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Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous?
Many of us are familiar with Donald Rumsfeld's famous (and surprisingly useful) taxonomy of knowledge:
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.
But this taxonomy (as originally described) omits an important fourth category: unknown knowns, the things we don't know that we know. This category encompasses the knowledge of many of our own personal beliefs, what I call unquestioned defaults. For example, most modern Americans possess the unquestioned default belief that they have some moral responsibility for their own freely-chosen actions. In the twelfth century, most Europeans possessed the unquestioned default belief that the Christian god existed. And so on. These unknown knowns are largely the products of a particular culture; they require homogeneity of belief to remain unknown.
By definition, we are each completely ignorant of our own unknown knowns. So even when our culture gives us a fairly accurate map of the territory, we'll never notice the Mercator projection's effect. Unless it's pointed out to us or we find contradictory evidence, that is. A single observation can be all it takes, if you're paying attention and asking questions. The answers might not change your mind, but you'll still come out of the process with more knowledge than you went in with.
When I was eighteen I went on a date with a girl I'll call Emma, who conscientiously informed me that she already had two boyfriends: she was, she said, polyamorous. I had previously had some vague awareness that there had been a free love movement in the sixties that encouraged "alternative lifestyles", but that awareness was not a sufficient motivation for me to challenge my default belief that romantic relationships could only be conducted one at a time. Acknowledging default settings is not easy.
The chance to date a pretty girl, though, can be sufficient motivation for a great many things (as is also the case with pretty boys). It was certainly a good enough reason to ask myself, "Self, what's so great about this monogamy thing?"
I couldn't come up with any particularly compelling answers, so I called Emma up and we planned a second date.
Since that fateful day, I've been involved in both polyamorous and monogamous relationships, and I've become quite confident that I am happier, more fulfilled, and a better romantic partner when I am polyamorous. This holds even when I'm dating only one person; polyamorous relationships have a kind of freedom to them that is impossible to obtain any other way, as well as a set of similarly unique responsibilities.
In this discussion I am targeting monogamy because its discovery has had an effect on my life that is orders of magnitude greater than that of any other previously-unknown known. Others I've spoken with have had similar experiences. If you haven't had it before, you now have the same opportunity that I lucked into several years ago, if you choose to exploit it.
This, then, is your exercise: spend five minutes thinking about why your choice of monogamy is preferable to all of the other inhabitants of relationship-style-space, for you. Other options that have been explored and documented include:
- Non-consensual non-monogamy, the most popular alternative.
- Swinging, in which couples engage in social, recreational sex, mostly with other couples.
- Polyamory, the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. This category is extremely broad, but the most common variations include:
- Polyfidelity, in which >2 people form a single committed relationship that does not allow outside partners.
- Hierarchical polyamory, in which each individual has (usually) one primary partner and some number of secondary partners. These labels typically reflect the level of commitment involved, and are not a ranking of preference.
- "Intimate networks", in which each person maintains some number of independent relationships without explicit rankings or descriptions, such that a graph (the data structure) is the best way to describe all the individuals and relationships involved.
These types of polyamory cover many of the available options, but there are others; some are as yet unknown. Some relationship styles are better than others, subject to your ethics, history, and personality. I suspect that monogamy is genuinely the best option for many people, perhaps even most. But it's impossible for you to know that until you know that you have a choice.
If you have a particularly compelling argument for or against a particular relationship style, please share it. But if romantic jealousy is your deciding factor in favor of monogamy, you may want to hold off on forming a belief that will be hard to change; my next post will be about techniques for managing and reducing romantic jealousy.
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Comments (651)
The second person pronoun grates throughout this post; it's a "chalk hitting the chalkboard at the wrong angle and making your hair stand on end" kind of feeling, and the snippet quoted is where it's at its most pronounced. (I downvoted it earlier, but it's taken me a while to put words to my feelings.)
So your encounter with Emma led you to discover one of your "unknown knowns", or basic assumptions. But your writing comes across as making a much greater number of unwarranted assumptions about your reader. One of these you have the grace to make explicit: "romantic jealousy is your deciding factor in favor of monogamy". Your Emma-epiphany might possibly grant you some kind of right to lecture a reader who is much like you with the exception of still holding that belief.
But what about your other unknown knowns? Just how many of the features of your own situation are you tacitly assuming also apply to your reader? What compelling arguments in favor of monogamy might you bring up if you put yourself for a moment in the shoes of a 40- or a 60-year old reader of LW? One who lives in a rural area and plans to run a farm for a living? One whose goal is to raise children? And so on. Despite giving lip service to the idea that one's preferred relationship style is a matter of choice, you're giving little value to someone who is facing that choice from a position other than yours, where "romantic jealousy" looms large as a consideration.
The final paragraph more or less gives the game away: this post isn't really a curious and honest inquiry, it's advertisement for a conclusion you have already reached and are planning to expand on. For all I know your conclusion is correct, but your methods to establish it strike me as suspect.
You:
Me:
The only conclusion I've reached is that polyamory is a good choice for some people, and that it might be a good choice for more people if they had some way of dealing with (irrational, unpleasant) feelings of romantic jealousy. Ignoring jealousy entirely, there are still good reasons to be monogamous; a number of them have been pointed out elsewhere in the comments.
My point here is only that you have a choice, and you are better off knowing that you do. Part of knowing about that choice is understanding what the other options are; I'm only proselytizing for polyamory in the sense that I think people are better off when they can make informed choices.
Why did I choose monogamy? I haven't. That implies I've got a mate to be monogamous with. ;)
If I could get into a relationship with a harem of hot bisexual chicks, I'd do so. Of course, I'd also just as happily get into a relationship with one girl. Either would be better than nothing.
I would be astonished if your expected utilities for these two cases were identical. It's also worth noting that whether you're looking for monogamous or polyamorous relationships can have a big effect on your likelihood of succeeding (which, of course, varies a great deal based on who you are pursuing).
For the record, most bisexual poly women tend to look down on your approach as "unicorn hunting."
Do you mean that you're more likely to get a monogamous relationship with someone monogamous, and more likely to get a poly one with someone who's poly? Or am I missing your point?
Hopefully this isn't true, but if it is it's incredibly hypocritical. Why are their relationship choices acceptable but other people's preferences something to be looked down at? Is this a status thing?
Yes, but also that if you're primarily looking at people in the pagan/geek/bi cluster, you'll see many more poly people there than elsewhere (relatively, at least).
As for unicorn hunting, it's usually about being annoyed by hypocrisy, so far as I've seen. Bisexual women get annoyed when they have straight male partners who want the rules of their relationship such that the man can date whoever he wants, but the woman can only date other women. This is often derogatorily referred to as a "one-penis policy," and seems to be the result of the man not feeling threatened by lesbian relationships because he doesn't think of women as "real competition." (This is not a straw man. I have actually seen and heard this view stated seriously by some men in the poly community.)
I'm straight, and I'm currently dating a straight girl. One of our close mutual friends is a bisexual girl, and the two of them used to (before we started dating) occasionally make out when we were drunk etc. After I started dating her, this question came up. Instinctively, I feel much less threatened by her making out with a girl than with a guy. That makes sense evolutionarily, since my romantic interest is not going to be having her babies. However, intellectually, I don't want to have different standards for people with different sexual orientations, so they stopped.
I understand that, and it does seem unfair, although some couples have reasons for having unequal arrangements, or use them as a stepping stone. (Links possibly NSFW.)
However, it bothers me that a type of consensual relationship is disparaged as wrong in general, when it's something that the people involved agree to and find workable.
All that said, I'm a little confused, because the comment that you responded to was about dating multiple bisexual women, not about a one-penis policy. The comment was:
I read this as either referring to a closed, polyfidelity relationship, where everyone is limited to sex with people in the relationship, or as completely open, where any of them can have sex with any other people (male or female). Is there a one-penis policy implication in there that I'm missing?
Also, does the one-penis policy objection apply to polyfidelity where there is only one male in the relationship? That situation seems more equal.
Agreed. While the OPP is a common failure mode, it doesn't apply to all relationships one-man/multiple-women relationships. Just usually.
The objection really only applies when it is a deliberate policy, as opposed to situations where the genders of a relationship's participants just happen to fall out that way. IMHO, of course.
I agree with the OP that people assume monogamy as the default is an interesting relic. I often speak to atheists that hold many distinctly Christian notions without realizing it and having no real justification for them.
I may get downvoted for what I am about to say, but feel the need to disclose since I wish to check for faults in my reasoning as well as any ethical objections (I request you thoroughly explain the reasoning behind such objections from first principles up).
If I only want safe sexual pleasure I am better off financially seeking professional services.
If I want companionship in itself I have many friends both male and female which provide similar psychological benefits.
Bonding can make such exchanges more stable and long lasting, but considering the high divorce rate and turnover rate we see in modern socioeconomic conditions this is probably not something to depend on.
The only reason evolutionary speaking to bond with someone is to increase the odds of our genes spreading.
There is no such thing as a special someone. I could live relatively happy lives with a non trivial fraction of the population either in monogamous or alternative arrangements.
Romantic love is a just a special state of mind not so different from being high on any sort of drug. I shall therefore plan in advance on how to reduce or increase the likleyhood of faling in love so it matches my long term plans. Any drug I take must help me reach my goals according to my values, I despise hedonism.
Repeatedly having sex with the same person increases the likelihood of bonding to them.
Rates of false paternity are overestimated by most popular science claims and urban myths but still a factor to consider (3%).
Psychological differences between men and women. Women are hypergamus. And women on average prefer to be dominated rather than to dominate someone they are sexually attracted to.
For all the above statements I can provide citations and elaborated reasoning on request. I may ask for some patience since I still have a few crucial exams in the upcoming week but I will provide them after this period.
Before proceeding let me first point out I don't consider happiness in itself to be a goal for me. Happiness in some quantity is simply a necessary condition of following my goals optimally.
I have decided that I shall avoid sexual relationships unless I have judged the girl in question to have a sufficiently high IQ and reasonably attractive. One nights stands are an exception to this rule, after analysis I've concluded they feature in like a free prostitute service, so they are accepted when needed but I strictly close of further contact to avoid increasing the odds of paribonding.
I have relationships only with women who I see as potentially good mothers and carrying good genes.
A wild oats strategy unfortunately isn't going to work since I need financial resources to pursue my other goals (living a thuggish baby daddy life may be evolutionary optimal in my country due to the welfare state but I may not have the genes or mems for it) and the state can force me to make payments for children I sire.
I make it clear I will not accept sexual intercourse on her part outside the relationship (any other GFs I have are theoretically part of the relationship but I've never heard any such desires expressed by them).
Also all children will be tested for paternity as policy in order to equalize both our risks (she knows she is the biological mother of her child by default, I without tests do not have that certainty)
I reserve the option to have sexual intercourse outside the relationship and more than one girlfriend/wife. I must however insure minimal risk to STDs and inform the wives/GFs before having sex outside the relationship.
These policies are by most Western standards selfish. However I do lay them bare before beginning the relationships. I see no reason to desist them as they serve me well and women who I date judge my value sufficient to accept them and are fully informed. If they do not consent I politely terminate contact trying to minimize any trauma they experience with the severing of any potential pair bonds or infatuations that may have developed in that short time.
I have not had many relationships since I've implemented this policy. Ironically my relationships have become more LTR and much closer in practice to the monogamous ideal.
In many ways my lifestyle choice and evo strategy is very very conservative and traditional after one reviews how polygamous societies function.
Minor update:
This has changed.
