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wedrifid comments on Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous? - Less Wrong
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Some of my relationships are monogamous. The main advantage to them is that they take less time and effort. They can also reduce drama
Unfortunately monogamy involves creating an artificial monopoly on physical and emotional intimacy. The problems with monopolies that you learn in economics class apply to relationships too and constitute or cause a lot of the 'drama' of relationships. The Nash equilibrium in games modelling monopolies are very different from those without a monopoly and human instincts often reflect that difference depending on context.
This is counter-intuitive but I find it reasonably accurate. On a related note studies show that women orgasm more often and more powerfully when their partner has been with an other woman even if they are not consciously aware of this fact.
How in the world do you ethically perform a study that shows this?
Err... Oops. I just went to google to try to find the relevant references. Let's just say that anything you can find on that topic on google would constitute "generalising from fictional evidence".
Take a group of women who are not in monogamous relationships and who are having sex with men who have other partners. Randomly assign half to group A and half to group B. Take one partner for each woman. Instruct the partners of the women in group A to not have sex with any other women for two weeks, and instruct the partners of the women in group B to have sex with their other partners frequently for two weeks. Ask the women to self-report how pleasurable they find the sex, and how often and powerfully they orgasm. Tell everyone participating in the study about this procedure, and get their consent to it.
It seems like finding a statistically useful number of such scientifically-inclined, polyamorous couples would be quite a challenge.
To be clear, they don't have to be polyamorous couples: just using women who have a friend with benefits would work.
Don't know, but the whole "double blind" part sounds kinda fun. :P
This sounds plausible, though no immediate examples of this leap to mind. Can you give some example?
The very fact that 'sent to the doghouse' exists as a cliché is the most obvious illustration. I'll add that this kind of thing is often bad for both parties. Our instincts aren't there to make us happy, they are there to gain power, resources and reproductive advantage. Using sex and emotional intimacy to gain power is a common failure mode in relationships and can make both people miserable to a lesser or greater degree but it does work.
(This fact is completely bizarre to me. If anyone tries to punish me to gain control or coerce me in any way they instantly lose any influence they had over me based on goodwill and I automatically feel free to use any or every means available to get what I want. That is, they have absolutely no ethical rights until such time as they are not coercing me. But I learned in primary school that other people are often quite willing to be controlled by punishment.)
I react similarly to attempts at coercion. Is this perhaps an asp thing?
More like a self-esteem thing. Nearly everyone whom I have ever known and respected (and, as far as I know, everyone whom these people know and respect) reacts in that way, and that group includes a lot of people who are as far from aspies as possible.
People who were sincerely friendly and submissive towards their abusers got called many disrespectful names, depending on the context: sluts, boot-lickers, whipped boys, pet doggies, etc.
Do you use asp to refer to Aspergers' ?(I sometimes see 'aspie' but haven't encountered asp).
It is certainly in there among the big cluster of correlated traits and labels that includes Aspergers' syndrome and often ADHD. I don't necessarily qualify for an Aspie label although I quite probably would if I had less IQ. I do know that i would never attempt to coerce any of my friends, lovers or enemies that I identify as having Aspergers'. I wouldn't expect it to give good results.
Mind you I don't coerce 'typical' others as much as is optimal either. The work of the mind projection fallacy. I have to remind myself that others are 'spineless pushovers' (my perspective) or 'do not have an attitude problem' (another common perspective).
I use 'asp' to refer to both autism-spectrum and archetypical Serpent qualities, because of the pun and the overlap.
Serpent? As in Slytherin (sneaky, tricky, conniving, plotting)? That doesn't seem like there would be much overlap.
Oddly enough, the archetypal serpent was a well-developed concept before J. K. Rowling was born.
Both involve social incapacity, compensated for with cold analytics. Both are potential sources of powerful knowledge, complicated by disrespect for, or incomprehension of, traditional limits on the safe use of such knowledge. Both have an unnervingly primordial feel.
Don't worry; I don't actually think Rowling made that up.
But I'm surprised by the "social incapacity" part: I would think of a serpent as sort of a sociopathic master manipulator.
