into the Bayesian formula?
I dunno, that depends on how you think the meaning of words should be construed in general. Eliezer, CEO and caliph of rationalism, wrote a sequence on this exact topic, actually, but I suppose it doesn't have much to do with "boiling down assumptions to single-dimensional numbers fed into the Bayesian formula", so it might not qualify as properly Rationalist writing, ahaha.
I've read only about three quarters of the series, but I believe you.
Russell wrote the Principia Mathematica, to demonstrate how mathematics was a self-contained complete and provable edifice. Then came Gödel to say, um, no, it isn't.
Eliezer, however, not only wrote the Principia Bayesiorationalica, but he also came to be his own Gödel.
Quite impressive, if you think about it.
I feel like a simpler rebuttal to such an article would be statistics comparing relationship happiness/satisfaction in polyamorous people and monogamous people. Does no such comparison exist which is why one must resort to reviewing n-of-1 studies or raising concerns about people deriving generalizations from a handful of n-of-1 studies?
Judging by the discourse around "does having children make you happier?" studies, I'm not confident such statistics would accomplish much. And that's before aggressive societal selection effects.
The samples are self selecting.
You do run into the issue that people going for polyamory are more likely to be willing to adopt fringe ideas (and actually act on them) *and* they don't have as much cultural background on how to resolve these problems because it hasn't been around as long.
(Ex: I expect that early lesbian relationships tended to have more problems, but that the percentage got closer to average as a greater portion of the population participated, because the early adopters were more likely to have 'interesting' problems.)
Though poly has more inherent challenges, so I'd still expect you get higher problems on average. Dunno whether possibility of higher happiness/satisfaction outweighs that. (I'd also slightly worry that there'd be an effect of people who practice polyamory are more likely to be more willing to be selective than the average typical relationship but unsure)
https://aella.substack.com/p/polyamory-vs-monogamy-how-relationshipslyamory-vs-monogamy-how-relationships
Aella's finding was that both very monogamous and very polyamorous people seem pretty happy, and people in the middle are unhappy.
That link sends me to a 404 page (not found). Did the link get cut off or the post removed perhaps?
The link got duplicated somehow. https://aella.substack.com/p/polyamory-vs-monogamy-how-relationships
The monogamy-evangelist sounds pretty much like purity culture in evangelical circles in the 90's and early 2000's, at least as I remember it. Honestly, you're underselling how creepy and off-putting it was/is.
I was going to say, there are plenty of Christian marriage authors, influencers, etc.
One of those tantalizing "I enjoyed this post but it feels like there's a missing Section V to tie it all together". Something about how book-writing selects heavily for x, y, z, in the same way as things that bubble to your attention are heavily selected for against natural apex predator memes. And this is one of the big lessons about life in the modern epistemic environment. Everything around me survivorships by selection effects. [link to On Bounded Distrust here]
Also passed up the obvious connection of "activists are not necessarily representative of things they activate for" in exactly the same way as book-writers being outlier exemplars.
Either way, I'll happily read your memoir and/or polyamory advice book if you choose to publish one.
> "I enjoyed this post but it feels like there's a missing Section V to tie it all together"
And I think there might be some actionable advice that could stem from that hypothetical. Like, eliminate as many filters and algorithms as you can. Or, figure out which of your sources share the same filters and higher-level-sources, so that you can distinguish "literally everyone is talking about it" from "this appears to be a hot topic in the Xsphere right now" from "the X-wing media is pushing this narrative strongly". Or, view things in at least a 2-dimensional grid, where in addition to a political axis, there's also a "wants my attention" axis, and pay meta-attention to what sort of things cluster at different points along that axis.
This seems unusually against the prevailing local ethos of throwing science or at least principle-seeking at things people normally take for granted.
Why are relationships more like walking and less like, say, judo or dancing? As in, we can all sort of naturally grapple or shimmy if we must, and perhaps subdue/impress an opponent/partner if we're lucky or naturally strong/graceful, but there are clearly techniques and body conditioning that make it unambiguously better, and these are generally taught by people successful at it?
(I do accept that it matters how mastery is reached, and the people who had to fight harder for it might be better at teaching the process, in a kind of Berkson's Paradox way - but still.)
His article about him getting married also suffered from the same problem.
In general, there’s an annoying taboo on how to get better at attracting romantic partners, and for some reason Scott implicitly honors it. This article’s point is “don’t judge a minority by its most vocal members, that’s bound to be nonrepresentative”, but there are strong undertones of “it all must happen naturally, don’t try to improve your skills”.
I think every time someone tried to explicitly explain it (for men anyhow, never really looked at the advice for women) it devolved into a fairly problematic mess quickly. Not mentioning any names but even the most brilliant writer among them eventually went off the rails, badly...
Whether that was driven by the explainers or their frustrated audience is hard to really say.
To be fair, I actually agree with (and have lived by) the idea of the unexamined romantic epiphany as the only genuine article - but the man who wrote 'In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences' shouldn't. I've been reading SSC/ACX mostly because it's often alien to my worldview and therefore interesting. This sop to my irrational meatbag ways feels like a betrayal.
Anyway, there's a difference between attracting romantic partners and sustaining stable relationships with them, the latter being the focus here. Reasonable to assume there are useful non-obvious heuristics for the bits that aren't all Keats and roses.
And yeah, the article's main point is good, though I'm not thrilled with the idea of a minority voice being dismissed as non-representative merely by virtue of being audible. Perhaps 'ethnographies' of subcultures/minorities (where a conscientious, neutral non-member investigator seeks out those who don't self-select) can be usefully complementary to memoirs/advocacy.
Tangential, but I'll bite. There is plenty of good advice about how to get better at attracting romantic partners, and some of it gets buried, but also, people who are bad at it just won't listen. I think the good advice is unwelcome.
But here, here is the good advice in three simple bullet points:
1. Spend a long time, *years* of time, developing general social skills and social intelligence, really until you're some kind of advanced level.
1a. This *mostly* means learning to pay more attention to non-verbal, implicit, deniable social cues. Listen more, speak less, watch more, judge less, and stop trying to force everyone to say what they mean. Learn to hear what they mean when they're not saying it.
2. Spend more time in larger groups with better gender balance. Don't sit around in gender-skewed specialist cliques waiting for the opposite gender or whatever type of person you want, go out and spend your time in places where there are a lot of different types of people.
It’s not like you’re entirely wrong, but I don’t think you’re fully on the right track either, because this isn’t actionable advice. For example, while something similar could be said about learning to play the piano, spending years around musicians won’t get you far. You need something or someone to tell you what keys to press and how, and to get feedback when you press them wrong. Such materials and people are readily available for the piano, but it’s taboo to teach somebody relationships in a similar way.
The key point of the advice is that relationships and attraction are not like piano; there no formally explainable set of buttons; as soon as they exist, normal humans move the goal posts again because they by and large do not *want* clear rules, because they are (mostly unknowingly) using “plays well by the secret rule book” as a sorting function, and classing the most rule bound in last place.
So the very actionable advice is to abandon your rules based goal and spend years in quiet, *unbiased* observation, not making formal rules, but instead letting your brain form an intuitive model.
That’s the core advice, and that’s why lawful nerds reject it. They do not want to hear that the relationship system is purposely chaotic and selects for smart observant chaos people, and against lawful types.
Everything else is like a piano and can be studied using the scientific method. But psychology, and not even all of psychology, but only the psychology of attraction, is resistant to science? This in itself is a scientific claim that needs to be substantiated scientifically!
Your argument that as soon as science figures out attraction rules, people will start consciously acting contrary to those rules, sounds extremely strange to me. How do people even learn that attraction has been solved scientifically so they know to immediately engage in violating the rules that have been discovered? “Annu. Rev. Psychol. has published a study that women are attracted to men that brush their teeth (p=0.003). Effective tomorrow, I shall reject men that do so”?
To the extent that people are aware they're being studied and described by rules, psychology is indeed resistant to science. (No, don't look away, stay with me. I'm at least as much of a scientist as you, and I'm going somewhere with this.) Why do you think psychology is experiencing the worst of the replication crisis? Do you think psychology academics are uniquely unethical? No! It's uniquely hard to design an airtight psychology experiment. Read Feynman's Cargo Cult Science, man.
It's *well* substantiated per the above, but also, it doesn't need to be, any more than "jumping out of an airplane without a parachute will kill you" needs an RCT.
"""Your argument that as soon as science figures out attraction rules, people will start consciously acting contrary to those rules, sounds extremely strange to me. How do people even learn that attraction has been solved scientifically so they know to immediately engage in violating the rules that have been discovered?"""
It doesn't happen at the field level, it happens at the individual level. I'm sorry for being rude, but you sound like someone who went up to a crush with a "Do you like me? Please check Yes / No" paper. How did that go? People have a demonstrated history of being extremely weirded out by rigid, rules based human interaction.
It's not that people hear about being studied and work against it. It's that most of them have intuitive systems to detect stilted rule-dorks, and react *very* differently when those systems alert. If you rule-dork someone, you're not getting real data about how people react to your behavior. You're getting stilted data about how people react to rule-dorking.
As I said at the top level when I took the bait, the trouble here isn't that there isn't a method, or that the method is held secret from you. The trouble is the method is outside your acceptable set of methods, so you reject it out of hand. And stay single.
I was a published mathematician and am now a machine learning model builder. If *I* can step outside formalisms and learn a purely intuitive system and find myself a spouse, so can you.
And what does it mean to be successful at it? We are talking about increasing the quality of long-term relationships here, not just courting people. If you find someone you're really compatible with and end up spending the rest of your life of them, you still don't really know what you did right because you don't have many examples of failure to compare against. The people who claim to be good at courting people don't really have useful advice for long-term relationships because, unless they're polyamorous, they can't keep courting people while in a long-term relationship.
What I'm trying to say is that the only person that might be able to give you useful information about long-term relationship is either someone who failed at way too many of them for a single lifetime or some kind of polyamorous sex god, and you are going to have a very hard time finding either of them.
"And what does it mean to be successful at it? We are talking about increasing the quality of long-term relationships here, not just courting people."
Correct, that was what I meant, as well. I now realise that going with grappling and dance as examples of quasi-natural skills more improvable than walking managed to imply that I'm talking about the 'conquest' part rather than the sustainment part. That's on me. Man with a hammer, and all.
"If you find someone you're really compatible with and end up spending the rest of your life of them, you still don't really know what you did right because you don't have many examples of failure to compare against."
I think you might well know something of what you did right. You're not blind or unreflective, you can be aware of the bullets you've dodged or choices you've made at pressure points that have worked out well. You can compare yourself to general trends you observe, or other people you know in the same milieu. Whether you would be incentivised to analyse it and write about it is another question - but these days enough people seem eager to exploit even the tiniest scrap of supposed social alpha that someone somewhere surely would.
The problem is that people do not have a good understanding of other people's relationships compared to their own. If you asked the average conservative religious couple about why their relationship works, they'd probably give you some shit about how it's because they were faithful to each other and God or whatever, as if plenty of people didn't do the same thing and their relationships didn't fail anyways. The root of the issue is that nobody has enough good data.
An obvious solution would be to run an experiment involving forcing clones of an already successful couple to marry and seeing which ones end up living happily and which ones end up trying to killing each other, but you'd probably get lynched for even suggesting such a thing. Though... we could try it with monogamous birds instead. Grey parrots are intelligent enough to match 4-6 year old humans, and that might be enough to get some insights that are applicable to humans as well.
...Honestly, it probably isn't worth spending this much effort figuring out how to build a happy marriage. Most people don't seem to have a problem with it in the first place.
Most people who raise kids only raise a very small number of kids, yet books on parenting are being published and many are actually useful
> If you find someone you're really compatible with and end up spending the rest of your life of them, you still don't really know what you did right because you don't have many examples of failure to compare against
I don't know, I failed plenty of times before finding someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
If I were to write a dating book it would come down mostly to "be patient and meet a whole lot of people until you find someone you're compatible with" and "don't have any massive personal flaws".
Well yeah, that's the advice I would give too, and I haven't even been in a relationship before. But surely there's more to it than that? Even if it's just some minor micro-optimizations to reduce the chances of something going wrong... There are always going to be better or worse options to choose from, and you need accurate data and understanding to figure out what's what.
>Why are relationships more like walking and less like, say, judo or dancing?
In a sense, all those things are alike. Most of the difference is in that, over the course of ordinary life, you're supposed to get appropriate amounts of practice to reach acceptable skill levels in certain crucial activities by default. If you're neurotypical/whatever the physio- counterpart of that is, of course.
I think the comparison to shopping at Whole Foods is really on the money (no pun intended).
Most people (in fact, an overwhelming majority) shop for groceries at some kind of a grocery store. But if you write a memoir about shopping at Whole Foods, the implication (be it intentional or not) is that your shopping habits are somehow superior to those of the hoi polloi, and perhaps your groceries are elegant and refined -- thus worthy of inclusion in your memoirs. This kind of attitude invites derision, because really all you're doing is buying plain old potatoes at double the price.
Similarly, most people have either slept around at some point, or are at least aware of the concept. So when you write a book about sleeping around in this elegant and refined way with a fancy name like "polyamory", you invite derision, because really all you're doing -- from the average person's point of view -- is hooking up with floozies just like everyone else.
Granted, there's more to polyamory than random hookups (AFAICT), just as there's more to Whole Foods than overpriced potatoes; but the barrier to making that difference clear is quite high, and is probably beyound the reach of the kind of people who feel compelled to write excruciatingly detailed step-by-step guides to polyamory.
The Whole Foods one strikes me as probably unintentional, considering it's followed by The Lonely Island; I get the vibe this person would be fine specifying they went to shop at Food Lion if that's where they'd gone shopping.
Yes, but she is also signaling that she's the type of person who would shop at Whole Foods instead of Food Lion. This is likely unintentional and is a type of signaling that she naturally slips into (saying things she, even subconsciously, believes will boost her social status).
I think Whole Foods and The Lonely Island are just things that she likes. The problem with the paragraph is that it implies that we should be interested in her preferences at that detail.
"I clicked Spotify and it played Tom Waits, who I normally love, but that day I wasn't in the mood, so I clicked next track and it played Jason Isbell. That sounded better, so I let that one play."
Not the stuff of a gripping memoir.
I think whole foods comes off as hoi polloi to people in some cultures and just normal to others; in much of NYC whole foods is actually the relatively cheap option (since they're a chain and local shops have nyc-local prices, which are high).
Well, this would be even better bragging. "I live in such rarified air that Whole Foods is considered the cheap option!"
This is like people talking about driving to the store. It feels like a weird brag if you live somewhere where having a car is a conspicuous sign of wealth and just normal if you live somewhere people regularly drive, and if you say "no no everyone in my neighborhood drives" it just comes across as even more braggy.
I probably shouldn't comment because I haven't read the Atlantic article or the subscriber only post (both are behind paywalls), but the argument in this post seems to be 'Tyler Austin Harper can't argue against polyamory based on a memoir because memoirs are written by narcissists or activists and advice is written by "defective people"'.
I disagree. Most memoirs I have read give a positive impression of what the author does (e.g. if I read a memoir by a professional gambler, it makes advantage gambling sound exciting). And plenty of memoirs don't give the impression of being written by narcissists. The problem with the passage from the memoir quoted here is not that there is anything wrong with what is described, it is how it is described (and the fact the author presumes anyone would be interested in anything so banal.)
And advice is generally written by professionals, or teachers, or coaches or therapists (obviously these are all "defective people" in the trivial sense of "everyone is defective", but they generally do have some skill in whatever they are writing about, if they aren't frauds).
As far as polyamory is concerned, it is a very controversial issue; a lot of people dislike it or find it immoral and have reasons for doing so before they read any specific memoir.
If you dislike it a priori, but are interested in the topic, maybe you should study some evidence, such as a memoir, and update your beliefs based on that? Of course, being fully aware that memoirs as a whole are biased towards the kind of person who writes a memoir.
This may be a matter of personal taste; I immediately develop a dislike of the author of a memoir while reading it more or less independently of the person (with the exception of Marcus Aurelius; I also find Caesar's memoirs insufferably self promoting, so disagree with Scott Alexander here).
I was thinking about this. Most of the autobiographies I have read (which isn't all that many) have been written between about 1800-1970. Usually these either give me a positive or a neutral impression of the author.
But on the internet nowadays there are comparatively unimportant people who write blogs about how they found themselves and what they want to do in life, and what is special about them, or how their effortless extraversion has been so helpful to them, and what advice they would give the rest of us. Some of these people write books too. These people are irritating. So maybe there is something to the idea that contemporary culture promotes narcissism.
I never really read Caesar. I thought St Augustine's Confessions was annoyingly sanctimonious, but I guess that is because I, as modern, secular reader, expected it to be something different from what it is.
While having valid points, this argument taken as a whole seems a bit too reductio ad absurdum. An expert, whether their expertise be gained via siccessful experience with the object of their desire or painful failure with it, need not becCesear to have something valuable to share with others interested in the topic. The easiest example is John and Julie Gorman’s studies of both successful and unsuccessful marriages. Or, using the physical therapist example, physical therapy is NOT based on studying how people who have problems move; rather, it’s largely based on stimuli’s of normal physiology-at least the parts about moving normally. The parts about movement problems are oriented towards diagnosis, not healing. Another example is the field of positive psychology, which primarily focuses on what works. I think there may be a confusion in the essay between what’s popular and what’s effective.
I think Activist and Influencer are new roles, products of the internet age. Of course there have been activists since forever, and once the world was connected enough for someone to become world famous, there have been plenty of world famous people, many of whom influenced the views or fashion choices of other people. In our era, though, the internet grabs hold of certain people, or some people grab hold of the internet, and then they are inflated like the Macy's floats. They are Activists or Influencers. You can't be an activist or influencer without fucking *tweeting* a chunk of your supposed subjectivity, or maybe strutting it before the world via some other social media format.
But there were rabble-rousers and showmen and hucksters and cult leaders way before DARPA. As new communication methods are invented, some humans use them to their advantage. The rest of us comment on more successful people's Substacks. ;)
Um, there have been activists for far longer than the internet has existed.
Yeah, I said that. Second sentence: "Of course there have been activists since forever." I wouldn't be touchy enough to point it out if you weren't the second person to call my attention to the fact that there have been activists since forever. My point was that when certain public roles get Internetized they change. If you internetize your activism you become an Activist, a bloated and subtly different kind of entity.
Edit: Just realized what else made me speak up: your "Um," at the beginning. That's really irritating. It means, "I don't mean to embarrass you, and I feel awkward bringing it up, but you just said something really really obviously dumb." And people who say "um" before pouncing on someone's gaffe never seem to be a feel a bit awkward bringing it up, and generally appear to relish the original writer's embarrassment.
Edit: Huh. Didn't realise it came across that way. TY. Honestly, I was tired and braindead, and I wanted to write more, but settled for "Um" (until I found a Red Bull in the fridge).
Invectives about polyamory are inevitable now, in the current phase of polyamory Overton window shift. This is the only acceptable way polyamory can be currently portrayed and discussed.
As Overton windows move for new social norms like LGBT and polyamory, the mainstream media narratives evolve along the axis of omission/taboo -> negative/critique -> ambiguity -> struggle/oppression ->positive -> new normal. We have seen LBGT cover almost all these steps during recent 40 years, currently I think we are between positive and new normal. With polyamory, we have just recently moved from omission/taboo to negative/critique. Portraying polyamory as positive or struggling/oppressed in mainstream media is still out of the Overton window, showing ambiguity is now at the edge, only negative critique is in the window. This is also why almost all movies and shows about polyamory are telling a story of a failure of a polyamorous relationship.
Positive polyamory testimonials exist on social media, but usually the comments below are a shitstorm. This also proves how positive portrayal is unacceptable. At the same time, positive polyamory testimonial + shitstorm comments = negative meta-content bundle that itself fits well within the Overton window.
Note that these negative portrayals still promote polyamory somehow, as they at least put it on the map. 10 years ago there were no polyamory movies, shows or social media content - it would have been unthinkable, as we were in the omission/taboo phase back then.
You're assuming it catches on--they tried this with the Bloomsbury group in the early 20th century and 'free love' back in the 70s. But maybe it'll work this time. Seems to have gotten further than the last couple of times.
I kind of wonder about the kids given the increased instability. But as Giles says, it may be a form of harm reduction for the lower classes where families already disintegrated. And the Silicon Valley guys seem OK. The Park Slope bunch are on antidepressants and their marriages break up, but then they always were and did.
"The people I know from various oft-discussed groups [...] are all nicer and more normal than their public representatives would lead you to believe"
This has been, very strongly indeed, the absolute opposite to my personal experience!
I think part of why Scott has experienced this is his own personal Niceness Field skewing his experience ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds ) and partly because his social circle has been hand-cultivated to encourage nice people and discourage not-so-nice ones to a greater extent (and with more conscious thought) than the average person's social circle (my own included).
Contra Scott, my personal experience has been that the average person in an oft-discussed, heavily-memed-about group does seem to be more cantankerous, boorish, self-centred, belligerent, and one-dimensional (especially one-dimensional!) than the average person-in-the-street.
(One exception being the rich, who in my experience tend also to be considerably more horrible than the average person, but along different axes)
I think that this might be because the people in such groups are just as vulnerable to the memeplexes ("memeplices"?) Scott describes - perhaps more vulnerable, even, since they're actually in the talked-about group themselves:
> Very few are indifferent to the memes ('cos, as Scott points out, in a Darwinian sense the memes are really bloody effective)
> Some thrive on the memes - these are the self-obsessed public-memoir-writers, public-social-media-ers, etc. who are awful to be around for all the reasons Scott describes.
> Others really don't like the memes at all, and so their mental/inner life is in a permanent state of siege against a memeplex they don't like but can't escape - is it any wonder if such a person ends up becoming overly-self-focused and belligerent?
[Please don't take this as a personal criticism if you're reading this and are in an oft-discussed group - obviously I'm making a comparison between the *average* person from such a group that *I happen to know* and the *average* person not from a group that I happen to know, so A) there'll inevitably be a whole bunch of selection effects going on for me, just as there are for Scott, and B) obviously there will be many non-average lovely people in the group and many non-average awful people outside it. Also I do have to admit that there are definitely some oft-discussed and heavily-memed-about groups - vegans come to mind, but I'm sure there are others - where the average person I m̶e̶a̶t̶ meet does genuinely seem to be perfectly nice, interesting, friendly, multidimensional, etc. and such groups do kinda mess up my nice neat theory a bit..]
Hm, Scott's experience is very close to mine. For context, the groups in question I've been with have been transgender, autistic, and rich - I'm none of those things, but was either close enough (eg gender non conforming) or had personal connections (the rich people in question were my stepmother's workplace). I'm also very conflict-avoidant. I know where the tripwires are and can step over them.
I wonder if some of Scott's, PJohn's and eclare's experience is driven by what they bring to the relationship. Scott is such a sweetheart that when he knows someone personally, he likes them, and eclare may be too. PJohn may be a little more attuned to their faults.
(Or not, but maybe. What did Hamlet say? There are no most interesting men in the world, nor boors, but that thinking makes it so?)
Possibly! I would say that I'm a polite person and (as I said) conflict-avoidant. I think people are interesting and like to talk to them. However, I do also internally judge people I don't know very well all the time, so I can't say I'm totally nice.
I know this is one of your trigger-topics we disagreed on years ago, and I think that’s clouding your interpretation here.
> But The Atlantic’s complaint was that the book seemed kind of navel-gazey.
That’s a polite way to put it. Did it come up in the subscriber-only post that The Atlantic’s critique only came *after* a wave of glowing reviews that ignored everyone in the book being miserable and borderline-abusive?
Much of the media has an obsession with making poly sound fantastic, and giving this no-name narcissist platforms, book stores will host her but not Actual Person Rob Henderson. The Atlantic published one article to the contrary, and that’s the one you pick on? Hmm.
> I think this goes beyond polyamory. The people I know from various oft-discussed groups - transgender, super-religious, autistic, rich, etc - are all nicer and more normal than their public representatives would lead you to believe.
While I would mostly agree with this, poly has a complete lack of sympathetic public representatives. The other groups have skewed representation- other comments discussed why- but not such a thorough lack. Clearly, it’s no longer an extreme taboo, it’s a luxury belief most media has been portraying positively for a decade now- and yet. Hmm.
No, you and Aella don’t count.
A *lot* of people hate Aella, and Scott's had the NYT go after him.
The media is really pushing it, I agree. It's been all over New York magazine and the NYT. It was in the WSJ a few days ago, and I contemplating cancelling my subscription. I have no objection to polyamory (heck, I...uh...had a girlfriend and a sub for a few years a while back), but my gut feeling is, if the liberal (and apparently not-so-liberal) media's pushing it, it must be some plot to screw cishet white men over.