Thanks to everyone for all the feedback so far. I especially appreciate being reminded of the possiblity of a ADS. Considering I'm basing much of my actions based on the above reasoning I need other opinions coming from a more rational perspective than is available on most sites. I apologize for going a bit OT but considering the OP I assumed it would still be in the acceptable range.
Now I of course I understand that values in themselves are prerational. To be honest the darwinian obsession comes from valuing life & survival and learning new and interesting things. Living longer is a good way to increase your odds of learning interesting things. Also Konkvistador isn't a discrete entity, should the meatbag be damaged or disintegrated the effects of the meatbag will continue to be felt in the world. Cryonics is ok and I'm sold on the concept, but spreading genes and mems seems like a more fail say way of going about it. What could work better than raising your own children to ensure something of you survives to the future?
I've in the past tried to scale up other values to fill the void of others I have when I noticed inherent conflicts between them. The current system is the only one I've come up with that seems to be a functioning compromise with my personal reality into something liveable.
Anyway wanting sex in itself has always seemed dumb to me. One wants to fill the universe with fluid exchangning mean? Happines? Wirehead yourself if you want happines in itself, I me much happier ;) following some of my own values. Love however perhaps deserves some discussion as a potential value.
This line made me blanch. Yes, but, but... are you trying to say here anything more than "the only reason evolutionary speaking for anything we do is to increase the odds of our genes spreading"?
You are correct, the statement is hideous. I should have been more specific I meant primarily increase the odds of successful producing and caring for offspring (which ultimately everything else is also about) but then I remembered obviously that pairbonding may in many cases increase your own survival probabilities as well. Thinking about it again makes it clear to me the statement was redundant.
The idea I should have conveyed is that considering the poor choices many people who describe themselves as "addicted to love" and people who turn into stalkers I should regard pair bonding like I regard sex. Pleasant, necessary to some degree for normal functioning but potentially derailing, therefore opportunities for it should be regulated. However that is more or less covered in the spirit of the remaining comment.
Thankyou, I was going to make clarifications along the lines that you just made but then I realized that the statement was technically correct (if pointless) so it would be presumptive to declare what you 'really' meant. :)
Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you've done an affective death spiral around evolution (please note - it is possible to have an ADS around a true idea!)
Evolution by natural selection is a convenient description of the mere statistical phenomenon that genes which code for traits beneficial to themselves, tend to live to the next generation. It has exactly the same "goals" as, say, Regression toward the mean - i.e., zero.
You do not have to do what evolution "wants" (as one might say in anthropomorphic shorthand), although your values do bear the stamp of this wild and wacky algorithm.
Perhaps the desires you express above are really your desires, but I am suspicious that they actually represent what you think you should desire "rationally," based on the mistaken idea that maximizing inclusive genetic fitness is some kind of moral imperative. It's not! Your values are pre-rational - you don't need to justify them to anyone, least of all to an anthropomorphization of gene frequency fluctuations.
That being said, do you seriously find this reproductive strategy optimal, in a short and long-term sense? Optimal for what?
I don't consider it optimal. I consider it better than the average lifescrpit in maximizing the total of interesting things "parts" of me (or should I say my descendants) learn.
More of them + as smart as possible + valuing similar stuff to myself
I am very intrigued by this post, because it seems to suggest that your axiom of desire (or at least, a major axiom of desire for you) is evolutionary success.
Is this in fact the case?
I also have cites for a bunch of the empirical claims you make. Trade sometime?
Preferably, trade publicly or just give them to me too!
If I understand you right please do post them, I'll post the other ones in a few days if they are of any interest to you.
Why do you want to have children?
Check out A General Theory of Love for additional reasons to want close bonding. A short version is that many animal species need contact to regulate basic metabolic systems, and humans, as the only animals which can die of loneliness as infants, need it a lot.
Would you prefer marrying a woman who had a similar attitude about goals being much more important than happiness? My impression is that it would be a bad idea for you to marry someone who didn't share your take on things, but this is only a guess.
At first sight this may seem true. However are you sure you recognize that I acknowledge that keeping myself at least somewhat happy is vital to my continued functioning towards fulfilling my values (whatever I eventually settle upon)? The same applies to any mate, the irony being that someone who dosen't value happiness in itself will be less "happy" (whatever that means) than someone who does since It will change my expectations.
Does anyone else feel like this just a weird remake of cached thoughts?
Cached thoughts are default answers to questions. Unquestioned defaults are default answers to questions that you don't know exist.
If one defines a graph with each individual representing a node, and an edge connecting two individuals who have had sexual contact, then the large majority are part of a huge connected cluster. This is why STDs are a problem. If a group of people agreed to limit their sexual contacts to others within the group, and if they were all tested beforehand, they would achieve a high degree of structural protection from STDs.
This is my current reason for choosing monogamy: my sex drive, and general interest in the touchy-feely part of romantic relationships, is so much lower than the average that I have a hard time sustaining one relationship, and don't see what the benefit to me would be from having more people to have sex with. The emotional connection of romantic relationships is different, but isn't that what very-close-intimate-but-platonic-friendships are for?
This is an excellent reason for not choosing a monogamous relationship - your partner can have those things satisfied elsewhere.
I concur.
Looking at the base rates of people-you-match-with + willing-to-have-poly VS people-you-match-with + tiny sex-drive/need-for-contact in more detail and in a context-specific manner along with availability factors like the more prevalent views of closer populations might clear up the issue, but a quick mental estimate tells me the monogamous kind is much more likely to be a monk or religious practitioner, and the poly kind seems to have a much better distribution with automatic filtering against most religions.
I think (though I'm not quite sure) that you're presuming that the only potentially valuable difference between friendships and romantic relationships is sex, so if you don't value sex with more than one person, you see no reason to value romantic relationships with more than one person.
Looking at my poly friends, I conclude that for some people, their romantic relationships have a valuable nonsexual component that their friendships don't have.
So presumably they calculate the benefits differently than you do.
Also, my friendships may be unusual. I talk about literally everything with my best friend, including subjects that may be taboo for most people, like pubic-hair-shaving. Likewise with my mom and my siblings; I can talk to them about anything and not be judged. I think this is an element that some people only find in relationships.
Or have more experience and can actually differentiate. The one relationship I've been in that didn't have a sexual component was emotionally draining for other reasons. As I get older and actually experience more variations, I may change my mind. I'm sure there's a potentially valuable difference...but I'm reluctant to chase after polyamorous-but-non-sexual relationships just to recoup that difference.
If I had a choice between having sex and not having sex, period, I might choose not having sex. This is complicated because I have a condition that means I can't actually have sex, yet, and although my boyfriend and I are attempting to work on this problem, our attempts involve very little pleasure for me. But I'm holding off judgement because maybe once this is dealt with, I will find sex and related activities more pleasurable. I consider this a separate problem from the fact that I'm not very touchy-feely in general.
This is the sort of thinking that moral conservatives think is dangerous, and I think their arguments are underrated. Can anyone point me to that quote? It's like 'you should leave walls standing until you can see the purpose for which they were built'. (I would add that it's extremely easy to attribute incorrect reasons to Far wall-builders, like evolution or God. And things are allowed to exist for more than one purpose; most things only happen because many reasons cohere.) "Although Logos is common to all, most people live as if they have a wisdom of their own." Link. I'm a fan of something like conservative Taoism.
You may be thinking of this passage from G. K. Chesterson's The Thing:
Best wishes, the Less Wrong Reference Desk.
I dislike how readers think an argument is more persuasive when it repeats a simple idea over and over again repeatedly many times with hardly any variation or change in content at all despite the simplicity of the idea. Chesterton could've just written "the wall has a purpose, don't be an idiot" and for the attentive reader that'd have been enough.
Well for the attentive reader the whole argument itself was probably unnecessary.
Superfluous
(Skim the first paragraph and read the second.)
Thank you, Z. M. Davis of the Less Wrong Reference Desk! That's exactly what I was lookin' for. ETA: I might just read the whole Thing; Chesterton's pretty seductive.
Steve Landsburg makes a fairly plausible case that monogamy is essentially a cartel formed by men to prevent them having to work too hard to keep onto their wives:
If true, this would suggest that women have more to gain from polyamory than men on average (although high-status men might well have the most to gain).
Polygamy is definitely to women's advantage. Since there's no real limit to the number of children a man can father, women can agree to share the very best male genetic material amongst each other and leave all the other men out in the cold. Think of the private harems that any number of rulers have maintained. In a monogamous culture, any given sub-excellent male has a much better chance of mating.
See Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist's Wife for an extended example for why there's more to life than reproductive fitness.
The author is from a fringe Mormon sect which pushes families to be one man, seven wives, and as many children as possible.Going on welfare isn't feasible because of fears that the illegal arrangement might be discovered. The result is not only a serious level of poverty, but an emotional mess because of jealousy among the women. They each wanted more time and attention from their husband than he had available.
I feel like I should point out that the official Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has officially repudiated polygamy (except insofar as men can be "sealed" to several wives if it happens that each dies before he marries the next). I've lived in Utah and this repudiation is carried out in everyday social stigma; it's not just on paper. Since "Mormon" is recognized as a nickname for that religion more readily than its spinoffs, calling polygamist sects "Mormon" instead of the distinct "Mormon fundamentalism" is misleading and perpetuates stereotypes. "Fringe" is a nod to this, but it doesn't specify what it's on the fringe of (even standard-issue Mormonism could be considered on the fringe of, say, generic Christianity).
How would you recommend that I describe such groups? Always mention that what they're doing is repudiated by the vast majority of Mormons?
You call them "fundamentalist Mormons", or name the specific sect.
I think that naming the specific sect is a lot more likely to miscommunicate than "fringe."
I agree on that.
There is an element of truth behind what you say, but ask yourself what your desired response was to this comment and whether it is the optimal way of eliciting that response.
Far more care is required when presenting facts that could support positions that are not politically correct. Without such care such claims can actually immunize against future acceptance of the information.
</condescension> ;)
Consider the stereotype: Beautiful young woman marries rich older man, cheats on him with the handsome young pool boy.
Women weren't the ones who set up those harems.
Evolutionary fitness is not morality. It doesn't have a thing to do with our preferences. We are adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers.
Polygyny (not necessarily generic polygamy) is to women's genetic advantage insofar as the selection of husbands depends on things that correlate with valuable genes. It is not necessarily to our advantage in other ways or under other circumstances.
In my experience, the polyamorous community generally includes more women than men, and the women are frequently higher status. Most books on polyamory have been written by women, and they're much more involved in high-level activism than women usually are in other communities; this seems to support your hypothesis.
I recall one of the Evolutionary Psychology books I read discussing this (I think it was The Moral Animal). It claimed that polygamy was relatively beneficial to high quality males and low quality females; high quality males would end up with more mates and low quality females would end up with a higher quality mate than they would otherwise. For the same reasons, monogamy was relatively beneficial to low quality men and high quality females; low quality men would have a higher chance of finding a mate at all and high quality females would end up with a higher quality mate.
Interesting point, thanks. I enjoy living in a mostly-monogamous society way better than the alternatives, and your comment gives us old hats a new weapon against those pesky free-love liberals: elect girls who win beauty contests into positions of power. Shouldn't be too hard.
...Wait, did I just confess to being a low-quality male?
Don't you mean that high quality females would wind up with the exclusive attention of a high quality mate? The quality itself probably doesn't change between scenarios.
del
Warning: broad, slightly unfounded generalizations forthcoming. But I think they're insightful nonetheless.