Doesn't sociopathy qualify as a type of incapacity?
Ahh, I may just have to adopt that name. All too apt!
For monogamous relationships, the cost of having an additional partner is much higher: you have to forgo your current relationship, and possibly experience drama and a period of being partnerless. Polyamorous relationships mitigate the cost of having an additional partner.
As a result, a monogamist knows that his or her partner is limited to them for the time being, because the costs of ending a monogamous relationship can be so heavy. A monogamous partner gets a lot of leeway to slack off, take their partner for granted, fail to satisfy their partner, or be a jerk, just as long as this behavior doesn't create a cost to the other partner that is heavier than the projected costs of a breakup.
Monogamist partners have the ability to partially shut out their competitors. When you know that your partner isn't able to to sample other potential partners for better matches, you don't have so much of an incentive to fulfill your partner's preferences.
Of course, polyamorous partners may also have leeway in how well they satisfy their partners' preferences, because the partner doesn't expect to be satisfied in every area by them. Yet the polyamorous person who isn't satisfying a certain preference of their partner isn't expecting that their partner stays stuck in that dissatisfaction, because the partner can go elsewhere, at least in principle.
The trick would seem to be trying to get the best of both worlds. In many cases the game (in this case the temptation to slack off and let yourself go) is played unconsciously. Commitment and trust, however, tend to be higher level features. The best lovers are, by hypothesis, able to foster security and trust while at the same time keeping competitive instincts in play. The impulse to satisfy all the partner's desires before they stray. The spark.
If you control someone's access to a resource, in this case sex, dating, and romantic interaction, you can set whatever price you want for it.
Real world relationships (and real world commericial monopolies, for that matter) would suggest that this isn't literally true. The literal truth is that you can set a higher price than you could get if you didn't have a monopoly.
To be more accurate, you can set whatever price you want, and the other person needs to choose between paying the price and ending the monopoly (by violating the monogamy agreement or ending the relationship). But in the real world people are often very reluctant to end long-standing relationships quickly.
I probably should have said that you can probably get a higher price than you could get in the absence of a monopoly.
People shouldn't be missing the point that many people like to have a monopoly and its part of the reason many enter monogamus relationships.
There are obviously limitations, humans being what they are and all. From what I can tell people can go to more extreme lengths in real world relationships than real world commercial monopolies. When played well people can be made to give everything they have. It's seriously pathetic, and painful to watch.
Some people seem to find it hilarious (as in the movie "Saving Silverman,") at least in fiction. I wonder if there's a Trope for that.
Speak not Trope's name lest ye summon it.
del
The Bell System monopolized telephone service in the U.S. because of the enormous cost (stringing wires to every customer) any competitor would incur to start to compete with it. (Later, U.S. regulators guaranteed its monopoly but imposed conditions on it, including if I am not mistaken the rates ("tarriffs") it could charge, so let us restrict our attention to the earlier "unregulated" period.)
IBM monopolized the market for computers in the 1960s and early 1970s because of the largeness of the cost (e.g., retraining the programmers, operators and users employed by the customer) for the customer to switch to a different vendor.
Yes, since a large part of the benefit a man derives from a sexual relationship depends on the parties knowing each other really well, the time it takes for 2 lovers to get to know each other imposes a significant switching cost on the man and a significant cost on any woman who would try to compete with the initial woman, but the costs do not seem high enough (especially if the man already has female friends and coworkers) to warrant the use of the word "monopoly" and more importantly, the woman in the relationship faces costs just as high, so the strategic situation is much more symmetrical than it is between the Bell System and a consumer wanting telephone service.
So, "monopolist" is not a good choice of word, IMHO.
del
The prupose of monogamus marraige is to ensure male productivity.
In a way monomgamus norm is sexual socialism for men. Almost everyone has a wife, almost everyone has a child. It redistributes sexual power away from women and the top 10% of men and gives it to the remaining 90% of men, forcing us into K selection, slowing the pace of evolution and equalizing outcomes.