> That’s a polite way to put it. Did it come up in the subscriber-only post that The Atlantic’s critique only came *after* a wave of glowing reviews that ignored everyone in the book being miserable and borderline-abusive?
Do you consider the NYT review "glowing"?
Doctor, heal thyself!
I only know you through your blog but you seem to be struggling lately with clarity of thought---many of your posts seem to be blinded by some agenda or axe to grind.
You describe this article as, "they conclude they hate polyamorous people" and that the article implies there is something wrong with polyamory. It's almost as if you didn't read the article!
The article ends with a clear statement that polyamory works well for some people. The last paragraph begins, "Open relationships really do provide some people . . . the freedom that they want and need." This follows the previous few paragraphs discussing that it's ethically fine, and that it's nobody's business how consenting adults want to live their lives.
What they seem to hate is uncritical fads and "therapeutic libertarianism," not polyamory. What you seem to hate is...?
Critique of EA by non-EAs and critique of poly have long been “triggers” for the good doctor. Certainly my own attitudes on the topics play a role in interpretation, but I tend to find his quality of communication to take a dip in these zones of thought.
Yes. And I hold higher expectations for ACX (and myself, and the rationalish-sphere in general) than I hold for most people. I have been adjusting my expectations for ACX lately but I'd rather not stop reading this blog, which is the only blog I read.
One could easily write an article complaining about therapeutic libertarianism, but this article is titled "Polyamory: The Ruling Class's Latest Fad", its subtitle is "Americans who most reap the benefits of marriage are the same class who get to declare monogamy passé and boring", and it uses the word "polyamory" about 150% as much as the words "therapeutic libertarianism".
I agree that in some sense the author *meant* to criticize therapeutic libertarianism and that all of his arguments are against that. But *in fact*, he wrote an article criticizing polyamory, and part of my objection to the article is that he ended up criticizing a thing other than the thing he meant to criticize.
In general I would like for people here to discuss things politely and not start a discussion by speculating about someone's character flaws.
The phrase "doctor heal thyself" was intended to refer to your writing, and not your character.
Your writing has shown a lot of bias, almost to the point of misrepresentation.
I stand by my comment: you have not accurately represented the Atlantic article.
Perhaps some more attention to nuance. Something like: "Although this article overtly states an acceptance of polyamory as a practice, if you ignore what the author says in the last few paragraphs, it actually means something else."
And: I can see the problem with my own comment. I will be more sensitive to possible misinterpretation in the future.
I should have said, "I only know you through your blog and you seem to be struggling lately with clarity of thought..."
I should follow my own advice, and watch my but.
Your own article is titled "You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books", and moves in and out of addressing The Atlantic and addressing your readership. Who is "you"? Is "you" me, the long time reader? I felt personally speculated-against, or reduced, or something, and I think so did other people. I have polyamorous bay area friends and have never read a book about the subject, and so my feelings do not at all come from where you're saying.
From any other author, I would call that title "extreme clickbait". Since you are fundamentally well meaning and truth seeking, I bend and call it "muddled thinking". Yes, the Atlantic is doing it too, and probably with more of an axe to grind, but you are very much in pot calling kettle black territory.
You really need to read actual memoir, not the ghastly nonsense that passes for memoir now.
Recommend some!
Just hate everyone like I do, it’s easier and more effective…
Feels like the less angry-at-out-group-y, more identity-oriented-yay-in-group-y flavoring of: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07
I find it notable that's from 2013.
No, I really do hate polyamory. It is, simply put, evil. I think the negative societal effects will become more apparent over time, both for the people involved and, in particular, for the children involved. (For one thing, that is one hell of a Chesterton's fence you're tearing down.) And even if the negative effects don't become more apparent, polyamory will still be evil.
I'm sure this post will not be appreciated. But I wanted someone to point out that moral absolutes exist, and that someone needs to stand athwart history yelling, "Stop!"
You can't just say something is evil with no further explanation and expect people to be convinced, though.
I can't tell if you're being ironic
Not remotely
Humans are a sexually reproducing species. And how specifically is having sex with multiple partners more disgusting than having sex with one?
Because 99% of the human race has an inborn extreme disgust reaction to this behavior, honed by billions of years of natural selection. That instinct should be trusted over midwit “rationalism” that isn’t as clever as it thinks it is.
User banned for this comment.
Wow, ignorance on display
I'm not going to pretend that I can convince anyone that they should convert to and follow Christianity by posting on this board. But they still should do so, and I'm going to say so, even if I know it's futile.
I don't feel like this is the dominant effective model for successful proselytizing and in fact I'm pretty sure it's the opposite. I would say that I am now 0.01% less likely to become Christian on the grounds that you have reminded me what a bunch of annoying, judgmental twats actual Christians act like with far too much frequency.
I'm mostly not posting to proselytize. The assertion in Scott's title is no one hates polyamory. I'm posting to convince Scott (and others) that I exist. There are, in fact, people who hate polyamory, not just those who write books. And the reason I hate polyamory is because it is evil.
Okay. I hate Christianity. The reason I hate Christianity is because it is evil. Your posting has convinced me of this fact: Christians are evil people who love sitting in judgment over others while pretending to follow Jesus.
Man, it would be too much simple if Christianity was just evil. Instead, it has just the right mixture of authentic love with judgmental holier-than-thou authoritarianism, sprinkled with some real weird-ass myth, to hit some weird memetic corner that makes it super sticky and strangely repulsive at the same time.
Sure, and your existence is good evidence that the statement "No one hates Christianity" is not completely accurate.
I agree, everybody should convert to Christianity, it’s so progressive and poly-friendly it has instructions what to do in case you knock up both your primary partner and a friend with benefits (Deuteronomy 21:15)
Of all the arguments against polyamory, "no because this ancient book of fiction says so" is like the 300th most convincing.
I suspect polyamory isn't for everyone, and monogamy isn't for everyone. Even marriage isn't for everyone.
Polyamory must work best when each of the people involved isn't satisfied having only a single partner AND doesn't get jealous of the partner's partners. Monogamy must work best when both devote their whole being to the other person. But monogamy is simpler, since it has fewer conflicts. If something is better for your kids than for your partner, which do you choose? For polyamory, who gets which bedroom, and who has to sacrifice the most to make the arrangement work?
"I suspect polyamory isn't for everyone, and monogamy isn't for everyone."
NAMBLA could make the same argument. It's still evil.
...Are you seriously comparing polyamory to sex with minors? I'm sure you could have thought of a better example.
This response really starkly demonstrates the Overton Window aspect that is so terrifying. I swear just a few years ago "are you seriously comparing same-sex relationships with polyamory?" was the standard thing to hear in a debate about changing sexual norms. I'm too young to be sure, but I expect it was only a few decades before that "are you seriously comparing pre-marital sex (or no-fault divorce) to homosexuality? How offensive!" was the standard liberal thing to say.
You know what would make many, many people infinitely more sympathetic to a social change like this? Some sort of credible promise or committment that "this time, we will change this one last thing and then we will STOP". And not move as soon possible to finding another pillar of society to dismantle, to tear down the last remaining parts of civilisation that interfere with somebody's personal desires.
There is a much clearer Schelling point between activities that only involve consenting adults, and ones that don't, than between various activities between consenting adults.
I don't think liberals/progressives tended to say that any sexual activity between consenting adults is immoral, or should be illegal, any time in the last several decades. In fact, polyamory was legal in many places earlier than homosexuality, as it's been generally legal anywhere pre-marital sex is. I didn't follow all the debates very closely, but I doubt people would've said "are you seriously comparing same-sex relationships with polyamory?"; aren't you confusing it with "are you seriously comparing same-sex marriage with polygamy?"? (And I'm not sure they said that in this tone either.)
No, I'm pointing out that the argument of, "Well, maybe it's just not for everyone." is a terrible argument.
It's a terrible argument when some of the people involved in the thing aren't asked if they want it, or are too young to make an informed decision. Not when all the people doing it are consenting adults.
"Monogamy must work best when both devote their whole being to the other person."
See, I think the modern insistence that your romantic relationship is your most important relationship and should over-ride everything else is part of the problem. We're being encouraged to put all our eggs in one basket, a basket that wasn't designed for it. Why *should* your spouse be your best friend? There's nothing wrong with having a best friend! Or a bunch of friends you hang out with, or your hobby group, or you go talk to your parents/sibling/great-grandpa about your emotional problems.
Making the spouse the person who has to carry all the loads, and making it that you devote your whole being to them, puts pressure on. And that's why people find themselves 'falling out of love' or looking outside the marriage for someone else, and because we've made romantic relationships the loadbearers, people look for a new romantic relationship and blow up their existing one in the illusion that what they need is a new "all in one basket".
Except that isn't what it means, in practice. Instead of "always" think more like "often". If you always thought of your partner first, you couldn't say, eat. It's a balance that tends to favor your partner. You can still hang out with other people, and should, since your partner wants what's best for YOU.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-02-01
This all sounds nice until you become the victim of cruel circumstance (which is inevitable) such as dementia or cancer or whatever and find that since you no longer make an attractive partner to anyone, you are abandoned when you’re most vulnerable. Suboptimal relationships are the only kind of relationships. And the notion that you should always be on the lookout for a better deal is disturbing to us old farts. If you were terribly injured in an accident tomorrow and would never recover, would you not value (and want to reciprocate) the irrational commitment of your partner to care for you despite having nothing to gain? Who better to be the load bearer than the person you’ve solemnly committed yourself to? Unless of course you’re rich enough to just pay someone to do the dirty work involved in caring for you when the time comes.
Ehh, no, the traditional idea is that your spouse *is* the one you can count on for that. That is the special mutual responsibility you take in a long-term committed relationship. And to preserve that, you try to have a life outside, so that your partner doesn't have to double as your secretary, maid, best friend, shrink, etc, to the point where they get sick of you.
Modern life has weakened social bonds quite a bit, but when you're in a monogamous relationship, and for as long as it lasts, it's as intense as ever because you're sharing a roof and an everyday life. Which ends up demanding too much of the relationship, and putting a strain on it. Hence the advice to have a life outside.
This incidentally shows us how the traditional model was not nearly as monogamous as it looks. Just add "sexual partner" to the list of roles above, keep it under wraps, and you have the way it's been done for the longest time.
I’m confused. Are you saying the spouse is the one you can count on for care and practical compassion but not romance, or that the spouse is the one you can count on for romance but not care and practical compassion, or are you saying a spouse can be counted on for both but should not be “your secretary, maid, best friend, shrink, etc?” Because I don’t think I argued that a spouse should be any of those things. I just think a spouse is defined by the commitment itself. And commitments will at times be more burdensome than anticipated.
Maybe I just misunderstood deiseach’s meaning. If so, my bad.
> are you saying a spouse can be counted on for both but should not be “your secretary, maid, best friend, shrink, etc?” Because I don’t think I argued that a spouse should be any of those things.
That one. Maybe we're running in circles a bit. I was just reiterating my understanding of Deiseach's post, which is that modern culture errs in shoving too many of these extra roles on the spouse or romantic partner. Because being there for romance, care, practical compassion, and a shared day-to-day life is already quite a lot.
No, kids first. If we don't agree on that, then no marriage.
Well said.
Everywhere else you are supposed to diversify. Multiple investments, multiple friends, multiple job applications, multiple grocery stores and gas stations etc. Somehow “simpler and fewer conflicts” is almost never a plus. Why should romantic relationships be different?
Diversification is a way to hedge your bet. There is no way to hedge a bet concerning love.
Don't apply a principle where it doesn't apply. The opposite of a profound truth is often a profound truth.
A claim as strong as “there is no way” requires strong evidence, and the term “to hedge a bet” is somewhat misleading unless you elaborate what kind of bet is being made.
The obvious improvement on the concept of monogamy is to start with multiple FWBs and gradually let them grow closer and closer to you. Or more distant, that also happens all the time. Eventually you’ll see which ones, if any, are good matches for you, you might even fall in love with one or more of them. I don’t know whether this would be close to your definition of hedging a bet, but betting on one person that you hardly know anything about and when you can easily mistake infatuation for love is not exactly ideal.
Sorry, I thought it would be obvious, concerning love. If you diversify in love, you cannot, by definition, put all of your focus on one person, even temporarily. If you do it temporarily and then do it temporarily on another person, both people will find you aren't there when you are with the other person. If you were talking about sex, then yes, depending on the emotional make-up of all the individuals involved, you could have sex with more than one person and have a back-up if it doesn't work out.
But then you're talking about having multiple partners which whittle down over time. That is the opposite of diversification. Consider having some number of FWBs, and changing the number up and down as circumstances allow. How can you consider any of that to be love? It is certainly diversified, though.
If you’re the kind of person that can only love one other person, then perhaps “diversification” is not the most precise term, it’s more like “shopping around” (though that one sounds a little rude, maybe you can suggest something better).
You start with FWBs, and as you correctly point out, you don’t love any of them. You have lots of fun though. And if your goal is to find a single person to love, eventually you get closer and develop feelings for one of them.
It’s not like there’s anything revolutionary about this, just common sense. If you want to find a suitable romantic partner, of course you should surround yourself with candidates, and of course you should take it slow to better know each of them.
>you cannot, by definition, put all of your focus on one person, even temporarily
Yes, but should you? I think you shouldn’t, even if you’ve found one person you love and your goal is emotional monogamy. (And for the record, that’s not the same as sexual monogamy, which I don’t recommend for anyone.)
>both people will find you aren't there when you are with the other person
The tautology club consists of the members of the tautology club? You aren’t there either when you’re with your platonic friends either.
Evil is just a very strong word, even from the disapproving eye of a Christian. I don't think most Christians would go so far as to use that word, which in my understanding would imply the work of Satan.
I'm not a theologian, but this seems like a pretty good definition/explanation of evil:
"Evil, according to St. Thomas, is a privation, or the absence of some good which belongs properly to the nature of the creature." (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05649a.htm)
Seems to me it applies here.
That's a surprisingly broad category that could encompass a LOT of things, depending on your views of what "belongs properly" to human beings. Difficult to talk around, that one.
There's a verse in James that helps explain the Christian perspective on evil: "Therefore, to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin."
The scope of 'sin' is quite large in Christianity, which fits with their belief in the universality of sin (see, the commonly cited verse in Romans, "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.") Anything short of the glory of God is a sin, and a seed of evil.
A lot of Christians really struggle with the scrupulosity problem that Scott wrestles with in Nobody is Perfect, Everything is Commensurable (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/.) To some people (Scott included, I think), imperfection in themselves feels evil. Falling short of the mark feels unacceptable.
Having some way of making your inner self-judge shut the hell up is important for scrupulous people; for Christians, it's that Christ replaced that standard of perfection with his own perfection, and now only asks that you follow him and let him live in you. Your errors aren't your own to bear. For Scott, he's found a Schelling fence where he can tell his self-judge that he's already paid his RENT on that infinite debt, so shut up already.
I can understand, and agree with the basic idea that we have a certain weight of dirt or imperfection in our system. Psychologically, it's the residue of imperfect coping mechanisms, the weight of our selfish choices, etc.
But how on Earth does that amount to an *infinite debt* in anyone's mind? The mind/heart/organism/whatever itself is finite, so if I'm carrying a pile of dirt in it, how can it be anything else than finite too?
Sorry it's been so long, but in case you're still interested, "infinite debt" was a reference to the eponymous Scott-post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/10/infinite-debt/
How much do you owe your mother for all her care for you? How much do you owe society for inventing and creating roads, laws, and modern health care? etc.
Out of curiosity do you have a special axe to grind with polyamory specifically? I was raised devout catholic and had 13 years of Catholic education and while it would certainly be sinful its really not near the top of the list and has a fair amount of biblical precedent.
And the chestertons fence argument doesn't track - monogamy is the more recent invention, and there are actively other norms practiced around love and child raising in other societies.
The point of chestertons fence isn't that you shouldn't tear down fences without a good reason, it's that you shouldn't tear down fences before you _know why they're there_ and I think that's pretty well understood already.
No, not really. Scott approached this topic as only viewing practical considerations as the ones anyone would reasonably value and didn't even reference the moral aspect, as if morality is so passe it shouldn't even cross your mind. That irked me.
And I disagree that it's not near the top of the list. I think it's probably at the top of physical non-violent sins.
Scott has written at length about being an EA and a consequentialist, if there's one thing you can't fault him for not doing, is thinking hard and writing about morals. Maybe they're just so different from the kind of morals you believe in, that they don't even register as such for you?
You probably know that this is a rationalist (-adjacent) blog. We can't really expect people here to be swayed by arguments of authority, like your "even if [no bad consequences], it's still evil".
Again, this isn't about swaying people by my arguments. It's pointing out that people that think like me exist--which was denied by the title of Scott's post.
That's not at all the point of the post. It's that people who read memoirs that involve polyamory think they hate polyamory after reading them, whereas they actually hate what they have read.
You are welcome to hate polyamory on its own merits as you see fit.
his tacit point is "polyamory is seen as bad because of its visible advocates" but not because it itself is bad...normal
people do it fine. you won't hate it if you look at them.
The title is pretty awful and incendiary, and the content freely jumps from addressing the Atlantic to addressing the readers, or at least is very ambiguous in this regard.
Kevin was not the only person who felt personally addressed in a bad way by the article.
I am not Christian, but I am against polyamory. I have never read a book about it. I am against it because I did not like watching the experiences of bay area polyamorous friends. Not one bit.
The article is far from Scott's ordinary careful thinking and careful modes of address. This is an author who has gone as far as to put extensive parenthetical disclaimers on statements, effectively saying "I know some people are going to read this as X, and make angry comments, and I can't stop you, but I just want you and everyone else to know I really meant the less incendiary Y".
Right after wearing clothes that mix multiple kinds of fibers?
You do understand that Christians believe that Christ replaced the old law, so that no longer applies, right?
You’re strengthening my belief that everybody should switch to Christianity. It’s so progressive you can even cherry pick the parts of the law that you want to follow, you’re free to believe the rest has been replaced!
"Before you speak, let your words pass through 3 gates; Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?"
>there are actively other norms practiced around love and child raising in other societies.
Can you name them? An off the top of my head survey of cultures across space and time is that institutionalized pairing of a man and a woman is predominant.
The predominant norm as practiced—not preached—has always been that powerful men fuck whoever they want, women seldom like it but they put up with it.
Casual sex is clearly not what I or Sovereigness was referring to. A society that has institutionalized a man/woman pair as the family unit, including ones where shelter is shared among extended family, can have normalized casual sex - this is still the case in Western countries, despite the efforts of the purple haired.
Define “institutionalized” then? If monogamy is considered moral, if there are rituals officially pairing men with women, but husbands routinely have sex with other women, that doesn’t look like a monogamous society to me.
I meant institutionalized in the sociological sense where individuals step into social roles that exist before and after them. These roles are shaped and maintained by both intergenerational habits and formal laws, eg the entire field of family law.
>husbands routinely have sex with other women
An observant person might have noticed that this is usually met with opprobrium, and that this fact undermines the point they (you) were trying to make.
People often contravene the expectations that are associated with the institutionalized roles that they've stepped into. That doesn't mean the institution doesn't exist. Eg, teacher-student relationships and the associated expectations are also institutionalized, teacher-student intimacy being one expectation that is codified and socially taboo, yet this does happen with some frequency.
It’s quite grotesque when children are involved. If you don’t have kids or plan to have kids then you do you. But kids should make this utterly off limits.
Yes, I strongly agree! I can't even comprehend how disgusting it would be to put your desires for sexual exploration ahead of a stable environment for your children.
And this is also where your. "lifestyle" is absolutely 100% society's business.
The kind of polyamory where people have children with their primary partner and protected sex with their secondary partners seems like a more stable environment for children than monogamy where a strong desire for a new partner often leads to a divorce.
But still much less good than the ideal case -- a monogamy where both partners manage to squelch/ignore whatever desire they might have for other partners.
It is easy to lose in a comparison against some idealized situation. Let's imagine a polyamorous situation optimized for children...
OK, imagine three men and three women, living as three "primary" pairs on the same street. They already had this relation for a few years. Approximately at the same time they all decide to have children. They keep visiting each other, help each other babysit the kids, and organize some activities for the kids together. It's almost like living next to your extended family, except the adults are also having sex with each other, when the kids are sleeping or away from home (which can happen quite often, if they agree on e.g. "on Monday afternoon all kids are in our house, on Tuesday they are in your house, etc.").
I would imagine that this is even better situation.
You would imagine that because you have no children, and have perhaps forgotten what it was like to be one.
Children watch adults. Children are very sensitive to competing priorities, shifting arrangements, and wavering allegiances. Children do not treat *complicated structure* as structure, they treat it as chaos. Children strongly prefer and respond positively to simple structure. "We brush our teeth at 8," not "it is Tuesday, so you brush your teeth at 7, except for Steve, who brushes his teeth at 840 for reasons I don't want to explain again in detail".
Furthermore, give me a percentage value on relationship dissolution. Let's be very kind and say only 10% of functional, healthy relationships dissolve over ten years. In the monogamous case, that's a 90% chance at ten years of consistent relational structure for the child to rely on.
In the six person case you've described, that's (0.9)^6 = 0.53, a 53% chance at ten years of consistent relational structure for the child to rely on.
This is one of the core reasons to make this ladder:
Well executed monogamy >> well executed polyamory > poorly executed monogamy >> poorly executed polyamory.
You're idealizing polyamory and comparing it to a realistic low quality monogamy.
Childcare in a stable household without complicated conflicting priorities is better than childcare in a stable household with managed conflicting priorities. That's well executed monogamy > well executed polyamory.
You're free to decide whether poorly executed polyamory is better than poorly executed monogamy; I won't defend one way or the other.
This actually used to be a topic of serious discussion, and the general consensus was that yes, you need to make sacrifices and compartmentalize things to avoid impacting your children. Polyamory was very big on upholding commitments and honoring agreements, and providing a healthy and stable environment for children was seen as a "pre-existing" commitment. Your use of "disgusting" indicates that you may have different object-level about what "healthy" means, but please do believe that anyone with a working brain was taking the meta-level question seriously. (With the caveat that a known failure mode in poly is "not thinking with your brain", if you know what I mean.)
Yes, okay. There's two different attitudes here that are a whole *universe* apart.
1. Genuinely believing that your lifestyle is the best thing for your children, and the morally correct path.
2. Not particularly caring if it's best or moral, but really wanting to do it anyway.
I only meant "disgusting" in the context of the second. People who honestly believe they're doing the best thing for their children, even if I disagree that they are, are just an instance of reasonable, factual disagreement. People who say "it doesn't actually matter what the moral thing is, because I have a right to do *whatever the fuck I want*" are...well, all I know is "disgusting" is much too kind a word for them.
And any look at progressive and feminist spaces shows how common the latter attitude is. On abortion it's most clear: there are women who firmly believe unborn children have no consciousness and abortion is the morally best option for everyone. And there are women, more than I can comprehend, who literally say "it doesn't actually matter if it's a person, all that matters are my rights to do whatever I want for any *reason at all*".
It. Doesn't. Actually. Matter. That's literally what they say. I think I can say, with virtually no exageration, that there is no one more evil on the face of the earth than these people. Even Vladmir Putin thinks he has to have a fake "reason" for killing people, he doesn't proudly, with no shame whatsoever, say that the mere fact that he wants to is enough.
Now if we lived in a remotely just world, any community (polyamory, pro-choice, and so on) would, as soon as any of their members started talking like that, immediately denounce and ostracise them, the same way they would to someone saying that black people's lives don't actually matter. Of course, the very idea is laughable, that these movements would treat someone saying children don't matter to someone saying black people don't matter: much of the time, they actually *valorise* the first!
So, in summary, I'm sure lots of people in these movements have consciences, and have thought carefully about the moral implications and are trying to do the right thing. Just remember that they're rubbing shoulders with people more evil than words can describe. And there's a good chance they're enabling those sociopaths by not condemning them, or even distancing themselves from them, when they proudly advertise their evil. They're (often) either evil-adjacent or evil-complicit.
There are many possibilities between
1. Believing that something is the best for your children and the most moral choice, strictly better and more moral than any other option
2. Not caring if it's best or moral, but doing it even if it were terrible for your children and grossly immoral,
like
3. Believing that it's indifferent for your children, and indifferent morally (that is, neither better nor worse than other options), and doing it because you prefer it yourself (but you wouldn't do it if you though it were much worse for the children or morally)
4. Believing that it's slightly worse for your children but much better for you; putting a large weight on your children's interests, but not infinitely more weight than on your own
5. Believing that, within some range, neither option is inherently significantly better or worse for your children, but if you take an option you have a strong preference against, it'll probably lead to dysfunction that's bad for your children too; so whichever you prefer is also best for your children.