I think that most people's beliefs are largely determined by reward, power, and status. I want to state explicitly that I don't endorse these social standards, but I think they're pretty solidly established.
For virtually all women, sleeping with multiple men is not high-status. Being with a man who is seeing other women is a marker that she can't get him to "commit" to her, and is therefore somehow deficient. For a substantial majority of men, they are not sufficiently attractive enough (overall, not specifically physically) to entice women into such a lifestyle. In other words, because women feel like they take a huge status hit being with a poly man, your average woman will only consider such a relationship with a man who might otherwise be out of her league. Thus, since most men date women roughly within their own league, most men do not have the opportunity to pursue this.
Men at the top, on the other hand, are probably chasing tail more than they're chasing love or romance. Also, at least based on my knowledge of such men, they don't view female infidelity as being OK - having your woman sleep with other men is definitely a status hit for any man - so it's easier for them to engage in non-consensual non-monogamy than polyamory. This is also "efficient" in the sense that it gives them someone to manage their household/come home to, and some thrills on the side. Polyamory may lack those practical benefits, and is difficult to justify in a social setting for most professions, particularly high-paying ones (that are not entertainment). I would imagine showing up with two dates to business functions, or different alternating dates, might negatively influence one's chance of making partner or the like.
Other obvious obstacles include the legal system and some of the practicalities of child rearing, but I really think the status structure explains a lot of people's reticence to consider the lifestyle. That, and, of course, jealousy.
"Status" as you are using it here is meaningless. There is a polyamorous subculture whose members are largely indifferent to an outsider's perception of their status; as is generally the case with subcultures, status is only relevant within the subculture.
And in the polyamorous subculture, having multiple stable relationships is high status.
Furthermore, not all people are terribly sensitive to status. I find that trait attractive in potential romantic partners, so I'm quite safe in ignoring considerations of status entirely.
This reinforces my point; it does not undermine it. I agree that it is a common error to view status as an single linear continuum. Members of subcultures have different status continua. If, however, you do not join that subculture, its continuum is irrelevant to you. Thus, for the vast majority of people who do not subscribe to the subculture of polyamory, what I said is essentially correct. If something inspires them to join this subculture, their values may change.
If you consider how the median person's social circle (or date!) would react to the revelation that they are polyamorous, I think it proves my point. Most women on dates with men who called themselves poly would likely react, "Maybe, but not with me," but would be more receptive to the idea if they were less concerned about having kids and if the man were more desirable than their typical options. I expect most men would either reject a woman who described herself as poly out of hand, or else see her as an easy lay but not a legitimate romantic partner. It'd be very interesting if someone tried to experimentally verify this, though I'm not sure if that could be done ethically.
As far as real-world effects, I would expect that your average poly man is relatively desirable, compared to your average poly woman, but I'm not really sure what the standard romantic marketplace looks like, so other factors (class, education, etc.) may skew this. The lifestyle is not purely choice driven, though, so I would expect the effect to be somewhat weak. I could also be totally wrong, if poly women are generally more "empowered" than I'm estimating, which is entirely possible.
I'm sure not all people are terribly sensitive to status, but with a multiple-continua definition of status, I bet there are a lot fewer exceptions than you might think. The drug-addled kids who sit around Telegraph avenue asking for spare change and pot may not care what their parents think, but I bet they care a fair amount about what their peers think.
I suspect you meant "do not subscribe."
My evidence is largely anecdotal, but I suspect that this is the case. Men and women in the poly subculture seem to have approximately the same attractiveness distribution as the broader population, though only if you control for the subculture's demographics, which skew heavily towards white, young, liberal, geeky, pagan bisexuals. Members of those demographics likewise skew towards feminism, egalitarianism, and other such ideals, so one should certainly expect poly women to be more "empowered," which so far as I can tell they are.
WrongBot:
But how much of the status within the subculture is a reflection of the same traits that enhance one's status in the mainstream society? Honestly, I don't think the answer is zero even for subcultures much more extreme than polyamorists.
Moreover, since subcultures don't function as closed autarkic worlds (except for some religious sects), their members still have to struggle to make a living and maintain their functionality within the mainstream society. Are you really saying that people in polyamourous relationships are largely indifferent to how successful and well-adjusted their partners are in the broader society outside the subculture?
I certainly don't doubt this, but surely the traits and skills that enable one to elicit and maintain attraction from multiple concurrent partners in the polyamorous subculture are not altogether different from those that make one attractive to potential partners for more traditional arrangements in the mainstream society. Or would you really claim the opposite?
That sounds like an extremely strong claim. If you started constantly behaving in ways that would tremendously lower your status among people in the mainstream society, do you think that this wouldn't affect your status and prospects in the polyamorous community at all?
"Not terribly sensitive to status" isn't the same thing as completely indifferent to it or committed to lowering one's status.
I think a great many people aren't working to raise their status, even if they're making some efforts to keep it from being lowered.
One of my friends who's in a triad has said she doesn't think that polyamory is consistent with maximum achievement-- intimate relationships with more people simply takes more time and attention than being in a two-person relationship.
NancyLebovitz:
Trouble is, many important status-enhancing behaviors are as natural as breathing air for some people, but mysterious, unnatural, and hard to pull off for others. People of the latter sort have to commit significant thinking and effort if they wish to achieve the same results that others get by simply going with the flow.
When people whose natural behavior is decently good status-wise say that they're "not terribly sensitive to status," it's as if someone with good language skills said he was not terribly sensitive to fluency of speech, without stopping to consider the fate of folks suffering from noticeable speech impediments. The analogy is not perfect, in that many more people suffer from impediments in social behavior than in speech, but the basic point holds: just like generating fluent speech, navigating through human status games is a task of immense complexity, which however some people can handle adequately or even superbly without any conscious effort -- which can make them think that there isn't really anything significant about it, if they haven't stopped to consider the problems of those who aren't as lucky in that regard.
So, yes, lots of people who don't suffer from status-related problems aren't investing effort in raising or maintaining their status, in the same sense that they aren't investing effort in maintaining their language skills. For them, the hard work is done by their brains at subconscious levels, and manifests itself as spontaneous adequate behavior. That, however, doesn't mean that the whole issue is vacuous, no more than the fact that most people speak normally without conscious effort (and some with great eloquence) means that linguistics is a vacuous science.
For the record, I was diagnosed with Asperger's about a decade back; believe me when I say that I'm one of those people who's had to "commit significant thinking and effort if they wish to achieve the same results that others get by simply going with the flow."
If anything, I'd say that having to deal with status in a conscious and deliberate way has caused my status-indifference: I have a very clear picture of how shallow that game is. I only play it when I need to.
I'd agree with Nancy that polyamory isn't consistent with maximum achievement. Devoting resources to intimate relationships always has that effect, even if you only have one at a time; polyamory necessarily requires more of an investment. It's a trade-off that I'm more than happy to make, but your priorities may not agree. It's (potentially) a good reason not to be interested in polyamory.
Even monogamy isn't always consistent with maximum achievement, as illustrated by the expression "married to the job".
To make this comment a bit more concrete, imagine if you (or those around you) suddenly started picking their noses incessantly, farting a lot, and speaking like rednecks with no conception of how to conjugate english verbs.
Even better: suppose you started behaving in ways that are commonly associated with the epithet "dorky." To make the point especially relevant, focus on those ways that are characteristic of large numbers of people who live peaceful, productive, and honest lives, but suffer from social ineptitude.
As someone who isn't terribly sensitive to status, I often find this site's emphasis on it puzzling. Have you seen this post for further discussions unpacking status?
Blueberry:
Well, that's sort of like saying that you're not terribly sensitive to the issue of eating and drinking -- maybe you really don't think about it much overall, but it's still an essential part of how you function within the human society.
Eating is rarely used as an explanation for anything around here, whereas the word "status" often appears in proposed answers to various questions: why hasn't there been a male counterpart to the feminist movement, why are most women monogamous, and so on.
My experience in the past few months has been that in many cases, such explanations turn out to be vacuous, the statements made in support of them (e.g. "women are institutionally lower status than men") readily debunked, or at best true only if you pick precisely the right one out of the many meanings of "status". (So that, to make an effective argument, you should really use the more precise term in the first place - prestige, reputation, wealth, political power, or what have you.)
The term often masks sloppy thinking of the virtus dormitiva variety: it replaces a question about a puzzling or poorly understood phenomenon with an "answer" that is really just a bit of jargon, and fails to advance our understanding by identifying a regularity relating more primitive objects of our experience. (In the case of the feminist movement, "who has the right to vote" turns out to be that kind of regularity, for instance: it's not even particularly hard to improve on "status" as an explanation.)
I have reached a point where I now suspect the mere appearance of "status" in an argument on LW is a useful heuristic to detect sloppy thinking.
Your dark arts don't work on me. Eating? Why should eating be used as an explanation for everything? It's just not as relevant. In fact, in many conversations using the word status I could instead describe the relevant insights in terms of eating. It would basically involve writing a paragraph or two of detailed explanation and using search and replace on all instances. But I shouldn't do this. We use words to represent higher level constructs because it saves time and allows us to fit a greater amount of understanding into our limited ~7 slots of working memory.
How can I reply to that except with a clear contradiction? "We don't use 'eating' therefore we shouldn't use 'status'" is sloppy thinking. Using the word 'status' to refer to a whole body of strongly correlated behaviours and the interactions thereof in social animals is merely practical.
Morendil has been pressing a "don't say status" agenda here for over a year, often with the claim "you can't make any testable predictions based on 'status'". I have previously made an offhand attempt to humor that implied challenge by reference to body language in humans (as an example of the class social animal). The response to body language signals predictably varies according to objective measures of 'status', such as job, age, connectedness in a social map and even the most primitive metric of popularity. If I recall correctly Morendil's response was to simply deny the data. That is simply not an option for me.
If I didn't understand status, if I extracted the 'status node' from my map because it was sloppy, then I would be ill equipped to survive in the world. The only way you can expect to succeed in the world without understanding status is if you already have a strong unconscious competence in the related practical skills. Without that you can expect to:
No, I will use the word 'status' whenever it applies and I will defy any accusations that to do so is in any way evidence of sloppy thinking.
Indeed. May I note I wasn't the one to drag nutrition into this argument? As far as I can tell you're echoing my objection.
Fact check: I registered around mid-september, and started voicing my skepticism of (some) status-related claims in early March.
But I'll choose to take your observation as flattering - my writings on the topic must have been memorable to loom that large. :)
Still, it's grossly misleading to summarize my views as "don't say status". I am not yet arrogant enough to ban a word that boldly. However I'll have to agree with Eliezer that "concepts are not useful or useless of themselves. Only usages are correct or incorrect."
I'm pretty sure you would agree too.
My "agenda", if I have one, is to better understand how the world works. If the concept "status" can be recruited in this effort, I'll be glad to use it. I went to the trouble of procuring the Johnstone book, of scouring the Net for explanations that I couldn't find here when I asked for them, and of writing up my observations and conclusions.
Are you alluding to the exchange starting here? It's the only one I can recall matching your description, but I don't see what in my response warrants the label "denying the data".
You have a lot more nodes that are more precise and useful in various situations, I have started enumerating them: prestige, reputation, popularity, wealth, social class, political power...
I have been pointing to (what I believe to be) diseased thinking about issues that activate the "status" node, and asking people to raise the quality of their explanations one notch by tabooing the term. I have rarely seen that done satisfactorily, and I have yet to be pointed to an authoritative source on "status theory", showing good reasons to keep a "status" node.