Konkvistador:
That's a good way of putting it -- and it leads us to the fascinating question of why people who express great concern about inequalities in material wealth under economic laissez-faire almost invariably don't show any concern for the even more extreme inequalities in matters of love and sex that inevitably arise under sexual laissez-faire. I think a correct answer to this question would open the way for a tremendous amount of insight about the modern society, and human nature in general.
Michel Houellebecq has an interesting paragraph about this issue in his novel Whatever:
del
I have a notion that political ideologies are apt to include ideas which are inconsistent with each other, but got bundled together for historical reasons.
That's certainly true. However, in such cases, one can typically find people who have a greater inclination towards systematization and consistency, and whose overall positions will have clear origins in a particular ideology, but differ from the orthodox positions of that ideology insofar as they'll have these inconsistencies straightened out somehow. (This will usually not be accepted favorably by their co-ideologists, of course, and will result in their marginalization.)
To take one example, in the historical development of today's mainstream ideologies, environmentalism got bundled up with leftism pretty much by sheer historical accident. (If you doubt it, consider that an example of a prominent environmentalist from a century ago was Madison Grant.) Thus, there are important points of friction between environmentalism and various leftist ideas that are highly correlated with it today -- and although the inconsistencies are usually passed over in silence or answered with implausible rationalizations, one can find people who have pointed them out and ultimately ditched one or the other. (See e.g. this story for one glaring example.)
The issue of economic vs. sexual inequality, however, is one of those cases where the seeming inconsistency is, to the best of my knowledge, without any significant exceptions. This suggests that rather than being bundled up due to historical accident, these positions both stem from some shared underlying motivation. Robin Hanson has written some preliminary speculations on this question, but I think he has only scratched the surface.
This is a poor comparison. Individual units of money are interchangeable and useful only as means to acquire some desirable end, whereas individual sexual encounters are unique, have many different kinds of value, and are desirable ends in and of themselves. (As a side note, excluding love from any discussion of monogamy and its alternatives is already a substantial deviation from reality; a cursory mention is not sufficient.)
Inequalities of material wealth have killed many millions of people and will kill many millions more. Inequalities in matters of love and sex have not.
Governments can redistribute wealth (via taxation) without causing great suffering to any one person. Redistributing sex would require institutional rape on a massive scale.
Modern society is generally opposed to rape. This should not be a striking or insightful conclusion.
This is just a failure of imagination! There are all sorts of ways a government could redistribute sex, should it so choose:
Economic incentives: pay or give tax breaks to people who have sex with the sex-poor. (If you're worried about economic coercion, you can limit the payment to those above the poverty level, or create more welfare programs so no one has to depend on sex to meet a certain living condition.) Penalize or charge extra for the sex-rich.
Social and moral incentives: create a publicity campaign through advertisements and mass media to try to change people's views on sex and attraction.
Leveling out attraction levels: teaching social and flirting skills to the sex-poor and providing them with plastic surgery, personal trainers, or other cosmetic resources. Alternatively, lower everyone to the same level, as in the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron.
Changing men and women's sex drives and sexual selectivity with neurosurgery, hormonal treatment, or childhood conditioning.
Any or all of these might work, though your last suggestion seems to me to be even worse than wide-scale institutionalized rape. And the Handicapper-General, well, I think that's the worst of all possible worlds; extinction would be better.
But criticism is easy and having ideas is hard, and I don't think that you're taking a bad approach.
Oh, I'm not suggesting that these are good options or that a government should do them: some of them would require a near-totalitarian state to enforce. The easiest and least controversial is probably to teach more social skills and flirting in schools.
But I'm not seeing why the last suggestion is worse than wide-scale institutionalized rape: if we gave young children hormone treatment along with childhood vaccines, and the end result was to balance out levels of sexual selectivity, why is that bad? (I'm not sure this is possible exactly, but there is some evidence that stimulant drugs and changing testosterone levels, for instance, can affect sex drive and selectivity.)
On the other hand most governments go to some lengths to prevent your first option from arising naturally by criminalizing prostitution. Society doesn't merely not engage in redistribution of sex, it actively campaigns against it. It is interesting to consider why this might be.