----
If someone on your political side says extreme things, which would be evil at least if taken literally, how quick are you to ostracize and condemn them? How quick are most people on the same side?
I think your two categories are actually missing the core group here, which I'd describe as roughly:
1.5. People who think that the mono/poly distinction, by itself, has no moral valence and is irrelevant to the health of children, but who do think that certain ways of implementing mono/poly relationships can be better or worse for children, and feel a moral imperative to choose the ones that are better.
Like, there's a lot of advice out there on how a single parent with children should go about mono dating. It's not my situation and not something I'm very familiar with, but as I recall, one bit of advice is to have the early dates away from the home, and only bring people home to meet your kids once you've been seeing them for a while and the relationship is stable. The theory behind it is that it's bad for kids to have a succession of potentially-unreliable adults coming in and out of their lives and making them feel uncomfortable or unsafe in their own home, and so the dating is arranged to keep the kids feeling safe. And exactly the same thing applies in poly relationships. From what I understand, most of the advice is like that, where it applies equally to mono and poly.
So in that respect, I think the argument you want to be making is that there's something inherently wrong about poly relationships, and exposure to them will damage children?
I'm separating that aspect from this:
> "it doesn't actually matter what the moral thing is, because I have a right to do whatever the fuck I want"
Which I agree is a problem. I've complained here before about protestors using rhetoric that's easily twisted and interpreted to mean something horrible, and this seems like another example. And I have no doubt that there are people out there who get high on self-righteousness and do things that harm their kids. My main argument here is that these people would still be hurting their kids even if they'd never heard of poly and were just doing a serious of mono relationships. But I have to admit that poly provides more opportunities for things to go horribly wrong.
And yes, I worry about what happens when poly becomes "mainstream" among people who are used to black-and-white thinking and who find it easy to justify stuff to themselves by using the latest slogans. And I worry that various interpersonal habits among poly people and among nerdy geeks make them a prime stalking-ground for sociopaths. A weaker argument I'll make is that a lot of people are inconsistent and kind of stupid some of the time, and while they'll respond to criticism with a brain-dead slogan, they don't actually believe it 100%, and won't follow it when their common sense tells them to do otherwise. That said, I sadly have experience with people like that who will cave in and follow the slogan when they're put under any sort of pressure, and who are afraid to disagree even in private to themselves. :-(
> Just remember that they're rubbing shoulders with people more evil than words can describe. And there's a good chance they're enabling those sociopaths by not condemning them, or even distancing themselves from them, when they proudly advertise their evil. They're (often) either evil-adjacent or evil-complicit.
I feel rather strongly that this is the sort of claim that needs to be backed up with examples, not just of wrongdoing, but of the coverups and excuse-making. It resembles how some people raised in an abusive religious family go on to become strident atheists who blame all religion everywhere for the harm they suffered. There are many wonderful, decent religious people, and I don't think it would be fair to describe them as "rubbing shoulders with people more evil than words can describe".
Polyamory has been around for a very long time in the form of small tribal societies, and the harems of kings and emperors. The main difference in what we see today is that the focus is on sexual opportunity rather than child rearing or power expansion (in the case of kings). Multiple parents that one could count on actually being there is not a bad thing. However, polyamory as it stands in modern times is not geared for that. There's a lot of churn in pods that make for bad conditions in child rearing. As a disclosure, I'm fully monogamous, but have been close to a number of poly groups- mostly poor and working class.
Um, actually, while sexual opportunity is often part of it, and sometimes all of it, many, if not most, poly people seek connection, trust, understanding, respect... ie. relationships with other people.
Sure, but they aren't typically prioritizing stable child rearing.
Many do, actually
I'm sure they exist. It's not prioritized at all in my decently sized polyamorous friend set. It's hardly the top concern in these comments. Would you claim it's actually prioritized to the level typical in normal society, and I've just missed it?
Yes, polyamory is evil.
I'm about to jump on a 12 hour shift running conduit, so I apologize if this is a little disorganized. Id intended to write this for next Monday, but it's topical.
I've been thinking about the structures I've observed in polyamorous groups and the challenges that they face. Very little is codified as generally acceptable in the space, though certain pods may have structural rules that work for them. As a whole though, it's a kind of laissez faire dedicated to maximizing sexual access rather than building cohesive groups of reliable people with healthy relational habits. I suspect this focus on sexual access alone is an accident of how political sexual liberation has affected polyamorous culture rather than an inherent evil that is baked into the practice.
In many, (though not all) polyamorous groups I've seen, kids are often an afterthought who are brought up by single mom's who often find themselves as satellites to several disparate polyamorous groups. The nature of easily picking up a new flame and dropping old ones makes it easy to pick up attractive but difficult people, and get rid of them (and their kids) when they become too inconvenient or unreasonable. Given the inherent complexity of maintaining multiple relationships, I see it a lot. 2 people have 1 relationship to manage, 3 have 3, 4 have 6, 5 have 10... And so on. So many simplify to a wheel and spoke type of relationship structure to simplify. There may be a primary power couple who are tied together financially and they sleep with other people who are easily discarded and have no financial obligations to them. Children produced in this manner are similarly easy to discard, and grow up in difficult circumstances. Some pods have around 4 or 5 people who are part of the primary group and financial obligations are slightly more rigid, though I have often seen an ease of discarding in this structure as well. In these groups I've seen that the kids sometimes stay with the main pod while the satellite parent is ejected. This is marginally better, but still not ideal.
Raising healthy children who have stable family backgrounds could be a primary focus within polyamorous culture in the US if expectations were a little more codified and there were fewer individuals flying the polyamorous flag for hedonic sexual pursuits alone. Kids need a fair amount of support, stability, and need to have connections to people of all ages to grow up as responsible, strong minded people. The small village mentality that could exist in polyamorous groups could reduce the burdens most parents experience in child rearing, because there can be a number of kids growing up together with a number of parents to provide support. But again the lack of codified expectations in that space means that relational churn is prevalent.
I'd be interested to see what effective polyamorous marriage would look like as a legal institution, as it could provide satellites who have kids more recourse. However, it still wouldn't solve the cultural issue of commitment to relationships, which is increasingly rare in monogamous couples as well. How to address that and make people just behave as good people in relationships can't really be written into law. I suspect there may be something about the templates of life we learn from the dominant stories we consume, but that's a whole other tangent.
I think the major point here is that it isn't polyamory so much as the dominant strain of polyamory that is so distasteful. Since it looks like it's around to stay, I'd like to see it hashed out to be healthier and geared towards making good people.
We don't know if it's around to stay.
I do agree it's a lot more dangerous when kids are involved.
I trust Scott and his wife. It's the proletariat I wonder about.
I've seen a lot of adoption of polyamory among disabled and those on food stamps where I live. It looks to be a strategy to find resources as a group, as well as to maximize sexual access for those who are not traditionally desirable. As an outsider, I have observed a lot of toxic behaviors in these groups, but it seems to be far more common than one would expect. I'd love to see the numbers, but my intuition says that this amount of buy in doesn't go away quickly. It's possible that there aren't many people who are actually interested in healthy polyamory outside of a few well off, responsible individuals such as Scott. Possibly most people just want casual sex on the side of their committed relationships. If that is the case, I'd prefer a culture of swingers in already committed relationships to a culture of satellite relations who have no recourse. At least swinger couples and quads each have two parents who are financially responsible for any kids that come around because of one of their dalliances.
I was thinking that, if you actually had a stable quad or couple-of-couples you might actually come out ahead as you'd now have four parents responsible. But I think it's too 'alternative' to attract stable people in large numbers. We shall see!
I suspect it would be a lot more stable because it's two primary relationships. It's a lot easier for our monkey brains to say this is my main relationship, and these are my two secondary relationships than it is to say these are the three relationships I have to manage my place in the hierarchy within. Also I am responsible for kids that this partner has (or I have if female).
I know many people in stable poly relationships.
Wow, you really don't see poor and disabled people as human beings, do you?
Quite the contrary. Necessity makes for ugly choices because opportunities are scarce. Much of the adoption of poly I've seen from poor friends and family has been out of the need to consolidate resources among a number of people. The relationships are often explosive, due to the nature of their complexity and the wider culture around polyamory.
I can tell you run conduit because of the ease with which you think about how many unique pairings there are between things.
Just imagine me drawing 5 dots and counting the lines that can be drawn between them. I appreciate the compliment, but I'm afraid I have to scribble on paper for that kind of thing like everyone else ;)
You do bring up a good point about child-rearing. Human children are probably the most demanding children to care for on Earth. Traditionally, mothers had a lot of help from their extended family and friends in raising their children, but that's not really possible under the current status quo of monogamous nuclear families. If we could just normalize setups that made this kind of collaborative childcare practical, maybe that could encourage people to have more children. ...Of course, there's still the issue of affordability, and we still have a problem of people failing to form relationships in the first place. *sigh* I really doubt things are ever going to improve at this point...
Thank you, this actually shifted my views somewhat.
This is one of the topics that helps make it clear that politics and law are a thin meniscus on top of culture and practice. It would be nice to codify stable versions of polyamory into law, but I agree it would be hard to do so without stable versions in practice. It would be an improvement to shift stable versions of polyamory into practice.
""""""I think the major point here is that it isn't polyamory so much as the dominant strain of polyamory that is so distasteful. Since it looks like it's around to stay, I'd like to see it hashed out to be healthier and geared towards making good people."""
I am opposed to polyamory, having never read a book about it, because of what I saw in practice among my polyamorous friends, and how I felt about it. This statement helps heal that feeling somewhat and helps me imagine a world where the practice is not awful.
Is this an April Fool’s prank
A couple of years ago I visited a Maasai village in Tanzania. They are very traditional, as in "we got to the Stone Age and decided to stay here." The son of the headman asked me how many wives I had. I told him just one. He was clearly disappointed in me as a man--I was a guy who lacked the status and prosperity for multiple wives. He, on the other hand, had three wives and his father the chief had six. Those were men who made it big, despite living in dung-and-stick huts without running water or electricity. So is polyamory for the elites? I guess your cultural mileage may vary.
The argument is these cultures aren't as wealthy and successful long-term, and given the Maasai versus the Brits...I kind of have to admit the monogamy advocates have a point.
I can only say that the Maasai did not seem envious of the Brits or other first-world societies, and they have been around since forever.
Oh, because Brits are doing so well right now. It might surprise you to know that there are quite a few poly people in the UK.
I think Anonymous Dude means the Brits from the past who were both more monogamous and more successful.
Presumably those men were the elites in their society.
Yes, this.
Modern polyamory takes many forms, but old-school polyamory generally meant "elite men get lots of wives; poor men get no wives." May sound good if you're elite, but historic polygamy was a negative for the majority of men.
Wow, stone age?
Also goes for weight loss advice, where fat people have endless supplies of suggestions and seem especially to try to force those thoughts on non-fat people who are successfully dieting already despite having a lot less weight to lose. In the past when I had bad obsessive compulsive disorder I had lots of advice for how to deal with it, but now that it's been years since I had any symptoms I've mostly forgotten them. I was also a bit insufferably into self-analysis back when it was bad, but since that eventually led to improvement it wasn't a waste.
Speaking as a fat person in the process of becoming less fat (through boring calorie counting that I really don't need to explain), I am probably a bit guilty of this, but I think it's a good example of Scott's other point: people who have never had a problem with their weight can't offer any useful advice on weight control at all, because they don't really know what they are doing differently. I have tried asking these people and they pretty much just say, "I don't know, I just eat whatever I want." You can learn a lot by _observing_ them and seeing what "whatever they want" actually is for them, but you don't learn anything useful by just asking them.
Ideally if you are looking for advice you ask people who have successfully conquered a weight problem, but they are not so likely to be proactively offering advice as people currently dealing with one because it is no longer at the forefront of their mind.
For what it's worth, as a person with a pattern of once every few years deciding I weigh too much and then successfully dieting to lose it, my advice is to weigh yourself daily and use an app to track the results over time as a way of gamifying the process. Since that's all that's necessary for me, that's all the advice I have to give. With that approach I generally lose 1 or 2 pounds a month, which is completely sustainable but slow, and the biggest problem is just how boring the whole thing is and keeping interest from fading over time. Good luck withy our weight loss journey. Oh, and don't drink sugar water including fruit juice, skim milk, and alcoholic beverages. That advice is so baseline that it's easy to forget to mention it.
"The people I know from various oft-discussed groups - transgender, super-religious, autistic, rich, etc - are all nicer and more normal than their public representatives would lead you to believe."
Yes! I've interacted with all of these groups (aside from super- religious) and despite my worries, I found that even the most ideological of them are willing to engage with you as people first if you grant them the same grace.
From Tolstoy's dictum, "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", it follows that every happy family's memoir or advice would be repetitive and vapid.
I'm sure the subscriber's only post does a good job on the specific disagreements, but without that context this feels like FUD more than insight: "Maybe advice is written by defective people. Ok, it's not really advice, but memoirs might be written by narcissists. Or maybe by activists. Maybe all of the above!"
These are probably useful stereotypes to keep in mind, but it's left to the reader to assume they apply in this case. And even so "a defective narcissist activist writes a memoir about their experience" is obviously the thesis of an article titled "Polyamory: the Ruling Class's Latest Fad." You can claim she doesn't represent all of polygamy, but I failed to find that claim in the article anyhow.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant this way with more context, but this post comes across like a substance-free attack on the article by casting aspersions at the book the article is attacking.
Wait, I don’t understand why “the ruling class’s latest fad,” which seems to be a statement about poly people generally (or at least a certain class that is drawn to poly), is equivalent to a statement about a *particular* person who wrote a book.
I agree, that would be quite an extrapolation if true!
Okay, I have two basic objections to polyamory. The first is a broader but weaker point, and the second is narrower and stronger.
1. If you actually love someone, that person should be enough for you. Especially, if most people who claim to love someone do, in fact, find that that person is enough for them. I struggle to see how it doesn't *almost* follow by definition that if Aaron wants to be in a momogamous relationship with Brenda, and Carl wants to be in a polyamorous relationship with Diana, then Carl loves Diana less than Aaron loves Brenda. Now maybe this assumption can be refuted somehow, by reference to irreducible personality types or something, but it certainly seems like the prima facie assumption, and requires an affirmative defence.
2. There seem to be two types of polyamory: the "hippie" kind where a group of people are all in a single demarcated "relationship" with each other, all know each other as either friends or lovers, and having sex with anyone outside that group would be condemned as cheating. And the "open relationship" kind where two people are dating or married but are "free" to sleep with other people (but still have each other as a "primary partner" or some such). The first, while I'm not endorsing it, seems to have decent case for being a form of actual love. The second, unless I'm missing something, looks like despicable pure hedonism. First, because the "primary" aspect shows it really is all about sex, not about sharing your love with someone else. Second, because it's basically legitimised cheating, and for all the talk of mutality what's to stop someone pressuring their spouse to "consent" to "opening" their relationship? (I've seen a number of online stories of this happening, though with beautiful poetic justice where the pressured partner ends up finding someone who actually values him or her and wants a true relationship, and the other partner ending up entirely alone and certainly not finding the harem they were expecting). And third, because it creates *competition* between the two spouses over who can get more partners, and for fuck's sake a marriage is the ONE place such toxic sexual competition should not exist!
And also, I can't find it but when I was reading through the old slatestarcodex archives, I at one point followed a link to a post where Scott's former girlfriend, Ozy someone, was outright arguing that cheating is sometimes okay! As in, actual non-consensual cheating. I think when you've got your activists doing that, it's fair to say your movement has a massive problem. How many monogamous people will you find publicly, proudly saying "cheating is okay, actually"?
Point 1 has the unstated assumption that love is a conserved quantity. This may be false. "If you see someone without a smile, give them yours."
Still, one can only smile at one person at a time. It is impossible for someone to love two people the same way.
Love is not conserved, as many people that have multiple kids can attest to. Time and attention are extremely limited, and people are very aware of when they are getting the short end of the stick on either.
But (to restate the point I just made to drsophilist's similar reply) even people in monogamous relationships spend some of their time and attention outside of the relationship: they spend it on work, on friendships, on hobbies. That doesn't mean these fail to be issues; they definitely are issues for many couples. "You care more about this hobby than you care about me," "you're spending too much time at the office," "I never get time to see my friends"—these are all complaints that relationship counselors are familiar with, and they're all legitimate areas of conflict. But of course no relationship counselor would say "just do without your friends/hobbies/job; your partner should be enough for you." They're things that have to be negotiated, and the most acceptable answers will vary from couple to couple.
Sure, but romantic love/attachment tends to have a much higher status in most people's mind. Jealousy is a thing, and spouses are well known to be much more jealous of a rival love interest than a job, even if that job is 60-80+ hours a week.
If you doubt that, I would be interested in your opinion on a wife whose husband is at the office 60 hours a week. Would she feel the same, better, or worse if she found out that her husband was having an affair with his secretary so he was only actually working 40 hours a week? Would she feel better about it if he told her he was going to do it first? Some people might say yes, but the vast majority would say that the affair is strictly worse than the work hours, despite being the same amount of time away from the home.
I definitely don't doubt it, and I agree when you say the vast majority would find work hours more acceptable than poly-hours. The vast majority are going to continue to not be poly! For most people—probably particularly most women—the "negotiation" over poly will be "No, that's a dealbreaker," and woe betide the poly person who doesn't accept that going in. That said, the answer to your question "Would she feel better about [the husband sleeping with another woman] if he told her he was going to do it first" is clearly yes for some people, since that's the arrangement poly people arrive at. Though of course that arrangement, if done properly, wouldn't be "he told her" but "they worked it out openly."
So no, I definitely would not say "A spouse should accept a poly relationship just as they would accept a job or a bowling league." Hours are not created equal. The point I was making is that someone getting the short end of the stick is a subjective perception that some people will hold regardless of any negotiation, whereas other people will find worth negotiating around.
Love may not be a limited resource, but time, energy, and attention span certainly are, and you can’t have true love without those.
That's true, but the amounts of time, energy, and attention each partner requires are going to vary quite widely among different couples. As an example, some people would not be compatible with a partner who has a high-powered, high-stress job that takes up a huge amount of their time and attention. Others would, even though a lot of maintenance might still be required. That's the kind of thing that has to be worked out partner to partner; it's hard to lay down a general rule about how many hours each partner should work and no more.
Which is why a spouse banning someone from seeing their friends is doing something obviously correct.
The poly question is structurally quite similar to the gay/lesbian issue, which went from censored to mainstream acceptance quite recently. The claim is not that people "should" be poly, it's that it works better than the alternative for a certain % of people.
These kinds of subtle shifts always have a way of eliciting fearful responses from people who think someone is trying to turn the whole of society gay/poly/whatever. And of course the world being what it is, there will always be some overexcited confused teenager misunderstanding the issue and arguing for just that.
But it's really about just letting people with minority options in life do their thing. I'm not in any of these groups, but I'm happy to see society shift in the direction of letting them live their lives in whatever way suits them best.
>The poly question is structurally quite similar to the gay/lesbian issue, which went from censored to mainstream acceptance quite recently.
Is anyone arguing that poly people are "born that way"? I've heard this once or twice (and I don't buy it), but the bulk of the discourse does seem to promote it as a *choice*, and in media it does tend to get a "try it" note, and not as an inherent quality. As such, it is not a good parallel to the gay/lesbian issue. And as such...
>The claim is not that people "should" be poly, it's that it works better than the alternative for a certain % of people.
I disagree here. It is a hard sell to claim that something is better for X% without specifying that % and what makes them unique. As with any lifestyle- veganism, paleo, prepper, Crossfit, whatever- there is an implicit or explicit "this is better" component.
I'm not arguing either way about "born that way". People form stable preferences over things, some can be more genetic and others less so. In a world where gay/straight was mostly a developing preference freely taken by a certain % of people, I'd still be happy for society to normalize that.
> there is an implicit or explicit "this is better" component.
I think the difference is that the lifestyle examples you give didn't originally have a contingent of people ready to call them "evil" and "bad for society". Before it became a movement, "I eat caveman food" would at worst make you a weirdo, not a menace to cultural norms. You don't have to go very far in this very thread to find people who honestly believe that normalizing poly is just that.
So I'm not worried at all about the poly group trying making me feel like I'm inferior for not being one of them. Group cultures change though, if they ever make it to the mainstream and then degenerate that far, I'll be ready to grumble.
I don't know if I was born poly, but it's certainly hard-wired. I've been poly since I was 19 (now 48), aside from 2 painful and disastrous mono relationships in my mid-to-late 20s. I don't fit into mono relationships, so I became increasingly miserable, and so did my partners. (One relationship was abusive, so big grain of salt there.) Swore off monogamy after that.
Have all my poly relationships been blissful? No, of course not, but then, most mono people can't say that either. All have been better than my mono ones, though, and many have been lovely.
Also, poly isn't better than mono, or vice versa. It depends on the person.
Hooray! Thank you
I'm sure you can see the problem in going from "I remember one person was arguing this extreme position" to "your activists are arguing this extreme position, therefore your movement has a massive problem." It's not suspicious that you can't find Ozy someone's post saying cheating is okay, but if this is a massive problem within the movement you should be able to find a bunch more posts saying the same thing, right?
It was just a single example I thought a number of people here might be familiar with. This Ozy was someone Scott was constantly linking to in the early SSC posts and I could probably find her post on cheating if I trawled through those archives. I use it as an example of someone in Scott's own (past) polyamorous circle, and again I thought some of the regulars here might recognise what I was talking about.
But more generally, what I find about these related sexually liberal movements (gay, feminist, polyamorous) is that while their members will rarely outright defend cheating, they also won't condemn it very clearly or very often. Maybe I'm wrong, it's just an impression I get, that it's rare to see a full throated "cheating is one of the worst things to you can do to someone and you're a disgusting person if you do!". If I could see a lot of that, I'd feel a lot better. It just feels like their attitude is an (unspoken) "yeah, cheating's bad, but it's not really *that* bad, and I wouldn't really *judge* someone for it".
Which I find really, really disturbing.
Well there's morals, and then there's psychological realism, and sometimes they paint quite different pictures. Cheating sucks, if you want to hear it from a permissive liberal, here it is. Don't do it. Especially now that you can leave a bad relationship quite freely. But cheating is also a fact of life, probably has been for as long as there have been modern humans. There have been places and times in history where it's been disallowed as hard as possible, and it looks like it still happened quite a lot, just underground. At some point you have to make peace with the whole human package, and accept to work within that.
Which means that within these constraints, as much as cheating sucks, the optimal level of cheating in any society is not zero.
Do you think the feminist movement has on the whole been gentler to cheating than pre-feminism was? I would find that very surprising, given that men seem much more likely to cheat and women much more likely to be expected to put up with it. Laws in olden times were harsher with female adulterers than male adulterers, "mistresses" much more common than whatever the male counterpart would be called, etc. I suppose it could depend on which "wave" we're talking about, but I would need some pretty definite reasons to think that feminism as a whole has been lenient on cheating.
In fact I don't even know if I'd agree that feminism is "sexually liberal" as a whole; a lot of feminism's relationship to sex has been to insist on *strictures*: feminists historically have been more opposed to prostitution and child marriage, have gotten marital rape laws passed and enforced, etc. Again, it depends on what generation of feminists you mean: there are feminists who are pro-sex worker and feminists who are anti. But that just seems to illustrate the problem with sweeping statements like you're making here.
I also think you're greatly overstating the degree to which pre-feminism was anti-cheating. Mad Men is a great show, I highly recommend it!
Pretty much. That's why they claim to be 'sex-positive' but get upset when shows, movies, video games, etc. have female nudity--it's the 'male gaze'.
It's one of the big reasons no man should ever trust a feminist when they say 'it's for men too'--no, it's not. They want to benefit themselves at your expense, and you should know that.
You're conflating different people who believe different things.
EDIT: But also, what does what you just said have to do with the question of whether feminism is gentler to cheating or not?
If cheating is something men engage more than women, they're going to be against it. I'm agreeing with you.
There is no single "them", that's why "they" are confusing and mutually contradictory.
It's a broad church, for sure. My point is--by and large, if you have a Y chromosome, these people are Not Your Friend.
well this is because when you make a virtue out of a vice its hard to stop. its a vice to not be able to commit to one person; polyamory tries to make it into a virtue. you cannot have flaws with the upperclass, they always must be recast. so even cheating becomes one i guess
Haha.
Um, poly here, and almost all the poly people I know are very against cheating. Also, cheating is possible in poly relationships: some relationships have rules, and breaking them = cheating. More broadly, doing something that you know your partner would feel uncomfortable/betrayed by is icky. Not telling them? Cheating.
Cheating in poly is way more complicated than that, but I gave obvious examples.