No, if you think that those concepts can be used to compensate for an artificial prohibition against 'status' then you do not understand either the term or a broad aspect of human behavior. If people limit themselves to those nodes because a 'status' node is forbidden to them then they can be expected to:
Things like prestige and wealth are useful concepts in their own right but to limit your thinking to only considering each of them independently is to impair your ability to form critical inferences about general patterns of human behavior.understand They are related concepts and more importantly human intuitions and behavioral instincts are integrally tied up in that relationship. A word to represent that area in a map of reality is critical.
There is a difference between tabooing a broad concept in a specific instance for the purpose of exploring a narrow topic in more detail and just plain tabooing to whatever extent you can. The latter is an epistemic parasite that needs to be crushed mercilessly whenever it appears. The below quote is a representative example:
I may not understand the term then: what is the difference between "status" and "prestige" or "reputation"?
I will not give an exhaustive list explaining the difference or attempt to define the nuances of the boundaries between them (because that is hard and I am sure someone else is better qualified to answer.) What I will do is point out some obvious differences that spring to mind, cases where to use the words interchangeably would just be wrong.
Someone else (or me with more time) could almost certainly provide a clearer picture of the differences but that scratches the surface somewhat.
Blueberry:
Status is about people's purely subjective perceptions of whom they admire and wish to associate with, imitate, and/or support -- or, in case of low status, the opposite of these things -- because it results in good feelings. (Though of course the situation is usually complicated by the entangled instrumental implications of these acts.)
Reputation is an established record of past behavior. Status can stem from reputation, but doesn't have to. For example, strangers among whom you have no reputation of any kind will quickly evaluate your status based on various clues as soon as they meet you.
Prestige is a more elusive term. Sometimes it's used as a synonym for outstandingly good, high status-conferring reputation. At other times, it denotes a property of certain things or traits to signal high status by a broad social convention (e.g. a prestige club, or a prestige accent).
Morendil:
Trouble is, often we don't have a more precise term. Some kinds of status that are immensely important in human social relations can't be reduced to any such concrete and readily graspable everyday terms, and insisting on doing so will lead to completely fallacious conclusions -- it is akin to that proverbial drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost.
Of course, far better and more accurate explanations could be formulated if we had a precise technical vocabulary to describe all aspects of human status games. Unfortunately, we don't have it, and we still have no accurate model of significant parts of these interactions either. But a vague-sounding conclusion is still better than a spuriously precise, but ultimately false and misleading one.
A good illustration is the extensive technical vocabulary used in PUA literature. Before this terminology was devised, there was simply no way to speak precisely about numerous aspects of male-female attraction -- and attempts to shoehorn discussions and explanations into what can be precisely described with ordinary everyday words and concepts have misled many people into disastrously naive and wrong conclusions about these issues. Unfortunately, developing a more general technical terminology that would cover all human status considerations is a difficult task waiting to be done.
If you believe that my explanations have been vacuous or based on factual or logical errors, then you're always welcome to point out these problems. I have surely committed a great many intellectual errors in my comments here, but I think that failure to pursue arguments patiently in detail when challenged is not one of them. As for others, well, I don't speak for others, nor do they speak for me.
Pardon me, but I find it somewhat impolite to claim that something I said is "easily debunked" when nobody seems to have debunked or even seriously attacked it in the first place. HughRistik did ask me to clarify what I meant by institutional status, but after I did, nobody challenged that. If you disagree with my response, please reply to that one directly.
ETA: Though I do find it amusing that I'm making a blatantly status-conserving move in a discussion about status. :)
OK, I'll withdraw "debunked" as applied to that particular example, until I've had a chance to look at it more closely.
I stand by the claim that the alternative explanation (feminism as continuation of the women's right to vote movement) sticks closer to the original query, so what was debunked was at least your claim to obviousness of your status-based explanation.
Thank you.
You mention that as an "alternative explanation", but that sounds to me as an example of my explanation rather than something that excludes mine. Yes, feminism is probably a continuation of the women's right to vote movement (which in turn was a continuation of earlier trends), and the women's right to vote movement was a successful attempt to fix one particular issue that gave women a lower status. After the success of that one, feminism has concentrated on others.
I suspect that polyamory, or monogamy, may be a deeply wired preference for some people, and not something that is easily changed. For someone who is wired to be polyamorous, these status considerations seem less relevant or applicable. There still may be the risk or fear of social disapproval, but someone who is wired to be polyamorous is probably less likely to feel a personal status hit from having their partners sleep with other people.
This seems to miss the point, which is that polyamory is a preference or orientation, not something that women need to be "enticed" into by high status or attractive men. (Compare: a lesbian would probably prefer a woman to a high status man.)
There are significantly more "out" homosexuals than there were in 1850, even if you think homosexuality is purely orientational. Since we're talking about observed behaviour and not personal preferences, social consequences are highly sensitive to social determinations.
That aside, I sincerely doubt this (or sexuality) for that matter, is purely orientational. Consider a very undesirable man who is somewhat inclined towards polyamory in his youth. Because he is undesirable, he's going to have an extremely difficult time actually practicing polyamory. The result will be rather heavy, continual negative feedback. If he tries monogamy, and is relatively successful, he may start to lose interest in polyamory due to the fact that the rewards he is receiving contradict it. A more desirable man may have met with more success, gained positive reinforcement of polyamory, and decided to incorporate it into his identity.
For a non-sexual/romantic analogy, consider the same child born to two different families (or identical twins, if you prefer): a highly functional, wealthy family that strongly encourages him towards "traditional" success of whatever form best fits his skills, and a similarly functional but relatively poor family that encourages him to do whatever his father did and be self-sufficient. If we interview these two children at 21, we expect them to be very different people. They will likely both have very different but firmly held views on what constitutes a good life and what constitutes success, such that each might be miserable in the other's life. This is very much analogous to an orientation, as it is unalterable and not directly in the control of the individual. It is, nevertheless, highly sensitive to local social values and rewards. Some individuals are such that, almost irrespective of their circumstances, they will turn out a certain way - some underprivileged children will find ways to be lawyers and investment bankers, even with inhospitable childhoods, and some children of extremely successful people will regress to the mean despite their parent's every effort, in many cases quite willingly.
In many cases, people first try polyamory when they're enticed into it by an attractive potential partner. WrongBot gave an example - "The chance to date a pretty girl, though, can be sufficient motivation for a great many things (as is also the case with pretty boys)" - and I've seen it several times myself.
In many places, enticing previously-monogamous people is a polyamorist's only choice, because polyamory is so rare.
Polyamory is relatively common in science fiction fandom, though I think it's common more by contrast with the mainstream society. [1]
Possible status implications: Fans get status by not being like non-fans-- specifically by pursuing some kinds of pleasure more than they do. Or it might be affiliation with Robert Heinlein, in which case we should see a generational effect.
Null hypothesis: Fans aren't more likely to be polyamorous than non-fans, they're just less discreet about it.
[1]Fandom seems to have a lot of pagans and libertarians. Actually, as far as I can tell, neither are all that common.
This is reminding me of a bit in a Samuel Delany essay. This was written some decades ago-- he mentioned that he was apt to overestimate the proportion of women in a crowd.
It seems to me that seeing how accurately people can estimate the proportion of various easily identified groups in a crowd could be a test of background levels of prejudice.
The vast majority of people in the US perceive monogamy as a moral issue, and believe that Christianity requires monogamy. Many Christian missionaries have struggled to convert the groups they were evangelizing around the world to be monogamous. Yet, the Old Testament condones polygamy; and the New Testament does not forbid polygamy.
The verses Christians cite "against" polygamy are Titus 1:6 (Paul, "An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife"), 1 Timothy 3:2 (also by Paul, "Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife..."), and 1 Timothy 3:12 ("A deacon must be the husband of but one wife and must manage his children and his household well.") all say the same thing: Elders of the church (not ordinary church members) should have "but one wife".
Does "but one wife" mean "but one wife at a time", or "should not have remarried after a divorce or death"? These same verses have been used to argue that remarriage after a divorce or a spouse's death are forbidden, because a man would then have had two wives, and not be "the husband of but one wife". Jesus himself said (Matthew 19:5-12) that neither men nor women should remarry after a divorce; is that what Paul meant?
The counsel to have but one wife is in both cases in the middle of a long list of good qualities that various sorts of people should have - be temperate, hospitable, not given to much wine, not a lover of money, not malicious talkers, etc. Yet few have insisted on outlawing wine (at least lately), inhospitableness, greed, or gossip based on these verses, even though those are "commanded" more generally to all believers, while the "but one wife" clause is directed only at church elders. (A "church elder" is not an old church member, but one with special responsibilities.)
Supposing that "but one wife" means "but one wife at a time", should an elder have just one wife because more than one is bad, or because more than one would give him too large a family to pay full attention to church business? Paul doesn't say. The latter interpretation is supported by the arguments used in the 12th+13th centuries to say priests should not marry, and by Jesus' view of families as bad things that distract people from God (Mark 3:31–35/Matthew 12:46–50, Mark 10:29-30/Matthew 19:29, Matthew 8:20, Matthew 10:21). (No "family values" for Jesus!) And Paul is the same person who told the Corinthians that it's better not to marry at all (1 Corinthians 7:29-31), because the world was about to come to an end; so why don't we ban marriage altogether?
Nor do Christians pay much attention to the more-clear teachings surrounding these passages. Shortly after Titus 1:6, Paul goes on to say, "Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive." The verses in 1 Timothy are preceded by 1 Timothy 2 9-12: "I also want women to dress modestly, ... not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes... A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; she must be silent." And they are followed by 1 Timothy 6:1: "All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect,so that God's name and our teaching may not be slandered. Those who have believing masters are not to show less respect for them because they are brothers."
In summary: It's not advisable for Christian women to have braided hair, pearls, or expensive clothing, or to teach men. But it is okay for Christians to have slaves and multiple wives.
There may be Christian traditions handed down from the first century, which Catholics would be more likely to know about. I'm not aware of any, though. AFAIK monogamy was just a Roman thing, in which there was no expectation that a married man would have sex only with his wife. Here's a Christian website claiming monogamy is a pagan abomination on that basis.
What I want to know is: What's with all the braided hair today? How can we stamp out this immorality?
Interesting about the braided hair. In East Europe it is actually seen as a sign of female virginity. Коса - девичья краса (A braid is a maiden's charm - Rus.)
So monogamy became default thanks to the Romans... Doesn't really fit into the whole "Quo Vadis" narrative that well, does it?
That is a moral norm I'm happy to advocate. (I just don't find braids nearly as attractive. ;))
I'm nonogamous, and I didn't choose.
Logistics.
I should probably provide a corollary to this. It's an interesting question and deserves more than a pithy one-word response.
Logistics:
It is difficult enough to coordinate the work diaries, social calendars, birthdays, anniversaries, dietary requirements, travel plans, in-laws, etc. of two reasonably busy people who live in close proximity to one another. The more people and locations you add, the more it compounds any orchestration problem.
Economics:
I claim romantic relationships do not enjoy the benefits of economies of scale, and the overhead of each additional relationship actually increases logarithmically. I also claim additional partners are subject to diminishing returns. In fairness, if this is accurate, it is less of a case against polyamory and more of a case against an arbitrarily high number of partners. Still, it's not unreasonable to suggest that the optimal number of typical partners for a given person is between 0 and 2.