Deliberately and permanently altering someone else's mind to achieve your own ends without their informed consent may not necessarily be evil, but I would never want any human being to be able to do such a thing (as we currently are as a species).
Just in case I was unclear on this matter, I am not arguing in favor of any particular view on these issues at the present moment -- I merely wish to point out that there seems to be a discrepancy here that calls for explanation, and that my hunch is that a correct explanation would open a whole gold mine of insight.
That said, I don't think your replies to these points are at all satisfactory. In particular:
That is all true, however, there is still the undeniable fact that people differ greatly in their attractiveness, that these differences are to a large degree involuntary, and that those blessed with higher attractiveness are offered a great deal of choice and opportunity to achieve these desirable ends in their lives. Whereas those on the bottom are denied virtually any such opportunity, and a large class of not very attractive folks are outcompeted by those in the upper echelons and are thus left with only meager choice and opportunity.
Therefore, even considering all the differences relative to inequalities in material wealth, I don't think a serious case could be made that harsh inequalities don't exist in this regard too.
However, tremendous amounts of concern about inequalities in material wealth are voiced even in rich societies where even the very poorest people haven't been in danger of starvation for several generations. It is clear that those concerned about material inequality in modern developed countries object to it as something that is unjust as a matter of principle, or perhaps because they fear that it might cause social instability. (But even in the latter case, surely it not outright absurd to ask similar questions about the possible social consequences of vast inequalities on the sexual market?)
Nobody was mentioning any such idea. What was mentioned was merely the plausible-sounding hypothesis that in a society with strong monogamous norms, outcomes will be more egalitarian in comparison with a society of sexual laissez-faire, where the immense differences in people's attractiveness give them vastly unequal opportunities, and those less attractive arguably get a worse deal than under stronger monogamous norms.
Moreover, for an even more extreme test of our intuitions, we can also take an even broader cross-cultural view of things and observe cultures that practice arranged marriage. I have no close familiarity with any such societies, so fairly speaking, I can only suspend judgment, but I certainly don't see any reason to condemn them harshly outright. (David Friedman relates an interesting anecdote here -- I definitely recommend it as an interesting debiasing story.)
As regards Friedman's anecdote, I have no (ethical) objection to arranged marriage, provided both of the people involved are freely choosing to enter into it and are old enough to understand the consequences of doing so. But this is often not the case with arranged marriages, and so I do object to those specific instances, of which there are many. Happiness is important, but so is choice, even when that choice is to deliberately relinquish some other choice.
Of course harsh inequalities exist, and I have not claimed otherwise. Some people have much more sexual and romantic success than others, and this does seem quite unjust. But the reason that inequalities of romantic and sexual opportunity go unquestioned is not due to a failure to perceive those inequalities. Rather, it's because there is no (ethical) way to systematically reduce them.
Whether or not monogamous societies are more egalitarian than sexually laissez-faire ones, coercing one into the other would require a reduction of basic freedoms that I find unacceptable.
Furthermore, I think that the idea of "sexual laissez-faire" that you are discussing here is something of a non-sequitur. No one has suggested that we adopt anything of the sort as a cultural norm; I should note that polyamorous standards include levels of honesty, communication, and egalitarianism that are not at all compatible with any kind of "free market." You also seem to be operating under the assumption (and I apologize if I'm reading too much into your comments) that such a free market would necessarily involve successful (or possibly "high-status") men attracting the vast majority of the pool of available women, leaving few options for less successful/attractive men, which ignores the ability of women to form multiple attachments themselves, as well as relationships in which all partners have multiple attachments, which more closely resembles the polyamorous ideal.
WrongBot:
What about reductions of freedom that don't stem from any legal compulsion or violent threats, but merely from social norms enforced via status and reputation (and, obviously, their consequences on people's future willingness to maintain and establish various sorts of private relations with you)? Do you believe that these are also unacceptable?
If the answer is yes, then you must perceive any realistic human society, including the one you live in, as a hell of intolerable suffocating constraints. (Honestly, I would lie if I said that I don't feel a certain sympathy with this perspective -- but people are often biased in that they make a big deal only out of certain constraints that bother them, while completely overlooking other even more severe ones that they're OK with.)