>First, because the "primary" aspect shows it really is all about sex, not about sharing your love with someone else.
It’s OK to have relationships with people that are all about football, not about sharing your love with them.
It’s OK to have relationships with people that are all about model trains, not about sharing your love with them.
What’s so different about sex?
Nothing, but then that's not polyamory any more, it's just polysexy.
That’s exactly what the parent commenter vehemently opposes
Also, many poly people don't have primary and secondary relationships
> First, because the "primary" aspect shows it really is all about sex, not about sharing your love with someone else.
Sex is a human need. But do you think it is impossible to also love someone you have sex with?
> Second, because it's basically legitimised cheating
That's like saying that trade is basically legitimized theft, or that sex is basically legitimized rape. In some sense, yes it is, but the word "legitimized" makes a great difference.
From my perspective, the bad thing about cheating is not the sex per se, but lying to one's partner. If my wife had other sexual partners before she met me, then having another one now would kinda be a difference in timing only. But if she lied to me about that, then... how could I trust anything else she says, and how could I organize my life with a person whose words I can't trust? (Probably a very aspie perspective, but hey, that's who I am.)
> what's to stop someone pressuring their spouse to "consent" to "opening" their relationship?
Presumably the same thing that stops them from pressuring their spouse to other things.
And, you know, sometimes monogamous people divorce, and they can do that completely unilaterally, without any "consent" from the other party. Seems to me that even unilaterally declaring a relationship to be "open" is still not worse than applying for a divorce.
> And third, because it creates *competition* between the two spouses over who can get more partners
That would be quite immature, IMHO. Okay, let's assume that I get 3 extra sexual partners, and my wife gets 4. What exactly should be my problem with such outcome, compared to e.g. a situation where each of us gets 3 extra partners?
I would expect that people who react this way are probably already feeling competitive about the number of their previous partners, or the quality of their previous partners, or the length or intensity of the previous relationships, or something.
"Sex is a human need. But do you think it is impossible to also love someone you have sex with?"
I don't understand the question: I'm saying that particular setup makes it look like the desire is only for more sex not more love. And scratch that, I don't actually mean desire for sex (or more sex, which you could have with your own partner) but for sexual variety. The latter is surely not a biological need.
But now I worry that everyone's talking past each other. I'm even less of sure of what "polyamory" actually means than I was before.
"That's like saying that trade is basically legitimized theft, or that sex is basically legitimized rape. In some sense, yes it is, but the word "legitimized" makes a great difference."
Fair point, to my lack of context. The context that I think makes it different is: imagine if we lived in a society where people were regularly swindled out of some item, say family antiques. A group of fraudsters go around, tricking people into selling them their antiques for much less than their actual value. Society condemns this, these people are ostracised when exposed, and there are countless widely shared tips on how to avoid being so swindled, and campaigns to inform people that this behaviour is not okay and how to be on the lookout for it. It's widely accepted that if you sell a family antique for less than its value, you have been wronged, end of story.
And then suddenly a movement of people arises advocating for people's "right" to sell their antiques for less than their value, if they so choose. It's a free trade after all! Who are we to judge if some people freely choose to make what the majority consider unfair deals?
I think there would be strong suspician that a lot of this is being driven by the fraudsters, and it would be reasonable to call it an attempt to legitimise fraud. Even though you could say, technically, it's not fraud if the sellers are aware of what they're doing, that they're part of this "right to make unequal trades" subculture.
This is a badly hacked together analogy and it would take me time to come up with a better one that more closely resembles polyamory. But without focusing on the details, can you see the rough point I'm getting at?
"But if she lied to me about that, then... how could I trust anything else she says, and how could I organize my life with a person whose words I can't trust? (Probably a very aspie perspective, but hey, that's who I am.)"
I'm possibly aspie as well (at least somewhat) and I agree with your account of why lying is so bad (I'm almost a Kantian about lying). But I don't share your intuition that lying is the only immoral part of cheating. Saying to your spouse "I will now be having sex with someone else, like it or not" is only slightly better than lying about it. Lying makes it worse, but that would still be absolutely horrible, still a fundamental betrayal of the highest order. Do you disagree?
"Presumably the same thing that stops them from pressuring their spouse to other things.
And, you know, sometimes monogamous people divorce, and they can do that completely unilaterally, without any "consent" from the other party. Seems to me that even unilaterally declaring a relationship to be "open" is still not worse than applying for a divorce."
I disagree. An honest, clean, unilateral divorce (while I think it's often wrong absent good reasons) seems much, much less bad than a unilateral physical withdrawal while still being married, or a unilateral emotional withdrawal, or something similar. The latter is just so horrifying, that someone could keep up the pretense of being in a relationship with you while actually, secretly (to most outsiders) abandoning you partially. And when you've broken up, everyone understands something bad has happened, that you've been abandoned. In the other cases, people might well not understand at all, not even realise there's any problem. I find it terrifying. And emotional abuse to the extreme.
More generally, the huge sticking point for me is the whole Chesterton's Fence. We have, as a society, decades or centuries of codified standards and norms, some harshly debated and some widely accepted, about what spouses owe each other, and what demands and actions are normal and abusive, regarding sex, division of labour, communication, raising of children and so on. We have all but nome of this in relation to demands and desires for opening a relationship, and the difference between "consensual" affairs and non-consensual ones, because it's been taken completely for granted that involving a third person in a relationship is something you categorically do not do.
And now there's a movement to tear down this fence. Well, if this happened over the course of centuries, I daresay society might adapt to it fairly well. There'd be established norms and official advice and so on about all the intricacies, and metaphorical "case law" regarding every possible situation. When this is happening in the space of a few years...can't you see how much harm this could cause?
Fair point about the immaturity of competition, but people in general can be pretty terrible, and several times more so for the subset who are inclined to throw away conventional morals for high status trends.
> I'm saying that particular setup makes it look like the desire is only for more sex not more love.
Ah, so the problem is basically with "I want to have sex with you, and even a long term relationship, but you are not my primary" -- especially the last part, doesn't seem too loving?
But it's not like monogamy gives a better answer. If you love two people, you should... marry one, and leave the other alone, right? That's why people are so broken-hearted about narrowly losing to someone. In polyamory, the person gets three options: (a) find someone else, (b) accept being a "secondary", (c) be alone. Or, possibly, find someone else *and* remain a "secondary".
Also, there is an obvious incentive to pretend love, just to get more sex. But the same is true in monogamy.
> more sex, which you could have with your own partner
Sometimes different people have different needs, and sometimes it causes problems in a relationship that could otherwise be happy. Suppose than one partner would prefer to have sex every day, and for the other once in a month is best; but otherwise they are a perfect couple.
> I'm even less of sure of what "polyamory" actually means than I was before.
It probably means different things to different people. I suppose the important part is whether you plan to have kids. If yes, you need to make it clear who will have kids with whom. If not, then it simply means people having sex with multiple partners, and letting their partners have sex with multiple partners.
> A group of fraudsters go around...
Ok, so what exactly is the threat we are trying to avoid here? I can imagine a few bad situations that often happen in relationships:
* A guy gets a girl pregnant, then says "not my problem" and walks away.
* A guy keeps two or three girls in parallel; they do not know about each other. The girls believe that they have some kind of relationship (an exclusive relationship, with the potential to become an exclusive marriage with children), but they actually never had.
* A 20-something guy dates a 20-something girl, with the assumption that they will have fun now and start a family later. Ten years later, the 30-something guy breaks up with her, finds another 20-something girl and starts a family with the new girl. The 30-something girl is shocked when she finds out how her value on the dating market has changed in the meanwhile.
* The same as the second and the third situations, but the girl also gets pregnant.
Probably some other options, too. I have mentioned the ones that I observe happening around me. Now the funny thing is, none of these guys was (officially) polyamorous. It all happened under the pretext of monogamy.
An analogous situation in polyamory would be the guy telling the girl that she is his "primary", and later changing his mind to "actually, I only want you as a secondary" or "actually, I decided to be monogamous, with someone else". That still doesn't seem worse.
An argument could be made that in the (pretend-)monogamous situation, when the girl finds out that the guy has other girls in parallel, the smart move is to leave him, immediately. While in the polyamorous situation, she is encouraged to stay -- and she may miss a different opportunity for a relationship that would come if she paid better attention and advertised being single.
To take it further, if you are okay with *both* mono and poly, it may seem like poly is strictly giving you more options... but actually it takes some of the options away, as your potential monogamous partners see you as "in a relationship" and therefore not available to them. You may not even notice that this is happening!
But it seems to me that most of the centuries-old norms were already abandoned by the prevalence of premarital sex and "serial monogamy" and cheating. Compared to cheating, and the kind of serial monogamy where you are already planning to replace your partner later but you haven't communicated it to them clearly, polyamory seems like a more honest option.
> Saying to your spouse "I will now be having sex with someone else, like it or not" is only slightly better than lying about it. Lying makes it worse, but that would still be absolutely horrible, still a fundamental betrayal of the highest order.
I agree. As I see it, the problem is with starting the relationship under some assumptions, and then changing the deal unilaterally later. That is almost like applying for the divorce, in the sense that you announce that the original form of relationship no longer exists.
It would be different if (a) you made it clear from the beginning that you are only interested in a polyamorous relationship, or if (b) both partners made the decision that being poly was better for them.
> And when you've broken up, everyone understands something bad has happened, that you've been abandoned.
I think, if your previously monogamous partner suddenly announces "I will now be having sex with other people", and you consequently break up / apply for a divorce, this will be quite legible for the outsiders, if you summarize it as "he/she started cheating on me".
> We have, as a society, decades or centuries of codified standards and norms
We also currently have 50% of marriages ending up with a divorce.
> First, because the "primary" aspect shows it really is all about sex, not about sharing your love with someone else.
Actually, I think it's mostly an explicit hierarchy for prioritization. Sometimes stuff goes wrong, sometimes you're needed in two places at once, and this provides a simple framework. As the good book says, "No man can serve two masters". And for the people on the other end, it provides clarity about what they can expect.
The alternative in 99% of cases is to make a lot of nice sounding noise about egalitarianism, but with the hierarchy still in place beneath, except now you're not allowed to talk about it.
People don't like proselytizers 🤷♂️ but proselytizing is at the core of American culture in a lot of ways, so we're screwed I guess
There's something slightly amusing here, in that I regard you as one of the better legible-principle-finders I've encountered, in fully general. You're quite excellent at taking knowledge which is implicit, and forming it into a legible (implicit) structure.
I find it a lot in people who, for one reason or another, "had to grow up too fast" - sometimes because their parents were crap and they had to step up far too early, sometimes because their effective peer group as a child was more closely aligned to "adults" than "actual peers". (Being very smart can cause adults to be far more interesting as a child than your fellow children.) Not really having the time to make a nice slow gradient descent, they get really good at finding shortcuts - and sometimes this coincides with the ability to actually specify what these shortcuts are.
This is the more detailed, thoughtful, and charitable version of what I was arguing last night, kudos!
I really want to double-down on the "you should hate people who write books" angle: it is - theoretically - possible to write a book of advice excellent enough that it more than redeems the author from all the errors in judgement led to them gathering such legible expertise. But in practice the writer of a sexuality memoir has not just made a chain of mistakes throughout their life, they are actively and determinedly making a continuous, crowning mistake through the process of publishing their book. It is one thing to screw up a conversation with a lover and hurt feelings; it is another to fuck up so dramatically and so often for this to be a relevant pattern; and it is a third far worse thing to fight to sell the second as entertainment.
It’s always seemed incredibly fraught to me, and always and only (before we became self-consciously deliberate about these things, anyway) seems to arise in situations where something is happening to drop the numbers of the male population, or else is put in place after such an event to exclude some number of men from the mating population by a religious institution like the FLDS.
I know in my bones an internet comment isn’t going to change many people’s minds on this, but two points because I can’t help myself.
1. Granted, I had one of those childhoods that was so terrible that people find it fascinating but this seems just awful for kids. Again, I’m probably bias because my parents have racked up close to ten marriages between them and I grew up knowing that their first and most heartfelt loyalty was never to me. There would be my brothers and sisters, whichever of my parents we were with, and just some random person they’d decided they loved more than us. And that person definitely made their resentment of us known and usually made whichever of my parents was there perform some sort of loyalty test. Most other people I know in this situation have some kind of similar experience even if the examples are less dramatic and more open to being interpreted as over-sensitivity. Say what you will about monogamy but it makes lines of loyalty very clear within a family unit. That might not matter as much when there are resources to go around for everyone, but when you’re poor it matters a lot because there isn’t that much to go around and one year your step-mom might want to ritually humiliate you and your siblings by giving you socks at Christmas while her children open elaborate gifts.
Again, personal experience, blah blah blah. But you have to acknowledge that the pathways for this kind of thing open up just because you’ve expanded the numbers of players in the game and unaligned their motivations.
2. This seems incredibly susceptible to motivated reasoning as a lifestyle. When we sit down and think about ethics, morality, or whatever, the expectation we should have is that we will walk away from those thoughts having some list of things we are not allowed to do. The whole purpose of ethics/morality/whatever is to figure out how your wants and desires step on the wants and desires of other people. So when people sit down and think through those things in a romantic context and in the back of their head there’s a command that says “and remember, try to rules-lawyer this in some way that you can still get what you wanted at the beginning” it kind of short-circuits the whole thing. When people talk about what they get out of this kind of a thing my biggest feeling is “Doesn’t it make you suspicious that when your partner is expressing their boundaries to you it always turns out that you should just be able to have everything you want?”
If there’s some beautiful version of polyamory where you’re putting bits of yourself into another person and bits of them into you, and your concern and caring for those bits of them in you grows greater than your concern and care for yourself, I would genuinely, sincerely, love to hear it. Otherwise, what I generally take away is a lot of “…. Yes, maybe someone does want that ideally but what about ME?”
3. A third point because I can’t help myself. Once you have kids, I think there’s a biological command in you, or at least there was in me, that shouts “Go fuck myself!” Your kid is the most important thing in the world. I felt that in my bones, anyway. If you’re shy, or don’t want to do some particular thing because it will be too stressful there’s that command “Go fuck myself!” And you just do it anyway.
You don’t want to brush their little teeth because they get wiggly, just do it anyway. You’re too tired to change the dirty diaper, just do it anyway. He’s crying and won’t stop and you’re just about out of fuel to keep going, just keep holding him anyway and kiss the top of his head and tell him it’s going to be okay. That voice, or chemical tug, or evolutionary imperative, or whatever you want to call it, guides you along the path of things that are best for your child.
Whatever anyone does before having kids, I think if you listen to that voice honestly, it tells you to dedicate yourself to a nuclear family unit.
Again, I’m also not typical because even if my wife and I got divorced for any reason I would never get remarried. I would never want my children to feel that my loyalty is divided. I remember what that was like where I was just a little kid and I suddenly knew that I couldn’t count on my mom and dad anymore (or even less than before in my case) and I would never ever do that to my kids.
Thanks for this.
You are welcome.
> Once you have kids, I think there’s a biological command in you, or at least there was in me, that shouts “Go fuck myself!” Your kid is the most important thing in the world.
Thank you.
Having children *changes* you, because suddenly, you're not the most important person in your own life anymore. There's a distinct step in someone's maturity and their priorities between before and after they have kids, and I have my doubts whether this is compatible with the quadratically growing social complexity of non-monogamous relationships.
(of course there are exceptions, not every parent is selfless and devoted, some people are born with the maturity of an old crone, and some gain that maturity through hardship and suffering – I'm talking "in general")
We should all aspire to Mufasa level fathering. I am practicing how to manifest as a cloud right now so that I will be prepared when my son needs me after I die.
Just, uh, maybe don't wait until he's an adult before you help him work through some childhood trauma and misguided feelings of guilt.
If he can avoid my brother, Jeremy Irons, for long enough.
As per your point 1, I am very sympathetic to your experience, that sounds very difficult, I just don't really see how that's an argument against polyamory. As I'm understanding your comment, your parents weren't polyamorous, they were monogamous? As in, all of their relationships were monogamous relationships? It seems like an argument against instability, and against not prioritizing children, but how exactly is it related to polyamory when it's the result of broken/unhealthy monogamous relationships?
Take a man from Mars view of this situation where you can’t really understand why anyone involved in any of this is doing anything. They can’t explain it to you and you couldn’t understand it. You just watch how atoms move around.
First scenario, two humans live in the same domicile, never procreate with anyone except each other and the Martian can observe this. They create offspring and provide them with resources during development.
Second scenario, two humans live in the same domicile for some period but continue there’s turn-over into the specific humans. You chart an increase in physical force used against the developing humans on average and a drop in support given to the offspring. The statistics around child abuse when an adult lives in the house who is not related to the child aren’t very good. You even see this kind of behavior in primates where they start to do weird stuff to the babies of other gorillas, presumably to create more resources for their own child.
Third scenario, more than two humans live in the same domicile for some period, with the specific configuration of humans changing across time. I think it’s fair to assume the dynamics of this situation will follow scenario two as this scenario *is* basically scenario two where you have just changed the temporality of where people are at a given time.
I was quite close to a girl in high school whose parents started to do the polyamory thing and she definitely felt like her and her siblings were not their priority. The problem isn’t “were the other relationships separated by time” the problem is “were there conflicting relationships at all?”
I think of polyamory like I think of cousin marriage. I will still be polite and kind to people who do it. I will look at particular examples of it and think “Well, everyone involved here seems to love each other quite a lot.” And I will still think “this may be locally okay, but it is still globally bad, and not sustainable at the level of the population for very long periods of time. This probably represents some developmental process breaking down somewhere and people should be encouraged to date outside their families.”
I am not saying make it illegal or break into people’s homes and start going through their stuff to figure out who is screwing who.
But I am saying when my son is a 60 year old man and I am a close to 100 year old man I will look at his gray eyebrows and tufts of ear hair and say “You’re still my baby.” And I am saying when I didn’t talk to my dad for five years he just sort of didn’t notice because he had other things going on with some lady he just met so that when I saw him again he just asked me to go refill a tank of propane for him.
You can argue you don’t owe some kind of magical Mufasa-level mentorship relationship to your child and maybe in a certain sense that is true. But that certain sense is also self-evidently pretty shitty and we should try to be better. I don’t care what people do before they have kids, except when I know them personally, or if they’re just trying to get a vibe on what they should be doing, but once they have kids your kid should know your eyes are always on them first and never on some person you just happened to meet who had big tits.
This was what I was trying to get at with my comment about - what if we were less verbal, and expressed ourselves in pictures.
How much padding there is …
You could imagine further scenarios where the two original parents stay together in a loving relationship prioritizing the children, the only difference being that the parents don't restrict eachother from having additional romantic/sexual involvement with other people. This could have positive or negative effects on the children, but those effects would be a result of the way the parents behave and prioritize, regardless of whether they place default restrictions on eachothers romantic/sexual interests.
A parent prioritizing a (additional) romantic relationship over their children is no more harmful than a parent prioritizing their friends over their children. The issue is the way they're prioritizing. When I defend polyamory I'm not defending loosening You familial bonds.
Whether or not parents prioritize their children's needs seems to be the main important distinction. You offer an example where the children weren't prioritized. I think your example exemplifies monogamous attitudes, you disagree, but I think we agree that not prioritizing children is the issue.
Imagine yes.
I can also imagine an infinite and perfectly frictionless plane where objects once put into motion continue in straight line trajectories until acted upon by other forces.
We’re not circle heads on stick bodies. We have an evolutionary and biological history that gives us all kinds of built-in natural urges/chemical tugs/biological imperatives. You have a natural urge to defend *your* specific children and anything that threatens that gives you a natural urge to behave in a hostile manner.
Wrote this above, yes I can imagine finding examples fairly easily where I would say “this seems okay.” And also at the same time, in no way contradictory to that, think it’s a worse system that doesn’t scale and people for whom it worked out had it work out by accident.
I think parents that don’t prioritize their kids won’t prioritize their kids weather or not they have various romantic relationships. It might have been golf instead of a girl with big tits. The only exception is if a parent that doesn’t prioritize their kids stays with the other biological parent who does care more about the kids and thus influence them into being a somewhat better parent than they’re inclined to be. But I really don’t think this has anything to do with sex except that adults like sex - they like other things too. Some parents are bad parents.
There will always be terrible homes in any system. My best guess, given what I said above, is that you probably have bad homes less often with monogamy. And I’m sure there are probably polygamous groups where I’d be fine with everyone there.
We’re not circle heads on stick bodies executing logic perfectly on an infinite plane with no friction. Whether we want them or not, we inherited certain drives/chemical tugs/biological imperatives whether or not we would prefer them to be there. You have to engineer your society around what’s there. And you have a very limited budget to get people to go against those instincts.
Not saying anyone isn’t free to go do what they want. I’m not going to lobby to have this made illegal or break up someone’s home where nobody is being hurt. Just that it’s probably not a very good idea over the long term. Especially with kids.
I am also probably in a minority here where I just don’t really care what makes someone who is a parent feel better or worse about the “fun” in their own personal life. We all get a bit of time to go out and have our fun. Then some of us go and take on a duty that’s more important than that fun. It’s still loads of fun! The most fun I’ve ever had in my life. But it’s a different kind of fun and it doesn’t involve a lot of immediate gratification.
Right, but the set of "parents who won't prioritize their kids" disproportionately includes *step*parents. And probably even more so step-hey-I'm-not-even-married-to-this-kid's-mother or whatever.
Polyamory necessarily introduces into the "family", adults who are disproportionately inclined to not prioritize at least some of the kids. And who, being part of the family, will necessarily suck bandwidth from the actual parents of those kids. It's certainly possible for a polyamorous relationship to be structured to mitigate this risk, but it's not guaranteed. So it's a serious concern that shouldn't be handwaved away with "sometimes parents just suck, that's not our problem".
This had less of gamesmanship and more of honesty than 90% of the comments.
I think of something I observed with my niece. Who was beloved, and really desired - a 40s surprise, my brother and his wife seemingly confirmed in infertility (pro-tip: get your gall bladder removed, but that’s another story).
Anyway, mental illness and whatever other mutual discontents led to the breakup of their marriage after a few years of delight in their child, and spoiling her rotten.
I then saw how, as if on cue, they both began complaining about their time, about being late for picking up, about personal plans getting messed up, about whose turn it was (they had no agreed upon custody schedule, and as mentioned, there was some mysterious illness or other alteration in one party).
I remember feeling a little pang when even my mother, the child’s grandmother, took up this chorus on behalf of her son, “he has to do too much, he has to have her too much”, etc.
I can’t emphasize enough that everyone loved this child but somehow they lapsed into a more selfish single version of themselves after the divorce. When she had been the sole apple of their eye only shortly before …
We are not a kid friendly culture and it drives me up the fucking wall.
It is one of a very few topics where I will shout at strangers in real life because I can remember when I was a kid the worst part was always that self-evidently messed up stuff was happening and everybody kind of just walked around it.
My prayers to your niece and I hope she knows you love her. In a healthier culture her parents would have been encouraged to take life paths that prioritized her.
"Say what you will about monogamy but it makes lines of loyalty very clear within a family unit."
I think I disagree with this, for exactly the reasons you talk about here. It sounds like (sorry - your comment wasn't super clear on this, but I'm trying to read between the lines) your parents were monogamous, at least in terms of ideology if not in practice (compare eg someone who votes Republican with someone who deeply embodies conservative principles in everything they do). It sounds like this failed them. I'm not saying that being ideologically polyamorous would have served them any better. But it doesn't seem like it could have served them worse.
The way I'm thinking about this is that both monogamy and polyamory have failure modes and success modes (for long-term relationships with kids, I don't care as much about low-commitment flings):
MONOGAMY SUCCESS MODE: You stay faithful to your partner and stay with your family.
MONOGAMY FAILURE MODE: You cheat on your partner, betray their trust, they get really angry, you get divorced, your family is torn apart, maybe you monogamously marry someone new, repeat multiple times.
POLYAMORY SUCCESS MODE: You have a primary partner who you live with and have children with, on the understanding that you might have other relationships too. You stay with your primary partner, have a great relationship with them, and continue to raise children together happily, while also having one or more good relationships on the side. Your other partners either don't interact with your family, or act as aunt/uncle figures to the children.
POLYAMORY FAILURE MODE: You try to have children with a primary partner, but one of you switches to prioritize another relationship instead and you divorce, or there's some other kind of instability that affects the children.
I've seen many people talk about the monogamy failure mode and claim this is a strike against polyamory. To score points against polyamory, I think you would have to prove that switching the marginal person from monogamy to polyamory increases the risk of the polyamorous failure mode more than it decreases the risk of the monogamous failure mode.