"Love Anarchy":
Much like the international system, my lovelife has no police force. I am generally quite pleased with this state of affairs. In a monogamous relationship my partner and I each have a single trade partner for our romantic resources. The quantity of those resources may or may not be to our exact liking, but the distribution is not contested. This is a relatively stable system. Once a third (or fourth, or fifth...) party becomes involved, we have a negotiation problem.
There's no feasible method for someone to commit to a set distribution of time/effort/attention between partners. I'm not saying there should be, just pointing out that such things can't realistically be budgeted for or enforced. The absence of such a mechanism makes polyamory highly unstable compared to monogamy, though I suppose this only really sits in the pro-monogamy column if you place a premium on stability.
Actually the logistics is not so clear-cut.
Lets say Sarah has two partners Tom and Maria. Now Sarah has the wednesday afternoon free. The probablity that one of her partners has free time is higher than it would be in a monogamous arrangement.
The time needed is not necassary "everyone needed" but for "some suitable combination of people".
Tom and Maria, on the other hand, have to take into account not only their own availability, but also Sarah's and each other's when planning their activities.
Meanwhile, if both Tom and Maria are available on the Wednesday, Sarah has a dilemma, and regardless of whether they're both free, or who she ends up seeing, she will have to accomodate the other at a later date, at which point the entire process begins again.
You're right that the logistics are indeed more complicated in a polyamorous relationship; that's probably one of the hardest parts of polyamory. But I'm not sure I agree with:
Even in monogamous relationships there are time and energy conflicts. People need to schedule their time between their partner, friends, family, work, hobbies, and personal time. The only method I know for committing to and scheduling time is to make a schedule with your partner(s) and discuss it with them regularly to make sure you're keeping to it. You can schedule slots of time, and then if you're missing that time with them, there's a problem in that relationship and it needs to be reconsidered.
It's one thing to compete for time and attention against a hobby or a job. It's another thing entirely to compete for time and attention against another human being whose needs are essentially the same as yours.
You pretty much took the words out of my mouth. A relationship between two people already involves an awful lot of moving parts and give-and-take. Let alone the 3-body problem. Even Newton had trouble figuring that one out.
I toyed with the three-body problem joke, but couldn't really fit it in :-)
EDIT: OH my God, I forgot the special LW markup, ARGH. Comment has been edited.
I have an enormous amount of experience with the polyamory community and with observing polyamorous relationships, but I was convinced that I myself had a "monogamy orientation" until recently, when I became less sure. Regardless of whether or not a person is "oriented" towards monogamy or polyamory, however, I think it's useful for both monogamous and polyamorous people to discuss relationships in the kind of depth that is common in the poly community; in other words, discussions in the poly community can offer a lot of insight on how to thoughtfully organize a relationship.
The two best polyamory FAQs I've seen are here and here.
The best swing FAQ I've seen is here.
Here is an excellent example of a polyamorous relationship contract, in which both parties carefully set priorities, discuss triggers, and define their terms.
The relationship contract is very interesting. It's good to have a concrete, realistic example of the ideas of polyamory put into practice.
Both parties have various veto powers. I imagine neither party has to explicitly use their veto power very often. As in politics, the possibility of a veto exists to ensure that both parties will always take the other's desires into account.
There are two asymmetrical articles in that contract, and I was surprised to find that both of them are restrictions on what the woman can do. The first requires that her male secondary partners court her husband, and it's explicitly stated that this is to allay his jealously. The second prohibits the wife from having penetrative sex with anyone besides her husband, and the explanation offered for this article doesn't really explain why there isn't a similar prohibition on the husband. I wonder if the real reason is the husband's jealousy again. In any case, it seems the man in this relationship is more prone to jealousy than the woman.
I don't know evolutionary psychology yet, but it's a little astonishing to me how this asymmetry, particularly the emphasis on penetrative sex, seems to be precisely what the ev-psych stories told elsewhere in this thread tell us to expect.
While that contract isn't unusual, it's not typical either, in several ways.
First off, most poly relationships don't have an explicit contract in place; negotiating rules and boundaries is standard, but putting them down on paper is uncommon, at least in part because many poly people want to change their rules as time goes on; for example, my girlfriend and I started off with quite a few rules, but we've been gradually removing those as she gets more and more comfortable with polyamory.
Second off, the contract creates a clear hierarchy, where one relationship is primary and any other relationships the two might form are necessarily less important. This is a pretty common arrangement, but far from universal.
Third, there's a bit of controversy over veto rights in the poly community; they make some people feel more secure, but others argue that if your partner won't take your preferences into account without veto power, then adding that power will only cause resentment. I lean towards the latter camp, but veto rights seem to be helpful for couples who are gradually transitioning from monogamy to polyamory, so my stance there is far from absolute.
My point is only that polyamory encompasses an incredibly broad array of relationship styles, all of which have proponents who will happily argue that theirs is the one true way.
Women are much less likely to be capable of achieving orgasm through penetrative sex than men, so the ban on penetrative sex for her may be less asymmetrical than you seem to think. After all, if she can easily achieve orgasm by several methods other than penetrative sex, but he prefers penetrative sex over other methods, then while there may be some jealousy active in the penetrative sex prohibition, it may also not be that much of a "sacrifice" for her.
It is also entirely possible that she feels more jealous when she knows her husband's partners well, and therefore the requirement exists for him to know her partners, but not for her to know his partners. Different people react differently to these things.
It is also entirely possible that they have a BDSM relationship as well, and that he is the dominant partner. A lot of polyamorous BDSM relationships restrict the submissive partner more than the dominant partner.
Finally, I don't personally read the veto as existing to ensure that both parties always take the other's desires into account .... Remember that poly relationships tend to be much more highly-communicated, verbally, than the average mono relationship. I read it as intended for partners to be able to veto, not intended to force partners to think about each other. After all, if they weren't thinking about each other, they wouldn't have written this contract in the first place.
It is my hope that WrongBot's next post will explore the varied facets of romantic jealousy.
Just read through these links, and I have to say that the concept of "fun" leapt out at me as being largely missing.
I suspect there's a major problem where a lot of the people who spend the most time writing about polyamory or BDSM or, hell, sexuality in general, are people who literally have nothing more important in their identities. They're trying way too hard to sound adult and serious. You want to scream at them to just lighten up.
I'm starting to get that dreadful "I could do better than that" feeling which makes me do things like write Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality or explain Bayes's Theorem...
Hey Eliezer,
Interesting point. I think part of the problem is that sex theorists have to work very hard to get ourselves taken seriously, so many of us overcompensate. Another problem is that while sex is totally fun, sex also comes with an enormous potential to harm, so it's important to take it seriously at least somewhat.
Also, sex is a highly-triggering area for most people. I specifically try to include some humor and/or sexy anecdotes in my writing, but I find that I am considerably likely to be misinterpreted when I do so, and when I'm misinterpreted it can get really bad really fast ("I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU JUST MADE LIGHT OF ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIPS!11").
One of the projects I'm outlining right now is a BDSM erotica novella in which I try to include as much theory as I possibly can while still keeping it sexy. We'll see if I succeed.
Another thought -- along the lines of my first paragraph, one common term that's used to insult sex-positive feminists (by feminists who don't identify as sex-positive) is "fun feminists". The idea being that we wouldn't hold our position if it weren't "fun", or that we've been distracted from the "important" stuff by the "fun" stuff, or that we get undeserved attention for being more "fun". This obviously makes some of us feel like we have to prove that we're not that fun :P
I'd just call 'em "dull feminists" and get on with my life.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Sexuality?
rule 34.
Omake?
Hahaha. You wish.
I want to read that novella. It sounds educational.
I'd like to consider a related question: why did our society "choose" monogamy as a social norm? One major clue is the high correlation between monogamy and economic development--virtually all modern industrialized societies have adopted monogamy as a social norm, whereas most societies throughout history have practiced polygyny. But what direction does the causal relationship run? (*)
Does it make sense to start tearing down this norm before we get that question sorted out? Several commenters have said that they're not for or against polyamory, but they are for being aware of and considering the possibility of polyamory. But one way to enforce a social norm is to teach people to think in such a way that they do not even consider the possibility of violating it.
* See http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/bardhan/e271_f05/tertilt.pdf for one attempt to answer the question.
I think it may have something to do with limiting violence.
I'm trying to remember the reference (it might be Hanson or possibly the book the Red Queen Hypothesis - if I remember I'll post it) but a vast majority of violence is over access to women, at least in primitive societies. Obviously mongamy means that the largest number of males get access to a female, thereby reducing losses in violent competition to females. I think this would certainly explain why rich societies tend to be monogamous - less destructive waste.
Additionally I can imagine societies with high levels of polygyny (think emperors with giant harems) could be extremely unstable due to sexual jealousy, but that's mere speculation.
Apologies if this has already been posted - I was late to this thread and there's an unmanageable number of comments to search through.
Once a society attains a certain level of efficiency or productivity, changing social structures can free up significant amounts of otherwise untapped potential. Every modern industrial society had a rather rigid concept of "women's work" until relatively recently. The technological advances (and immigration) that broke this tradition resulted in a tremendous increase in human capital and significant economic growth (among many other mostly-but-not-entirely good things).
Modern polygynous societies are vastly different from modern monogamous societies in ways that do not revolve around mono vs poly. Furthermore, I don't think many societies have been tolerant of polyamory, as opposed to polygamy. Given that other values (having kids, working, buying needless crap) remain relatively constant, polyamory would likely help revive the strong social support networks of yesteryear and exhibit positive returns to scale versus the current system. This is not to say it would definitely result in an improvement, but demonstrating, "Polygynous societies aren't that productive, therefore monogamous norms are vital to continued economic success" requires vastly stronger evidence than you cite.
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the predecessors to our society "chose" monogamy because it seemed like a good idea at the time, without any very coherent reasoning about the longterm effects.
The effects of breaking down monogamy are an entirely different question.
del
This is a good and important question. As the paper you linked to indicates, monogamous societies tend to have fewer children than polygynous ones; this, in turn, leads to a host of economic benefits.
But we should distinguish between polygyny and polyamory, which are not at all similar practices. The Trobriand people have a relationship-style that has much more in common with polyamory than polygyny, and this seems to be a direct result of their belief that sex does not cause pregnancy (which they possess because their diet greatly reduces the odds of conception).
While the Trobriand people are not economically well-developed, I think that their relationship-style is a result of that of lack of development and not the other way around. Consider: economic development would lead to a more varied diet, which would then restore conception rates to more normal levels and demonstrate a connection between sex and childbirth; prior to the advent of widely-available contraception, economically developed cultures and the varied diets that accompany them were incompatible with relationship styles similar to the Trobriand people's.
If this explanation is true (and I acknowledge that the evidence is certainly not conclusive), modern contraceptive techniques might make non-monogamous relationship styles viable in a way that they might not be otherwise. Contraception certainly has the potential to limit population growth, which seems to be polygyny's greatest economic downside. And we know from the Trobriand example that polyamory-type relationship styles are quite compatible with contraception.
I generally prefer fewer closer relationships than many less involved ones. I enjoy getting to know people really really well and then spending lots and lots of time with them. This extends beyond romantic relationships, for example I have only three close real life friends. Also I have a strong desire to have lots of children.
There are also non-trivial opportunity costs in terms of my relationships with others for going for a non-standard option. I'm already having difficulty getting my immediate family to recognize and respect both of my current relationships. I'm having even greater problems with their families.
This is the reason that on the scale of many or few partners, I lean strongly towards few, and I generally tend towards a partner count of one or monogamy. Since I'm in a relationship with two women, both of the relationships are otherwise exclusive, I don't think I deviate that much from my stated preferences.
