knb comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong

48 Post author: lukeprog 05 November 2011 11:06AM

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Comment author: knb 08 November 2011 11:27:26AM 12 points [-]

I downvoted for several reasons.

  1. The post is long, yet there isn't much of value here, just a lot of things that are obvious (e.g. goth dress might help success with goths, here is a graph to demonstrate that already totally intuitive bit of info). People on LW like to see obvious things restated in formal ways, with graphs and footnotes. This feels like accessing secret knowledge via x-rationalist super powers. But it isn't. It isn't even standard learning. I see this kind of thing a lot on LW.
  2. Relationship advice is outside of the LW comparative advantage (and I suspect absolute advantage as well).
  3. I get the feeling this is about to turn into a commercial for polyamory, and I don't want that to happen. There have now been several posts devoted to advocating polyamory as a "rational" relationship style. To me this feels a lot like hearing people talking about creating "rationally-planned" utopian communes. (It's no coincidence that polyamory and utopian socialism have so often been found together, from the early Christian Adamites, to the Radical Swedenborgians, to the counterculture hippies in the 1970s.) It's depressing and non-productive to see people falling into the same traps over and over.