More of my research for Luke, this time looking into the polyamory literature.

I read Opening Up and The Ethical Slut; the former was useful, the latter was not. My general impression of the research is that:

1. it's all hard to get as the journals are marginal and relevant academics have bad habits of publishing stuff as book chapters or prefaces or books period

2. the studied polyamorists are distinctly white, educated, urban or coastal, professional, older (how odd) middle/upper-class.

   This means there is zero generalizability to whether polyamory would work in other groups and massive selection biases (few other groups are so well-equipped to leave a community not working for them), and even if a survey finds that polyamorists are 'average' in various dysfunctionals or pathologies, one needs to check that the average is the right average (ie. non-amorous educated professional whites).

   These two points do not seem to be appreciated at all by many advocates (eg. the ones saying STDs are not a problem)

3. the one academic doing good work in the area is Sheffer, who is running a longitudinal survey which may or may not have enough statistical power to rule out particularly dramatic variances in outcomes. (Sheffer mentions the selection bias problem but seems to have the attitude that it's not a problem for her work.)

My notes/bibliography/quotes: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-gwern-polyamory.txt