So the three of you don't have any other partners? Or did you just mean that your partners are limited to those two?
We don't have other partners.
The majority of my motivation towards monogamy comes from jealousy, and so I'm interested in seeing your next post (although I'm not sure whether I want to self modify ie murder pill). However, another advantage to the complexity of monogamous relationships is fun. The dating game is an opportunity to play complex games of strategy. Is it difficult? At times. Do you get hurt? At times. Is it worth it? I think so.
For people who are embedded in a social structure, it can be costly to step outside of it. Many people will justifiably choose monogamy simply because, given the equilibrium we're in, it is the best move for them...even IF they would prefer a world of polyamory or some other alternative.
To go off topic for a moment, the same could also be said of religious belief. I know the people here feel a special allegiance to the truth, and that's wonderful, but if we lived in 12th century europe it might not be worth rejecting religion even if we saw through it. For that matter, people in the modern day who are particularly entrenched in a religious community...may wisely choose not to even think about the possibility that they're wrong. Wise because, taking this equilibrium behavior as given --- accepting that no one else in the community will seriously consider the possibility of being wrong --- means that deviating will be scorned by all the people whose opinion the deviator cares about.
I applaud people who are devoted to truthseeking, but I do not condemn the rationally ignorant, or for that matter the people who choose to be monogamous simply because that's what society expects of them, rather than because it's "what they really want" or "who they really are."
Wouldn't there be some advantages in 12th century Europe to being a secret atheist (especially a rationalist, if that were somehow possible), and simply not speaking about it to anyone? It would eliminate the chance of going on crusades or the psycological fear of excommunication (even if excommunication would be a horrible situation anyway) if a noble, and a lot of superstitions if a commoner.
There are advantages to that, but there are disadvantages too. You'd have to constantly maintain a lie to everyone you knew, and there are psychological consequences to that. Additionally, it's a lot easier to believe that there is no afterlife when cryonics is possible. If you're in 12th century Europe, you will cease to exist after about 30 years, and that could be very painful to realize.
A little bit of silliness here. The conflict in the movie "John Tucker Must Die" is set up when it is revealed that the titular John Tucker, the most popular guy in high school, has been secretly dating three different girls at the same time. When the three girls find out about each other, they team up and decide to get their revenge on John. Not-all-that-funny hi-jinx and generic romantic comedy moments ensue. When it's all over, one of the last scenes of the movie illustrates that John Tucker has "learned his lesson": he has three (unnamed) girls hanging on him all at the same time, showing that he's now being honest about his non-monogamy.
Somewhat OT: this is not really Rumsfeld's taxonomy. My first knowledge of it is probably from the 1997 book, "To Do, Doing, Done" -- which in turn cited the space program as the origin of the taxonomy, and also of a phrase, "deadly unk-unks" used to describe the unknown unknowns.
Ah, thanks for the cite. And "deadly unk-unks" is the best phrase I've encountered this week, so thanks for that too.
"Deadly unk-unks" is much funnier than "unknown unknowns".
What about nature vs. nurture? I don't have to struggle to not be jealous whereas many people just can't do polyamory because of intense feelings of jealousy. I don't think there's a single polyamorous or jealousy gene, but like homosexuality, there might be a complex array of related genetic factors.
The jealousy response also tends to be different in nature between the sexes.
Jealousy warns a woman that she is vulnerable to losing the resources (and the signals like love, attention, time and sexual desire that are her practical measure). Males require the same warnings from the instincts (to a lesser degree for a slightly different reason). But on top of that males must be warned that their huge investment of resources may be vulnerable to being utterly wasted when another male impregnates their investment. There is a stronger evolutionary motive for territorial instincts to assert themselves.
A light went on above my head as I read your comment. Thanks. Now I understand why I mysteriously stopped feeling jealous ever after I let go of the provider mindset towards women. If other men here are troubled by strong feelings of jealousy, maybe they could try the same.
I found out about poly pretty early and had a generally positive impression of it... in theory.
I do monogamous relationships, at least for the foreseeable future, because I'm pretty much a one-thing-at-a-time person. I don't really multitask -- it's the same phenomenon. I want to focus on one person, and get more intensity out of the relationship.
The other thing is, I'm very private -- I don't like having to tell people about my comings and goings and certainly not my sex life. The whole part about checking in with your primary would rub me the wrong way.
Yes, for me too. I watched a documentary about the lifestyle, and was just baffled that people would shoulder the n^2 communication burden and associated drama.
But a poly friend of main maintains that for him it's worth it. We agreed that the two of us have different thresholds for drama and relationship effort, hence a different result from the same cost-benefit analysis.
n^2?
1
2+1=3
3+2+1=6
4+3+2+1=10
5+4+3+2+1=15
6+5+4+3+2+1=21
7+6+5+4+3+2+1=28
Let's see... (n-1)n/2. Yes, n^2 it is.
It didn't occur to me to think of it that way given how important that -1 and /2 are for most practical purposes but that just means I wasn't aiming high enough in with my hypothetical plans to require a harem of bisexual women (sorry guys...). More to the point I suspect I discount my expected exposure to other people's drama by more than a linear factor. With larger polyamorous entanglements I'm more likely to be affected by factional politics. Given how they work I'd estimate a drama exposure of order n*log(n).
Now for the real practical consideration... what is the relationship between number of polyamorous partners and expected depletion of my Pramipexole supply... Yes, Pramipexole enhances libido for both sexes and in the case of males reduces or eliminates the refractory period). ;)
" Yes, Pramipexole enhances libido for both sexes and in the case of males reduces or eliminates the refractory period."
If these effects were reproducibly demonstrable, controlling for placebo effect, Boehringer (it's maker) would be all over it with both feet, but they're not. They are the company that recently wasted many millions trying to get flibanserin approved for enhancing female libido. The FDA voted 10-1 that it was no better than placebo, and that the side effects were unacceptable. Boehringer would not likely have gone to all that trouble if they already had a FDA-approved drug (pramipexole) that they could have submitted for approval of a new indication without repeating all the pre-clinical safety trials.
You are mistaken. The maker tried to get FDA approval for this use but were unable to. I do not consider this particularly strong evidence that the effect is not present. Faith in the FDA as an efficient arbiter of truth is not a misconception that I suffer from.
I have very little evidence regarding whether that drug is effective. And yes, I am saying this after being informed of the FDA vote. I only consider a 10:1 vote against to be weak evidence in favor of the effectiveness of a drug for this particular application.
They did.
You may find it interesting to note that under the side effects of pramipexole the maker is required to list hypersexuality due to multiple studies showing increased sexual urges and 'hedonistic behavior'.
If it causes increased sexual urges in 1 in 100 people, it'll show up in studies but be useless to most people trying to increase their sexual urges.
Have you found pramipexole effective in reducing your refractory period? I hadn't realized there were drugs that could do that. I'm interested in trying: how much does it reduce your refractory period? What have your experiences been with it? It looks like there might be a lot of unpleasant side effects.
I would be extremely hesitant to recommend taking pramipexole just for the sexual side effects. It works as a powerful dopaminergic receptor agonist. You don't play recklessly with your dopamine system, it's not a toy... that's the acetylecholine system! ;) (Within reason!)
I have used pramipexole but I did so not (just) for the sexual effects but because the overall profile fit well with my needs at the time. I stopped using it because I found it made me work too hard, which has limits. It is also just like to cycle most substances that have stimulatory effects.
If I recall it was down to 5 minutes. It was absolutely ridiculous, especially when combined with cialis. I cannot speak for general applicability, studies have focussed on libido but I haven't seen anything except anecdotal evidence regarding refractory period affects.
Be careful and do your research.
Positive, but No Free Lunch. I recommend researching other people's experiences, with the Mind and Muscle and Immortality Institute forums being good places to start. The best thing about those forums is that they are absolutely riddled with citations from PubMed. That saves time tracking the solid evidence down!
Not as bad as with SSRIs but that says little. Want something that gives a mild libido boost but is also neuroprotective and an enhance motivation? Try selegiline. It is much less intrusive.
do you generally do DIY medicine? I was always leery of it, even if you do your research.
Absolutely.
To be clear my research involves consulting with professionals that I select for competence as well as qualification. This is too important to merely go with the flow.
plus cross-dressing.
That is a seriously funny side effect. I presume it is just related to the boost in appeal of hedonistic activities and general drive towards anything. But still... cross dressing pills. :P
General fact: Summing a polynomial of degree k results in a polynomial of degree k+1. This is easier to see if you use the x choose k basis, rather than the x^k basis.
This is even easier to see if you remember that summation is discrete integration, which is the opposite of differentiation, which reduces degree by one. I recommend Graham, Knuth and Patashnik's "Concrete Mathematics" for stuff like this.
Pramipexole? Wow, you're serious. Do you just take it quietly, or do you offer it to the girls too? In the latter case they should share the cost :-)
I don't think all polyamorous relationships require such checking in, especially if you're uncomfortable with it. But I understand your point about multitasking.
Same here: I am theoretically interested in polyamory, but I am rather monotropic.
I asked myself, "Why not be polyamorous?" The answer I got back was "Don't think about that; it will worsen your relationship." I'm listening.
del
Actually, I don't know whether the answer was what I said, or "It will worsen your relationship; you are now done thinking about it". My intuition says that since I'm in Michigan while my boyfriend is in North Carolina (which does sound unwise, yes), sex with someone else would invariably lead to us being too far apart.
And it just seems weird.
This is entirely based on intuition, of course, not conscious reasoning, but consciously reasoning about it seems unnecessary somehow.
Okay, I got a glimmer of "polyamory simply means more options; there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with that". Responses coming back: "He would object." and "Focusing on just the two of us will result in that relationship becoming stronger." and "It's more intimate with just two."
And now, on the meta level, I'm thinking that conscious reasoning is unnecessary, as this is entirely about values, not facts.
So, so far, my mind is not changed.
del
I have no objection to anyone choosing monogamy, or valuing it over other options, but I hate to see anyone refuse to explore an idea out of fear. The message I got from the original post, which applies to many areas of life, is that sometimes we can go along with a consensus without thinking about it, even when doing so doesn't benefit us, because the alternatives don't even occur to us, or we brush them aside as "weird".
It seems like there are facts as well as values involved here, facts such as whether he would object, and what would make your relationship improve. Even when dealing with questions of values, rationality and conscious thought can be useful in helping reach those values. My point is not that you should, or should not, be monogamous, but rather that maybe the times when conscious reasoning seems unnecessary at first are the times when it's most needed.
del
He.
Note to self: never assume people are male online.
Hmm? Stefan assumed you were female, right?
Yes. Given how I feel about people assuming that I'm female, I would be a hypocrite to make an assumption about someone's gender in the future.
Ah, I understand now. It was an easy assumption to make in that context, because the stereotype is that gay men are fine with non-monogamous relationships, but women are typically reluctant to let their boyfriends have sex with other partners (and there is some evidence that non-monogamy is more common among gay couples).
If you don't mind me asking, does it raise different issues, or are there different background assumptions, in considering whether to be monogamous when dating another male?
I've faced more resistance to polyamory from men I've dated than women, but my case may be atypical. I suspect (but can't prove) that gay men are more often non-monogamous because they already have some experience with questioning and defying social norms involving sexuality. There's also probably much more to it than that.
Well, I've never dated a female, so I can't actually compare the two. I wouldn't expect there to be different issues and assumptions because we're a gay couple. (Apart from the obvious stuff like family disapproving, of course.)