I would say that my parents’ marriage appeared to be a failure to us, their kids, although the misery was mainly down to one party, my strange and very difficult father (as my own husband put it, after knowing him awhile, “I don’t think he’s in the DSM”).
Well - failure looks like success now. He has succeeded in making them financially very comfortable (my brother: “Even Dad couldn’t screw up this bull run”) and she provides the round the clock care he needs, that no one else in the world would.
Marriage looks different as time passes.
Thank God they stayed together, or rather, she was not the type to seek to leave, both for lack of gumption and for social reasons.
Note that this isn’t precisely the same thing as weakness …
Firstly, I probably ought to have toned down some of my response here. You’re a real guy with real people around you and it’s always important to remember that down from the narrative level the personal is the most important. So, anyway, sorry to you and your loved ones.
You are basically correct on the situation with my parents.
It’s always hard for any of us to sort out what are the failures of the system versus the failures of our particular piece of the system. No system is perfect and culturally enforced monogamy on the scale we had a few generations ago didn’t produce 0 difficult family circumstances. Likewise, I’m sure there are probably polygamous relationships where I’d have a real hard time identifying a victim because everyone involved seems to be doing well. That said, it’s also equivocating for me to put it that way because I think one of these both in theory and in practice is clearly superior to the other and far less prone to be abused. And I also think that to not have an abusive polyamorous relationship you basically have to Mr. Magoo your way through a field of incredible hazards to arrive unharmed at the other side. Great for you if it all worked out but also it’s not like there’s a very good road through the sewer holes and moving I-beams that everyone can just follow.
“I've seen many people talk about the monogamy failure mode and claim this is a strike against polyamory. To score points against polyamory, I think you would have to prove that switching the marginal person from monogamy to polyamory increases the risk of the polyamorous failure mode more than it decreases the risk of the monogamous failure mode.”
To this I would just refer back to the statistics on the likelihood of abuse when an adult other than a parent is in the home. Why would those be different in a polyamorous situation? That’s my general system level proof of which one of these is likely better for children at the social level of analysis. Also the statistics about the general well-being of children with two parents in the home. That is very clearly more stable, you probably know those statistics better than I do, and while of course not perfect it does seem very hard to argue that if that wasn’t the case for more people (which we know is possible because it was the case for virtually everyone not that long ago) general welfare would be much better.
To argue for polyamory being generally better you’d have to make the case why the statistics about adults other than the parent being in the home don’t apply in the general case and also point to a historical precedent. Note, I know that something being “generally better” doesn’t mean anything in terms of legality/enforcement or what someone should do in their day to day reality. If someone’s gay while I think it’s better for a kid to have a mom and a dad I’m still going to encourage them to figure out a way to have a child because that is the greatest good available to them (note, I don’t think being polyamorous is like being gay). And I’m not in favor of anyone kicking down anyone’s door or publicly shaming them for their private lives.
I don’t think from purely an ethical perspective that this is as simple as a grid of success and failure modes. I mentioned this in another comment but say you’re a man from Mars. You can see what people are doing but can’t really tell why and they can’t explain it to you (your translator tech is broken and your biology is too different to make inferences). Would you easily be able to tell that the failure mode of monogamy isn’t just polyamory? Say you see one person go into another person’s house, mate, and leave and they get back home the other human there makes loud noises. That’s the same if it’s a husband cheating on his wife or if it’s polyamorous and someone gets jealous. The labels are different but the behavior is the same.
Pulling apart the success mode of polyamory… I’d challenge you to reconsider your entire mental model of consent in this scenario. If someone says “yes” to you is that enough for you to consider that you have full moral authorization to do something? I have not always lived by this, but I don’t think that a single “yes” is consent without additional questions. I am not saying you don’t follow any of these already I’m just explicating them to apply to the happy polyamory scenario. We have at minimum three additional obligations to a person to really know we have their consent. One is to reasonably imagine that out of all the possible lives they are likely to live would the the happiest bulk of those possible lives think that what they are consenting to is a good idea? And if I were them, but still knew what I knew, would I be okay with whatever the situation is that they are consenting to? And a third since becoming a parent: would I be okay with someone doing this to/with my kid? You’re famous and you’re quite good at making arguments. You have additional obligations. Is this person consenting to you because you are famous and is what they are consenting to likely to cause them harm? If there is some conflict you are sorting out with them, if they had your ability to quickly array facts and speak them out loud would their side of whatever dispute become stronger? That last test is the best one I have against motivated reasoning.
When you have a “primary” relationship would you ever be okay with someone making you one of their “secondary” relationships and treating you like a lower priority when this is consuming your time/resources to go make another bond with someone else? I haven’t read all of your old stuff but someone pointed me to a piece a few weeks ago where it seems like some people were pretty shitty to you. Can you easily imagine a future where if this satellite person wasn’t spending their time with you that they go off and find a more fulfilling relationship? If the answer to that question is yes and you imagine that person thirty years in the future what do they ask you to do right now in order to help them on their way? Are you doing that? Maybe the answer to that exercise really is “I love you so much that I always just wanted to sort of be in your orbit, but never really mattering enough to be in the home with you.” I won’t lay out the last one because I just typed it out and it felt mean but yeah, if the person you loved most in the world was involved in this kind of a situation would you think that is what is best for them and everyone is doing their best for them?
You have always struck me as a good and fundamentally decent person and I want to state I still think that is who you are? You gave someone an organ for crying out loud. But have you, genuinely, ever asked yourself these questions in reference to polyamory? These are very hard standards to meet and I think the simple “yes” version of consent where you back it up with “I’m trying to not be patronizing and I’m honoring their agency!” becomes almost Faustian in this context. Which of these views of consent and obligation would you rather have applied to you and the ones you love the most?
I don’t think polyamory does well in this reference frame.
Try to put on the same hat you would wear if we were talking about cousin marriage. Locally you’d probably find all kinds of cases where everything is fine and you could say “seems to be working for them, no genetic defects in these children, but it’s just not for me.” But if you pull back the lens you can see if everyone does it that this is genetically damaging the entire society and the health of the nation and that probably some social institutions broke in such a way that people stopped dating outside of their family. I think polyamory is similar. Local cases are fine, and if anyone is already in a historical situation where everyone is fine I’m not saying throw them into a garbage can, but at scale it doesn’t work.
Taking the man from Mars perspective again if someone brought you a system diagram of human reproduction and there were all these lines all over the place of how mating clusters worked and someone asked you to find the simplest, least entropic state, how long would it take you after understanding how humans mate to come back with monogamy? Even one minute?
As you are likely to you continue to see no problem with polyamory as a theoretical system, can you admit the ethical model outlined here around consent is a better model than the “yes, and asking more questions would be wrong because I’m honoring your agency!” If in your own mind you can see a better future for someone than whatever it is they are doing that you happen to like, I’m sure you will feel compelled to help them along in that direction because you’re the same guy that was so distressed over the suffering of a stranger you gave them a kidney.*
*Because I remember your kidney article well enough to remember you objecting to something like a sibling to these ethical tests being applied to you and someone denying you the ability to donate and I can already sense the version of you that lives in my head standing up to make the objection, I don’t think a fair reading of that is they were asking how all the imagined future versions of you would feel about having saved someone’s life at low risk.
"To this I would just refer back to the statistics on the likelihood of abuse when an adult other than a parent is in the home. Why would those be different in a polyamorous situation? That’s my general system level proof of which one of these is likely better for children at the social level of analysis. Also the statistics about the general well-being of children with two parents in the home. That is very clearly more stable, you probably know those statistics better than I do, and while of course not perfect it does seem very hard to argue that if that wasn’t the case for more people (which we know is possible because it was the case for virtually everyone not that long ago) general welfare would be much better."
Hm, this didn't occur to me because I rarely see poly people bring a third person into the home itself. I more often see partners interact with the children the same way as any other close friend.
But also, thinking about this in near mode - does this mean people shouldn't live with their extended families? Shouldn't have nannies? That single moms shouldn't remarry? I think usually people agree that an extra parent-figure is worth this risk, especially if very carefully screened. I haven't thought about this much because I haven't seen this situation, it's not something I have a strong opinion about, but it doesn't seem that different from things which we already acknowledge are good.
I'm not sure I agree with the man from Mars argument for two reasons. If the third partner was living with the couple, it would look completely different from cheating. If they weren't, I think the Martian would process it as an unusual sort of friend or relative - someone sometimes comes to the house, everyone is glad to see them, they all hang out together, and maybe the third person helps take care of the kids sometimes. I don't think it would look very much like cheating unless the Martian already privileged the have sex/don't have sex distinction above everything else. But also, I'm not sure I agree with the Martian argument at all. Movers bringing your stuff to a new home would look to a Martian a lot like thieves robbing you. So what? Are we supposed to draw some deep conclusion from that?
"When you have a “primary” relationship would you ever be okay with someone making you one of their “secondary” relationships and treating you like a lower priority when this is consuming your time/resources to go make another bond with someone else? I haven’t read all of your old stuff but someone pointed me to a piece a few weeks ago where it seems like some people were pretty shitty to you. Can you easily imagine a future where if this satellite person wasn’t spending their time with you that they go off and find a more fulfilling relationship? If the answer to that question is yes and you imagine that person thirty years in the future what do they ask you to do right now in order to help them on their way? Are you doing that? Maybe the answer to that exercise really is “I love you so much that I always just wanted to sort of be in your orbit, but never really mattering enough to be in the home with you.” I won’t lay out the last one because I just typed it out and it felt mean but yeah, if the person you loved most in the world was involved in this kind of a situation would you think that is what is best for them and everyone is doing their best for them?"
I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what you mean here. If you mean "X is Y's primary, but Y is X's secondary", I agree that's not a good kind of relationship. I don't really see it happen and I think people would be against it with their usual "be against specific unhealthy dynamics" module. If you mean "do you think someone will help their other partners find primaries and build happy families", then yes, this seems to be what happens. I wrote my partner's dating site profile, and my wife actually tried to match up one of her partners with a mutual friend last week.
I do hope that I'm adding (rather than subtracting) to most of my partners' lives, and they're adding (rather than subtracting) to mine. I don't want to do too much personal infodumping to you, but one of my partners helped me through a really hard time, let me live with them when I had nowhere else to live, and was partly responsible for me starting this blog. Another comes over once or twice a week to help take care of our children. I've helped one of my partners get their business to work, and am helping another partner and her husband figure out IVF and genetic screening issues.
I continue to be interested in knowing the exact way it doesn't work at scale. We have Aella's survey data which says poly relationships seem to last as long as mono and have the same level of self-rated security and satisfaction. If you tell me a specific theory about the problem with poly relationships, I can probably get Aella to test it.
I’ll email you for the sake of observing the forms of truth-seeking but I would advise you to ignore it because you have twins who matter way more. I feel like I’m scolding someone who is gay about being gay and that isn’t my intent. You’re a person, whatever a perfect relationship might be with zero entropy at zero degrees kelvin doesn’t matter as much as your humanity. If you have history with people that certainly matters and it’s very important.
I have my own bullshit which I fully admit might color my views here. I doubt I’ll be able to think up some test that could be obtained by filtering some columns in a spreadsheet that someone hasn’t already filtered. But I’ll see if I can’t think of something worth typing up an email over.
Everything you're saying makes sense and I'm not upset. I hope I'm not crossing the line by discussing your childhood trauma too dispassionately. I'll probably ask people in general for a test in a Highlights From The Comments post, so don't feel obligated to figure one out if you're not excited about doing so.
Email sent and likewise no offense taken.
> That single moms shouldn't remarry?
Trivers' theory of genetic conflict raises its head here. It's bad for her existing children, but can permit her to have additional children who have entirely different interests.
I am a monogamous parent who had a good childhood that lets me take a lot for granted when I kiss my child on the head.
You, sir, are a GOOD. MAN. Thank you for writing this, it made me cry.
In a weird guy who spends too much time online but thank you.
The real reason to prefer monogamy is that most cultures/societies have been polygynous, but the smaller number of monogamous ones were the winners in the contest of cultural group selection*.
* https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/07/addendum-to-enormous-nutshell-competing-selectors/
Does that mean I should prefer to have the flu rather than not, because the most successful societies have had endemic flus?
I'm a committed monogamist by the way, happily married with kids, I just think we should query the issue/ought distinction here; the evolutionary winner is not necessarily the one that best promotes human flourishing
No, but it means you shouldn't live in a society without endemic flus, if societies with endemic flus exist, because your society is gonna get wiped out the moment the borders open.
But maybe this analogy isn't the best.
I'll accept the nuance and critique of the analogy.
To clarify your views here, are you saying:
1) The societies that are the most 'successful' (in a taking over the world sense) are *necessarily* the societies that best promote human flourishing; or
2) We should not value individual human flourishing, but should instead value societal success/greatness/replication?
Really I'm just questioning your flu analogy rather than agreeing with the great-grandparent post.
I would say that (1), but with the causation reversed; human flourishing is more likely to occur in a society which are successful in a taking-over-the-world sense. And monogamy certainly seems to be pretty good for making a society that's successful in the taking-over-the-world sense.
My objections to this kind of argument:
- Circumstances have changed a lot. There is no reason to assume that norms that evolved when reliable contraception and paternity tests didn't exist, infant mortality was high, most work was physical (so women had a significant disadvantage), and the economy often barely produced enough for subsistence, are optimal today. (Cf. we didn't biologically evolve to wear clothes, but we had to start wearing them when we moved to colder climates than we were adapted to.)
- The sample is small, and heavily confounded. In particular, if we're talking about the West's success in the last few centuries, it's a sample size of 1, and it may have been caused by any of the various differences between it and other civilizations.
- If by success we mean surviving and multiplying (which is fitting if we're talking about a sort of evolution), Islam is doing pretty well for itself. In fact, the early Islamic conquests were some of the fastest, widest conquests having long-lasting cultural effects. If by success we mean prospering and thriving, right now many of the most prosperous societies are among the ones that are the most liberal about sexual morality. I'm not saying that sexual libertinism causes prosperity (if anything, the causation goes in the opposite direction)—but that just drives home the point that cause and effect are hard to disentangle, causation in a particular direction doesn't follow from correlation.
Men have a physical advantage in plough agriculture, not so much in hoe agriculture. In the latter, men tried to collect many more wives for economic reasons.
Neandertals lived in much colder areas than humans originally evolved in, and they didn't seem to have sewing needles, instead wearing animal hides. The late Judith Harris theorized that they were still hairy, and that modern humans mostly ate them as a result: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11509
Monogamy is not just a feature of the west. Per Jack Goody, "monogamy is part of a cultural complex found in the broad swath of Eurasian societies from Japan to Ireland that practice social monogamy, sexual monogamy and dowry", linked to intensive plough agriculture.
Even Islam constrains the number of wives to four, which is less polygynous than the pre-Islamic norms of the area in which it arose (monogamy was more of a Roman thing).
Polygamous marriage is still not legal in the liberal societies you're referring to. And within them the cultures which appear capable of maintaining above-replacement fertility are those like the Amish & ultra-orthodox Jews.
Example # 1,000,000 that the map is not the territory.
“being so good at writing that you can elevate humdrum existence… into transcendent poetry”? Try this:
https://www.adamnathan.com/p/scheherazade-ii
Isn't the structure of this critique kind of a variant of Bulverism?
From C. S. Lewis, *Bulverism*[1]:
"Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is "wishful thinking." You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not."
And change it to:
Suppose I think, after reading polyamorous memoirs, that polyamorous people are dysfunctional. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is wrong (due to me having made a mistake due to the people I read being memoir-writers and thus selected for dysfunctionality). You can never come to any conclusion by examining my ability to infer whether one's dysfunctionality is related to polyamory or desire-to-write-memoirs. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the polyamory vs. monogamy dysfunctionality statistics yourself. When you have checked these stats, then, and then only, will you know whether polyamory is actually connected to dysfunction or not.
I think many of this post's ideas—that memoir-writers are selected for potentially-repulsive traits which may poison one's feelings on polyamory or whatever else, and more broadly the idea that people might be misled about the inherent properties of X class of individuals due to the consumption of information regarding said class X being confounded by the methods (mediums, groups, personality types, etc.) involved in obtaining information about class X—are quite good and valuable, but one can't help but notice that the proving of what is seemingly the central point ("polyamory isn't (non-trivially) worse") has been left hanging. Much akin to C.S. Lewis' psychologist perhaps being able to find all sorts of interesting psyche-related facts about the guy with the bank account, but not having advanced one whit in confirming whether he has a large balance or not.
So the question remains: does polyamory work similarly well to monogamy? I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but a quick Google search and some skimming tells me[2]:
"Polyamorous relationships aren’t historically the most successful, says relationships expert Neil Wilkie.
He told Red magazine that 20% of couples have experimented with consensual non-monogamy, but open marriage has a 92% failure rate. What’s more, he suggested 80% of people in open marriages “experience jealousy of the other”."
This would seem to suggest polyamory does involve much more dysfunctionality. Perhaps there's some other confounding factor—I can only assume openness to polyamory strongly selects for verbal intelligence, and AFAIK verbally-oriented people tend to have higher divorce-rates; also it seems quite intuitive that people whose relationships were already going south would try open marriage as a Hail Mary—but it certainly goes against the idea that attempts at polyamory are currently as successful as attempts at monogamy, and that such equivalent success is obfuscated by people who write books.
[1] quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism#Source_of_the_concept
[2] quote from https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/can-polyamorous-relationships-really-work-out-long-term_uk_64941b68e4b02f808ab3ddb5
In fact, true polyamory has never been tried.
Kinda like Marxism...which a lot of poly people are also into...
Um, really?
Yeah, this kind of argument isn't automatically invalid based on its form. I don't think communism can be implemented in a way that works well. But I think so because I have theoretical arguments why communism can't work, some of them inspired by the problems real-world attempts not implement communism had. It has to be argued. It's not something we can conclude with certainty just from that people tried to implement it a few times (whether it was "true communism" is a matter of definitions) and it didn't work.
This ("You say «true X has never been tried», but that's ridiculous, just like those silly commies who say «true communism has never been tried»") is basically a fully general argument that if people have tried doing something a few times in particular ways, and it didn't work, then it can't be done, even in different ways. But that surely isn't always true.
Replying to the methodological point, because it's unique and interesting on its own.
Of course if we're talking about evaluating claims about the real world, I'll be the first to say that the only real way to get to the bottom of things is to search for ground truth.
But in actual discourse, it's not the only thing we're doing. In a public dialogue we engage with what the other person said, rather than ignoring it and going for our counter-evidence. If each side just keeps pushing their line of argument without critiquing the other's, not much is going to be learned.
So I think there's a place for things like showing reasons why someone's arguments can be bad at the source, like the dynamics of "people with mediocre but hard-hearned wisdom being the loudest at shouting their advice".
There's also proof by contradiction. If you can show that your opponent's conclusion says entails a contradiction with known facts, you can short circuit the rest of their argumentation. Even if they happen to be right in terms of ground truth, they would be right by chance, and not by virtue of the arguments they are giving.
It is absolutely good to engage with the other person's points in a dialogue—no disagreement there! But there are different ways to engage. For instance if Bob says he's pro-choice because he thinks banning abortion will cause women to suffer more, Alice might argue against him by:
a) Telling him he only feels like banning abortion will cause women to suffer because his liberalism biases him towards such intuitions. (Analogous to "You only feel like polyamory leads to dysfunction because the memoirs you've read confound you towards such intuitions")
b) Sending him arguments about the sanctity of life and fetal rights
c) Engaging his point, e.g. by showing him studies indicating banning abortion reduces woman suffering, or saying: "Since you care about women suffering, I assume you care about the suffering of other beings too, right? According to this study, many more fetuses suffer when abortion is legal, more than enough to offset decreased woman suffering"
Option A alone is Bulverism. Even if Alice can conclusively prove that Bob's intuitions here are pure bias and have no bearing on reality, she still has not at all proven that women will not suffer more if abortion is banned. But in reality even conclusively proving that Bob's intuitions are pure bias would be essentially impossible.
I think the following quote from an SSC comment really gets at the heart of it[1]: "*Bulverism* is arguing why someone is wrong, rather than that they are wrong."
Now, options B and C are both pretty important for a public dialogue. You can't *just* engage the opponent's points enough to disprove them (option C) because then you're just showing that Bob's wrong to think an abortion-ban would cause women to suffer more, without providing any reason to be pro-life. But you can't only provide reasons to be pro-life (option B) because then you haven't engaged with Bob's reasons to be pro-choice.
But option A can still be valuable *if paired with the others*, because it can explain why your opponent is (apparently) wrong.
For instance, if Scott had found and shared (hypothetical) statistics showing that polyamory leads to very similar outcomes as monogamy does[2], he could then speculate about how memoir-writers and their drama could've confused the Atlantic writer and others. Perhaps some (hypothetical) statistics on those how dysfunctional memoir-writers are could even have been shown.
To return to C.S. Lewis' example: if Bob claims to have a large sum in his bank account, AND Alice says Bob is showing clear traits of wishful thinking, we have a good explanation for why Bob was probably wrong, and it seems quite convincing that Bob was in fact wrong. Perhaps if Bob hadn't seemed like he'd have lied about that, we'd have instead found it more plausible that he had a secret second bank account or something. But what Bob said seemed to be untrue, and we had a good reason for why this might be. Quite convincing!
[1] quote from https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/#comment-775710
[2] This is option B and C at once, much like if Alice found proof that banning abortion reduces woman suffering.
"You only feel like polyamory leads to dysfunction because the memoirs you've read confound you towards such intuitions" (or rather, the more detailed argument Scott made about memoirs being an unrepresentative sample) is a much more valid argument than "you only feel like banning abortion will cause women to suffer because your liberalism biases him towards such intuitions" because the former offers a concrete way the target of the argument may have come to an incorrect conclusion.
Cf. "I looked at your calculations of your fortune, and you think you have a total balance of $X because you mistakenly counted one of your dollar accounts as a euro account, which biased you towards a bigger number than you should have, even if the rest of your math was correct". This isn't bulverism; of course we wouldn't typically use the word "bias" here either, it's not the sort of vague thing like "liberal bias".
"Liberal bias" might make it more likely that someone is wrong in a particular direction, but it isn't a valid argument against a concrete, object-level argument. But "the sample you used is unrepresentative" is very different thing, it *can* be valid against a concrete argument, as can be "you mistook a dollar account for a euro account". You are overgeneralizing the point that "you think so because you have liberal bias" is bulverism and an invalid argument in a very weird way, to a point where you seem to say that *any* claim that a concrete argument someone else is making is wrong is bulverism and invalid. You're proving too much.
----
Later, you seem to say essentially that it's only valid for Alice to point out a mistake in an argument Bob makes if Alice makes a positive case for her own, different conclusion. That surely isn't the case. Now, if Alice doesn't make her own, positive case for a different conclusion, she can't claim that Bob's conclusion is *definitely* wrong. But she *can* claim that the particular argument Bob made should be ignored or discounted, and she *can* say that Bob shouldn't claim he's *definitely* right, unless he also has a different, better argument for his conclusion.
I don't see the analogy between your two "Suppose I think" paragraphs at all. Bulverism involves imputing some thought process to the target of the bulverism that's irrelevant to the correctness of the claim the target of the bulverism is making. This: "hey, the model of calculator you've used to calculate your fortune is known to be faulty" wouldn't be bulverism, because that's something that can actually influence the correctness of the conclusion. The argument that the source the author used is unrepresentative is more like the latter—an argument that's relevant to the correctness of the author's conclusions—than like the "wishful thinking" argument. It's no more of a bulverism than basically any argument to the effect that someone else is making a mistake in his claims, or that there is a fault or bias in someone's sources.
Moreover, the reason it's clearly silly to argue about wishful thinking when discussing someone's bank balance is that it's a very objective thing that can be calculated exactly, so biases are unlikely to affect it. Inferring whether someone's dysfunctionality is caused by polyamory isn't so objective. And, in particular, if there isn't actually any inferring of causality going on beyond looking at the statistics and observing that most polyamorous relationships are dysfunctional, it's very relevant whether the sample is representative, even if the math is correct.
The title here is wrong. I'm perfectly capable of disliking both at the same time.
Phoo. Well, I've seen polyamory go well and I've seen it go badly. It's not my jam (too much input, and I don't take pleasure in dealing with all the social stuff all the time) - my concern has always been that people get "stuck" on ideas and then pursue them past the point where they're good or enjoyable. I've seen this done with polyamory, but I've also seen it done with monogamy for that matter, way more. It's just that the polyamory stuckness I saw was more of an idealistic thing, and less of a default thing.
A motto I try to live by is "pain means move away." If someone or something is causing you pain, please, retreat from it. Don't double down. If it's not a fun relationship, you can't make it fun because "polyamory is valid." I have seen that happen a bunch. Yes, it's valid, but if any partner you're with is causing you chronic pain, that's not a good relationship, period.
