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ciphergoth comments on Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous? - Less Wrong
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Datapoint: I've never read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; I got into poly through meeting poly people at a bisexual convention.
The overlap between bisexuality and polyamory is quite high, that's for sure. As another data point for that correlation, I think it makes a lot of sense that this is so.
Datapoint 2: I've never read any Heinlein that I can recall, though I do have some rather mild bisexual tendencies. I ran into polyamory-like concepts in a variety of sources, with the first I think being some religious books I liked before becoming an atheist. I've also happened to know several polyamorous people since then.
Hypothesis 1: Polyamory, queerness, and nerdy intellectual interests cluster together. (Kink clusters with them, too.)
Hypothesis 2: This clustering is related to some biological factors (not excluding social factors, of course).
Hypothesis 3: Prenatal testosterone is one of those potential biological factors, in both men and women.
My thinking is that non-monogamy is the more male-typical pattern. Nerdiness and systemizing are the more male-typical patterns of cognition. Prenatal testosterone could be related to cognitive masculinzation, and it has been shown to be related to homosexuality in digit ratio studies.
Giving the full reasoning for these notions would take a lot longer, and get off-topic, but I wanted to lay out those hypotheses in case anyone finds them interesting.
This is pretty anecdotal, but on one time we noticed that being on the Finnish IRC channels for any of the following subjects meant that you had an unusually high chance of also being on any of the others: transhumanism, the Pirate Party, polyamory, BDSM, atheism and I think role-playing games. (I'm personally on all but the atheism one.)
It could be one of those meaningless correlations. For all I know, it's also the case that people on Norwegian IRC channels for cooking also tend to be on those for socialism, biotech hobbyism, and interpretative dance, and people on Italian IRC channels for football also tend to be on those for Wikipedia editors, foot fetish, and dish detergents.
I think the common factor involved in most of these may be science fiction.
The connection to transhumanism is so obvious that I shouldn't have to explain it.
The path from science fiction to the Pirate Party is long, but pretty clear. Science fiction is connected with interest in new technology, which leads directly to computers and the Internet, which soon brings you face to face with intellectual property issues in the form of illegal downloading.
Polyamory has the obvious Heinlein connection, but there's plenty of other science fiction that concerns itself with other social structures - and polyamory is a pretty obvious example. Why should Archie have to choose between Betty and Veronica when he could just marry them both if not for the rest of society getting in the way?
Finally, much science fiction takes a perspective that is completely at odds with traditional religions, if not one that is explicitly atheist. For example, Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Star.
So, yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. ;)
I've encountered similar anecdotal evidence. I propose a biological factor, because I can't think up any plausible social ones for many of these correlations; they are just too weird.
The first thing that came to mind on seeing Kaj Sotala's list is "ah; these are people who like to have fun and think about cool things". But that's more of an indication that I've internalized this clustering of interests, rather than an illuminating hypothesis.
I notice that the items in Kaj_Sotala's list all have in common that they're not plurality orientations in society. That is, a non-plurality of people are transhumanists, a non-plurality take the Pirate Party seriously, etc. In that case, they might all be partly due to a contrarianism/non-conformity trait, a trait which would probably be socially influenced.
Some support:
I once attended a convention ran by Wicked Events that seemed to be half devoted to roleplaying games (as in LARPing) and half devoted to various kinds of kink, especially BDSM. It was pretty fun.