I should note, however, that this is a back-door relationship: it started with us talking about sex in general, then it progressed to talking about sex with each other, then it progressed to us feeling jealous at the thought of each other having sex with anyone else, at which point we decided to consider ourselves in a relationship.
del
What if it is? What if polyamory would save her current long-distance relationship from falling apart?
I don't know that it would, but it might. I've certainly seen polyamory work wonders for couples dealing with the long-distance thing.
Refusing to think about something because you're afraid of what you'll discover is seldom a helpful strategy.
del
Shades of Slavoj Žižek pointing out unknown knowns as the basis of ideology.
Of course, the most appropriate Žižekian point about this post is that ultimate super ego injunction is "Enjoy!" In other words, one of the main forms of conformity today is exactly this pose of throwing off the demands of mainstream society demonstrated in this post. This ideal is the main message of consumerism in advertising - choose for yourself, unlock your deepest desires, express your true identity! If you really want to enjoy yourself fully, you can't just settle for the boring default option - whether in toilet paper, jeans, music or relationship style. You are supposed to consider all your options and find out what generates maximum enjoyment.
This is the main form of authoritarianism today, and the correct response to the demand here that we justify our choice of monogamy is "It's none of your business!"
So the correct response to a suggestion that you think is: "It's none of your business!"?
I thought Lesswrong was all about thinking, and becoming less wrong.
The OP didn't demand you explain yourself, merely suggested you ought to consider why you believe what you believe. Seems a reasonable suggestion to me.
This sounds very defensive to me; you might wish to examine why that is the case.
To reply to your argument, which is really just guilt (of poly folks) by association (with conspicuous consumption):
(1) Non-monogamous people will experience a high social cost at present for admitting the fact. You can hardly compare them to "rebelling" consumers. Saying you want to choose a polyamorous sexual relationship is not analogous in social cost to buying $2,000 shoes, it's analogous to buying a butt plug in front of your friends and family. It takes genuine mettle.
(2) Just because consumer culture emphasizes enjoying yourself, doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy yourself (reversed cupidity is not eudaimonia). In the case of consumer goods, it means real reflection on what you actually enjoy, for how long, and what are the ethical implications? For sexuality, it means real reflection on what you want, what you already have, what is practical given human nature, ethical concerns, etc. All WrongBot is asking you to do is reflect on why you choose monogamy - publicly on LW, if the mood strikes you. Clearly it does not.
Well, ceteris paribus, yes! Of course, ceteris are not paribus: there are other people and contingencies to take into account. But your enjoyment is morally considerable in and of itself, as well as in how it impacts others.
I nearly missed this in the middle of that dense paragraph so it is worth a quote!
I'd have upvoted the first paragraph by itself, except that the present application is a bit of a non sequitur. ISTM that one of these things is not like the others:
I'm not sure who's standing to make money off of people switching from monogamy to polygamy, I haven't seen paid advertisements for polygamy, and it seems to be more worth five minutes' thought than does, say, choice of toilet paper.
P.S. Oh, and welcome to Less Wrong! I look forward to hearing your take on a number of other issues, as you appear to have a very different argumentative toolkit from the usual one here.
The issue I'm raising is that the logic of greater options and choices is the logic of consumerism. Renata Salecl has some interesting observations about this emphasis and how it generates anxieties and personal crises that directly challenge the ideological assumption that more choice can't be bad. (See here: "Who Am I For Myself? Anxiety & the Tyranny of Choice: http://slought.org/content/11318/) As far as social critiques go, this is far more challenging to deal with than this post, which smugly & uncritically assumes that it stands outside of social norms. The truth is that society is not constituted by a single homogeneous set of norms which we can easily reject, but multiple conflicting and contradictory ones. Here, the norms of consumerism and choice come into conflict with the norms of marriage. Given what I've said about the tyranny of choice, the real challenge to our thinking would be to see this as an reason to reject polyamory. What if the main benefit of monogamy is that it provides relief from this tyranny? Sometimes you hear happily married people say that they are glad to not have to deal with the dating scene, which is a very interesting example of how the removal of choice is experienced as a benefit. A point I should make here is that the issue I have is definitely not with the practice of polyamory itself, but the stated rationale for it. It's certainly possible to have non-consumerist justifications for polyamory - Mormon justifications, Muslim justifications, etc. The main problem I have is this uncritical assumption of the social norm that says more choice & fewer limitations is always better, particularly when it dresses itself up as nonconformity.
This ideal is particularly inappropriate applied to sexuality. The standard dictum that we can only truly enjoy ourselves once we get rid of all limitations should be reversed. Limitation is an inherent part of enjoyment, especially in the domain of sexuality. Why do we get erotic enjoyment from the sight of naked bodies but in tribal cultures where they walk around nude all day, they don't? Nudity is only erotic if it is taboo and prohibited, which suggests that transgressing a prohibition is an essential part of sex. This explains the otherwise strange paradox of why mainstream society tacitly accepts infidelity so long as it's discreet. Why not just make it official? The obvious conclusion: it would ruin all the fun. It's well-known that the easiest way to make something attractive is to prohibit it which may explain why the rate of illegal drug use is higher in the US than in places with fewer prohibitions like the Netherlands. The mistake to avoid is thinking that the only purpose of the social regulation of sexual activity is to put a stop to enjoyment, and so it is therefore repressive. It is repressive, and that creates the moment of true erotic enjoyment, in the guilty or rebellious pleasure of having broken the rules. Thinking of society and social oppression as a consistent set of oppressive rules and regulations which we should try to reject misses the point. Ideology is at multiple levels, both in the rules and the ways in which we are solicited to break them, and the real social critique is not the cliche to always question the rules, question authority, etc. Rather, we should question the implicit rules of how we're expected to break the rules.
So it's very interesting how polyamory reverses the standard traditional relationship between law and transgression. The standard model is explicit official prohibition, but unofficial tacit acceptance of rule-breaking, which is then eroticized. Polyamory's approach is officially about freedom -- break free from the constraints of monogamy, etc -- and unofficially filled with rules and prohibitions as I pointed out earlier, which we're nonetheless assured aren't really rules, only guidelines and suggestions, etc., which further attests to their secretive nature. Here we might find an example of how devotion to the law and the rules functions as a kind of obscene form of enjoyment in itself. In addition to the nonconformist polyamorist who gets an erotic thrill from freaking out the squares and is obsessed with what they think and how they are scandalized, there is also the conformist polyamorist who finds erotic enjoyment in the highly regulated and controlled lifestyle and in obedience to it's secret rules and rituals. Maybe they unconsciously realize that standard monogamy model offers too many loopholes to violate the rules, they need them to be much stronger. We might also notice all the typical jokes about the wife as "a ball and chain", keeping a man's testicles in her purse, he's whipped, etc., obvious references to BDSM practices. These jokes aren't just incidental, they are part of the institution itself, even secretly integrated into its rituals, in the coded exchange of rings, an obvious symbolic representation of becoming a (sex) slave. The simplistic vision of standard marriage is that it's very boring and vanilla, but what if it is a kind of kinky BDSM roleplaying?
I disagree with the first sentence. Since my disagreement hinges on the difference between partial and total derivatives I hope it is broadly interesting.
When Milton Friedman titled one of his books Free To Chose his underlying model was that happyness was a function both of the number of choices and the quality of the choices:)
. His theory is that q is a dependent variable: )
. When choices, c, are few, then producers offer consumers poor choices, on a take-it or leave-it basis. When choices are many, producers compete and consumers are offered good choices. 
is positive and large. 
is positive and large. What of 
? Presumably it is negative, all that comparison shopping is a chore, but in this analysis it is seen as small. Choice is good,meaning )%20=%20\frac{\partial%20h}{\partial%20c}%20+%20\frac{\partial%20h}{\partial%20q}\frac{dq}{dc}%20%3E%200)
.
I see the consumerist position, that choice is good, meaning
, as a crude vulgarisation of the argument above.
Trying to apply this to a 30 year old American contemplating polyamory, my assumption is that he has experience of how the inner dynamics of the modern American monogamous romance play out. Unhappy experience. Now he is wondering about the dynamics implicit in polyamory. He wants to know whether changing the rules produces a better game, and he knows that he cannot find out via the simple equation: more choice = better. He must consider how the players respond to the changed incentives produced by the new rules.
I hope you don't mind if I make some observations and suggestions about the form of communication you're using, since there appears to be a little bit of culture clash at work right now. (I acknowledge up-front that a discussion of form isn't a critique of content, and at any rate, I'm neither a practitioner nor an evangelist of polyamory myself.)
In a threaded conversation, brevity is the soul of communication: a few clearly stated points are much easier to reply to than a long essay. (Your first comment communicated much more clearly than the subsequent ones; it's no coincidence that it was upvoted.) I completely understand the desire to expand more and more on a point in order to be more persuasive and less misunderstood, but in this format it's usually much more effective to keep it short at first, then reply to specific questions and objections. (Here on the Internet, there's much more of a tendency for people to gloss over long sections of text. You can mitigate this to some extent by bolding or italicizing the key points; clicking the "Help" link below the comment box tells you how to do this here.)
Second, the repeated "What If" questions stand out from the usual form of discourse. There's a norm on Less Wrong (not universal, but common) of stating the actual reasons that cause you personally to hold a position, rather than tossing things out to see if anything sticks. (People do regularly play Devil's Advocate, but even in this case they're listing the reasons that would be most persuasive to them if not for their objections). I'd find it more helpful and interesting if you told us which of these considerations actually lead you to rule out polyamory as an option for you.
Again, this isn't an indictment of your reasoning, just a note on what differences in mode of expression might be making this discussion less effective than it could be. (Reciprocally, please tell us if any specific aspects of Less Wrong writing style strike you as unnecessarily smug, uncritical, etc; that sort of input is extremely helpful to a community like ours, and we need to listen to newer voices to hear it.)
I appreciate the feedback. Once I respond to people's objections, I'll be on my way.
This is (obviously) your prerogative; however, I would ask that you give it a bit more time than that. I'll just be blunt about why: you need LessWrong or something like it.
Okay, I know how annoying it is to be told about your own psychology by a stranger, but here goes. Your stated opinions, while extremely interesting and clearly well-educated, are of a form that makes it apparent you're starting with a bottom line and working upwards to arguments. That is, in the particular case of polyamory, you seem to be starting with annoyance at polyamorists and, as orthonormal implied, throwing out plausible arguments to see what sticks. The ethic of this community is to use rationality to become right rather than prove ourselves right. We don't always succeed at this, but we try.
Consider a thought experiment.
Think of all the hundreds of opinions you have on various issues and fact questions relating to science, public policy, economy, ethics, culture, sexuality, etc.
Realistically, you are dead wrong on at least one of those opinions (just like you know everybody else is). If you can't accept that as likely, I give up.
But you don't know which ones are wrong. Also, your brain is really terrible at telling you which ones, because it has dozens of (largely opaque) reasons for keeping its current beliefs. It only looks for confirmatory evidence. It likes stories better than statistics. It fears the social stigma of changing your mind. Perhaps worse than anything, the smarter you get, the better you get at rationalizing your bad ideas to yourself! I could go on, and on, and on...
Our community is pretty good at digging up those biases, exposing them to the light of day, and challenging you to question opinions previously held which might have been influenced by them. If you can do the same for others, the mutual benefit redounds to the favour of both.