Ya, treat every day like a gift from God. And God wants you to be happy, OK? That's all it boils down to. If you're happy with multiple partners, happy with one, or happy alone, whatever. You do you, boo. Just be happy.
I just don’t think it’s true that people who are good at things don’t have useful lessons they’ve learned and continue to apply. The lessons might be simpler and less contrived but that’s because they work
The problem is people who for whatever reason don’t follow good advice. Then you have to resort to contrived tricks and tips
The issue is more in their ability to explain, especially to novices and the unskilled. But they can still provide useful lessons, even if rather than providing it themselves, it's provided by those who study, observe, and successfully copy them instead.
However, there's a difference between being unskilled and committing to a doomed idea. Those whom aren't natural talents can still learn how to do many things to at least an adequate level, barring certain highly physically- or mentally-intense fields. Most of life doesn't require genius intelligence. But there is no successful formula for polyamory. It's too against human nature. Way more than polygyny, monogamy, or even adultery.
I think there's an easier explanation:
The thing that creates engagement is the worst example of a thing. If you're poly you're common. Everyone knows what you think and either already agrees or doesn't. Either way, you're probably not interesting enough to talk about.
But if you're a poly person who thinks everyone else should be poly, and that "poly" means "allowed to have and abuse a harem," you have a perspective that can create strong feelings, debate, love, hate, jealousy. So if one hundred million poly folks write a book, and an insane publisher publishes them all (imagine if every person in the world could publish their inane stuff every day), the only ones that will get publicized will be exceptionally well-written or reasoned, or ones that make polyamory seem controversial. And it's much easier to do the latter.
Whenever I point this out, I get accused of impugning motive. "You can't just claim every person on the internet is a liar." But that's not my claim. It's a pure numbers game. It's not that everyone who attempts to talk to the public is a liar, it's that of a billion pieces of content, only liars or insane people will get popular enough to get through.
I strongly recommend ignoring or at least casting an extreme critical eye at anything written since 2000.
The overall form was: “I read a memoir about polyamory, everyone involved seemed awful and unhappy, and now I hate polyamorous people.”
That is not how I felt the Atlantic writer came to a conclusion; it wasn't polyamorous people per se, but rather the self-indulgent, 'I must be my True Self' rooting around for novel experiences by bored, well-off people who think that they have to constantly be gazing in the mirror of their psyche, and that turning everything upside-down is good because never mind the collateral damage, they're being *authentic*. The kind of people who will glom on to polyamory as the newest fad.
The memoir author seems to have remained in a long-term marriage, so maybe they worked out their problems, but the reviews don't paint the entire process as one of happiness. You're probably right about memoirs and the people who write them, and that is why this is a terrible book by (well, calling her a terrible person would be unfair).
But for the second memoir, I have to agree with Freddie. What that person needs is a bucket of cold water in the face, not a book deal to ramble on about how simply super special they are.
"One night, I watched comedy band The Lonely Island, laughing in a crowd alone as they brought out Michael Bolton and T-Pain."
How do you laugh in a crowd alone? You're in a crowd, by definition you're not alone! Were you the only person laughing? If so then that band must have been awful at comedy. If everyone else was laughing, then you were not laughing alone.
Oh, you're trying to indicate your superior delicate sensibility because you mean you didn't know anyone else in the crowd, you weren't connected to them, you were there on your own. Wrong! You are in the set of "people who go to watch comedy bands", so there's your connection.
Somebody hand me a bucket, I need to go to the well and fill it up, there's a pseud needs a face-washing.
> That is not how I felt the Atlantic writer came to a conclusion; it wasn't polyamorous people per se, but rather the self-indulgent, 'I must be my True Self' rooting around for novel experiences by bored, well-off people who think that they have to constantly be gazing in the mirror of their psyche, and that turning everything upside-down is good because never mind the collateral damage, they're being authentic. The kind of people who will glom on to polyamory as the newest fad.
Yes, that's what I thought too. Comparing this post with the first one, I think Scott may be moving in this direction, too?
Reducing one's romantic relationships to political statements is a real thing. I spent time for a few years in a polyamory group which turned into a Relationship Anarchy group. They redefined "Polyamory" to mean every bad thing that anyone labeling themselves polyamorous had ever done to them. Some of them eventually did that to the term "Relationship Anarchist" too, and switched to "Political Relater". I wrote more about this here:
https://nemorathwald.dreamwidth.org/400711.html
In retrospect, I might say to my past self "you don't dislike Political Relaters, you dislike those who attend meetups about things."
I don't hate polyamory. I do think it's poor social technology that will not work for the vast majority of people. For those that claim it does work, I don't see anyone trying to stop them from (legally) continuing to do it. Social approbation is a good thing if it stops the spread to people who would not do well with it.
This seems like a non-problem at current equilibrium.
Or, in other words, today's public discourse is dominated by a loud and unrepresentative minority for any particular topic, for any particular group, and the majority of people are far more normal.
As for polyamory: I think there are lots of people with great social skills in long term relationships that will tell you it took a lot of work. And considering that, a great many of us monogamous people simply cannot imagine having to do that load of work with more than one person.
That's why humans have evolved the tendency to copy the behaviors of successful people, not the things they say. I'm surprised you didn't make this connection to your prior reviews of Joseph Henrich.
If you're postulating an evolutionary response to human communication, then you need to be treating memoirs and the written word more generally as a brand-new threat vector - hence this piece. As for mass media, well...
> But I still notice a totally unfounded feeling of contempt (just to emphasize, I’m not endorsing this contempt, and for all I know the writer might be great). If you write this kind of thing in a memoir, and it claims (even as subtext) that you’re a deep and interesting person, then readers are going to make fun of you.
I dislike this, though I can't quite explain why. I feel like scorn is one of the things whose danger is underappreciated. As a general rule, I'd like to live in a world were people were less hesitant to say and do (normal, ethical) things that feel unpopular. Perhaps they'd be more straightforward in their communication, and less afraid of sounding trivial, or immodest, or stupid. And perhaps they'd more readily share their experiences - including simple experiences told in a simple language, like the excerpt in question.
(I'm not stating Scott endorsed that contempt he described - I know he didn't. I just wanted to share my feelings on this matter)
+1
While I agree with your general sentiment, I also think that Scott in particular tends to hide himself away, and I for one am glad to see him occasionally feel comfortable showing us where he falls short of being an abstract embodiment of "niceness, community, and civilization". It feels like a more human sort of interaction.
I'm sorry, but this and the prior essay sound a little "the lady doth protest too much, methinks," as in overly defensive. And such defensiveness often comes with a healthy dose of negative judgment against the person who disagrees or just isn't that thing even if they have no issue with its existence. It's a subtle form of predjudice that is just as bad and pernicious as the more well-known forms of predjudice imho.
In general, I find that defensiveness and happiness don't mix well together. YMMV, but nothing in these last two essays has changed my mind. It has been uncomfortable reading because I wonder at the latent angst driving the desire to explain and explain and explain.
I think "you're making an argument, which means you must be obsessed with this, which means you must be overly emotional about it, which means you're wrong" is a kafkatrap (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122). I love writing, have written about three articles a week on a wide variety of topics for the past twenty years, and I think someone is wrong on the Internet, which is mutually agreed to be the best and noblest reason to write something. Why did you post this comment?
I didn't say you were wrong. I didn't say you were obssessed. I didn't say you weren't a very good or a very prolific writer who hasn't gotten better and better at his craft and analysis over the years. I didn't say that you couldn't/shouldn't write about whatever strikes your fancy (which would be a very dumb take given that this is your site and community). I did not say these things because I don't think them (and I'm not being Cicero-like, I'm clarifying given your comment to me).
I merely remarked that I percieve a lot of explaining for something that doesn't need it as defensiveness and that it doesn't seem to align with happiness/really enjoying that thing. That to me is a curiousity and so I expressed said curiousness and why.
I apologize that my words sounded like criticism, it wasn't my intention. You put a lot of yourself out there with your writing and I can imagine it gets tiresome hearing from the peanut gallery.
"Sound overly defensive" is not the same as ascribing motives.
"I wonder at the latent angst" is ascribing them, but with low confidence. A simple "I can see how you'd think that, but no, I'm not angsty or defensive" would suffice.
I have spent a lot of time around the poly community and they're almost all suffering stupidly, and the lower on the social ladder they are the worse it is.
I've seen the same thing. It's particularly harsh because the culture pathologizes ordinary human responses (anxiety, jealousy, loneliness) as if they're deviant. This seems to drive underground the kind of useful conflict - in which issues get addressed and incremental improvements made - that are standard operating procedure for high functioning monogamous relationships. I'm sure some people can do polyamory well, but it's not for many, and certainly not for most.
In my experience being poly, anxiety and jealousy aren't treated as deviant, they're treated as natural feelings to be communicated about and validated.
I'm glad to hear it. My exposure is pretty limited, so the handful of people I know who are tackling polyamory may not be all that representative. Come to think of it, that's at least part of the point Scott is making above.
Exactly
To be honest, it's because the average 'polycule' is made up of the least sexy individuals imaginable. That's it.
It makes sense to me that less attractive individuals would opt out of the mainstream relationship system given that they're less likely to be successful in it, but I don't think that's what makes people get that gut 'ick' feeling about polyamory, polyamorists being too few in number for most people to know any at all.
Ok...
Excellent
First, what a terrible article. Does no one edit the Atlantic anymore?
Scott's assessment takes me back to something that's on my mind a lot lately. I'm definitely not the first person to have this thought, but it seems to me there's always been a powerful selection bias against happy people in public discourse. Or maybe in any kind of discourse. I noticed this first in feminism; if you took a random sample of feminist writing one could easily conclude that there had never been any authentically happy women anywhere before around 1965, and maybe not ever. But this is probably not true, and quite likely far from true. Like Scott said, happy people who feel like things are going well don't spend a ton of time analyzing much less writing about the ways in which they're going well. See Tolstoy's quote "All happy families are alike..."
I wonder more and more how this the radio silence of actually happy people might have affected us throughout history, and is affecting us now. I feel like a lot of critical writing seems to assume the presence of theoretical happy people somewhere. Often they're cast as an oppressive force, or as sheeple leading unexamined lives, not at all like the author and you, dear reader.
Scott correctly points out that people who have managed to avoid certain problems don't write books about them, and if they did their advice wouldn't be particularly useful. I think it goes somewhat deeper in that we have an uncomfortable relationship with happiness itself. We desire it, and consider its absence a sign that something is wrong, but when we achieve happiness it immediately becomes suspect, because the intellectual position has long been that happy people are inherently doing something stupid or unethical.
At the same time, we almost can't help trying to maximize at least our own happiness. It's literally its own reward system. But because of our uncomfortable relationship with the idea of happiness itself we're necessarily on a poorly-lit path, following either the dim lanterns of happy people (for whom intellect dictates we must harbor some subtle contempt), or the blazing lights of inauthentically happy or downright unhappy people. I think a lot of the conservative-liberal divide could be described as mostly unhappy people attempting to tell each other how to live, and anyone who isn't already strongly aligned with the values of the source noticing their unhappiness and wondering why they should listen to them.
"First, what a terrible article. Does no one edit the Atlantic anymore?"
Every time an Atlantic article pokes through online, and I therefore have a reason to go read it, I am freshly appalled at what has happened to what was once a bastion of strong and interesting writing. I'm being literal: every single time. For several years now. And regardless of whether the article gained online currency positively or negatively (whether Very Online people are holding it up to praise it or to blast it).
I've no idea what's happened over there, it seems to be well beyond the general crumbling of legacy media. And to answer your specific question: no. There is no way that any meaningful editing takes place at the Atlantic anymore.
Hi Scott,
You're a good man, and it clearly hurts your feelings when people criticize polyamory, so I don't want to feel like I'm piling on. Yet, as one of the few women of the ACX commentariat, I'm going to emphasize something that other commenters haven't really focused on:
On average, straight men and straight women differ in their sexual/romantic preferences. For obvious evolutionary reasons, men's sexuality is optimized for variety/novelty/as many partners as possible, while women's sexuality is optimized for emotional attachment/find the best man you can and get him to stick around and help care for your babies. (Obvious disclaimer: I'm talking about trends and averages, not every man/not every woman, blah blah blah.)
For this reason, I'm worried that a widespread embrace of polyamory/open relationships would be a disaster for women. Sure, you'll say that polyamory is all consensual and based on negotiated agreements, so what's the problem? But it's not so simple, and people who are emotionally entangled find it hard to make logical choices, and people are good at lying to themselves. "I can totally accept polyamory as the price of holding onto the man I love! [six months later] I'm so jealous and miserable and I keep hiding in the bathroom so he won't see me crying, but all open-minded people do polyamory nowadays, I can't let this get to me, I'm with the man I love, this is totally the right choice... excuse me while I get another box of tissues..."
If polyamory catches on in society at large, we'll see, at minimum a lot of tearful letters to advice columns from women saying things like, "Dear Abby, my husband wants to open our marriage, I really hate the idea of him being with another woman but I don't want to be an old-fashioned prude, plus I'm afraid he'll leave me unless I agree, but the thought makes me so unhappy, what should I do?"
Other commenters already mentioned the potentially negative effects on children.
To paraphrase something you, Scott, have written in one of your old SSC posts: Going from monogamy to polyamory is not "solving a problem," it's "replacing one set of problems with another exciting set of problems."
This theory doesn't match what's found in reality of social dynamics. Polyamory is mostly driven by women. In my 18 years of experience, the majority of polyamorists I have known either were (or were dating) a woman who was in a monogamous relationship to a man, she wanted to open a relationship, her husband agreed to it, she got lots of dates, and he did not.
That is 100 percent of the (handful of) polyamorist households I have been acquainted with.
Yeah, I also became polyamorous because the woman I wanted to date at the time was.
90% same in my personal observation, but I think this is just the old taboo against polygamy pushing down the male-driven numbers. That'll go away eventually if polyamory is normalized, and then it will be at least a 50/50 male/female driven thing.
As Arnold says, polyamory is mostly driven by women, and your odds are much better of finding dates from an open marriage if you are female.
However, it is entirely possible that polyamory benefits women more than men within it, and that it makes women overall less happy...if you have two different groups of women! If polyamory destroys the expectation of pair bond, a small fraction of women, say group A, will benefit from being able to force their boyfriends/husbands to let them sleep around, while a (likely much larger) group B will be unhappy because they can't get the stable monogamous relationship they want.
The game theory does point in that direction, yes, though I find it very puzzling that it's mostly women pushing for this and the man can't get any dates (it's strongly suggests that the woman just partnered with a sub-standard male and wants an excuse to ditch them without ditching them.)
It's well-known that at least some men will go for sex under almost any circumstances. This is much rarer for women. So you can find a lot of men willing to be a woman's sidepiece; a woman will (usually) only accept sidepiece status if she thinks she can be the main squeeze later on, or the man is very attractive or wealthy.
I may partially withdraw my statement about mostly women pushing for it; there are plenty of men who think they're going to get lots of tail on the side and get disappointed. It's mostly *advantageous* to women (who want to have outside partners) as currently constituted.
All of this discussion is infused with the American ideas that (1) adultery is a tremendous evil, and (2) discord in marriage is evidence of a serious pathology which must be cured. My quotes file contains:
"Europeans think Americans are a bit naive for thinking that a president of a country, especially, wouldn't cheat on his wife." -- Pamela Druckerman, author of "Lust in Translation"
"Discord and dissolution in mating relationships are typically seen as signs of failure. They are regarded as distortions or perversions of the natural state of married life. They are thought to signal personal inadequacy, immaturity, neurosis, failure of will, or simply poor judgment in the choice of a mate. This view is radically wrong. Conflict in mating is the norm and not the exception. It ranges from a man's anger at a woman who declines his advances to a wife's
frustration with a husband who fails to help in the home. Such a pervasive pattern defies easy explanation. Something deeper, more telling about human nature is involved--something we do not fully understand." -- David M. Buss, "The Evolution of Desire"
Though of course anyone who understands the evolutionary perspective on human behavior understands why discord is ubiquitous.
Adultery is a tremendous evil if you're breaking a promise. One should keep one's promises, and not make them lightly. If both people in the relationship with full knowledge agree to see other people while married, then it may be adultery, but is no longer cheating.
But do be aware this is a very American point of view, looking at marriage as some sort of contract whose terms one negotiates. Compare with religion: in most places there are one or a few religious choices offered by society, and people are assessed by which one they choose and the degree to which they adhere to the socially-defined rules of that religion. In the U.S., it's considered fairly normal to *make one's own religion*, and then expect to be judged by how one adheres to that individualistic standard. Similarly, in most cultures, the terms of marriage are defined by the culture, and people adhere to them or not. You don't get to redefine marriage, and then boast that you have followed the standard that you've created yourself. (Why would anyone else care?)
As one researcher noted, "The key to understanding marriage versus pure pair-bonding is recognizing the role of a community in defining, sanctioning and enforcing marriage norms. This element of human social life is routinely missed in non-cultural approaches to monogamy."
I think the promise-keeping part holds true regardless of one's religion, or lack thereof. A specific religion will have its own marriage vows, which are promises. If those vows say nothing of sexual relations then no promise can be broken by sexual practices, but I know of no marriage vows that don't.
As an American, I do need to keep in mind that things in the rest of the world may be different and equally valid, and in this case I think I have done so.
Fellow American, don't worry, this person Worley is making things up whole cloth. Most places through most of recorded history have frowned mightily on adultery, even the non-monogamous ones.
Some of us have lived extensively in Europe and know better than to take you at your word. Violent hatred of adultery greatly predates America, and there has not in the last six thousand years been a society anywhere that consistently start-to-finish tolerated adultery. Pick me a cool French novelist who normalizes adultery. I will pick you an older French adultery case that ended in *capital punishment*.
Is it somehow *American* that adulterers were publicly flogged in medieval Germany? Call it medieval if you want, implicitly call North America, South America, China, Japan, Korea, etc, medieval. But don't say it's American. That's profoundly unsupported and very easy to dispute with historical evidence.
Outside of France, a majority in every country in Europe believes that adultery is immoral. ( https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/04/16/europeans-hold-more-liberal-views-on-moral-issues/ ) There is a gap between the US (85% agreement that adultery is immoral) vs the EU (65%), but it's not like Europeans think it's actually acceptable behaviour.
Yeah. There are a vanishing small number of relatively modern and scattered historical societies where adultery-is-immoral has even dropped below majority support. Almost everywhere else at almost every time almost everyone thinks it's pretty bad.
Adultery is a tremendous evil.
Adultery is a tremendous evil.
I'll say it again, adultery is a tremendous evil.
Find someone crying in a bathroom, shattered, and tell them they had consensual sex with their adulterer and see if they agree with you. See if they think it was consent, given the false pretenses.
(No, it has never to my knowledge happened to me. It didn't have to. To have seen it secondhand, ever, is to have witnessed *a tremendous evil*.)
That is not an American idea, that is a historical idea and a near universal. "Adultery is not a tremendous evil" is a recent, aberrant, unjustified idea. I do not care what author or 20th century continental philosopher you pass off as old to try to justify that it is an old or universal idea. It is not. Those were bad people reviving a discredited idea.
I want to defend people who defend a belief or a system of beliefs. While I agree that sometimes they're the kind of people who win a Darwinian battle, the more local practitioners are just ordinary people living their lives and offering advice to the rising population. Here I'm thinking of the Scoutmaster teaching the scouts, parents teaching their children, or the local minister delivering his weekly sermon.
And actually, it's that sermon that seems to me to be the least well understood. Most of the time, it's not there to TEACH the congregation something they don't know already. "Wait, you haven't heard the Christmas story yet? Let me tell you all about it. Everyone else in the congregation can nod off for a few minutes while I waste their time on an inefficient teaching method." If teaching were the point of church, it would be pretty bad at its job and people would stop coming. But a sermon is about preaching, not teaching. Preaching - especially to a congregation of like-minded believers - is about reminding people of principles they already know about and agree to. It's encouragement to Stay the Course, or to get back on track.
I think there's a legitimate benefit to preaching - including outside the strictly religious context. It's an effective method of motivation to achieve a long-term goal, or to maintaining/restarting behaviors you wish to persist in. A lot of these self-help books are a kind of low-grade preaching, and as such aren't always meant for consumption by people outside the 'faith'. As such, they're not entirely worthless, even if the people doing the preaching are sometimes poor role models for the cause they espouse.
If you want to know WHETHER to follow a behavior model, probably look at the statistics for success at your long-term goals to see whether it's a model with a proven track record of achieving those goals. If you want to know HOW, maybe the self-help books could work a little, but there's no substitute for in-person instruction.
If you want to renew your motivation, I can see a place for books like these. There's an old story about a motivational speaker. After his talk, a woman comes up to him and says, "I like what you're saying, but the trouble is I have a hard time staying motivated long after these things are over." The speaker replied that, "I like to shower to stay clean, but the next day I have to do it again. That doesn't mean yesterday's shower wasn't worth doing."
Well said.
Thanks, good thought
The stronger the social taboo against something, the more it selects for people who really want to practice the taboo. Polyamory is still seen as taboo to most people in the West, so we should expect that the people practicing it are the best suited to maintaining it (otherwise, they drop out to default monogamy).
As polyamory becomes more acceptable, the selection effect weakens.
A direct comparison of the happiness levels of poly vs. mono relationships probably does not generalize to the whole population.
The word “polyamory” is silly. Who came up with it? (Who benefits?) That “amor”!
Whatever would we do if instead of words we relied on pictograms?
Transgression has a deal of appeal to some, I know, but it’s hard to view something as norm-breaking when it’s merely a reversion to the norm over much of the globe.
It’s like - Snow People’s Last Hot Wet Summer.
First of all, agree to all of this, especially the idea of monogamy influencers. If you had never heard of monogamy and read Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus or The Rules (or, god help you, The Game), you would run screaming from this obviously dysfunctional and dehumanizing institution.
Second, the end of this post makes an interesting accompaniment to The Toxoplasma of Rage. Not sure if it makes more sense to pose this as an alternative media stream that functions on less politically-charged issues, or just as one function of that pipeline which creates more toxoplasmic popular examples to select from.
Those books are more "hetero culture" than monogamous, in fact The Game deliberately encourages sleeping around, which is not exactly what a zoologist would call monogamy if they were observing, say, a bird.
Did you actually read The Game? It's a morality tale about the futility and emptiness of sleeping around. The last page of the book states explicitly: "To win the game was to leave it." and the last sentence of the book is: "It was time to leave the house, and the community, behind. Real life beckoned."
You're right, I had only picked that up from the way people talked about it. Serves me right, next time I'll actually read it.
I kept waiting for the part where Scott was going to tell us how we should form opinions on polyamory. Obviously, favorable anecdotes are also subject to selection effects.
I think it's okay not to form opinions on things. I like the idea of asking the question when is it important for us to form an opinion about something?
I don’t happen to have strong interest in this topic (and I have moral views about it that are independent of the kinds of things he’s talking about) but if I did I would like to be able to look into it and figure it out. Seems reasonable since it’s a frequent topic of discussion here.
I think one should never form opinions, but use the ones provided by celebrities and politicians.
Feels like this is crying out for a Last Psychiatrist-type analysis of *why* this particular sort of memoir writing makes people so angry. If you're reading it, it's for you; what is it about polyamorous memoir-writing narcissists, specifically, that made them rise to the top of the Darwinian hyper-specialized outrage meme pool? Maybe the feeling of contempt is founded, maybe it's not, but either way I'm more interested in where it comes from and what it implies about Atlantic readers/ACX readers/internet-addicts/people in general.
All of the happy polycules I have encountered have a lot of trans or autistic people. Just going by personal observation I don't think it works so well with neurotypicals, if you can call solomonesque narcissism neurotypical.
There was actually a discussion about this on the polyamory subreddit a while back. Cishet guy said he wasn't queer, neurodivergent, or kinky and didn't fit in, and they all agreed with him.
I think when you get two cishet people of the opposite sex the tendency to go back to the default programming of pair-bonding is too strong. With autism the programming is sometimes nonfunctioning to some degree.
You may be right.
I do not think you are, at least about it being laughable in 10-15 years.
However, it would probably be better for all of us if you were.
> But I still notice a totally unfounded feeling of contempt (just to emphasize, I’m not endorsing this contempt, and for all I know the writer might be great)
Yeah I feel it too. I think it's because it sounds like they're doing and feeling everything they're supposed to, *because* they're supposed to. Like we are reading the thoughts of a completely fake person and implicitly being asked to believe that that fake-ness is real-ness. It takes only a slight amount of perceptiveness to realize how false it is. If there's one thing we humans find contemptuous it's fakeness.