That assumption is, in my opinion, indeed correct, and consistent with what we observe in reality. But I don't see why you think that I was talking exclusively about men. Less attractive women also get a bad deal in a society where attractiveness is an important status marker, which I see as inevitable under sexual laissez-faire. Moreover, those women who would like to form permanent monogamous relationships, especially if they're less than stunningly attractive, are faced with much worse prospects in a situation where any man they attach themselves to could be at any moment tempted to defect and try his luck playing the field a bit more before settling down. (Again, note that I'm not contrasting this with a situation where the man would be somehow coerced into attachment, but with a different state of social norms where this would simply be a less attractive option.)
Now, you write:
But this seems to me like fallacious reasoning. You apparently assume that if women are to form multiple attachments, there will be more attachment opportunities for all men, not just those in the upper tiers of attractiveness. Yet in reality, we see some contrary evidence, in that when women become more promiscuous, the additional amount of sex taking place is not at all distributed randomly or equally across all categories of men; instead, those in the upper tiers of attractiveness get the overwhelming part of it. (I know that this is not equivalent to what you have in mind, but I do think that there is enough similarity to provide at least some relevant evidence.)
You seem to imply that under your most favorable social arrangements, there would be some constraints relative to a complete sexual laissez-faire (even one with the usual caveats about consenting adults etc.). But how would these be enforced? Or do you believe that people would spontaneously follow them under some favorable circumstances?
This does seem to be the case. F. Roger Devlin makes a rather bold statement of this argument in this essay (though I dislike his conservative political slant and certain biased terms; also, ignore his criticism of feminist discourse on sexual violence, because it is massively lower quality that everything else he writes and riddled with errors):
One question answers the other. I don't imagine, by the way, that polyamory will ever be the norm, nor do I think it should. The social arrangement I favor most involves each individual freely choosing whichever option they prefer; I imagine that under such circumstances no one style of relationship would predominate.
I like the point and love the expression thereof.
WrongBot said:
To the extent that sexual and romantic success is related to non-innate qualities, those qualities could be distributed more equally. Based on my experience with the seduction community, many components of sexual and romantic attractiveness are based on behaviors that can be learned, particularly in the case of male sexual attractiveness to women. Currently, these skills are not distributed equitably, leading to vast disparities in social skills related to romantic success that are not required by biologically-based differences in aptitude. Once someone gets set on the wrong "track," then they end up greatly lacking in procedural knowledge. As I argued here, these disparities are unjust.
I saw that post earlier and I think I largely agree with it. Consider that quoted assertion retracted: education in social skills may be an ethical way to systematically reduce inequalities of romantic and sexual opportunity. I'm not without my criticisms of the seduction community, but discovering and documenting processes that allow people to become genuinely more attractive is praiseworthy.
Tangentially, while women seem to be better at acquiring social skills on average, I think most people underestimate how many of them would be interested in a PUA-like program, if it were presented in the right way. (Which is to say, not how the PUA community represents itself to men. Different social norms and all.)
WrongBot:
While inequalities of love and sex don't usually kill, I would claim that those inequalities can be significantly harmful. For people who want to have partners, not being able to tends to trash their mental health. Look into involuntary celibacy, and love-shyness. Gilmartin's work on men with "love-shyness" who experienced significant heterosexual anxiety and impairment found them to be depressed and have violent fantasies. They had suicidal thoughts, but he concluded that they were too depressed to even attempt suicide. His book can be downloaded for free here (despite the caveats on that page, it is a must-read for anyone who finds that these difficulties ring a bell).
Note that inequalities in matters of love and sex have quite certainly led to countless murders and suicides both. They have probably not killed as many people as inequalities of material wealth, true, but in absolute terms the death toll is still large.
This is a good point, but I think there's still a distinction. If you're broke and starve to death, that isn't (usually) the result of someone's deliberate choice. But when love or sex drive someone to doing something terrible, it is still ultimately their decision.
I suppose this distinction is complicated somewhat when you take reductionism into account, but in practice it still seems to be a worthwhile one.
