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gwillen comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Why did you close it early? That seems entirely unnecessary.
I put a link and exhortation prominently in the #lesswrong topic from the day the survey opened to the day it closed.
3 vs 16 seems like quite a difference, even allowing for the small sample size. Is this consistent with the larger population?
So ~3x more people prefer polyamory than are actually engaged in it...
Impressive.
Woot! And I'm not even trying or linking LW especially often.
(I am also pleased by the nicotine and modafinil results, although you dropped a number in 'Never: 76.5%')
So more people are against than for. Not exactly a mandate for its use.
Sounds like you did a two-tailed test. shminux's hypothesis, which he has stated several times IIRC, is that people who can solve it will not be taken in by Eliezer's MWI flim-flam, as it were, and would be less likely to accept MWI. So you should've been running a one-tailed t-test to reject the hypothesis that the can-solvers are less MWI'd. The p-value would then be something like 0.13 by symmetry.
I would not describe this as an accurate conclusion. For one thing, I currently have one partner who has other partners, so I think I am unambiguously "currently engaged in polyamory" even though I would have put 1 on the survey.
For another, I think it is reasonable to say that someone who is in a relationship with exactly one other person, but is not monogamous with that person (i.e. is available to enter further relationships) is engaged in polyamory.
Do you think your situation explains 2/3s of those who prefer polyamory?
Well, I think you can probably break it down as follows, given just the data we have:
Of those, I would say the second and fourth are unambiguously practicing poly, the third could go either way but you could say is presumptively mono, and the first probably doesn't count (since they are actively practicing neither mono nor poly.)
If someone wants to run those numbers, I'd be curious how they come out.
The second could be people looking for replacements for their current partner, no? I wouldn't call that unambiguous.
I don't agree that the first doesn't count. The Relationship Style question was about preferred style, not current active situation. It could be that 2/3 of the polyamorous people just can't get a date (lord knows I've been there). (ETA:) Or, in the case of not looking, don't want a date right now (somewhere I've also been).
I'm in the "no preference" camp, not the poly specifically, but I'm certainly there. LessWrong does seem to indirectly filter for people who are there, simply because people who aren't are less likely to take an interest in things that would lead them to LW, IME.
TL;DR - I think it's not that simple.
Opinion is divided as to whether poly is an orientation or a lifestyle (something one is vs. something one does).
i.e. saying someone with no partners is practising neither mono nor poly is like saying someone with no partners is not currently engaged in homo-/bi-/hetero-sexuality. (However I would accept a claim that they were engaged in asexuality.)
This is a good point.
I wonder if it's worth even making the distinction between "lifestyle" and "act". Thus, poly could be an orientation ("I'm not poly because I don't want multiple partners"), lifestyle ("I'm not poly because I don't have and I'm not actively seeking multiple partners"), and act ("I'm not poly because I don't currently have multiple partners").
I used to always use the "act" definition when discussing sexual orientation ("I don't have one - I haven't had sex with anyone lately") to the confusion of all interlocutors.
Heh, in fact I started but then deleted as a derail some discussion of problems in activist and academic discussions of sexual orientation - what are we to make of someone whose claimed orientation (identification) does not match their current and past behaviour, which might in turn be different again to their stated actual preferences.
I'm not current in my academic reading of sexuality, but when I was, anyone researching from a public health perspective went with behaviour, while psychologists and sociologists were split between identification and preference.
Queer activism seems to have generally gone with identification as primary, although I'm not as current there as I used to be. The trumping argument there was actually precisely your situation, where to accept behaviour as primary meant that no virgins had any orientation, and that does not agree with our intuitions or most peoples' personal experiences.
There's also a bi-activism point which says that position means the only "true" bisexuals are people engaged in mixed-gender group sex. (This is intended as reductio ad absurdem but I've heard people use it seriously.)
Poly seems to be more complicated still, q.v. distinctions between swinging, "monogamish", open relationships, polyfidelity and polyamory. I know multiple examples of dyadic couples who regularly have sex with other people but identify as monogamous, and of couples who aren't currently involved with anyone else, aren't looking, but are firm in their poly identification.
I guess my TL;DR is that I'm entirely untroubled by an apparent difference between preference and practice, and if the survey had asked similar questions about sexual orientation preference & practice, we would have seen "discrepancies" there too.