I distrust polyamory on a Chesterton's Fence level, and it annoys me when people like Yudkowsky say that it's the correct evolutionary choice.
The fence around sleeping around between several people was taken down completely decades ago. To be frank this amounts to erecting a new fence by trying to get them all married.
"But if you’re not in this situation, taking their advice will probably go much the same as taking an ataxic’s advice on walking. You’ll overthink it and trip over your own feet."
I guess I'm surprised to see the "probably" here (it's so strong!), especially from someone whom I think of as a (former?) self-help author himself. So many of your (and esp. Eliezer's) writings on rationality are legible principles for seeing truth and achieving success in life ("rationality is winning"). Do you think the probable outcome of trying to follow that advice is the equivalent of "trip[ping] over your own feet"? If not, I'm curious what distinguishes the rationality movement from other forms of self-help in your mind.
Also, if your point here applies to "books on how to walk", then doesn't it also predict that most writing on "how to overcome depression" would be unhelpful (and written by depressed people, as opposed to by therapists)? That seems unlikely to me, or at least like it would be a too-easy way for someone to invalidate the (very helpful!) writing you've done on Lorien. And it predicts that Zero to One (a book you've reviewed positively) would be harmful to most. Anyway, I think your argument here proves too much.
Do not seek to bring things to pass in accordance with your wishes, but wish for them as they are, and you will find them.
Epictetus
Same advice as "treat every day as a gift from God" really. I feel like this will be that one quote I never forget
An interesting wrinkle is that this state of mind seems to make me more willing to make changes, as I have more confidence in my ability to appreciate the results
I was poly for two years or so then stopped. Jealousy, in the sense of feeling bad because someone was sleeping with my partner, wasn't a problem for me. I will say what the problems were, and I'll be interested to see responses/links to responses.
I hung out in two polyamorous friendship groups: one was good but very small and not much happened. The other was large, and it was *awful* to be in for a man - to be blunt, because competition for females ended up happening two-faced way - "oh it's so great to see you man!" - while not actually having any interest in one another. I don't think the women were always aware of it (my primary partner certainly wasn't). The problem polyamorous communities have that modal-person-is-monogamous communities does not is that men get an extra incentive to interact with other men: that incentive is a chance of sleeping with your partner. This makes for more shallow interactions.
To say a possibly-related and by-no-means-original thing: polyamory probably makes it so that more attractive men have extra sex, while less attractive men have relatively less extra sex. It seems plausible that this makes men, on average, more miserable (I appreciate this is related to jealousy of course, but not quite the same, because it's not focussed on one person, i.e. one's partner).
I could be wrong about that part - but if you think I am wrong, and that's why you favour polyamory, please let this be a hill you would die on, that is, if I can show you that polyamory leads to misery of this kind, you have to give me that polyamory is therefore bad. I can understand people disliking the principle that some (attractive) people should have their personal lives limited in order to make life a little happier for less attractive ones, but sometimes that's what it looks like to decrease misery.
With respect I also think Scott is not the perfect person to listen to about this, simply because is at the top of a status hierarchy and the people whose welfare I am concerned for are not there.
I'm not a person who thinks poly will be ruinous by the way - even without it there seem to be lots of reasons people are moving away from committed relationships with an eye toward having children. But I don't think it's good.
>polyamory probably makes it so that more attractive men have extra sex, while less attractive men have relatively less extra sex.
Probably! Just like tinder, no-fault divorce, birth control, female higher education, a labor market that doesn't discriminate against women, and not confiscating the babies of unwed mothers or kicking said women out of society. And you can argue against all of those, too, or you can argue that some of them actually have offsetting benefits, but if you're doing the latter, you're just haggling over the trade-offs we should accept for higher male sexual inequality.
Also, nearly everyone benefits from some type of status/inequality that is making someone else either objectively worse off or worse off in relative terms. And while I'm not against the idea that some people should limit their life to decrease overall misery, when I have seen this expressed, the person putting it forth is rarely volunteering to go first or articulating some kind of general principle on the topic.
Yes, haggling could be worthwhile. Of those, Tinder is something I'd say doesn't have to be viewed as an inevitability - it's not ridiculous to consider at least regulation of dating apps to fight this problem. In the same vein subsidies for couples with children and tax breaks for married couples.
I focussed on men so I see why you went for the other examples. But I'll say one argument is that male sexual equality could benefit women, because they benefit from men competing to better husband/dad material(focus on job and stable friendships) instead of better fling material (focus on gym+politics).
> nearly everyone benefits from some type of status/inequality
Yes, everyone is a bit evil. But re: articulating general principles, Categorical imperative, veil of ignorance, and negative utilitarianism all seem to say that one should "volunteer" in this way. And one can at least choose to ostracise people who exploit inequality for their own gain too much. Again assuming that the inequality situation is true, it might be that for a community to be stable, it should adopt a principle like that one.
I wouldn't actually be a one to do that though; I love my poly friends.
You assume that all women want marriage and kids.
Not all women would be happier with a husband and kids. Some percentage, who are currently not getting it, would be happier; I don't know how many. Another factor is how *much* happier those women would be with that outcome; plausibly this is a lot; but I still don't know how much.
If we did some research and gave ourselves an idea of how much happier people are with families, and how much people are not getting that, at what threshold would it make us want to change something? Eg, at what threshold does it become more important than the happiness levels of other people we're considering? I heard a sad statistic about this, but I later found out the stat was dubious, so I'm not sure what to think.
Huh. Interesting thought! Thank you.
However, I see no reason why we can't let people choose their own way, whether that's marriage or not, kids or not, or hell, running off to sail around the world alone, or devoting their lives to poor people. We should all be able to choose the way we want to live our lives. We may be wrong, but that's on us.
The stats I've seen are that older women who didn't want kids and didn't have them are largely happy with their lives. Same with older women who did want kids and had kids, although the numbers are, interestingly, slightly lower for this group.
WRT marriage, there are so many studies out there, but I read a review article a while ago that assessed the methodology, data collection, stats, bias, etc. of a large number of papers on the subject of marriage, wellbeing, happiness, etc. Wish I'd saved it! Their conclusion was that men overall were happier and healthief in marriages, while a large majority of women were happier and healthier outside of marriages (including singles, people in long-term relationships who weren't married, and divorced women).
There is at least a wealth of literature on the question of why more-educated women are less likely to have kids. This study found that even though less-educated women *have* more kids, they are no less likely than more-educated women to *want* them https://aifs.gov.au/research/research-reports/its-not-lack-wanting-kids-report-fertility-decision-making-project another reason this matters demographically is that women are now a bit more likely to go to college
The discussion this sometimes leads to is lots of men saying "career-driven posh birds [which there weren't many of in the 50s] don't want to settle". That's part of it, and that's why it's important to think about the production line of marriageable men. Relatedly, being unmarried is now relatively more fun than it was before. Polyamory is part of making that so.
Aside from the children thing, regarding marriage alone, it would be nice if we had that study you mentioned. You don't want to just say this thing without being able to answer the *many* questions it raises about how this can be known when it's somewhat counterfactual ("you didn't have kids, but how would you have felt if you did?").
Exactly! Steve Sailer has the Law of Female Journalism: they tend to argue for situations which make the writer more attractive. At one point, a commenter argued that the equivalent Law of Male Journalism would be the writer arguing for situations which make them higher status...which we *do* see an awful lot of, probably about as much if not more!
As you allude to, we're all out for ourselves, some of us just lie about it better, including *to* ourselves, since the loss in understanding of the universe can sometimes be balanced by making the lie more believable. When you understand reason was made to convince people of things rather than understand the universe (that's a later hack that started in ancient Greece), it makes a lot of things make more sense.
I think there's a lot to be said for socially conservative cultures which ask more of people and have tools for enforcing status compression! But there's also a reason why people get out of them, and if you're endorsing a small part of that without thinking about what you personally -- a globally high-income and probably high-status person -- would give up, then that is a useful exercise to engage in.
To pose this argument in a different way: some people speculate that within two centuries or so, cultures worldwide will necessarily have become more conservative and insular, because the only ones (cultures) that are able to reproduce themselves will be the ones that avoid letting their young people collectively fall into a lifestyle that makes them less likely to reproduce. The claim is that poly is part of that lifestyle (maybe an extreme of it).
I am on the fence about whether this is correct. You can't get an ought from an is, so even if this is correct, that doesn't necessarily mean we have to throw out the principle that we should let people choose the lifestyle they want. But I am interested to know whether that principle has a determinable expiry date.
> Freddie de Boer recently wrote a harsh review of a memoir, which included quotes like this:
I'm reading the linked post and damn, I never thought I would feel so in agreement with Freddie DeBoer. Not just, like, agreeing on some fact or abstract principle, but a visceral feeling of seeing the same situation the same way. Same for his linked post about disabilities.
This is a very good writeup which made me LOL (ruefully) several times.
This general point -- "If you want good advice about how to walk, ask someone with cerebral palsy. They experience walking as a constant battle" -- expresses itself to some degree in the world of organized sports. It is a longstanding sports-fan cliche, which seems to generally hold up well to real-world review, that the superelite athletes rarely turn out to be effective coaches and usually fail in the attempt. Or put the other way around many of the most-successful sports coaches turn out to have been active players who weren't gifted enough to reach, or to succeed in, that sport's highest level/league.
The books I've seen on polyamory are self-help books not memoirs and in that they seem to be sincere attempts at helping people think through what kinds of resources and capacities a person might need to have on board to pull it off successfully. Those books make it seem like a second full-time job to pull it off responsibly, and not a lot of people have that kind of time or capacity. For the people that do, or who pull it off well regardless, there's nothing to hate it seems to me.
I do wonder if there are two kinds of people doing polyamory (just to oversimplify for a minute) -- those who are doing it to try and solve problems in their monogamous relationships and those who are proactively setting out to create polyamory from the start because that's what they want.
As a therapist (and from talking to colleagues) many of our client bases tend to select I think for the first kind, and that does give us a biased view because in that context, polyamory looks like people putting a lot of energy into new and exciting romantic and sexual liaisons while they're having trouble communicating and being emotionally present for their primary relationship. And for a while that may bring a kind of breath of fresh air back into the primary relationship, but it also brings a ton more emotional and psychological complexity which the primary relationship is not equipped to manage. I've seen multiple situations, with and without kids, where polyamory was a transitional step to divorce (and of course that's not an indictment of polyamory itself).
Therapists also see situations where even if the parents manage polyamory well between them, it's very time and energy intensive at a time developmentally when their small kids need a lot of care. Young kids can have a hard time getting enough care anyway with two working parents in late-stage American capitalism with all its demands outside of the family. So seeing the parents' spare going to nurturing second and third romantic interests when the emotional needs of the kids (or the grownups for each other or themselves individually) are not adequately met seems like not a helpful thing.
Now of course polyamory in that frame can join all the other things that people choose or have to put energy into -- substance use, very involved hobbies, workaholism, economic precarity, media consumption, emotional avoidance, etc.
On the other side, the nuclear family in our current culture is pretty widely insufficient for parents and children. As well that narcissistic self-gratification is not an adequate motivation to sustain a marriage. So to the extent that polyamory might offer more social connectivity for people and to the extent people in it create a larger sense of purpose for it than just self-gratification, then maybe it's a good alternative social structure, including maybe for raising kids.
My bias is that many of my data points make it look like people engaging in emotional avoidance by finding another arena in which they can pursue self-gratification. I'd be interested to hear from people happily in polyamorous situations and who have more data points any reflections about whether they see these two kinds of people doing polyamory and any guesses about what the ratios are (and really anything else they might want to say).
Agreed. Almost all articles in the press are about mono couples "opening up". I've never been in one of those, nor have some of my poly friends. Also, some people open a mono relationship, it falls apart, but then they're poly thereafter. We're out here, we're just less exciting, I suspect.
Sure. This is where affection, cultivated or deserved, really pays dividends.
But yeah, the culture is not terribly excited by that.
Our cultural products tend to assume certain things about women’s sexuality that are totally false, though, so perhaps best not to put too much trust in them.
There seem to be a couple distinct strands of polyamory I've noticed, one has a massive PR problem and the other doesn't want PR at all.
On one hand you have these arrangements that sound like some nightmarish bubbling ooze emerging through several sedimentary layers of Tumblr and Asperger's. "Queer catgirl polycule" kind of stuff that you'll see late-transitioning transwomen post about when they've basically abandoned any idea that they can find a home in normieville. Living arrangements that get broadcast as shock journalism in the Daily Mail, seemingly tailor made for normies to look down on the whole thing. A continuation of the Jerry Springer spectacle, often completely fabricated by the participants, but a spectacle that nevertheless convinced me at a very young age that involving any 3rd person in a relationship would probably just get a chair thrown at your head.
On the other hand, there are various flavors of "swingers", with a surprising amount coming from the ex-military and current law enforcement community, who have semi-stable ongoing activities with another couple. They don't want normies knowing about any of it, and treat it like a secret club. So the publicly successful and well-adjusted members of the community who have secret sexual/romantic lives aren't talking about them, and as a result that leaves only the eccentric outsiders as the "face" of the lifestyle, such as it is.
I have never had an inclination towards any of this, the amount of potential drama just seems miserably high, and I've been conditioned to see it as either low-status or psychologically damaging to a person's self-conception of their social identity ("if you go too far, you'll never get back to where the rest of them are".) I think that a society which encourages people to view polyamory negatively is probably doing most people a favor, as most people will find these arrangements dangerous and unrewarding and are better off being steered towards traditional monogamy. If you decide you really want to do it later in life, you'll find the pineapple people or an adjacent alt-lifestyle group eventually, and you know where California is if you want to go further than that. I don't hate polyamorous people, but I do find them weird, and it's probably for the best if most people feel the same.
I think it was Justin Lehmiller who, in 'Tell Me What You Want', actually pointed out that the poly and swinging communities are separate, and one leans left and the other right. This was privately confirmed to me by a gentleman who had contacts in both communities. Apparently heterosexuality is expected among swingers, though sometimes the wives can play with each other.
Swingers have the added benefit of having responsible adults to take care of any children who are made from their activities. Additionally, there's not an odd man/woman out. Most of my complaints with polyamory do not work in the face of swingers. I have no inclinations towards the practice, but swingers have my grudging respect.
I'm just about 5% of the way through this article right now, so this may be terribly unfair, but I'd like to leave the comment while it's on my mind. If the rest of the article causes me to amend my opinion, I'll edit this comment.
I just want to say that I think it's almost always a mischaracterization to assume people conclude that they 'hate polyamorous people' as opposed to concluding that 'polyamory seems like a shit lifestyle' - and while this might not seem like a significant difference to people on the receiving end of the latter attitude, it makes a world of difference in my experience as to whether people are movable on the issue or not.
[EDIT: I'm rescinding my initial contention because - it turns out - this article is more about criticizing the evaluative process than the conclusion framework.]
That doesn't seem too different from what the article is saying. You're saying, "polyamory (as practiced by narcissists and activists) seems like a shit lifestyle". There's a whole genre of parenting influencers that try to go viral on tiktok or youtube by recording contrived scenarios. Do they give an accurate representation of parenting? Probably not, because it's filtered through the experience of someone that is using their children to get likes.
In other words, true polyamory has never been described. Unfortunately, this means I'm not sure how we can evaluate any lifestyle from memoirs. Hillbilly Elegy made growing up in a rust belt wasteland sound miserable. But maybe that's just because Vance is the type of person that thinks his experience is important and there's really no issue with growing up in Appalachian backwaters is great and normal. There's nothing wrong with the culture, it's just the people who write books.
Sorry, I can't parse what you're saying and who you're accusing of living in the bubble.
I don't have any strong opinions on polyamory. I disliked the central argument of this article -that you can not form opinions on polyamory from the writings of polyamorous people -since it "proves too much". Surely Scott would concede that it's reasonable to (for example) make conclusions about the "hillbilly" lifestyle from reading J.D. Vance's memoir. Or that reading Frederick Douglas could tell you something about slavery. With the logic presented in this article, why wouldn't I dismiss them as narcissists or activists, and therefore unreliable?
To repeat, I don't have an argument about polyamory. This is a meta-argument that it's reasonable to make conclusions about a lifestyle from memoirs.
(I realize that my examples are different than polyamory because the authors are not proponents of what they're describing , but wanted to choose topics (rural destitution and slavery) that are obviously unpleasant)
Yeah, I got through the full article and feel somewhat less strongly about what's being asserted here. I'm still vaguely disinclined towards the framing. Most people that I know do a pretty good job compartmentalizing their generalized conclusions away from their individual judgements. For instance, most people who read a garbage polyamory memoir written by a narcissist will come away with -0.5 for some general heuristic involving the polyamorous lifestyle (one that never manifests as bigotry towards an individual in daily life) but -1,000 for that specific author, amounting to serious dislike.
Wait! Is that your secret? In real life are you terrible at everything you write about? Also you don't seem like a narcissist but I guess you must be. TIL
no, i hate polyamory because its a bad idea, not because its loudest proponents are annoying. The erotic force in people is too volatile to be safely indulged in with multiple people at the same time; its binds people too tightly together. Like good lord, the negative aspects of eros with one woman or man are painful; with two you can add whole dimensions of pain. its a rough sea far better people have shipwrecked in.
as for the "normal," you need to ask how well you know them. People are very good at hiding the bad stuff till it explodes; some may take it to their graves. Once they explode, people can't believe it. They were such a nice couple.
its not a simple as just annoying people. We rarely get the full story from anyone, and people are too good at hiding.
A friend of mine once put it to me this way: "a good rule of thumb is you stay attached to anyone you had sex with, for three years. you won't act normally when you see their name, or their picture, or see them in a room. three years."
Volatile indeed.
thats probably a good breakup too; you can pine for them a lot longer.
my parents divorced. love can turn into pain and screaming matches quickly, and they never, ever remarried. when it goes bad it goes BAD, and polyamorous people are not immune to that.
Agreed
Similarly you don't hate CrossFit, you hate people who talk about their workout programs.
One thing you can try is to ask them if they're vegan or polyamorous. If they're either one, they can't decide which one to tell you first and they can't talk.
"There are probably some acceptable times to write a memoir, like when you’ve just conquered Gaul. But usually memoir-writing means you think your True Self is absolutely fascinating and your experiences are worth recording and analyzing at book length" is a fully general objection to writing almost anything. Reword it as "writing means you think your thoughts are absolutely fascinating and your ideas are worth recording and analyzing at book length," and there's very little anyone should ever write.
This is not criticism; this is in fact why I haven't written anything of note.
To throw it out there, I think this argument also works against you? "I am friends with stable, generally nice people, some of those people are polyamorous, and they enjoy stable, generally nice relationships. Therefore, polyamorous relationships are stable, and generally nice." Isn't this line of logic making the same mistake as believing that polyamory is bad based on the dysfunctional people who write about it? Selection is occurring in both scenarios, after all. Hope I'm not mischaracterizing things here.
On a different note, even if the memoirs only show the effect of a polyamorous lifestyle on jerkwads, that's still useful info, right? If you're going to have a great relationship no matter what lifestyle you choose, then lifestyle choice doesn't really matter. But, if you are an unrepentant egoist, and a polyamorous lifestyle makes that trait more damaging in really obvious ways, then you shouldn't live that lifestyle, even if it works for others. Norms around long-term sexual arrangements should probably be tailored towards the worst that society has to offer, not the best. After all, the best are likely going to be happy regardless, while the worst will take any excuse to increase their own misery.
Well, I wouldn't say he's rubbing my face in it, I decided to read the article after all. But yeah, he definitely has a few bubble-beliefs, polyamory included. Weird to see his typically even-handed style sort of fade away, whenever he writes an article about one of them. Makes me wonder which topics would lead me down the same path.
Gotta say, those posts are usually the most enjoyable to comment on, though. It's kind of fun to ride the line between second-guessing the author's even-handedness, and second-guessing my own interpretations of how even-handed they're being.
Also excellent advice
Lotta people commenting on how they can't read the Atlantic article due to the paywall, you can use https://archive.ph/ to get around that and most other paywalls. Doesn't work for Substack, though.
Harper never said he hates polyamorous people, or anything like that. Scott is misrepresenting the article.
A similar thing happens with the gender debate. Someone describes her concerns about the ideology, and the response is “Well, you just hate trans people.”
Am I so literal: I read your bit as critiquing the impulse for a poorly informed person paid to read a book by a narcissistic self indulgent polyamorist memoirist to equate the memoirist with all people choosing this lifestyle and to make rather moralistic conclusions about said lifestyle. Your critique is either with the person who wrote the critique or with the person who wrote the memoir. (Both I think)
I’m not sure why everyone here then is yammering on about poly vs mono.
But here goes:
What if poly and mono were seen as both having challenges and issues. Like trying to decide if it’s better to wear hiking shoes or sneakers.
Perhaps in the lifespan it’s better to wear sneakers and at other times it’s better to wear hiking shoes, but no need to dismiss all people who are at a life phase of wearing hiking shoes because one particularly loud one gets a book deal.
Or perhaps the substack post, the Atlantic article and the memoir all exist because we as a group are curious about them and want to read about them (click on them) wonder how others can do it/can’t do it etc etc.
What if: we as a people evolving in bands of 150 people were inherently poly and it’s no big woop. What if the current majority of folks who read sub stacks experienced being raised in nuclear families so have “moral imprinting” that nuclear is better? And now here we are in the middle of something old and wild coming forward again?
If it’s such a clear case to dismiss polyamory/astronaut boots why are you reading and commenting about it?
Jeez, I love memoirs. But the ones I like are not by people who are making the case that they are a certain kind of interesting, special entity. They're I yam what I yam books. James Agee wrote one that begins, "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child."
I tried "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" about 5 years ago, but I bounced hard off of the writing style. I think it was too highbrow for the way my mind was working then. I'm a bit more functional now; do you recommend it, or his other stuff?
> Advice is disproportionately written by defective people.
Maybe in a purely statistical sense of disproportionate. But not really. Advice is written by people who are motivated to give advice. That motivation can be due to a personal defect. It can also not be. For example, the millions of words of financial advice issuing from Wall Street are not a sign of people who are defective about money. Nor do they know less about investing than your average person.
Being defective itself is not a motivation but lends itself to many motivations. For example, your defect might make you intimately familiar with a system and highly motivated to overcome its flaws. Your defect might also create anxiety which you then soothe by trying to normalize the defect by showing it off publicly. Or the defect may give you significant advantages in having interesting things to say and you want to make a career out of some form of attention economy (whether blogs or TV shows or whatever).
The disagreement between you and the other side (I do not have a ready name to hand) is what your motivations are. Your side posits the first version: you want to overcome the flaws of the modern relationship system which you believe you have special insight into because of, effectively, a quirk of psychology/biology/whatever. The other side posits the second or third: that you are defective and less happy but are narcissistically seeking either attention or to normalize your defects to make yourself feel better about them.
At any rate, this is a battle between soldiers and so (to be honest) not incredibly interesting. I am on neither side and no one is truly trying to convince me. I wish you enough space for your oddities but not so much space you deny the other side theirs.
IMO, monogamy people don't care that much whether Poly people are really happy/narcissistic . The real issue is many monogamy couples can stay Mono just because there is no other option. Poly is hideous, unacceptable, fullstop.
This is mostly a trust issue, i.e: I am not sure whether my spouse would leave if Poly is widely accepted.
I think this is a pretty strong version of the typical mind fallacy. (Guessing that you are poly.) "Everyone would be poly if they could be and no one actually cares about whether they think I'm lying to them or harming the social fabric" is not really a great model of the other side's minds here.
Why do you attribute the views you are criticizing to "The Atlantic", rather than the author of this particular book review (which was published by The Atlantic)?
I would understand this, if your critique concluded that the review was so bad that The Atlantic should not have published it, but that does not seem to be the case.
Tyler Austin Harper. This post is a critique of the writing of Tyler Austin Harper; but his name does not appear, which reads strange to me.
The smuggled premise is presumably: "The Atlantic does not publish book reviews which take an attitude contrary to that of its editorial staff".
A smuggled premise which I find obviously true, but you're right, there is a distinction here which could at least be mentioned.
For a reducto ad absurdem: I struggle, for example, to believe that the Atlantic would publish a review of some book by Dugin making the case that Ukraine Is Legitimately Russian Land wherein the reviewer concludes "His arguments convince me entirely, Ukraine Is Legitimately Russian Land".
It is legitimate to infer the attitude of the Atlantic from the not-technically-made-by-the-Atlantic-but-certainly-signalboosted-by-them set of views which they choose to publish.
Because I want to avoid pile-ons against individual people, and although this is probably not going to cause a huge pile-on, I think it's important enough that I want to build a fence around the law.