If there's a decent solution to this problem, by the way, I'm listening. It's certainly an awful state of affairs.
Whose purpose?
That was proorly phrased I agree. I should have said monogamus marriage emerged as a semiwidespread norm because societies that had it oucompeted other societies.
Also it may fit the purposes of several historical pseudosocial engineers (founders of religions and city states, rulers, village elders, ect.).
I've actually been thinking that polyamory would be closer to sexual socialism in increasing people's chances of getting a partner. Limiting ourselves exclusively to heterosexual people for a moment, with an uneven amount of men and women, monogamy guarantees that some people will have to remain outside a long-term commitment. In a polyamorous environment, where people can freely choose to form pairs, triads, etc., this is much easier to avoid.
Theoretically, yes. So I don't know why you are getting down-voted. My initial reaction was to disagree, and that things would only work that way if people's preferences were uncorrelated, such as from attractiveness being equally distributed among the population. Since that is not the case, the more choice you tend to give people, the more they would gravitate towards the most attractive people of the gender they are attracted to.
Yet there could be another effect in the opposite direction. Under monogamy, you can only be with one person, so you have to make sure you are really into them. Yet under polyamory, it you could get together with people who are lower on your scale of attractiveness without suffering an opportunity cost of forgoing a higher attractiveness partner.
Under non-monogamy, I would speculate that with straight women, the first effect predominates (going for the most attractive people). With straight men, the second effect (being willing to compromise on the attractiveness of partners) may play a stronger role than it does with straight women.
Even if appealing traits are distributed unevenly, the most appealing people will still only have the time for a limited number of relationships at a time. In a monogamous world leads to high-appeal people being paired with high-appeal people and low-appeal people being paired with low-appeal people. I would expect the same phenomenon to mainly persist in a polyamorous world, with the exception that it wouldn't be just couples anymore and, for the reasons you note, the stratification would probably be somewhat less harsh.
I'm not sure if there is any actual evidence for this conclusion. In a polyamorous world (and considering for simplicity only heterosexual relationships), if women of all levels are strongly inclined towards the upper tiers of men, to the point where they prefer a polyamorous arrangement involving more women than men, but restricted to men of higher appeal, this can lead to far more inequality than any monogamous world. In this scenario, it may happen that men from the lower tiers get shut out of access to women altogether, while those from the top enjoy arrangements involving many women and few men, or even exclusive polygynous arrangements. Among women, too, there would be a severe stratification with regards to how favorable arrangements are realistically available to them depending on their attractiveness.
Considering the evidence from quasi-polyamorous behaviors that are widespread nowadays, i.e. serial monogamy and promiscuity, this scenario doesn't seem at all unlikely to me. Of course, these behaviors are not identical to what would happen in a hypothetical polyamorous society, but they still provide significant information about the revealed preferences of both men and women.
Personally, I've seen more examples of polyamorous arrangements involving more men than women than the opposite. Of course, this might be just sampling bias, and obviously it would hardly be any better if men were the ones who got shafted.
I'm pretty sure there is a decisive sampling bias there, since men in the top tiers of attractiveness are, in all likelihood, severely underrepresented among those practicing explicit "card-carrying" polyamory. Therefore, it seems to me that the patterns of quasi-polyamorous behaviors that are widespread in the general population provide a much better indication as to what would happen if polyamory became the general norm -- and these point pretty clearly towards the scenario I described above.
Monogamy: High-appeal people date single high appeal people. Low-appeal people date single low-appeal people.
Polyamory: High-appeal people date multiple high appeal people. Low-appeal people date multiple low-appeal people. Sometimes, high-appeal people are willing to date slightly lower-appeal people because they wouldn't have to break up with a high-appeal partner to do so.
I guess we are saying the same thing...
How can you have multiple monogamous relationships in the present tense?
I think my observation is consistent given that it covers past relationships, expected future relationships based on existing principles and whatever my current relationship status is as part of my overall time line. I wouldn't want to say "some of my relationships have been monogamous" even if it is a more simple and precise historical claim because it comes with potential implications regarding current principles and present relationship status which I do not wish to make.