So if you just want to convince people you're right, you should indeed leave. If you want to try to be more right, stick around and keep talking. That is why I am here (I'm a relative newbie). I want to be right about all those issues. It's an ethical question. And so far I have found nothing better than LW, for all its flaws.
I agree that we all need what you claim LessWrong wants to be, but I don't think I'm retreating in any way from having my assumptions scrutinized. If anything, the problem is the opposite one, most the replies haven't identified the key points on which my argument turns or their weaknesses, instead they've largely seized on what I think are irrelevant or incidental points, basic misunderstandings or just jumping to odd conclusions. I don't think my arguments are insincere attempts to see what I can make stick, I intend to defend them as best as I can & I can't even find an example of something that might be interpreted like that. But I respect the desire to keep this community free of disruptive elements, and concede the right of the members of the community to determine what that is and if it includes verbosity and inadequate formatting.
My purpose is not to prove myself right, but to help drive the debate to a less obvious and boring conclusion by calling into questioning some of the assumptions and the frame in which the problem of polyamory is posed. I think the post implicitly frames the problem in such a way as to unfairly tilt the playing field against those who disagree. But many of my comments have been down-voted without explanation, and the ease with which you can register your disagreement without having to confront the substance of what you disagree with (or do not understand), IMO goes against what you claim to be the purpose of this community.
At this time, your only comment with a negative score has 5 direct replies.
I like interesting, aesthetically pleasing ideas. But ceteris paribus, the simplest ones are the ones most likely to be correct. Some of our communication difficulty may be a matter of phrasing--can you see why something like this:
makes it sound like you're engaging in cognition motivated by something other than finding the truth?
Not at all. Are you suggesting I'm attempting to conceal the truth? I don't know how this could be misconstrued, it seems perfectly straight-forward to me. The author suggests that polyamory is a product of a thought process that challenges social norms. I take the opposite view, that rejecting polyamory on the grounds that it is overly conformist to social norms is a genuinely challenging and interesting thesis. I'm at a loss as to why this is considered out of bounds.
None of your comments have been downvoted to invisibility, and your total karma is non-negative. For someone so new, you're actually not doing too badly. Others can chime in, of course, but I don't see any reason for you not to stick around... unless you're more interested in winning arguments than improving your rationality, that is.
While I suppose that there must be people who actually think like this, I myself have never met one.
Is it smug and uncritical to point out the existence of a social norm? All I've done is to observe that the norm exists, (very briefly) describe alternatives, and ask "Why do you believe what you believe?" This doesn't seem to be a question you're interested in. While the paradox of choice is well-documented, it is not a linear function. Too much choice can be paralyzing, but we are happier when we can make important choices for ourselves.
First, religion is a poor justification for anything. Second, the fact that polyamory is a choice does not mean that a preference for more choice justifies it; the question to be answered is still, "why choose polyamory?" One excellent reason is utilitarian: if polyamory is anticipated to make you and your loved ones happier than any alternative you've considered, why, you should choose it.
Choice is only helpful when it is possible to evaluate one's options by some pre-existing metric. If I were to offer you three closed, unlabeled boxes, allowing you to choose which one to take does not improve your expected outcome.
I will try to sum up your position: you're saying that
(1) limitation is inherently important to sex and romance;
(2) explicit prohibitions are often implicitly allowed to be violated;
(3) your problem is not with polyamoury per se, but with the fact that its proponents want explicit approval rather than mere legal toleration, which would
(4) provide too much choice (less choice is a relief for many monogamous couples) and undermine the sexiness-inducing nature of the prohibitions against it.
Is this fair?
no, it isn't.
you've summarized a few of mike's descriptive claims regarding ''how the world works'' and extrapolated mike's probable values from those claims and how they were presented, but neither his hypotheses nor his (unstated) values have much to do with the ''thrust'' of his argument.
to paraphrase mike in the language of lesswrong: the original post is framed in such a way as to make readers think it is Obviously Obvious that being a conformist is 'bad' and being a non-conformist is 'good'. Lesswrongers havent noticed because the Schelling Points offered up in the original post align very neatly with the pre-rational values Lesswrongers are most likely to have.
wrongbot's post does not give us a reliable procedure for uncovering conflicting values. it does not tell us when we should invest time and energy trying to reconcile the conflicts we uncover. it does not tell us how to reconcile values when we decide it's a good idea. it basically just says, ''here's a social norm that may be constraining your behavior!" and implies (subtlely) that you should start ignoring it if you cant think of any clever reasons [that you can translate into words] why you shouldnt. how does that further the cause of Rationality?
Okay, so to summarize again:
(1) WrongBot's post assumes unjustifiably that non-conformity is obviously a good thing;
(2) monogamy is tied up intimately with human terminal values - values that are not well-addressed by the post and may even make rational justifications of monogamy superfluous;
(3) the demand for justification (or, failing that, rejection) of a social norm is somehow unfair or hasty, or again assumes non-conformity must be a good thing.
(1) Yes, but also I claim that WrongBot's claim of nonconformity is simply false. He's just applying a very widely held value in a slightly novel way.
(2) I think monogamy can be justified rationally, but this involves reconstructing certain values that have been eclipsed by consumerist logic
(3) The demand to justify our sexual practices or risk being put into stigmatized position of conformist is unfair.
Some further points: the debate of polyamory vs. monogamy is not, strictly speaking, a debate about whether it's best to have one partner or multiple partners. It is partly about whether society should stigmatize the open deviation from the norm, but that is not the thrust of the argument here. There's a stronger claim lurking here, that many people consider maximum choice and flexibility the royal road to happiness and since polyamory more adequately embodies this ideal, it is superior to monogamy, at least for those people. Once people examine their beliefs in the cold light of reason, they will choose what works for them, etc.
Upvoted for being a good & concise distillation of your concerns.
Which values would these be, and what do you mean by reconstructing them? I'm listening.
Well, as someone said to you above, I don't think WrongBot's intention was to stigmatize anyone. You could have simply said "I personally find polyamory icky" and that would have been considered a perfectly valid 'justification.' I understood him to be saying merely: here is an opportunity to reflect on this norm - I personally found my rejection of it to be a net positive in my life.
This is, IMO, your most interesting and defensible claim. It is certainly plausible that some or many modern Westerners and polyamorists are fetishizing "variety of choice" in their decisions, in the naive belief that greater choice leads to greater happiness. However, what is the right way of making such decisions then?
I suspect you're defining "reason" too narrowly. For me, the 'reasonable decision' is basically by definition the best decision, given a thorough weighing of all potential factors that could come into play - including whatever objections to polyamory and arguments for monogamy you might have! Moreover, reason's light is not cold, since before it can even get off the ground, it needs to know our warm and fluffy terminal values. When you think of reason, think "All Things Considered," don't think "Spock."
I'll repeat something I alluded to before: a happily married woman who listens to her sister's dramatic dating stories and feels relief that she no longer has to worry about all that. This is an example of how removing choice and flexibility can be the source of happiness. This requires us to see choice in negative terms, which is actually quite difficult to do, because the problems of a lack of choice have been dramatized in movies and novels so often that we have a strong emotional resonance with them - for example, the familiar narrative of the son who is forced into the family business by an overbearing father, deprived of his opportunity to explore and pursue his dreams. The plot of the movie Ratatouille is something like this. We know intellectually that problems of too much choice exist, of course, but strong cultural narratives have deformed our cognition such that they appear insignificant to us. Just noticing and critiquing these values when they appear is a very useful thing to do.
One good example of this is a recent book called Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough. The thesis is that women have extremely high expectations for potential husbands, to the point that they reject perfectly good men in the hopes that something better will come along. Eventually their options dwindle and they find themselves childless and unmarried in their 40s, which was the experience of the author. The problem here is buyer's remorse. Given the wealth of options as well as the emphasis on getting the very best for yourself, this translates into a need for flexibility: form less secure, more temporary relationships until you find the one that gives you everything you want. I don't really know what an improved decision-making process would be exactly, but the fact that our gut reaction to the title "Settle for Mr. Good Enough" is that this sounds patently absurd is a good gauge for our thinking. When this seems like wisdom rather than absurdity, we will know we have made progress. Having said that, I think the book is flawed because it doesn't go far enough in it's critique which forces the author to compromise the thesis.
Polyamory might posit itself as a solution to this problem of excess choice, diagnosing this situation as a problem of inflexibility within the social obligation to choose one person. If one person doesn't have everything you need, you should find someone else who does, but why not have both of them? So polyamory addresses the problem of excess choice with still more flexiblity and choice, which in turn generates more crises which are then addressed by the proliferation of rules. To me, this points to the general unsustainability of flexibility as a single guiding norm, and also the undesirability of polyamory itself - in order to sustain this "freedom", excessive regulation is required. This last point is of course a personal judgment; if others prefer heavily regulated sex lives, I have no reason to prevent them.
There's a kind of knee-jerk analysis that happens: we see a difficult situation, and conclude that the ultimate problem is a lack of flexibility: things that are easy to change are always good, and things that are hard to change are always bad. Politically, this translate into support for right-wing economic policies, which are ideologically rendered as more flexible than the restrictive constraints of government action, and therefore preferable. And yes, I am aware that I am drawing another counterintuitive connection, between right-wing economic policies and left-wing sex politics, but I think there are unconscious shared assumptions underlying much countercultural politics that posits itself as radical, left-wing, etc.
Let's look at why Wrongbot actually included the "Unknown Knowns" part. Was it an attempt to sneak in psychological influence in favour of his preferred sexual pattern or was it because he wasn't secure in his right to post on this topic and was trying to justify it by framing it as a cognitive bias? I suspect the later. That reduces the 'dark' rating I give it considerably (but raised the 'wussiness' rating commensurately.)
I obviously have an interest in the answer to this question, so please keep that in mind.
Your latter suggestion as to my intentions is much closer to the truth (and you may be entirely right and I may be rationalizing). Because I'm so new to this community, I was certainly trying to avoid posting something that looked inappropriate. This is a specific issue that I think rationalists should consider regardless of framing, and I won't deny that to that end I attempted to present it in the best light possible.
The choice of frame wasn't arbitrary, though. My writing process for the post basically involved explaining why considering alternatives to monogamy was a good idea, and then noticing that relationship style was an example of a broader problem which I hadn't seen described on LessWrong, and that this observation would bring the post more in line with other content I'd seen on the site. Then I went through about five more drafts and hit submit.
I honestly believe that conformity is orthogonal to truth; that other people believe something makes it no more or less true (though it may provide evidence as to the thing's truth, if those other people are particularly trustworthy or untrustworthy). The comments above and elsewhere indicate that I was not sufficiently clear in communicating that in my original post, and I would be grateful to anyone who suggested how I could have been more clear.
Thankyou for making a well reasoned and self reflective explanation in response to criticism what could quite reasonably be considered insulting.
Insulting or not, you had a point. And I try very hard to appreciate well-intentioned criticism, so don't worry about it.
Negative? *blink* That possibility didn't even occur to me. I thought the descriptive component rather obvious and the normative component neutral (commensurate transfer of any 'negative' component from one label to another.) Curious.
Now, I know with some confidence that calling out 'wussiness' is extremely effective in discouraging future examples. I am almost as confident that this applies even if me making the call is met with disapproval. I have collected a significant sample of cases of calling things wussy (or context appropriate alternatives) with intended positive influence.
With no replies except mine (as of this edit) I can delete my comment without losing face. The question I must ask myself is whether I am willing to potentially sacrifice status in order to make this influence. That question is easy, which gives a strong signal of the degree to which I consider 'wussiness' my enemy!