I see. Thanks for the response. However, I would think that the author would be happy to have his work engaged with in a fair way (which I think you've done), by name.
I don't hate polyamory, I hate admin and scheduling.
Polyamory is like... I dunno, snake charming? Juggling knives? It's a risky activity that some people can apparently do just fine (though I've never met any) and which will hurt most people who try it.
This is fine, most people don't even think to juggle knives most of the time. But when I start to hear people promoting knife juggling to the masses as a great and fun hobby, I feel compelled to weigh in on the side of "Yeah, nah, that's still kinda stupid and dangerous, and not even that much fun, have you considered juggling fruit maybe?"
If you hear me saying like this, it's not aimed at erasing the lived experience of all the expert knife-jugglers out there who have been juggling for decades and somehow still have eight, nine, or maybe even ten fingers. It's just aimed at all the inexperienced youngsters out there who might need to be reminded that knives are sharp and hands are meat.
Aella's data says that on average poly relationships last about the same amount of time as mono relationships and are about as happy. https://aella.substack.com/p/polyamory-vs-monogamy-how-relationships
Is there any set of questions I could ask on the next ACX survey that would test whatever hypothesis you have that makes you disagree?
Not really, I think that the ACX readership (and even more so, the ACX survey-replyship) is heavily selected for being anomalous in a whole bunch of dimensions, and can't be relied on to be representative of anything. Aella's sex survey even more so.
(And I've read https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life , I just disagree with it )
As someone who has never read a book on polyamory but knows several people who have been or are in those relationships, they are near universally unhappy or one partner is dissatisfied with the relationship. In all these cases, the major friction in these relationships is coming from the structure of the relationship.
I know it is not for me, but I see a lot of my friends who are trying to "have it all" so to speak and very reluctant to confront the problems coming from their arrangements.
Inviting anyone who would find it entertaining to join me in coming up with the most irritatingly narcissistic book titles they can think of. Such as:
The Adorable Complexity of Being Me
Woke Polyamorous Ayahuasca Meditation -- a Spiritual Path for the Intrepidly Sensitive
Becoming Fully Myself
Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem
Me/Myself/I: A Journey of Three and One
Every Man and Woman is a Star
Transgressing Boundaries: A Non-Binary, Non-Toxic, Non-Violent Journey
Neutralizing Poison: The Fourth Level of Self-Healing (the first three being, of course, Curing Light Wounds, Slowing the Venom, and Banishing Blindness, and the sequel being Returning from the Underworld)
The Love of an Influencer: Very Different from Conventional Love
Yum!
"Delish" has my vote for mildly more irritating
Saw an ad addressing 'delish-etarians' today
How about The Anguish of the Cultivated Sensibility
also, I Kiss Myself upon the Throat
and Awesome Enough to Sell My Own Shit
Someone actually did that last one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piero_Manzoni
Ah, Piero, I did not know about him. There was a German artist in the 30's who did paintings of evil-looking members of the public in cafes, & mixed shit into his paints. But I can't think of his name.
I cannot take credit for this, but:
"A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir"
https://www.amazon.com/Woman-First-Deeply-Personal-President/dp/1419733532
I think this one takes the cake. Amazon blurb is really funny, but somehow I can't imagine author sustaining the amusement for 100 pp or so -- seems like kind of a one trick pony. Tho I'm sure somebody highly inventive could keep finding variations that kept the reader howling.
I actually read it! (I gave it as a present to a friend who was also a fan of the show.) Half of the funny stuff is the disconnect between the book and what we see on the show - sometimes the book omits important things, or glosses over bad stuff, or otherwise outright lies in ways that wouldn't be obvious if you didn't know the kind of person it was about.
Yikes. I didn't even know there was a show about a woman president. I live in a cave.
My friend was the one who kept me in touch with this stuff. :-)
It sounds like you don't much like TV, but this might work to make you feel better about the politics of the last decade.
Heck, they even predicted a race between a 1-term narcissist and the sitting president who replaced them. Or maybe it's some sort of sympathetic magic curse, it's hard to tell. At least we haven't had an electoral college tie yet. **knocks on wood** And how about a sitting president cutting short his re-election campaign, and putting forward his vacuous VP? That sounds like it might be in the cards, too.
Refresh this several times for narcissistic self help titles:
https://bugsby.net/drive/heal.cgi
"Yes Your Self"
"Find Your Always"
"Love Your Yum"
(From https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/brand)
My god, it’s an online narcissism generation machine!
On the subject of “legible relationship principles”: I grew by great and rapid strides when I started reading books in that category, precisely about things like NVC and gaslighting. The impact on my life has been significant. Granted, my use case was mostly “I’m serially attracted to abusive partners and need help realizing this fact, holding a higher bar for others, and believing I can and should stick to it”. It worked for me.
This makes me wonder if physical therapists/people with cerebral palsy who had to intensely learn how to walk are better at QWOP
Why this website runs so slow on Chrome?
Chrome's Task Manager indicate that this tab use 520MB memory! Even scrolling is lagging badly. Anyone havesame problem?
Yeah, it's kinda ridiculous. 650 MB for me.
"Relationships work the same way. Go to an elderly couple who have been happily married for fifty years, and they’ll give you vapid old-person advice like “Treat every day as a gift from God.” But go to someone who’s struggled with every one of their last thirty-seven relationships, and they’ll be full of suggestions"
Can you say confirmation bias? I can easily think up at least five different people who are the exact converde of what you are saying. A better takeaway is most people have a hard time articulating advice.
Honestly, this can be barely considered a rationalist blog anymore. Tons of assertations without any evidence simply backed ip by ridiculously anecdotal data to reject possibly correct criticism on a practice that you like. Cmon Scott!
I am deliberately trying to not defend polyamory with statistics, because people freak out whenever anyone defends polyamory or makes an affirmative case for it, and accuses them of trying to push their lifestyle on them. Instead I'm just using it to make a slightly related point about sources of information.
Judging by the comment section this plan has definitely worked out in your favor (/s) and I look forward to the inevitable follow-up (mostly not /s) and/or Highlights from the Comments (fully not /s).
People already seem to be interpreting your point about 'sources of information' as being driven by ulterior motives, so I think you might as well bring out the statistics at this point. If there's a case, I'll hear it, though I'm more interested in TFR than I am in in self-reported life-satisfaction for younger age groups, or the like.
"You don't hate the Taylor Swift media obsession, you just hate beautiful successful women getting their due".
When you used the unwitting re-creation of the televangelist attitude, you didn't disprove the critics though - happily married committed monogamists who raise their children to value such and who roll our eyes at the polyamorist media focus with the same disdain as for veganism, absolutely can be put off with the Jesus freaks.
And deBoer's point was that if you put your deep thoughts on paper, and it get's published, and you and your publisher promote your deep thoughts as deep thoughts, you can't cry foul when someone lampoons the vacuity and banality of the alleged deepness of the alleged thoughts. There's no contradiction or lapse in logic in any of this.
No, I hate polyamory.
This defence is just pathetic. You know, I also hate Rationalists, as they are my enemies. Perhaps one reason is that I can point to blog posts like this one and say, "Wow, isn't this not only stupid, but in defence of something inherently oppressive and evil, and obviously so?" But then Scott jumps out and says, "No no, you actually hate me, and other Rationalist bloggers, not Rationalists!"
How does anybody even respond to that? "I hate X due to multiple self-written examples of X showing X as having negative consequences even by those who promote X publicly." And then the defence, "Oh no, you don't hate X, you only hate the public examples of X! I have secret personal examples that show it's okay. You're just falling for confounders!"
Yeah well, I have multiple personal examples of underage girls marrying men in their mid to late 20's, and it not ending in personal horror. That doesn't mean it's a choice equal to others, and that I don't actually hate giant age gaps in underage relationships.
This is probably the first time I've read Scott's blog post and just thought, dude, just stop.
You sound pretty bitter
In my (limited) experience, there are two kinds of polyamorous people:
1) Polyamorous 20-somethings. These guys are insufferable. They jump back and forth between "You shouldn't be so judgmental" and "Polyamory is the only ethical way to hold relationships". "You shouldn't snark at people who are different than you" and "The human heart is large enough to hold more than one person!" "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE JOYS OF NRE!!!" Toxic people yell "I'm polyamorous!" and, suddenly, the topic shifts away from the toxicity to defenses of Polyamory Theory. Ryan cheats on Chris and the community joins together to tell Chris to be more open-minded and less selfish.
2) Polyamorous 40-somethings. These guys are pretty okay. There's a lot less jumping back and forth. It's not really a "polycule" as much as a "stable triad/quadrad". NRE? Ha! I'd have to leave the hosue. Oh, man. I haven't thought about Ryan for years. I heard they moved to Wisconsin. I think Jamie is still Facebook acquaintances... I'll ask next time we get coffee. You know what? I won't. I don't care. I'm glad they're no longer here.
The problem is that the only way to get a 40-something polyamorist is to take a 20-something polyamorist and wait a couple of decades.
I'm putting together a response for someone else, but one thing I thought about including but probably won't, is that the distribution of personality types in "poly" has changed over the years. Like with tech, in the beginning there were a bunch of early adopters, figuring out how to implement feminist theory in a way that let them have lots of sex, and they tended to be fairly good about self-awareness and boundaries and the like. I expect that Scott's circle is a younger generation of people like this. But there were also people who discovered the poly community and thought "if I say the right words, I get to have fun, and if I say these other words, I can hurt people and get them to think it's their own fault". And eventually there were people who thought "if I say the words other people say, and do the things other people do, I can fit in with the cool kids". (Similar to what happened with wokism.)
Back in the 90's, I watched someone hurt a lot of people and who was very good at changing the subject to Polyamory Theory and the need for others to ethically manage their jealousy in a healthy way.
This person eventually moved out of the circle when there was no one left to lie to.
I take grim satisfaction in having a relationship that has outlasted every single relationship among those who gave speeches about how I just didn't understand, man.
Though, of course, I'm sure that they'd explain that if I thought that relationships were supposed to last forever, that I still don't understand the point of polyamory.
This was a funny morning read, but your paragraph breaks are disgracefully optimized for online reading.
Sorry!
This reminds me of all the hate that Christopher McCandless got after Into the Wild came out. In that case it was particularly unfair because he wasn't writing a book. If someone publishes your diary without your permission it's going to make you sound like an asshole
Since I don't see myself represented in the comments, I will add this:
I lived in the Bay Area for many many years working as a software engineer, and I had and still have a number of polyamorous friends, and I've never read a single book about polyamory.
I hate polyamory, not people who write books. Many of my friends have the same experience as me. I know the post is ostensibly addressed to the Atlantic, but it has reduced me out of existence.
I suspect "advice is disproportionately written by defective people" generalizes to many classes of book, including ones supported by this blog and this community, which makes this a biased take. But I can't easily back it up, so I just offer it as an opinion.
For what it's worth, I agree with many of the other commenters who say the value of systems like monogamy and polyamory varies a great deal based on the competence of the executors, or their place on the socioeconomic bell curve.
I think well executed monogamy is best by far. It has stealth benefits that take decades to become apparent, mostly enjoyed by the kind of people who don't bother to explain themselves. This class is rare.
I think well executed polyamory is second best. It very obviously solves some problems with poorly executed monogamy. This class is also rare.
I think poorly executed monogamy is third best. Yeah, it's a shit show, but points for trying. Real utility points for real tries. This class is obviously most common.
And poorly executed polyamory is by far the worst. By far. The downsides are insidious and subtle, and sometimes take years to make themselves known. I do not want to see it become any more common than it is.
That’s an interesting perspective, could you explain more about these long-term stealth benefits and drawbacks?
Yes, please go read Some Guy's top level comment about his parents, who were ostensibly monogamous, but actually not obviously different from polyamorous, and how that affect his childhood, and how he behaves as a parent, and the parent comments from monogamous parents in general in this thread. Those are half the stealth benefits, though I'm afraid you're not gonna get a more accessible explanation if you haven't had kids yourself.
The other half is barely explainable. You'll hear "cancer" and scoff at it, but *please go live through it*, please go live through a monogamous experience of cancer, and you will understand something important about dependability that can barely be explained.
tldr: if you haven't had a bad disease or a child under monogamous conditions, the answers will be glib.
Agreed.
Most people are stupid. Ideas that make stupid people's life worse are an infohazard.
(This set probably includes polyamory, atheism, who knows what else.)
I wonder what would be a good general solution to this problem. Perhaps smart people should live on a separate island with their own rules and internet. Except, this couldn't work in the actual world, someone would tell the plebs.
The end of Brave New World.
I'm fascinated by the selective looseness of the good/bad person absolutism in rationalist writings. Here you describe yourself as a 'particular type of bad person' (twice) as a qualifier to not-super-unreasonable thoughts. Presumably(?), someone simplistically inferring "Scott thinks of himself as a bad person" from this would be silly. I found an explication of a non-loose variant in https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/16/the-economic-perspective-on-moral-standards/.
I didn’t understand that either.
He's saying that his thoughts/behavior are not ideal and he would not intentionally choose them if he were able to do so. It's admitting to non-rationality in that particular area of his thoughts, which is a sort of meta-sin in rationality. I think you're reading it as intended though, in that it's not a big deal and he might as well be saying "I'm human."
Speaking of memoirs, I stumbled across a particularly good example of why someone might want to write one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paEfZa-wHtw&t=573s
"I was a Reagan conservative; what was that about? I was a drug addict hospitalized in a mental institution; what was that about? I was accused of assault with a deadly weapon by a woman with whom I was having an extra-marital affair and it became front-page news throughout the country, because I was nominated for the Undersecretary in the Department of Education position - the number 2 position - in the second Reagan administration, and it was while that nomination was pending that this fiasco, this disaster in my life, et cetera et cetera... I could go on, obviously, in this frame for a long time. You asked me a pointed question, 'why did I write the book'; I'm saying that I had something to explain and I had something to say."
"And I've kind of gestured at why I want to explain it to others because I think I need somehow to contextualize my biographic profile from my point of view, to humanize it and to invite a more sympathetic view of those who will be taking my measure."
Wow. Where on earth do you get that from? Evidence, please.
Honestly, so many people in this discussion assume that their biases are Truth, instead of seeking out actual evidence.
Sorry if this has been brought up before, because I am not prepared to read 700 comments, but I did a search for "Klein" in the thread and it didn't show up. So.... Ezra Klein recently had Rhaina Cohen, the author of a new book called "The Other Significant Others" on his podcast. It's so new it's not out yet so I haven't read it, but I did listen to the podcast talking about the book.
If the interview is anything to go by, I think it's going to be a great book about polyamory because it's not a book about polyamory. It's a book about people who choose to live together with partners in a relationship that not conducted as a traditional marriage and who do not regard themselves as romantically involved. Sometimes there are more than two of these partners. They are "platonic life partners" as we call it. Childcare and how people can come together to raise children in a partnership that is not "two people who have sex with each other" is apparently a major theme of the book. This is not a memoir and it is not written by unhappy people.
It is not a book about polyamory, but I strongly suspect we will be able to learn more about polyamory from it than we will from many books about polyamory because it is a book about how people can perform many of the functions of marriage without being a two-person romantic couple.
I think the reason most people are uncomfortable with polyamory is that it subverts the dearly-held mythology of all-conquering “true love” between soulmates that pervaded western culture for a few centuries until the last decade or-so. Years ago, Jason Pargin (of Cracked.com, back when it was still relevant) said that outsiders looking back at our culture would see romantic love as our religion, and I think he was right.
For the first decades of my life, we were so immersed in it that it didn’t occur to us that it was strange compared to other times and cultures to believe in and focus on finding your “true love,” mutually “falling in love” with a soulmate for an eternally-passionate, all-satisfying, exclusive marriage that transcends and conquers all problems. Most of our popular stories reinforced these myths, from Disney’s “Happily Ever After” twists on ancient fairy tales that originally had dark endings, to hero’s journey stories that required the crucial step of “getting the girl,” to more-disturbing stories like Punch Drunk Love. It was so pervasive that it was shoehorned into the ending of Fight Club, where we barely even noticed that it didn't make much sense.
As these myths have been breaking down in recent years, movies and TV shows have started moving away from them, but to the many people who still hold these romantic myths as dearly as a religion, hearing about people who don't share them can be as frustrating as hearing about the "new atheists" was to fundamentalist Christians in the early aughts.
Yeah, true love might not really be the norm in relationships, but the vast majority of pre-modern societies weren't consent-based sexual free-for-alls either. Marriage was enforced by stigma and social convention and was seen more as a mutually-beneficial business arrangement than anything else, assuming the bride was consulted at all. Even non-monagamous societies still had very strict rules regarding these transactions. Love would be nice and all, but it could (A) develop over time, and (B) wasn't really the point per se. Reproduction was.
Very true, and of course, most people who have religious feelings for monogamous "true love" mythology would be irritated by heretics in their culture abandoning it for any other system, whether consent-based free-for-all or any of the other historical, often-coercive systems. There just aren’t many westerners practicing/advocating a return to those historical systems, so it doesn’t come up as much. Similarly, modern Christians rarely get upset about ancient Greek mythology but would if people around them started believing in it.
There's a version of True Love that's dumb and toxic, where it's implied that Your Special Someone is a girl/boy you'll just coincidentally lock eyes with across a room and settling for anyone else is a betrayal of your needs (and yeah, the older Disney films kinda reinforce this), but there's a more defensible version of the myth where you're expected to work on developing a stable relationship with your spouse that develops into a deeper affection over time. Ideals being lofty isn't a problem in and of itself- your aspirations have to be a bit higher than the norm or the norm degenerates over time.
things I enjoy about memoir (not having read this one): realistic dialogue from people's heated moments, better social dynamics, less tropey characters, more focus on interiority and a slower pace as a result.
This makes me want to read more memoirs
That's fine, but use the words that have the actual meaning you intend if so. It's simply not correct to say that lower classes have practiced polyamory commonly in the past. It's true for non monogamy. Soyou're arguing they are closely related concepts, but even if so, the latter is more accurate to use than the former, so you should use it instead.
I’ve been to a talk by a monogamy influencer, and it was actually pretty good. He didn’t have a book deal, but I think he’d given dozens of similar talks. He gave a limited number of examples of things from his life, and talked about some of his reasoning in those decisions. He described the situations in enough detail that it was easy to empathise with the way he made those decisions, and he drew a small enough number of examples from his life that he could stick to meaningful examples. Maybe life advice is different from a memoir, but it’s possible to dispense the former and be in a happy and successful relationship (he and his wife were giving simultaneous talks to men and to women, respectively).
I'm less concerned about the direct effects of polyamory on quality-of-life for the immediate participants (though those could well be terrible) and more on whether they're (A) reproducing at all, (B) reproducing eugenically, and (C) setting a poor example to peers, especially in the lower class.
There are some fundamental and obvious game-theoretic reasons to suspect that polyamory is highly destabilising to the long-term relationships conducive to raising children, especially when you roll it out at scale (temptations to infidelity/defection multiply as unattached or loosely-attached singles increase), and that smart women are more likely to be sensitive to this, which impacts fertility. You can make a pretty good argument that it just degenerates into a harem system for the top 20% of men, minus the reproduction.
Did you mean to reply somewhere else? But also, l think you’re skipping some steps in this. If nothing else, you’d have to explain why harems are unstable or bad for raising children. I think there are lots of benefits from having a small family unit with clearly defined parent-child relationships, where a child can trust their parents to see them as important, but even I don’t have a clear sense of whether the world would be more stable if families clustered together so a good parent can look after more children. (Also, maybe put in more groundwork before you refer to infidelity as “defection”, if you want a good conversation with anyone who supports polyamory).
I've seen enough twin/adoption studies that I don't think home environment, barring rare cases of serious negligence/abuse, makes much of a difference to kids' long-term outcomes at all, but the stability of a relationship has a large effect on whether women will commit to bearing children in the first place (at least if they have a brain in their heads.)
And... yeah, defining infidelity as a non-bad-thing is the point in contention here, and IMO the onus is on polyamorists to prove their case before I revise my language.
People in polyamorous relationships would use contraception unless they intended to have a long-term child-raising relationship. Argue that they wouldn’t, or that contraception would be ineffective. And… you won’t convince many people if you say, “The onus is on you to accept my conclusion, and you won’t accept the language I argue with until you do”.
Infidelity has been considered a sin, sometimes punishable by death, in just about every human society for thousands of years, and as I already went over, there are good theoretical reasons for why this might be so. If polyamorists want to make the case that all of these societies were wrong, the onus is on them to prove it.
I'm not directly concerned with use of contraception here, because I don't measure the utility of child-rearing exclusively as a function of the parents' life-satisfaction, and I don't see evidence that contraception is solving the OECD's problems with sub-replacement/dysgenic fertility. It may well be making them worse.
Are you defining infidelity differently than most people? I understand that poly people have sex with people outside of a 1-1 relationship, but I've generally heard that this is discussed and accepted by both/all participants. I don't consider that infidelity, if it's pre-arranged and accepted.
Not sure how MA views it, but I read his "infidelity = defection" to describe something that was not arranged previously. He seems to be making the point that non-monogamous relationships seem more prone to defecting against loose agreements than (presumably more rigid) monogamous relationships.
Something unfamiliar in the style. Topics that catch the imagination? Intelligent focused stream of consciousness? I am starting to search these pieces out.
The Bay Area Poly thing & discussion reminds me of the old observation: Each generation believes it is the first to discover sex. To enjoy sleeping around is not exactly something new in human evolution.
If it emotionally confuses and hurts children & hampers developing deeper feelings for another person is a different matter. But if children without psychological scars & parents with deep feelings for each other were necessities for human survival, our species would have gone extinct long ago.
I'm a tall, good looking guy. I was cool and in popular groups. I'm the chad. The cool and good looking guys slept around. The less good looking guys tried but did poorly. The top dogs were shamed by many of the top girls for being 'players', but they would still get involved with us.
Poly came around and you could tell people about it and most would think it was cool, but few would challenge the idea because... well we were cool and they weren't. You can convince uncool people of many things by being cool and good looking.
Cool people never said they were poly back in the day. But we definitely acted poly. Then some more nerdy guys started to say they were poly. This let more moderately attractive people have greater sex choices, something only good looking guys previously had.
I've had multiple girls. Many times. It's not hard to do but it's a headache. I got older and decided on one girl. If you want kids, one long-term partner focused on your children is better (time is resource constrained).
For all the poly people out there, Chads are so much better socially. We get more practice --- the amount of gentle touch to maneuver numerous relationships is large. We're better than you at it. Are we better because of skill or because people are nicer to us? It's probably a bit of both. Most poly people seem pretty bad juggling things and ruin their lives. You get more slack when you're high status or hot. If you aren't high status or hot you'll struggle.
Even with all those skills and numerous opportunities most of the Chad guys I know (85-90%) pick one girl eventually, because it's tedious! You will become more bored of sex (not entirely but a lot) and you'll want other things than sex optionality as you age.
Hot guys have sex optionality in monogamous relationships. We can cheat faster than you stumble getting her number. But we overwhelming don't. It's a tremendous waste of time. This 'support relationship' or whatever nonsexual relationship you might also think about having is a waste of time.
I don't know how else to write this. I feel like my writing skills are sorely lacking compared to the more bookish people on this website. As a man who's lived the poly life poly people romance. It's not worth it. It's rationalized horniness.
IF you plan to never have children, poly is fantastic. The Chads I know that didn't pick one girl are either dead or taking drugs and will likely remain bachelors
I think you nailed it. No need to worry about the writing style; it’s a bit overly analytical and blunt (autistic?) but effective at conveying your points. I think this kind of ‘status envy –> nerds replicate and amplify “Chad behavior” –> Chad behaviors become translated into warped, rigid conceptual frameworks’ pathway is helpful for thinking about this.
I generally agree with this, though not sure the framing of the Atlantic piece is fair. If I remember rightly, the Atlantic author has no issue with polyamory as a general practice, and certainly doesn't "hate polyamorous people". Rather, they take issue with the uncritical (professional middle class) championing of it – especially when that championing presents polyamory as a radical challenge to capitalism, when in fact the two are wonderfully compatible. I may well be conflating their tweets and what they actually wrote in the piece. Either way, I think the 'radical challenge' point is fair and useful.
I find it so fascinating that the older I get the more insight I can have on people just from a few words.
I can tell that Scott comes from a divorced family and was raised by his mother and doesn’t have a lot of married male friends he hangs out with solo.
I know this because men talk a lot about what it takes to have a successful marriage while women attribute it to their mere existence.
I talk with my male friends and father about being a good husband and father a lot. And it isn’t because I have the equivalent of MS for relationships. It’s because I know that relationships are so,etching you actually do have to work at to get right.
That’s not a bad thing because it leads to a happy life.